IMMANUEL KANT'S ACCOUNT OF COGNITIVE EXPERIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION

In this essay Gregory Bynum seeks to show that Immanuel Kant's thought, which was conceived in an eighteenth‐century context of new, and newly widespread, pressures for nationally institutionalized human rights–based regimes (the American and French revolutions being the most prominent examples), can help us think in new and appreciative ways about how to approach human rights education more effectively in our own time. Kant's discussion of moral experience features prominently in Bynum's analysis, which emphasizes the following: Kant's conception of a Categorical Imperative to treat humanity as an end in itself; his conscious avoidance of, and his discussion of the necessity of avoiding, the limitations of empiricist and rationalist extremes of thought; and his discussion of moral experience in interrelated individual, community, and global aspects. Bynum demonstrates the usefulness of Kant's approach by using it as a lens through which to appreciatively examine a Japanese‐born university professor's account of her ultimately successful effort to teach American students about U.S.‐instigated human rights violations abroad.     

In Excess of Epistemology: Siegel,Taylor, Heidegger and the Conditions of Thought

Harvey Siegel's epistemologically‐informed conception of critical thinking is one of the most influential accounts of critical thinking around today. In this article, I seek to open up an account of critical thinking that goes beyond the one defended by Siegel. I do this by re‐reading an opposing view, which Siegel himself rejects as leaving epistemology (and, by implication, his epistemological account of critical thinking) ‘pretty much as it is’. This is the view proposed by Charles Taylor in his paper ‘Overcoming Epistemology’. Crucially, my aim here is not to defend Taylor's challenge to epistemology per se, but rather to demonstrate how, through its appeal to certain key tropes within Heideggerian philosophy, Taylor's paper opens us towards a radically different conception of thinking and the human being who thinks. Indeed, as will be argued, it is through this that Taylor and Heidegger come to offer us the resources for re‐thinking the nature of critical thinking—in a way that exceeds the epistemological, and does more justice to receptive and responsible conditions of human thought.     

Pity and Justice in Rousseau's Emile: Developing a Concern for the Common Good

Scholarly accounts of the training of pity in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile focus on how Emile's tutor activates the psychological mechanisms necessary for the feeling of pity in book 4 of the text. This account is inadequate, for it fails to show how Emile acquires the evaluative ability to make the judgment about who deserves pity as well as the willingness to adjudicate his own and others' interests. In this article, Wing Sze Leung argues that books 1 through 3 lay the foundation by developing in Emile the attitudes and dispositions that guide him in his judgment-making about which kind of life he should pursue. Books 4 and 5 then develop Emile's ability to make interpersonal judgments of pity through habituated practice. By gradually cultivating Emile's sensitivity to the potential conflict between his self-interests and others' well-being, as well as the resolution to refrain from infringing on others' interests and to pursue the common good, Rousseau's long-term educational project molds Emile's disposition to act as justice demands. The article concludes with a brief response to some criticisms about Rousseau's educational project.     

From father to son: generative care and gradual conversion in William James's writing of The Varieties

Using a historical and biographical, then developmental, approach, this article examines William James's spiritual family history by reviewing key events in the life of his father, Henry James, Sr. It pays particular attention to Henry Sr's tumultuous relationship with his own father, William James of Albany, and Henry Sr's subsequent conversion to the religious thought of Emmanuel Swedenborg. James's writing of The Varieties of Religious Experience can be seen as integral to his moral and religious development; that is, it functioned as an extended process of conversion that permitted him to distance himself from a rational, scientific identity. In search of the deeper emotional satisfaction and in loyalty to the two paternal ancestors, James's redefined himself, dramatically expanding his own generative legacy.     

On Scholars and Pragmatists and Fitting It All In

The author looks back on his career as an academic in Australia, tracing both his own and higher education's descent into pragmatism. In particular, he re‐examines 25 years later the AVCC working party report on Teaching Methods in Australian Universities of which he was a co‐author.     

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? JEAN‐JACQUES ROUSSEAU ON LISTENING EDUCATION

In this essay Megan J. Laverty argues that Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's conception of humane communication and his proposal for teaching it have implications for our understanding of the role of listening in education. She develops this argument through a close reading of Rousseau's most substantial work on education, Emile: Or, On Education. Laverty elucidates Rousseau's philosophy of communication, beginning with his taxonomy of the three voices—articulate, melodic, and accentuated—illustrating the ways in which they both enhance and obfuscate understanding. Next, Laverty provides an account of Rousseau's philosophical psychology, with specific reference to amour‐propre and amour de soi. Listening plays a central role in Rousseau's philosophy of communication, Laverty maintains, because it is in the act of listening that humans fulfill, or fail to fulfill, the imperative that we seek to understand others.     

Pedagogical Thinking in a Student's Mind: A conceptual clarification on the basis of self‐determination and volition theories

This article suggests that educational psychology should pay more attention to the role of the curriculum when the optimal motivation to learn in school is considered. The curriculum frames the teaching‐studying‐learning process in school. This fact has several implications on the motivation to learn in school. After the child starts school, his or her motivation to learn seems to change from an intrinsic motivation to an extrinsic motivation. To develop pedagogical thinking in a student's mind means that the student must become acquainted with the aims and goals of the curriculum, assimilate them into his or her integrated sense of self and, thus, fully accept them as their own. If this succeeds, it will have positive effects on the student's motivation at school and especially on the motivation to study and learn. The concept of pedagogical thinking in a student's mind is analogous to the concept of teacher's pedagogical thinking. Based on previous studies, this article provides an example of how joint‐planning can offer a learning environment that promotes students' pedagogical thinking and the internalisation of the aims and goals of the curriculum in school. This article calls for new theoretical syntheses and research programmes that better take into account the normative nature of learning and teaching in school.     

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.     

“Unpacking my Library”: Children's Literature in the Writings of Walter Benjamin

In recentyears as the works of Walter Benjamin, the German‐Jewish cultural critic and philosopher, have become more widely available in translation commentaries have emerged which focus on what his writings have to offer current practices of cultural history. Benjamin was an avid collector of children's books. He also wrote extensively on children's literature, forgotten children's stories, the compulsion and cultures of book collecting and about his own childhood experiences in Berlin. This essay concerns itself with Benjamin's relationship with children's literature, both a child and as a collector, and his insights into the process of engaging with the internal world of the child. In doing so consideration is given to his innovative approach to memory‐work and the relationship between “remembering”, memory, artefacts and history. In this sense, this essay is about the book and education and the writing of cultural history.

     

Traversing the gap: Andrew Wright,John Hick and critical religious education

This paper discusses aspects of Andrew Wright's version of a liberal, critical religious education and his criticisms of some other views of modern religious education. This is attempted not by examining these ‘other views’ as such but by concentrating on the work of John Hick. The reason for this is that Wright, like Cooling (in his book A Christian Vision for State Education: Reflections on the Theology of Education) identifies Hick as a significant influence on forms of religious education to which he objects. In a number of his writings Wright identifies Hick's work as an example of universal theology informed by romanticism. This runs counter to a comprehensive reading of Hick, and to Hick's own account of his work. Hick, like Wright, is a critical realist but by identifying Hick as a romantic, Wright is in danger of not only polarising views on religious education but also closing down a debate to which Hick's work has much to contribute. The latter part of the paper illustrates how a nuanced understanding of Hick's religious pluralism can make a contribution to discussions about critical religious education.     

Learning from MacIntyre about Learning: Finding Room for a Second-Person Perspective?

In this article I try to bring into relief the background significance of learning in Alasdair MacIntyre's writings. After briefly adverting to his own manner of learning from other thinkers, I begin by outlining what he sees as essential to learning in early childhood (§I). Next, I spell out what I take to be important implications for learning, mainly in the context of schooling, of his conception of ‘practice’ (§II). Turning then to the ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’ of his later work, I elucidate the kind of transformative learning that he deems necessary because of dominant tendencies in late modern societies (§III) and because of key features of human lives—including fallibility, narrativity and ‘final end’—that he analyses in his most recent book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (§IV). I then consider his conception of how one person's learning can be aided by another, suggesting that this conception would be strengthened by the incorporation of a second-person perspective (§V). I link the absence of such a perspective to what I see as his underestimation of the salience of the teacher–student relationship and his consequently diminished account of teaching—a largely Aristotelian-Thomist account whose strengths in other respects I acknowledge (§VI). I conclude by asking whether this line of criticism, if valid, might not indicate a lack in MacIntyre's conception of personal relationships more generally—despite the great import that he grants to them, for weal or woe, in all human lives (§VII). [The present article is included in wider discussion of issues bearing on learning and teaching in my Persons in Practice: Essays between Education and Philosophy (Wiley, forthcoming)].     

Influence of a catalan peer tutoring programme on reading comprehension and self‐concept as a reader

This study relates to the results obtained in the development of reading comprehension (RC) and self‐concept as a reader in students who participated in Llegim en parella (Reading in pairs), a Catalan peer tutoring programme. The research combines a quasi‐experimental design with the use of comparison groups and pre‐tests/post‐tests for both variables; a qualitative approach is adopted by analysing the interactions in order to detect influencing factors. Statistically significant results were obtained for all students in terms of RC but only for student tutors in relation to reading self‐concept. The factors involved in the improvements identified in RC are: reading strategies, scaffolding in inferential and deep comprehension questions. Regarding self‐concept, the tutor's own role, his involvement with their tutees' progress, reading aloud and the metacognitive reflection processes, are all factors that enable us to explain the improvement in the tutor's reading self‐perception. The positive influence of peer tutoring on the development of reading competence through this programme is clearly evident.     

Teachers as writers: learning together

This paper reports upon the insights gained through working with teachers as writers at their own level. As part of a two‐year research project into the development of children's voice and verve in writing, a group of fourteen teachers' reflective journeys as writers were documented. Two other groups of teachers and one group of student teachers also took part in writers' workshops across the same period. The data encompassed: questionnaires, observations and teacher commentaries on their own writing, as well as interviews. A number of issues emerged, including: the tension between public and private writing and the security of the writing environment; authenticity in modelling writing; the importance of re‐reading writing at the point of composition; the significance of choice and autonomy in writing and the potency of drama as an ideational and reflective tool. The consequences for classroom practice are also considered. It is argued that in order to enhance the teaching of writing, teachers and student teachers need real opportunities to write at their own level and reflect upon the process.     

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.     

The Hirst‐Carr Debate Revisited: Beyond the Theory‐Practice Dichotomy

This article examines the benefits and burdens of the debate between Paul Hirst and Wilfred Carr over a set of issues to do with philosophy and education specifically and theory and practice more generally. Hirst and Carr, in different ways, emphasise the importance of Aristotelian practical philosophy as an antidote to the theory‐oriented confined method of ‘conceptual analysis’ that has haunted the philosophy of education. Despite their proper recognition of the irreducible character of practice to theory, they fail to provide a satisfying account of their interpenetrating relation. Hirst falls into error by fencing off ‘forms of theoretical knowledge’ from ‘forms of practice’; Carr's dismissive attitude to theory is saturated with internal tensions in his own discourse. This article contends that what is left unaddressed both in Hirst's and Carr's arguments is the most fundamental sense of ‘social’, which is prior to relative differences in the standards of knowledge among societies and which reminds us that theory is not a socially disembodied enterprise. A lively appreciation of this point encourages us to see the prevailing outlook towards the relation between philosophy and education quite differently.     

Westernization and social transformations in Chinese music education, 1895-1949

Editor's note: ’Dear Mum and Dad’ is rather different from the kind of academic article that the Journal usually publishes, in that it is an autobiographical account of one person's educational experiences. The paper tells the story of a young woman's three years as a student at Nottingham University through her letters to her parents written between 1952 and 1955. Memory and reflection engage with this contemporary source to produce both a vivid and humorous reconstruction of student life in the 1950s, and the identification of a set of serious issues concerning gender and higher education. Young middle‐class women at university were involved in learning financial independence, developing communal life in their halls of residence, investigating relationships with male students individually and collectively, and making subject and career choices. This subjective account reminds us that the parameters of the feminine norm were not cultural fixtures of the higher education institutions of the 1950s, to be passed on with the degree certificate. They were explored, contested and renegotiated by the women students themselves.     

Real‐fiction versus historical reality: Rhetorical purification in “kent state”—the docudrama

This essay analyzes the ways in which Kent State, the made‐for‐TV docudrama, purified the image of William Knox Schroeder‐one of the four students killed on May 4, 1970, by Ohio National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. The author was a boyhood friend of Schroeder, his roommate at Kent State University at the time of his death, and an observer of many of the major events of the Kent State affair. This essay views the making of a docudrama as a complex problem to be solved and characterizes a docudramatist as a less‐than‐perfect decision maker. Also, this essay views Kent State as a real‐fiction through which the act of rhetorical purification was accomplished. The paper discusses the docudrama's efforts in this regard by analyzing important scenes in which inaccuracies are presented in order to achieve the purification of Schroeder's image.     

Adult education and the politics of knowledge: the relevance of Malta's Dun Gorg Preca

This paper sets out to explore the contribution that Dun Gorg Preca made to the development of adult education in the Maltese islands. Preca's achievements are situated historically in order to highlight more effectively his relevance to the development of the field. Qualities underlined in this account are Preca's commitment to the democratization of knowledge, his stance vis‐à‐vis the learner, opting to reach out to communities and to work at the grass roots rather than the formal institutional level, and his conviction that difficult knowledge, often used as a positional good by status groups, can, given the right pedagogical approach, be communicated to all learners, whatever their social and educational background.