Assuming that critical thinking dispositions are at least as important as critical thinking abilities, Ennis examines the concept of critical thinking disposition and suggests some criteria for judging sets of them. He considers a leading approach to their analysis and offers as an alternative a simpler set, including the disposition to seek alternatives and be open to them. After examining some gender-bias and subject-specificity challenges to promoting critical thinking dispositions, he notes some difficulties involved in assessing critical thinking dispositions, and (...) suggests an exploratory attempt to assess them. (shrink)

What is critical thinking, especially in the context of higher education? How have research and scholarship on the matter developed over recent past decades? What is the current state of the art here? How might the potential of critical thinking be enhanced? What kinds of teaching are necessary in order to realize that potential? And just why is this topic important now? These are the key questions motivating this volume. We hesitate to use terms such as “comprehensive” or “complete” or (...) “definitive,” but we believe that, taken in the round, the chapters in this volume together offer a fair insight into the contemporary understandings of higher education worldwide. We also believe that this volume is much needed, and we shall try to justify that claim in this introduction. (shrink)

Despite the importance of ethics in corporate crisis management, they have received limited attention in the academic literature. This article contributes to the evolving conversation on ethics in crisis management by elucidating the ethics of "justice" and "care" and distinguishing between them. Examples of the two approaches are offered through consideration of cases in corporate crisis management, including the alleged glass contamination case faced by Gerber Products Company, and, the shooting tragedy at San Ysidro faced by McDonald''s Corporation. It is (...) argued that both an ethic of justice and an ethic of care can be appropriate approaches in corporate crisis management. Areas for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Care theory is used to describe an approach to global ethics and moral education. After a brief introduction to care ethics, the theory is applied to global ethics. The paper concludes with a discussion of moral education for personal, political, and global domains.

Education has long been charged with the taskof forming and shaping subjectivity andidentity. However, the prevailing view ofeducation as a project of producing rationalautonomous subjects has been challenged bypostmodern and poststructuralist critiques ofsubstantial subjectivity. In a similar vein,Emmanuel Levinas inverts the traditionalconception of subjectivity, claiming that weare constituted as subjects only in respondingto the other. In other words, subjectivity isderivative of an existentially priorresponsibility to and for the other. Hisconception of ethical responsibility is thusalso a radical departure from the prevailingview (...) of what it means to be a responsible moralagent. In this paper, I use jazz improvisationas a metaphor to focus on three interrelatedaspects of ethical responsibility on Levinas'saccount: passivity, heteronomy, andinescapability. I then point toward some waysin which reframing responsibility andsubjectivity along this line might offer newpossibilities for conceiving subjectivity andmoral agency in education. (shrink)

Cheating is a serious issue among business students worldwide. However, research investigating the social factors that may help prevent cheating in Chinese higher education is rare. The present study examined two key social relationship factors of perceived teacher-student relationships and peer relationships by the students. It attempted to build a model which addressed the effects of two variables on Chinese business students’ cheating behaviour: the teacher’s approachability and the relationship goal of the students. Two important social influence factors were also (...) tested as mediators: neutralizing attitudes and perceived cheating norms of the students. A student survey was conducted with 1329 questionnaires collected. The results showed the negative effects of both social relationship variables on cheating, and that their effects were fully mediated by neutralizing attitudes. Moreover, perceived cheating norms fully mediated the effect of the teacher’s approachability, but not so for the relationship goal of the students. This study provided novel insights and recommendations for promoting academic integrity in Chinese business schools and universities. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the potential contribution of care ethics to the field of media ethics. In the first part of this article, we discuss the theoretical and philosophical background of the ethics of care. In the second part, we suggest some specific avenues for theoretical, critical, and practical applications of care ethics to the field of journalism and media ethics.

Ample attention is being paid in the higher education literature to promoting active learning among students. However, critical examination of educational purposes and ends is largely lacki...

Over the past 20 years, there has been a shift in history education away from a view of history as the pursuit of an objective, universal story about the past toward ‘historical consciousness,’ which seeks to cultivate an understanding of the past as something that makes moral demands on us here and now. According to Roger Simon, historical consciousness calls us to ‘live historically’ – to live in a particular kind of ethical relationship with the past. However, no matter how (...) much educators might believe in the importance of learning to live historically, if students do not see it that way, even the most thoughtfully designed program in history education will never get off the ground. This paper is an attempt to see whether the notion of ‘caring for the past,’ based on Nel Noddings' ethic of care, might help us begin to address the problem of moral motivation in educating for historical consciousness. (shrink)

This study examined how self-worth of students mediated and moderated their perceived positive teacher-student relationships and student engagement among middle-school students from rural China. Eighth graders completed surveys measuring their perceived relationships with teachers, their self-worth, and engagement. Statistical analyses revealed significant correlations among all three variables, with the strongest being between teacher-student relationships and student engagement. The structural equation modeling indicated that self-worth partially mediated the effect of teacher-student relationships on student engagement; however, positive teacher-student relationships were a stronger (...) predictor. Multigroup analyses identified self-worth as a moderator, whereby students with lower self-worth were more reliant on positive teacher-student relationships to enhance their engagement. This study provides insights into how self-worth of students and their perceived positive teacher-student relationships influence their academic engagement in disadvantaged rural areas of China. (shrink)

Care is a feature of all of our lives, all of the time. An analysis of Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence reveals that care and caring permeate complex dimensions of life in and after school and we ask here, if, on some accounts, care can do the work required of it. Acknowledging the significance of her contribution to care, we focus on the work of Nel Noddings suggesting that she pays insufficient attention to other emotions implicated in the work of morally (...) appropriate care. We argue here that Noddings' version of care would benefit from the support of an ethical theory of the emotions, including a moralized form of compassion, if care in schools is to be both better understood and more likely realised. (shrink)

My task in this paper is to demonstrate, contra Nel Noddings, that Kantian ethics does not have an expectation of treating those closest to one the same as one would a stranger. In fact, Kantian ethics has what I would consider a robust statement of how it is that those around us come to figure prominently in the development of one's ethics. To push the point even further, I argue that Kantian ethics has an even stronger claim to treating those (...) closest to oneself as imperative than Noddings and sentiment-based ethical theory in general, proposes. (shrink)

In this article we argue that ubuntu (human interdependence) is not some form of essentialist notion that unfolds in exactly the same way as some critics of ubuntu might want to suggest. Rather, we offer a philosophical position that (re)considers the situation of the self in relation to others. The article starts from the general issues at stake in the debate concerning particularity and universalist ethics. We then reconsider the general position of the ethics of care, and particularly how it (...) has recently been revisited by Michael Slote. Following this, ubuntu is characterised as a particular kind of ethic of care. With this in mind, what we shall put forward is an extension of Seyla Benhabib's (2006) view that the self and others should iteratively and hospitably engage in deliberation. Although we agree with Benhabib that iterations (as arguing over and over again and talking back) are worthwhile in themselves, considering ubuntu (‘a person becoming a person in relation with other persons’), we find Stanley Cavell's (1979) idea of ‘living with skepticism’—particularly, acknowledging humanity in the Other and oneself—as more apposite to extend the theoretical premises of ubuntu. Although the practice of ubuntu is lived out differently amongst Africa's people, we want to add to the diverse ways in which ubuntu can both disrupt and offer ways as to how challenges of human conflict and violence can possibly be resolved. The article finally addresses a couple of educational examples and argues that this approach, by being well-grounded in the life experience of learners, can critically assist the central role of education. (shrink)

Growing research evidence on the ethic of care suggests that caring should be an integral part of the pedagogical methods implemented in schools. However, the colour blind ‘community of care’ often described in the literature does not disaggregate lines of ethnicity or race and much of this existing literature concerns elementary‐ and middle‐school students. This phenomenological study examined teacher care for African American secondary students, through a theoretical lens of critical race and care theory, as it was represented through the (...) counter stories of eight ‘successful’ African American teachers. Findings revealed that teachers’ definitions and perceptions of care reflected a blend of traditional care literature, critical race theory and the literature on African American teachers before and after the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown decision on integration. Findings also reveal the possibility of a pedagogy that I refer to as ‘culturally relevant critical teacher care’. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore job performance, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from an ethical perceptive. A great number of studies have extensively discussed the link between M&A and performance; however, most focused on the financial functions and strategy selections. Although ethical issues emerge in the M&A process, it is a less studied area. This study adopted the structural equation modeling approach to empirically test our hypotheses. Based on 264 samples from financial companies, data analyses indicated that ethical (...) conduct in M&A is significantly correlated with employee job performance. Ensuring employment security and caring practices can significantly explain organizational commitment. Organizational commitment also plays a significant mediating role between a company’s ethical conduct and employee job performance. Managerial implications are also provided. (shrink)

The main focus of this paper ison ways in which Kantian philosophy can informproponents and opponents of constructivismalike. Kant was primarily concerned withreconciling natural and moral law. His approachto this general problematic was to limit andseparate what we can know about things(phenomena) from things as they are inthemselves (noumena), and to identify moralagency with the latter. Revisiting the Kantianproblematic helps to address and resolve longstanding epistemological concerns regardingconstructivism as an educational philosophy inrelation to issues of objectivity andsubjectivity, the limits of (...) theoretical andpractical reason, and the relation betweenhuman experience and the world. It also servesto address ethical concerns regardingliberation from limited self-interests andcontexts conditioned by localised beliefs andinclinations. In light of revisiting theKantian problematic, both Glasersfeld's radicalview of constructivism and Jardine's socialcritique of constructivism are found wanting.Beyond constructivism, Kant's distinctionbetween phenomena and noumena and the limits ofreason that follow from it are brieflyconsidered in terms of Merleau-Ponty's noveldouble-embodied notion of flesh as anontological primitive – as a matter of beingboth in, and of, the world – with an aim tomore intimate connections between epistemologyand ethics. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to explore the ethical orientations of Taiwan's school leaders by means of a questionnaire survey of 573 school leaders. A multidimensional ethical framework, including utilitarianism, justice, care, critique, and virtue, was used. The results demonstrate that the most frequent ethical orientation of Taiwan's school leaders is justice. Second, the ethical orientation of Taiwan's school leaders is influenced by Confucian ethics to some degree, especially in terms of virtue ethics. However, the ethical orientation of school (...) leaders significantly varies depending on gender, age, position, years of teaching experience, and educational administration ethics training. (shrink)

Contemplative pedagogy focuses on creating a sense of presence within educators to effectively educate the whole person through mindfulness in teaching. As I engage in a self-study, I develop initial components for the way I employ contemplative pedagogy. I aim to understand myself as an educator in order to teach effectively. One way to enable particular kinds of understandings is through self-study methodology. The foundational framework that develops through my ongoing self-study may interest those who are unfamiliar with the terrain (...) of contemplative pedagogy. For the purposes of this article, I place an emphasis on the philosophy and ethics classes that I taught at Middlesex County College in New Jersey, although I teach several classes on many campuses. My philosophical method requires me to engage in a self-study of my teaching practices. My project involves self-study as a philosophical research methodology that aims to inform educators and rethink the theories and praxis of teaching. As I work towards improvement- aimed pedagogy, I make myself vulnerable as I share my experiences with my Peer Scholar. My Peer Scholar, which some researchers call a “critical friend”, deliberates with me to challenge epistemological assumptions along with suspicions. The self-study dialogue with my Peer Scholar causes me to define initial components of how I engage in an improvement-aimed contemplative pedagogy. My hope is to support those who wish to implement contemplative pedagogy in higher education as I relate my working framework based on the themes that developed from the deliberation. The components in the article that convey how I engage in contemplative pedagogy are not meant to serve as a checklist or stern procedure for classroom activities. I share these components as aspects of my contemplative pedagogy, with suggestive scripts, not as a rigid structure but rather as a work in progress that is always under construction. (shrink)

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterizes our time as a time of “liquid modernity”. Rather than settled meanings, categories, and frames of reference Bauman contends that meaning is always in flux, open ended rather than closed. Given Bauman’s assessment, pedagogies that are directed towards finding, accepting, or imposing meaning come up short. They offer closed, ‘finished’ meanings instead of an examination of the ongoing, open ended, process of meaning making. What might a pedagogy for a liquid time look like? This is the (...) animating question of this essay. Pedagogically we are interested in this ambiguous space between paradigms of meaning. Rather than resolution or the accommodation and building of new schema, we explore the need for constant schema building and renewal—the necessity of living in a state of perpetual emergence. Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity” suggests that anomalies, rather than exceptions, are the norm; we are living with permanent uncertainty, needing to hold all schemes lightly. (shrink)

Abstract : This article makes the case that teacher’s personal qualities should be considered to be of great importance to being a teacher and that pre- and in- service teacher education has a social responsibility mandate. Developing personal qualities in teacher education is an important way in which teacher education can address its social responsibility mandate and, conversely, this mandate can provide the perspective from which the value of teacher’s personal qualities for teaching can be judged. Finally, the article discusses (...) the role of reflective thinking and reflective practice in addressing the social responsibility mandate of teacher education and identifies characteristics of reflective practices that seem particularly suitable for developing a teacher’s personal qualities relevant for addressing the social responsibility mandate of teacher education. Résumé : Cet article fait état des qualités personnelles de l’enseignant qui doivent être considérées comme d’une grande importance pour être un enseignant et que l’éducation initiale des enseignants et la formation continue a un mandat de responsabilité sociale. Le développement de qualités personnelles dans la formation des enseignants est un moyen important par lequel la formation des enseignants peut s’acquitter de son mandat de responsabilité sociale et, inversement, ce mandat peut fournir la perspective selon laquelle la valeur des qualités personnelles de l’enseignant pour l’enseignement peut être jugé. Enfin, l’article examine le rôle de la réflexivité et de la pratique réflexive à travers ce mandat de responsabilité sociale de la formation des enseignants et identifie les caractéristiques des pratiques réflexives qui semblent particulièrement appropriées pour le développement des qualités personnelles de l’enseignant pertinents pour atteindre les objectifs de ce mandat de responsabilité sociale de la formation des enseignants. -/- . (shrink)

Our analysis reveals two major types of "Community of Learners" (COL) projects: instrumental and ontological. In instrumental COL, the notion of community is separated from instruction in order to reach some preset endpoints: curricular or otherwise. We notice three main instrumental COL models: relational, instructional, and engagement. Ontological COL redefines learning as an ill-defined, distributed, social, multi-faceted, poly-goal, agency-based, and situated process that integrates all educational aspects. We will consider two ontological COL projects into: narrowly dialogic and polyphonic.

The Ethics of Care and Empathy. Michael Slote. London and New York, Routledge, 2007. Pp. 152.Hbk. £65.00; Pb. £18.99.

In meetings between people in school our values are shown through, for example, our actions, our speech and body language. These meetings can be regarded as ethical situations, which can arouse strong emotional reactions that ordinary, everyday situations usually do not do. The aim of this paper is to illuminate, interpret and discuss students' lived experiences of ethical situations in their school. The participants in the study were students in a Swedish secondary school, and the empirical data consisted of written (...) reflections and interviews. The study is based on the lived experiences of students. The analysis of the empirical data resulted in two themes: response in speech and action , and power relations . The comprehensive understanding of the results is that healthy relationships play an important ethical role in the school. Finally, we discuss how ways of listening to students' voices and appreciating practice can develop an ethical school. (shrink)

One of the tasks of Jean-Paul Sartre's later work was to consider how an individual could live freely within a free community. This paper examines how Sartre describes the process of group formation and the implications of this discussion for education. The paper begins with his metaphor of a bus queue in order to describe a series. Then, by means of Sartre's analysis of the storming of the Bastille, the discussion expands to show how a series becomes a genuine group. (...) Finally, suggestions are offered, extrapolated from Sartre's theorizing about groups, as to how teachers might create and maintain genuine groups in and across schools rather than having them remain merely collections of individuals organized from outside. Throughout the paper, the implications of Sartre's insights into groups and educational settings are examined. (shrink)

This paper draws on recent re-conceptualisations of the notions of 'care' and 'caring' (Noddings, 1992; Tronío, 1993) to explore data from semi-structured interviews with the parents and key workers for about twenty children under three who were attending two London children's centres. Located in an environment of frequent new policy initiatives, including an advocacy of parental partnership, it seeks to describe the ways that these adults construct their mutual relationships, and the difficulties which may attend this process. Class and cultural (...) differences, as well as conflicting understandings of 'professionalism' are shown to inform the development of the 'triangle of care', with potential consequences for the care and welfare of the small child on whom the relationship is focused. (shrink)

This paper addresses two main questions: (1) What has theory been doing? and (2) What might theory be doing? The first question is addressed historically, and the second question is addressed imaginatively. In between those two topics, I have inserted a brief interval to raise some sticking points pertaining to the question, “What is properly educational about educational theory?”.

This article considers conversations in and about education. To focus the discussion, it uses the scenario of a conversation between a trainee teacher and her mentor reflecting together on a lesson that the trainee has just taught. I begin by outlining the notion of reflective practice as popularised by Donald Schön, and show how, in the scenario, the reflective practice conversation leads to talk characterised by recourse to particular dominant discourses within education, and how this in turn can lead to (...) a certain voicelessness. I then consider what the possibilities for the reflective practice conversation might be, looking first at the Greek notion of parrhēsia and how this has been discussed in the work of Michel Foucault in contrast to other forms of talk such as rhetoric or chattering. I argue that, whilst the parrhēsiastic conversation may allow for the exploration of the relationships (between the mentor and the trainee, each participant and their words and a relationship of care for the self), such possibilities are fraught with difficulty. I then move to consider how such relationships might be developed through recognising the expressive aspects of language emphasised in Stanley Cavell's notion of passionate utterance. I first trace the development of Cavell's thought through John Austin's contrast in language between the constative and the performative. I then illustrate the idea of passionate utterance from the films Cavell describes as the ‘Hollywood comedies of remarriage’, and argue that the passionate utterance opens up opportunities for the kind of conversation in education that is itself educative. (shrink)

This article attempts to explain through the lens of the Five Relationships the meaning of Joseon neo-Confucian view which emphasized relationship development as the aim and contents of education. In neo-Confucianism, education is the task of guiding learners in cultivating and unfolding capabilities in the relationships of everyday life. Within the context of neo-Confucianism, the development of competency in relationships was another expression of the educational goal of actualizing the ‘original nature’ including of the four virtues. Understanding the nature of (...) education to be the embodiment of the original nature, neo-Confucian scholars sought its actual manifestation in everyday life, taking the practice of five particular relationships to be the core method. Encompassing both ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ while progressing from the Elementary Learning into the Great Learning, neo-Confucian education characteristically takes the Five Relationships as both its foundation and its outcome. Despite the p... (shrink)

This paper aims to consider the implications of Noddings’ ethics of care theory for child-friendly projects and their underlying philosophical assumptions. It is explained that this theory with its emphasis on the children’s needs and rights and, more importantly, the emphasis on the care relation and care encounter indicates how Noddings’ main concepts and ideas could be taken into consideration in exploring the challenges of implementing child-friendly projects. Therefore, the main concepts of ethics of care theory including need and right, (...) empathy and sympathy, receptive and projective, care about and cared-for, expressed and inferred needs were investigated by considering their adaptation with the origin and the destination of child-friendly projects. Accordingly, a series of questions was set out to illustrate the theoretical challenges that may have been reflected in implementing the child-friendly project. These questions were also categorized in light of three core characteristics of Noddings’ theory of caring: 1) relational ontology; which refers to the relational nature of children life, 2) attention with concern; which refers to the moral sentiment/non-rational life of children and 3) particularism; which refers to the particularity of children’s lives. As individuals/researchers and as members of the child-friendly community we can focus on these questions to understand the challenges of the project and provide a potential for its qualitative evaluation. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, numerous studies on the relationship between parents and their children have been reported on in the literature and implemented as a philosophy of care in most paediatric units. The purpose of this article is to understand the process of nurses' care for children in a paediatric setting by using Noddings's caring ethics theory. Noddings's theory is in part described from a theoretical perspective outlining the basic idea of the theory followed by a critique of her work. Important (...) conceptions in her theory are natural caring (reception, relation, engrossment, motivational displacement, reciprocity) and ethical caring (physical self, ethical self, and ethical ideal). As a nurse one holds a duty of care to patients and, in exercising this duty, the nurse must be able to develop a relationship with the patient including giving the patient total authenticity in a 'feeling with' the patient. Noddings's theory is analysed and described in three examples from the paediatrics. In the first example, the nurse cared for the patient in natural caring while in the second situation, the nurse strived for the ethical caring of the patient. In the third example, the nurse rejected the impulse to care and deliberately turned her back to ethics and abandoned her ethical caring. According to the Noddings's theory, caring for the patient enables the nurse to obtain ethical insights from the specific type of nursing care which forms an important contribution to an overall increase of an ethical consciousness in the nurse. (shrink)

Whilst care imperatives have arisen across the breadth of Western societies, within the education sector they appear both prolific and urgent. This paper explores the deployment of care discourses within education generally and draws upon the case of Australian Health and Physical Education (HPE) more specifically, to undertake a Foucauldian interrogation of care. In so doing I demonstrate the usefulness of Foucault's pastoral power lens and its capacity to provide insight into the moral and ethical work conducted by caring teachers (...) on behalf of the state (Acker, 1995). Following a brief overview of the advocacy, challenges and debates surrounding the issue of caring teaching within education, I draw on the work of Hunter (1994) and three case studies from a genealogical interrogation of HPE that employed Foucualt's ethical fourfold as a heuristic device to reveal the ethical practices and objectives of the good HPE teacher. Drawing on this genealogical work, I argue that HPE teachers and their colleagues have been purposefully incited to constitute themselves as agents of pastoral power. From this Foucauldian perspective, I conclude with an exploration of the unintended and possibly ‘dangerous’ practices of caring teaching that may emerge within the complex and messy nexus of contemporary self‐constitution. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is not to provide an overall picture of care ethics, but, rather, to reflect upon the concept of care, which has gained significance in particular scientific contexts. Undoubtedly, the importance of the subject of care represents a challenge on the level of fundamental philosophical positions and a diversified look into the occurring forms of the psychological and social suffering, dependency, and vulnerability. I will shed light on tenets that are considered central to the care ethics (...) and that have led to the setting up of the relationship between care and democracy. By introducing the basic aspects of Carol Gilligan’s and Joan Tronto’s theories, I will emphasize their vocation to be politically relevant. A discussion on the relationship between care and justice on the one hand, and needs and rights on the other, will follow. Can hearing voices of care make democracy more just? How can care ethics provide a concrete support for democracy? On the political level, care ethics builds on the assumptions of the necessary relatedness and equality between individuals who are decisive in the light of the welfare state perspective. Upon closer examination, one may see that the setting up of these relationships is not new to the liberal perspective. Liberalism is historically rooted in the fundamental interconnection between freedom and equality. Virtues such as care and meekness can be formulated in the language of politics, but they still remain unpolitical. On the one hand, engaging in a critical reflection upon such virtues might be an indispensable measuring instrument for distinguishing a good democracy from a bad one. On the other hand, care ethics does not prove to be a real alternative to the ethics of justice. In this regard, care ethics seems to show its feet of clay. (shrink)

After her curriculum proposal is presented, Noddings' feminine ethics is submitted to a critique through an interpretation of her three books. Her distortion of Gilligan and Chodorow is explained. Indebtedness to male sources is noted. The over-emphasis upon good and upon first-person experience is criticised and traced to feminist rage, which is interpreted as the result of the oppression of women. Noddings' suppressed 'Kantianism' is explicated to maintain the dialectic between so-called male and female voices. Main strengths of her curriculum (...) proposal are interpreted more broadly than her perspective allows to indicate a promising return to normative, macro-theory of education. (shrink)

This paper promotes a philosophy derived from the direct distribution of goods to needs that occur in mothering and invisibly in many other aspects of life. Such a philosophy is suggested as an alternative to market based values, which currently permeate society. It is important to bring alternative values to consciousness and validate them for both teachers and children so that the orientation towards the other that characterizes the gift paradigm will not be lost in the fight for survival endemic (...) to a market society. The hope is that we can find solutions that are viable for all. After presenting this philosophy, we show how it already exists among educators and children, and we suggest ways in which it may be validated and promoted in early childhood education. (shrink)

This essay explores the question Is Nel Noddings a visionary who sees past the constraints of contemporary education or is she, like Don Quixote, madly tilting at windmills in her description and defense of happiness as an educational aim?Viewing the educational aim of happiness as an ideal raises substantial challenges for the practicality of Noddings’s ideas.

This paper presents research on the moral sensibility of six pre-service teachers in an undergraduate teacher education program. Using their reflective writing across their first two semesters of coursework as well as focus group interviews in their third semester as sources of data, the paper identifies and describes three distinctive types of moral sensibility and examines ways in which moral sensibility interacts with experiences in teacher education. Suggestions for explicitly incorporating the moral in pre-service teacher education are presented.

This paper draws on process philosophy to imagine “care” as a collective practice of children and the forest in the context of Finnish early childhood education. By locating care in movement rather than an individual, the author challenges the notion of caring subjectivity and employs postqualitative inquiry to conceptually focus on an impersonal production of care. The author shows how care emerges in the between of children and forest in an outdoor learning environment and highlights what it continually produces. She (...) concludes by discussing the need for a conceptual evolution of “care” in the philosophies of environmental and outdoor education. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis was set against the background of changed expectations on education and teachers’ work in contemporary Western societies, reflecting global educational trends of standardisation and assessment moving further down the ages. The overall aim of the thesis was to explore and gain understandings of how teachers’ work is constituted. The exploration was based on lived experience and philosophical perspectives, and the main research questions were: i) what is the significance of existential dimensions of teachers’ work, and (...) ii) how can they be understood in the light of a globalised and standardised education? The theoretical and methodological basis of the thesis was mainly the philosophy of the life-world as formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The studies included employed the following methods: drawings with associated oral comments, written teacher responses and follow-up interviews, visual documentation with associated oral comments, and finally, the study of the relevant philosophical literature. In total 50 teachers and 112 children participated in study I, ten teachers in study II and eight teachers in study III. In study IV, the data consisted of philosophical literature.The findings show that teachers’ work involves not only teachers’ intellectual capacities and skills, but also their emotional and embodied being, and intertwined relationships as well. Further, teachers’ work it affected not only by the views of children, knowledge and learning held by teachers, policymakers and society that affect teachers’ work, but also by ontological assumptions and existential dimensions in a wider sense. It emerged that teachers’ views of education and their attempt to appreciate the unpredictable beyond dualistic assumptions are holistic, and multidimensional, in comparison to the rather linear and standardised global agenda.The crossover analysis of the findings suggests that teachers’ work is mainly constituted by ambiguities and intertwinings of an ontological character that have epistemological implications. In this thesis ambiguities are used to describe aspects that at first seem contradictory but are in fact more like irreducible uncertainties – as intertwined and reversible aspects of teachers’ work as a whole. Accordingly, existential dimensions of teachers’ work are ubiquitous within these ambiguities and intertwinings, and appear as significant in mainly two ways – firstly, as closely connected dimensions of the life-world and lived experience, referred to as lived time, lived space, lived body and lived other; secondly, as basic notions mainly about the relationships between i) subject and object, ii) mind and body, iii) human, culture and nature, iv) linear and multidimensional temporality. These existential dimensions of teachers work are discussed as Intercorporeal reversibilities, Intertwinings, chiasm and flesh and A chiasmic being. The ambiguous aspects of teachers’ work seem to derive from a general ambiguity of views on education, in which the rationalistic view tends to dominate since it often reflects the management of education. This overall ambiguity demands a reconsideration of the wider aim of education as well as of different relationships within education beyond dualisms and divides. Particularly, intercorporeal and intertwined relationships are essential, encompassing the significant intertwinings of ‘subjectobject’, ‘mindbody’, and ‘humannatureculture’. It is argued that this rethinking needs to be done in order to create conceptual and operational space for diverse and challenging pedagogical relationships. Thereby, a process of a chiasmic being for teachers in their work and for children’s learning can be enhancedKey words: teachers’ work; teaching; school; early childhood education; lived experience; existential; pluralistic; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Educational research has explored the potentials and problems inherent in student anonymity and pseudonymity in virtual learning environments. But few studies have attended to onymity, that is, the use of ones own and others given names in online courses. In part, this lack of attention is due to the taken-for-granted nature of using our names in everyday, “face-to-face” classrooms as well as in online learning situations. This research explores the experiential significance of student names in online classrooms. Specifically, the paper (...) reports on one relational thematic that surfaced in a phenomenological study investigating experiences of teaching and learning online. (shrink)

Taking up the theme of this year’s Congress – Bridging communities: Making public knowledge, making knowledge public – our panel’s three essays each examines from three different locations how knowledge and knowledge-making function in the contemporary market/knowledge economy: international education, autobiographical inquiry, and teacher education. The educational vision and commitment that these three distinct pieces share is ethics of care. Problematizing commodification of knowledge and its notion of having knowledge, we make the case for the centrality of being in human (...) and societal living. We then make suggestions for how the being-dimension can be conceptualized and lived. In particular, we argue that caring, being present, self-knowing and human agency are central. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which narratives speak to issues of national identity - its production, reproduction, and contextual performance. Drawing first upon literature in history education, the paper explores the multivoiced nature of the historical narratives which structure American national identity projects. The paper next employs phenomenological methodology in order to explore the narratives produced by students in speaking about school experiences, which they found to have a national component. In this section, there is a particular focus on (...) the teacher as a powerful text as read by students - a curriculum of its own right. The paper concludes by moving to theorize, using phenomenological and post-structural analyses, the relationship between the personal and the national, lived and historical experiences - while maintaining a focus on the civic and pedagogical implications of the data analysis. (shrink)