THE EDUCATIONAL MEANING OF COMMUNAL LAUGHTER: ON THE EXPERIENCE OF CORPOREAL DEMOCRACY

In this article Joris Vlieghe, Maarten Simons, and Jan Masschelein attempt to articulate a new way of dealing with the public character of education. Instead of discussing laughter as an instrument that one could use to facilitate established educational goals, the authors provide an extensive analysis of the phenomenon of laughter as a specific form of corporeal behavior. Their analysis demonstrates that when we laugh, we give an answer to a disorienting situation, but this answer is not the product of intentional agency. Instead, it consists in the uncontrollable spasmodic contraction of our diaphragm and other impersonal and automatic corporeal reactions. We are thus exposed to an ultimate loss of self‐control. The authors argue further that communal laughter—that is, when the lack of mastery over our own lives becomes a shared experience—results in what they call a “democracy of the flesh.” In this state, it is no longer possible to stick to well‐defined positions, nor is it tenable to defend any hierarchical ordering, including the strict hierarchy we typically find in the context of schooling and education. Common laughter makes equals out of us and grants the possibility of an unforeseen and unimaginable future. For precisely this reason, the authors conclude, communal laughter might be considered as an educational event itself.     

CHANGING VISIONS OF EXCELLENCE IN ONTARIO SCHOOL POLICY: THE CASES OF LIVING AND LEARNING AND FOR THE LOVE OF LEARNING

In this essay, Rosa Bruno‐Jofré and George Hills examine two major Ontario policy documents: 1968's Living and Learning and 1994's For the Love of Learning. The purpose is, first, to gain insight into the uses of the term “excellence” in the context of discourse about educational aims and evaluation, and, second, to explore how these uses may have changed over time. Bruno‐Jofré and Hills employ the conceptual framework developed by Madhu Prakash and Leonard Waks to elucidate the varied notions of excellence contained in the two reports. Bruno‐Jofré and Hills argue that Living and Learning is an eclectic report that creates continuity by aligning itself with the pedagogically progressive tradition in Ontario; that propounds a holistic conception of excellence centered on the all‐around development of the self; and that seeks simultaneously to secure a sense of being Canadian while dealing with rapidly emerging social fragmentation. For the Love of Learning, in contrast, attempts to combine a technical view of excellence in education (stressing various literacies and skills as measurable indicators) with the principles of caring and the goals of social responsibility. Each report can be seen as an attempt to respond to the expectations of a population that had become increasingly diverse in the interval between the two reports. What is cause for concern in terms of policymaking, Bruno‐Jofré and Hills conclude, is the turn away from broader, more comprehensive and coherent views of excellence in education toward narrower and more fragmented accounts that are preoccupied with various types of literacy or loosely related vocational and other skills. The effect of this shift is to leave educational policy and practice in the schools essentially rudderless.     

THE LIFE SPAN: HUMAN DEVELOPMENT FOR HELPING PROFESSIONALS (2nd Ed.)

The purpose of the present study was to investigate attitudes toward old age in an Israeli population, compared with attitudes toward youth and middle age, among individuals representing these same ages. Global concepts “Youth,” “Adult,” and “Old person” were rated in comparison with the “Ideal Person.”

Representatives of 62 three‐generation families participated in the study. A semantic differential consisting of 21 bipolar adjective pairs in 7‐point scale format was used to measure attitudes toward the four concepts. Results indicated that the concept “Old Person” was rated lowest in relation to the “Ideal Person,” as a global concept as well as on three cut of four dimensions derived from the global concept. This pattern was found among all three groups of raters, including the elderly themselves. The elderly, however, rated themselves significantly more favorably than did the other groups.     

CRUCIAL NEEDS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIFELONG LEARNING ‐ CONCLUSIONS OF THE INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR ON STRATEGIES FOR LIFELONG LEARNING

In the editorial of the Bulletin concentrating on “Higher Education and the Concept of Lifelong Education” (No.4, Vol.IV, October‐December 1979), we pointed òut that “Adaptation of the concept of lifelong education to existing structures in higher education becomes a natural consequence in the wake of technological and scientific progress together with socio‐economic development and the need for new and updated knowledge”. But life shows that in order to achieve a state of “natural consequence” a number of changes have to be made in educational policies, in the attitude of education in the hope of influencing public opinion. This need for change is emphasized in the conclusions which are presented in the following article of the International Seminar on Strategies for Lifelong Learning which was held from 5 to 10 May 1980 at Brandbjerg Folk High School, Denmark.

The article is based on the draft conclusions of the seminar by Dr. John Robinson.     

Social Metaphorical Mapping of the Concept of Force “CHI‐KA‐RA” in Japanese

This research focused on the concept of “force” (“CHI‐KA‐RA” in Japanese) in Newtonian mechanics. The primary objective was to develop a tool, based on metaphor, to interpret student thinking in learning scientific topics. The study provides an example of using the tool to trace the process of mutual changes in thinking during a dialog among students who have different perspectives on the same topic. “Social metaphorical mapping” was used to interpret a dialog between two groups of junior high school students with different epistemological paradigms with regard to the concept of force (CHI‐KA‐RA) in the learning environment of a computer simulation. Both source domains were recontextualized through social metaphorical mapping and the process of mutual changes in concepts was traced. Participants noticed that the Buridanian ¹ 1. Buridan was a French scientist in the fourteenth century who proposed a theory of impetus. concept of“force” differs from the Newtonian concept of “force,” differentiated between the concepts of “force” that use the same Japanese term “CHI‐KA‐RA,” and noticed that the Buridanian concept of “force” resembles the Newtonian concept of “momentum.”     

Turning a City into a Milieu of Study: University Pedagogy as “Frontline”

In 2016 Bruno Latour delivered a lecture at Cornell University in which he responded to what he called the actual situation of disorientation and (literal) lack of common ground by offering some “hints for a neo‐Humboldtian university.” One hint he offered was that we should consider pedagogy as the frontline for staging an approach to societal challenges that links basic research and public engagement. Here, Jan Masschelein follows and extends upon this hint through exploring some ways to reclaim or reinvent the university as pedagogic form. Concretely, he describes the development of a course on designing educational practices that is conceived as a way to turn cities into a milieu of public and collective study. Masschelein's contribution to this symposium offers a “technical story” about physical, material experiences, one that contains some prepositions and propositions, an example, many detours, and a few practical notes and considerations. By this means, he explores the meaning and form pedagogy takes when we do not reduce it to teaching and extension, but instead approach it as the genus and the locus of a nexus between public engagement and basic research. Masschelein concludes by proposing the “public design studio” as a pedagogic form suited to the neo‐Humboldtian university.     

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.     

Banaji,Shakuntala & Buckingham,David (2013) The civic web MIT Press (Cambridge MA & London) isbn 978‐0‐262‐01964‐4 185 pp £20.95 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/civic‐web

With the sub‐title “Young people, the internet, and civic participation”, The civic web recognises that youngsters are now well along the path to fully and seamlessly integrated offline and online lives. How can we ensure these young people become and remain fully engaged in their wider society and worlds now and throughout their lifetimes? It applies to teachers insofar as “digital media are part of the taken‐for‐granted social and cultural fabric of learning, play, and social communication”. There is some relevance to formal learning technology here, but the recommendation is that you borrow a copy for thought‐provoking “spare‐time” reading. Eric Deeson     

Inside the Black Box: On the Concepts “Teaching” and “Learning” and the Connections Between Them

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I discuss the concepts “teaching” and “learning” and investigate the connections between them. Starting from the perspective on teaching and learning expressed in The European Qualifications Framework (EQF), I analyse three theses on the concept of teaching: the Dewey-thesis, the Standard-thesis and the Hirst-thesis, identifying problems in the established definitions. Following Hirst, I contend that teaching is an intention, hence a potential, having learning as its possible realization. That the learning is only possible is the papers main argument, since it explains how and why (the quality of) input is vitally important in educational settings. This idea is in direct opposition to the view in the EQF. In consequence, I argue that the connection between teaching and learning is teleological as opposed to mechanical. By way of contrast, I distinguish my understanding from Ryle-like analyses of teaching as task and learning as achievement, and argue that on a teleological understanding, teaching might be considered an achievement in its own right.     

Following One's Nose in Reading W. G. Sebald Allegorically: Currere and Invisible Subjects

In education, we are concerned with the teaching and learning of subjects, but the word “subject” can refer to the discipline being studied as well as the individual who is studying. In this essay, Teresa Strong‐Wilson explores this “double entendre” (which William Pinar refers to as the “double consciousness”) of curriculum studies through the analogy afforded by German author‐in‐exile W. G. Sebald's working through of difficult subjects by way of semi‐autobiographical writing that takes the form of an “invisible subject”: a preoccupation with an unnamed injustice entangled with his own upbringing. Curriculum theory, as currere, has foregrounded the autobiographical. While the place of autobiography in curriculum studies has often been taken to mean writing (especially of a confessional sort), currere is more an allegorical method of study, of intellectual engagement, of learning through reading and writing, and of teaching so as to open spaces for agency. Strong‐Wilson suggests that Sebald can provide a strong example for us in curriculum studies of how to ethically bring into being an allegorical, autobiographical practice focused on “invisible” subjects of deep concern.     

Learning to Write: Plowing and Hoeing,Labor and Essaying

In this paper Amanda Fulford addresses the issue of student writing in the university, and explores how the increasing dominance of outcome‐driven modes of learning and assessment is changing the understanding of what it is to write, what is expected of students in their writing, and how academic writing should best be supported. The starting point is the increasing use of what are termed “technologies” of writing — “handbooks” for students that address issues of academic writing — that systematize, and smooth the work of writing in, Fulford argues, an unhelpful way. This leads to a reconsideration of what it means to write in the university, and what it is to be a student who writes. Fulford explores etymologically the concept of “writing” and suggests that it might be seen metaphorically as physical labor. Writing as physical labor is explored further through the agricultural metaphors in Henry David Thoreau's Walden and through Stanley Cavell's reading of that text. In making a distinction between writing‐as‐plowing and writing‐as‐hoeing, Fulford argues that some technologies of writing deny voice rather than facilitate it, and she concludes by offering a number of suggestions for the teaching and learning of writing in the university that emphasize the value of being lost (in one's subject and one's work) and finding one's own way out. These “lessons” are illustrated with reference to Thoreau's text Walden and to American literature and film.     

How to ask better questions? Dewey's theory of ecological psychology in encouraging practice of action learning

This paper provides an overview of John Dewey's ecological psychology and his basic concepts: experience, inquiry, and habit. The concept of habit, which is particularly relevant in understanding problem-solving strategies, is further explicated on the basis of Gross’s (2009. “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review 74: 358–379) conceptions of habits by way of an analysis of an action learning case study. It is argued that a deeper understanding of Dewey's ecological psychology, and the application of his concepts, may assist action learning practitioners to better understand why problems arise and how people solve them habitually, and thereby enable us to ask questions that can foster double loop learning.     

RADICAL HOPE AND TEACHING: LEARNING POLITICAL AGENCY FROM THE POLITICALLY DISENFRANCHISED

Abstract If teaching is a political act, how can teachers hope to make a difference through their work? In this review essay, Julian Edgoose explores this question of hope in relation to three recent books: David Halpin’s Hope and Education, Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher, and Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. Halpin describes how hope comes from our targeted efforts to connect our critical analysis of the present to a better, yet realistic, idea of the future. In contrast, Kozol (echoing Cornel West’s “tragicomic hope”) describes a hopefulness that sustains him despite and alongside his critical view of schools. Edgoose asks a further question: can one reasonably remain hopeful in the absence of that critical stance — in the absence of a sense that one can understand the situation one faces enough to know a way out? To Lear, this would be a case of “radical hope,” and Edgoose offers a second reading of Kozol through the lenses of Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt to show what such radical hope might look like for teachers.     

Finding Voices in a Changing World: Standard Language Education as a Site for Developing Critical Literacies

What are the “key competencies” needed in our time? What literacy is needed to make students active participants in their societies and contributors to changing cultures? This article offers a contribution to the ongoing discussion about these questions. It takes as its point of departure the “key competencies” formulated in the OECD program Definition and Selection of Competencies (DeSeCo) in response to educational challenges in a changing world, and the five “basic skills” to be developed in all school subjects from year 1 to year 13 in the Norwegian curriculum of 2006 (LK06). It argues, first, for the need to understand “basic skills” in the perspective of DeSeCo “key competencies”, with a focus, as formulated in DeSeCo, on using tools interactively, acting autonomously, and interacting in heterogeneous groups. Secondly, the aims and purposes of the school subject “Norwegian” in Norway, as formulated in LK06, are discussed in relation to the aims of the DeSeCo key competencies and the concepts of critical literacy and Bildung. Thirdly, the article offers a discussion of how standard language education can become a site for the development of key competencies and critical literacies, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about utterances and voices and Roz Ivanic's about discoursal identities, and talking about the StLE subject as a potential public space, a stage, a resonance room, and a cultural workshop. Finally, some concluding remarks are made about the crucial role of the teacher in such a curriculum, and about the role of standard language education in relation to other school subjects.     

Skilling for the Workforce: A tertiary education response to enrich professional development

Tertiary educators are being directed by government policy: to develop a learning environment where participants become more than passive receivers of knowledge and to skill the workforce through technical skills and competency‐based education. Professional development is needed for compliance, and to develop and maintain generic, productivity, and technical attributes relevant to the profession. Profession and career development, for continued employability and professional recognition, involves “skilling for the workforce” through enriched self‐directed and lifelong learning. The article examines what could be a tertiary education response on the part of universities. This is through developing a learning environment which addresses the various motivating policies and common educational drivers in professional practice. It further examines the suitability of Work‐Integrated Learning (WIL), as a recognised integrative learning environment, to provide a foundation for effecting self‐directed professional development.     

CARPE DIEM: OVERCOME MISCONCEPTIONS IN COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTANCE LEARNING

ABSTRACT

This paper makes note of the vast opportunities for growth and expansion available to community colleges through online distance education. While many community colleges have taken advantage of these opportunities, continued success may be in jeopardy because of the high drop-out rates in online courses of study relative to courses offered as traditional, face-to-face classroom instruction. The reason for this may be that the “digital divide” still exists between students of the 21st century and faculty who were educated long ago in the 20th century, including even those faculty who have stepped forward to offer online courses. Perception of up-to-date concepts of distance learning is a major issue, and only when the gap is bridged between distance learner and instructor will online learning reach its potential. The literature available on distance learning has numerous suggestions for bridging this gap between students and faculty. The authors of this article recommend that community colleges make the institutional commitment to equip and train Internet-ready faculty to appropriately advise and teach 21st-century students. However, taking such a step may have significant implications for the immediate future in the allocation of financial resources.     

Monetary Reward Versus the National Ideological Agenda: career choice among Chinese university students

Abstract

This paper studies university students’ job‐selection criteria as an indicator of how socio‐economic forces have deconstructed the state‐supported value system in China in the course of reformatting a society in which money‐power has risen to combat not only political control but moral forces. The analysis is based on the surveys conducted by Chinese researchers in various institutes and different regions between 1990 and 1995. The study suggests the increasing importance of “a good income” in graduate job selection, which is a reflection of a set of new concepts competing with the official ideology. Growing market forces, translated into educational reform as “economic efficiency”, have undermined the effectiveness of political‐moral education. Because of the collapse of traditional values and the lack of new ethical standards of conduct, “money talks” has become a norm guiding social behaviours and personal relationships, and has helped form a force to resist the power of political‐moral education.     

Outside the Comfort Zone of the Classroom

What comes to mind when the word learning is mentioned? Is it a classroom full of students and a teacher dictating notes as the students struggle emphatically to write down every word that is said? Is it a picture of a student in the library with a stack of books piled on a desk, trying to read them all? These examples of learning may fit the traditional definition but this paper expands learning to include service. This paper describes a non‐traditional style of learning that takes the student “out of the comfort zone of the classroom” into the community and explains how this experience has an impact on the students’ education as well as their lives. The authors of this paper hope to influence its readers to re‐think the definition of learning by understanding the importance of service.