In this paper I provide a critique of what I refer to as ‘perspectival reason’, which is the idea that the fundamental setup of human beings in relation to the world is in terms of individuals having perspectives on the world. I argue that the idea of the world as something to view and have a perspective on is not a neutral, trans-historical category but a configuration that emerged in modern times when the world became ‘view’ of ‘picture’, as Heidegger (...) has put it. I indicate some of the key problems of perspectival reason in our time, both in education and society. I then work towards an alternative configuration by discussing a number of ‘world-returning philosophies’. I discuss pragmatism and phenomenology as attempts to return the world, and indicate that, while successful in returning (to) the world, they return the self in problematic ways. Through a discussion of ideas from Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion I propose a configuration in which both world and self are ‘returned’ in more meaningful ways. Key in this is the idea of the world as appeal and of the self as the one who responds to this appeal and through this ‘arrives’ in the world. My explorations are intended to highlight why the idea of ‘taking a perspective’ is problematic, and how we can work towards an alternative. I also discuss where the logic of perspectival reason causes problems for education and how the alternative configuration I present provides a productive way forward. (shrink)

While the teaching of controversial issues has generally been supported by schools and education scholars, new laws and public outcry have impacted whether and how controversial issues are taught. Calls to ban or limit teaching of controversial issues have largely been spurred by conservative parents, policymakers, and political groups. Some teachers and many education scholars are deeply concerned and want to preserve teaching about controversial issues. This situation suggests that inquiry is needed into changes in the educational aims held and (...) practices endorsed by various stakeholders. This article reconsiders the aims used to justify teaching controversial issues and situates them within larger understandings of good citizenship, revealing important differences in the explanations and values endorsed by opposing groups. It categorizes the aims more generally held by teachers, philosophers of education, and citizenship education scholars as: reasoning, engaging, communicating, and sustaining democratic communities. Then, those aims are compared to aims circulating within the discourse of opposing parents, policymakers, and political organizations. Finally, this article argues that pragmatic adjustments to educational aims held by many teachers and education scholars are both warranted and wise. It provides potential ways to better justify the teaching of controversial issues, including through approaches that more strongly ground teaching in American principles, historical examples, and a commitment to living together well. (shrink)

According to one historic view of liberal education, such education is incompatible with the express pursuit of civic goods. Call that view ‘pure liberal education’. Students engaged in pure liberal education are set free, temporarily, from utilitarian concerns, for a course of study aimed at intrinsic goods—most notably knowledge but also the formation of a virtuous mind. Proponents claim that a direct pursuit of civic goods would compromise the mode, matter, and/or integrity of pure liberal education—that is, its freedom from (...) utilitarian concern, its wide-ranging and intrinsically valuable subject matter, and its commitment to following the truth wherever it leads. In reply, I offer a pedagogy that requires (almost) no departure from the pure liberal ideal yet which reserves a modest, though important, place for civic formation. That place emerges from the fact that academic and civic life ‘overlap’ in an important respect: both involve a conversation and thus a common set of virtues. The latter consist in those practices and dispositions that enable the conversation to go well, by encouraging mutual understanding and the formation of true beliefs. The existence of this overlap provides a way for pure liberal educators, who already expressly influence their students’ academic formation, to likewise influence their civic formation. It consists in teachers consciously developing those virtues in their students, along with an awareness of the virtues’ relevance for civic life. This pedagogy retains the matter and integrity of pure liberal education, with only brief introductions of the practical mode. (shrink)

In more than half of its states, the USA has recently passed or proposed legislation to limit or ban public educational curricular reference to race, gender, sexuality, or other identity topics. The stated justifications for these legislative moves are myriad, but they share a foundational claim; namely, these topics are asserted to be politically and socially divisive such that they ought not to be included within state-controlled schools. In this paper, we consider the claims of divisiveness regarding these topics and (...) explore whether, even if taken in good faith, the popular versions of these arguments and actions are epistemically defensible. We conclude that these bans are an epistemic injustice and therefore argue for their end. The article proceeds to consider the foundational claims of epistemic injustice, followed by the invocation of epistemic standards by which the arguments for these bans can be evaluated. The article then transitions to a close application of these standards, weighing the possible epistemic gains and losses. Before concluding, we consider objections and explore the social and epistemic significance of these issues. (shrink)

Civic education that prepares students for principled civic participation is vital to democracy. Schools face significant challenges, however, as they attempt to educate for democracy in a democracy in crisis. Parents, educators, and policy‐makers disagree about what America's civic future should look like, and hence about what schools should teach. Likewise, hyperpartisanship, mutual mistrust, and the breakdown of democratic norms are perverting the kinds of civic relationships and values that schools want to model and achieve. Nonetheless, there is strong evidence (...) that young people want to be civically engaged and are hungry for more and better civic learning opportunities. Reviving the civic mission of schools is thus a win‐win‐win. Adults want it, youth want it, and democracy needs it. We propose three means by which educators and the public can reconstruct our common purpose and achieve civic innovation to help democracy in crisis: support action civics, strengthen youth leadership outside the classroom, and engage both students and adults with “hard history” and contemporary controversies. (shrink)

Engineering ethics is a required aspect of accredited ABET programs, but there is widespread variation in how ethics is taught, to what ends, and how those ends are assessed. This variation makes it challenging to identify practices for teaching ethics to engineers aligned with extant practices in the field. In this study, we revise a recent coding framework by reviewing exemplary engineering ethics programs recognized by the National Academy of Engineering in 2016, or what we refer to as “exemplars.” We (...) pursue two primary objectives: (1) To apply and revise a prior coding framework to codify ethics learning objectives, instructional strategies, and assessment strategies in engineering education; and (2) To use the revised coding framework to identify trends in learning objectives, instructional strategies, and assessment strategies of NAE exemplars. We employ systemic review procedures to update the coding framework using 24 of 25 exemplars as a data source. The updated framework includes four primary categories associated with learning objectives, instructional strategies, assessment data collection strategies, and assessment design characteristics. Results indicate that ethical sensitivity or awareness was present in every exemplar as a learning objective, often alongside ethical reasoning-based learning objectives and the formation of professional skills. Exemplars employed numerous instructional strategies in tandem, as we coded eight out of 18 instructional strategies among at least half of the exemplars. Assignments/homework and summative reflections were the most oft-used sources of assessment data. Due to our challenges in coding assessment approaches, we offer practical suggestions for assessing engineering ethics instruction which are based on many of our coding discussions. We hope that this coding framework, the results classifying exemplary features of the NAE programs, and our practical suggestions can guide future instructors as they design, classify, assess, and report their approaches to engineering ethics education. (shrink)

The body of research on civic education points to the importance of teachers creating open democratic environments, leading to what has been termed the political classroom. This yearlong study of an Israeli multicultural and bilingual high school civics course, in which students from different citizenship status participated, presents a case in which teachers were unsuccessful in achieving this goal, raising the question of what limited this class's potential to create an educational environment where democratic discourses could have taken place? The (...) main argument points to Israel's current disputative political environment that led to the enactment of four educational mechanisms that resulted in such a futile reality. These included: conflicting objectives, avoiding discussion of controversial issues, implementing traditional teaching practices, and overlooking language issues. The neo-liberal educational environment and a culture of fear and self-censorship were both identified as a common explanation to these, leading to an educational reality in which there was a detach between the lessons and the students’ transcultural lived political experiences. From a methodological perspective, the study illuminates the importance of focusing on such unsuccessful cases, examining their elements, and understanding what influences them. (shrink)

Social studies teachers are often reported as remaining reluctant to engage their students in discussions of contemporary social and political issues. It is therefore critically important to investigate instances of such discussions when they do occur. This paper, part of a larger qualitative study that included six middle and high school classrooms and 24 observed discussions, considers how students are positioned in classroom discussions of social and political issues. By thinking in terms of positions and Ellsworth's (1997) notion of “modes (...) of address”, the authors conceptualize political discussions in terms of the delicate relations between intent and outcome, the social and personal, certainty and surprise. This paper identifies three modes through which students are invited into relation to social and political life via discussions of current topics: task-oriented participants, distanced commentators, and/or as implicated citizens. (shrink)

Using data from interviews, student work, and classroom observations in a “History of Race” course at a private predominantly White high school, this article examines the racialized tensions that led the teacher (first author) to create an unofficial affinity group for students of color that met outside of class. The authors argue that the teacher's attempt to implement a curriculum that was culturally affirming for students of color by de-centering Whiteness led to White students’ resistance that necessitated the creation of (...) an unofficial “safe space” outside of the classroom for the students of color. The need for such a group demonstrates the difficulties inherent in presenting a more honest account of the role of race and racism in the United States that challenges narratives of historical progress. The article concludes that while students of color ideally should have access to culturally affirming knowledge inside social studies classrooms, this experience demonstrates why that kind of knowledge can only be engaged effectively within learning spaces that challenge the norms of conventional social studies education. (shrink)

Young people around the world show considerable engagement with climate change. How can education draw on this engagement in order to benefit students and society? In this article, we discuss how inquiry-based dialogues can support students’ development in their societal engagement. We argue that such dialogues should include real-world problems involving disagreement, which promote students’ agency. We elaborate on qualities of dialogues, such as developing argumentation and perspectives together through respect, attentive listening and recognition of others’ viewpoints. Central theoretical perspectives (...) include inquiry-based dialogues and students’ lived democracy. This research draws on data from a classroom activity where 15–16-year-old students in Norway investigate controversial issues related to electrifying offshore oil platforms. The students are in a learning situation, and the teacher wants them to learn about climate change and the oil industry and the skills and attitudes needed to participate in inquiry-based dialogues. The dialogues show that students bring knowledge, opinions and attitudes from outside school, characteristics that are crucial for students’ engagement. We discuss how teachers can facilitate students’ further engagement by addressing multiple aims of inquiry-based dialogues. (shrink)

Ever-increasing numbers of teachers are expressing commitments to social justice education today, but few experienced critical or democratic education in their own schooling or in their teaching practicum. Thus, teachers’ critical democratic commitments can be difficult to put into practice, especially in classrooms where students with diverse and unequal positionalities are engaged in learning together – what I call “heterogeneous” classrooms. Education that is “democratic” (that includes a range of warranted perspectives) can seem to come into conflict with education that (...) is “critical” (that elevates and centers marginalized perspectives). We have little research depicting how educators meet such challenges.This paper depicts an experienced and committed social justice educator wrestling with difficult problems in the enactment of critical democratic education. Mr. Crane regularly engaged his racially and linguistically heterogeneous students in discussions of social issues, and during these discussions regularly encountered practical facilitation challenges posed by inequality among students. He wrestled with how to elevate students of color's views without spotlighting them, and how to challenge dominant perspectives without shaming the students who voiced them. Drawing on qualitative data from classroom observations and interviews, I depict Mr. Crane making sense of and mobilizing emergent instructional responses to these challenges – with, by his own reckoning, mixed results. One instructional routine, an impromptu version of a critical inquiry, was flagged by Mr. Crane as a promising method for navigating some of the trickiest problems of critical democratic education practice.This paper's findings demonstrate that enacting critical democratic education is not easy. Even experienced and committed social justice educators struggle with how to put their critical values into practice. By making visible one experienced critical democratic educator's recurring problems of practice, my research acknowledges the difficulties of this work and contributes to problem-framing. Furthermore, by deconstructing a promising routine for impromptu critical inquiry during classroom discussions of social issues, this research contributes a model of effective critical democratic education in practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT People suffer from a variety of cognitive shortcomings when forming and updating their political beliefs. Three pervasive shortcomings are confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, and motivated reasoning. The emotional state of anxiety can help us overcome these biases given the open-minded, information-rich, reflective deliberation with diverse people it may promote—although mass and social media may hinder this type of deliberation.

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a polarizing historical survey that has become a common subject of social studies curricular battles. This mixed methods study uses survey data and interviews with teachers who frequently assign the book to understand who uses this text and why. Findings reveal that the text has functional, pedagogical, and political appeal for teachers who are committed to including multiple perspectives and critiquing historical narratives. That these teachers are not primarily animated by (...) Zinn's intention for the text to inspire students’ participation in social movements should undermine critics’ fears of indoctrination and sloppy history teaching, but may disappoint supporters of the text hoping for more critical pedagogical motivations. (shrink)

How should we teach controversial issues? And which issues should we teach as controversies? In this paper, I argue that educators should heed what I call a ‘psychological condition’ in their practical efforts to address these questions. In defending this claim, I engage with the various decision criteria that have been advanced in the controversial issues literature: the epistemic criterion, behavioral criterion, political criterion and politically authentic criterion. My argument is that the supporters of these various criteria have focused too (...) closely on the socio-political and epistemic qualities of controversial issues in deriving their controversial issues pedagogies and have thereby overlooked the necessary subjective conditions for teaching controversial issues. If our pedagogical efforts to cultivate students’ reason by means of controversial issues are to be successful, then we must understand controversy as fundamentally a psychological phenomenon consisting in an intellectual tension in the minds of students. In the final pages, I conclude by recommending several forms of directive teaching that promise to be instrumental for creating such intellectual tension. (shrink)

In this article, I will begin by describing recent divisive concepts legislation, which bans teaching about aspects of racism, sexism, and equity, speculating briefly on the motivations behind it and the implications resulting from it. I will then describe how discussing divisive concepts in classrooms may be a helpful way for students to better understand the particular concepts and for students to take a stand on them. While I will briefly argue for the importance of classroom discussion of divisive concepts, (...) my central claim will be that we must do more than merely discuss these concepts. Instead, we should engage in classroom inquiry about them. Inquiry positions students to not be silent regarding divisive concepts, as some legislation may cause, and inquiry positions students to not just talk about divisive concepts, but to solve social problems related to them in our world today. In other words, inquiry enables us to do something about divisive concepts, rather than just learning about them, as some educators currently advocate in calls for discussion. And inquiry is certainly more effective than banning divisive concepts or pushing them to the background, as recent legislation attempts to do. I argue that rather than excluding divisive concepts or the divisions they may provoke from our classrooms, we need educative spaces where we inquire into what divides us, why we are divided, and how we might respond to such division. Within that inquiry, we can better attend to our divisions while also taking up the specific concepts prohibited in recent legislation. (shrink)

The press and scholars alike often bemoan the failure of civil public deliberation. Yet this insistence on civility excludes people who engage in adversarial tactics, limiting the ideas that are heard within deliberation. Drawing on a deliberative dialogue that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the aftermath of the deadly White Supremacist rally of 2017, this article reveals how the capacity of deliberation to be inclusive of diverse voices depends upon deliberators’ orientation to learn from people who do not participate in (...) deliberation. While much scholarship attends to learning for democracy, as in the preparation of young citizens, this article shows the significance of learning in democracy, as in the capacity of adults to learn in the midst of political strife. (shrink)

Critical pedagogy is an optimistic approach for achieving transformative agency, which remains an elusive and vital aspect of civic education. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the pedagogical approach of three critically identifying teachers. Specifically, this study was interested in understanding participant teacher critically civic ontological postures. The posture implies an understanding of the power inherent to civic relation and pedagogy. Participant teachers uniquely demonstrated postures that allowed them to address conceptual, personal, and material aspects of civics (...) education. Participants achieved this first by making clear temporal connections between citizenship and disciplines; second, by incorporating student experiences; and lastly by utilizing a range of instructional approaches to negate traditional civic archetypes. Findings suggest that critical civic ontological postures are dynamic, contextual, and disciplinarily situated. Authentically critically civic ontological postures include developing intellectual solidarity with students and those in educational communities. (shrink)

This Q methodological study explored the ways preservice and in-service social studies teachers engaged with a collection of social media posts about the Black Lives Matter movement. The study asked participants to share their reactions to the posts as well as how they would determine which posts they might present to their students in the classroom. The analysis of the Q sorts identified three subject positions available to these social studies teachers—labeled the Context Provider, the Data Debater, and the Critical (...) Confronter. Notably, each of these subject positions was underscored by a prevalent discourse of teachers working as a Guide on the Side. These findings suggest that social studies teachers’ pedagogical imaginings of engaging students with social media content and in the analysis of current social and political movements for justice are significantly informed by dominant discourses of teacher “neutrality.”. (shrink)

Heightened political polarization challenges civic educators seeking to prepare youth as citizens who can navigate affective boundaries. Current approaches to civic education do not yet account for the emotional basis of citizenship. This paper presents an argument for critical affective literacy in civic education classrooms. Drawing from concepts and theories in critical emotion studies, affective citizenship, and agonistic political theory, critical affective civic literacy challenges the rationalistic bent of civic education, and offers instructional strategies for educating the political emotions of (...) students. The voices of late-arrival migrant youth enacting affective citizenship are featured in order to help illuminate the contributions of critical affective literacy to social studies research and practice. (shrink)

Enhancing agency—or in a more colloquial term, promoting empowerment—is typically viewed as an unquestioned good. International organisations promote the empowerment of girls and other vulnerable groups around the world. Domestically, democracies rely for their legitimacy on the idea that citizens have agency; hence, civic educators aim to strengthen student ‘voice’ and their inclination to participate. This is all for good reason, as justice does depend in part on the agency of individuals and oppressed groups. But a focus on individual or (...) even collective agency has a dark side. For if people feel that they can change the world, then they also often feel that they should. This sense of responsibility to use one's agency at all times can encourage an instrumental relationship to others and make it difficult to learn receptively, particularly from people with whom we disagree, and especially in moments of crisis. (shrink)

This qualitative study explores the perceptions of democracy and citizenship among 14 teachers of Islamic religious education in the Israeli Arab and secondary schools in Israel. It expands the knowledge on how religious (Muslim) teachers conceptualize the meaning of democracy and citizenship education. The first theme addresses three critiques of democracy: the ethnopolitical (the failure of democratic regimes, including Israel, to protect the rights of religious minorities); epistemological (the shortcoming of the rule of majority in ensuring a decent and just (...) life for all citizens); and theological (moral). The second theme highlights the cultural obstacles for achieving democracy in Arab society in Israel and the possible contribution of Islamic education to detribalizing and depersonalizing the meaning and practice of democracy in this society. (shrink)

Experts in civic education and social media used the “Delphi Method” to address countering social media's “echo chamber” effect. Analyses revealed relative agreement, with required civics courses emerging as the most recommended solution. The need for well-prepared teachers, a coordinated curriculum, and appropriate materials and methods were major considerations.

Numerous articles and books focus on questions about teaching controversial issues in the classroom, and these controversial issues are on the educational agenda in many countries. The modest goal of this essay is to lay the necessary groundwork for a discussion and study of the goals for teaching controversial issues in schools, in order to examine the practicability of achieving them in the educational reality, and to study possible ways for raising such subjects in the classroom. It refines and adds (...) to the concept of “controversial issues” from a particular, timely, perspective. The rise of “fake news” and “illiberal democracy,“ including empowered illiberal subgroups in liberal democratic polities demands a reconsideration and new delineation of some of the major tenets proposed by previous scholarship. The delineation that is proposed here moves through three stages. The first stage separates and distinguishes between the controversial issues and the assertions that according to the criteria that logical positivists have coined are meaningful. The second stage proposes the main criterion for defining a topic as controversial, and this is the epistemic-rational criterion, as defined in this essay. The third delineation stage proposes seeing a subject as being controversial if it is currently relevant for social and political life. Moreover, the essay asserts that the result of the examination of these three stages is dependent upon the context – time and place – in which the educational act occurs. (shrink)

The primary objective of this article is to describe how the children of soldiers critiqued and examined media representations of war. Taken from a more extensive qualitative case study involving eight teachers, this article examines one social studies teacher and her students’ perspectives on media coverage of war through two Socratic Seminar discussions focused on two wars: the American Civil War and Gulf War. Data was collected through interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations. Students leveled a specific set of critiques (...) at television media and those who consume it. They also grappled with two ethical quandaries: censorship and the justness of war.This article emerged from an unusual place – a Mathew Brady photograph. The teacher, a lecturer typically, decided to engage her students in discussion. This discussion was designed to provide “process and sense-making time,” according to their teacher, Ms. Jones, after four days of lecture on the American Civil War. Yet, the discussion grew into something much different than Ms. Jones's original plan. It evolved into an interrogation of how the media represents war. Inspired by the thoughtful discussion, several months later, Ms. Jones engaged the same students in an examination of media representations of the first Gulf War. Ms. Jones is the focus of this article because out of the eight other teachers in the larger qualitative study, she was the only one to focus on classroom time (two entire class sessions) on media representations of war. (shrink)