Killing the Buddha: Towards a heretical philosophy of learning

This article explores how different philosophical models and pictures of learning can become dogmatic and disguise other conceptions of learning. With reference to a passage from St. Paul, I give a sense of the dogmatic teleology that underpins philosophical assumptions about learning. The Pauline assumption is exemplified through a variety of models of learning as conceptualised by Israel Scheffler. In order to show how the Paulinian dogmatism can give rise to radically different pictures of learning, the article turns to St. Augustine’s and Robert Brandom’s examples of language learning, and to general strands in scholarship on moral education. Dewey’s view of childhood immaturity and the problem of adult maturity are used as first attempt at a counter picture to the idea that learning must have an end. The article takes Dewey’s idea further by suggesting how the Zen-Buddhist idea of killing the Buddha and Wittgenstein’s method of destroying pictures work on the dogmatic focus on uses of ‘learning’ that assume ends. In conclusion, the article suggests three possible uses of ‘learning’—learning from wonder, intransitive learning and passionate learning—that do not assume that learning has or must have a teleological end.     

Training and Abrichtung: Wittgenstein as a tragic philosopher of education

As a landmark philosopher of language and of mind, Ludwig Wittgenstein is also remarkable for having crossed, with apparent ease, the ‘continental divide’ in philosophy. It is consequently not surprising that Wittgenstein’s work, particularly in the Philosophical Investigations, has been taken up by philosophers of education in English. Michael A. Peters, Christopher Winch, Paul Smeyers and Nicholas Burbules, and others have engaged extensively with the implications of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy for education. One challenge they face is Wittgenstein’s use of the word ‘training.’ It appears throughout his discussions of language learning and in his periodic references to education. This is made all the more problematic by realizing that the German term Wittgenstein uses consistently is Abrichtung, which refers to animal dressage or obedience training, which is currently used in sadomasochistic practice, and which also connotes also the breaking of an animal’s will. I argue that this little-recognized fact has broad significance for many important Wittgenstinian insights into education. I conclude by considering how an unflinching recognition of the implications of Wittgenstein’s word choice might cast him as a pessimistic or tragic philosopher of education and upbringing—following German-language traditions—rather than as thinker more compatible with progressive Anglo-American perspectives.     

Aesthetic Learning,Creative Writing and English Teaching

My article argues that the concept of ‘aesthetic learning’ can be helpful for English teachers on two levels. First, it can be a useful identity for English teachers and students to adopt, based upon my own experiences as a secondary English teacher, creative writer and PhD student. Second, I argue that ‘aesthetic learning’ is an effective and productive way of analysing some of the learning processes that happen in the English teacher’s classroom. In order to arrive at these conclusions, I examine my own creative writing, teaching and learning processes from which I extrapolate the notion that we are all ‘aesthetic learners’ in the sense that we learn to appreciate the qualities of the worlds we inhabit, whether these are actual or virtual. Throughout, my own writing, learning and teaching are used to illustrate my argument. In particular, the article seeks to re-position my own teaching in secondary schools within the context of ‘aesthetic learning’.     

Increasing international and domestic student interaction through group work: a case study from the humanities

This article explores the use of group work strategies to increase student interaction and learning. Despite the growing linguistic and cultural diversity in tertiary institutions, there is strong evidence of minimal interaction between ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ students in classrooms and in wider university contexts. This study investigates the implementation of teaching and learning strategies in an undergraduate class comprising domestic and international students from Education and Arts. The strategies relate to in-class group work, tutorial groups and assessment design. The findings indicate greater class interaction, higher satisfaction ratings and better learning outcomes as a result of the strategies. The article argues for three key features underpinning the pedagogy: where international students can work from a position of power equality in class, where both groups of students can enact the role of ‘experts’ and where support in language and learning how to learn is embedded in assessment and outcomes.     

Can lifelong learning be the post-2015 agenda for the Least Developed Countries?

This paper discusses what approaches to ‘lifelong learning’ should guide the post-2015 education agenda for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) which refers to a group of 49 countries that are off-track in achieving most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Education for All goals. Reports prepared by major consultation groups such as the High Level Panel established by the United Nations and Global Thematic Consultation Group have proposed that ‘providing quality education and lifelong learning’ is an overarching post-2015 education agenda. It is an important breakthrough since ‘lifelong learning’ has been recommended; however, it is not clear what understanding(s) of lifelong learning has been articulated in those documents. How have those recommendations addressed the issues and challenges of the LDCs? In this paper, I review literature on lifelong learning and analyse major documents related to the post-2015 education agenda, especially the one prepared by UN High Level Panel. I conclude that unless the LDCs are given a leadership role for setting their goals—according to their contextual realities—the post-2015 millennium initiatives, such as ‘lifelong learning’ as a new educational agenda, will make no sense.     

The Labouring Sleepwalker: Evocation and expression as modes of qualitative educational research

This paper deals with the highly personal way an individual makes sense of the world in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the so‐called private language. For Wittgenstein following a rule can never mean just following another rule, though we do follow rules blindly. His idea of the ‘form of life’ elicits that ‘what we do’ refers to what we have learnt, to the way in which we have learnt it and to how we have grown to find it self‐evident. But the reference to the ‘bedrock’, to what was originally learnt, is the only kind of situation for which it makes sense to ask whether the meaning of a concept is correctly stated. Dialogue, conversation, and exchange of ideas are the right ways to characterize all the other situations. The challenge of Wittgensteinian philosophy is therefore that of a balance of the individual and the community, of language and the world. His insistence on the third person (or the intersubjective level) is countered by the importance he gives to each individual's personal stance: persons must speak for themselves and do what they can do. Given the growing interest for the kind of educational research where the ‘personal’ is focused on, I will try to take up the challenge to see how here as elsewhere ‘language’ works. By making clear what it does for us, it will gradually become clear how this kind of research may itself have to be reinterpreted.     

Analysing Cognitive Learning Processes through Group Interviews of Successful High School Pupils: Development and Use of a Model

The focus is on the metacognitive awareness of ten high-achieving high school pupils in mathematics in Denmark and England and their understanding of their cognitive learning processes and strategies. Mainly unstructured focus group interviews investigate how they explain that they learn a mathematical concept that is new to them. I develop the ‘CULTIS model for analysis’ (Consciousness, Unconsciousness, Language, Tacit, Individual, Social), which consists of six themes in which various psychological theories of learning are expressed. The model uses the theories of Ernest, von Glasersfeld, Hadamard, Krutetskii, Mason, Piaget, Polya, Sfard, Skemp, and Vygotsky. The model is used to sort the pupils' explanations and it also functions as a tool with which to compare the pupils' explanations with the various theories. I conclude that the pupils can talk about their learning in their own words and each pupil refers to elements that the researcher associates with different theories. Half the pupils furthermore explain that how they are used to learning, or being taught, influences how they later on are able to learn. I also discuss metacognition and whether this can be an aid to enhance learning.     

Transforming knowledge to knowing at work: the experiences of newcomers

This paper explores how newcomers experience their transition to work as they strive to move from a position of ‘educational’ knowledge to professional knowing. Hence, we focus on how newcomers learn to transform knowledge to knowing at work. We do this through the analysis of two ethnographic case studies: one with a focus on new office workers and the other on newly employed paramedics. In our analysis, we approach knowledge as a question of knowing through practise. This enables us to recognize the complexities of learning at and for work and learning and knowing as integrated processes, where learning is situated, relational and mediated. We find that newcomers’ learning occurs through social interactions and participation, not simply by joining in but involving complex interactions to first find and grasp the pathways or the ‘codes’ (established organizational culture) that enable fruitful participation. Getting access to colleagues and thus, established practice is already considered important support for newcomers to learn to enact ‘educational’ knowledge professionally. However, we find that what is most important for newcomers is how they become knowledgeable as they recognize that it is not their educational knowledge, but working out how to engage and participate in the social practices, that counts.     

Emergencies and Emergent Selves

) article used Wittgenstein to argue that self functions as an explanation for a name rather than a referent. This brief response tries to rescue Marshall from an apparent reduction of self to material body without returning him to the mind/body dualism that he, with Wittgenstein and Dennett, seeks to avoid. It treats ‘I’ as an emergent institutional fact, not inconsistent with a constructed explanation or narrative, but emerging from shared social practices rather than an abstracted agent.     

Community and Learning: contradictions,dilemmas and prospects

In this article I reflect on learning and community and their joint deployment. ‘Community’ evokes images and feelings of security and comfort (‘us’ and ‘ours’), while ‘learning’ evokes a sense of progress and confidence in overcoming obstacles—a lifelong and somewhat breathless journey these days. We learn every day, but what is worthwhile learning? What types of communities are worth learning towards? Such crucial considerations can remain unexamined because these words are so beguiling—every one can agree that learning communities are worthwhile. Together these terms have provided a powerful contemporary discourse for different educational reform agendas. Recent proponents of ‘learning communi ties’ have drawn upon sociocultural theorising of learning initiated by Vygotsky and others in the early 20th century. I suggest that this recent deployment of sociocultural learning theory is opportunistic and reflects an effort to resolve certain endemic pedagogical dilemmas related to how inclusion/exclusion is negotiated, how diversity/uniformity is reconciled, and how membership of a learning community is managed over time. I suggest that our role as learning and/or community theorists is principally to critically reflect on what types of learning and communities are worth striving towards.     

Issues in action learning: a critical realist interpretation

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the perspective of ‘critical realism’ has considerable potential for moving forward the theory and practice of action learning. The paper addresses three questions: (1) Does action learning emphasise the individual or the collective? (2) Can action learning be thought of as critical, but should it also be the subject of criticism? (3) What gets carried forward from action learning by way of learning? Critical realism is argued to be illuminative of these issues; this involves dealing with ontological questions – what is there out there to learn about – as well as epistemological ones – how can this be learned about. It also involves seeing the world as an open system with emergent properties rather than the predictable machine of the positivist approach and the ‘nothing but a sea of meaning’ of the extreme social constructionist approach. The conclusions are that: (1) Yes, it can, and should, focus on both. Individual and organisational foci (one form of the individual-collective question) for action learning are compatible and reconcilable, though often with difficulty. (2) Yes to critical approach of and from action learning, which is its true intent. Suggestions are made on how to do this in an ultimately constructive way. (3) There are several answers to this, the ability to learn, ‘mechanisms’ that can but may not necessarily work in future situations, depending on circumstance and ‘state of play’ information.     

Social learning strategies

In most studies of social learning in animals, no attempt has been made to examine the nature of the strategy adopted by animals when they copy others. Researchers have expended considerable effort in exploring the psychological processes that underlie social learning and amassed extensive data banks recording purported social learning in the field, but the contexts under which animals copy others remain unexplored. Yet, theoretical models used to investigate the adaptive advantages of social learning lead to the conclusion that social learning cannot be indiscriminate and that individuals should adopt strategies that dictate the circumstances under which they copy others and from whom they learn. In this article, I discuss a number of possible strategies that are predicted by theoretical analyses, includingcopy when uncertain,copy the majority, andcopy if better, and consider the empirical evidence in support of each, drawing from both the animal and human social learning literature. Reliance on social learning strategies may be organized hierarchically, their being employed by animals when unlearned and asocially learned strategies prove ineffective but before animals take recourse in innovation.     

Art and Design Blogs: a Socially‐Wise Approach to Creativity

Many images of the ‘artist’ or ‘designer’ pervade the media and popular consciousness. Contemporary images of the artist and creativity that focus solely on the individual offer a very narrow depiction of the varying ways creativity occurs for artists and designers. These images do not capture the variety of creative processes and myriad ways artists and designers work. Young creatives in particular are choosing to work with a social approach to creativity. An example of this approach is the world of blogging, a form of social media where young creatives have a very active voice. This article explores how creative bloggers, that is, artists, designers and makers who blog about their practice, use a social approach to foster creativity with a sense of community, environmental and ethical awareness, a value framework that is in opposition to the market‐driven notion of liberal individualism. Is there a way to include participation in the broader art and design blogging world as part of art and design education? What can we learn from such a social approach to learning in higher education art and design programmes? This article explores these questions and shares findings of an ethnographic approach to an analysis of art and design blogs. In doing so it argues for a socially‐wise approach to creativity in art and design education as a means of promoting values other than those usually connected to the market.     

Japan’s new lifelong learning policy: exploring lessons from the European knowledge economy

The concept of ‘lifelong learning’ or shōgai gakushū has rapidly become one of the topmost priorities in Japan’s education policy agenda. This was considerably evident in December 2006 when the term ‘lifelong learning’ was added to Japan’s educational charter, the Fundamental Law of Education. This paper explores, as a means to develop Japan’s new lifelong learning policy, the lessons that can be learnt through an examination of the European countries’ efforts to build a knowledge economy, where lifelong learning is regarded as the key solution in overcoming several important social and economic concerns. In this paper, I first examine the current situation of lifelong learning in Japan, employing the ethnographic data that I have collected since 2001. Second, I provide a brief review of the European lifelong learning policy, which is one of the priority guidelines in the European Union. Under the Lisbon Strategy, for example, the argument on European lifelong learning theoretically centres on developing human capital in order to survive in the global knowledge economy. Lastly, referring to the European experience over the past decade, I propose to directly connect Japan’s latest policy development regarding lifelong learning with the trend of building human capital through lifelong learning in order to enhance its competitiveness in the era of globalisation.     

Teaching and Learning with Wittgenstein and Turing: Sailing the Seas of Social Media

Results of the Boston University Mellon Sawyer seminar 2016–2019 ( www.mellophilemerge.com ) reveal that social and philosophical drives are increasingly central to our uses of technology, including AI. This raises critical challenges for democracy, especially in a hyper‐connected world where social media shapes human conduct in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. A history of the mutual impact of Turing and Wittgenstein on one another points to the contemporary foundational significance of our artful capacity to embed everyday words in forms of life. Wittgenstein's mature focus on forms of life, interlocutory drift, and rule‐following, with its play between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’, was an informed critical response to Turing's idea of a ‘Turing machine’, his analysis of the very idea of taking a ‘step’ in a formal system. Wittgenstein's characterisations of our drive to evade a responsibility in speech, especially by appealing to ‘machines’ or ‘algorithms’ as pure mathematical objects, are invaluable warnings for us. The enduring importance of mutually‐attuned ‘phraseology’ to education may be formulated as a humanistic challenge to the very ideas of ‘computational foundations’ and ‘Big Data’ in our hyper‐connected world.     

Political depression,cruel optimism and pedagogies of reparation: questions of criticality and affect in human rights education

This article argues that there is an urgent need to engage with a deeper analysis of the contemporary culture of ‘political depression’ and its affective implications in human rights education (HRE). In particular, the article focuses on the following questions: How might a theorization of political depression be relevant to efforts that aim to renew criticality in HRE? In which ways can a ‘critical’ HRE turn our attention to important ethical, political and affective questions on human rights? Can the negativity of political depression become a site for HRE pedagogies that are ‘reparative’? The article makes an attempt to articulate some of the content and strategies of pedagogies of reparation and their significance in what is currently being formulated in the literature as ‘critical human rights education’. Reparative pedagogies invite in the classroom the challenge of how students can learn from unimaginable traumatic histories, while acknowledging the affective politics of histories of violence, oppression and social injustice, without falling into the trap of sentimentality, but rather engaging in social justice-oriented action and activism.     

Power,pedagogies and lifelong learning: reading between the lines

The UK English subject benchmark statements express the discipline’s commitment to contribute to an ‘ideal of lifelong learning’. In this article, I consider what this commitment may mean for practice and explore why its attainment is complex and contentious. In doing so, I examine some of the ways in which lecturers’ professional identities are experienced and enacted in educational settings where students have their first introduction to higher education English Studies. I suggest that the pedagogic principles and practices which lecturers describe need to be seen as deeply embedded within networks of social and discipline-based discourses and social and institutional relations.     

A gaggle of raging grannies: the empowerment of older Canadian women through social activism

This article explores a particular expression of social activism by older Canadian women to consider its implications for later life learning. ‘Older women’, despite their heterogeneity, have tended to be pathologized as a part of the ‘problem’ of ageing and languishing welfare societies—i.e. stereotyped as passive recipients of welfare and healthcare services. Yet, they can also be seen as part of the ‘answer’ to the challenges societies like Canada face. Given the combination of a greying population and the growing tide of citizens' participatory democracy, it is timely and important to shed light on older women's social activism. Based on document analysis and fieldwork with the Raging Grannies in Canada, this qualitative case study examines the influence of activism on women's later life learning and development from an interdisciplinary perspective including adult development, critical gerontology, women's studies and psychodrama. Analysis focuses on the Grannies' motivations, the strategies they employ in their activities and the process of learning and changes they say they undergo. Themes emerging from document analysis, interviews and participant observation of 15 Grannies in Ontario are divided into three categories: (1) ‘Raging Grannies’ as a self‐defined social role; (2) the Grannies' dual‐layered mask strategies; and (3) their collective identity and sense of empowerment. These do much to explain the successes of Raging Grannies' activism as a social movement, which fosters older women's creative energy, critical awareness and self‐assurance despite their physical and psychological problems in later life. Implications of the Raging Grannies' movement help us reconsider current trends in later life learning, which tend overlook the needs and abilities of women in the third age.     

‘Don't talk about what you don't know’: on (not) conducting research with/in Indigenous contexts

This article raises the recurrent question whether non-indigenous researchers should attempt to research with/in Indigenous communities. If research is indeed a metaphor of colonization, then we have two choices: we have to learn to conduct research in ways that meet the needs of Indigenous communities and are non-exploitative, culturally appropriate and inclusive, or we need to relinquish our roles as researchers within Indigenous contexts and make way for Indigenous researchers. Both of these alternatives are complex. Hence in this article I trace my learning journey; a journey that has culminated in the realization that it is not my place to conduct research within Indigenous contexts, but that I can use ‘what I know’ – rather than imagining that I know about Indigenous epistemologies or Indigenous experiences under colonialism – to work as an ally with Indigenous researchers. Coming as I do, from a position of relative power, I can also contribute in some small way to the project of decolonizing methodologies by speaking ‘to my own mob’.     

The Social Foundations Classroom

In this article, we promote the use of autobiography in the social foundations of education classroom as a means of connecting education to real life experiences, history, and fostering epistemological development of college students. Autobiography involves students' awareness of the relation between theory and lived experience. As a form of reflective knowing, autobiography may help students understand complex terms such as "learning," "knowledge," and "education" by exploring various contexts that influence such understandings. Reflective knowing explores some of the experiential and purposive contexts that influence knowledge creation. Intellectual maturity and self-awareness may arise from circumstances that can lead students to be more confident critical thinkers and problem solvers. We describe how we have used autobiography in our social foundations of education classrooms and explore how influencing the pedagogy of teacher education critiques traditional epistemologies toward a redefinition of education for a democratic society.

Now reflecting on my educational history, I realize that everything I have learned in the past has taught me something about myself. Whether I was aware of my development at the time [hinges] on individual circumstances. I have thrived on learning, brought about by major changes impacting my life. These variations and my necessary adaptations have taught me the most important skill I need to know. Because of changes in my life, I have succeeded in learning how to learn. (Rita, Bucknell University, learning autobiography, September 1999)1

If I can make present the shapes and structures of a perceived world, even though they have been layered over with many rational meanings over time, I believe my own past will appear in altered ways and that my presently lived life - and, I would like to say, teaching - will become more grounded, more pungent, and less susceptible to logical rationalization, not to speak of rational instrumentality. (Greene 1995, 77-78)