“We're Not Going to Do That Because It's Not Right”: Using Pedagogical Responsibility to Reframe the Doublespeak of Fidelity

In this essay, Doris Santoro examines the discourse of “fidelity of instruction” to show how it is doublespeak for teacher compliance that is incompatible with democracy and education. Analyzing the distorted use of the term “fidelity” by market‐based reformers, Santoro illustrates how it can be used as a weapon against teacher intelligence and moral response. She argues that John Dewey's philosophy provides conceptual resources to reframe some teacher infidelity as intelligent response, the moral agency required for pedagogical responsibility.     

The Role of “Small Publics” in Teacher Dissent

In this essay, Sarah Stitzlein and Amy Rector‐Aranda, drawing on John Dewey's theoretical suggestions regarding how to best form publics capable of bringing about change through deliberation and action, offer teachers guidance on how to form and navigate spaces of political protest and become more effective advocates for school reform. Using Aaron Schutz's analysis of teacher activism as a point of departure, Stitzlein and Rector‐Aranda argue for the development in schools of “small publics,” that is, Deweyan democratic spaces within which teachers can dialogue and exchange ideas about the problems they face in the classroom. While Schutz treats this type of space merely as a stepping stone toward the real locus of political action, the power public, Stitzlein and Rector‐Aranda argue that small publics are themselves important spaces where teachers can work together to frame problems and build coalitions and solidarity with other groups in order to take action in the wider public sphere and bring about change in schools.     

Lying in Politics: Fake News,Alternative Facts,and the Challenges for Deliberative Civics Education

Inspired by Orwell's chilling account of brainwashing, propaganda, and the obliteration of the lines between fiction and truth, Mordechai Gordon attempts to make sense of the phenomenon of lying in politics as a challenge to deliberative civics education. His analysis begins with a detailed consideration of the distinctions Hannah Arendt draws between factual truth, lying, and opinions in several works but with particular reference to her essays “Lying in Politics” and “Truth and Politics.” Gordon shows that although Arendt recognized many of the dangers to the vitality of a democracy when the lines that distinguish between facts, lies, and opinions become blurred, she could not have anticipated the extent to which the advent of modern technology and online media would exacerbate this problem in contemporary society. Next, he draws on the theory of deliberative democracy to argue that the lack of a clear distinction between fiction and factual truths serves to undermine the quality of political debates in a democratic society. In the final part of the essay, Gordon discusses the challenges that the advent of fake news organizations and the dissemination of alternative facts as truth pose to deliberative civics education, specifically how the trend of a diminishing space of truth and fact undermines efforts to teach students how to engage effectively and productively in democratic deliberations.     

An Archetypal Phenomenology of Skholé

In this essay David Kennedy argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult–child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. Following Herbert Marcuse's invocation of a “new sensibility,” Kennedy argues that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny — the long formative period of human childhood and the paedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle — makes of the adult–child collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. After exploring child–adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what John Dewey called “impulse” and “habit,” Kennedy identifies three key dimensions of dialogic schooling, all of which are grounded in a fourth: the form of dialogical group discourse called community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), which is based on the problematization and reconstruction of concepts through critical argumentation. As a discourse model, CPI grounds practice in all of the dialogic school's emergent curricular spaces, whether science or mathematics, whether literature, art, or philosophy. Second, CPI opens a functional space for shared decision making and collaborative governance, making of school an exemplary model of direct democracy. Finally, CPI as a site for the critical interrogation of concepts encountered in the curriculum (such as “alive,” “justice,” “system,” and “biosphere”) and as a site for democratic governance leads naturally to expression in activist projects that model an emergent “new reality principle” through concrete solutions to practical problems on local and global levels.     

Whose Citizenship Education? Hong Kong from a spatial and cultural politics perspective

Citizenship (education) is de facto a political and spatial concept and should be considered in local, national, and global contexts. Adopting a spatial and cultural politics perspective and with the dynamic formation of Hong Kong's citizenship education as a case study, this article tries to illustrate the politics at three different levels. It shows how citizenship and identity are hotly contested, with the result that, while the official civic education programme is oriented towards “national education”, a pluralistic and vibrant civil society allows the hybridization and cross-fertilization of multiple discourses and practices to run parallel with the state project, either in a complementary or competitive way. Civic education launched by the democratic camp in civil society may be viewed as empowerment struggles for human rights and democracy vis-à-vis the domestication efforts made by the government and the pro-Beijing camp, as well as the tyranny of global capitalism.     

CROSSING BORDERS WITHIN: STANLEY CAVELL AND THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION

The matter of crossing borders in the creation of democratic communities arises in ways that are pressing, both within the nation‐state and on a global scale. Tensions between tendencies toward nationalism and the cosmopolitan call for global understanding touch the heart of ideas of democracy as beginning at home—at political, psychological, and existential levels. Yet in both orientations there is a certain consolidation of what John Dewey called the “we.” In this essay Naoko Saito and Paul Standish address questions concerning the “I's” relation to the “we.” It is through an exploration of the apparently apolitical approach of Stanley Cavell, through what he calls the “politics of interpretation,” that Saito and Standish try to give substance to the critical destabilization of these terms and tensions that they believe to be necessary. Cavell's Wittgensteinian approach to skepticism and his account of the Emersonian sense of the tragic help to demonstrate the need to meet the political crisis of democracy with language of a more subtly critical kind. The antifoundationalism Cavell derives from these sources, with its concomitant notion of philosophy as translation, provides us with a language that answers to the problems of the “we.” This is, the authors conclude, a better formulation of, and a more hopeful response to, the challenge of crossing borders within. It touches despair but realizes within it the prophetic power of language. And it shows the political crisis in which democracy finds itself to be something that is not peculiar to our times but internal to the very nature of our (political) lives.     

论近代中国“公民科”的设置

在近代中国由封建帝制向民主政治的转型中,伴随公民道德观念的滥觞,公民资格意识的倡导,公民教育制度的实施,"公民"概念这一舶来品最终落户中国。公民科取代修身科跻身国家教育课程体系,既是民主政治思潮在教育层面的反映,也是共和政体下教育对政治制度的回应,更是近代仁人尝试对国家层面进行"公民"意识启蒙的成功。     

Pentadic cartography: Mapping the universe of discourse

Expressions of time have increasingly infused the rhetorical experience of post-industrial war, especially since 9/11. This essay demonstrates how these “signs of time” operate as one of three tropes: deadline/countdown, infinite/infinitesimal war, and the ticking clock. The persistence of such signs of time in public discourse can be seen as an expression of what Paul Virilio has called the “chronopolis,” a political universe textured by real-time communication technologies. The chronopolitical will exhibits certain autocratic traits at odds with democratic ideals, primarily the refashioning of citizen identity into that of the “contemporary.” The analysis here charts the autocratic rhetoric of the chronopolis as a critical democratic project.     

The promise of recognition and the repercussions of government intervention: the transpedagogical vision of popular educators in Buenos Aires,Argentina

ABSTRACT

This investigation draws from Mouffe’s [2005, On the Political. London: Routledge] theoretical work on the politics of public togetherness, together with Biesta [2011, “The Ignorant Citizen: Mouffe, Rancière, and the Subject of Democratic Education.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 30 (2): 141–153] and Kamat’s [2014, “The new Development Architecture and the Post-political in the Global South.” In The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics, edited by J. Wilson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press] insights on democratic discourses centered on empowerment, inclusion, and participatory democracy, to show how popular education and social change movements in Buenos Aires conceive of partnership building in communities under the impediment of neoliberal governance. It provides an empirical account of former popular educators who together built the first and only school in Latin America to offer educational opportunities for transgender men and women, how they secured government recognition, but eventually how they lost their power within it. In making the shift from a community-based popular school, to one run under the thumb of Argentina’s Ministry of Education, these educators were forced to drop the more radical aspects of their work in favor of a pedagogy aligned with patriarchal, neoliberalist-sanctioned reform.     

Community education as citizen organising for democratic accountability

This article focuses on the role of adult education in community development initiatives that intentionally aim at more general and equitable power-sharing arrangements at local and regional levels. It argues that community-based learning is a necessary component of community development and the rejuvenation of democracy. In the new millennium, citizens participating in civil society need the vehicle of a city-wide broad-based organisation to act for the attainment of these goals. Adult education in North America was founded on citizen action—often around migrant issues: adequate shelter, jobs, English language acquisition, poverty, and urbanisation. Responses to common needs in the Mechanics Institutes, Citizens' Forums, and the Antigonish Movement are only a few examples of how citizen learning changed lifeworld conditions. In this unsettled and unsettling historical moment, as we move from late modernity or post-modernity to some version of a “new world order”, the potential contributions of critical adult education to the future well-being of a global civil society are becoming increasingly apparent. Identifying and assessing means of resistance to the escalating encroachments of international finance and administrative power into the domains of individual and community autonomy is one practical role for adult education.     

Christian Schools in a Pluralistic Society?

The central question of this article is whether separate Christian schools are defensible in a pluralistic liberal democracy. This question is answered from the perspective of Christian parents and based on the premise that these parents want to send their children to separate Christian schools. We argue that Christian education and separate Christian schools can be compatible with civic education of children towards a liberal democratic citizen, but that for some Christian communities this will not be easily achieved.     

Reflections on the “Counter” in Educational Counterpublics

In this essay, Judith Suissa draws on the tradition of radical and alternative education, and on some philosophical literature on democratic politics and the role of the political imagination, in order to suggest some ways of thinking about what constitutes an educational counterpublic that are different from those suggested in recent work by philosophers of education. Building on arguments by Nancy Fraser and others about the vital role of counterpublics in the political life of democracies, Suissa suggests that creating educational spaces where the formation, development, imagining, and nurturing of such counterpublics can occur is an important aspect of this role.     

An Exploration of “Hyper-Local” Community-University Engagement in the Development of Smart Cities

The use of big data in smart cities poses new questions about higher education and community-university engagement practices in addressing longstanding social and economic exclusion in urban communities. Drawing on transdisciplinary ideas in higher education, cultural theory, and science and technology studies, primary concerns in the era of big data are considered with current conceptualizations of higher education engagement and anchor institution purposes. Tensions in the narratives of civic engagement and democratic practice for community well-being are juxtaposed with tensions in the smart citizen narrative implied by the idealized smart city design. A new framing of community-university relations under what I term “hyper-local” engagement is suggested for more justice-oriented and democratic practices when universities interact with their surrounding communities given the impending and sweeping changes occurring from the use of big data in social policy.     

网络协商民主的发展与完善

网络协商是协商民主在新时期的重要实现形式,公民可以通过网络政治参与＂近似地＂实践协商民主的理想。鉴于网络协商民主中参与主体身份的开放、地位的平等、话语权的开放及网络本身的即时性等特征,公民参政的途径得以扩大,参政的热情和能力得以提高,这些都有助于我国的公民参政逐步走向成熟,并最终促进我国民主政治的发展。但是,作为一个新生事物,网络协商民主在实践中也暴露出了一些问题,需要我们正视这些缺陷,并通过进一步加大互联网硬件设施建设、制定完善的法律法规、促使政府自觉发挥在网络协商民主中的功能等举措,使网络协商民主最终成为当前实现民主治理应该选择的方式之一。     

Why educate “little scientists?” Examining the potential of practice‐based scientific literacy

In recent years, a number of curriculum reform projects have championed the notion of having students do science in ways that move beyond hands‐on work with authentic materials and methods, or developing a conceptual grasp of current theories. These reformers have argued that students should come to an understanding of science through doing the discipline and taking a high degree of agency over investigations from start to finish. This stance has occasionally been mocked by its critics as an attempt to create “little scientists”—a mission, it is implied, that is either romantic or without purpose. Here, we make the strong case for a practice‐based scientific literacy, arguing through three related empirical studies that taking the notion of “little scientists” seriously might be more productive in achieving current standards for scientific literacy than continuing to refine ideas and techniques based on the coverage of conceptual content. Study 1 is a classroom case study that illustrates how project‐based instruction can be carried out when teachers develop guidance and support strategies to bootstrap students' participation in forms of inquiry they are still in the process of mastering. Study 2 shows how sustained on‐line work with volunteer scientists appears to influence students' success in formulating credible scientific arguments in written project reports following an authentic genre. Study 3, using data from three suburban high school classes, suggests that involving students in the formulation of research questions and data analysis strategies results in better spontaneous use of empirical data collection and analysis strategies on a transfer task. The study also suggests that failing to involve students in the formulation of research can result in a loss of agency. The implications of these findings for future research and practice are discussed. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 234–266, 2004     

Marginalization of democratic values: a gendered practice of schooling?

Contemporary Swedish debate is much occupied with young men's attraction to anti-democratic ideals and the fact that they seem to learn less than girls about democratic values in school. Within politics, voices have been raised in favour of putting more effort into the schooling of young people's—especially boys'—social competence and democratic understanding. This paper analyses present school practice and discusses how schools go about handling issues of democracy. This will be done by reference to empirical results from two Swedish studies carried out in the 1990s. The presentation will focus in particular on the marginalization and gendered fostering of democratic values in school. It will also touch upon the implications for the kind of masculinities and femininities reproduced.     

EDUCATION AND “THICK” EPISTEMOLOGY

In this essay Ben Kotzee addresses the implications of Bernard Williams's distinction between “thick” and “thin” concepts in ethics for epistemology and for education. Kotzee holds that, as in the case of ethics, one may distinguish between “thick” and “thin” concepts of epistemology and, further, that this distinction points to the importance of the study of the intellectual virtues in epistemology. Following Harvey Siegel, Kotzee contends that “educated” is a thick epistemic concept, and he explores the consequences of this for the subjects of epistemology and philosophy of education. Ultimately, Kotzee argues that its nature as a “thick” concept makes education suited to play an important role in explaining how the intellectual virtues can be acquired.     

Kosmic rhetoric: Reading democracy alongside Walt Whitman and the Bhagavad Gita*

Walt Whitman’s poetry challenges how rhetorical scholars are accustomed to studying democracy. Adopting an ontology similar to, and a vocabulary inspired by, the Bhagavad Gita, Whitman roots democracy squarely in concerns of soteriology, metaphysics, spiritual practice, and the care of the self. By recovering what I call Whitman’s “kosmic rhetoric,” my goal in this essay is to inspire rhetorical scholars to discuss, debate, and reconsider several of our most deeply held assumptions about democratic politics, including anti-foundationalism and the mechanics of dissent.     

The People Against Corporate Personhood: Doxa and Dissensual Democracy

This essay theorizes dissensual democracy as an event that requires both demonstration and critique of doxai. Jacques Rancière joins many theorists in rhetorical studies by arguing that democratic doxa is necessary for transformative collective politics. But Rancière famously dismisses the possibility that post-ideological approaches such as “critical rhetoric“ might contribute to democracy. Critique, however, has an important role to play in dissensual democracy. The political rhetoric of the anti-corporate Move to Amend shows how both demonstrations and critiques of doxai are required to produce the appearance of a democratic subject of enunciation, which, I argue, is a type of Deleuzean sense-event.     

Groundworks for a Pedagogy of Evolutionary Love Ethics: Archetypes of Moral Imagination in the Pragmatisms of Peirce and Addams

In this essay, Russell G. Moses argues that Charles Sanders Peirce's article “Evolutionary Love” establishes a general normative framework for a logic of evolutionary, progressive imagination that can be used to elucidate an evolutionary continuity between the normative works of Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Alain Locke. This exercise contributes to an understanding of pragmatism as a philosophy that seizes insights from evolution in order to normatively reconstruct dynamic meanings of truth, reality, ethics, politics, and art. In a dynamic model of progressive evolution — one homologous to the Golden Rule of “love your neighbor” — we find a normative cosmology that animates the moral imagination of philosophy toward what Addams called “democracy and social ethics.” Moses concludes that in the Peircean model, together with subsequent developments, we may ultimately apprehend that evolution suggests a general form of development that may be hypothesized as a worthy normative guide for universal progressive education.