PHILOSOPHY of EDUCATION SOCIETY
2010 PAPER ABSTRACTS
ABSTRACTS PRIMARY PAPERS (CONCURRENT AND GENERAL SESSIONS)
FRIDAY
C.S. Peirce’s Rhetorical Turn: Prospects for Educational Theory and Research
Author: Torill Strand (University of Oslo)
This paper explores the ways in which the later semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce may offer a new way of theorising the dynamics of knowledge and learning within a globalised world of change. In the first section of the paper I outline Peirce’s semeiotic as a theory of educational processes. Next, I demonstrate how Peirce’s later semeiotic contributes to a richer conception of the dynamics of knowledge and learning, as he – after his “rhetorical turn” – established an explicit connection between his phenomenology, pragmatism and semeiotic. In the third section I sum up the prospects of Peirce’s new rhetoric as a productive model of the dynamics of knowledge and learning within contemporary symbolic economies and knowledge societies.
Broadening Education for Freedom
Author: Jarrod Hanson (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Philosophical conceptions inform our discourses about civic education, but do not provide adequate guidance for educators. Considering the political structure within which freedom is understood provides a greater understanding of how civic educators can educate students for freedom. This is illustrated through sketching two philosophical conceptions of freedom, that of John Stuart Mill as well as an aesthetic conception of freedom. Then these conceptions are examined in the context of two democratic structures – that of aggregative democracy and deliberative democracy. By considering conceptions of freedom within a political context, we are better able to answer difficult questions that arise in civic education, such as those related to the role of deliberation.
Producing Islands of Self-Mastery: The Biopolitics of Self-Determination in Special Education
Author: Michael Surbaugh (University of Oklahoma)
Special education places a premium on teaching special needs students “self-determination.” This paper explores the philosophical history of self-determination, tracing the genealogy of self-determination to Locke’s conception of the body as property, and turns to Michel Foucault’s conception of “governmentality” and Roberto Esposito’s “paradigm of immunity” to describe self-determination as a manifestation of biopolitics. While intended to empower, the discourse of self-determination examined rests idealizes autonomy as the sine qua non of personhood, reinforcing pejorative views of individuals with disability. As a theoretical corrective, the author proposes exploration of John Dewey’s conception of the “live creature” in Art As Experience (1934) to re-frame agency as a co-constructive flourishing with transformative implications for special education.
"Can You Hear Me?" Questioning Dialogue across Differences of Ability
Author: Ashley Taylor (Syracuse University)
This paper is an exploration of the specific possibilities and limitations of a dialogue across differences of ability. It offers a critique of the ideal of dialogue within critical pedagogy, pointing to the tensions and possible impediments that result from the unequal social and structural relations of power in which dialogue occurs. I show how within these relations of power the perspectives of dominant group members are privileged over the perspectives of socially marginalized or minority group members – in this case individuals with disabilities – in such a way that the knowledge and experience of this latter group is often distorted, delegitimized or silenced within the dialogic encounter.
Care Ethics, John Dewey’s “Dramatic Rehearsal” and Moral Education
Author: Maurice Hamington (Metropolitan State College of Denver)
There have been very few efforts to find useful intersections between the philosophy of John Dewey and feminist care ethics. Dewey’s holistic and aesthetic approach to ethics provides an intriguing framework not only for enriching the contemporary notion of care ethics but also for how the habits of caring can be developed. Specifically, this paper focuses on Dewey’s notion of “dramatic rehearsal” within moral deliberative processes as fostering a caring imagination. Moreover, infusing an embodied dimension to Dewey’s concept of dramatic rehearsal suggests that rich experiences of character acting, also referred to as “method acting” can exercise our empathetic and imaginative capacities. If dramatic embodiment is viewed as a potent method of empathy development, the implications for contemporary approaches to “moral education” are significant.
Flawed Objections to Religious Pluralism: The Implications For Religious Education
Author: Andrew Davis (Durham University)
Religious exclusivism, defined as the conviction that the truth of my religion implies the falsity of others, is widespread. It fuels hatred and conflict. Certain objections to religious pluralism, together with associated defences of exclusivism are flawed. Moderate pluralism says that the truth of one religion does not automatically imply the falsity of others.
Respecting persons even when holding them mistaken in their religious beliefs is peculiarly difficult. Moreover, the intentional-descriptivist approach to reference is inadequate and yet is assumed by some exclusivists. The irreducibly metaphorical character of much religious language means that some differences between world religions can be more apparent than real. Religious education should be informed by insights into the problematic character of exclusivism, and by support for a moderate religious pluralism.
The Precarious Self: Schools and the Challenge of Climate Change
Author: Julian Edgoose (University of Puget Sound)
Given that large-scale governmental efforts to slow carbon emissions have repeatedly failed, and given that the climate instability is becoming increasingly evident, this paper asks how educators might begin to respond to the challenges of climate change. Focusing on one part of the challenge, it examines how our understandings of self either allow or impair our abilities to grapple with the challenges we face. Finally, it argues that the embedded belief in the structural hope of schooling inhibits the exploration of new ways to conceive the educational project.
SATURDAY
The Moral Duties of Parenthood
Author: Charles Howell (Northern Illinois University)
The Kant-Sidgwick account of parental duty, based on biological parents’ procreative role, is evaluated in light of Blustein’s contention that parental duty is a social construct and subject to modification by custom or social agreement. The procreationalist thesis shown to survive Blustein’s challenge. Kant’s account, moreover, implies that parental duties are not limited to meeting children’s basic physical and emotional needs and preparing them for work and citizenship. Parental value transmission is examined as a test case of non-minimal parental duties. Under specific societal conditions, Kant’s account is shown to support parents’ efforts to influence children’s moral commitments and beliefs about what is important and worthwhile in life.
Reconsidering Common Sense: Vico and Education
Author: F. Tony Carusi (Georgia State University)
This paper argues for more thoroughgoing philosophical considerations of common sense than what presently exist to produce frameworks for educational policies. Using the work of Giambattista Vico as a point of departure, I argue for common sense as a contentious arena, which those of us engaged in ideology critique must take seriously if we are to challenge successfully the assumptions that currently inform educational policy and practice. When turning to Vico’s use of common sense, one finds an emphasis on its protean, historically contextual character out of which arises the social institutions and actions that differentiate social organizations. As such, common sense is always susceptible to interruption, redirection, and change. It is in this sense that we can consider Vico’s notion of common sense and its constitutive role in education as both disruptive of the practices that manifest as neoliberal education as well as productive of alternative worldviews that address the uneven and arbitrary distribution of socio-political privilege.
Educational Epistemic Ecosystems: Re-Visioning Educational Contexts on Code’s “Ecological Thinking”
Author: James C. Lang (OISE/University of Toronto)
Assumptions about knowledge, knowing and knowers that are constitutive of mainstream epistemology generate an image of a morally neutral, universally-applicable educational epistemic context within which knowledge is transmitted from teacher to student. I contrast this view with re-visioned educational epistemic contexts drawn from Lorraine Code’s notion of “ecological thinking,” as predicated on epistemologies of situated knowledges. I conclude that the latter reveal a vastly expanded moral terrain, replete with crucial particularities and subjectivities that escape examination on the mainstream epistemological model.
Choosing “The Ferry of Life”: On Moral Agency as a Mean in Education
Author: Rosa Hong Chen (Simon Fraser University)
This essay is an examination of moral agency: a metaphysical state of character in the person, which becomes apparent in the activities of soul. Drawing on Aristotle’s concept of the Golden Mean and Confucius’ Doctrine of the Mean, I discuss the idea of moral agency as an object of ethics and moral education with a focus on a mean state between experiences and choices, between the agentic moral state and educational efforts. I further consider qualities such as self-discipline, self-reflection, and courage as agency to ensure moral choices approaching the mean state, and suggest that these qualities can be cultivated through education. I hope to show in this essay that a person can make a moral effort to cultivate the virtue—a state of character of the person concerned with choice—an ethical act that can be sought, rightly and practically, hence educationally.
Lost Causes: Online Instruction and the Integrity of Presence
Author: Dini Metro-Roland and Paul Farber (Western Michigan University)
This paper examines an issue of teaching in higher education concerning the emergence of online instruction. In particular, we focus on two different forms of presence, virtual and embodied, and the modes of possibility and educational ideals to which they gravitate. While online instruction tends towards the ideal of utility of presence, the redeeming quality of traditional instruction emerges, in our view, from what we call the integrity of presence. Examining such presence, we contend that there are vital forms of educational experience that are more characteristic to, and may even require, the embodied presence of face-to-face instruction.
Other Desires and Public Recognition: Re-reading Mayo’s Plato’s Aristophanes
Author: James Stillwaggon (Iona College)
Cris Mayo's 2007 featured essay "Disruptions of Desire: From Androgynes to Genderqueer" addresses the question of how desires relate to the social structures by which they are subject. Drawing from Aristophanes' myth of the origin of desire in Plato's Symposium, Mayo attributes desire's potential for changing social norms to its capacity to disrupt human purposes. Maintaining her emphasis on social change, I question how Mayo's reading of desire in Aristophanes' myth as prior to divine law could have the power to disrupt that to which it has no relation. As an alternative, I offer a reading of desire as a product of the law that emphasizes the public character of those erotic motivations capable of disrupting social norms.
Dewey, Interests and Distinctive Schools of Choice
Author: Terri Wilson (Southern Illinois University – Carbondale)
Small school reform creates distinctive schools of choice designed draw students and parents into new communities organized around their particular educational interests. Drawing on Dewey, this paper examines the role played by the concept of ‘interest’ in this reform model. I examine three dimensions of Dewey’s understanding of interest: distinct from preferences, embedded in a temporal and transactional situation, and connected to a vision of democratic growth. I argue that Dewey’s understanding of this concept provides critical leverage for examining the normative and democratic questions involved in these new models of school communities.
Liberal Education and Reading for Meaning
Author: Kevin Gary (Goshen College)
My concern in this paper is the loss of a certain kind of reading, and a certain kind of reader. Traditionally, liberal education cultivated a personal and passionate engagement with key texts, or what Søren Kierkegaard describes as primitive reading. More than fodder for critical thinking, texts in this tradition were regarded as sacred, as sources of profound wisdom. This textual reverence, however, did not place such texts beyond questioning and examination. On the contrary, often a rich midrash surrounds such writings, with several distinct interpretations. What endured though was a regard for certain texts as sources of enduring wisdom that personally challenge and edify readers who avail themselves. While not wanting to reify a culturally exclusive canon I am interested in how primitive reading can be nurtured and sustained, arguing why it is a worthwhile good. Drawing from Bruce Kimball and Pierre Hadot I first situate and clarify the meaning of liberal education, noting the kind of readers cultivated by the two major traditions of liberal education. I then turn to Jean LeClercq’s work The Love of Leaning and the Desire for God to illuminate a particularly rich instantiation of primitive reading practiced within a monastic milieu. I then turn to more recent sources, namely Søren Kierkegaard and Flannery O’Connor. Both deplore the loss of primitive reading, offering insights on the nature of primitive reading and how modern readers evade it. Finally, I consider how teachers might cultivate primitive reading.
No Child Left Behind, or Each Human Person Drawn Forward? Arendt, Jaspers, and the Thinking-Through of a New, Universalizable Existential-Cosmopolitan Humanism
Author: Bruce Novak (Truman College)
I suggest that we can begin to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of Arendt’s educational thought—and the full implications of that thought for contemporary education—once we see how it follows from and is in constant dialogue with the educational thinking of her mentor Karl Jaspers. In particular, Arendt’s last, uncompleted book, The Life of the Mind (1978), seen as stemming from Jaspers’s “Conditions and Possibilities for a New Humanism” (1949), can be perceived as laying the ground for a certain kind of universalizable philosophical education that would, in turn, lay the ground for the establishment of thoughtful democratic political life. From these readings of Jaspers and Arendt, I argue that replacing the banal policy of No Child Left Behind with a policy mindful of the personhood and freedom of each individual—called “Each Human Person Drawn Forward”—would be to enact the democratic “change” our times most need: the universal cultivation of personal responsibility upon which the preservation of the human world now clearly depends.
Teaching Religion in Public Schools: A Critical Appraisal of Dewey's Ideas on Religion and Education
Author: Walter Feinberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign);
In this paper I align Dewey’s ideas on religion and education with the requirements of a post modern, religiously plural, liberal society. By post-modern I mean a society that enables multiple perspectives and conflicting narratives. By religiously plural, I mean a society where competing religious denominations have the same legal status, and by liberal, I mean a society where the individual person is both the object and the subject of moral action. Although such a society is consistent with Dewey’s general philosophy and its emphasis on community, plurality and enriched experience, I argue that his writing on religion has a hegemonic side to it and is in tension with his concern to promote community and plurality. In this paper, I draw on recent movements to teach religion courses in the public schools of the United States to suggest ways in which this tension can be resolved in schools. In this paper I argue that in a modern, religiously pluralistic society, neither the separatist denominational school that Dewey rejected nor the religiously empty school that he embraced is adequate, and that a modern education needs to help students dialogue across their religious and non religious differences. This means that while religion should not be promoted, neither can it be ignored.
Are Schools Improvable? A Rumination on Positionality
Author: Alexander M. Sidorkin (University of Northern Colorado)
If schooling is a positional good, increasing parental choice will have negative consequences, because it encourages class inequality. It also makes significant school reform unlikely. While demand for good schooling does not seem to be positional, the supply of good schooling is. The institution of schooling requires placing students in large groups; their level of effort and self-efficacy depends on their perception of whether their school is bad or good. Good schools rely on bad schools for existence. Because schools may not be improvable, we must think about education reform outside the constraints of the institution of schooling.
SUNDAY
Dewey’s Spiritual Response to the Crisis of Late Modernity and Early Postmodernity
Author: Jim Garrison (Virginia Tech)
Dewey profoundly understood the crises brought on by the publication of Darwin’s, The Origin of Species and Nietzsche’s pronouncement “God is Dead,” along with God’s creator “Man.” He does for all forms (eidos), essences, and identities what Darwin does for species. All forms, including personal and cultural identities, are relatively stable, but constantly evolving in a contingent, pluralistic, and perilous universe. Dewey also rejects the notions of a fixed and final telos and ultimate foundations (arche). Like Nietzsche, his response to the crisis is aesthetic, but it is also democratic and religious. I argue that his response is better than that of Nietzsche, his disciple Michal Foucault, or Dewey’s own disciple, Richard Rorty.
The Contingency of Moral Education: Nabokov versus Rorty
Author: Herner Saeverot (University of Bergen)
This paper begins with a short review of Vladimir Nabokov’s concept of moral education, and claims that the Russian-American author does not surrender to rules for moral conduct. That claim is supported by a reading of Richard Rorty’s essay on Nabokov, The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty. At the same time, this paper takes issue with the Rortian picture. By reading the Russian-American author on his own terms, instead of reading him as a Rortian, will cast his concept of moral education in new light. But more importantly, this reading will, so I hope, offer a new and different approach to moral education, one that differs from conventional approaches.
Reflective Practice and the Reception of John Dewey
Author: Harvey Shapiro (Northeastern University)
In this article, I consider the reception of John Dewey in what has become a “Schönian” tradition of reflective practice discourse, challenging what I will argue is a limited and, at times, distorted view of Dewey’s thought. Positively, I suggest some directions for reconsidering how Dewey’s theories of experience, habit, and the ideal offer a more expansive, more integrated notion of professional growth. For Dewey, learning is not purely an experience of logical, practical knowing. It is also an aesthetic, evocative, emotional experience propelling the learner forward with an increasing desire for deeper inquiry and with a more fluid, sensitive, thoughtful, practice. If we decenter Schön’s interpretation of Logic and recenter Dewey’s concepts of experience, habit, and ideal we can extend and deepen our practices to include a greater sense of the transcendent intangibles that outrun our palpable everyday encounters with the problems in our professional lives.
When Projects of Critique are Complicit with the Object of Their Critique: Enabling Whose Education?
Author: Barbara Applebaum (Syracuse University)
This paper examines the debate around Megan Boler’s “Affirmative Action Pedagogy” that calls for the interrogation of any expression of racism, sexism, homophobia etc… in the classroom and that intimates there are times when speech should be constrained in the classroom. Two strands of arguments against speech restrictions are delineated and their underlying concerns are illuminated. The first strand is inspired by the work of Judith Butler. The second strand has a more pragmatic concern. I argue that the Butlerians are not only focused on the question of whether or not to silence but also with complicity. I conclude that theorists researching social justice education must not only ask the pragmatic question but the complicity question, too.
Welcoming Difference at the Limit of Tolerance Education
Author: Elisabet Langmann (Mälardalen University)
In this paper I argue that, contrary to what some critics have argued, the problem with the idea of promoting tolerance in education is not the tolerating/tolerated distinction as such, but how we tend to think about the place of welcome in practices of tolerance. Drawing on the ethical dimensions of hospitality (Derrida), I first elaborate on the importance of examining new ways of welcoming difference beyond clear cut dichotomies between self and other. I then make a distinction between two modalities of hospitality. Using this distinction, I discuss how a move from knowledge and control to hospitality and risk may open new spaces for welcoming the other, and consider what implications this move has for advocating personal transformation and social justice in tolerance education.
The “Veiling” Question: On the Demand for Visibility in Communicative Encounters in Education
Author: Sharon Todd (Stockholm University/Mälardalen University)
Across Europe there has been much discussion over those sartorial practices on the part of Muslim students and teachers that cover the face in whole or in part (e.g., burqa and niqab). One of the reasons frequently given in supporting the rejection of such practices in schools is that hiding the face hinders communication. This paper explores the assumptions that underlie this claim. I particularly focus on the theme of visibility and relate these to specific examples drawn from the Swedish and UK contexts. The aim of the paper is to analyze critically, through the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, the fixation with vision and the visible as a Western epistemological trope that seeks to master the other. It further discusses the idea of the face in Levinas’s ethics in relation to the limits of “reading” facial expression, and draws on Irigaray’s feminist approach to elaborate on the specifically sexed nature of the demand for visibility.
One Language, One World: The Common Measure of Education
Author: Paul Standish (Institute of Education, University of London)
The central concern of this paper is with the possibility and the problems of there being a common world language, and with the relation of this question to culture and education. The paper begins with a question posed by Hilary Putnam relating to the credibility of Enlightenment values after the Holocaust, but it takes up a seemingly minor aspect of his discussion in order to enter into an extended exploration of questions of language and meaning. This is achieved via the consideration, in the light of a paper by Jacques Derrida, of a letter on the subject of language sent by Gershom Scholem to Franz Rosenzweig. The deconstruction that Derrida’s reading achieves is examined for its potential to offer a retrieval of Enlightenment values along the lines Putnam seeks. The particular status of English as a world language is considered in relation to the idea of one language, one world, and some ramifications of such homogenization in education are briefly explored.
A Deweyan Approach to Integrity in an Age of Instrumental Rationality
Author: Peter J, Nelsen (Appalachian State University)
Educators in the contemporary United States are increasingly faced with demands to teach prescribed curricula using scripted methods driven by standardized assessments – all grounded within an instrumental rationality that prizes use-value over intellectual exploration. Such demands may conflict with the concomitant expectations to be nurturing, caring educators, conflicts that can pull at teachers’ senses of moral integrity. In this paper, I explore a conceptual response to these conditions by focusing on the inadequacy of individualistic definitions of integrity. I work with Cheshire Calhoun’s argument that integrity is a social virtue, but I push her conclusions further by drawing upon Dewey’s moral philosophy to propose an even more social account. While maintaining integrity certainly involves the alignment of one’s moral beliefs and actions, I argue that integrity also entails the influencing of one’s social-moral context in ways that support the development of habits that sustain integrity’s further growth.
MONDAY
Tending Neocolonial Gaps
Author: Frank Margonis (University of Utah)
This essay seeks to reconcile Gloria Ladson-Billings’ powerful analysis of the education of African American students with the promising relational philosophy of Gert Biesta. Biesta’s philosophy suggests that teachers should seek to create open and dynamic intersubjective relationships in their classrooms, which involves teachers prioritizing responding to students rather than seeking to understand them. As such, Biesta makes arguments against any totalizing description given off students. In The Dreamkeepers, Ladson-Billings develops a way of thinking to enable us to recognize oppressive and visionary pedagogical approaches enacted amidst polarized relationships of race and class. This “neocolonial hermeneutic” involves totalizing claims made about students and teachers, and it relies upon a rigid structural logic.
By speaking of “Tending Neocolonial Gaps,” this essay endeavors to rely upon both the language of Biesta and the structural analyses of Ladson-Billings to describe the possibilities for visionary pedagogies in neocolonial contexts.
Learning to Articulate: From Ethical Motivation to Political Demands
Author: Claudia Ruitenberg (University of British Columbia)
In many postindustrial societies, concern has risen over an alienation from political processes and institutions, especially among youth. Simon Critchley attributes this alienation to a “motivational deficit.” In this paper I argue that, in addition to this motivational deficit, an articulatory deficit plagues the contemporary political situation: individual desires or actions for change do not become linked with others. I analyze the process of political articulation using Ernesto Laclau’s work and argue that, while people need to perceive injustices in order to be motivated to act, in societies as complex as ours they should also learn to articulate the political demands that result from such ethical perception. I end with a discussion of political education that is attentive to the mechanics of articulation.
Character Education and Citizenship Education: A Case of Cancerous Relationship
Author: Dwight Boyd (OISE/University of Toronto)
This paper critiques the relationship between character education and citizenship education assumed by one currently popular approach to character education. It argues that this approach fails to pay attention to important differences in conceptualizing virtues of the “good person” and those adhering to the role of citizen in a liberal democracy. This failure is seen in four related ways to foment a dangerous cancer of the body politic.
“What Good Does All This Remembering Do, Anyway?” On Historical Consciousness and the Responsibility of Memory
Author: Ann Chinnery (Simon Fraser University)
Since the early 1990s there has been increasing attention to the moral significance of memory in education, as well as in cultural studies, history, psychology, and philosophy. Much of this work focuses on the Holocaust as a watershed moment in human history and as a referent for both goodness and evil in the human condition. However, one might ask, “What good all this remembering do?” In this paper I draw on the literature in historical consciousness in order to show that remembering does constitute a good insofar as it facilitates the development of subjectivity and moral responsibility. While sympathetic to the aims of Roger Simon’s “critical historical consciousness,” I critique his reliance on testimony and witness, suggesting that a similar pedagogical experience can be evoked through impersonal historical documents.
CONTACT: PES Executive Director Jeffrey Ayala Milligan
850-644-8171; milligan@coe.fsu.edu