EDUCATIONAL THEORY最新文献

Pedagogy and justice are two central concepts in the study and practice of education. Schools and the societies within which they are situated are characterized by varieties of injustice, including social, racial, and epistemic injustices, and pedagogy is foundational to educational practice. These two concepts can converge in a variety of ways, including when educators and schools are called on to help remedy injustices through pedagogical efforts both within and beyond the classroom.

These calls raise important philosophical questions about our understandings of pedagogy and justice and their relationship to one another. Philosophers have contributed centrally to the development of our understandings of varieties of justice and injustice, from now-classic work on the distributive, representative, and recognition-based dimensions of social justice,¹ to understandings of justice rooted in overcoming oppression and domination,² to the growing exploration of epistemic injustice,³ to the coloniality of the concept of justice in central axes of mainstream political philosophy.⁴ Contemporary understandings of pedagogy have also been informed by philosophical and theoretical perspectives that have become cornerstones informing the thinking and practice of scholars of education, teachers, and educational leaders.⁵ And in recent decades, decolonial theory has called for deeper consideration of the ways that both pedagogy and justice are situated within colonial contexts and logics.⁶ These examinations of both justice and pedagogy ground much contemporary work in philosophy of education, whose scholars are well-positioned to help deepen our understanding of the relationship between pedagogy and justice and the implications of that relationship for educational practice.

Considering the relationship between these two core concepts, this symposium asks whether pedagogy either is necessarily or should be justice-oriented or transformative of unjust conditions. Exploring this conceptual and normative provocation, further questions arise: Is such an understanding of pedagogy too demanding in the nonideal context of schooling in North America (or other contemporary schooling contexts)? If pedagogy is central to justice (either conceptually or normatively), are current dominant understandings of pedagogy in need of revision? Is pedagogy properly understood as justice? Or should pedagogy go beyond the limits of dominant notions of justice? These questions push us to clarify what pedagogy is in practice and what it should be, both in ideal conditions and in the nonideal conditions in which we currently find ourselves.

In contrast to views that pedagogy either is necessarily or should be justice-oriented, two challenges arise. First, consider the challenge that pedagogy is insufficient for justice. If pedagogy cannot deliver justice, expecting pedagogy

Since the 1970s, the concepts of “lifeworld” and “everyday life” have been part of the discourse of social pedagogy and social and educational work in general. Xavier Úcar's objective in this article is to generate and communicate socio-pedagogical knowledge that helps social pedagogues to build socio-educational relationships that are more effective, more sustainable, more satisfactory, and ultimately richer in terms of both experiences and learning for participants. A conceptually oriented, nonsystematic analysis procedure was used to conduct this research. The procedure involved an in-depth investigation of documents that focus on the two target areas of this study: (1) social pedagogy, and (2) lifeworld and everyday life. The results describe the theoretical background of lifeworld and everyday life, discuss the development of the perspective of “lifeworld orientation” within the framework of social pedagogy in Germany, and analyze how everyday life is understood through actions undertaken by social pedagogues. These results provide ideas for mapping the essential dimensions of everyday life from the perspective of social pedagogy.

Educating against extremism doesn't just involve seeking to prevent individuals from becoming extremists or radicalized, although that, of course, is a significant concern. There is also an important role for education in teaching the rest of us, the general populace, the best way to react and respond when we learn of a terrorist attack or consider the potential risk of violent extremism in our community, or even worldwide, given we are connected globally via technology. In this article, Laura D'Olimpio argues that educators have a central role to play in teaching young people to respond to the news of violent extremism and the worry about terrorists and terrorism in ways that support our sense of community and personal well-being. Among the ways in which educators may support such aims is by educating the emotions. There are practical and moral reasons to temper our fearful reactions, and it is in our best interest to educate pupils to avoid allowing fear of terrorists or violent extremism to interfere with their daily lives and actions. D'Olimpio claims that our best response to extremism, both representationally and practically, is to refuse to be terrified. By not being overwhelmed by fear or altering our day-to-day activities, we not only better support a well-functioning democracy and our own happiness or flourishing, but we also disempower rather than empower extremists.

Schools plausibly have a role to play in countering radicalization by taking steps to prevent the acquisition of extremist beliefs, dispositions, and attitudes. A core component of the extremist mindset is aversion to compromise. Michael Hand inquires here into the possibility, desirability, and means of educating against this attitude. He argues that aversion to compromise is demonstrably undesirable and readiness to compromise demonstrably desirable, so discursive teaching of these attitudes should guide pupils toward these verdicts. And he identifies three methods of formative teaching by which readiness to compromise can be cultivated in pupils.

Democracies are calling on schools to respond to a rise in extremist ideologies and actions. In this article Sigal Ben-Porath situates the rise in extremism within the broader context of political polarization. She suggests that the latter is a more appropriate target for school intervention than the former. She further suggests that addressing polarization can result in a reduction in extremism, and that polarization can be addressed by refocusing the use of existing teaching and learning tools, rather than by instituting new forms of intervention such as the Prevent strategy used in the UK. Tackling polarization through media literacy and the development of democratic habits can help rectify false beliefs, which contribute both to broad political polarization and to individuals' slide toward extremism. Focusing on strengthening knowledge as well as social ties can fortify individuals' and communities' resilience against extremism, as well as build bridges and connect people to a sense of shared fate across political divides. These practices are more effective and more justified than targeting individual students who are suspected of holding radical beliefs.

Societies concerned with preventing acts of violent extremism often target the ideas that are thought to motivate such acts. The state's use of educational institutions is one mechanism by which those ideas are subjected to challenge. Teaching liberal democratic values to students is one method. Here, David Stevens argues that this model is misguided. First, commitment to violent methods is not primarily driven by the attractiveness of radical ideas themselves, but by material facts and circumstances. Second, an education that ignores the teaching of various socioeconomic values, such as a commitment to a certain degree of material equality and welfare provision, is inadequate as a conception of citizenship. These criticisms are related. Citizens are owed certain resources and commitments as citizens, and grounds for dissatisfaction and violence are reduced when citizens receive the holdings to which they are entitled, and when their fellow citizens recognize and endorse this. Consequently, it is the role of education to teach directively toward the adoption of such socioeconomic values and commitments.

Schools are increasingly being asked to identify and monitor youth who may be susceptible to recruitment toward radical groups. Rather than asking teachers to identify at-risk behaviors, Dianne Gereluk argues here that a whole-school approach may help to foster belonging and connection among youth that is not additive, but a central component of safe and inclusive schools. Whole-school approaches attend to the different power relationships that occur within the school community, focusing on the classroom environment, the school organization, and the broader school environment. Insofar as radicalization is partly a response to the perception of exclusion and oppression, these factors may go some way toward mitigating the appeal of extremism.

A key epistemological assumption in the ideologies of many of the groups termed extremist is that there is an unmediated access to a Divine Will. Driven by this assumption, and facilitated by several other factors, a range of coercive actions (including violence) to force others into submission to the perceived Will of God are seen as justified by some of these groups. A consideration of how religion is discussed in various contexts, from seminaries and schools to media and policy discourses, shows that this assumption about unmediated access to Divine Will is widely shared and that most children grow up socialized into it. In this paper, Farid Panjwani argues that challenging this assumption through educational settings can help young people acquire critical capacities that may lead to a critique of extremist narratives, thereby decreasing their attractions. In this regard, the paper draws upon a range of theoretical ideas, for example, the hermeneutical tradition (in particular the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer), as well as historical and textual examples, to make a case for a rethinking of religious education to develop more critical capacities among the students.

Do schools have a role to play in counter-radicalization? Insofar as extremism and terrorism represent a clear and present danger to public safety, are there steps educators can reasonably be asked to take to mitigate the threat? And if so, what does a defensible program of education against extremism look like?

In the UK, schools already have a statutory duty to “have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism,”¹ and the Department for Education (DfE) has issued advice on how this duty should be fulfilled.² Schools are charged, first, with identifying and referring to the police “children at risk of radicalization” and, second, with providing learning opportunities that “build pupils' resilience to radicalization.”³ Among the resilience-building measures recommended by the DfE are “providing a safe environment for debating controversial issues,” equipping pupils to “understand and manage difficult situations,” teaching “effective ways of resisting pressures,” and cultivating “positive character traits.”⁴

The UK Prevent duty is by no means unproblematic. The identifying-and-referring part of the duty casts teachers in the role of informants, undermining trust in teacher-pupil relationships and inhibiting open discussion in the classroom. The stipulated definition of extremism — “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values”⁵ — is strikingly inadequate. And the recommended resilience-building measures are excessively vague and diffuse.

Still, it is not absurd to think that certain kinds of educational intervention might reduce young people's susceptibility to extremist ideas, attitudes, and thinking styles. While it is possible that the causes of extremism lie wholly beyond the reach of education, it is also possible that, armed with a more adequate account of extremism and a more focused set of resilience-building measures, schools may be in a position to do something about them. We think the latter possibility is at least worth exploring.

In 2021 we convened a group of scholars with an interest in these matters for an Educational Theory Summer Institute. We had planned to meet in person at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, but the COVID-19 pandemic pushed our gathering online (and, with participants stretched across the globe from Karachi to Calgary, added some interesting time zone challenges). Over three days we workshopped draft versions of the seven papers collected here, and in the weeks that followed we revised and refined them in light of our conversations. As convenors, we would like to extend sincere thanks to our fellow participants for their fine papers and constructive engagement with one another's work, and to Nicholas Burbules for his judicious chairing of the discussions and his editorial support in bringing this symposium for Educational Theory to fruition.

Needless to say, our contri

This essay describes what it means to live with existential self-doubt, explores how such doubt emerges in educational encounters, and examines some educational benefits and challenges of uncertainty and doubt. Mordechai Gordon begins his analysis by describing the type of self-doubt that Paul Cézanne embodied, that is, of an artist who painted throughout his entire life yet was still consumed by existential uncertainty. Drawing on Cézanne's example, as well as poet Rainer Maria Rilke's life and his own experience, Gordon sheds light on what it means to live with existential doubt. Following the discussion of existential uncertainty, he revisits the epistemic self-doubt displayed by Socrates and René Descartes and compares it to existential self-doubt. In the third part of this essay, Gordon draws on the examples of some veteran teachers in order to illustrate how educators have approached the challenge of living with existential self-doubt. The final part of the essay considers both the promises and perils of existential self-doubt in the context of education.