Expressing the Not‐Said: Art and Design and the Formation of Sexual Identities

Central to this paper is an analysis of the work produced by a year 10 student in response to the ‘Expressive Study’ of the art and design GCSE (AQA 2001). I begin by examining expressivism within art education and turn to the student's work partly to understand whether the semi‐confessional mode she chose to deploy is encouraged within this tradition. The tenets of expressivism presuppose the possibility that through the practice of art young people might develop the expressive means to give ‘voice’ to their feelings and come to some understanding of self. I therefore look at the way she took ownership of the ‘expressive’ imperative of the title by choosing to explore her emerging lesbian identity and its position within the normative, binary discourses on sex and sexual identity that predominate in secondary schools. Within schooling there is an absence of formal discussion around sex, sexual identity and sexuality other than in the context of health and moral education and, to some extent, English. This is surprising given the emphasis on self‐exploration that an art and design expressive study would seem to invite. In order to consider the student's actions as a situated practice I examine the social and cultural contexts in which she was studying. With reference to visual semiotics and the theoretical work of Judith Butler, I interpret the way she uses visual resources not only to represent her emerging sexual identity but to counter dominant discourses around homosexuality in schools. I claim that through her art practice she enacts the ‘name of the law’ to refute the binary oppositions that underpin sex education in schools. This act questions the assumptions about the purpose of expressive activities in art education with its psychologically inflected rhetoric of growth and selfhood and offers a mode of expressive practice that is more socially engaged and communicative.     

A limited,apolitical, and open Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire’s work is often characterized and used in terms that seek to produce widespread political and economic changes across societies. Peter Roberts, however, in his book Paulo Freire in the twenty-first Century, offers readers a much different way of approaching Freire’s work. Throughout his book, Roberts presents Freire as recognizing the limitations of educational initiatives, as not seeking specific macro-political objectives, and as emphasizing openness to alternative discourses. These themes weave throughout each chapter of the book, in which Roberts examines a wide range of topics, from Freire and Dostoevsky to reason and emotion to political correctness to Freire and the Tao Te Ching. In this review essay, I engage a number of purposes. I elucidate and trace these three themes as they weave throughout and support the various topics that Roberts examines in his book. I illustrate how Roberts’s treatment of these themes challenges many of the interpretations of Freire’s work found within the critical literature, and, through this critique, it offers readers new ways of thinking about Freire’s thinking. Lastly, I discuss how Roberts’s thoughts suggest new ways that Freire’s work, and critical education in general, might begin to make more meaningful and practical inroads into public education and might develop new avenues of scholarship on Freire’s work.     

Poetics of the Encyclopaedia: Knowledge,Pedagogy and Research Today

This paper explores ways in which Roland Barthes' discussion of the encyclopaedia provides us with resources for thinking about education and research practice today. What Barthes addresses in his essay ‘The Plates of the Encyclopedia’ is a particular encyclopaedia, the Encyclopédie produced by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, which was published in France between 1751 and 1772. This is commonly referred as the first of a form that we recognise as the encyclopaedia today. I begin with Barthes' analysis and critique of the Encyclopédie. Barthes, writing in 1964, engages with the Encyclopédie as an iconic product of its time, seeing it as conditioned by and, in effect, reinforcing a particular way of experiencing the world. Next, I consider ways in which a parallel critique is pertinent today. I explore some current examples of encyclopaedic form in relation to education and educational research. The purpose of this is to examine the interplay between particular cultural products and their society, in which not only certain types of knowledge but also a certain conception of knowledge are produced and reinforced. So, it will not be the purpose of this paper to provide direct analysis or critique of the Enlightenment, or to provide a historical account of knowledge. Rather, what I am interested in is problematising a particular understanding of language and knowledge that arises through these cultural products, particularly with regard to educational inquiry. This lays the way for thoughts expressed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy? which, as I shall try to show, are of help in furthering the analysis of the dominant research culture's use of such products and in imagining the task of education and research differently.     

Educational Critique,Critical Thinking and the Critical Philosophical Traditions

Responding to Jan Masschelein's discussion of critical distance and the trivialisation of critique in his ‘How to Conceive of Critical Educational Theory Today?’, I draw attention to the antinomic character of immanence and transcendence—that is, to the way that it entails both non‐circumventible necessity and omnipresent risks. I argue that the discourse of critical thinking in education is exemplary of the tensions generated by such consolidated meanings. Through this prism, I aim to offer a nuanced account of ways in which the trivialisation of critique nurtures narcissistic and conformist tendencies that do not leave unaffected any critical philosophical line of thought. To illustrate my critique of contemporary critical education of all persuasions, I deal with an ethics of reading and writing. I suggest that, rather than encouraging cynicism and an abdication of responsibility, this antinomic character of critique should discourage any complacent and one‐sided reliance on one's own tradition.     

Education as Training for Life: Stoic teachers as physicians of the soul

This paper is an indirect critique of the practice of American liberal education. I show that the liberal, integrative model that American colleges and universities have adopted, with one key exception, is essentially an approach to education proposed some 2400 years ago by Stoic philosophers. To this end, I focus on a critical sketch of the Stoic model of education—chiefly through the works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius—that is distinguishable by these features: education as self-knowing, the need of logic and critical thinking for informed decision-making, learning as preparation for life, and knowledge for integration in private, local, and global affairs. Such a critical sketch may not only help institutions instantiate their own similar aims more effectively, but also help them assess those aims with apposite normative force, which today they lack.     

Can difference make a difference? A critical theory discussion of religion in sexuality education

This article conceptualizes religion as a critical theory challenge to sexuality education. Religious views in sexuality education are often perceived as intolerant and incompatible with today’s progressive and modern society. This article engages with the idea that the inclusion of religious viewpoints on sexuality will challenge the efficacy of current sexuality education in Australia and New Zealand school contexts, to create a more contemporary and inclusive learning experience that caters for all students’ sexual needs and lives. Utilizing a critical theory lens, I demonstrate how religion can challenge dominant views of sexuality education, introduce alternative modes of content and delivering, promote critical thinking skills and more egalitarian ways of learning about sexuality. Drawing on data collected from Australian and New Zealand public schools, this article endeavors to reframe current discussions of the relationships between religion and sexuality education.     

The curriculum as a site of counter politics: theorising the ‘domain of the sayable’

Whilst there has been increasing focus on the impact of neoliberal education policy on the curriculum covered in schools, as well as on teacher and student subjectivities, less research has been done on the possibility, or otherwise, for teachers to challenge curriculum constraints. Arguing that these curriculum constraints are not simply imposed by an external censor, this article takes up Judith Butler’s concept of the ‘domain of the sayable’ to theorise what it is possible to imagine teaching in the primary school classroom in the first place. I draw on two different ethnographic data episodes to explore the parameters of the domain of the sayable in the space of the classroom in which I taught, mapping the silences and sudden swerving away from topics that seem to be straying close to what is impossible to say or hear. This process offers new insight into how we might conceptualise teacher resistance and counter politics within the current educational policy milieu in the United Kingdom.     

Maybe one in a hundred or one in a thousand in the neoliberal,new-managerial university! Aesthetics of experience and the question of transgressive critical thinking

ABSTRACT

Trangression is an act of challenging boundaries that separate apparently distinct oppositional categories objects. Examples are categories such as such as civilised/primitive, male/female, master/servant, Lordship/bondage. The article deals with such transgressions related to the evolution of class consciousness transgressive critical thinking. It is said to be particularly important and at risk in higher education today, as performativity reforms have closed the spaces for transgressive reflexivity, making it difficult for students to make sense of the possibilities and costs for the self that higher education can create. However, although the now professionally managed entrepreneurial university might appear to form a difficult space for developing critical thinking, critique is also a basis for the expansion of capitalism in the university, and through transferability this can create spaces for critical reflection.     

Self Examination, Philosophical Education and Spirituality

As a contribution to thinking about the possibility of spiritual education, I examine Pierre Hadot's important distinction between 'philosophy as theory', a detached investigation into 'the natures of things', and 'philosophy as a way of life', practical exercises which Socrates introduced as a means of 'learning to die'. While most philosophy today amounts to 'philosophy as theory', 'philosophy as a way of life' remains a respectable and viable tradition and a most exacting education of the spirit. I illustrate it here through an examination of some of its practitioners such as St Bernard of Clairvaux, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Etty Hillesum.     

In Excess of Epistemology: Siegel,Taylor, Heidegger and the Conditions of Thought

Harvey Siegel's epistemologically‐informed conception of critical thinking is one of the most influential accounts of critical thinking around today. In this article, I seek to open up an account of critical thinking that goes beyond the one defended by Siegel. I do this by re‐reading an opposing view, which Siegel himself rejects as leaving epistemology (and, by implication, his epistemological account of critical thinking) ‘pretty much as it is’. This is the view proposed by Charles Taylor in his paper ‘Overcoming Epistemology’. Crucially, my aim here is not to defend Taylor's challenge to epistemology per se, but rather to demonstrate how, through its appeal to certain key tropes within Heideggerian philosophy, Taylor's paper opens us towards a radically different conception of thinking and the human being who thinks. Indeed, as will be argued, it is through this that Taylor and Heidegger come to offer us the resources for re‐thinking the nature of critical thinking—in a way that exceeds the epistemological, and does more justice to receptive and responsible conditions of human thought.     

Advocating a Post-structuralist Politics for Educational Leadership

Abstract

Post-structuralist discourses have usually been associated with forms of critique and deconstruction of social, cultural and philosophical phenomena. However, this article attempts to provide a generative approach to understanding educational leadership through Michel Foucault’s notions of power and subjectification, and Judith Butler’s notions of performativity and discursive agency through re-signification. We argue that leadership is not simply a list of traits, characteristics or behaviours to be implemented. Rather, we argue that leaders are performatively constituted through everyday practices and discourses. The aim is to interrupt prevailing discourses that often re-inscribe certain forms of meaning and understanding in educational leadership. This disruption subsequently provides possibility for putting forward otherwise silenced ideas about what leadership is and how leadership ‘identity’ (subjectivity) is formed, thus expanding the methodological tools scholars can use to talk about leadership.     

Finding Educational Insights in Psychoanalytic Theory with Marcuse and Adorno

This article seeks to clarify the potential that Herbert Marcuse's and Theodor W. Adorno's psychoanalytic accounts may have with respect to the philosophy of education today. Marcuse and Adorno both share the view that psychoanalytic theory enables a deeper understanding of the social and biological dynamics of consciousness. For both thinkers, psychoanalytic theory provides conceptual tools for thinking through contradictions between the needs of an individual and those of the governing entity. In fleshing this out, I first explore Marcuse's radical account of sublimation which seeks to demonstrate how the revision of instinctual energy makes it possible to establish a subjectivity which utilises the human potentiality to its fullest. I then turn to Adorno who emphasises the importance of understanding that exterior conditions transform our instinctual energies. After recapitulating Adorno's conception of natural, instinctual impulses and his use of psychoanalytic theory, I will explore the possibility of a critical rationality through a critique of rationality's current mode. From the perspective of Adorno's and Marcuse's theories, both rationality and sensuous desire play their respective roles in enabling critical rationality. In conclusion, the article reflects the different advantage points of Marcuse's and Adorno's accounts from the perspective of philosophy of education. Thus, education should provide individuals with the ability to recognise the subtle and invisible ways through which the calculating mode of rationality operates in late‐capitalist society. Regarding education, Adorno's conception of non‐identity could be developed in the direction of promoting ways of experiencing non‐conformity within such a society.     

Does Critical Thinking and Logic Education Have a Western Bias? The Case of the Nyāya School of Classical Indian Philosophy

In this paper I develop a cross‐cultural critique of contemporary critical thinking education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and those educational systems that adopt critical thinking education from the standard model used in the US and UK. The cross‐cultural critique rests on the idea that contemporary critical thinking textbooks completely ignore contributions from non‐western sources, such as those found in the African, Arabic, Buddhist, Jain, Mohist and Nyāya philosophical traditions. The exclusion of these traditions leads to the conclusion that critical thinking educators, by using standard textbooks are implicitly sending the message to their students that there are no important contributions to the study of logic and argumentation that derive from non‐western sources. As a case study I offer a sustained analysis of the so‐called Hindu Syllogism that derives from the Nyāya School of classical Indian philosophy. I close with a discussion of why contributions from non‐western sources, such as the Hindu Syllogism, belong in a Critical Thinking course as opposed to an area studies course, such as Asian Philosophy.     

A Critical Pedagogy of Ineffability: Identity,education and the secret life of whatever

Abstract

In this article I bring Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘whatever singularity’ into critical pedagogy. I take as my starting point the role of identity within critical pedagogy. I call upon Butler to sketch the debates around the mobilization of identity for political purposes and, conceding the contingent necessity of identity, then suggest that whatever singularity can be helpful in moving critical pedagogy from an emancipatory to a liberatory project (a distinction I take from Marx). To articulate whatever singularity I situate the concept within the work in which it appears, and then take a detour into Agamben’s general philosophical project. I propose that, for critical pedagogy to take whatever singularity seriously, it must uphold a respect for the ineffability of being, which entails in part the suspension of dialogue. To help flesh out what I mean by this proposal, I turn to a fragment of Lyotard’s philosophy and his critique of democracy. I conclude by addressing a pressing ontological critique of Agamben, which leads me to argue for a materialist appropriation of the figure of whatever singularity, one that is held in tension with ontological concerns of identity.     

THE EDUCATIONAL MEANING OF COMMUNAL LAUGHTER: ON THE EXPERIENCE OF CORPOREAL DEMOCRACY

In this article Joris Vlieghe, Maarten Simons, and Jan Masschelein attempt to articulate a new way of dealing with the public character of education. Instead of discussing laughter as an instrument that one could use to facilitate established educational goals, the authors provide an extensive analysis of the phenomenon of laughter as a specific form of corporeal behavior. Their analysis demonstrates that when we laugh, we give an answer to a disorienting situation, but this answer is not the product of intentional agency. Instead, it consists in the uncontrollable spasmodic contraction of our diaphragm and other impersonal and automatic corporeal reactions. We are thus exposed to an ultimate loss of self‐control. The authors argue further that communal laughter—that is, when the lack of mastery over our own lives becomes a shared experience—results in what they call a “democracy of the flesh.” In this state, it is no longer possible to stick to well‐defined positions, nor is it tenable to defend any hierarchical ordering, including the strict hierarchy we typically find in the context of schooling and education. Common laughter makes equals out of us and grants the possibility of an unforeseen and unimaginable future. For precisely this reason, the authors conclude, communal laughter might be considered as an educational event itself.     

Regimes of performance: practices of the normalised self in the neoliberal university

Universities today inescapably find themselves part of nationally and globally competitive networks that appear firmly inflected by neoliberal concerns of rankings, benchmarking and productivity. This, of course, has in turn led to progressively anticipated and regulated forms of academic subjectivity that many fear are overly econo-centric in design. What I wish to explore in this paper is how, emanating from prevailing neoliberal concepts of individuality and competitiveness, the agency of the contemporary academic is increasingly conditioned via ‘regimes of performance’, replete with prioritised claims of truth and practices of the normalised self. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s writings on governmentality, and Judith Butler’s subsequent work on subjection, I use findings from a series of in-depth interviews with senior university managers at National University of Ireland, Galway to reflect upon the ways in which academics can respond effectively to the ascendant forms of neoliberal governmentality characterising the academy today. I contemplate the key task of articulating broader educational values, and conclude by considering the challenge of enacting alternative academic subjectivities and practices.     

Children in Public or 'Public Children': An Alternative to Constructing One's Own Life

This article arises from the thoughts of Hannah Arendt, and more especially from her idea that the essence of education is the renewal of the world. That idea forms the backdrop to a consideration of the current interest in education as the construction of one's own life. I argue that the will to construct one's own life is not a natural, biological given, but a product of a 'biopolitical machine'. In the first part of the article I challenge the contemporary discourse of self-empowerment and expose the way that the will to construct one's own life, in its current manifestation, is an effect and an instrument of a (strategic) configuration that includes the construction of one's own life as a matter of public concern. Ironically, the foregrounding of 'public concern' in this way undermines a more meaningful realisation of the public realm. I see this, however, not primarily as a problem, but as an invitation to think again. In the second part I argue that what the 'biopolitical machine' has shown is precisely that thinking of childhood in terms of a becoming and a 'not yet' does not capture the essence of human being. Instead it should be conceived as a singular, historical experience emerging within a particular historical context. What this reveals is an opening onto a possibility of acting and thinking differently. I conclude with an alternative idea of education, one that is inspired by Arendt. However, this is not intended as a utopian turn, but rather as a means of exposing a dimension of education that has remained silenced or even largely excluded: a dimension that is an invitation to think and to put our thoughts at stake, which is something altogether different from utopia.     

Neither Humean Nor (Fully) Kantian Be: Reply to Cuypers

In this paper I reply to Stefaan Cuypers' explication and critique of my views on rationality and critical thinking ( Cuypers, 2004 ). While Cuypers' discussion is praiseworthy in several respects, I argue that it (1) mistakenly attributes to me a Humean view of (practical) reason, and (2) unsuccessfully argues that my position lacks the resources required to defend the basic claim that critical thinking is a fundamental educational ideal. Cuypers' analysis raises deep issues about the motivational character of reasons; I briefly address this matter as well.     

Problematising Critique in Pedagogy

Following the Enlightenment, the concept of ‘critique’ broadened and acquired a political denotation, in which the expression of opinion alone could itself be already considered critique. This meaning of ‘critique’ expresses acknowledgement of men as equal, free and rational. This broad concept of critique, however, also tends to negate certain more technical and specific forms. This paper goes back to conceptions of critique introduced by Kant and developed in an educational perspective by the neo‐Kantian Paul Natorp. Kant's concept of critique concentrated on the conditions of possibility of judgemental powers, resulting in a transcendental critique of Reason. Natorp applied this conception of transcendental critique to education. Though Natorp relates education to society as a whole, his concept of critique does not uncover the social determinants of educational views but holds on to a transcendental critical idea of critical judgement that is not completely socially determined. Consequently, in the transcendental critical approach, the critical function of Reason is given priority over any political vision. This results in a conception of critique that primarily questions validity claims, stressing rational testing as opposed to other sources of validity, such as traditional or religious authority. The transcendental critical programme, further developed in twentieth‐century Germany, still endorses the implied denial of the possibility of deriving the validity of propositions from experience. It can be distinguished from Karl‐Otto Apel's brand of transcendental critique by its refusal to assume any primary criterion for critical judgement, in the manner of Apel's ‘ideal communicative community’. Consequently, this programme cannot result in any positive conception of education. Its main contribution consists in exposing those presuppositions of educational views and practices that function as a priori ideas as conditions of the possibility of their justification. Though not denying the value and relevance of positive educational conceptions, this transcendental critical approach primarily aims at preventing metaphysical foundational questions from being forgotten or dogmatically fossilised.     

The passion of teaching at the border of order

In this text, which was originally delivered as a speech, I discuss the massive critique of teachers in the public discourse on education in Sweden over the last decade. I speak in defence of teachers, and since I am a teacher I speak in defence of myself. The critique of teachers, schooling, and teacher education has been so overbearing that a purely rational response is simply not possible. Therefore, my response is rhetorical in tone. In highlighting the passion of teaching, I lift something central for teachers, which is seldom or never taught about teaching in teacher education. Neither is the passion of teaching present in the public discourse on education. Passion, I argue in the article, is that which adds excess or an overflow of meaning that cannot be contained within the order of discourse and which therefore puts this discourse out of balance. Finally, I discuss a new balance beyond this order in the context of a classroom. In a concluding section, I highlight the struggle over borders which define who can speak and think in “good” order and who cannot.