PHILOSOPHY of EDUCATION SOCIETY
2008 PAPER ABSTRACTS
FRIDAY
9:00 – 10:15am Concurrent Sessions I
A Willing Compliance
Author: Charles Howell (Northern Illinois University)
Student engagement is a major focus of current research interest, because of its link to achievement. Though definitions vary, engagement most frequently refers to on-task behavior, which involves compliance in learning activities designed by the teacher. But what could motivate the student's subordination of her will to that of the teacher? This paper explores two sources of motivation: duty and enjoyment. These motivational sets both help to justify teachers’ paternalistic control over students, albeit in different ways and within distinct sets of constraints. Implications for teachers’ authority and legitimacy are examined.
B Social Experiment Wolves in Social Justice Sheepskins: Defanging
Inquisitional Variants of Whiteness Theory via Critical Realism
Author: Steven Mather (University of Alberta/NAIT)
The implementation of social science theories in educational policy can constitute a social experiment. When are ethical research protocols warranted? The whiteness theory in-services described and outlined in Barbara Appelbaum’s “Social Justice Education, Moral Agency, and the Subject of Resistance” fit the parameters of social experimentation. In these in-services, intellectually suspect theory guides ethically suspect practice, in a performative contradiction, replete with quasi-religious overtones. Much of what is suspect is discernible at the level of theory. The ethically suspect practises needn’t have occurred. An ethical research protocol was warranted.
C Adam Smith and the Stages of Moral Development
Author: Daniel DeNicola (Gettysburg College)
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith presents a provocative account of moral development, derived from on our innate capacity for sympathy and our desire for “fellow-feeling.” Unusual in the centrality it gives to emotions and to moral imagination, rather than to reason, Smith’s theory is developed here in interpretive, analytical, and critical modes as a communitarian stage theory of moral development. The stages appear through a dialectic of the perspectives of actor and spectator, of sympathizing and judging—a process that moves us from the desire for approval to the love of virtue. This paper, while “sympathetic” to Smith’s vision, also identifies and judges problems that threaten his project, and considers the important role he leaves open for moral education.
10:30 – Noon General Session I
Premodern Postures for a Postmodern Ethics: On Resistant Texts and
Moral Education
Author: Ann Chinnery (Simon Fraser University)
In this paper I explore two divergent approaches to using literature in moral education: 1) the currently popular approach, which uses literature as a way to cultivate empathy and compassion by helping readers to imaginatively bridge the gap between themselves and those whose lives may be very different from their own; and 2) an approach which sees the self-other gap as fundamental, and which advocates the use of "resistant literature" (that is, literature that deliberately keeps the reader at arm's length) in order to cultivate humility and respect for the other as other. I focus especially on the ways in which these different approaches might enable or constrain ethical relationship in pluralist societies.
2:15 – 3:30pm Concurrent Sessions II
A Reservations about White Privilege Analysis
Author: Lawrence Blum (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
Without challenging the value of the “turn to whiteness,” I raise several concerns about the current state of “white privilege analysis” in relation to education. (1) inadequate attention to the normative foundations of the moral criticism of “white privilege,” (e.g. not distinguishing between injustice-based and non-injustice-based privileges). (2) A general absence of analyses of the particular structures of racial inequality in different life domains (e.g. health, education). (3) Tendency to conflate the situations of different racial groups in counterposing them to “Whites.” (4) An overly narrow (implied) political practice that omits meaningful ways Whites can engage in racial justice projects.
B The Bonds of Learning: Dialogue and the Question of Human
Solidarity
Author: Megan Laverty (Teachers College, Columbia University)
Society is moving towards greater global interconnectedness as local communities are becoming more diverse. These societal changes call for new habits of human sociability. I propose a dialogical conception of our humanness as an ideal to sustain these new habits. I distinguish this conception from the dialogical philosophies of Jürgen Habermas, Paulo Freire and Richard Rorty. I argue that dialogical relationality establishes learning as the constitutive core of human experience. Learning involves the discovery of conceptual limitations and the overcoming of them in the creation of new meanings and new modes of being. I conclude that human solidarity informed by dialogical relationality is ambiguous and relies on our ability receive and bestow the grace of pedagogical eloquence.
C Disestablishment as Legal Paideia: Assessing Michael McConnell’s
Educational and Religious Pluralism
Author: Erik Owens (Boston College)
The legal doctrine of “disestablishment” plays a central role in American law and culture as a touchstone for thinking about religion and public life. As such it serves as a sort of legal paideia, shaping the character of both American citizens and American law. But can the concept of disestablishment extend to other areas of public life beyond religion? This paper assesses Michael McConnell’s concept of “education disestablishment” as a justification for universal school vouchers, and considers its potential impact as a form of legal paideia. I argue that despite its rhetorical power (grounded in appeals to pluralism and the nearly universal support of religious disestablishment), McConnell’s analogy of religious and educational disestablishment is inapt, and that therefore the expansion of disestablishment as legal paideia would have unwelcome consequences, even within the “thin” “pluralist” political philosophy McConnell espouses.
SATURDAY
9 – 10:15am Concurrent Sessions III
A Performing Philosophy of Education ‘Whitely’: Reliable Narration as
Racialized Practice
Author: Helen Anderson (University of Toronto/OISE)
Drawing upon Audrey Thompson’s essay “Philosophers as Unreliable Narrators,” my aim in this paper is to bring further attention to the narrative dimensions of philosophy of education scholarship, examining in particular how reliable narration can lend itself to the performance and maintenance of particular white identities premised on racial subordination. I explore what sort of racialized borders might be created through the use of reliable narration, as well as explore how philosophy of education might be narrated in a way that more adequately addresses systemically racist discourse(s).
B Caring and Clapping (with one hand): Towards an Agonistic
Progressivism
Author: Chris Higgins(University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
In this paper, I approach the progressive-traditional debate from a fresh angle. I examine how the idea of motivational displacement gets pulled in opposite directions by the progressives and traditionalists. This concept proves central to both Nel Noddings and Michael Oakeshott, but for almost exactly opposite reasons. The question that divides them is whose motivation must be displaced, that of the teacher or that of student? I then turn to two pedagogical traditions in which these different versions of motivational displacement seem to work in complex concert: that of Socratic dialogue and that of the Zen koan. Despite their cultural distance, it is possible to read these two pedagogical forms as cousins, together outlining a genre that explodes the dichotomy we have been discussing, a genre we might call agonistic progressivism. Teaching here clearly requires to a high degree that special form of pedagogical tact, that feeling for the interests and needs, situation and perspective, of the student. But in this genre such tact is put into the service of effecting a second motivational displacement, a displacement of the student's approach onto a new vector more productive of genuine learning.
C Towards a New ‘Logic’ of Emancipation: Foucault and Rancière
Author: Gert Biesta (University of Stirling)
The idea of emancipation plays a central role in modern education. This is not only true of traditions which are informed by an explicit political agenda; it can be said of any approach in which it is acknowledged that there is a fundamental difference between education and indoctrination. Although there is likely to be widespread support amongst educators for the ‘sentiment’ of emancipation, there are quite different views about what emancipation entails and how it can be achieved. In this paper I provide a critical analysis of the prevailing way in which emancipation has been understood in modern educational thought. I then sketch the outlines of a different conception of emancipation, drawing upon ideas from Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière. The paper is an attempt to think emancipation differently and to begin to explore how and why this might matter for education.
2:15 – 3:30pm Concurrent Sessions IV
A There are no Sheep in Post-Structuralism
Author: Audrey Thompson (University of Utah)
Rather than start from the complex particularities of race and culture, post-structuralist theoretical approaches that focus on race tend to begin with independent frameworks and principles of analysis that are then applied to particular “race” texts and contexts. This is true even of post-structuralist whiteness theories that do seem to be entirely about race. By not starting from specific historical and everyday contexts, we in effect predecide what counts as race or culture. When we subsequently apply the analysis to the chosen understanding of “race” or “culture,” we are unlikely to end up very far from where we started. Using the example of sheep in Navajo culture, this paper argues that scholarly efforts to address race and culture need to start from particulars — start from the sheep.
B Education through a Cosmopolitan Prism
Author: David Hansen (Teachers College, Columbia University)
The ancient idea of cosmopolitanism is a topic of renewed interest today. Scholars and practitioners in many fields are reconsidering the moral, cultural, juridical, economic, and political ramifications of what it would mean to conceive all human beings as linked by their membership in a shared cosmos. In this paper, I offer a reading of the cosmopolitan that sees it as straddling the local and the universal – as pointing, metaphorically speaking, to the unfathomable spaces between those moving end points. I suggest that what can be called educational cosmopolitanism generates critical resources that reach beyond international, liberal, and multicultural education. Educational cosmopolitanism provides a dynamic way to cultivate creative responses to both the difficulties and the invitations of a rapidly changing world.
C The Social Nature of Epistemically Normative Deliberation
Author: Sheron Fraser-Burgess (Ball State University)
In her democratic theory of education, Amy Gutmann provides principled answers to educations fundamental questions, which she views as a matter of the source of educational authority and the bearing of moral principles on education. Democratic deliberation dictates the parameters of educational control and is the primary virtue of a democratic theory of education. However there are shortcomings in Gutmann’s political theory of education and deliberation, related to her theory not addressing the intersection of the deliberative democratic education with truth and justified belief, as primary aims of education. Recognizing the interrelatedness of the twin aims means acknowledging the role that cultural and economic factors can play in influencing whose beliefs dominate school and society. Additionally, the liberal roots of Gutmann’s democratic theory lend an individualist bias that introduces further barriers to appropriately weighing the significance of social factors in schooling deliberation. Needed is a deliberative procedure that takes into account the epistemic benefits of group membership as a vital piece of resolving intercrop conflict along the lines of group membership and identity. I argue for such a heuristic, using the Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings case as a paradigm of such disagreement. I then address some implications for inclusive inquiry and substantive, equitable educational authority.
D Citizenship Education and the Philosophy of Affirmation: A Study in
the Formation of a Liberal Identity
Author: Ryan Bevan (McGill University)
Shelley Burtt (2003) offers an alternative model of the sort of autonomy that is demanded by ‘consumerist’ liberal theorists in regards to civic education in pluralistic societies. Rather than structure a conception of autonomy around the capacity to select the principles that govern one’s actions and determine one’s identity, as in the free choice or consumerist model, Burtt recommends a more affirmative and less arrogant approach to introducing liberal virtues. I follow Burtt in contending that the distance and challenge approach to cultivating autonomy through education in liberal-democratic societies exacerbates a divisiveness between tradition and autonomy and stultifies the very dialogue that it should be dedicated to facilitating. This is because the virtues celebrated by liberalism are not exclusively ‘liberal’ virtues, and when erected as a standard of evaluation for traditions denies the requisite care that can be supplied by the traditions to remedy the frailties of reason-based conceptions of justice. I conclude that a more rigorous investigation of how the virtues celebrated by liberalism can be extracted from traditions is a more effective approach to forming a liberal identity than the challenge approach that views tradition with suspicion as inimical to autonomy.
3:45 – 5:00pm Concurrent Sessions V
A Being in on the Joke: Pedagogy, Race, Humor
Author: Cris Mayo (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
My general concern in this paper is to analyze the black humor’s strategies of playing with the audience, disrupting passive spectatorship, and insisting on nonreciprocity, features that may be useful to intervening in stalled discussions. I begin by tracing a general history of humor’s relationship to power. I then focus on African American humor and its traditional roots in signification, a form of metacommunication that simultaneously reflects on its own production and produces innovative readings that destabilize certainties. Starting with African traditions that inform later signifying practices, I argue that humor’s function as commentary on language moves it into the realm of social criticism that can establish relationships yet hold them at a critical distance. Next I examine pedagogical applications of the social criticism in black anti-racist performance art and black queer camp. In conclusion, I show that the nonreciprocality of subversive black signifying humor invites nonpassive spectators to participate in forms of knowledge that enable them to become fuller participants. The signifying pedagogy derived from black humor traditions, through its pleasures and complexities, ultimately offers a way to move from spectator to participant to a more knowing, more critical partner in its examination of knowledge and forms of engagement.
B “The Tears that a Civil Servant Cannot See” – Rethinking Civic
Virtue in Democratic Education: A Levinasian Perspective
Author: Trent Davis (York University)
This piece opens by noting that one of the most common ways to conceptualize civic education is to divide it into the reciprocating parts of “knowledge,” “skills,” and “virtues.” After expressing skepticism regarding the overall coherence of this approach, the author examines the third component, “virtue,” from a Levinasian stance. The argument that emerges is that “virtue” denotes much more than traits of character, and instead names the fundamental role of an ethics of subjectivity in the peaceful state. The second part of the paper examines what Levinas himself thought was the strongest objection to his ethical philosophy, that it was too unrealistic, and tries to show that this “utopian” quality can actually help cultivate a democratic pathos that can profitably infuse our day to day actions as responsible teachers and citizens.
C A Situated Philosophy of Education
Authors: Nicholas Burbules (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and
Kathleen Knight Abowitz (Miami University)
Speaking in general terms, philosophy of education today is broadly divided between two distinct modes of inquiry: a distanced, objective view from nowhere, and a subjective, historicized postmodern view. We introduce a pragmatist view that counters these divisions and offers a way of conceiving our work as situated, self-reflexive human practice. Philosophy of education as situated practice positions our work as an activity that is aware of, and reflective about, its local contexts and norms. Thinking of our work in terms of a practice requires us to engage in more critical reflection about the implicit norms of our work. Thinking of our work as situated requires us to inquire into the conditions, constraints, and consequences of the ways in which philosophical work in education is carried out. A situated philosophy of education enables us to adopt more of an engaged, collaborative, and interdisciplinary understanding of what it means to do philosophy of education; such a move can allow philosophical thinking in education to become less marginalized and more relevant to educational practice and policy-making.
D The Superstition of Learning: Rethinking Dewey
Author: Ray McDermott (Stanford University)
John Dewey early reframed the problem of continuity across misleading dualisms – stimulus/response, perceptions/ideas, knowledge/action – with two arguments about their sides: they are better understood as relations rather than isolates, and they operate by sequential relevance in experience, each side reflexively enacted in anticipation of the other. He accordingly rejected knowledge as a correspondence between proposition and world, and logical necessity as an autonomous device for connecting judgments without attention to contexts of inquiry. This paper presses Dewey's 1893 arguments on "The superstition of necessity" into a critique of the contemporary superstition of learning in education.
SUNDAY
9:00 – 10:15am Concurrent Sessions VI
A White Privilege/White Complicity: Connecting “Benefiting From”
To “Contributing To”
Author: Barbara Applebaum (Syracuse University)
A prominent claim in Critical Whiteness Scholarship is that all white people are complicit in the perpetuation of racism because they benefit from systemic privilege. How does being systemically privileged lead to collaboration with an unjust system and how can one be held responsible for such collusion even when one does not intend to collude and might even be trying to work to eradicate the system? This paper will expand upon conventional meanings of white privilege to examine the unique conception of “benefit” presumed. This more systemic understanding of benefit will help to then address the benefits of systemic white ignorance and how such ignorance protects the morality of white people from challenge. With the meaning of these concepts spelled out, the link between “benefiting from” to “contributing to” can be elucidated and the ways in which white people are responsible for racism clarified. Such an analysis, I submit, can help us to understand what Fiona Probyn means when she claims that complicity must be the starting point and the condition of ethics itself.
B Education for Critical Democracy and Compassionate Globalization
Author: Kathy (Southern Illinois University)
In this paper I argue that educational philosophers have not spent enough time thinking about the challenges and possibilities of globalization, perhaps the defining reality of our era. I suggest one important aspect of developing a critical response to globalization is to revitalize talk about democracy in education, both what it means and how we can live up to our own best democratic visions. I begin by providing an overview of globalization and its democratic potential (most present in globalization from below). I then connect this democratic potential to critical work being done to revitalize democratic purposes in schools. I end by offering a vision for a more robust and responsive democracy, one that can help us to awaken the passion and motivation needed to challenge the deleterious impacts of globalization.
C Can (and Should) Educational Research be Value-Neutral?
Author: Jonathan Dolle (Stanford University)
What makes scientific research more objectivesome might say more valid or reliable than mere opinion? A partial answer is that research is (or tries to be) neutral in a way that other modes of belief formation are not. This paper examines several difficulties with the form of neutrality defended by D. C. Phillips. While Phillipss value-neutral ideal helpfully avoids the pitfalls of radical relativism, it fails to account for the real, pervasive, and sometimes necessary role of moral and political judgment in educational inquiry. I discuss several challenges to the value-neutral account and argue that value-laden science does not entail dangerous epistemic sacrifices or the forgoing of objectivity. On the contrary, it can encourage epistemic values (like honesty) and make research more objective, not less.
D Drawing on Derrida: Aesthetic Practice as a Displacement
of Learning
Author: Margaret Manson (York University)
This paper examines the nature of an aesthetic that is characterized by disjunction and dissonance, which can be termed a disruptive aesthetic. In this regard, Derrida’s conception of the supplement that generates a multitude of signifiers at times confounding in their relation to what has been apprehended and imagined provides a productive reference point from which to begin to consider how, and in what form, aesthetic education is important to teacher education. I argue that inserting the arts as an aesthetic supplement (in a Derridean sense) to curriculum in teacher education, opens up opportunities to learn about the nature of pedagogy and the production of knowledge. My discussion concerns the practice of a professor teaching in an undergraduate program for pre-service teachers, who integrated visual art into a course on reflective practice in order to inquire into how arts-based inquiry offers teacher candidates ways of encountering, interpreting and producing new knowledge about teaching and learning. I focus on the panel created by one teacher candidate to illustrate how Derrida’s notion of the play of signifiers, and the resulting indeterminacy of interpretation that he discerned in the movements of signifier and signified, defines aesthetic experience as arising from a Derridean process of disruption and displacement rather than a Deweyan process of consummation. I consider how this conception of aesthetic experience shapes contexts through which the new, the yet-to-be-known, emerges through aesthetic practices of meaning making.
2:00 – 3:15pm Concurrent Sessions VII
A Equal Opportunity and Outcomes Assessment
Author: Randall Curren (University of Rochester)
The paper addresses a pair of related puzzles concerning the fairness of grades and fair equality of opportunity. One puzzle pertains to the apparent moral difference between a student’s constitutive luck with respect to quality of instruction received and a student’s constitutive luck with respect to other formative influences. Another pertains to the impact of grades on a student’s opportunities. The first puzzle is resolved. The second supports the conclusion that fair equality of opportunity precludes the use of grades as credentials. It is suggested that a form of Outcomes Assessment might serve instead.
B Citizenship and Domination: The Relationship between Sophie
and Emile
Author: Lyndsay Spear (Indiana University)
Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile: or on Education is praised for its insights into human development and the psychology of childhood. However, Book V, which follows the education of Sophie and her subsequent marriage to Emile, is often given an inadequate treatment - if not ignored altogether. As John Darling and Maaike Van De Pijpekamp argue, the domination and violence that Sophie must suffer is a topic still virtually untouched by scholars. As a result, we have failed to appreciate the issue of control that is present within the relationship between Sophie and Emile. Within this paper, I hope to show that it is actually Sophie’s education, not Emile’s that comes closer to preparation for citizenship in a democracy. Sophie is often thought to exist only for Emile’s pleasure, but I believe Sophie to be much more complex than she appears on the surface. Furthermore, what stifles Sophie is not necessarily her education, but the dynamics of her marriage to Emile.
C Kant, the Nomad, and the Publicity of Thinking: Finding a Cure
For Socrates’ Narration Sickness
Author: Eduardo Duarte (Hofstra University)
This paper moves between two memories: the re-calling of a conversation Kant had with an itinerant scholar, and the re-hearing of the voice of Socrates’ daimon. Together, the memories remind us that the liberatory pedagogy of dialogue is a carthasis of thinking. With Socrates’ daimon, we hear again the tragic irony of the midwife who cannot give birth to wisdom. With Kant we remember the awakening from dogmatic slumber, and the publicity, or free movement, of thought that has been released from the thinker. The contrast between the two memories reveals both a malady and a cure: narrative sickness and liberatory dialogue. The memory of Socrates indicates the chronic condition of so-called dialogic teachers who, upon close examination, are unfit to practice this pedagogy because they suffer from various forms of monologism; the malady of a thinking that remains captive within the thinker, or, more precisely, a pedagogy that remains under control of the pedagogue. The memory of Kant’s encounter with the anonymous scholar indicates that there is a therapeutic catharsis in the dialogic encounter that liberates thinking from the sovereignty of the thinker. The outcome of this memory work is a recommendation for a renewed approach to philosophy of education that is akin to what Foucault identifies as the pharmacology of the ancient practices epimeleia heautou, cura sui, which he translates as ‘care of the self.’ In sum, the paper is a recollection of dialogic pedagogy’s cathartic power to liberate thinking.
MONDAY
9:00 – 10:30am General Session II
The Unbelievable Truth and the Dilemmas of Ignorance
Author: Jennifer Logue (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
This paper is an attempt to highlight some tensions behind our encounter with knowledge and consider the contradictory role ignorance can play in locating agency. I suggest that social justice education has yet to seriously grapple with the disarming possibilities of ignorance: at once a defense against difficult knowledge and an intriguing entry way into new understandings of responsible agency. The development of a taxonomy of forms of willful ignorance—from Nietzsche, Freud, and Mills—can help us to develop and anti-bias critical pedagogy that is able to reckon with “the passion for ignorance” and cultivate the conditions for learning (unlearning and relearning). The common sense understanding that learning is a progression from ignorance to knowledge is challenged as we begin to think of responsible agency as a balancing act between the desire to know and the desire to remain ignorant.
10:45 - Noon Concurrent Sessions VIII
A The Mined Mind: Domination, Desire, and Melancholy
in The Corn is Green
Authors: James Stillwaggon (Iona College) and
David Jelinek (Pratt Institute)
A critique of liberatory pedagogical narratives leads contemporary educational theorists with the problem of accounting for progress or change in educational practice. In this paper, we turn to film as a site where cultural beliefs about education as a liberating practice come to light in order to note some of the themes that emerge when education as liberation is troubled. The Corn is Green, a classic story of freedom through education, serves as the object of analysis. By highlighting the overriding forces of domination and desire in the film’s relational structure, we reconstruct a different sense of liberation present within these relationships and based in a theory of melancholy as the internalization of a forbidden object.
B Disability Consciousness: A Prolegomenon
Author: Michael Surbaugh (University of Oklahoma)
Through a case study of Under the Eye of the Clock (2000), Christopher Nolan’s autobiographical novel about the experience of spastic quadriplegia, this paper draws upon Susan Wendell’s feminist analysis of disability in The Rejected Body (1996) and Hannah Arendt’s concept of consciousness in The Life of the Mind (1978) to construct a concept of disability consciousness. It proposes this concept as a possible tool for educational efforts that involve students with disabilities. A key feature of this concept is its applicability to people with and without severe labeled disabilities. It further proposes philosophical study of literary narrative as an educational resource for cultivating disability consciousness.
C In Praise of Parens Patriae
Author: Jason Blokhuis (University of Rochester)
In this paper, I start with a simple point that often seems to get drowned out in the hubbub of 'rights talk' in general and of parental rights talk in particular: Children are creatures of state. "The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all government in this Union reposes excluded any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only, wrote Justice McReynolds in Pierce. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations. These iconic words have often been interpreted as if the words mere and only did not matter, as if the upbringing of children were not subject to state authority, as if parents had an exclusive and unfettered right to control the education of their offspring. This is an untenable interpretation.
CONTACT: PES Executive Director Jeff Milligan
850-644-8171; milligan@coe.fsu.edu