A love towards a thing eternal: Spinoza and the classroom

There is a growing concern about the struggles of early career teachers and an understandable questioning of the preparation being offered by teacher education courses. Are our preservice teachers being given workable strategies and techniques to allow them to survive the early years? Is it strategies and techniques that are primarily at issue here? Could it be that there is something more fundamental, to do with an underlying philosophical understanding about human nature, the desire to learn and the need to relate? I want to suggest that instruction about strategies and techniques is too often built on an insecure and incompatible foundation of assumptions about the nature of the world of sentient beings and their relationships. Ontology matters. Philosopher Spinoza divided the world of thought into ideas that were adequate – contributing to our well-being, potency and happiness – and those that were inadequate – leading us to feel weak, at the mercy of outside forces, and sad. I want to argue, with Spinoza, that inadequate ontologies lead to a sense of impotence and frustration, and that adequate ideas – a stronger ontology – can underpin and sustain a more durable pedagogy. I explore this idea by looking at some classroom events through a Spinozean lens.     

Regulating research: The problem of theorizing community on LambdaMOO

This article considers ongoing attempts to regulate or even ban researchon LambdaMOO. Industry, private individuals, and research institutionshave supported MOOs, or multi-user object-oriented worlds. The earlyresearch on MOOs by Pavel Curtis, who was one of the key designers,suggests that these systems are part of a research project and have beenresearched since they were originally designed. However, a group ofMOOers have grown increasingly uncomfortable about the quotation ofcertain texts on web sites and academic journals and the potentiallypanoptic effect of research. Some of these practices have breachedcommunity conventions. Yet, such things as testing, invisibly watching,freely quoting characters, and ignoring certain rules have always beenaspects of the system. The dispute over research ethics and theparticipation of varied researchers within this setting indicate thatdiverse values are represented among MOOers and different expectationsexist about how the MOO might be a community. The term ``community' andthe presumption that online characters are people may have alsoincorrectly informed the research debate by making it seem that onlinesettings provide immediate access onto spaces, bodies, and individuals.Many MOOers may believe that research threatens individuals andcommunity. However, critical histories and analysis are needed in orderto explain the system to new users and encourage alternative forms ofdevelopment. Such work can only be produced if online systems are opento research and critique.     

Social Welfare,the Neo‐conservative Turn and Educational Opportunity

This essay examines the educational opportunities of people in poverty who receive social welfare assistance. The dominant political theory underlying social policy (including education policy) in the United States has evolved from 1960s and 1970s welfare liberalism into 1980s and 1990s style neo‐conservatism—a theory that embraces principles of the market and individual liberty as paramount social values. Against this backdrop, I review two recent books that provide compelling evidence for this turn and I call for increased understanding of the relationship between social welfare policies and higher education opportunities for those in poverty.     

Dinosaur discourses: taking stock of gendered learning myths

The persistence of gendered learning myths in educational contexts and the wider imaginary continues to trouble feminist educational researchers and practitioners. The tracing of such myths and the categories they create through authoritative and elite discourses of the past suggests how they have functioned across different fields to preserve a hierarchised binary. Gendered myths seem to be lent authority by some of the more popular claims of contemporary neuroscience as they were by the nascent Victorian psychological sciences. Adopting Le Doeuff's [2003. The Sex of Knowing. Translated by K. Hamer and L. Code. London: Routledge] heuristic of identifying which attributes are absorbed into masculine intellectual legacies and which ‘cast off’ to women allows for a focus on patterns of privileging of learning discourses across the humanities and sciences, and the ways these are constituted in historical and contemporary contexts.     

A Survey of Documentary Materials Available on U.S. Tribal Websites

This survey of official U.S. tribal websites examined sites for documentary materials of importance to each tribe that have been archived online, including such materials as historical essays, photos, videos, maps, newspapers, legal and historical documents, historical images, books, pamphlets, bibliographies, cultural and language materials. The materials found on those websites appear to be intended for the use of both tribal members and the general public. The result of the survey was to show that many of the same types of documentary materials held in tribal archives are also available on official websites, and to produce a current snapshot of the large array of tribal records which have been made openly available, although the length of time each document will be available on each site is unknown.