This article examines four related aspects of Hegel's approach to the teaching of philosophy and to the philosophy of the teacher. Specifically, it highlights some of the views Hegel expressed on education in general whilst Rector of the Nuremberg gymnasium; describes his opinions on the place of philosophy within the school curriculum and the structure of the philosophy course which he designed for his pupils; examines the pedagogy which he employed in teaching his system of philosophy; and offers preliminary comments (...) on his insights into the contradictions which resist the abstract identity of the teacher. (shrink)

In the past fifty years, hundreds of definitions of 'literacy' have been advanced by scholars, adult literacy workers, and programme planners. This paper analyses three major approaches to the problem of defining literacy: quantitative, qualitative and pluralist. The pluralist perspective, while not without its difficulties, appears to have the most to offer in understanding literacy in the contemporary world.

When Mathew Lipman first introduced Philosophy for Children to the world, his goal was not to sneak a little academic philosophy into the typical school curriculum, as one might expect from the titles of his first books: Philosophy in the Classroom and Philosophy Goes to School. His goal, rather, was to create a paradigm shift in the field of education itself: namely, to transform the typical hierarchical model into one in which the teacher/facilitator solicits responses from students and hence, in (...) that sense, meets them where they “are at.” This non-hierarchical model, however, has stumbled in taking root, which is, perhaps, not surprising given that the hierarchical model, whether in school, in sport or in the home, appears to be so much easier and so much more efficient. If those of us who support a non-hierarchical model in all these arenas are serious about furthering this approach, it would appear that the onus lies with us to articulate precisely in what ways a hierarchical model falls short. In so doing, we will not only provide ourselves with a precise framework by which to make the case for the importance of adopting a non-hierarchical approach, we will also provide ourselves with a metric whereby we can measure whether our own non-hierarchal practice is true to its justification; and that the approach is not simply non-hierarchal for sake of being non-hierarchical, nor quasi-authoritarianism for the sake of more wide-spread acceptance. It is the articulation of the flaws of a hierarchical model that non-hierarchal model can correct that will be the focus of the analysis here. (shrink)

Waldorf education, an alternative pedagogy imported to the USA from Germany in 1921, is rarely researched yet popularly conceptualized as a space of unusual educational freedom and creativity. However, viewed systematically through the lens of critical ethnography and discourse analysis, the Waldorf approach is quite the opposite, governed by rigid routines and adult control of children's bodies, activities, and language. Drawing upon the critical sociology of childhood and combining observational and interview data from a nine-month ethnography, I argue that Waldorf (...) education's central tenet of ‘protecting childhood’ is fundamentally about adult control and a deficit notion of young children. Specifically, I use critical discourse analysis to illuminate how pronominal use in the teacher's discourse serves to justify her authority and deficit constructions of child development. The article concludes by considering the ways Waldorf education might be made more egalitarian by incorporating multiple conceptions of child development in its pedagogical practice. (shrink)

Anti-racist education within the Academy holds the potential to truly reflect the cultural hybridity of our diverse, multi-cultural society through the canons of knowledge that educators celebrate, proffer and embody. The centrality of Whiteness as an instrument of power and privilege ensures that particular types of knowledge continue to remain omitted from our curriculums. The monopoly and proliferation of dominant White European canons does comprise much of our existing curriculum; consequently, this does impact on aspects of engagement, inclusivity and belonging (...) particularly for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) learners. This paper explores the impact of a dominant Eurocentric curriculum and the Decolonising the Curriculum agenda within higher education and its influence upon navigating factors such as BAME attainment, engagement and belonging within the Academy. This paper draws on a Critical Race Theory (CRT) theoretical framework to centralize the marginalized voices of fifteen BAME students and three academics of colour regarding this phenomena. Aspects examined consider the impact of a narrow and restrictive curriculum on BAME students and staff and how the omission of diverse histories and multi-cultural knowledge canons facilitates marginalization and discriminatory cultures. (shrink)

Conversation, dialogue, reasonable disagreement, and the acquisition of knowledge through the words of others, all of this has always been at the center of philosophers’ concerns since the emergence of philosophy in Ancient Greece. It is also important to recognize that in contemporary philosophy, marked by the linguistic turn, there is a wealth of intellectual production on ethical, psycho-linguistic, logical-linguistic, and pragmatic aspects of the conversation. Despite all this, this is the first collection of texts dedicated exclusively to the strictly (...) epistemic aspects of this phenomenon which is so decisive for the very constitution of our humanity. This book brings together the contributions of fifteen leading philosophers on some of the most relevant issues of what we could call the Epistemology of Conversation. (shrink)

An outstanding group of leaders left evidence that a richer and more sustainable democracy could be achieved with American independence and democratic principles integrated into a new republican form of government. They were moved by principles that are the very spirit of democracy. These principles are needed to enhance democracy and improve well-being. Using the constructivist tradition of grounded theory and Aristotle’s conception of abstraction, the article proposes a theory of the first principles of democracy based on substantive data: the (...) Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, The Federalist Papers, and the United States Constitution. Knowledge, fairness, human dignity, hope, unity, and security are the first principles of democracy and are regarded as the bedrock of democracy and a government framework for the people. This theory contributed to a formal model of democratic social change. It also contributes a conceptual framework that supports Solum’s semantic originalism, a theory of constitutional interpretation. The principles of democracy can revitalize democracy and provide new possibilities by protecting education as an innate human right, abolishing capital punishment, criminalizing private prisons on the stock market, and reevaluating the proportionality of prison sentences. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to make a case for The Rebel as an important educational text. Discussing The Rebel in this way for the first time, the goal is to try and demonstrate that the work could have a unique contribution; in particular there might be a number of similarities between Camus and educational thinkers relating to the goals, pedagogy and the meaning of education. The Rebel has been noted as Camus’s most underexplored text so by investigating these (...) synergies for the first time, this article aims to demonstrate another dimension to The Rebel and potential relevance for educational theory and practice. (shrink)

Existing social disparities in the United States are inconsistent with Lincoln’s promise of democracy; therefore, there is a need for a critical conceptualization of the first principles that undergird American democracy and the genesis of democratic social change in America. This study aimed to construct a grounded theory that provides an understanding of the process of American democratic social change. The result was the construction of two frameworks: the demoralization process that triggers social change, and a formal grounded theory that (...) could explain democratic social change endeavors across different domains and levels of analysis. This democratic social change grounded theory answers the research question: How do the principles of the American founding documents provide an understanding of the process of American democratic social change? (shrink)

UMI Number: 3319553 This study is a historical ethnography of religious diversity in post-revolutionary Nicaragua from the vantage point of Catholics who live in the city of Masaya located on the Pacific side of Nicaragua at the end of the twentieth century. My overarching research question is: How may ethnographically observed patterns in Catholic religious practices in contemporary Nicaragua be understood in historical context? Utilizing anthropological theory and method grounded in Weberian historical theory, I explore Catholic ritual as contested politico-religious (...) cultural terrain. The patron saint celebration of Masaya becomes a contested symbol in 1999 as those who carry Saint Jerome in street procession refuse to honor a sitting president, challenging his right to rule. The deep Marian devotion of the Nicaraguan people is reflected in the household and neighborhood celebrations of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, while nation-building elites have a long history of claiming the Virgin as patron saint of the nation. While these traditional Catholic saint celebrations figure in imagining a nation, three "new" Catholic movements also compete for attention, while the polity is increasingly exposed to Protestant and Pentecostal groups. When Anastasio Somoza Debayle was overthrown in 1979, ending the 40-year family dictatorship, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) ruled for a decade with the attention of the world placed on its religion of revolution, the Christian base community and liberation theology. At the same time, however, two other movements began growing quietly. They, like liberation theology, draw their justification from the second Vatican Council. In Masaya, Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the Neocatechumenal Way are "exemplary" prophetic movements gaining ground within the Catholic Church in competition with the "ethical" prophets of the Christian base community. Selectively adopting "protestant-like" forms of worship through these modern movements, the Nicaraguan Roman Catholic Church reacts to the challenge to its cultural hegemony coming from evangelical competitors. New history is continuously being made as people in this part of Nicaragua struggle over the direction of their country within a complex terrain of religious competition. (shrink)

Although anonymity is a central feature of liberal democracies—not only in the secret ballot, but also in campaign funding, publishing political texts, masked protests, and graffiti—it has so far not been conceptually grounded in democratic theory. Rather, it is treated as a self-explanatory concept related to privacy. To overcome this omission, this article develops a complex understanding of anonymity in the context of democratic theory. Drawing upon the diverse literature on anonymity in political participation, it explains anonymity as a highly (...) context-dependent identity performance expressing private sentiments in the public sphere. The contradictory character of its core elements—identity negation and identity creation—results in three sets of contradictory freedoms. Anonymity affords (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. This contradictory character of anonymity's affordances illustrates the ambiguous role of anonymity in democracy. (shrink)

Inspired by the practice of dialogue in ancient philosophical schools, the Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL) Project at the University of Notre Dame has sought to put dialogue back at the center of philosophical pedagogy. Impromptu philosophical dialogue, however, can be challenging for students who are new to philosophy. Anticipating this challenge, the Project has created a series of manuals to help instructors conduct dialogue groups with novice philosophy students. Using these guidelines, we incorporated PWOL-style dialogue groups into (...) our Spring 2021 course “The Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender” with the hope that, through having conversations about these challenging topics, our students would both be able to practice having philosophical dialogues as well as form their views on race and gender in light of contributions from their diverse peers. This article examines several strategies for how instructors can seek to incorporate similar dialogues into their own introductory classroom. (shrink)

Education as identity formation in Western-style liberal-democracies relies, in part, on neutrality as a justification for the reproduction of collective individual identity, including societal, cultural, institutional and political identities, many aspects of which are problematic in terms of the reproduction of environmentally harmful attitudes, beliefs and actions. Taking a position on an issue necessitates letting go of certain forms of neutrality, as does effectively teaching environmental education. We contend that to claim a stance of neutrality is to claim a position (...) beyond criticism. In the classroom this can also be an epistemically damaging position to hold. To further explore the problem of neutrality in the classroom, and to offer a potential solution, we will look to the philosophical community of inquiry pedagogy, and advocate for the addition of place-based education; a form of experiential education that promotes learning in local communities in which the school is situated, each with its own history, culture, economy and environment. However, how we understand ‘place’ is fundamental to understanding the potential of place-based education in giving students a ‘sense of place’—how they perceive a place, which includes place attachment and place meaning. To this end, we look to Indigenous understandings of Place and social reconstruction learning to inform place-based pedagogies. Doing so, we hold, opens a pathway to ethical education. (shrink)

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) and community engaged research (CEnR) are key to promoting community and patient engagement in actionable evidence-based strategies to improve research for health equity. Rapid growth of CBPR/CEnR research projects have led to the broad adoption of partnering principles in community-academic partnerships and among some health and academic organizations. Yet, transformation of principles into best practices that foster trust, shared power, and equity outcomes still remain fragmented, are dependent on individuals with long term projects, or are non-existent. (...) This paper describes how we designed our Engage for Equity PLUS intervention that leverages the leadership and membership of champion teams (including community-engaged faculty, community partners and patient advocates) to improve organizational policies and practices to support equity based CBPR/CEnR. (shrink)

There has been the recurrent suspicion that community, harmony, cohesion, and similar relational goods as understood in the African ethical tradition threaten to occlude difference. Often, it has been Western defenders of liberty who have raised the concern that these characteristically sub-Saharan values fail to account adequately for individuality, although some contemporary African thinkers have expressed the same concern. In this chapter, I provide a certain understanding of the sub-Saharan value of communal relationship and demonstrate that it entails a substantial (...) allowance for difference. I aim to show that African thinkers need not appeal to, say, characteristically Euro-American values of authenticity or autonomy to make sense of why individuals should not be pressured to conform to a group’s norms regarding sex and gender. A key illustration involves homosexuality. (shrink)

In 2020, an international team of intercultural philosophers and African linguists created a multilinguistic game named Adinkra. This name refers to a medieval rooted symbolic language in Ghana that is actively used by the Akan and especially the Asante among them to communicate indirectly. The Akan is both the meta-ethnic name of the largest Ghanaian cultural-linguistic group of which the Asante is an Akan cultural subgroup and of a Central Tano language of which Asante-Twi is a dialect. The Adinkra symbols, (...) which have permeated Akan life and the arts, can be found e.g. on Asante royal staffs and gold weights. They are also loosely connected to Akan proverbs. The game Adinkra aims to enhance its players’ intercultural communicative, and moral philosophical understanding by matching Adinkra symbols with Akan proverbs. It was created for educational and therapeutical purposes. This article focusses on the rules, the making of Adinkra, its aims and objectives. The objective of this article is twofold. First, it focusses on the game itself. It elaborates on what its rules are and the content of the game. It also focusses on how playing the multilinguistic game, Adinkra can enhance intercultural understanding and communication. It, furthermore, concentrates on the results of a pilot reception study of this game in the Netherlands among intercultural groups of players. This study has proven that the Adinkra game stimulates creative thinking, engagement in dialogue and reflective ethical thinking. For this reason, the authors believe that it has a lot to contribute to intercultural educational programs with a focus on intercultural communication, philosophy and arts in both Africa and the global North. Finally, a section is devoted to the question of how the Adinkra game was developed and methodologically grounded in Gadamer’s playful hermeneutics, and the theories of the Wheel of the Intercultural Art of living and (African) Indigenous Religions. Secondly, the article focusses on the game’s oral-literary storytelling context and Akan moral ideas. It then throws the searchlight on the creative, therapeutic value and its potential to serve as a ‘cultural detox’. The authors and game makers think that being introduced to an African communitarian ethos hidden in the Adinkra symbols and Akan proverbs can help its players to develop a critical eye for the highly individualistic ethos of Western culture that, among others, is promoted by neoliberal thinking and praxis. The word praxis is used by the authors in the meaning found in educational contexts. Adinkra’s players are stimulated to reflect upon a different moral idea, which can change their mindset and put them into action to contribute to social awareness and societal change. (shrink)

Higher Education has been considered as a site of knowledge, and it is a place, where one can pursue it. But, the distribution of knowledge and acquiring knowledge is controlled by various factors. For example, caste, class, language, region, religion, gender, race, etc. The two principal factors, i.e. language and caste, determine one's access and then survival in higher educational institutions. The Hegemony of English language becomes a very problematic for non-English background students in the higher educational classroom in India. (...) The hegemony of one language itself achieves the status of dominant or prestigious. The caste, class and gender also determine who are going to use the English language as a medium of instruction. In the era of modernization and globalization, caste, class and gender dynamic work inherently in the higher education. In this context, this paper gives a broader insight of language and caste-based discrimination, and it's a mechanism in the higher education set-ups. (shrink)

Hoping is an integral part of what it is to be human, and its significance for education has been widely noted. Hope is, however, a contested category of human experience and getting to grips with its characteristics and dynamics is a difficult task. The paper argues that hope is not a singular undifferentiated experience and is best understood as a socially mediated human capacity with varying affective, cognitive and behavioural dimensions. Drawing on the philosophy, theology and psychology of hope, five (...) modes of hoping are outlined: patient, critical, sound, resolute and transformative. The key aim of the paper is to illustrate how different modes of hoping are associated with different pedagogical strategies. Phrased differently, the paper seeks to delineate a range of pedagogies of hope. The phrase ‘pedagogy of hope’ is very much associated with critical theory—one thinks instantly of, for example, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux or bell hooks. There are many pedagogies of hope, however, and an explicitly conservative text such as William Bennett’s Book of Virtues has as strong a claim to the title as Freire’s radical and utopian ideas. A broader argument, therefore, is that there is nothing inherently radical or subversive about a pedagogy of hope. Pedagogies of hope can serve to reproduce social relations as well as to transform them. (shrink)

This paper discusses literacy as a socio-political phenomenon from the perspective of several relatively independent educational discourses. The first is critical education theory and research revealing the hidden mechanisms by which education policies act in the interests of a global market economy. The second is the perspective of critical pedagogy scholars on contemporary educational challenges, who offer responses similar to those discussed in current discourse on informal civic education. The third is the heated discussion of high-stakes literacy testing (related to (...) OECD literacy studies such as PISA, IALS, etc.) the results of which are used as a source of argumentation for diverse attitudes and educational consequences. Based on an analysis of literacy theory, research on active citizenship and civic education, the term “civic literacy” is proposed and argued as a relevant conceptual frame for conceptualizing school as an institution which can be involved in resistance to all forms of power politics or ideological indoctrination and manipulation, while at the same time, respecting the traditional values and aims of general education. (shrink)

There is no abstract for this chapter. The following is a summary. -/- We distinguish between, explicit, inadvertent, and habitual racist actions. We argue that while inadvertent bigots and habitual racists are inclined to (sincerely) deny that they committed a racially motivated action, they have different reasons for their denial. Inadvertent bigots are denying it because, however deeply they search, they are not going to find any such motive. Habitual racists, by contrast, may hold explicit egalitarian attitudes but they are (...) nonetheless implicitly racially motivated. There is thus an implicit stressful conflict between their covert racist intentions and their overt egalitarian attitudes. While they aren’t aware of the source of this distress, cognitive dissonance theory predicts that they nevertheless will engage in dissonance-reducing strategies. Specifically, we argue that habitual racists will be inclined to confabulate a description of the action in non-racial terms. (shrink)

Theoretically, this study is framed within the semiotic tradition of communication theory, which theorizes communication as the intersubjective mediation by signs. Methodologically, this study is guided by Peirce’s semiotic ideas, especially his writing about the commens and commind, or the sign and the object, and the power of a community as the final interpretant performing the process of sensemaking. Results showed how the survivors of a natural calamity symbolically interacted with such calamity, and how this led to a reformation of (...) the way they view themselves and the world. The survivors’ symbolic images captured in narratives, in sketches and drawings, and in poetry helped them to reframe their sense of self and their worldview by believing in common sense and intuition, and by valuing the power of courage, initiative, preparedness, hope, and resilience. An unfortunate irony emerged in their symbolic interaction with the disaster such that their sinning and self-inflicted blame made them think they were worthy of punishment. Nonetheless, this unfortunate irony will change if the survivors continue to reflect on their civic roles, interrogate their environmental and political contexts, and expand their awareness and social consciousness. As these unfold, the survivors will be able to accomplish empowerment, emancipation, and an independent mind. (shrink)

In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning. But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational (...) knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged—or even engaging—epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren’s idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower’s being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other. (shrink)

The narrative of Plato’s cave story is loaded with ‘some of the most suggestive opposites in the repertoire, namely the contrasts between down and up, darkness and light, chains and freedom’ (Hrach...

Community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is a way of practicing philosophy in a group that is characterized by conversation; that creates its discussion agenda from questions posed by the conversants as a response to some stimulus (whether text or some other media); and that includes discussion of specific philosophers or philosophical traditions, if at all, only in order to develop its own ideas about the concepts under discussion. The epistemological conviction of community of philosophical inquiry is that communal dialogue, facilitated (...) by a philosophically educated person, recapitulates and reconstructs the major elements—and even the positions or claims—of the tradition, in one form or another, through the distributed thinking characteristic of dialogical discourse. The pedagogical locus of control of CPI is the group as a whole, which is understood as potentially self‐regulating through a process of ongoing dialectical transformation. The role of the facilitator is to act, among other things, from the Socratic “position of ignorance” as a bridge between concepts and arguments and as a trigger for conceptual system transformation. (shrink)

As educators, writers and public intellectuals, many of us share a sense of responsibility for reflecting on the worlds in which we live, with a view to transforming them for the common good, towar...

Although social justice is an integral component of medical professionalism, there is little discussion in medical education about how to teach it to future physicians. Using adult learning theory and the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, medical educators can teach a socially-conscious professionalism through educational content and teaching strategies. Such teaching can model non-hierarchical relationships to learners, which can translate to their clinical interactions with patients. Freirian teaching can additionally foster professionalism in both teachers and learners by ensuring that (...) they are involved citizens in their local, national and international communities. (shrink)

In the past 20, years the impact of progressive educational theories have become influential in nurse education particularly in relation to partnership and empowerment between lecturers and students and the development of student autonomy. The introduction of these progressive theories was in response to the criticisms that nurse education was characterized by hierarchical and asymmetrical power relationships between lecturers and students that encouraged rote learning and stifled student autonomy. This article explores how the work of Michel Foucault can be mobilized (...) to think about autonomy in three different yet overlapping ways: as a historical event; as a discursive practice; and as part of an overall strategy to produce a specific student subject position. The implications for educational practice are that, rather than a site where students are empowered, nurse education is both a factory and a laboratory where new subjectivities are continually being constructed. This suggests that empowering practices and disciplinary practices uneasily co‐exist. Critical reflection needs to be directed not only at structural dimensions of power but also on ourselves as students and lecturers by asking a Foucauldian question: How are you interested in autonomy? (shrink)

For centuries, philosophy has been considered as an intellectual activity requiring complex cognitive skills and predispositions related to complex (or critical) thinking. The Philosophy for Children (P4C) approach aims at the development of critical thinking in pupils through philosophical dialogue. Some contest the introduction of P4C in the classroom, suggesting that the discussions it fosters are not philosophical in essence. In this text, we argue that P4C is philosophy.

Efforts to develop democratic schools have moved along particular rules and standards of ‘reasoning’ even when expressed through different ideological and paradigmatic lines. From attempts to make a democratic education to critical pedagogy, different approaches overlap in their historical construction of the reason of schooling: designing society by designing the child. These approaches to democracy make inequality into the premise of equality, assuming a consensual partition of the world and the need for specific agents to monitor partitioned boundaries, thus reinserting (...) differences as the basis of practice. Democracy, however, according to Jacques Rancière, only becomes visible when its partitioning is challenged under the opinion of equality. Yet, undoing the epistemological dogma of planning embodied in the notions of ‘critical’ and deliberative democracy might also involve confronting the comparative style of thought which provides the epistemological ‘rules’ that insert inequality as equality. Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome and Derrida's justice help extend Rancière's democracy and equality into unfamiliar terrain. What implications might this have for thinking about educational policy and curriculum? The argument, ironically, maintains Enlightenment attitudes about reason and rationality, but while ‘trying’ different epistemological rules and recognizing how the epistemological and ontological fold into one another it provides an alternative understanding of education and democracy. (shrink)

D’ALONZO KT. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 282–288 Getting started in CBPR: lessons in building community partnerships for new researchersThere is a growing interest in community‐based participatory research (CBPR) methods to address issues of health disparities. Although the success of CBPR is dependent upon the formation of community‐researcher partnerships, new researchers as well as seasoned investigators who are transitioning to CBPR often lack the skills needed to develop and maintain these partnerships. The purpose of the article is to discuss the competencies (...) needed by new researchers to form successful CBPR partnerships. The author presents a series of strategic steps that are useful in establishing academic–community partnerships and in initiating, maintaining and sustaining CBPR projects. These steps include suggestions regarding community engagement, selection of community advisory board members, outreach, the community’s role in problem identification, selection of research methodologies, considerations related to the community setting, need for flexibility and patience, ‘insider vs. outsider’ conflicts, commitment and training issues, timing concerns for tenure‐track faculty and the process of community empowerment. Community‐based participatory research is both rewarding and time consuming, for both the researcher and members of the community. Given its promise to address health disparities, it is imperative that researchers acquire the skills needed to develop and cultivate durable community‐researcher partnerships. (shrink)

In defending a new framework for incorporating metacognitive debiasing strategies into critical thinking education, Jeffrey Maynes draws on ecological rationality theory to argue that in felicitous environments, agents will achieve greater epistemic success by relying on heuristics rather than more ideally rational procedures. He considers a challenge presented by Mercier and Sperber’s “interactionist” thesis that individual biases contribute to successful group reasoning. I argue that the challenge can be met without assuming an individualist ideal of the critical thinker as a (...) solitary reasoner. Focusing on cognitive laziness and myside bias, I then argue that a more complete reckoning with the implications of interactionism about reasoning will require us to transcend individualism more fully to embrace the selection, design, regulation, and navigation of dialogic environments as central pedagogical aims of critical thinking education. (shrink)

The critique of metaphysics can often entail a critique of liberalism. Rorty sought a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophy and the broader humanities, by linking the rejection of metaphysics to a justification for liberal democracy and reformism. He believed that the recognition of socio-historical contingency concerning interpretations of fundamental values and of truth, combined with a humanities education, would create a sense of solidarity that would motivate reforms. Freire argues that a dialogic form of education is as important as the (...) humanities’ content. For Freire, people liberated by a critical education based on dialogue rather than a passive reception of information, can develop a radical critique of capitalism. Vattimo argues that while Heidegger saw techno-science as being the final phase in metaphysical domination, the contemporary development of information and communications technology creates a ‘Babel-like’ pluralism that undermines the ‘violence’ of metaphysic’s totalising thought. This can allow for the development of a post-metaphysical ‘weak communism’ that improves social justice. Rorty and Freire help to show that it is education, rather than technological developments, that can motivate a post-metaphysical politics of solidarity, and Vattimo and Freire are correct to argue that replacing reformism with radical critique is needed for social justice, although Vattimo’s weak communism only provides limited social justice. (shrink)

The decolonial theory understands that Western Modernity keeps imposing itself through a triple mutually reinforcing and shaping imprisonment: coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being. Technical design has an essential role in either maintaining or overcoming coloniality. In this article, two main approaches to decolonizing the technical design are presented. First is Yuk Hui’s and Ahmed Ansari’s proposals that, revisiting or recovering the different histories and philosophies of technology produced by humankind, intend to decolonize the minds of (...) philosophers and engineers/architects/designers as a pre-condition for such decolonial designs to take place. I call them top-down approaches. Second is some technical design initiatives that, being developed alongside marginalized/subalternate people, intend to co-construct decolonial sociotechnical solutions through a committed, decolonizing, and careful dialog of knowledge. I call them bottom-up approaches. Once that is done, the article’s second half derives ontological, epistemological, and political consequences from the conjugation of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Such consequences challenge some established or not yet entirely overcome understandings in the philosophy of technology and, in so doing, are meant to represent some steps in PT’s decolonization. Even though both top-down and bottom-up approaches are considered, the article’s main contributions are associated with decolonial technical design practices, whose methodologies and outcomes are important study cases for PT and whose practitioners can be taken as inspiring examples for philosophers who want to decolonize/enlarge PT or make it decolonial. (shrink)

Volume 46, Issue 3, November 2019, Page 454-457.

Lifelong learning is something which one does for oneself that no one else can do for one: it is a public and personal human activity, rather than private or individualistic. One of the features of the education system is the paucity of a language for learning as process and participative experience. Personalised learning requires a sense of the worth-whileness of 'being a learner' - a virtue in the 21st century. A sense of one's own worth as a person is essential (...) to understanding one's identity as a learner. Research suggests the human capacity to learn can be understood as a form of consciousness which is characterised by particular values, attitudes and dispositions, with a lateral and a temporal connectivity. This 'consciousness' has several dimensions which are all related to becoming a person, with a learning identity. They also enable the learner to become aware of and appropriate what is of worth and map onto the sorts of core values that learning communities espouse. Awareness of self and of one's own worth as a person is a necessary condition for 'becoming a learner' and for identifying and engaging with 'what is of worth'. Furthermore, a sense of self as a learner is formed in relationship, and understood as one learns to tell one's own story, as a participant in the conversation of the learning community. Character is the way in which we refer to that quality of personhood in which there is rooted the capacity to change and learn over time. (shrink)

Research into violence in schools has been growing steadily at an international level, and has shown high degrees of violence at various different levels. Given the seriousness of the problem, finding ways of responding to this issue in schools becomes an imperative for educationists. In this article, we engage with this problem by defending the view that whilst violence might be endemic in schools, there are also real possibilities for working towards different ways of being in relationship in schools. Firstly, (...) we discuss Galtung’s understanding of violence and peace, paying particular attention to his concepts of structural and cultural violence, peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding. Secondly, we connect Galtung’s notions of peacemaking to Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, in order to make a case for an ‘epistemological shift’ which might enable individuals and communities to achieve ‘peace’. Finally, we direct our argument to the education context and put forward some concrete proposals for peacemaking in schools. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine diverse political philosophical conceptualisations of justice and interrogate how these contested understandings are drawn upon in the burgeoning food justice scholarship. We suggest that three interconnected dimensions of justice—plurality, the spatial–temporal and the more-than-human—deserve further analytical attention and propose the notion of the ‘justice multiple’ to bring together a multiplicity of framings and situated practices of (food) justice. Given the lack of critical engagement food justice has received as both a concept and social movement in (...) the context of the United Kingdom (UK), we draw upon empirical research with practitioners and activists involved with heterogenous food movements working at the local, regional and national level and apply the justice multiple concept to the interview data. We highlight the diverse ways that justice is discussed in terms of access, fairness, empowerment, rights and dignity that reflect established organisational discursive framings and the fragmented nature of food system advocacy and activism. Based on this insight, we argue that a plurivocal, relational conceptualisation of socioecological justice can help enhance the multiple politics of food justice, pluralise UK food movement praxis and nurture avenues for broader coalition-building across the food system. (shrink)

This article proposes a rethinking of Bourdieu’s habitus as context-specific, multiple, and decentralized based on nine months of participant-observation fieldwork with dumpster divers in New York City. Dumpster divers are mostly white, college-educated people in their twenties and thirties who eat food from retail trash as a lifestyle choice. Sociologists have recently theorized culture as a fragmented, incoherent “toolkit” of cultured capacities acquired throughout the lifetime. Bourdieu on the contrary, theorized socialized culture as habitus, a relatively durable, classed structure acquired (...) during childhood. While he recognized the possibility of acquiring “specific” habitus (Bourdieu 2000) later in life, he never developed the theoretical implications of socialization across multiple contexts. Building on ethnographic evidence of dumpster divers’ contradictory pursuit of food taste through the distasteful behavior of eating from the trash, I develop an alternative model of habitus as interlinked bundles of dispositions acquired in specific contexts. To theorize the bundled quality of habitus, I introduce what I call the practical congruity of dispositions. I show how rather than being disparate elements of a cultural repertoire, ways of seeing, common sense, dexterity, and orientations “make sense” in conjunction as actors mobilize them in specific contexts: dumpster diving acquires a commonsensical character based on the practical sense practitioners acquire. My understanding of habitus goes beyond the fragmentation assumed in notions of culture as a repertoire of cultured capacities, on the one hand, and the continuity and coherence premised in notions of primary and secondary habitus, on the other hand. (shrink)

The recent enthusiasm for “participation” in agricultural development has fueled the development of new approaches to research and extension. The rhetoric of “participation” extends the horizons of agricultural research and extension beyond technical problem-solving. Yet in practice few of the personal, political, and experiential aspects of this process are addressed. This paper aims to draw attention to these elements of practice and to locate research and extension within wider social processes. Through a critique of conventional methodological strategies, this paper considers (...) the possibilities offered by “participatory” alternatives. Considering the scope and objectives of agricultural development raises a series of methodological questions: What counts as knowledge? Who defines and represents this knowledge? Whose knowledge counts? Knowledge for what? Knowledge for whom?The paper goes on to assess a number of these “new” methodologies, within and beyond agricultural development. Through a consideration of their strengths and weaknesses, a series of further issues are highlighted for future methodological development. It is argued that for agricultural research and extension to acknowledge process, closer attention needs to be paid to context. The activities of research and extension need to be set in time. Strategies are needed to explore and address diversity and difference in communities. Situating the actors and agencies involved in development within relations of power involves addressing—and redressing—the nature of interactions between these actors. These changes require not an ever increasing array of methods, it is argued, but new approaches to learning. (shrink)

Digital storytelling has become a popular method for curating community, organisational, and individual narratives. Since its beginnings over 20 years ago, projects have sprung up across the globe, where authentic voice is found in the narration of lived experiences. Contributing to a Collective Intelligence for the Common Good, the authors of this paper ask how shared stories can bring impetus to community groups to help identify what they seek to change, and how digital storytelling can be effectively implemented in community (...) partnership projects to enable authentic voices to be carried to other stakeholders in society. The Community Digital Storytelling method is introduced as a means for addressing community-of-place issues. There are five stages to this method: preparation, story telling, story digitisation, digital story sense-making, and digital story sharing. Additionally, a Storytelling Cycle of Trust framework is proposed. We identify four trust dimensions as being imperative foundations in implementing community digital media interventions for the common good: legitimacy, authenticity, synergy, and commons. This framework is concerned with increasing the impact that everyday stories can have on society; it is an engine driving prolonged storytelling. From this perspective, we consider the ability to scale up the scope and benefit of stories in civic contexts. To illustrate this framework, we use experiences from the CDST workshop in northern Britain and compare this with a social innovation project in the southern Netherlands. (shrink)

The Liberal Arts model of undergraduate education within small, internationally-focused University Colleges is becoming increasingly popular in Europe. This trend is most notable in the Netherlands, where the liberal arts model is acclaimed as filling a gap in Dutch undergraduate education at conventional research universities. This paper explores the status of the Dutch University College as simultaneously continuing the liberal arts tradition of the US, with its civic and pedagogic values, and providing a truly modern education preparing students to find (...) innovative and inter-disciplinary solutions to the complex problems which define contemporary society. It concludes that the traditional role of a liberal arts education in cultivating intellectual rather than vocation skills does not have to exclude its appeal as providing the skills necessary for professional success in global sectors of the 21 st century knowledge economy. (shrink)