EDUCATIONAL THEORY最新文献

In this article, Seamus Mulryan contends that dialogue about questions that matter to a body politic require the ethical virtue of courage, which is distinct from the virtue of intellectual humility, and this is of central importance in the education of members of a pluralist society. Mulryan begins with Robert Kunzman's theory of Ethical Dialogue and departs from it through Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of hermeneutic experience and Charles Taylor's claims about the inextricable relationship between self-intelligibility and moral spaces. Finally, Mulryan illustrates the promises and perils of courageous dialogue as an educative activity by way of Plato's Meno, Protagoras, and Gorgias.

This article draws on the philosophical work on dialogic rationality offered by Charles Taylor as well as qualitative studies of dialogues between politically opposed college students to argue that these conversations succeed as tools of democracy precisely because they fail as interventions. That is, the democratic strength of such dialogue is the way in which it is unreliable as a means of producing particular outcomes. Students whose political views eventually shifted partly in response to dialogue understood this not as a process of changing their commitments, but rather of finding a better expression for the commitments they already held. But the interviews show, too, just how rare it is for such shifts to occur at all, at least for these students in a period of political polarization and mutual distrust. The interviews suggest as well that the appeal to already shared ground is not the whole story of what prompts people to change their minds in these kinds of conversations. Rather the asking of direct but respectful questions was a crucial ingredient. Finally, dialogue did not independently cause the most profound changes in political views. Instead, it was the direction of students' lives that over time shifted their outlook. Their dialogue experience then gained meaning in retrospect, as the beginning of a process of self-questioning that was brought to fruition only later, as a first time that they had heard alternative possibilities for how value commitments can be expressed through politics.

It is widely believed that we are facing a problem, even a crisis, caused by so-called “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles.” Here, David Coady argues that this belief is mistaken. There is no such problem, and we should refrain from using these neologisms altogether. They serve no useful purpose, since there is nothing we can say with them that we cannot say equally well or better without them. Furthermore, they cause a variety of harms, including, ironically, a tendency to narrow public debate within predetermined limits.

Ian Normile begins this study from the premise that critical thinking is often conceptualized and practiced in problematically narrow and instrumentalized ways. Following Ronald Barnett, he suggests that the idea of critical being can help expand the theory and practice of critical thinking to better meet the needs of education and society. Essential to this effort is greater consideration of how critical thinking articulates with other aspects of being. Normile uses two examples of “non-critical” experiences that he argues can help critical thinking expand into critical being. First, he explores the emotive power of wonder as a source of inspiration and emotional education, and as an essential aspect of critical thinking. He then argues that curiosity, wonder, contemplation, and critical thinking are complementary aspects of critical being. The second example is the Chinese concept of wu-wei, a form of efficacious non-critical action. Normile argues that inevitable breakdowns in wu-wei provide opportunities for critical reflection while the unlearning common to both wonder and wu-wei facilitates receptivity to new perspectives and possibilities beyond the boundaries of the familiar; in this state, one is capable of facilitating the metacritique that is essential to truly transformative critical thinking. Normile concludes with some brief thoughts on implications for practice as a starting point for further inquiry.

In this article, Lauren Gatti and Paula McAvoy explain the interdisciplinary methods that they used for developing a theory of professional judgment for teachers that they call the Ethical Long View. In developing the theory, they engaged in empirical inquiry through the solicitation of dilemmas from practicing teachers using an online survey (N = 127) and follow-up interviews with a subset of survey participants (N = 11). The interviews were developed into qualitative normative cases, which are richly described vignettes of a teacher's dilemma and thinking. In between analyzing the survey data and developing the cases was a philosophically oriented recursive process that was both iterative and interdisciplinary. The qualitative work helped the authors develop the conceptual framework for the Ethical Long View and, at the same time, positioned participants as co-constructors of the ethical theory. This research draws on the tools of both applied philosophy and social science, but it belongs exclusively to neither.

This symposium centers on the English translation of sociologist Niklas Luhmann's 1991 article “Das Kind als Medium der Erziehung”¹ (“The Child as a Medium of Education”), which is being published for the first time in this issue of Educational Theory. This work forms part of Luhmann's broader long-term project — to develop a general theory of society — which included numerous writings on education. Although well-known in German-speaking countries, Scandinavia, and Latin America, Anglophone readers (other than specialists in the social sciences, including educational theory) are generally less familiar with Luhmann's work. For that reason, it seems useful to outline Luhmann's background and wider project before introducing his theory of education and the other papers in this symposium.

Niklas Luhmann was born in 1927 in Lüneburg, Germany. After studying law at the University of Freiburg, he embarked on a career in public administration, first in Lüneburg and subsequently in Lower Saxony. During that period, he was already showing an interest in conceptual questions related to the structure of administrations, meetings, and informal aspects of organization and power. Outside his working day as a civil servant, he immersed himself in scientific literature, and in 1961, a scholarship enabled him to develop this interest at Harvard's School of Government in the United States, where he discussed his project with the sociologist Talcott Parsons. On returning to Germany, he worked as a lecturer and researcher at a number of institutions while continuing his sociology studies. In 1968, he became a professor of sociology at the newly established University of Bielefeld, and his debate with Jürgen Habermas in 1970 brought him to the attention of a wider audience. He remained at the University of Bielefeld until his retirement in 1993. Before his death in 1998, he was awarded the city of Stuttgart's Hegel Prize.² During his extremely prolific career, he published more than seventy books and almost four hundred scholarly articles, and several more have been published posthumously.

Luhmann's sociological project is typically characterized as a system theory of society, with a conceptual emphasis on the terms system and theory. While his main focus was undoubtedly theoretical, it should not be assumed that Luhmann was an armchair theorist. For example, he and sociologist Renate Mayntz conducted large-scale statistical surveys and analyses of civil service career progression in their efforts to reform German civil administration.³ Luhmann also wrote extensively about changing semantics, notably in his book on love and intimate relationships, which was based on archival research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.⁴ Much of his writing on informal organizations is based on his own direct experience as a civil servant, and this is reflected in the ethnographic st