Increased global attention to early childhood education and care in the past two decades has intensified attention on the education of infants and assessment of their learning in education policy. This interest is particularly evident in the focus upon infants in the early childhood curriculum frameworks developed in recent years in many countries. To date, there has been little examination of implications of this policy/curriculum emphasis in relation to its possible implications for how infants are understood. In this article, using (...) Levinas’ notion of ethical encounter, we present a critical reading of curriculum for infants. Drawing on his ideas of the ‘Other’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘unknowability’ we argue that the rapidly growing corpus of knowledge about infants and their inclusion in education policy and curricula texts, has the potential to narrowly define educators’ responsibilities and prescribe pedagogies in ways that may have unintended consequences. Using the Australian National Quality Framework (NQF) and its associated Early Years Learning Framework as examples, this article highlights the tensions inherent in a system that aims to provide equity, consistency and certainty, premised on a particular ‘knowing’ of the infant. We draw on Levinas’ ideas about ‘said’ and ‘saying’ to propose ways of working with policy and curricula texts that recognise that they can offer only partial understandings of the possibilities for infants’ learning. (shrink)

This article explores and extends Levinas’s ideas of singularity and community as multiplicity and argues that his identification of language and discourse as the means to create ethical communities provides tangible possibilities for rebuilding genuine democracy in a humane world. These ideas help us reimagine school and classroom as communities open to differences. They also give education the opportunity to support the emergence of the singular and the irreducible—infinite human beings.

In this article I explore the implications of the educational use of diversity in current discourse and practice. I argue that the current recognition of differences through the emphasis on social identity is just the continuity of the logic that traditionally has responded to otherness through suppression or possession. The central idea is that the category of diversity, even if it is used in the educational sphere as a purveyor of recognition of otherness, hides in reality a fear of the (...) other, as it comes from the consideration of human beings in terms of power . The result of this fear is the attempt to decode the other by enclosing her in an alienated and standardized identity. Finally I will propose dependence as a main educational category that understands humans as recipients of other beings, thus values as responsibility, gratitude and generosity become prominent over those of respect or tolerance. (shrink)

In this article I explore if and how very young children can be the educators of their early childhood educators. I describe and discuss a story constructed form a fieldwork done in one early childhood setting in Norway. The story is read with Levinas and his concepts Said and Saying. Further I discuss if and how this might be understood as education arguing that the children`s expressions are offering new beginning and change in the pedagogical thinking and praxis within the (...) early childhood setting. (shrink)

After providing a general overview and critique of some of the main problems with teacher praise, in which I basically argue that praise binds and controls the students instead of liberating them, I go on to examine whether it is possible to praise without the intention to control the students. In this way I challenge conventional and standardising ways of praising, and argue that it is possible to make room for the singularity and uniqueness of students through praise.

This article begins with an account of an improvised classroom in a refugee camp. From this account, and building on Heidegger's' analysis of spatiality, two fundamental characteristics are identified as: first, that classrooms are 'sanctioned-off' from the world, and secondly, that educational situations involve attention to the world.Arendt's distinction between education and politics is presented not only as a normative call to action, but also, and perhaps primarily, as a phenomenology of education as a basic human activity. The article turns (...) to Mollenhauer's account of the emergence of a pedagogical sphere in early modernity, and particularly to his notion of representation, to understanding the way things of the world appear in classrooms.The article proposes the concept of liminality to describe the classrooms as neither 'inside' nor 'outside' the world, and could therefore offer their inhabitants (i.e. students and teachers) opportunities for imaginative exploration, as well as ethical encounters. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most profoundly original Western philosophers in the twentieth century, has recently received considerable attention from educators and educational theorists. Against t...

Online and blended learning (OBL) overemphasize the process of creating artifacts, producing strategies, or otherwise utilizing a “making” orientation in education. As an alternative to this making-orientation, we offer a model for relational course design founded in the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber. We examine an OBL course design focused on interfaith leadership and ethics that lends itself to the need for relational pedagogy. The focus on asymmetrical and symmetrical relationships that separate Levinas and Buber’s philosophies enable rich (...) ways of designing relational pedagogies and for resisting the making orientation. By focusing on human relationships, we demonstrate design principles through “philosophies of difference” that can be used in OBL. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 318-328, April 2022.

The insistence on knowledge accumulation in modern educational discourses has led to the formation of exclusive dichotomies in various forms, most tangibly observable in the division of people into ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘unknowledgeable’. What underlies this dichotomy is a conception of rationality based on which knowledge is seen as an ‘instrument’ which must necessarily result in a usable, profitable product. From a Levinasian perspective, the latter situation inevitably, if not purposefully, leads to the formation of the Other being located at the (...) side of irrationality, hence an unnecessary entity within the knowledge economy. Analysing Werner Herzog’s film, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser’s (1974), this paper aims to show how irrationality, contrary to the belief of dominant educational/pedagogical discourses, can act as a source for creative thinking. The paper argues that by accepting the Other as the unknowable, we allow them to resort to their singularity as a source for imaginative thinking. (shrink)

Recent years have seen educationalists turning to Emmanuel Levinas when considering the relationship between ethics and education. While it is true that Levinas never speaks of ethics in relation to the practice of classroom education, nonetheless, for Levinas, ethics is a teaching, and learning can only take place in the presence of the Other. This book considers how, within the constraints of the Irish primary school education system, teachers can develop a Levinasian approach to teaching, that affords both them and (...) the children they teach multiple opportunities throughout the school day to take up their ethical responsibility for each other as Other. Beginning from a Levinasian understanding of learning and teaching as constituting primordially relational and ethical events, and weaving the philosophies of Levinas, and the educationalists he inspires, into the approaches of philosophy with children, restorative practice, and PAX, this book suggests a unique approach to ethics in Irish primary school classrooms. The focus of this thesis, then, is on both the philosophical underpinnings that anchor teaching as a Levinasian, and a consideration of what practical approaches could be employed by the Levinasian teacher. (shrink)

This paper argues for an alternative notion of spirituality for education, based on Theo de Boer’s idea of a spirituality of the desert. Rather than depicting an inner, additional region named the spiritual, spirituality here is thought of as a discourse that depicts the everyday world in a particular way. In dialogue with David Purpel’s analysis, the paper argues for a notion of spirituality that is located in an ongoing oscillation between ‘the individual’ and ‘the community.’ This oscillation turns out (...) to be the call of justice. This analysis helps understand classroom dynamics differently, providing a place of critique for current practices. (shrink)

In his 2012 article Philosophy of Education for the Public Good: Five Challenges and an Agenda, Gert Biesta identifies five substantial issues about the future of education and the work required to address these issues. This article employs a Heideggerian reading of education to evaluate ‘Biesta’s truth’. I argue that Biesta’s point of view underestimates knowledge’s predominance and relativism; frames intentionality in pre-Heideggerian terms, which—although not a problem in itself because an individual is free to choose a particular perspective on (...) the concept—raises the issue of consistency in Biesta’s theoretical framework; and a final criticism concerns Biesta’s choice of tools for engaging with the identified challenges: The primary tools Biesta uses are intrinsic to the perspective he challenges. The use of a ‘first person perspective’ to frame pedagogy that focuses on the subject and ‘subjectification’ reaffirms the fundamental Western gesture that makes human beings subjects who ‘stand-over-and-against’ the world. I argue that it is possible to penetrate Plato’s ‘theoretical gaze’ and find a ‘weak’ alternative to an all-encompassing point of view of education through a Heideggerian approach that regards intentionality and thinking as ‘hearing’. (shrink)

After providing a general overview and critique of some of the main problems with teacher praise, in which I basically argue that praise binds and controls the students instead of liberating them, I go on to examine whether it is possible to praise without the intention to control the students. In this way I challenge conventional and standardising ways of praising, and argue that it is possible to make room for the singularity and uniqueness of students through praise.

Using insights from the tradition of via negativa and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this paper proposes that unknowability can occupy an important place in teaching and learning, a place that embraces the unknowable in general, as well as the unknowable Other, in particular. It is argued that turning toward both via negativa and Levinas offers us an alternative to conceptualizing the roles of the ethical and the unknowable in educational praxis. This analysis can open possibilities to transform how educators (...) think about the goals of education in two important ways. First, creating spaces for embracing unknowing in educational settings is an act of ethical responsibility that recovers a sense of the Other and his/her uniqueness. Second, rethinking the value of unknowing in the classroom may inspire in students and teachers a sense of vigilance, responsibility and witnessing. Unknowing is an act of embracing otherness and presents a curious element of redemption; in the lack of knowledge, the meaning of its absence is found. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the contribution of theoretical resources to the transformation in my thinking about professional development and accountability, within an action research self-study of practice as a civil servant, in the context of participation on the Doctor in Education programme at Dublin City University in the period 2008-2012. It is at the intersection of these subject positions, between theory and practice, that professional development was explored through the ‘leadership problem’ of encouraging trainer colleagues to investigate the educational (...) potential of information and communications technologies for the development of their practice. Ultimately, this constituted a critical space for sustained dialogue between the self and the social in exploring professional subjectivity. The resources discussed supported the interrogation of social, cultural and historical conditions influencing self-understanding and narrative reasoning and movement from strategic to communicative reasoning. It is claimed that this has significance for the development of a more educational training practice, which expresses a concern for subjectivity and agency in the face of a growing ‘performativity’ in professional life. (shrink)

Since Plato, Western thought has framed knowing as a method within ‘some realm of what is’ and a predetermined ‘sphere of objects’. The roots and the consequences of this stance towards reason and truth were noted by Heidegger, who equates the history of Western thought with the history of metaphysics. Since Plato, truth has relied on definition, hierarchy and mastery. Discourse on the truth begins to be discourse on the limits of things and, thus, on who is able to set (...) these limits and discourse. This dominant position erases its own traces, presents itself as unique and unavoidable, and excludes all other ways of thinking. This exclusion includes violence, and this violence is not merely a philosophical matter. It is written in the history of the West, which is a history that includes conquest, genocide and war. However, we can also identify in Heidegger ways to transcend this inner violence by returning to the originating stance towards truth, namely, truth as aletheia, or world disclosure. This article provides the groundwork to argue that Heidegger's thought, based on a call for existential responsibility, requires education to remake our existence. (shrink)