While civic education may not always be explicitly included in school curriculums, it can still be imparted through various non-teaching practices and in different places. In this article, we will delve into three potential educational spaces -memorials, museums, and libraries- that are commonly found in Western democracies. We will explore the significance and scope of each of these spaces and discuss their respective ethical, political, and aesthetic responsibilities. Additionally, we will examine how they possess agency and can influence the educational (...) process, recognizing that even non-human entities, such as nature itself, can play an important role in shaping our understanding of civic education. (shrink)

Constructivism, contextualization, and critique—these three concepts are central to and representative of educational research. This article elaborates in three steps why it is important for educational research to engage epistemologically with Bruno Latour and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in order to revise these basic concepts. The first section identifies some of the historical trajectories that helped to establish the belief in constructivism, contextualization, and critique in educational research. A second section deals with the shifts Latour proposes in order to revision constructivism (...) and contextualization, and, in doing so, to reframe critique. I suggest that this reframing may be called ‘post-critique’. A third section takes up the example of the history of educational technologies to illustrate why it is important to link epistemology and history in educational research and how exactly this can be done by ‘making’ post-critical history with Latour and ANT. (shrink)

Currently, the repetition of a critical way of speaking results in a stagnating tendency in educational debates. This had led to the endeavour of developing a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. This paper employs Rortyan and Latourian language in order to tackle the question of how such a post-critical pedagogy should deal with critique. It argues that if one takes critique as what Latour calls a debunking activity, then post-critical pedagogy should leave critique behind. If however critique means simply to say how something (...) should not be, then post-critical pedagogy should remain critical. In addition, however, there is a need for enriching the critical vocabulary with more affirmative language. For accomplishing this need, in contrast to recent suggestions to go back to ontology, the paper suggests that new propositions developed by literary theorists like Sedgwick and Felski are more promising. All these arguments are framed by Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics. (shrink)