This paper is a story of personal learning. I locate its beginning in my early, comfortable adoption of liberalism as the preferred perspective for my work as a philosopher of education. I then trace how and why I became disaffected with this perspective. I describe how learning from students, feminism and critical race theory led to an acceptance of the fact that my particular social locations as a white, upper-middle-class, educated, heterosexual man are not politically neutral as liberalism would have (...) it, but aspects of social relations that are oppressive to others. I illustrate how this development and its implications took shape in my work, leading me to the unpleasant implications of my unavoidable complicity in these relations, even down to the level of my very subjectivity. I worry, then, about an apparent conundrum that ?I? experience when I address the question of how ameliorative change might be initiated, and end with some injunctions to myself. (shrink)

Overcoming our disciplinary aversion to assessment mechanisms allows more possibilities for students to achieve fundamental philosophical skills. My essay discusses the use of Bloom’s taxonomy in a Feminist Philosophy course with detailed examples that demonstrate its efficacy as a learning and assessment tool that is particularly suited to philosophy, as well as how critical philosophy in general, and feminist philosophy in particular, is an ideal subject to help students gain critical thinking skills.

Current models for individuation in academe exacerbate generational tensions between second and third wave feminists. Feminist pedagogues must be wary of getting caught in the "vicious circle of contempt," where students are expected to compensate for a teacher's past narcissistic wounds. Instead, we must be willing to mourn the wounds we have received at the hands of a contemptuous culture and to acknowledge same-gender attachments that are disavowed in dialectical models of subject production.

: This essay considers the important role attributed to education in the writings of nineteenth-century feminist Harriet Taylor Mill. Taylor Mill connected ignorance to inequality between the sexes. She called up the specter of regression into lowness and ignorance when she associated feminism with progress. As she stressed the importance of education, she constructed an 'other' to feminism, variously associated with lowness, poverty, and the primitive. She made a case for the advantages of civilization (education, enfranchisement, equality) to be opened (...) up to women. Yet Taylor Mill's position that the ignorant poor, like all humans, should be in a position of so-called "perfect equality" drifted intermittently into the view that the elevation of women to perfect equality would refine and elevate the lower classes. (shrink)

The ways in which knowledge relates to power have been much discussed in radical education theory. New emphasis on the role of gender and the growing debate about subjectivity have deepened the discussion, while making it more complex. In Getting Smart , Patti Lather makes use of her unique integration of feminism and postmodernism into critical education theory to address some of the most vital questions facing education researchers and teachers.

In this paper I discuss some thoughts Judith Butler presents regarding corporeal vulnerability. This might help to elucidate the problem of whether critical education is still possible today. I first explain why precisely the possibility of critique within education is a problem for us today. This is because the traditional means of enhancing a critical attitude in pupils, stimulating their self-reflective capacities, contributes to the continued existence and strengthening of the current societal and political regime. A way out of this (...) deadlock is offered from within a Foucauldian perspective. Criticality here refers to an experience of exposure and expropriation of the self. This kind of limit-experience is also of a central importance in the most recent work of Judith Butler. She links this experience to the corporeal condition of susceptibility. Our bodies have a public dimension as we are inescapably exposed to one another. The main argument of my paper has to do with whether this appeal to corporeal vulnerability might offer a new way of thinking about the public realm and about the possibility of critique, especially within the field of education. I conclude the paper by showing the originality of Butler's thought in this respect and the possibilities it opens for thinking in a radically new way about critical pedagogy. (shrink)