Deliberative academic development: the potential and challenge of agency

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore possibilities and challenges for deliberative academic development. Deliberative academic development refers to a practice that engages members of the university in dialogue about its purposes, ways of organizing and leading higher education, as well as teaching and learning. The paper critically analyses data from focus group interviews with academic developers from four universities within two national contexts. Combining sociological conceptualizations of agency and the framework of ‘epistemic living spaces’, the paper offers insights into challenges and opportunities for deliberative academic development, as well as a framework for studying agency in other contexts.     

Deliberative Democratic Theological Education: A Proposal for Youth Ministry That Builds Peace

Abstract

Drawing on research in deliberative pedagogy, this paper will develop in depth one piece of a larger project that envisions peace education as an essential component of youth ministry. The paper proposes a sacred pedagogy that engages theological concepts through deliberative, democratic discussion, teaching young people skills in engaging across difference as well as habits of deliberative theological thinking for a lifetime of spiritual growth. The specific example of engaging the problem of how we image Jesus will serve as an illustration of the potential for a series of curricular materials for use in congregational youth settings.     

Cultivating Political Morality for Deliberative Citizens — Rawls and Callan Revisited

In this article, I will argue that the implementation of deliberative democracy needs to be supplemented by a specific political morality in order to cultivate free and equal citizens in exercising public reason for achieving a cooperative and inclusive liberal society. This cultivation of personality is literally an educational project with a robust ethical ambition, and hence, it reminds us the orthodox liberal problem concerning the relation between the state and its citizenship education. Following Callan’s reformulation of the political conception of the person, I will argue that Rawls’s political liberalism can accommodate the ethical demand of deliberative citizenship education. Liberal civic education should legitimately specify its own ethical endowments for active citizenship and need not shy away from making proposals on the cultivation of liberal character that might result in influencing individual’s conception of the good. Rawls’s theory thus redefines the state neutrality problem on education and paves the way for a framework of deliberative citizenship education.     

African(a) philosophy of education and deliberative university teaching

Abstract

This article explores the notion of an African(a) philosophy of education and its implications for university teaching in South Africa. African(a) philosophy of education brings into sharper focus the need to reconceptualise university teaching in South Africa, particularly along the lines of deliberative inquiry. This article examines constitutive meanings of African(a) philosophy of education and what it means for teachers both to be deliberative and to cultivate deliberation.     

Education and the cult of relevance

Abstract

Recent policy developments within the public service sector have led to widespread de‐professionalisation and a general loss of motivation and morale within education, health and social work. This state of affairs has been brought about by the imposition of a social market on public sector professions and through the introduction of competence‐based education and training (CBET) strategies into professional studies. These developments are criticised for their failure to capture the essential epistemological and moral dimensions of the work of professionals, and programmes for professional regeneration are recommended through the renewed emphasis on the workplace as the site of professional learning. Work‐based learning may enable professionals to re‐affirm the importance of experiential learning and reinforce the centrality of the ethical bases of professional practice.     

Ethical Reasoning and the Craft of Moral Practice

Abstract

Non-indoctrinational moral education involves teaching children to engage in ethical inquiry. This means that, since ethical inquiry has the status of a craft, the students will be apprentices in that craft. The classroom becomes, for this purpose, a community of ethical inquiry — an ethical atelier where students learn the tools, methods, practices and procedures which craftsmen associated with that tradition customarily utilize. It is only when one is adept at the generic procedures of reasoning that one can be adept at specifically moral reasoning, but to make the transition possible, the generic procedures should be taught within the humanistic and critical context of philosophy, and within the setting of a community of ethical inquiry.     

Multiculturalism and the common curriculum debate

Abstract:

This paper challenges the assumptions underpinning James Tooley's earlier critique in this edition of the Journal of the author's negative assessment of market‐led forms of educational provision. In particular, the paper highlights Tooley's failure to acknowledge that the pursuit of self‐interest within the market place can be self‐defeating. The paper concludes by arguing that deliberative public action is a necessary condition for addressing the major predicaments of our time, including those facing education.     

Curriculum policy reform in an era of technical accountability: ‘fixing’ curriculum,teachers and students in English schools

Abstract

Drawing on a Levinasian ethical perspective, the argument driving this paper is that the technical accountability movement currently dominating the educational system in England is less than adequate because it overlooks educators’ responsibility for ethical relations in responding to difference in respect of the other. Curriculum policy makes a significant contribution to the technical accountability culture through complicity in performativity, high-stakes testing and datafication, at the same time as constituting student and teacher subjectivities. I present two different conceptualizations of subjectivity and education, before engaging these in the analysis of data arising from an empirical study which investigated teachers’ and stakeholders’ experiences of curriculum policy reform in ‘disadvantaged’ English schools. The study’s findings demonstrate how a prescribed programme of technical curriculum regulation attempts to ‘fix’ or mend educational problems by ‘fixing’ or prescribing educational solutions. This not only denies ethical professional relations between students, teachers and parents, but also deflects responsibility for educational success from government to teachers and hastens the move from public to private educational provision. Complying with prescribed curriculum policy requirements shifts attention from broad philosophical and ethical questions about educational purpose as well as conferring a violence by assuming control over student and teacher subjectivities.     

Character education,the individual and the political

ABSTRACT

Recent critics have suggested that character education (either in and of itself or certain instantiations of it) is overly individualised and, as a result, fails to engage adequately with the political. In this paper, I offer an account of character education which takes issue with such criticisms, and seeks to make clear connections between the moral and the political necessary for character formation and expression. Drawing on an Aristotelian understanding of the political, I argue that individuals are intimately connected with their social associations, which in contemporary plural, westernised democracies include the sort of engagement with the political advocated by critics of character education. Through a focus on civic virtue and deliberative engagement, it is argued that an Aristotelian-inspired account of character addresses the precise concerns, including recognising and challenging social injustices and deliberative engagement with difference, which critics suggest are lacking from character education.     

How common is the common good? Moving beyond idealistic notions of deliberative democracy in education

Assumptions based on deliberative democratic theory have dominated scholarship of democratic citizenship within political science and educational research. However, both fields have produced scholarship that raises questions regarding the efficacy of the deliberative model of democratic education. This article presents a critical synthesis that highlights the major trends of deliberative democratic theory from the field of political science, while making connections to education specific literature. The shift, away from idealistic notions toward a model of deliberative democracy that considers identity, group interests, and power differences within society, supports similar efforts to revisit democratic theory within civic education. The article concludes with recommendations for a revised, more realistic, conceptualization of civic education.     

Behind the By-Lines

Abstract

This article uses a critique of modernity to examine the perceived relationship between global citizenship education (GCE) and digital democracy (DD). We review critiques of citizenship education in the global imperative and of the relationship of technology to democratic engagement. An analogy expresses the problematic way that GCE and DD are both mutually compatible and complicit in ethical global justice issues. We end with a suggestion of a pedagogical framework through which educators can engage with an ethical approach to GCE and DD.     

Fundamental Issues in Teacher Education for Human Rights: a European perspective

Abstract

Human rights education is an essential part of preparation for participation in a pluralistic democracy. As Europe aspires to be a continent of democratic states accepting human rights as their basic principles, a human rights ethic should be a feature of all schools within Europe. Human rights education provides an ethical and moral framework for living in community. Moreover, this ethical position is backed in Europe by the powerful legal framework of the European Convention on Human Rights. This paper describes the features of two teachers’ human rights education courses based on a structure proposed by Richardson. Both explore the relationship between moral and legal aspects of human rights teaching. The Council of Europe Recommendation on “Teaching and Learning about Human Rights in Schools” identifies three broad dimensions of human rights education, namely: skills, knowledge and feelings. The latter affective dimension, as well as facts and pedagogy, is critical to successful teacher education in human rights.     

Should education be transformative?

ABSTRACT

It has become commonplace within the educational research community to invoke the transformative power of education. The call to adopt a ‘transformative’ approach to teaching and learning can be heard in fields as different as adult education and school leadership and as estranged as social justice education and educational psychology. While there is undoubtedly great promise in the idea of transformative education, the fact that it involves deep psychological restructuring on the part of the student requires ethical justification. In this article, I analyze the three most pressing ethical problems that arise within a transformative educational environment: the problems of transformative consent, controversial direction and transformative trauma. In the concluding section, I argue that this ethical analysis urges us to adopt an approach to transformative education as a process of initiation.     

Aretaic pedagogy: how we can transform the aesthetics of good teaching

Abstract

The article aims to introduce the epistemology of aretaic pedagogy as a refreshing paradigm of good teaching, situating at its centrality, instead of a knowledge-based perspective, a virtue-based approach to education. Its origins are in Aristotelian virtue ethics, which premise the acquisition of intellectual and ethical virtues as the highest good of the good life. Aretaic pedagogy is therefore constructed on the basis of the theory of virtue development and deliberates teaching as an ethical, virtue-driven practice. Its epistemological framework depends largely on three components: the notion of teaching as a practice, the embodiment of internal goods in teaching/learning and the harnessing of students’ private knowledge. Dialogue, beauty and play are proposed as the main internal goods within the students’ learning, which can act as key sources of their practice of virtues. As concerns a teacher’s pedagogical presence, it is argued from a dual professional prospect: the technological and the ethical. Therefore, a teacher is called to exercise a nexus of epistemic, technical, poetic and ethical virtues.     

How autonomy support and ethical value alignment influences attitudes towards diversity in English police

ABSTRACT

Antagonism towards diversity, an attitude reflecting low egalitarian ethical values, has been a topic within policing that has received increasing attention in the last decade. Using two-wave data and applying self-determination theory, we investigated how autonomy support versus autonomy frustration, ways of being motivated either through encouraging one’s sense of volition, or otherwise, coercing and imposing pressures, can improve diversity attitudes through its relation with ethical values. Study 1 (n= 398 police officers and staff) found that autonomy-supportive communications fostered ethical values, and hence was negatively related to diversity antagonism. Study 2 (n= 859 police officers and staff) indicated that motivation to overcome prejudice mediates the relationship between ethical values and diversity antagonism. Perceptions of workplace culture as lacking in autonomy support acted as a boundary condition for the ethical values and diversity antagonism relationship; no relationship was present when autonomy support was low.     

Stakeholder influences on the writing skills debate: A reflective evaluation in the context of vocational business education

This paper attempts to contextualise the issue of skills and particularly writing for public relations as a business discipline within a broader debate about the key graduate skills. The paper raises themes for discussion on professionalisation and professionalism, which link to course structure and curriculum content. The paper considers writing skills as a key graduate (and public relations vocational) skill, debates surrounding theory and practice within the curriculum and aligning the curriculum to the work setting as proposed by Dearing. The paper analyses literature and reports from three stakeholder perspectives to evaluate their contribution to the skills debate, with particular focus on communication and writing as a core skill within public relations education and practise. The paper focuses on ideological and political issues that influence the skills debate in the post-Dearing era and assesses the impact of stakeholders on the presentation of evidence, argument and recommendations for higher education.     

The Care of the Self: poststructuralist questions about moral education and gender

Abstract

The relationship between poststructuralist theory and ethics or values in education is a complex and relatively unexplored one, yet in classrooms the ethical implications of theory are lived out daily in the relations between teachers and children. Teachers who are interested in bringing the insights of poststructuralist theory into their work with children still tend to refer back (consciously or otherwise) to the ethics of versions of liberal humanism in making value judgements. The incongruence which results can undermine changes that a teacher wants to bring about. One approach to this dilemma can be through narrative. Narrative, or story, is one of the “technologies of the self most available to teachers and children for the construction, regulation and care of selves (as knowers, as learners and as moral agents), including the ongoing construction of values associated with feminine and masculine gender identities. Deconstruction of children's classroom and lived narratives can make this process visible. This paper will explore the specific and differing values made visible in one story told by five children.     

Conceptualizing social justice in education: mapping the territory

Within recent studies of education policy, social justice has been an under‐theorized concept. This paper is an attempt to begin to remedy this situation. It critically examines some of the most prominent ways in which social justice has been and is being thought about within various traditions of social theory and concludes by sketching out a framework for conceptualizing social justice in the context of education policy research. However, the main purpose of the paper is not to provide a definitive conceptualization of social justice but to open up a debate which might usefully inform the work of the education policy research community.     

Theorising Drama as Moral Education

Although it is commonly assumed within schools that drama has a place within moral education, there is very little theory or analysis to support the assumption. This article sketches a theoretical framework to show how and in what ways drama can make a distinctive contribution to the field. Drawing upon Stenhouse (1975) it proposes a broad distinction between moral instruction and moral induction and analyses drama's potential contribution to both areas. In so doing, it draws links between the cultural practices of the theatre and those of the drama classroom, analysing the moral potential of the dramatic experience through five theoretical lenses. These include the enacted nature of dramatic narrative; the association between drama and the learning of rules; the communal function of drama as a public artform; dialogue and dialogism in drama; and the relationship between emotion, reason and moral engagement in drama.