In this paper I explore how citizenship education might position students as always/everywhere political to diminish the pervasive belief that one either is or is not a “political person.” By focusing on how liberal and radical democracy are both necessary frameworks for engaging with issues of power, I address how we might reframe citizenship education to highlight the ubiquity of politics, offering a deepened sense of democracy. This reframing of citizenship education entails highlighting how liberalism and radical democracy are mutually (...) reinforcing when it comes to illustrating political life as entangled in power relations. My argument centers on Sigal Ben-Porath’s :381–395, 2012) concept of shared fate as a frame for citizenship education. In this model, students are habituated into thinking of democracy as an “enduring pluralism” in which their fates are connected to that of their fellow citizens. In this paper I recast shared fate education in the singular to an education of shared fates in the plural. By doing so I theorize how citizenship education might construct citizenship as relational, emotional, embedded in power, and uncomfortable. (shrink)

Even though the interrelationship between education and democratic politics is as old as democracy itself, it is seldom explicitly formulated in the literature. Most of the time, the political system is taken as a given, and education conceptualized as an instrument for stability and social integration. Many contemporary discussions about citizenship education and democracy in the Western world mirror this tendency. In the paper, I argue that, in order to conceptualise the socio-political potential of education we need to understand democracy (...) in more political terms. This means that democracy can neither be seen primarily as a mode of associated living, nor a model for handling different life-views. A third alternative is Gert Biesta’s notion of democratic subjectification. Even though Biesta identifies depoliticising trends in citizenship education policies, I argue that his alternative still fails to be a sufficiently political alternative. What is lacking in Biesta is the explicit attention to political causes and the kind of collective activities that define a democracy: the creation of one’s own laws, norms and institutions. This capacity of the collective to question and govern itself is put in relief by Cornelius Castoriadis’s notion of “the project of autonomy”. (shrink)

Motivation is a concept more frequently found in venues concerned with educational psychology than in ones concerned with educational philosophy. Under the influence of psychology, and its typically dualistic way of making sense of the world, motivation in education has tended to be viewed in dichotomous terms, for example, as intrinsic or extrinsic in character. Such psychology-derived theories of educational motivation operate within a dichotomous ontology, traceable to structuralist notions of agency versus (rather than within) structure, while exemplifying the tendency (...) in psychology that philosopher R. S. Peters identified over half a century ago, of seeking to provide totalizing, comprehensive theories of human behaviour in emulation of the achievements of the natural sciences. This article offers an alternative reading of motivation in terms of Foucauldian ethical self-formation that attempts to recognize motivation as arising from the individuals? socially situated and constrained agency, and that focuses on how individuals pursue learning as a way of creating a particular desired version of the self. We illustrate this approach through a vignette of Wolfgang, a Hong Kong learner of German as a third language. Although we are certainly not seeking to supplant other approaches to theorizing motivation, we believe that the approach we elaborate here contributes significantly to the repertoire of motivational research in education. (shrink)

In this text I concentrate on semiotic aspects of the theory of political identity in the work of Ernesto Laclau, and especially on the connection between metaphors, metonymies, catachreses and synecdoches. Those tropes are of ontological status, and therefore they are of key importance in understanding the discursive “production” of identity in political and educational practices. I use the conceptions of both Laclau and Eco to elucidate the operation of this structure, and illustrate it with an example of the emergence (...) of the “Solidarność” movement in Poland, expanding its analysis provided by Laclau. I focus on the moment when one of particular demands assumes the representation of totality, which, in Laclau, is left to “circumstantial” determination. This moment inspires several questions and needs to be given special attention if Laclau’s theory is to be used in theory of education. It is so because theory of education cannot remain on the level of the ontological, but has to theorize “non-ontological” dimensions as well, that is the ontic, the deontic, as well as what I call the deontological—the very relation between “what there is” and “what there is not” as the locus of education. (shrink)

This paper outlines a theory of radical democratic education by addressing a key concept in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: articulation. Through their concept of articulation, Laclau and Mouffe attempt to liberate Gramsci’s theory of hegemony from Marxist economism, and adapt it to a political sphere inhabited by a plurality of struggles and agents none of which is predominant. However, while for Gramsci the political process of hegemony formation has an explicit educational dimension, Laclau and Mouffe ignore this (...) dimension altogether. My discussion starts with elaborating the concept of articulation and analysing it in terms of three dimensions: performance, connection and transformation. I then address the role of education in Gramsci’s politics, in which the figure of the intellectual is central, and argue that radical democratic education requires renouncing that figure. In the final section, I offer a theory of such education, in which both teacher and students articulate their political differences and identities. (shrink)