Can Education Still be Critical?

The article investigates how two different conceptions of the edifying potential of education attempt to take into account the normative dimension of scientific knowledge. In the first conception it is the demand for truth that is edifying, whereas in the second concept it is a distinctively ethical demand. It is argued that the first concept in the end implies the subjection of education to the 'brutality of facticity', under which it risks losing its critical point. The second conception, drawing on Levinas and Arendt, tries to safeguard this critical point. It conceives education as a process through which scientific knowledge is made subject to reflection, and is thus confronted with the ethical challenges and demands of society.     

Taking the Future Seriously: On the Inadequacies of the Framework of Liberalism for Environmental Education

International reports on environmental policy promote 'education for sustainable development' as an instrument for realising environmental awareness, values and attitudes consistent with the liberal concept of 'sustainable development'. In this paper the ethical and political-philosophical assumptions of (education for) sustainable development will be criticised. First, it will be argued that (Rawlsian) liberal ethics cannot include obligations towards future generations. Second, the commentary focuses on the economic perspective underlying this liberal framework, its anthropocentric bias and the hierarchical distinction between public and private spheres. Third, to offer a more adequate framework for environmental education, some fruitful ideas within neo-republicanism will be examined.     

The coordination role in research education: emerging understandings and dilemmas for leadership

Changes in expectations of research education worldwide have seen the rise of new demands beyond supervision and have highlighted the need for academic leadership in research education at a local level. Based on an interview study of those who have taken up local leadership roles in four Australian universities, this paper maps and analyses different dimensions of the emerging leadership role of research education coordination. It argues that while there is increasing clarity of what is required, there are considerable tensions in the nature of the coordination role and how coordination is to be executed. In particular, what leadership roles are appropriate and how can they be positioned effectively within universities? The paper draws on the Integrated Competing Values Framework to focus on the activities of coordination and on ideas of distributed leadership to discuss the leadership that characterises coordination. It is argued that without acknowledgement of the influences that coordinators need to exert and the positioning and support needed to achieve this, the contemporary agenda for research education will not be realised.     

Rethinking difference and sex education: from cultural inclusivity to normative diversity

This paper aimed to problematise what is meant by ‘difference’ and consider what such a reinterpretation might mean for methodological interventions in sex education research. Our concern is the tendency for sex education research to treat difference as a set of categories to be ‘added-on’, such as religious difference, cultural difference and sexual plurality. The danger of this is that it leaves the normative unchallenged, confirming the hegemony of the heteronormative, unraced subject. Constructing difference as an ‘add-on’ fails to address how young people locate themselves in a world in which they negotiate their sexualities through complex ‘glocal’ routes in popular and youth culture. We argue that decentring methodological strategies are required which draw on critiques made by post-colonial and decolonising methodologies. In the first section of the paper, we review the problem of difference, and how it is considered within current debates in youth and sexualities research. This frames a reflection on rethinking our own methodological practices through a consideration of two research moments. In the conclusion, we propose a metaphorical framework to scaffold a reimagining of methodological approaches to ensure that the normative is always a question mark.     

Doing student voice work in higher education: An exploration of the value of participatory methods

This paper will review the existing student voice work in higher education and critique its current weaknesses, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of and commitments to participation, transformation and empowerment. It will be argued that the employment of participatory methods in higher education student voice work offers a way to address these weaknesses. The potential of participatory methods is illustrated and discussed using two case examples drawn from one higher education institution in the UK. The first case provides an illustration of what is called ‘transformation of the familiar’, while the second case provides an illustration of empowerment, through recognising the importance of what is not voiced by students, as much as what is voiced. It is concluded that whilst a participatory approach to student voice work in higher education has potential, further work is required in order to evaluate the long‐term impact of projects that use such methods.     

Concrete and classrooms: how schools shape educational research

The notion of ‘the school’ as a set of institutional processes and practices that shape the possibilities of educational research forms the focus of this article. It is argued that the discursive and material practices that render schools agencies of cultural reproduction also have effects for what research can be undertaken in them and how. With reference to a series of ‘episodes’ that occurred during research about young people and sexuality in New Zealand, evidence for how schools shape research endeavours is provided. These examples present a complex picture of the way in which schools simultaneously police and are regulated by symbolic boundaries of gender and sexuality. How school disciplinary power works to effect what it is possible to claim about the voluntary nature of student research participation is also explored. It is argued that through the powerful discursive and material practices that occur in schools, these institutions can impede research that attempts to transgress dominant meanings about gender and sexuality.     

Subjectivity,social change and the reform problematic

The theme of ‘new directions for research in relation to social justice and teacher education’ raises questions about not only the broad economic and cultural shifts which now frame education (what types of exclusions and unfairnesses are being created?), and not only about the changing construction of inequalities in education in the reshaped education institutions (what is social justice?). It also raises the very difficult issue of how older research and reform agendas meet, or fail to meet, the subjectivity of students today; and the problem of how adequately the (human) subject, subject formation and the historical specificity of human subjects is now considered in the reform agendas. This paper will illustrate some of these questions by drawing on a seven-year longitudinal, qualitative study, now nearing completion, of students going through school. It will argue for the continued utility of this form of more traditional academic research, in addition to the types of action-directed and ‘partnership’ research that are commonly seen as the task of ‘teacher education’ now. From this study of the current generation of students at school, the paper will point to some continuities and some shifts regarding how winners and losers are being created through schooling today. It will also revisit the old issue for researchers and reformers in education, about who is speaking to whom and with what effects.     

Edifying Youths. The Chambers of Rhetoric in Seventeenth-Century Holland

For the early modern period, historians have primarily looked at institutional forms of education when investigating the intellectual molding of youths. With the exception of the wealthy, their conclusions have often been one-sided. However, youths of the middling sort in the Dutch Republic were more resourceful. Youths that could not afford a formal education at a Latin school or a university resorted to alternative resources such as chambers of rhetoric. For historians of education, chambers of rhetoric are not an obvious terrain to excavate. Traditionally, the chambers have been studied for their public literary and theatrical activities. However, those incidental public performances were only a fraction of what took place in private. In this essay we will probe into the literary activities of the chambers' private weekly meetings and illustrate how the Dutch chambers of rhetoric in the seventeenth century played an important role in edifying youths from the middling sort into a cultural elite.     

教育规律与经济规律相互关系探析

教育要遵循教育规律 ,也要遵循经济规律。经济规律在一定条件和范围内也适用于教育领域 ,但这决不等同于“教育商品化”和“教育市场化”。教育规律与经济规律具有一定的兼容性。据此 ,可以正确认识民办教育的公益性与营利性的关系问题。     

Should contentment be a key aim in higher education?

Higher education institutions are major concentrations of political, social, economic, intellectual and communicative resources. They reach freely across populations and cultures and connect to government, professions, industry and the arts. The neoliberal logic of markets has entered the realm of (higher) education. This leads to discourse on the benefits of education being positioned almost exclusively in terms of their effect on income. The perspective taken in the paper is the development of a happiness motive that asks education to challenge what it is to be a member of society: What moral and ontological stance one will seek to take in developing one’s future? The satisfied student perpetuates the current lifeworld in which they find themselves, seeking to improve the quality of the services provided. It is proposed that an overly emphasised desire satisfaction culture inhibits the edifying mission of universities. This is not to argue against high-quality service provision but to differentiate it from the edifying role of personal challenge, determination and social responsibility, conceptualised here as profound happiness or contentment, and the university’s role in its development. It calls for a different and more refreshing approach to higher education.     

Struggling for the soul of education: Towards accountability policy research

This chapter summarises the findings of the chapters above and derives research questions. It identifies potential domains of future policy research in accountability. Since beliefs about what constitutes knowledge and how learning can be demonstrated determine how educational accountability is to be accomplished, it concludes that such research will be central in the struggle for the soul of education. It also recommends cooperative methodologies that attend simultaneously to technical, economic, cultural, political, strategic and philosophical dimensions of a communitarian concept of accountability.     

Searching for the Norm in a System of Absolutes: A Case Study of Standards-Based Accountability Reform in Pre-Kindergarten

Research Findings: The emergence of standards-based accountability reforms in early childhood education has created new challenges for the field. This article presents findings from a case study that explored how stakeholders in a large urban pre-kindergarten program struggled to implement an assessment tool that aligned the normative academic achievement expectations found among their teachers and administrators with the absolute measures of this construct found in their state policymakers' high-stakes standards-based accountability reforms. Analyzing the tension that emerged in this process of alignment highlights the challenges early educators face as they fold their child-centered programs into these larger high-stakes standards-based kindergarten through grade 12 education systems. Practice and Policy: The findings from this study illuminate the need for early childhood education programs to understand how high-stakes standards-based accountability reforms define student achievement. Furthermore, as early childhood programs and personnel address these reforms, their responses need to be explicit about how their assessment measures are connected to their normative conceptualizations of student achievement and what this means for the education of children in their programs.     

Envisioning the Future Without the Social Alienation of Difference

This article will honour the career of John Elkins by presenting themes from research associated with advocacy, inclusive education, and deinstitutionalisation. As a mentor John's interest in these areas is indicative of how his career has centred around making a difference for children and adults who are at risk of marginalisation. The evolution of inclusion will be focused upon but also discussed within the context of research findings that suggest a phenomenon of ongoing social alienation arising from difference. A recent typology of inclusion that arose from a follow-up study of 56 people, who had lived on average for 22 years in an institution, will be outlined. The majority of those people, 8 years on from leaving the institution, had made few if any community connections. This does not deny that living in the community is cause for celebration, but if an inclusive future is to be envisioned then the question remains as to what needs to happen to ensure that people have more than just a community presence. Several responses to this challenge will be examined. It will be argued, however, that whatever the solution the voice of people with disabilities needs to surface. The challenge of how people with disabilities can become "co-researchers" as opposed to the "researched" will then be discussed.     

Environmental education research: to what ends?

This paper engages questions about ends in environmental education research. In doing so, I argue that such questions are essentially normative, and that normative questions are underrepresented in this field. After cautioning about perils of prescribing research agendas, I gently suggest that in environmental education key normative questions exist at the intersection of ‘education’ and ‘ethics’, and that they point to an area of research that deserves more attention. In describing the intersecting nature of these ideas, I show that how education is conceived in turn shapes interpretations of ethics, and vice versa. Seen this way, I also show how ethics inquiry in an educational context can be conceived as a means to explore controversy, dissonance, unconventional ideas, and to imagine new possibilities. Finally, I argue that research at this intersection of education and ethics can provide insights that can enable us to teach, inquire, and ultimately live as if the world mattered.     

Inclusive education: recipe book or quest. On diversity in the classroom and educational research

Teaching that takes into account the increasing range of differences between pupils is often called ‘inclusive education’. The practice of inclusive education in The Netherlands is informed by educational research that has mainly produced ‘recipes’ for effective education with a view to academic success. This research has tended to reduce differences between pupils to a limited number of characteristics and to reduce educational outcomes to academic success in the basics. Inspired by ethnic and gender studies, it is argued for an approach to inclusive education in which social-cultural outcomes as well as academic excellence are taken seriously and diversity is not restricted to a few standard characteristics of pupils. With reference to the authors' own research, it will be shown that the development of this broad interpretation of inclusive education demands educational research that does not merely produce recipes for dealing with certain characteristics of pupils. Research should help teachers to reflect on how diversity is manifested in their own classroom practice and suggest alternative forms of action and behaviour to achieve inclusive education.     

‘Everything is different here …’: mobilizing capabilities through inclusive education practices and relationships

There is some ambiguity and contention surrounding the role and potential of education and training measures beyond formal schooling. While labour market integration is generally the assumption underlining such projects and programmes, there is clearly another significant side to those measures that target educationally excluded youth; namely, its broader social inclusion dimension. An important aspect to this dimension is the consideration as to how social inclusion is articulated at a policy intervention level. This paper argues the importance of individual relationships, meaningful interactions and ‘everyday allegiances’ for authentic educational inclusion. Such social practices operate in ways to support the capabilities and personal resources required to compensate for the psychically and biographically damaging effects experienced through the institution of schooling. This paper details the contours of inclusive social practices and relationships surrounding a ‘second chance’ education and training intervention in Ireland known as Youthreach, which, it can be argued, bears some resemblances to what might be categorized as ‘positive welfare’.     

How to Strengthen the Connection between Research and Teaching in Undergraduate University Education

This paper explores how to strengthen the research-teaching nexus in university education, in particular, how to improve the relation between policy and practice. The focus is on courses and curricula for undergraduate students. From a review of policy documents and research literature, it appeared that the research-teaching nexus can be shaped according to two dimensions. One concerns an emphasis on either the research content and products, or the research processes and problems; the other concerns the role of students as either learning existing insights, or as 'participants in research' who contribute to insights which are new to the field (e.g., by conducting research themselves). It is concluded that if a university chooses to strengthen the research-teaching nexus in undergraduate curricula, this implies involving students more often in the role of participants in research.     

Environmental concern,moral education and our place in nature

Some strands of environmental concern invite a radical re-evaluation of many taken for granted assumptions of late modern ways of life—particularly those that structure how we relate to the natural world. This article explores some of the implications of such a re-evaluation for our understanding of moral education by examining the significance of ideas of our place in nature that focus not on our location in some grand abstract system, but on our felt sense of place in the course of our daily existence. It will be argued that exploration of the anticipatory and ecstatic nature of such concrete emplacement reveals an underlying normative character to our encounters with nature, now experienced as an autonomous and essentially mysterious non-human other that both sustains and is sustained by places—places in which find ourselves and live out our lives. It is argued that this view foregrounds a notion of transcendence that leads to both a questioning of the anthropocentrism (i.e. its metaphysical basis) that informs many Western moral views and an acknowledgement of intrinsic value in nature, such that some current mainstream understandings of the character of moral sensibility and of moral education can no longer be regarded as adequate.     

In search of good citizenship education: A normative analysis of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS)

In the last two decades, calls to place citizenship education (CE) at the top of national and European educational policy and research agendas have been gaining in prominence. Large‐scale comparative studies, such as the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), are often considered the main evidence base for setting these agendas and improving CE policies and practices. This article therefore considers the ICCS study as an inherent part of the process of translating general, educational aims into curricular policies and practices of CE. However, while critical voices about comparative educational studies have become paramount, a detailed analysis of their contents, of what and how they measure and what they promote as the aims of education is often lacking. This article aims to fill this gap by analysing the main research documents, design and items of the 2009 ICCS study. To find out what ICCS promotes as the goals of citizenship education, we examined its normative assumptions in terms of qualification, socialisation and/or subjectification. Our analysis shows that the qualification and socialisation functions are dominantly validated in all aspects of the study, whilst there is only marginal attention to subjectification. This implies that ICCS misses an important potential to document and/or promote pupils becoming autonomous and critical democratic citizens, whilst this is often considered a central aim of citizenship education by policymakers, practitioners and teachers.