From a cultural-historical perspective, nature and nurture (and thus education) are contested concepts. The paper focuses on the nature/nurture debate in the work of William Shakespeare (influenced by Montaigne) and in the Romantic tradition (evidenced by Rousseau and Wordsworth), and argues that while our Romantic inheritance (still highly influential in education) problematises nurture, it tends to mystify nature. Given that conceptions of nature are culturally driven, there is an urgent educational challenge to problematise nature as well as nurture.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article is an attempt to critique some of the limitations of dominant school reform discourses in education, drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Michael Apple, Maxine Greene, and Dennis Carlson, in addition to writers in the emerging field of what might be called ?eco-progressivism.? The intersections between ecology and education can help construct a distinct counternarrative of progressive educational reform that is informed by ecological discourses, movements, and zeitgeists. Through the field of conservation biology, I hope to connect (...) both ecology and education as crisis disciplines and suggest that the reform discourse in the field of biology utilizes a much different framework than that of current school reform orthodoxy. These differences have powerful and real consequences for the ways in which children and teachers experience school. Utilizing the well documented case of the failure of the Biosphere 2 research project as a grounding metaphor and cautionary tale, I plan to show not only the severe limitations of the current school reform orthodoxy but the ways in which the normalization of what I call the ?biospheric number? functions as a technology of power. Finally, I hope to position the emerging worldview of eco-progressivism as a useful framework for reconsidering school reform specifically and the progressive education movement more broadly. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 5-24, February 2021.

Guattari's ecosophy has implications for many types of pedagogy practiced in the school. While Guattari never explicitly advocated the educational use of ecosophy, I explore in this article how it can be used as a lens to ‘read’ pedagogy in nuanced ways, highlighting oppressive premises and practices. I first discuss Guattari's ecosophy, defining key terms and advocating ecosophy as a philosophy that calls attention to the interactions and ‘parts’ of assemblages of existence—a philosophy radical and encompassing enough to make intelligible (...) the dynamic connections between various fields of existence, trajectories into the new, and trajectories more destructive in nature. I then offer a ‘reading’ of two different pedagogical strategies that have achieved a wide following in the last few decades: direct instruction, and critical pedagogy. Reading these pedagogies through ecosophy allows us to name more fully the troubling assumptions and lacunae to be found within them. (shrink)