The Existentialists and Problems of Moral and Religious Education: 3. Bonhoeffer and Sartre

Abstract

This paper, which is intended as a brief and provocative discussion piece rather than a fully developed argument, discusses the nature of the logical relationship between children's moral values and their behaviour. I suggest that this relationship is less tight than is often supposed, and that there are no necessary behavioural or motivational criteria to determine whether or not a particular value is held, for there must always remain the possibility of a gap existing between the holding and the enactment of a moral value. Feelings of guilt and remorse are examined to see if they can provide an alternative criterion. Finally, three important educational and methodological implications are drawn for teachers and researchers in the area of ‘values education’, underlining the dangers of assuming that values are unfailingly revealed and recognized in overt behaviour.1 1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the World Congress in Education on the theme of ‘Values and the School’, held at the University of Quebec at Trois‐Rivieres, Quebec, Canada in July 1981.1 particularly wish to acknowledge Chris Ormell's detailed, critical comments on that paper.

     

The concept of teaching: a reappraisal

This paper examines the concept of ‘teaching’ in early education and childcare and argues that the activity of teaching, broadly defined, concerns all adults who work in this area and occurs in all phases of the educational system. Bronfenbrenner's (1979 Bronfenbrenner U 1979 The ecology of human development: experiments by nature and design (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press)  [Google Scholar]) ecological perspective on human development is applied to conceptualise teaching as (1) adults' attempts to extend children's current phenomenological perspectives of the world; and (2) as being based on adults' ability to capture children's momentum towards learning. The implications of current terms such as ‘practitioner’, and the ways in which ‘teaching’ in early childhood education has been conceptualised, are also discussed.     

Principals of audit: testing,data and ‘implicated advocacy’

Historically, school leaders have occupied a somewhat ambiguous position within networks of power. On the one hand, they appear to be celebrated as what Ball (2003 Ball, S., 2003. The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of education policy, 18 (2), 215–228.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) has termed the ‘new hero of educational reform'; on the other, they are often ‘held to account’ through those same performative processes and technologies. These have become compelling in schools and principals are ‘doubly bound’ through this. Adopting a Foucauldian notion of discursive production, this paper addresses the ways that the discursive ‘field’ of ‘principal’ (within larger regimes of truth such as schools, leadership, quality and efficiency) is produced. It explores how individual principals understand their roles and ethics within those practices of audit emerging in school governance, and how their self-regulation is constituted through NAPLAN – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy. A key effect of NAPLAN has been the rise of auditing practices that change how education is valued. Open-ended interviews with 13 primary and secondary school principals from Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales asked how they perceived NAPLAN's impact on their work, their relationships within their school community and their ethical practice.     

Cinders in Snow? Indigenous Teacher Identities in Formation

The identity work engaged in by Indigenous teachers1 1. We use the term ‘Indigenous’ here to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people working in Australian schools, although most of our informants to date are from Victoria, NSW and Queensland, who do not use the term ‘Indigenous’ when identifying themselves and their communities, preferring ‘Aboriginal’, ‘Koori’ or ‘Murri’.. View all notes in school settings is highlighted in a study of Australian Indigenous teachers. The construction of identity in home and community relationships intersects with and can counteract the take up of a preferred identity in the workplace. In this paper we analyse data from interviews with Indigenous teachers, exploring the interplay between culture and identity. We foreground the binary nature of racial assignment in schools, demonstrate how this offers contradictory constructions of identity for Indigenous teachers, and note the effects of history, culture and location in the process of forming a teaching ‘self’.     

Technology and Practical Humanism

Abstract

The paper describes how the Éiducâble service was set up in France around the three active principles of a national film bank, a telematic server, and educational marketing. It looks at the location of the sites, the operation of the service, its use, and its economics. It then mentions the Nord/Pas‐de‐Calais? ? This is fully described in Antoine Filippi's paper, ‘Teaching by Cable ‐ in the Nord/Pas‐de‐Calais Region’. project and how this can be used as an example for developing similar systems throughout the country.

     

Notes on British education: an American's perspective

Abstract

This paper argues that the Scottish Education Department (SED) has dispensed with its earlier advocacy of human relations management approaches to staff development. The concept of ‘collaboration’, stressed in the National Committee for the In‐service Training of Teachers (NCITT) reports of 1984, is not mentioned in the SED's consultation paper School Teachers’ Professional Development into the 1990s. The period between 1979 and 1984 is analysed briefly. This period was typified by a declared preference for collaborative INSET. Consideration is given to the SED's consultation paper School Teachers’ Professional Development into the 1990s, and the SED's concept of ‘professional development’ is examined. The SED's management ethos as implied in Curriculum and Assessment in Scotland: a policy for the 1990s is incorporated into the analysis.     

The construction of national identity through primary school history: the Irish case

Much recent sociological work on education makes reference to gender, sexual, ethnic, local and political ‘project’ identities, yet there remains a need to bring the nation, and the state, back in; to also question the way in which ‘national’ identities are constructed in a context of globalisation and localisation. Through an analysis of Irish primary history curriculum statements from 1971 and 1999, I identify some key features of the state’s response to identity construction in a globalised context. They include a focus on pupils becoming skilled in reflexively producing identity, and a focus on a ‘boundless’ globalised identity. These changes are not unproblematic.

You will know all too well that Ireland is a country at war with its past—or, at least, with conflicting versions of its several pasts. But we are each of us in a struggle with those … on a much more deeply personal level than we sometimes know. (The character ‘Sr. Mary Rose Kennedy’ in Joseph O’Connor’s novel Inishowen) (O’Connor, 2000 O’Connor, J. 2000. Inishowen, London: Secker & Warburg.  [Google Scholar], p. 42)     

The social justice implications of privatisation in education governance frameworks: a relational account

This paper explores the social justice implications of two, ‘linked’, governance developments which have been instrumental in reshaping many education systems throughout the world: the ‘privatising’ and ‘globalising’ of education (Klees, Stromquist, & Samoff, 2012 Klees, S., Stromquist, N. and Samoff, J., eds. 2012. A critical review of the World Bank’s education strategy 2020, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.  [Google Scholar]). We argue that such education governance innovations demand an explicit engagement with social justice theories, both in themselves, and as offering an opportunity to address issues of social justice that go beyond the re/distribution of education inputs and outputs, important though these are, and which take account of the political and accountability issues raised by globalising of education governance activity. To do this we draw upon Iris Marion Young’s concept of ‘the basic structure’ and her ‘social connection model’ of responsibility (Young, 2006 Young, I. M. 2006. Taking the basic structure seriously. Perspectives in Politics, 4: 91–97. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]a,b) to develop a relational account of justice in education governance frameworks.     

The Passion of Alice Laidlaw1

This article discusses Alice Munro's latest book, The View from Castle Rock, Munro, A. 2006. The View from Castle Rock, London: Chatto & Windus.  [Google Scholar] and the use it makes of her family's origins in the Scottish Borders in order to create a work of history, fiction and autobiography. Miller sets this discussion alongside an account of a trip he made last summer with two other writers, Andrew O'Hagan and Seamus Heaney, to some of the places Munro invokes, including the grave of James Hogg. In linking the two themes, Miller weighs the claims of ‘country’ writers.     

Negotiating queer and religious identities in higher education: queering ‘progression’ in the ‘university experience’

This article addresses the negotiation of ‘queer religious’ student identities in UK higher education. The ‘university experience’ has generally been characterised as a period of intense transformation and self-exploration, with complex and overlapping personal and social influences significantly shaping educational spaces, subjects and subjectivities. Engaging with ideas about progressive tolerance and becoming, often contrasted against ‘backwards’ religious homophobia as a sentiment/space/subject ‘outside’ education, this article follows the experiences and expectations of queer Christian students. In asking whether notions of ‘queering higher education’ (Rumens 2014 Rumens, N. 2014. “Queer Business: Towards Queering the Purpose of the Business School.” In The Entrepreneurial University: Public Engagements, Intersecting Impacts, edited by Y. Taylor, 82–104. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) ‘fit’ with queer-identifying religious youth, the article explores how educational experiences are narrated and made sense of as ‘progressive’. Educational transitions allow (some) sexual-religious subjects to negotiate identities more freely, albeit with ongoing constraints. Yet perceptions of what, where and who is deemed ‘progressive’ and ‘backwards’ with regard to sexuality and religion need to be met with caution, where the ‘university experience’ can shape and shake sexual-religious identity.     

Reading ads,reading the world

This paper challenges the reductive notion of children as ‘efferent'¹1 A term used by Rosenblatt (1938 Rosenblatt, L. 1938. Literature as Exploration. New York: Appleton-Century. [Google Scholar]) to critique the teaching of reading which involved students in ‘taking away’ a particular meaning. readers who learn to decode written language in order to ‘take away’ knowledge. This anachronistic idea has become entrenched in current UK curriculum and education policy. However, it is well established that decoding letters and sounds is only one aspect of reading, that reading is cultural and that learning to read, not only words but also images and sounds, develops children's comprehension and criticality. With this in mind, I seek to share a process through which children and young people were able to develop as readers with a particular focus on the reading of media texts. I present an account of media education activity which focused on the way children read media texts, in the classroom. I suggest that with appropriate pedagogic and conceptual tools children develop as critical, cultural and collaborative readers of words, images, sounds and texts and thereby of the world.     

Identity and Intimacy in Religiously Observant and Non-Religiously Observant Adolescents and Young Adults in Israel

Abstract

Ego identity and intimacy are two sequential stages, according to Erikson's theory. The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between ego identity and intimacy, as two continuous multidimensional variables among religious and non-religious individuals. Eight sample groups (age × gender × religious observance) comprising 308 subjects responded to The Adolescent's Ego Identity Scale (AEIS) (Tzuriel 1974 Tzuriel, D. 1974. Well-formed ego identity as contrasted with diffuse identity as a function of cognitive complexity, ethnocentrism, and nationality identification among oriental and western adolescents (in Hebrew), M. A. Thesis Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University.  [Google Scholar]; 1984 Tzuriel, D. 1984. Sex role typing and ego identity in Israeli oriental and Western adolescents. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46: 440–457. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; 1992a Tzuriel, D. . Ego identity and emotional disturbance at adolescence. Paper presented at the 25th International Congress of Psychology. Brussels.  [Google Scholar]) and to The Sharabany Intimacy Scale (1974). There was a difference in the ego identity variables' predictive profile for the various intimacy dimensions and the general intimacy score among the religious groups and among the non-religious groups, both for the two age groups (adolescents and adults) and for the two genders. A characterization of each group results from understanding these differential relationships. This research was conducted under the auspices of Orot Israel College.     

Discplacing identity – placing aesthetics: early childhood literacy in a globalized world

ABSTRACT

‘How to give brain and body to the multiple pack that we already are or are becoming: how, in other words, are we to make sensible (auditory, visually and affectively) the time before “I think” and “We think” that we cannot plan, control or know, but simply experiment with, which is the “time of the city” and nothing else?’ (Rajchman, 2010 Rajchman, J. (2010). Perceptions of the city. In Helena Mattsson & Sven-Olov Wallenstein (Eds.), Deleuze och mångfaldens veck [Deleuze and the fold of multiplicity] (pp. 21–40). Stockholm: Axl Books. [Google Scholar], p. 39)

These powerful words constitute the starting point for this article that argues that, within the context of early childhood literacy in a globalized and ‘multicultural’ world, we need to experiment with new ways of understanding identity and language through amalgamating early childhood pedagogy and didactics with aesthetics. Such an endeavour needs to take place beyond ‘the indignity of speaking for the other’ (Deleuze, 2004 Deleuze, G. (2004). Desert islands and other texts 1953–1974. Edited by d. Lapoujade. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). [Google Scholar], p. 208) and beyond the constructed categories that have been attributed to children in the name of one or another minority group. Through vivid examples and theoretical movements taking place within the research project ‘The Magic of Language’ we propose to shift focus – from the identifying and categorizing of individuals, as well as from the epistemological violence performed in the name of recognition and linguistic representation – to aesthetic experimentation and to the place of experiments. A ‘time of the city’ is also a ‘time of the place’ and in this article we are arguing for the importance of aesthetic experimenting with that place.     

Critical Questions and Argument Stratagems: A Framework for Enhancing and Analyzing Students' Reasoning Practices

This article explores the concepts of critical questions (from D. N. Walton, 1996 Walton, D. N. 1996. Argument schemes for presumptive reasoning, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.  [Google Scholar]) and integrative and refutational argument stratagems as an approach for teaching argumentation and critical thinking. A study was conducted for 6 months in 3 sections of a 7th-grade social studies classroom in which 30 students discussed and wrote about current events. One section served as a comparison group. Over time the experimental group made more arguments that integrated both sides of each issue. Collectively, the experimental group also successfully constructed salient critical questions, particularly in regard to weighing values and designing practical creative solutions. In-depth analysis of 1 student showed how conceptual structures and argument practices improved incrementally over time and how the appropriation of stratagems may have been facilitated by the dialectical nature of the intervention (e.g., using critical questions and stratagems successfully in discourse). The theoretical and practical importance of Walton's dialogue theory, and the critical question approach to argumentation, are discussed.     

From Hope & Glory to Waterloo Road: mediating discourses of ‘crises’ surrounding schools and schooling in British television drama, 1999–2011

Popular television drama is an important discursive site engaging the public with debates about schooling and professional identity. Between 1999 and 2011, external discourses of ‘crisis’ (of academic achievement or students’ mental and emotional health) were mediated as alternative discourses of ‘crisis, failure, and salvation’ in which a Standards agenda predominated, or that of the school as a ‘caring community’. Genre analysis reveals how ‘school’ dramas exploited distinctive narrative types to privilege a particular discourse. Adapting Schatz's (1981 Schatz, T. (1981). Hollywood genres. London: McGraw-Hill. [Google Scholar]) scheme of Hollywood genre types, these dramas are characterised by a narrative strategy of ‘restoration’ of the ‘failing’ secondary (high) school to its public function of raising achievement, or after 2007 of ‘integration’ more concerned with assimilating ‘troubled’ students into the school community. This shift in representation is consistent with, and contributes towards, the ‘rise of therapeutic education’ where the Head Teacher and teacher are portrayed more as counsellor than educator.     

Katsushika Hokusai and a Poetics of Nostalgia

Abstract

This article addresses the activation of aesthetics through the examination of an acute sensitivity to melancholy and time permeating the literary and pictorial arts of Japan. In medieval court circles, this sensitivity was activated through a pervasive sense of aware, a poignant reflection on the pathos of things. This sensibility became the motivating force for court verse, and through this medium, for the mature projects of the ukiyo-e ‘floating world picture’ artist Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai reached back to aware sensibilities, subjects and conventions in celebrations of the poetic that sustained cultural memories resonating classical lyric and pastoral themes. This paper examines how this elegiac sensibility activated Hokusai’s preoccupations with poetic allusion in his late representations of scholar-poets and the unfinished series of Hyakunin isshu uba-ga etoki, ‘One hundred poems, by one hundred poets, explained by the nurse’. It examines four works to explain how their synthesis of the visual and poetic could sustain aware themes and tropes over time to maintain a distinctive sense of this aesthetic sensibility in Japan.     

Considering (auto)biography in teaching and learning about race and racism in a diverse university

The ‘sociological imagination’ – the recognition of the relationship between ‘private troubles’ and ‘public issues’ (Mills [1959] 2000 Mills, C. Wright. [1959] 2000. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 8) – is central to the discipline of sociology. This article reports findings of a 2014 study which investigated students’ views on whether the development of the sociological imagination could be more explicitly embedded in a module on Race and Racisms through an (auto)biographical approach from teachers and the module’s racially diverse students. After reviewing benefits and challenges to an (auto)biographical approach, the article presents findings from a student focus group, concluding that students would welcome (auto)biographical approaches to the topic of race and racism, with the caveat that this is handled sensitively with steps taken to minimise the risk of emotional harm.     

Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy: A Philosophical Critique

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Michael Young's 1958 Young, M. 1958. The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033: an Essay on Education and Society, London: Thames and Hudson.  [Google Scholar] dystopia, The Rise of the Meritocracy. In this book, the word ‘meritocracy’ was coined and used in a pejorative sense. Today, however, meritocracy represents a positive ideal against which we measure the justice of our institutions. This paper argues that, when read in the twenty-first century, Young's dystopia does little to dislodge the implicit appeal of a meritocratic society. It examines the principles of education and administrative justice upon which meritocracy is based, suggesting that since 1958 those principles have changed. Young's warning no longer has any effect on us because the meritocratic system it warns us against has been transformed.     

The Social background to teaching in the united states: An English assessment

ABSTRACT

Since 9/11 the European Court of Human Rights (the European Court) has raised anew the question of the relationship between religion and public education. In its reasoning, the European Court has had to consider competing normative accounts of the secular, either to accept or deny claims to religious liberty within Europe's public education system. This article argues that the trajectory on which the term ‘secularism’ had been used by the European Court pointed increasingly towards secular fundamentalism. This study is located at the cutting edge of religion, education and the law and builds on previous work in the field (Arthur, 1998 Arthur, J. 1998. British human rights legislation and religiously affiliated schools and colleges. Education and the Law, 10(4): 225–236. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 2008 Arthur, J. 2008. Learning under the cross: legal challenges to ‘cultural-religious symbolism’ in public schools. Education and the Law, 20(4): 337–349. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). It examines, through extensive research of legal cases, the most important developments of the usage of secular and secular education in modern discourse and explores the background to these concepts. Unless otherwise stated, religion in this article shall refer to the Christian tradition because Christianity has been the historical context for the development of the concept of ‘secular’ in Europe. The paper outlines three models of secular education before moving on to scrutinise how the European Court has understood and evaluated various legal cases before it on the interaction between secular States, public education and notions of religious symbolism and influence. The paper will discuss the significance of the European Court's reasoning and decisions for public education within a secular State context and offer some conclusions on the implications of these decisions. It examines the legal principles that underpin the European Court's supervision of the State's role in the provision of education. It focuses on the chimeric goal of neutrality and highlights the risks attached to the use of an ideological conception of secularism that could lead potentially to the complete removal of the religious as a vital cultural and intellectual dimension of public education.     

Rethinking the preparation of HPE teachers: ruminations on knowledge,identity, and ways of thinking

This paper explores assumptions about essential knowledge in degree programs that have traditionally prepared teachers of physical education, and discusses the question of what sort of teacher education is necessary or desirable to prepare teachers for the new Health & Physical Education (HPE) key learning area. I argue that the curriculum of the typical HPE degree program reinforces a desire for certainty (Bauman, 2001 Bauman Z (2001) The individualized society (Cambridge, Polity)  [Google Scholar]) that is incompatible with the conditions of contemporary living and the nature of teachers' work. Moreover, it may be contributing to a ‘teacher identity’ in tension with the socially‐critical agenda embedded in the contemporary HPE school curriculum. Rejecting the notion of ‘business as usual’, I contend that it is the way of thinking about education, health, physical education, and the work of contemporary schooling, that is the most important graduate attribute our students may acquire. Proposing that Giddens' (1994 Giddens A (1994) Beyond left and right: the future of radical politics (Cambridge, Polity Press)  [Google Scholar]) notion of the sociological imagination offers potential in this regard, I consider one program with sympathies with this orientation.