Posthumanist Perspectives on Racialized Life and Human Difference Pedagogy

This discussion begins from the speculation that evaluating formulations of life has become one of the leading prerogatives of “novel” turns to matter, materiality, and the posthuman. However, moving with the Other (rather than simply representing them) has proven a difficult task for scholars in education concerned with decolonizing pedagogies by critiquing epistemological and ontological regimes of power disengaged from the interrogation of the metaphysics of race and sex at the center of Western metaphysical foundations of thought. There is an ongoing need for sustained engagement with the assumption of human primacy that runs through the nearly ubiquitous assertions of what Claire Colebrook calls active vitalism, which is characteristic of humanist approaches to education. In other words, the new conceptualizations of posthumanism only rarely challenge the lingering humanist concept of life itself. In this article, Petra Mikulan and Adam Rudder argue that posthumanist and neo‐vitalist materialist approaches to ontology must consider that racism is vitalist in the active sense because it begins with bodies (as bounded organisms always autopoetic and self‐proximate) and that vitalism is racist because it then distributes and discriminates racialized bodies according to their function as parts in a whole.     

Collaboration: The Politics of Working Together

“Collaboration” is frequently urged on students, who are praised for being “good collaborators.” Yet collaboration has two senses: a positive sense of autonomously undertaken joint endeavor, but also a sinister implication of treacherous cooperation with enemies. In this article, Amy Shuffelton probes the uses and misuses of collaboration as an educational aim. She engages Josiah Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty and John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems, as well as contemporary critiques of neoliberal workplace structures, to explore the loyalties that shape what we do and who we are. Education for democratic citizenship, Shuffelton concludes, demands that children be provided opportunities to undertake conjoint activities that go beyond the limitations of conventional school collaborations.     

The Analytic System of Martin Heidegger’s Da-sein and the Anthropology of Max Scheler in the Educational Perspective

When applied to education, Heidegger’s analysis of Da-sein suggests that in his ontology the epistemological problem of clarifying cognition is replaced by the existential problem of the cognition of the understanding individual. Thus, Heidegger treats “education” ontologically as the ability to achieve Da-sein as one’s own true and integral being whose Da-sein always takes precedence in understanding. On this basis, we can say that Heidegger treats education as a transcendental ontological structure that he, like Scheler, calls “disclosedness.” And although Heidegger almost never uses the term “education” in his analytic system, preferring instead to use expressions such as “authentic being,” “projection of the self,” etc., all of this content that he invests in this term closely follows Scheler’s interpretation, because it also characterizes human existence as “open” and “not foreordained.” For Scheler, the same “open” existence is an expression of existential human freedom, since it serves to manifest the spirit as the ontological principle. Considered in epistemological and value terms, this freedom, according to Scheler, is what he refers to as “education,” a transcending state of being that is manifested for another thing in existence as something that is “known” by loving participation in it with a view to achieving “one’s authentic self.”     

Earth Juts into World: An Earth Ethics for Ecologizing Philosophy of Education

Philosophers of education often focus their critique on issues such as neoliberalism, consumerism, pluralism, and so on, and they typically turn for solutions to what we might call the political: democracy, the public, cosmopolitanism, dissent. These critiques and solutions remain firmly connected to what Heidegger calls “the world,” and this worldly analysis seemingly hovers above earthly issues of the environment and ecology. In this article, Clarence Joldersma employs Martin Heidegger's distinction between earth and world, drawing on Kelly Oliver's interpretation of it, to “ecologize” philosophy of education by arguing that that earth “juts” into the world. Philosophy of education needs a Derridean supplement, something that makes up for a lack, but that, in filling the lack, simultaneously supplants it. Joldersma invites philosophy of education to supplement its worldly principles (dissent, democracy, and the like) with an “earth ethics” that is characterized by three features. First, this ethics lets the earth and earthlings be, recognizing their continuing mystery as beings. Second, it acknowledges gratefulness toward the earth, an indebtedness to the earth for the reliable support it provides to our worldly projects and concerns. Third, it recognizes earth's fundamental fragility, that its seeming worldly dependability conceals an earthly vulnerability. Joldersma concludes that these three features, in tandem, give rise to an earthly ethics of responsibility. Philosophy of education needs an earth ethics to supplement, if not supplant, its worldly principles.     

Waist‐High and Knee‐Deep: Humane Learning Beyond Polemics and Precincts

In this essay, Chris Higgins sets out to disentangle the tradition of humane learning from contemporary distinctions and debates. The first section demonstrates how a bloated and incoherent “humanism” now functions primarily as a talisman or a target, that is, as a prompt to choose sides. It closes with the image of Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, suggesting that humanism is more like the uncertain footing of Salcedo's fissure than the footholds on either side. The second section suggests that this “alien humanism” is hiding in plain sight, requiring us only to read an inch beyond the poster‐ready copy fueling the polemics. Even a cursory glance at the texts from which these epitomes are drawn — from Terence's “Nothing human is foreign to me,” through Shakespeare's “What a piece of work is a man,” to Arnold's “The best of what has been thought and said” — is enough to reconnect us with a tradition stranger and more dynamic than that portrayed by boosters and knockers alike. The third section explores the tensions between the research university and the tradition of humane letters it has come to house, arguing that it will not do to escape this rancor by hiding behind the functionalist, and ultimately circular, term “humanist,” defined as one who does research in the humanities. The final section shows that if this older tradition pulls away, to some extent, from the modern humanities, it simultaneously embraces scientific and professional fields, as demonstrated by the long tradition of the physician‐humanist.     

Kant versus the Managers: Historical Reconstruction and the Modern University

This paper examines the role of normative ideals in contemporary critiques of the university. It begins by suggesting that the normative ideal of the university advanced by Immanuel Kant in The Conflict of the Faculties is particularly relevant to current critiques, as exemplified by a manifesto produced at the University of Aberdeen entitled ‘Reclaiming our University’. The second portion of the paper notes that such critiques cannot however encompass all aspects of the modern university. The paper thus concludes that a Kantian framework enables a narrower, but more powerful critique of New Public Management, which foregrounds issues of legitimate conflict within the university and its institutional reproduction over time instead of speaking to broader concerns about the university's civic/humanist origins     

Images of thinking in feminist materialisms: ontological divergences and the production of researcher subjectivities

Qualitative feminist studies are much challenged by the contemporary critique of social constructionist postmodernism, as well as the renewed search for the body and materiality. The result is (at least) two diverging research accounts: a renewed feminist materialism, relying on some foundational ontologies and what has been called a new materialist feminist account that constitutes radical ontological rewritings. The aim of this paper is to investigate what kind of researcher subjectivities these different accounts produce for qualitative inquiry. This investigation will be unfolded using an example from a collaborative research process involving 10 PhD students. The example is woven into Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions on the Image of Thought and the three images of thinking outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. The investigation shows that although the aim of our collaborative process was to resist the assumed Cogito/“I” of philosophy and qualitative inquiry, we still got caught up in taken-for-granted images of thinking and doing analysis. A deterritorializing of habits of thinking and practicing in order for new and other researcher subjectivities to emerge required collaborative efforts that put to work a rhizomatic image of thinking and operated from within an ontology of difference.     

试论孔子的人文关怀与人文精神

孔子是世界上最早的人主义，他一生的人实践与人主义思想倾向说明他关注的对象是人与人类社会；尤其是他的“仁”，率先在世界上将“人”作为一个类概念来进行运思，产生了极其丰富的“人”学思想，其中所体现的人关怀与人精神，成为中国传统化中最为光辉的人遗产。     

时间性问题的转向与艺术的诗性归途—从狄尔泰到海德格尔

狄尔泰认为生命是一个时间性和历财}生的存在,是在“过去”、“现在”和“未来”三位一体中的体验之流,过去的历史生命是通过现在的体验而走向将来,他更看重“过去”对生命的意义。与狄尔泰不同的是,海德格尔对时间性问题是在存在论的意义上来探讨的,他认为此在是通过将来的筹划所规定的,更看重的是“将来”对此在的意义,因此时间性问题在海德格尔这里发生了转向。尽管如此,他们都走向了艺术这条诗性的归途,都把艺术看成是生命和此在的澄明之境。     

试论斯莱特的“稳定性质簇说”

回应哈金的“消去主义”,是当代自然种类理论研究的一个难题。克里普克通过哲学的语义分析导出一种“类本质主义”,引领出一个集中于解释分类自然性的自然种类理论研究趋势。由“类本质主义”到“稳定性质簇说”,相关探讨接受语言哲学“遵从世界”的思维,并随之接受一个“人-自然”式的二元世界结构预设。“稳定性质簇说”基于“集团稳定性”解释自然种类,该解释具有一定的优势,但是它主要从认识论的角度综合“自我平衡性质簇说”和“非规则的稳定性”,没有质疑已有研究的本体论基础,因此在本体论取向方面犹豫不决。“稳定性质簇说”重视本体论实践,但是需要一种本体论观念的修正。综合关于自然种类的哲学语义学、认识论和形而上学研究,有可能给出对于哈金“消去主义”的进一步回应。     

Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry

Abstract

This paper reviews Deleuze’s theory of language in Logic of Sense, and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In the ontology informed by the Stoics described in those books, human being and language do not exist separately but in a mixture of words and things. The author argues that this flattened ontology of surfaces is incommensurable with the ontology of depth used in conventional humanist qualitative methodology and recommends beginning new empirical inquiry with a concept instead of with method and methodology.     

Teacher educators’ collaboration in subject departments: collaborative activities and social relations

Teacher educators’ collaboration plays an important role in the improvement of teacher education. Many studies in educational research focus on collaboration from 1 particular perspective. A focus on 2 perspectives, a qualitative (focusing on collaborative activities) as well as a quantitative (focusing on relations) perspective, and relating both perspectives, can add to our knowledge. Data were collected in 3 subject departments of a teacher education institute. Findings indicated that educators’ collaborative networks inside the departments could gain from more coherent and dense relations, and that key players were important to support and sustain collaboration. Both perspectives were mildly related, correlations were found for “degree” and “information” (r = .31, p < .05), “degree” and “joint work” (r = .38, p < .01), and “reciprocity” and “joint work” (r = .33, p < .05), no correlations were found for “degree” or “reciprocity” and “discussing”. At the department level, only mathematics showed significant correlations. Results indicated that, in further research, qualitative aspects as well as quantitative aspects should be included.     

A Collaborative-Comparative Approach to Learning Qualitative Data Analysis

ABSTRACT

The literature on qualitative research offers the novice two strategies for learning analysis: (1) “trust” that you will “somehow” make sense out of qualitative material, or (2) follow a predetermined set of analytic steps and stages. A problem with the first approach is that it does not take into account the wide variety of qualitative analysis projects researchers undertake or differences in how individuals approach the interpretation of qualitative material. A problem with the second approach is that it does not maximize the learning potential possible from making explicit and sharpening the learner's own interpretive framework. In this paper we describe a third alternative: a collaborative-comparative approach to analyzing qualitative materials. This approach uses a group-based model of learning and explicitly capitalizes upon differences in group member interpretive styles to enhance learning qualitative methods of research.     

Effects of professional support in school improvement

At a time when much attention is being paid to teachers’ effectiveness, there is little regard for the effectiveness of their professional support. Although professional development facilitators are frequently involved in school improvement projects, little is known about the interventions they should carry out and the effectiveness of these interventions. In this study, five facilitators’ interventions are operationalised. Multilevel regression analyses show, that the intervention “guiding the process” explains a significant part of variance in teachers’ knowledge, attitude and concerns with respect to an innovation and the degree of implementation. The interventions “team training and coaching”, “creating conditions for innovation at school level” and “individual coaching” explain a significant part of variance in teachers’ knowledge with respect to an innovation. In general, it appears that professional development facilitators have considerable influence on teachers’ knowledge and concerns and reasonable influence on teachers’ attitude and the degree of implementation.     

教师学习:教育现代化视域下的教师教育观

教师作为教育现代化“人”的要素,其现代化同样是一个缓慢的渐进性过程。借鉴哲学本体论层面的研究,可以从工具性存在、关系性存在、精神性存在等三个角度理解教师职业存在的本质。教师教育观经历了第一代以“教师培训”为核心、第二代以“教师专业发展”为核心,正在向第三代以“教师学习”为核心逐步转变的过程。基于此,在教师学习过程中应当遵循情意原理、强化内隐属性、遵从同构迁移等三个过程性原则,以促进教师及教师教育的现代化。     

Residing in silence and wonder: career counselling from the perspective of ‘being’

We are approaching career counselling from the perspective of “Being”, which we recognize to be a daunting task. Nevertheless we find it extremely important that the counsellor become aware of and try to think, talk and act from his or her embeddedness in being, and by that help the client to do the same. This process involves an ontological and spiritual approach, and builds upon the Socratic ability to wonder, the meditative way of “undoing” and the artful act of creation.     

Cripping Human Rights Education with Disability Studies: An Undergraduate Reading List

Aiming to place disability studies in conversation with other antioppressive educational frameworks, this article “crips” human rights education (HRE), a field that, by definition, teaches people about equality, dignity, and respect. A theoretical sampling of HRE journals and an online library database uncovers that human rights scholarship largely overlooks disability outside a medical or legal framework, though disability scholars consistently reference human rights in their work. We argue that these absences exemplify the active erasure of disability at the ontological level, and in response we urge scholars to reconceptualize where and how politics, activism, and social change take place. This “visibilizing” project follows Baxi's dictum that HRE must constantly adapt to people’s localized experiences and the needs of future generations. We offer a reading list to begin this “visibilizing” project in undergraduate university settings, proposing that teachers use “Disability and Human Rights Praxis: Intersectional, Interdisciplinary Readings for Educators” to conceptualize how they might pair disability studies in education and HRE texts to facilitate interdisciplinary class discussions and student projects.     

Unpacking ontological security: A decolonial reading of scholarly impact

Despite the growing debate about scholarly impact, an analysis of the onto-epistemic grammar underlying impact has remained absent. By taking a different analytical approach to examining impact, we interrogate the concept through the lens of decolonial thought. We offer an empathetic review of the impact scholarship and illuminate the limits of the modern imaginary that circumscribe critiques of impact in the literature, making visible the Eurocentric and provincial horizons of modern reason underlying these critiques and impact in general. Drawing on ?ūnyatā ontological perspective, we seek to articulate from modernity imaginary’s edges and suggest imagining and being otherwise. We argue that the question of scholarly impact is intimately structured by and connected to the modern subject’s desire for ontological security.     

The die is cast: Topical and ontological dimensions of the locus of the irreparable

Claims that a choice cannot be repeated or that its consequences may involve an irreparable loss draw upon powerful topical and ontological assumptions. This essay identifies this commonplace with certain loci of “Quality” and with a view of time similar to Heidegger's general interpretation of human existence as Ek‐sistenz—"the standing beyond oneself.” Such an understanding reveals strategic and ethical implications of the irreparable for human decision‐making.     

Pedagogies of Hauntology in History Education: Learning to Live with the Ghosts of Disappeared Victims of War and Dictatorship

Michalinos Zembylas examines how history education can be reconceived in terms of Jacques Derrida's notion of “hauntology,” that is, as an ongoing conversation with the “ghost” — in the case of this essay, the ghosts of disappeared victims of war and dictatorship. Here, Zembylas uses hauntology as both metaphor and pedagogical methodology for deconstructing the orthodoxies of academic history thinking and learning about “the disappeared.” As metaphor, hauntology evokes the figure of the ghost in order both to trouble the hegemonic status of representational modes of knowledge in remembrance practices and to undermine their ontological frames and ideological histories. As pedagogical methodology, hauntology reframes histories of loss and absence and uses them as points of departure to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions that emerge from haunting. Pedagogies of hauntology are constituted as responses to “spectacle pedagogy” in teaching about the disappeared, that is, a ubiquitous form of representation that manifests the ghosts in a sensationalized and ideological manner.