Embracing the Risk of Teaching Literature

Contemporary Western educational systems have been described as a landscape of control and assessment meant to make education, in Gert J. J. Biesta's words, “strong, secure, and predictable,” and ultimately “risk-free.” Against this desire for strength, Biesta argues for weakness, focusing on the risks of the unpredictable and the unknown as primary features of an education worthy of the name. In this article, Ingrid Lindell promotes this weaker attitude specifically in the context of teaching literature. Guiding her analysis is the question, How might we create a practical approach to make the unmeasurable more accessible and assessible? In applying some of Biesta's concepts to the practical considerations of teaching literature and assessing student outcomes, Lindell identifies a tension that arises when demands for educational transparency and measurable outcomes are imposed on teachers of literature: in literary education, it is very often not desirable to know outcomes in advance. Against this background, Lindell introduces the methodological idea of teaching in the gap, an attempt to apply some of Biesta's concepts and ideas in the literature classroom in order to explore how we might embrace and teach “The Risk.” Lindell aims to strengthen the case for reading and assessing literature as a metacognitive activity rather than submitting to a ratio-based approach to literary education that focuses narrowly on reproductive knowledge that is measurable.     

Fifteen years of action research for political and educational emancipation at a South African University

This article traces the origins and development of an action research Master's in Education programme, which was introduced in the Faculty of Education at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa in the mid-1980s. The programme began during a time of political and social repression, when the apartheid government was very much in control, and was explicitly located within an emancipatory approach to education. The article discusses the vision of emancipatory education that underpinned the programme, linking this to the political situation of domination and resistance in the educational sector. The origins of People's Education are described, as well as various initiatives in action research which were closely linked to the People's Education movement of the time. The article concludes by discussing some of the new challenges for action research and emancipatory education in the post-apartheid era.     

The ignorant environmental education teacher: students get empowered and teach philosophy of nature inspired by ancient Greek philosophy

This paper presents an attempt to apply Jacques Rancière’s emancipatory pedagogy of ‘the ignorant schoolmaster’ to environmental education, which emphasises environmental ethics. The paper tells the story of a philosophy of nature project in the framework of an environmental adult education course at a Second Chance School in Greece, where adult students researched ancient Greek philosophy of nature, discovered and adopted environmental values and taught their schoolmates. The paper presents the findings of this pedagogical experiment and evaluates the benefits and the skills that students can acquire through emancipatory pedagogy and through peer teaching and learning. Α cross-disciplinary combination of emancipatory pedagogy, environmental education, philosophy of nature and environmental ethics that can empower students and strengthen their environmental conscience with emphasis in ecocentric and ecojustice values is proposed. Τhe role of the teacher as a student, who continues to investigate and learn, trusting the intelligence and the abilities of his/her students is also examined. Furthermore, it is argued that there is a need to focus on the role of philosophy of nature and environmental ethics in environmental education and, because of its wealth and subtlety, ancient Greek philosophy can contribute to this emancipatory, environmental education paradigm.     

Researching the competence-based curriculum: preface to a case study of four urban secondary schools

This introductory article accompanies three further articles forming a case study research project undertaken to describe the experience of four urban secondary schools implementing a competence-based curriculum for students in their first year of secondary education. The nature of such competence-based curricula is discussed in the context of secondary schools before providing an outline of the context of each of the case study schools. A democratic and emancipatory view of education provides the rationale for the development of transferable competencies, and this is considered with respect to the challenges of engaging in a cross-disciplinary approach to the curriculum. These challenges are viewed through the lens of Bernstein's concepts of strong and weak framing and horizontal and vertical discourses. Each of the accompanying articles takes up a different aspect of education, focusing on curriculum planning, teaching and learning, and leadership and management respectively. Further challenges with regard to changes in the English curriculum are briefly reflected upon. Finally an outline of the case study methodology which was employed in the study is provided.     

Acknowledging Ambivalence in Teaching about Art and Aesthetics

In this article Daniel Brodén explores the ambivalence in teaching about art and aesthetics in the humanities. By comparing and contrasting Gert J. J. Biesta's educational theory and Jacques Rancière's writing on aesthetics, he hopes to bring some of the particularities of aesthetic experiences into focus and to discuss a tension in educational situations that concern students' interpretation of aesthetic texts: how the teacher, on the one hand, will serve as a representative for a formal system of education — or what Rancière calls a system of inequality — and, on the other hand, should respect the autonomy of the aesthetic experience. Brodén argues, however, that more interesting than the ambivalence itself is the question of how we can acknowledge this tension in productive ways. Thus, his aim here is to show how the teacher can contribute to the verification of an interpretive approach to art, with Rancière's axiom of equality in mind. Drawing on Biesta's writings, Brodén also highlights how the teacher can provide students with possibilities to pursue a subject-ness and how the risks involved call for a deconstructive approach to the enactment of teacher power. The article concludes by suggesting that we would do better not to view the ambivalence in focus as a problem, but instead to see it as something that calls for continuous engagement and critical reflection.     

Reading and Teaching Literature as Writing

Christer Ekholm's point of departure in this article is Gert J. J. Biesta's call for a new pedagogical attitude that takes a stand against the current trend in education. At present, the dominant approach is to make what we do in school into something wholly predictable, measurable, and assessable, which (as Biesta argues) misses important aspects of what education actually is or should be. One such aspect has to do with “subjectification,” that is, events where someone makes an appeal to me, singles me out in my uniqueness, and makes me ethically responsible to the other one before me. What role can literary education play in facilitating such events? What kind of reading strategies should be promoted with the aim of such an ambition? On the basis of a critical analysis of the discursive construction of an opposition between reading as engagement and reading as distance, Ekholm argues that the answer to these questions is to be found in an alternative literature didactics, where the work of fiction is understood not as text, but as utterance; not as something written, but as writing; perhaps even, not in terms of object(ification), but of subject(ification)?     

(Re)thinking Religious Studies

The world religions paradigm (WRP), often regarded as hegemonic in research and education in religious studies, has long been criticized for being modeled on predominantly Protestant, Christian, and Western ideas about religion, and thus running the risk of reductionism and of a failure to recognize expressions of religion that do not fit this framework. Despite this, it is difficult to get rid of the prevailing WRP, especially in education. In addition, nonconfessional, nonreligious, secular education in religion may be biased by norms and values that assume that religion as such is outdated and irrational. The seemingly neutral, nonreligious, or agnostic position that is present in religious studies at the higher education level can then be seen as aligned with an institutional, not necessarily personal, secular bias that rules out religion from the very outset. Consequently, higher level education about religion runs the risk of presenting religion in terms of flawed stereotypes. In this article, Daniel Enstedt addresses these two interrelated and subject-specific problems by examining them through the lens of Gert J. J. Biesta's educational philosophy, and in particular in relation to his discussion about the three domains of education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification.     

Good education in an age of measurement: on the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education

In this paper I argue that there is a need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education, particularly in the light of a recent tendency to focus discussions about education almost exclusively on the measurement and comparison of educational outcomes. I first discuss why the question of purpose should always have a place in our educational discussion. I then explore some reasons why this question seems to have disappeared from the educational agenda. The central part of the paper is a proposal for addressing the question of purpose in education—the question as to what constitutes good education—in a systematic manner. I argue that the question of purpose is a composite question and that in deliberating about the purpose of education we should make a distinction between three functions of education to which I refer as qualification, socialisation and subjectification. In the final section of the paper I provide examples of how this proposal can help in asking more precise questions about the purpose and direction of educational processes and practices.     

A critical pedagogy of empathy: making a better world achievable

Based on the results of a large-scale study regarding the role of secondary education teachers, we tried to develop an emancipatory teaching programme within the framework of a critical pedagogy of empathy. This teaching strategy is a three-stage process, during which a constant teacher–student interaction, attentive listening and interchange of roles are emphasised, so as to foster empathy. The first stage includes understanding the students’ perspectives and giving value to their experiences. When the channels of communication are open and teachers get into their students’ shoes, material relevant to the students’ experiences is presented at the second stage, while students are encouraged to question the prevailing status quo and to raise their voices in institutional contexts in which they have traditionally been silenced. Finally, during the third stage, students disseminate self-gained knowledge and thoughts with a view to creating a better future and a different society, as part of the broader mission of informed, democratic, critical, empathetic and active citizens.     

CRITICAL LISTENING AND THE DIALOGIC ASPECT OF MORAL EDUCATION: J.F. HERBART'S CONCEPT OF THE TEACHER AS MORAL GUIDE

In his central educational work, The Science of Education (1806), J.F. Herbart did not explicitly develop a theory of listening, yet his concept of the teacher as a guide in the moral development of the learner gives valuable insight into the moral dimension of listening within teacher‐student interaction. Herbart's theory radically calls into question the assumed linearity between listening and obedience to external authority, not only illuminating important distinctions between socialization and education, but also underscoring consequences for our understanding of the role of listening in educational relations. In this inquiry, Andrea English argues that critical listening in teaching contributes to the moral education and development of the learner. To do this, she examines Herbart's view of the teacher's task as a moral guide in the realm of moral education. English contends that reexamining Herbart's theory of education (a theory that is, for the most part, no longer discussed in Anglo‐American educational philosophy) can productively inform our understanding of moral education in democratic and pluralist societies.     

论美国道德教育的传统及其面临的挑战

文章在分析美国道德教育传统的发展变化基础上，认为新教伦理是美国道德教育的思想基础，共和教育、民主教育与公民教育的道德教育传统不仅使美利坚民族性格得以形成，而且也使美国社会进一步强大。这些道德教育的传统是美国强盛的历史原因，但美国的道德教育传统在当代则面临着一系列巨大的挑战。     

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’.     

Emancipatory and critical language education: a plea for translingual possible selves and worlds

Language is the main resource for meaningful action, including the very formation of selves and psychosocial identities, shaped by practical norms, beliefs, and values. Thus, language education constitutes one of the most powerful means for both social reproduction and social production and ideological maintenance and utopian innovation. In this paper, we attempt to emphasise the invaluable psychosocial, political, economic, and cultural function of language education in order to propose a critical view of the current transition from the monolingual to a multilingual paradigm. We maintain that multilingual approaches tend to serve the neoliberal framework and reproduce its systemic inequalities. Therefore, we argue in favour of emancipatory multilingual practices that could embody a translingual pedagogy capable of promoting the development of capabilities, the recognition of otherness, and the cultivation of diversity. Rooted in critical theory, namely in Foucault’s notion of subjectification and Freire’s view of conscientisation, an emancipatory translingual pedagogy would enable and empower every learner to synthesise a contextually creative field of new semantic and pragmatic relationships. Critical language education would enhance the ethos of biophilia that fosters what we term the poetics of communality and selfhood, that is to say, the proactive commitment to expanding symbolic and existential novelty.     

Malaysian university students' attitudes to academic dishonesty and business ethics

Academic dishonesty is believed to have predictive ability for subsequent behaviours in the workplace. This study adds to the literature by investigating Malaysian business students' attitudes to academic dishonesty and their attitudes to ethics issues in business. This study also explores the association between these two constructs. The form of academic dishonesty being investigated here is related to assignments, quizzes, and examinations. Employing data collected from 153 business students from different academic years, this exploratory study concludes that business students may have found that some level of dishonesty is acceptable in some academic settings as well as in business settings. The study's outcomes highlight the possibility of using students' attitudes to academic dishonesty to explain their attitudes to ethics in business contexts. The findings of this study, to a certain extent, indicate that years spent in business education might contribute to such unfavourable attitudes. This exploratory study also draws attention to several issues related to the teaching of ethics within business education.     

The Potential of Education for Sustainable Development for Reform in Schools

Can the concept of education for sustainable development foster reform in schools? The discussion of this question is based upon some reflection on social challenges in education, on a brief presentation of three concepts of environmental education (OECD Project 'Environment and School Initiatives' (ENSI); Action Competence Model; Socio-ecological Environmental Education) and on a closer theoretical look at the term Education for Sustainable Development. With some reference to an ongoing initiative in whole school development on the basis of education for sustainability called 'Ecologisation of Schools', the present and future relevance of the sustainability debate, with all its inherent dilemmas, uncertainties and confusions, is seen as a breeding ground for promoting innovations in education which might meet and cope with the current social challenges in an active and constructive manner.     

Being well in the world: an alternative discourse to mental health and well-being

The author provides a critique of the current campaign promoting well-being and mental health in UK schools. The paper focuses on the unintended consequences of aligning with a medical model of understanding mental health which include concerns about ignoring ecological factors and, to some extent the social construction of individual mental health. The author considers the relevance of Arendt's notion of being at home in the world, (Arendt, 1994), as understood in the context of Biesta's educational commentary, (Biesta, 2017). Finally, the author argues that the current frame of reference for mental health intervention is insufficient in meeting the challenges facing the next generation of students.     

Unveiling their worlds: the use of dialogue as a health-promotion tool for HIV/AIDS education in a poor community in Kenya

Three decades since the onset of HIV/AIDS, 33.2 million people worldwide are infected and prevalence in Kenya is on the rise. This paper contributes to discussions about HIV/AIDS education and draws on the health promotion approach and the emancipatory theory of Paulo Freire. Freire argued that through dialogue people unveil their world. The researchers used the method of dialogue to facilitate parents' and teachers' reflections on sexuality education for the children. The dialogues seemed to facilitate some reflection and showed the attitudes of the community to matters that impact on sexuality education (e.g. gender and sexuality). This paper illustrates how dialogic processes can be useful to the process of constructing realistic and contextually relevant HIV/AIDS education. The challenges for the researcher as an outsider are also discussed.     

Imagining the shaping of reflective deliberative education leaders: The devil is in the detail

Abstract

In this article we critically engage with some of the challenges and issues pertaining to the implementation of the Advanced Certificate in Education: School Leadership following a national agreement by the national Department of Education, provincial education departments and several universities. The rather idealised vision of the programme to provide learning opportunities to promote quality education in South African schools through the development of a corps of education leaders who apply critical understanding, values, knowledge and skills to school leadership and management in line with the vision of democratic transformation seemingly meshed with our own approach to the development of leadership. However, consequent to the planning, budgeting and implementation of this school leadership programme we realised that realities posed serious challenges. In this paper we narrate how it became increasingly clear how “the devil is in the detail”.     

Is it ‘all about having an opinion’? Challenging the Dominance of Rationality and Cognition in Democratic Education via Research in a Gallery Setting

This article reports on findings from a research study exploring the potential for democratic learning in a gallery education project which took place in the UK in 2006–7. In doing so, it also explores a pressing issue for education today: the question of young people's democratic education in a time of political crisis in Europe. The focus of the article lies in a critique of the primacy of rational thought, cognitive skills and verbal discussion within democratic education, and an exploration of the potential role of the arts and art education in challenging this. Specifically, the article argues that there has been an affective and corporeal deficit in democratic education, and that some forms of gallery education are well placed to address this. Although the data discussed derive from a particular time and place (the UK in the latter days of a government that rigorously pursued an agenda of social and economic inclusion through both education and cultural policy), they also have relevance beyond their immediate context, illuminating the nature and dynamics of the process of democratic learning, and its aesthetic and artistic dimensions.     

Democratic Education versus Smithian Efficiency: Prospects for a Deweyan Ideal in the “Neoliberal Age”

In this essay, David Meens examines the viability of John Dewey's democratic educational project, as presented in Democracy and Education, under present economic and political conditions. He begins by considering Democracy and Education's central themes in historical context, arguing that Dewey's proposal for democratic education grew out of his recognition of a conflict between how political institutions had traditionally been understood and organized on the one hand, and, on the other, emerging requirements for personal and social development in the increasingly interconnected world of the early twentieth century. Meens next considers Dewey's ideas in our contemporary context, which is dominated by a neoliberal ideology that extends the economic logic of Smithian efficiency to all domains of modern social and political life. He argues that the prevalence of neoliberalism poses two challenges to Deweyan democratic education: first, Dewey's emphasis on general education and a resistance to specialization is economically inefficient; and second, Dewey's strong, democratic conception of the “the public” is anathema to the neoliberal vision of the public as a conglomeration of individual agents. These challenges, he concludes, significantly stack the deck against Deweyan education by ensuring that the latter will be neither economically practicable nor widely understood.