Emmanuel Levinas, a twentieth century French Continental philosopher, proposed an original understanding of ethics which has serious implications for the particular activities within higher education designated as service learning and community service. First I will define service learning and community service and briefly review the theoretical and philosophical justifications typically employed to substantiate and ground these activities within higher education. Next, I will explicate key aspects from Levinas’ ethical philosophy important for reconceptualizing service learning, and discuss their significance for related (...) concerns in higher education about language and justice. Finally, in light of these considerations, I will suggest the profound implications of a Levinasian conception of service for higher education. (shrink)

In this article I explore the implications of the educational use of diversity in current discourse and practice. I argue that the current recognition of differences through the emphasis on social identity is just the continuity of the logic that traditionally has responded to otherness through suppression or possession. The central idea is that the category of diversity, even if it is used in the educational sphere as a purveyor of recognition of otherness, hides in reality a fear of the (...) other, as it comes from the consideration of human beings in terms of power . The result of this fear is the attempt to decode the other by enclosing her in an alienated and standardized identity. Finally I will propose dependence as a main educational category that understands humans as recipients of other beings, thus values as responsibility, gratitude and generosity become prominent over those of respect or tolerance. (shrink)

Biesta distinguishes three functions of education: qualification, socialization and subjectification. We focus on subjectification. When first addressing this concept, Biesta referred to action as defined by Arendt, thereby stressing the importance of ‘the question of freedom’. More recently, the question of freedom is replaced by ‘the question of responsibility’. For Levinas responsibility is related to irreplaceability. While the concept of responsibility is valuable, we question the call upon irreplaceability in education. Actively taking responsibility where irreplaceability might not be either present (...) or felt should be central to education. Unlike the morally clear examples invoked by Biesta, complex societal issues like the climate and refugee crisis are not accessible as an immediate appeal to a specific subject. Therefore, we propose a return to Arendt and her concept of action. Action allows and requires students to create the world anew, to take a position without pretending that the outcome can be controlled. Biesta refers to this as the impossibility of education. However, rather than repeating the theme of impossibility, we focus on the possibilities of education: there are several ways to create the world anew. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the establishment of an Ethics Education Programme for school pupils aged between five and sixteen years who opt out of Catholic Religious Education in Malta. It needs to be seen in the light of the changing demography of Malta and the increasing secularisation of the country, as well as to the growing racism, islamophobia and rejection of the Other to be found all over Europe. We question if the Ethics Education Programme, in its commitment to ‘totalising’ (...) western ideals of rationality, autonomy, and universal values, is itself rooted in discomfort with the Other and constitutes a form of ethical violence. The work of Emmanuel Levinas on Otherness, sameness and violence is central to this paper. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyze the moral dimensions of teachers’ experiences of working with unaccompanied refugee students in language introduction in Swedish upper secondary school. Theoretically, the analysis uses Bauman’s postmodern ethics, focusing on the tension between the social and the moral space in teachers’ encounters with unaccompanied students. The empirical material is derived from interviews with three teachers, and a reflexive interview approach was used. The outcome of the analysis shows that balancing professional and moral responsibilities (...) is a challenge, and also that while teachers strive to see their students as Other in a moral sense, the demands of the profession might get in the way. This aporia of proximity – the insoluble conflict between the social and the moral space – is faced by the teacher as a moral subject, adding complex moral dimensions to teachers’ work with unaccompanied students. (shrink)

Lately, in educational research and debate, there have been discussions on a trend sometimes named as a ‘therapeutic turn’ in education. Mindfulness-oriented activities represent one therapeutic approach in education, aiming for virtues such as patience and trust. A large part of the critical viewpoints on therapeutic education among young students seem to concern problems of integrity, privacy and the autonomy of the student. It is therefore, I suggest, fair to say that meetings between teachers and students are of special concern (...) within the realm of therapeutic education. The aim of this study is to shed light upon two teachers' reflections upon their own work and their students' within a mindfulness-oriented approach in a Swedish secondary school. I turn to Iris Marion Young, a theorist who has dealt with questions of communicative ethics and respectful meetings, for guidance. I find Young's concepts of recognition and distance through the act of greetings interesting and possibly fruitful for discussing qualities in teacher–student relations in therapeutic education from a professional ethical point of view. The analysis shows that Life Competence Education has the potential to be an arena within youth education where traditional roles, hierarchies and relations within education may be challenged. Likewise, because of this potential, it may also function as an arena where traditional structures and hierarchies of education are reaffirmed. (shrink)

There has been a shift from teaching to learning, the so-called process of ‘learnification’, which promotes the idea that teaching should be primarily concerned with the creation of rich learning environments and scaffolding student learning. In doing so, this process of ‘learnification’ has also attacked the idea that teachers have something to teach and that students have something to learn from their teachers. The influence of constructivism, and thinkers like Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner in this paradigm shift is quite evident; (...) however, this gives rise to a tension in what a teacher is and what teaching entails, because the teacher, by definition, is someone who has something to teach students, and not merely a facilitator of the learning process. Moreover, because of constructivism and ‘learnification’, current educational practices and policies seem to pay little attention to the importance of ‘relations’ and ‘the encounter with the Other’, which become merely desirable by-products. In this article I criticise constructivism and ‘learnification’ by proposing that the teacher is a community ‘builder’ and teaching a ‘situational revelation’, while also emphasising the importance of ‘relations’ in the educational process. The starting point for my discussion is a much neglected passage of I and Thou where Martin Buber discusses the importance of the ‘living centre’ [lebendigen Mitte] for ‘true community’ [Die wahre Gemeinde] formation. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to reclaim a place for teaching in face of the contemporary critique of so-called traditional teaching. While I agree with this critique to the extent to which it is levelled at an authoritarian conception of teaching as control, a conception in which the student can only exist as an object of the interventions of the teacher and never as a subject in its own right, I argue that the popular alternative to traditional teaching, that is (...) to make the teacher a facilitator of learning, is insufficient. The reason for this has to do with the fact that learning, understood as a process of interpretation and comprehension, ultimately also does not allow the student to exist as a subject. I provide support for this point through a reading of two articles by Emmanuel Levinas in which he puts forward the case that our subjectness is not generated through our own acts of signification, but is rather constituted from the outside, that is, through the address of the other. It is in this event, where a different conception of teaching emerges—one that, unlike authoritarian teaching and unlike self-generated adaptive learning, is precisely aimed at making the subjectness of the student possible. (shrink)

The discourse of twenty-first century learning argues that education should prepare students for successful living in the twenty-first century workplace and society. It challenges all educators with the idea that contemporary education is unable to do so, as it is designed to replicate an industrial age model, essentially rear-focused, rather than future-focused. Future-focused preparation takes account of the startling effect on economy and society caused by rapid technological change, to the extent that the future cannot be accurately predicted. It is (...) a discourse that effectively renders knowledge obsolete, and which relies increasingly on communication technologies and online pedagogies. This is however an education which in some respects deepens the loss of identity characteristic of contemporary times. Thus, it has negative implications for face-to-face interactions in community which underpins the development of democratic practices. This article challenges these futuristic discourses by appealing to two philosophers of the twentieth century, namely Emmanuel Levinas and Paulo Freire. It considers the Levinasian concepts of the Other and the face, and the Freirean concepts of humanisation and critical education to argue that they offer a discourse of possibility and hope. These thinkers enable the argument that, despite rapid change, there are certain attributes and dispositions that transcend time and place, which schools have not only a right, but an obligation to develop. (shrink)