Reply to James Muir

A kind of ‘neo‐Aristotelianism’ that connects educational reasoning and reflection to phronesis, and education itself to praxis, has gained considerable following in recent educational discourse. The author identifies four cardinal claims of this phronesis‐praxis perspective: that a) Aristotle's epistemology and methodology imply a stance that is essentially, with regard to practical philosophy, anti‐method and anti‐theory; b) ‘producing’, under the rubric of techné, as opposed to ‘acting’ under the rubric of phronesis, is an unproblematically codifiable process; c) phronesis must be given a particularist interpretation; and d) teaching is best understood as praxis in the Aristotelian sense, guided by phronesis. The author argues that these claims have insufficient grounding in Aristotle's own writings, and that none of them stands up to scrutiny.     

Exploring the dynamics of cultures of learning in internationalised higher education

ABSTRACT

One of the main drivers of internationalisation in higher education (HE) is the intention to facilitate the development of intercultural competence (IC) among students and staff. However, previous research shows that higher levels of IC are not automatically achieved by participating in internationalised educational settings. Drawing on the results from a bi- and trilateral collaborative project, we combine cultures of learning and small culture approaches to analyse how participants’ previous educational experience may have influenced the learning process in internationalised HE classrooms. This article argues the necessity of a non-essentialist view of teaching and learning practices in internationalised classrooms. Our analysis demonstrates how academic practices and classroom norms are (re)negotiated in these new contexts, forming new evolving ‘small’ cultures of learning. The role reciprocity plays in working towards cultural synergy in internationalised HE is also addressed. Striving towards equality in power distribution proves to be significant in achieving cultural synergy.     

The Inner (and Unavoidable?) Violence of Reason: Re‐reading Heidegger via Education

Since Plato, Western thought has framed knowing as a method within ‘some realm of what is’ and a predetermined ‘sphere of objects’. The roots and the consequences of this stance towards reason and truth were noted by Heidegger, who equates the history of Western thought with the history of metaphysics. Since Plato, truth has relied on definition, hierarchy and mastery. Discourse on the truth begins to be discourse on the limits of things and, thus, on who is able to set these limits and discourse. This dominant position erases its own traces, presents itself as unique and unavoidable, and excludes all other ways of thinking. This exclusion includes violence, and this violence is not merely a philosophical matter. It is written in the history of the West, which is a history that includes conquest, genocide and war. However, we can also identify in Heidegger ways to transcend this inner violence by returning to the originating stance towards truth, namely, truth as aletheia, or world disclosure. This article provides the groundwork to argue that Heidegger's thought, based on a call for existential responsibility, requires education to remake our existence.     

The truths of business and the lies of academia: the order of discourse on higher education in Poland

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of an analysis of hierarchization strategies in public debate over unemployment among university graduates. The aim of the investigation was to grasp the way that discourse controls interact with one another to produce and reinforce a particular ‘truth’ about the university. The objects of our analysis were the ways of identifying the following places by the media actors: (a) the privileged positions from which the truth of a given social order is told and within which the common good may be expressed, and (b) the positions which are opposed to the latter and from which only a particular interest and ‘populist’ demands can be articulated. These two categories in the debate were successively filled by the following groups: entrepreneurs (bearing witness to the truth about the low level of instruction at universities) and the representatives of the social sciences and humanities defending themselves against these accusations. The diversity of argumentative strategies was revealed at the three levels of the order of discourse: hierarchization of responsibility, hierarchization of access to the truth, and hierarchization of interests.     

Transformative learning and concepts of the self: insights from immigrant and intercultural journeys

This article examines Canadian immigrant and intercultural learning as an insightful context for examining transformative learning. Theories of intercultural communication are explored, particularly the concept of transculturality and Bhabha’s concept of ‘Third Space’. Various concepts of the self are also compared, particularly two conceptions implicit in theories of transformative learning, the autonomous self and the relational self. Finally, three empirical studies from Canada are reviewed and findings discussed regarding the transformative process of learning into transculturality as well as the relational self and relational knowing in transformative learning.     

Do ‘global citizens’ need the parochial cultural other? Discourse of immersion in study abroad and learning-by-doing

The discourse of immersion is prevalent but little analysed in the field of study abroad. Linked generally to learning-by-doing, this discourse has significance for ‘intercultural education’. Based on text analyses of three guidebooks on study abroad, this article suggests four effects of the discourse of immersion: It justifies study abroad as different from, if not better than, classroom learning and tourism. It emphasises the difference between students’ home and host cultures and constructs each society as internally homogeneous. It constructs study-abroad students’ home societies as globalised and their host societies as immobile and parochial, creating a hierarchy when globalisation is valorized. Finally, it exoticises the learning-by-doing ‘teachers’ – the host people – by portraying them as parochial ‘cultural others’. This article suggests an uneven process where the call for production of ‘global citizens’ through study abroad constructs host societies as parochial and risks reproducing a colonialist hierarchy of exoticism through intercultural learning-by-doing.     

The Discourse of the Learning Society and the Loss of Childhood

I argue that Hannah Arendt's analysis of the development of modern society illuminates one aspect of prevailing educational discourse. We can understand the ‘learning society’ as both an effect and an instrument of the logic of ‘bare biological life’ or zoé that Arendt claims is the ultimate point of reference for modern society. In such a society we seem to live permanently under the threat of social exclusion, being permanently put in the position of learners or problem‐solvers, without the right of appeal. To imagine the possibility of such an appeal requires us to recover our sense of the experience of childhood.     

论中西方跨文化交流困境的原因

造成中西方跨文化交流困境的原因在于:根深蒂固的意识形态"成见"使跨文化交流出现对立;"前理解"对概念的不同阐释使跨文化交流缺少对话的空间;话语"不平等"使跨文化"对话"变成强势话语的"独霸天下"。     

Freire’s philosophical contribution for a theory of intercultural ethics: A deductive analysis of his work

This article claims that Freire’s work offers an important ground for a potential theory of intercultural ethics and, for that purpose, examines his ideas at different levels: (1) the ontological; (2) the ideological; (3) the political; (4) languages and languaging; and (5) cultural identity and diversity. Freire never used the word ‘intercultural’, although it is suggested here that this is due to the fact that terminology related to cultural diversity has changed over time and in his day this term was not yet common currency. Moreover, Freire uses more often the term ‘multiculturalidade’ rather than ‘multiculturalismo’ (multiculturalism) since the former suffix ‘-dad(e)’ has a different meaning which refers to the ontological nature of the condition and is more usual in both Portuguese and Spanish. This article also argues for the relevance of a theory of intercultural ethics in the contemporary world that imprints (inter)cultural flexibility on the current hermeneutics of ethics while preventing excessive abuses on behalf of relativism, dogmatism, essentialism and fundamentalism.     

Economic ‘revelations’ and the metaphors of the meltdown: an educational deconstruction

This article subjects contemporary informed discourse on the Credit Crunch/Great Recession/Long Recession to educational analysis and deconstruction. Such pro‐capitalist but not uncritical discourse is well represented by the UK Financial Times, whose columns between 2008 and 2012 comprise most of our data. We argue that the metaphors of the ‘meltdown’ are significant and performative, allowing variously moralised narratives to emerge as implicit diagnoses and remedies. In particular we identify a ‘domestic’ register of metaphors whose contained and homely tropes of austerity, prudence, book‐balancing and so on stand in dramatic contrast to a more melodramatic register, centring on various disaster scenarios. What is of most interest is that financial journalists and commentators switch between these registers, and allow ‘crossovers’ between them which are powerful in their discursive effects and political persuasiveness. These metaphorical discursive resources are intimately connected to the sorts of educational registers that characterise the ‘knowledge economy’. We conclude that our cultural ability to tell these sorts of stories rests as much on an underlying moral and theological storying as it does on any ‘scientific’ economic account (if such there can be, which we doubt). In this way we seek to educate economic discourses that are, as it were, ‘economical with the truth’.     

认知语篇分析的文化维度

通过分析意象图式与文化图式在语篇中的作用,揭示了语篇的认知研究不仅要依据基于一般性、普遍性身体经验的意象图式,还要参照基于社会性、文化性群体经验的文化图式。文化图式致使跨文化交际双方在构建互通的语篇宏观结构时,常常凸现意象图式中的不同方面,使跨文化交际双方构建出形似一致、貌似连贯而意不一致、不具认知连贯性的语篇。     

Emancipation,equality and education: Rancière's critique of Bourdieu and the question of performativity

Jacques Rancière's work has had significant impact in philosophy and literary theory, but remains largely undiscussed in the field of education. This article is a review of the relevance of Rancière's work to education research. Rancière's argument about education emerges from his critique of Bourdieu, which states that Bourdieu reinforces inequality by presuming it as the starting point of his analysis. What is at stake is the question of performativity, and the means by which discourse has effects. This debate has implications for considering the basis of claims to truth in literary and social science discourse. Parallels are drawn between Judith Butler's and Rancière's portrayal of the relationship between discourse and subjection, as well as their attention to discursive ‘imitation’ in making inequality representable. The article concludes with a discussion of the problematic which Rancière's work suggests for education research.     

Reflecting critically on the critical disposition within Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC): the developmental journey of a curriculum design team

ABSTRACT

Internationalisation of curriculum (IoC) practices promote students developing knowledge of other cultures, attitudes, values and ethics. This conceptual article argues that embedding critical reflection in the IoC program – through integrating insights from both IoC thinkers and critical reflection literature – may allow educators and students to not only gain understanding and/or competency in other cultures but better address questions of privilege, power and colonisation and thereby interrogate their own normative cultural understandings. Borrowing from debates within IoC pedagogy, as well as from Ahmed’s work on critical reflection, this article also argues that cross/intercultural understanding should be understood (and taught) not as a competency but a disposition towards thinking, analysing and understanding the world which is based on critiquing the ‘self’ and its relationship with the ‘other’.     

Toward a Postmodern Notion of Human Rights

Abstract

A central element of Richard Peters’ philosophy of education has been his analysis of ‘education as initiation’. Understanding initiation is internally related to concepts of community and what it may mean to be a member. The concept of initiation assumes a mutually interdependent, dynamic relationship between the individual and community that claims to be justified on cognitive, moral and practical grounds. Although Peters’ analysis is embedded in a different discourse, his insights are relevant to current discourse on the individual in community. A fruitful conversation can be developed between Peters’ account of the learner’s ‘initiation’ into ‘bodies of knowledge and awareness’ and Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of ‘practices’; and how both assume a notion of ‘tradition’ within partly overlapping accounts of ‘community’. Secondly, I will consider how ‘initiation’ touches the concept of ‘social justice as membership’ developed by current philosophers, Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer, and what import Peters’ analysis has for different degrees of active and passive membership and participation. Thirdly, I will consider Charles Taylor’s ‘social imaginary’ as a contextual framework for processes surrounding ‘education as initiation’. This article does not argue that Peters’ concept of initiation cannot be contested at some points but rather that it can inform, and be informed by, the conversation with those who contend that community is itself a good essential for human flourishing.     

The ideology of democracy/dictatorship as youth migrate

ABSTRACT

This article is an exploration in the mode of thinking of refugee youth on the relations of ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship.’ Tracing the geopolitical relations of authoritarian and democratic forms of governing we demonstrate the manner in which these political forms are socio-historically interdependent yet appear as politically distinct, which we understand as an ideological form of consciousness. Expanding out from interviews and focus groups conducted with refugee youth from the Middle East and North Africa who arrived in Canada to resettle, our analysis attempts to go deeper than that simply creating space for the voices of refugee youth. Instead, we want to theorise from the data to reconceptualise the social and economic projects that have been named as democratisation or youth at-risk. The conscious reproduction of democracy and dictatorship as distinct political forms requires that refugee youth learn to live in and act upon their world through an ideological mode of consciousness that furthers the relations of global capitalism and encourages young people to align their aspirations with neoliberalism. We, therefore, aim to reorient theorisations of democracy and dictatorship, and in doing so, challenge the forms of consciousness and praxis that arise from the bourgeois regime of political rights.     

The ‘End’ of Kant‐in‐Himself: Nietzschean difference

Kant's over‐reliance on universal reason and his subjection of free will to the moral law can be seen as normalising a particular and restrictive view of autonomous human existence—a view implicit in liberal accounts of education. Drawing on Nietzsche's critique of Kantian thought, this paper argues that the transcendental and unattainable realm of Kantian reason is insufficient as a sole basis for moral thought and action or as the basis of respect for others as ‘ends‐in‐themselves’. For Nietzsche, the possibility for each individual goes well beyond compliance with any imposed system of values, his metaphorical ‘death of God’ leaving room for creativity and difference.     

Revisiting China’s Africa policies and educational promises: towards a global convergence of development in the post-2015 era?

ABSTRACT

Comparing China’s 2006 and 2015 Africa policies, this article reveals how China’s political discourse has become more confident, practical, and depoliticised. In particular, this paper shows how education is allocated, promised, and embedded in China’s ‘shared’ agenda, which is centred on development co-operation and mutual learning. It then reflects on the extent to which China may move towards traditional donors. This paper concludes that, despite fragmented convergences in the discourse and an increased recognition of a Chinese model, China maintains its distinctive role and position in the post-2015 era.     

Institutional pedagogy for an autonomous society: Castoriadis & Lapassade

Abstract

This article explores how George Lapassade’s institutional pedagogy meets the definition of ‘praxis’ formulated by Cornelius Castoriadis, as the activity creating reflective and deliberative subjects. Lapassade applies Castoriadis’s criticism of bureaucracy to transform the teacher-learners’ relationship and emphasises how self-governance group dynamics among learners facilitates learning in general and access to critical thinking in particular. Castoriadis’s concept of democracy as individual and collective autonomy demands an interpretation of equality as a dynamic process instead of as a state of social relations, both in politics and in classrooms. His understanding of politics as a matter of opinions rather than applied knowledge necessitates a questioning of how the relationship between politics and knowledge is presented in classrooms. The argument articulates two main themes: (1) authority and power both between adults and children and within class groups, and (2) the relationship between knowledge and politics, problematised by Castoriadis’s concept of truth.