Skepticism about the limits of online learning is as old as online learning itself. As with other technologically-driven innovations in pedagogy, there are deep-seated worries that important educational goods might be effaced or obscured by the ways of teaching and learning that online methods allow. One family of such worries is inspired by reflections on the bodily basis of an important kind of understanding, and skepticism over whether this bodily basis can be inculcated in the absence of actual, flesh-and-blood, classroom (...) interactions. This paper focuses on the ways in which such worries arise in the influential work of Hubert Dreyfus. The negative conclusion for which I argue is that endorsing Dreyfus's Merleau-Pontian picture of the relationship between bodily skill and understanding does not commit us to his general pessimism concerning online learning—bodily, emotional, and interactive dimensions might be essential to learning, but we lack reasons to think that online learning necessarily lacks these dimensions. The negative argument motivates a positive claim: rather than giving up on online learning we should focus on designing courses and pedagogies that scaffold the bodily, affective and interactive dynamics constitutive of understanding in a particular domain. (shrink)

It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we should focus on the affective scaffolding of social media. We will show that some affective scaffolds enable desirable epistemic practices, while others obstruct beneficial epistemic (...) practices, or enable hostile epistemic practices. Particularly, we will show that emotions play a crucial role in the epistemic practice of critical thinking and that the affective scaffolding of social media can support, or hinder, online critical thinking. The upshot of our argument is that affective scaffoldings of social media can harness emotions to support beneficial epistemic practices, like online critical thinking. (shrink)

Education can transform our cognitive world. Recent use of enactivist and enactivist-friendly work to propose understanding transformational learning in terms of affective reframing is a promising first step to understanding how we can have or inculcate transformational learning in different ways without relying on meta-cognition. Building on this work, I argue that to fully capture the kind of perspectival changes that occur in transformational learning we need to further distinguish between ways of reorienting one’s perspective, and I specify why different (...) ways are differently valuable. I propose that recent approaches to Confucian ritual provide a clue to what is missing in characterisations of perspective transformation and the resultant transformed perspective. I argue that focussing on ritualised interpersonal interactions provides a further clue as to what’s missing from a mere appeal to the ritual-based inculcation of new perspectives, namely the kind of lightness and flexibility that some ritualised interactions encourage participants to have, and the deepening of perspective associated with that lightness. I argue that a case study of a project implementing a highly ritualised philosophical practice with prisoners in Scotland shows how these constraints, seemingly paradoxically, function so as to actually deepen the perspectival spaces of those agents. This case study provides a proof of concept for the proposal that certain forms of ritual engagement can reliably bring about the kind of transformation of perspective that is the target phenomenon of transformative learning theory. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The reconceptualisation of school placement (Teaching Council, 2013) poses a challenge to initial teacher education in Ireland. Some criticised the timing (Mulcahy and McSharry, 2013). Others considered it to be too great a professional leap (O’Grady, 2017). This study sought to explore if and how cooperating teachers could develop as mentors in the Irish context, through engagement in a ‘participatory action learning action research’ (PALAR) ‘mentoring community of practice’ (M-CoP). Qualitative data collection methods included: questionnaires with stimulus recall, pre-workshop questions, (...) workshop observation, workshop artefacts, reflective journals, learning journey plans, and extended focus group discussions. Data were analysed via constant comparison of codes and categories. CTs reported that their transformed practice as a mentor and a leader was achieved due to the multi-process, meta-pedagogical, meta-model design of the PALAR M-CoP. They indicated that the meta-model enhanced their fluency in the ‘language of critique’ enabling them to identify and become exercised about a range of complex barriers to growth. It also developed their fluency in the languages of ‘possibility’ and ‘leadership for change and empowerment’, which aided them to cope with, and overcome barriers to growth, resulting in the empowerment of themselves and other school placement partners. (shrink)