Dwelling and creative imagination in Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology: Returning to the poetic space of education and learning

Abstract

In response to the so-called crisis in contemporary education in the institutions of higher learning (USA)—the encroachment of corporatism and pervasion of standardization—there is a move to offset this dominance by reconceiving the university in terms of an intimate space of dwelling in learning and education. In light of this moribund condition in education, I address the following concerns: How should educators approach the ‘space’ of learning in the new millennium with respect to the supposed ‘new face’ of education in higher learning? What implication will such changes to curriculum have on the ‘context’ of learning? Will the context of learning now need to be reconceptualized, and if it is, what effects will this have on students and educators? Herein I consider the contributions that the philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological ontology of space, dwelling, and the creative imagination might make to the formulation of rejoinders to these crucial questions and concerns, which offer the reader a reconceived view of the space of learning that is radically at odds with our contemporary conceptions that might be linked with social efficiency ideology.     

Intentionality and Thinking as ‘Hearing’. A Response to Biesta’s Agenda

In his 2012 article Philosophy of Education for the Public Good: Five Challenges and an Agenda, Gert Biesta identifies five substantial issues about the future of education and the work required to address these issues. This article employs a Heideggerian reading of education to evaluate ‘Biesta’s truth’. I argue that Biesta’s point of view (a) underestimates knowledge’s predominance and relativism; (b) frames intentionality in pre-Heideggerian terms, which—although not a problem in itself because an individual is free to choose a particular perspective on the concept—raises the issue of consistency in Biesta’s theoretical framework; and (c) a final criticism concerns Biesta’s choice of tools for engaging with the identified challenges: The primary tools Biesta uses are intrinsic to the perspective he challenges. The use of a ‘first person perspective’ to frame pedagogy that focuses on the subject and ‘subjectification’ reaffirms the fundamental Western gesture that makes human beings subjects who ‘stand-over-and-against’ the world. I argue that it is possible to penetrate Plato’s ‘theoretical gaze’ and find a ‘weak’ alternative to an all-encompassing point of view of education through a Heideggerian approach that regards intentionality and thinking as ‘hearing’.     

When rights are not enough: What is? Moving towards new pedagogy for inclusive education within UK universities

There is confusion surrounding ‘Inclusion’. The aims and drivers of inclusive education (IE) as experienced in the 1990s to early 2000s, in the UK and globally, emerged from a ‘successful’ disability rights movement with its depiction of the medical model as pejorative and promotion of the social model. In education, what we currently experience are messy attempts at IE alongside growing collective anxiety and confusion, as some governments take reactionary policy steps. This paper engages with the ubiquitous and complex question of ‘IE' in the UK with specific reference to the intersectionality of ‘disability’ and its location within the University. It will problematise the UK rights agenda of the 1980s–1990s, locate and reflect on the complexities and conflicts of Inclusion and consider the need for new pedagogic developments. Such developments, it will be argued, emerge when one applies a critical eye to the impact of hegemony and ‘silence’ on the experiences of those with ‘disability’. This approach has been developed in other areas of social justice and diversity, that is, class, gender and ‘race', and it is argued that such an approach is needed with regard to ‘disability’. It is proposed that post-rights pedagogic developments linked to this may provide a sturdier basis from which UK inclusionists, in particular university educators, can locate their future work.     

The force of habit: channelling young bodies at alternative education spaces

This article develops a novel conceptual framework for examining the (re)formulation of habits in education spaces. It is based on the premise that education spaces are key sites for channelling and intervening in children’s habits, to various ends. The article focuses on the ways educators at alternative education spaces in the United Kingdom seek to (re)formulate children’s habits. In some cases, they do so to combat social exclusion, dealing with some of the most vulnerable children in the UK’s educational system. Drawing on the habit-theories of Ravaisson and Dewey, and commensurate post-human, more-than-social approaches to childhood, the article proposes a two-fold conceptualisation of habit: as ‘(re)calibration’ and as ‘contagion’. The article draws on empirical examples taken from 10 years’ research across 59 alternative education spaces in the United Kingdom. Developing recent educational scholarship on bodies, emotions and affects, it develops an expanded, post-human notion of ‘collective’ habits that might offer a conceptual language for challenging and imagining alternatives to the perceived problems of the neoliberal educational mainstream. However, the article closes by posing some critical questions for further scholarship about why educators might specifically choose to intervene into children’s habits – not least in terms of inclusion and social justice.     

Not just skills: what a focus on knowledge means for vocational education

This contribution to the symposium on Michael Young’s article ‘Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge based approach’, supports his contention that curriculum theory has lost sight of its object—‘what is taught and learned in schools’, and argues that this has particularly deleterious consequences for vocational education and training (VET). VET is unproblematically positioned as applied, experiential and work-focused learning, and it is seen as a solution for those who are alienated from or unsuccessful in more traditional forms of academic education. This article argues that rather than being a mechanism for social inclusion, VET is instead a key way in which social inequality is mediated and reproduced because it excludes students from accessing the theoretical knowledge they need to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their occupational field of practice. It presents a social realist analysis to argue why VET students need access to theoretical knowledge, how a focus on experiential and applied learning constitutes a mechanism for social exclusion and what a ‘knowledge rich’ VET curriculum would look like.     

Education policy borrowing in China: has the West wind overpowered the East wind?

Recent education reform in China reflects the global trend of education policy borrowing from Anglophone countries such as the USA. The reform in China essentially advocates shifting from knowledge reproduction and didacticism to knowledge construction by students through a learner-centredness approach. Aware of the trend of borrowing policy from ‘Western’ countries, some educators in China use the proverb ‘the West wind has overpowered the East wind’ to describe this phenomenon. This paper examines the cultural factors that influence education policy borrowing in China by drawing upon Johnson’s metaphors of the ‘politics of selling’ and the ‘politics of gelling’. This paper argues that there exist fundamental cultural differences between Western and Chinese perspectives on the nature and transmission of knowledge that make education policy transfer in China challenging. This paper further proposes that China borrow education policy judiciously by integrating foreign and indigenous sources of knowledge, teaching and learning.     

Young children learning about well-being and environmental education in the early years: a funds of knowledge approach

Early childhood educators currently provide content focused learning opportunities for children in the areas of well-being and environmental education. However, these are usually seen as discrete content areas and educators are challenged with responding to children’s interests in popular-culture inspired food products given these influence their consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor and highly packaged food in the early childhood setting. This paper reports preliminary findings from a pilot randomised trial examining the interconnectedness of sustainability, well-being and popular-culture in early childhood education. Planning, assessment documentation and summaries from twenty-four learning experiences implemented by six educators over a six-week period were analysed using a deductive approach. Twenty well-being and environmental education topics were identified and shown to be generated by the educators when considering the children’s ‘funds of knowledge’ on popular-culture inspired food products. We argue that topics derived from children’s engagement with popular-culture may help educators to create an integrated approach to curriculum provision. This may impact child weight and facilitate obesity prevention and environmental sustainability as children create stronger connections between these content areas and their everyday choices and practices.     

Life at the margin: education of young people,social policy and the meanings of social exclusion

This paper explores the term ‘social exclusion’ in the context of new social and education policies being constructed in the UK. It examines the links with terms such as ‘poverty’, ‘deprivation’ and ‘equality’ and the implications of policy developments for those identified as socially excluded. Tensions and contradictions appear to be emerging between the UK government's stated policy intentions to address social exclusion, and local knowledge and experience. Issues of power, market power, participation and inclusiveness are explored specifically in the context of education. The paper draws on research being undertaken in a deprived inner-city area with voluntary sector organizations that provide education for marginalized young people.     

Teacher self-efficacy in cultivating students to become ‘good citizens’: a Hong Kong case

Civic education is a contested subject in Hong Kong, and there is no agreement in society on what form civic education should take, which leaves each school to choose its own approach. Under these circumstances, each teacher needs greater capability and self-efficacy to develop school-based civic education. This study examined the factors that influenced Hong Kong primary school teacher confidence in teaching citizenship education with the ultimate goal of nurturing students to become ‘good citizens.’ The results of this study indicated that teacher self-efficacy was influenced by beliefs about the subject (Moral, Civic and National Education) and beliefs about teachers’ roles in the curriculum but not beliefs about teaching. Teachers felt more confident teaching social topics than political topics. While this study was conducted in the Hong Kong context, the findings could be valuable for policy makers and educators elsewhere who seek to strengthen teacher self-efficacy.     

RESEARCH SECTION: Provision in further education colleges for 14‐ to 16‐year‐olds with social,emotional and behavioural difficulties

Previous research set out to identify and examine practice and provision for young people exhibiting behaviour problems who may have been placed in colleges of further education for a variety of reasons. In this paper, Natasha Macnab, John Visser and Harry Daniels explore some of the implications faced by college staff and examine some of the key themes that emerged from this previous study. The first of these themes concerns ‘college culture’, which is seen as being ‘adult orientated’ and therefore more likely to appeal to young people who are tired of school. Indeed, college staff suspect at times that schools are using the transition to college as an alternative to exclusion for some young people. This form of ‘managed transfer’ raises real issues in colleges, especially when some members of college staff do not yet appreciate the ‘appeal of teaching young people with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD)’, regarding them as ‘disaffected’ and ‘switched off’ from education. The authors of this article note the need for ‘skilled and committed adults’ to build relationships with these young people in order to promote their social inclusion. They argue that this work will require professional development for staff but will have real benefits for the young people concerned.     

Conversing on ethics,morality and education

In philosophical use, ‘ethics’ and ‘moral philosophy’ are more closely synonymous—one deriving from Greek, ethikē and the other from Latin moralis. In typical social science paradigms, there generally prevails a consensual sense of contemporary everyday use of ethics, except where earlier usage sustains discourse in terms of morals—as with moral psychology. This article takes a recent publication in this journal by Patrick Welch to propose a ‘conversation’ between theoretic and empirical approaches to ethics and morals. This is illustrated using works by Joseph Ratzinger to suggest a natural law approach that brings together premises and empirics in ethical and moral discourse and action. This kind of integration helps the discovery and owning of truth that is ‘not of one’s own making’. Such a synthetic approach is especially relevant to raising student identity with ethical/moral issues and in assisting their building of psychological structures and processes that support education in ethical/moral reasoning and action.     

Education as if people matter: John Macmurray,community and the struggle for democracy

The educational writings of John Macmurray, one of the finest philosophers of his generation, have a special relevance for us today. In similar circumstances of international crisis he argues for the central importance of education addressing fundamental issues of human purpose—how we lead good lives together, the emphasis on wisdom rather than knowledge alone, the advancement of a truly democratic culture, and the overriding importance of community in human flourishing. A pioneering advocate of education of the emotions, he champions the development of imagination, spontaneity and authenticity as key to educating ‘the capacity for change itself’. For Macmurray, educators must place relationships and care at the heart of all they do. Overemphasis on technique and its typical separation from wider human purposes is emblematic of much of our contemporary malaise. An inclusive, caring community is the precondition of our human being and becoming. The paper concludes by taking some of Macmurray’s key philosophical insights and developing a framework which enables us to make judgments about whether or not contemporary approaches to education support or diminish our lives as creative, caring human beings within a context of social justice and democratic human fellowship.     

The professional identities of teacher educators in three further education colleges: an entanglement of discourse and practice

Initial teacher education programmes have been identified as crucial to meeting the twin policy aims of professionalising the further education (FE) workforce and achieving improved learner outcomes, yet college-based teacher educators are underrepresented in published research and commentary. Drawing on a case study of teacher educators employed by three FE colleges in England, this paper argues that the contested and politicised nature of the FE sector presents a unique set of circumstances that distinguishes this population from other members of their professional group and severely restricts the identities available to them. Through a thematic discursive analysis of documentation, observation and interview data, it is argued that FE positions teacher educator identity through political governance, through the business practices of colleges and through the sector’s historical relationships with vocational and higher education. Within this distinctive context, teacher educators experience competing identities of ‘qualified and credible’, ‘teacher’, ‘different from others’, ‘part of FE’ and ‘employee’ that are entangled with the dominant discourses of English further education. After discussing the implications of these findings for a professional profile of teacher educators, the paper concludes that teacher educators are better understood as a heterogeneous occupational group in order to avoid obscuring professional concerns linked to policy landscapes.     

Teacher counternarratives: transgressing and ‘restorying’ disability in education

This inquiry aims to explore the disconnect between the disability studies in education (DSE) perspectives on inclusive schooling held by a group of dually certified inclusive educators and the everyday, lived experiences of these same teachers who find themselves teaching students with labelled disabilities within the confines of the special education bureaucracy. Through a collaborative inquiry circle (with a teacher educator who is a faculty member in a dual-certification programme informed by a DSE perspective and seven teachers who are graduates of this teacher education programme), this study aims to: (1) articulate the dominant narratives or storylines about disability in education that may ‘discipline’ teachers' practice within the special education bureaucracy; (2) illustrate some of the ways in which teachers do resist and transgress the discursive structures of schooling in ways that enable them to ‘restory’ disability in education; and (3) explore the implications of this work for preparing teachers to be dually certified, inclusive educators of all children in public schools.     

Lifelong learning and the new educational order

Many adult educators are familiar with the term dialogue ‐akey concept in education guided by a sense of social justice. In this paper I want to reclaim some of the political agendas which are lost when the term is incorporated into education paradigms which present justice as a product to be distributed to the ‘disadvantaged’. This approach seems to ignore the role ‘advantaged’ groups play in maintaining ‘disadvantage’ (Lankshear, 1991). It also evades the issue of relations of power; relations which remain unchanged through the simple redistribution of resources. In recent times an orientation to competency based teaching has encouraged educators to focus their energy on identifying the learning outcomes one might expect from a course of study and to gear teaching behaviour to meet these outcomes. While learning outcomes are important I believe it is unrealistic to create simplistic links between teaching acts and learning outcomes. My concern is that complex and highly political processes like dialogue are being reduced, at least in some training discourses, to a series of orderly steps. This has two consequences. First, it falsely presents classroom life as a relatively predictable event. Second, these orderly steps imply that educational success lies in efficient and effective delivery techniques which may or may not take account of the political and social context of learning settings. If the techniques do not “work” educators may be left wondering what they did wrong rather than considering the viability of the steps in the first place.     

In search for the ideological roots of non-formal environment-related education in Finland: the case of Helsinki Humane Society before World War II

So far the research on historical environment-related education has focused on scientific rather than ‘humanistic’ (including Romantic and religious) educational approaches and ideologies. In the field of non-formal education implemented by associations these have, however, been common. We used content analysis to study two membership magazines of a prominent Finnish animal welfare organization, Helsinki Humane Society, before the Second World War. Our results show that the educational ideology of Helsinki Humane Society was based on romanticist and humane ideas. They emphasized especially the development of a human being’s total personality and a kindness-to-animals ethic as a solution to social problems. In the early 1900s, humane education seems to have been an effective way of advancing the animal welfare cause, but its importance declined by the 1930s. We believe that today’s environmental and sustainability educators could benefit from a better understanding of how historical animal welfare organizations were able to combine romantic and humane ideas with environmental goals.     

Two viewpoints on the challenges of ICT in education: knowledge-building theory vs. a pragmatist conception of learning in social action

The paper contrasts two different approaches to the educational challenges of the ubiquitous, rapidly developing information and communication technologies (ICT). The first is the constructivist ‘knowledge building’ theory spearheaded by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia and recently further developed by Kai Hakkarainen and Sami Paavola; the second is a pragmatist standpoint drawing in particular from John Dewey’s ideas about learning as a natural part of human social actions and transactions. The knowledge builders have set their approach out as a suitable answer to the challenges of the present-day, ICT-characterised ‘Knowledge Age’. But here it is argued that a pragmatist approach can be advanced that avoids the over-intellectualisation of education characteristic of knowledge builders and thereby offers a viable alternative for improving present-day educational practices in ways that promote appropriate utilisation of ICT in schools in particular.     

Serving two masters: how vocational educators experience marketisation reforms

Contemporary education reforms that draw ideas from the political and economic fields are said to be altering the nature of vocational education. While there are substantial policy studies on the effects of marketisation reforms, fewer analyse the perspectives of vocational educators on such reforms. How vocational educators negotiate the potential clash of values when marketisation reforms are enacted within the sector remains relatively unexplored. This paper aims to incorporate these perspectives in order to explore and help explain the responses of vocational educators to such changes. To do so the paper draws on concepts from Legitimation Code Theory, a sociological framework for analysing practices and beliefs. Specifically, it enacts ‘autonomy codes’, which reveal how external forces impact upon the internal practices of a social field. These concepts are used to analyse the beliefs and perceptions of a group of vocational educators in Australia who are undergoing marketisation reforms. The analysis suggests that many educators are experiencing a growing ‘code clash’ between the goals they attribute to reforms and their own beliefs about public education and the expectations of their students, one which problematises their capacity to reconcile these sets of values and colours their views of changes in the sector.     

‘To Give an Example is a Complex Act’: Agamben’s pedagogy of the paradigm

Abstract

Agamben’s notion of the ‘paradigm’ has far-reaching implications for educational thinking, curriculum design and pedagogical conduct. In his approach, examples—or paradigms—deeply engage our powers of analogy, enabling us to discern previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of classification. In this way we come to envision novel groupings, new patterns of connection—that nonetheless do not simply reassemble those singular objects into yet another rigidly fixed set or class. Agamben sees this sort of ‘paradigmatic understanding’ as our richest source of intelligibility. For Agamben the paradigm is ultimately about learning to see again, starting not with already perfectly known and categorized objects (or ideas), but rather with a fresh experience of one individual object and the analogical relations it may have to others, and to novel groupings that may arise. The paradigm is a method, a way in which educators might respond to a wide range of educational challenges. For a paradigmatic relation suspends while exposing, deactivates while revealing, complicates while clarifying. But articulating the enigmatic paradigmatic relation between example and class is far more than a method. It is epistemological (a way of knowing and conception of knowledge), ethical (a fostering of freedom from presupposed categories and reified principles) and ontological (a type of being that exposes the potential of knowing and communicating—their intelligibility and communicability). In these qualities, paradigms exhibit to educators a free, a new use of singularities.     

The Elusive Goal of Nation Building: Asian/Confucian Values and Citizenship Education in Singapore During The 1980s

ABSTRACT

The term ‘Asian values’ became popular in the political discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. The most vocal proponents of Asian values are Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir and their deputies and government officials, as well as post-Tiananmen Chinese leaders. Most notable of all these three strands of the Asian values debate is the ‘Singapore School’, which ‘comprises leaders who have articulated a defence of the Singapore regime, either in their personal or official capacities’. This article discusses the origins and philosophical underpinnings of ‘Asian values’ in the Singapore context and its relationship to civics education. First, it provides the historical context for the interest in Confucianism and Asian Values. It then looks at the role and use of Confucianism and Asian Values in Asia, before discussing the case of Singapore and Asian values. I explore the interconnections between changes in history, civics and social studies curricula, and the politics of the ‘Asian Values’ discourse in Singapore which underpins these curricula. At the heart of the issue was the state's attempt to forge and articulate a Singaporean identity, and the role of citizenship/moral education in attaining this elusive nation building goal.