Democracies are calling on schools to respond to a rise in extremist ideologies and actions. In this article Sigal Ben-Porath situates the rise in extremism within the broader context of political polarization. She suggests that the latter is a more appropriate target for school intervention than the former. She further suggests that addressing polarization can result in a reduction in extremism, and that polarization can be addressed by refocusing the use of existing teaching and learning tools, rather than by instituting (...) new forms of intervention such as the Prevent strategy used in the UK. Tackling polarization through media literacy and the development of democratic habits can help rectify false beliefs, which contribute both to broad political polarization and to individuals' slide toward extremism. Focusing on strengthening knowledge as well as social ties can fortify individuals' and communities' resilience against extremism, as well as build bridges and connect people to a sense of shared fate across political divides. These practices are more effective and more justified than targeting individual students who are suspected of holding radical beliefs. (shrink)

Educating against extremism doesn't just involve seeking to prevent individuals from becoming extremists or radicalized, although that, of course, is a significant concern. There is also an important role for education in teaching the rest of us, the general populace, the best way to react and respond when we learn of a terrorist attack or consider the potential risk of violent extremism in our community, or even worldwide, given we are connected globally via technology. In this article, Laura D'Olimpio argues (...) that educators have a central role to play in teaching young people to respond to the news of violent extremism and the worry about terrorists and terrorism in ways that support our sense of community and personal well-being. Among the ways in which educators may support such aims is by educating the emotions. There are practical and moral reasons to temper our fearful reactions, and it is in our best interest to educate pupils to avoid allowing fear of terrorists or violent extremism to interfere with their daily lives and actions. D'Olimpio claims that our best response to extremism, both representationally and practically, is to refuse to be terrified. By not being overwhelmed by fear or altering our day-to-day activities, we not only better support a well-functioning democracy and our own happiness or flourishing, but we also disempower rather than empower extremists. (shrink)

Educating against extremism doesn't just involve seeking to prevent individuals from becoming extremists or radicalized, although that, of course, is a significant concern. There is also an important role for education in teaching the rest of us, the general populace, the best way to react and respond when we learn of a terrorist attack or consider the potential risk of violent extremism in our community, or even worldwide, given we are connected globally via technology. In this article, Laura D'Olimpio argues (...) that educators have a central role to play in teaching young people to respond to the news of violent extremism and the worry about terrorists and terrorism in ways that support our sense of community and personal well-being. Among the ways in which educators may support such aims is by educating the emotions. There are practical and moral reasons to temper our fearful reactions, and it is in our best interest to educate pupils to avoid allowing fear of terrorists or violent extremism to interfere with their daily lives and actions. D'Olimpio claims that our best response to extremism, both representationally and practically, is to refuse to be terrified. By not being overwhelmed by fear or altering our day-to-day activities, we not only better support a well-functioning democracy and our own happiness or flourishing, but we also disempower rather than empower extremists. (shrink)

Secondary schools are well placed to avert radicalization processes toward extremism because such trajectories often begin in adolescence. Adolescents are in the process of forming their identities, and most adolescents are idealistic, which makes them susceptible to groups that passionately pursue utopian visions. To avert the path toward extremism, Doret de Ruyter and Stijn Sieckelinck propose to balance a prevention approach with a positive educative ethos that is sensitive to the emotions involved in students' quest for meaning in life and (...) identity formation. This involves schools being places where all students experience that they matter and where they can express their passion for their ideals and experiment with their identities without being ridiculed; at the same time, schools must guide students in learning that not everything they value will be accepted and that they must also take into account the interests and rights of others. The schools' role is thus complex and precarious, and teachers are in a position of navigating a politically sensitive minefield daily. Therefore, any theoretical proposition regarding what schools can realistically do to prevent extremism must be informed by everyday educational practice. (shrink)

Schools are increasingly being asked to identify and monitor youth who may be susceptible to recruitment toward radical groups. Rather than asking teachers to identify at-risk behaviors, Dianne Gereluk argues here that a whole-school approach may help to foster belonging and connection among youth that is not additive, but a central component of safe and inclusive schools. Whole-school approaches attend to the different power relationships that occur within the school community, focusing on the classroom environment, the school organization, and the (...) broader school environment. Insofar as radicalization is partly a response to the perception of exclusion and oppression, these factors may go some way toward mitigating the appeal of extremism. (shrink)

This essay describes what it means to live with existential self-doubt, explores how such doubt emerges in educational encounters, and examines some educational benefits and challenges of uncertainty and doubt. Mordechai Gordon begins his analysis by describing the type of self-doubt that Paul Cézanne embodied, that is, of an artist who painted throughout his entire life yet was still consumed by existential uncertainty. Drawing on Cézanne's example, as well as poet Rainer Maria Rilke's life and his own experience, Gordon sheds (...) light on what it means to live with existential doubt. Following the discussion of existential uncertainty, he revisits the epistemic self-doubt displayed by Socrates and René Descartes and compares it to existential self-doubt. In the third part of this essay, Gordon draws on the examples of some veteran teachers in order to illustrate how educators have approached the challenge of living with existential self-doubt. The final part of the essay considers both the promises and perils of existential self-doubt in the context of education. (shrink)

Schools plausibly have a role to play in countering radicalization by taking steps to prevent the acquisition of extremist beliefs, dispositions, and attitudes. A core component of the extremist mindset is aversion to compromise. Michael Hand inquires here into the possibility, desirability, and means of educating against this attitude. He argues that aversion to compromise is demonstrably undesirable and readiness to compromise demonstrably desirable, so discursive teaching of these attitudes should guide pupils toward these verdicts. And he identifies three methods (...) of formative teaching by which readiness to compromise can be cultivated in pupils. (shrink)

In this article, Andreas Reichelt Lind explores the possibilities of a Deweyan account of education for democracy. To that end, an account emphasizing democratic habit formation, direct experience of democracy as a way of life, and the distinction between being and becoming is explicated and discussed. Lind shows how these elements together point to the issue of designing educational environments and then discusses in a preliminary way the implications of this insight from the perspective of education for democracy. The article's (...) contribution is twofold. First, it explicitly contributes to a reconstruction of Dewey in relation to the issue of educating for democracy. This represents a reframing of his writings. Second, it highlights and discusses some theoretical implications of the possibilities inherent in the Deweyan account of education for democracy. (shrink)

A key epistemological assumption in the ideologies of many of the groups termed extremist is that there is an unmediated access to a Divine Will. Driven by this assumption, and facilitated by several other factors, a range of coercive actions (including violence) to force others into submission to the perceived Will of God are seen as justified by some of these groups. A consideration of how religion is discussed in various contexts, from seminaries and schools to media and policy discourses, (...) shows that this assumption about unmediated access to Divine Will is widely shared and that most children grow up socialized into it. In this paper, Farid Panjwani argues that challenging this assumption through educational settings can help young people acquire critical capacities that may lead to a critique of extremist narratives, thereby decreasing their attractions. In this regard, the paper draws upon a range of theoretical ideas, for example, the hermeneutical tradition (in particular the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer), as well as historical and textual examples, to make a case for a rethinking of religious education to develop more critical capacities among the students. (shrink)

Societies concerned with preventing acts of violent extremism often target the ideas that are thought to motivate such acts. The state's use of educational institutions is one mechanism by which those ideas are subjected to challenge. Teaching liberal democratic values to students is one method. Here, David Stevens argues that this model is misguided. First, commitment to violent methods is not primarily driven by the attractiveness of radical ideas themselves, but by material facts and circumstances. Second, an education that ignores (...) the teaching of various socioeconomic values, such as a commitment to a certain degree of material equality and welfare provision, is inadequate as a conception of citizenship. These criticisms are related. Citizens are owed certain resources and commitments as citizens, and grounds for dissatisfaction and violence are reduced when citizens receive the holdings to which they are entitled, and when their fellow citizens recognize and endorse this. Consequently, it is the role of education to teach directively toward the adoption of such socioeconomic values and commitments. (shrink)

In the context of the recent revival of virtue ethics, the notion of character formation under the rational guidance of Aristotle's notion of phronesis, or practical wisdom, has been exalted as the principal aim of moral education. However, this is not unproblematic insofar as the promotion of Aristotelian phronesis seems to operate on rather different levels or to be ambivalent between the two rather different (and demonstrably separable) aims or goals of fostering reasonably sound deliberation and judgment concerning “right” or (...) good (moral or other) agency or action and the allegedly optimal (empirical) psychological ordering of cognition and affect to the end of good or commendable human character. In this paper, David Carr argues that while the first of these aims is by and large educationally acceptable and defensible, the second is neither a desirable nor coherent educational goal. (shrink)

In this article Julian Culp offers a new conceptualization of democratic citizenship education in light of the transformations of contemporary Western societies to which the use of digital technologies has contributed. His conceptualization adopts a deliberative understanding of democracy that provides a systemic perspective on society-wide communicative arrangements and employs a nonideal, critical methodology that concentrates on overcoming democratic deficits. Based on this systemic, deliberative conception of democracy, Culp provides an analysis of the public sphere's normative deficits and argues that (...) current political communication may be systemically distorted. Drawing on this analysis, he suggests that practices of democratic citizenship education in digitized societies must not concentrate narrowly on the effective and responsible use of digital technologies. Instead, these practices should also focus on the economic and cultural conditions that are co-responsible for the structural problems of political communication as well as address the democratic deficits that are reflected in inadequate communicative arrangements. (shrink)

Andrew Aberdein recently explored whether Aristotle held a (proto-)virtue argumentation theory, which would evaluate a good argument in terms of whether the arguers engaged virtuously. Aberdein admits, however, that connections between virtue, character, and argumentation are scarce within Aristotle's works. Accordingly, here Cassie Finley approaches this question from a different angle, comparing Aristotle's concepts of dialectic and rhetoric with virtue theories of argumentation. She argues that the essential features of dialectic and rhetoric are in tension with the defining characteristics of (...) virtue argumentation theories. However, this tension raises a deeper methodological tension within virtue argumentation theories regarding their “intuitive” conception of arguments. Finley outlines a more viable route forward for virtue argumentation theorists, one that dissolves this tension through reframing their project as a virtue dialogue theory. This shift toward dialogue would help to assuage the main objections to virtue argumentation theories regarding adversariality, incompleteness, and vulnerability to ad hominems. At the same time, developing toward a virtue dialogue theory better aligns with the intuitive sense of engaging well with others that defines the virtue argumentation project, and it also more fruitfully sets up the project to encourage future scholarship connecting virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, and philosophy of education. (shrink)

How might a theory of communicative rationality be applied to policymaking to secure the morally justifiable administration of public education? In answer, Darron Kelly uses conceptual resources found in Habermasian practical discourse to outline development of a survey instrument. The survey is designed to measure constituent satisfaction with actual conditions of educational policymaking. To do this, the survey operationalizes and quantifies the epistemic conditions of inclusion, participation, truthfulness, and noncoercion. Once captured, analysis of these conditions in actual cases of policymaking (...) further provides for assessment of the degree of communicative agency and rational trust experienced by educational constituents. The instrument, as such, offers a standard gauge of the higher-level intersubjectivity of institutional communication in education — a necessary measure for constructing morally justifiable policies. (shrink)

In this paper, Anniina Leiviskä examines the moral, political, and epistemic claims of the social justice movement known as “decolonizing the university” from the perspective of Jürgen Habermas's distinction between objective and normative validity and the respective notions of truth and moral rightness. Leiviskä challenges the view, held by some representatives of decolonization, that the normative and epistemic claims of the movement are inseparable from each other and suggests that evaluating the justification of the movement requires holding these claims at (...) least analytically distinguishable. She argues that while the moral and political claims of “decolonizing the university” find strong justification through Habermas's discourse morality, its epistemic claims, especially the rejection of shared standards of knowledge, might have epistemically problematic consequences. Accordingly, Leiviskä suggests here that the epistemic justification of decolonization is conditional on the acceptance of shared epistemic standards — the pragmatic truth concept and the criterion of impartiality — which she develops in the paper on the basis of Habermas's pragmatic theory of truth and rational discourse as a model of justification. Finally, she proposes that the implications of these criteria for practices of higher education and the curriculum should be determined through an open and unconstrained discussion by the members of an inclusive university community. (shrink)

The concept of indoctrination is typically used to characterize the actions of individual educators. However, it has become increasingly common for citizens to raise concerns about the indoctrinatory effects of institutions such as schools and universities. Are such worries fundamentally misconceived, or might some state of affairs obtain under which it can be rightly said that an educational institution is engaged in indoctrination? In this paper Christopher Martin outlines what the concept of institutional indoctrination could mean. He then uses Jürgen (...) Habermas's discourse theory in order to develop a specific conception of institutional indoctrination: an educational institution indoctrinates when it exercises its authority in order to support the deliberative norm that some belief P ought to be exempt from tests of or challenges to its truth or rightness just because it is belief P. Martin argues that this norm undermines conditions of symmetrical and inclusive public discourse essential to the development of knowledge and understanding among free and equal citizens. That is, institutional indoctrination involves a closing of the public mind. (shrink)

The guidelines followed by many educational boards recommend behavioristic practices for dealing with student discipline; however, Lawrence Kohlberg's idea of organizing schools as “just communities” suggests a more promising approach. It translates to the school context the core principle of Habermas's discourse ethics: those norms to which all concerned agree are valid. In such democratically organized schools, students engage in less violence and take greater responsibility for safeguarding each other's welfare. Public debates about rules and handling transgressions generate knowledge regarding (...) shared norms, promote role-taking abilities, and foster ego-syntonic commitment to democratic values. Such participatory experiences may contribute to constituting ego identity. Whereas identity politics relies on particularistic affiliations and emphasizes demarcations between social groups, ego identity is based on a commitment to universal moral values. This commitment allows individuals to develop and sustain a sense of coherence, continuity, and uniqueness, and it fosters democratic cooperation and social cohesion. In this article, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler provides empirical support for these claims. (shrink)

In recent years we have seen a newfound engagement with Jürgen Habermas's work in philosophy of education, focusing on his conception of argumentative dialogue, or discourse, as the origin of both truth-related epistemic judgments and justifications of moral norms that claim rightness rather than truth. In this article, Krassimir Stojanov first reconstructs the way in which Habermas determines the relation between truth and rightness, and he then shows that moral rightness functions as a “truth-analogue” since moral norms, like true facts, (...) transcend the actual and local practices of their justification. In the case of moral rightness, this transcendence occurs as an infinite process of inclusion of the perspectives and interests of all potentially concerned persons — also (and foremost) the perspectives and interests of those who are strange to each other in their respective values, worldviews, and interests. With this account of “truth-analogue” moral rightness, Habermas conceptualizes a kind of processual and “difference-sensible” universalism, which is very different from the substantialist universalism of some traditional conceptions of education, or Bildung. In the final section, Stojanov shows why including children in their otherness as children in the discursive process of production of moral knowledge, and thus treating them with a kind of epistemic respect, is a constitutive condition for that process. The demand for the discursive inclusion of children follows from the discourse ethics approach, but it requires an enlargement and some corrections of that approach. (shrink)

What is pedagogy, exactly? Merriam-Webster defines it simply as “the art, science, or profession of teaching.” In contemporary academic discourse, however, pedagogy is generally left undefined — with its apparent implicit meanings ranging anywhere from a specific “model for teaching” (e.g., behaviorist or progressivist instruction) to a broadly political philosophy of education in general (most famously, a “pedagogy of the oppressed”). In this paper, Norm Friesen and Hanno Su follow the Continental pedagogical tradition in giving pedagogy a general but explicit (...) definition. They do so by looking at how pedagogy arises both in everyday life and in school as unavoidably ethical activity undertaken primarily for the sake of the young person or child. Such activities, the authors maintain, are structured not so much by processes, methods, and outcomes, but by irresolvable oppositions and the tensions between them. They illustrate this inductively through a series of images and examples — moving gradually from ones involving parenting and early childhood to ones from elementary and secondary schooling. In this way, Friesen and Su show that pedagogy is not so much one or more ideologically focused or evidence-based instructional or psychological approaches to be mastered by a professional or teaching specialist. It is instead an independent but ethically informed practical perspective — one that can (and has) been extended to form a distinctively pedagogical theory and discipline. As such, it is something that is not only a part of our everyday life and culture, but arguably of all human cultures. (shrink)

Scholarly accounts of the training of pity in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile focus on how Emile's tutor activates the psychological mechanisms necessary for the feeling of pity in book 4 of the text. This account is inadequate, for it fails to show how Emile acquires the evaluative ability to make the judgment about who deserves pity as well as the willingness to adjudicate his own and others' interests. In this article, Wing Sze Leung argues that books 1 through 3 lay the (...) foundation by developing in Emile the attitudes and dispositions that guide him in his judgment-making about which kind of life he should pursue. Books 4 and 5 then develop Emile's ability to make interpersonal judgments of pity through habituated practice. By gradually cultivating Emile's sensitivity to the potential conflict between his self-interests and others' well-being, as well as the resolution to refrain from infringing on others' interests and to pursue the common good, Rousseau's long-term educational project molds Emile's disposition to act as justice demands. The article concludes with a brief response to some criticisms about Rousseau's educational project. (shrink)

In this paper, Sarah Stitzlein considers the consequences of honesty on our democracy, especially for citizens' ability to engage in civic inquiry together as they face shared problems. Honesty is a key component of a well-functioning democracy; it develops trust and fosters the sorts of relationships among citizens that enable civic dialogue and reasoning. Post-truth attitudes and truth decay pose serious obstacles to good civic reasoning as citizens struggle to draw clear distinctions between fact and opinion, weigh personal beliefs and (...) emotions over facts, and increasingly distrust traditionally respected sources of information. Stitzlein employs a Deweyan pragmatist account of truth and a distinctly social account of democracy to build a case for foregrounding honesty in the development of citizens. She describes how schools can employ communities of inquiry to cultivate habits of honesty within citizenship education. She explains how a better democracy — one grounded in a wider understanding of social life and relationships — might head off the temptation to be dishonest for self-serving reasons, focusing on how dishonesty jeopardizes our relationships to each other as citizens and our ability to engage in civic reasoning together to fulfill shared goals. (shrink)

In this paper, John Tillson defends an approach to deciding the aims and content of public schooling from the critique of Public Reason Liberalism. The approach that he defends is an unrestricted pairing of the Epistemic Criterion and of the Momentousness Criterion. On the Epistemic Criterion, public schooling should align students' credence with credibility. On the Momentousness Criterion, public schooling ought to include content that it is costly for children to lack the correct view about, where they are otherwise unlikely (...) to have it. Public Reason Liberals seek to restrict both the Epistemic and Momentousness Criteria to within a range that is acceptable to politically reasonable citizens. In response, Tillson argues, first, that the considerations that encourage Public Reason Liberalism instead motivate unrestricted versions of the Epistemic and Momentousness Criteria; and, second, that Public Reason Liberalism faces a dilemma, that it either entails absurd consequences or must undermine itself in addressing these. (shrink)

Nearly everyone recognizes the fact of deep pluralism: it is hard to deny that contemporary America is characterized by widespread diversity of beliefs, practices, and values. We disagree, not on this reality, but on the way we should respond to the pluralism around us. In this paper, Emily G. Wenneborg discusses one of the most common responses to pluralism in contemporary philosophy of education: autonomy-based liberalism. She praises liberalism for its attempt to navigate certain tensions that accompany its approach to (...) pluralism. At the same time, she raises several critiques of liberalism as a response to pluralism, particularly with regard to religious communities and belief systems. She suggests that trust provides a better framework than autonomy for educating in and for deep pluralism. (shrink)

In this article, Barbara Applebaum examines “the inability to disagree claim” as it arises in objections made by those who want to ban “critical race theory” from being taught in schools and universities. Employing insights from the recent scholarship around willful hermeneutical ignorance, she discerns the important role that marginalized conceptual resources play in conditions of just and constructive dialogue. When such resources are misinterpreted and denied uptake, the resulting harm impedes the epistemic agency of marginally situated knowers. Applebaum claims (...) that many high-profile anti–“critical race theory” arguments put forth by politicians, scholars, and others are a form of willful hermeneutical ignorance, and she concludes by showing how more just communications, in which disagreement is distinguishable from dismissal, can be achieved. (shrink)

In this article, Heather Greenhalgh-Spencer argues that deep listening is the foundational component of bridge-building; that it is deep listening that foments the trust and desire for action that undergirds our building of bridges. While “listening” is not a new topic, Greenhalgh-Spencer adds to the literature by expanding on what are the essential components of the kind of listening — which she calls “deep listening” — that can lead to ethical action, change, and connection. She identifies desire, care, acknowledgment of (...) difference, acknowledgment of power, and courage as the key components of this form of listening. Furthermore, she aims to provide concrete examples of how deep listening enables — in fact, is the primary foundation for — bridge-building. She begins the article by defining “deep listening” and then moves to an example of deep listening in action, one taken from the context of community-engaged partnerships — a type of bridge-building in which university faculty create partnerships with community members. In taking this approach, Greenhalgh-Spencer provides a clear illustration of the essential role deep listening plays in the ethical bridge-building process. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to set out the contours for a pedagogy of dissent, i.e., a pedagogical approach to religion that recognizes the role of dissent in bridging the conventional antagonism between religious and LGBTQ concerns for education. Seán Henry begins it with the view that a pedagogy conducive to this kind of work can be engaged with if the relation between education and religion is framed in radically conservative terms. From here, Henry inquires into the pedagogical commitments (...) necessary for dissent as a mode of bridge-building to occur. These commitments are (1) an orientation toward remembrance, understood less in terms of a commonality of religious identity and more in terms of a “structural condition of the present”; and (2) an embodied attention to the proximity of the other. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the nature of the pedagogical content that could be helpful in enacting these commitments. Henry suggests that pedagogies of dissent require theological content that (1) reworks past traditions, without justifying or downplaying their shortcomings; and (2) is explicit in its rejection of heteronormativity through a sensitivity to the lived experiences of LGBTQ people. (shrink)

Many on the contemporary Left assume that the Right has irrevocably taken control of cyberspace. Many believe that the terrain of online memetic discourse, from 4chan to Russian interference in the 2016 election via social media, is now the domain of trolls, fascists, and neo-Nazis. In this article, Gabriel Keehn argues against that assumption, tracing the ways in which the Right won the meme war and arguing for the educative and liberatory potential of a left counteroffensive in this still contested (...) space. (shrink)

How can we build a path from the binary of gender to the unity of common humanity? What kind of difference can the “different voice” of feminism make as a human voice? In this article, Naoko Saito argues that the way we talk about the difference of a “different voice” needs to be radically transformed. To envision a route to such a transformation, she explores an alternative possibility of feminism in the American transcendentalism of Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (...) First, Saito critically examines the politics of recognition and suggests a susceptibility to binary thinking in its approach. Second, as a way of transcending the binary mode of thinking, Saito introduces the humanist feminism of the nineteenth-century American transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Third, as a way of elucidating the radicality of Fuller's transcendentalist feminism, Saito introduces the feminine voice of two male philosophers — Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stanley Cavell — as her conversational partners. By radically converting the way we talk about difference of voice, the transcendentalist feminism of Fuller, Emerson, and Cavell provides a third way that lies beyond the politics of recognition and care ethics. In conclusion, Saito proposes that the cultivation of the feminine subject requires an alternative political education that resists assimilation into political realism. This would realize our common humanity and, in its crossing of divides between men and women, would create democracy from within. (shrink)

In this essay Sandra Vanderbilt explores philosophies of peace and protest through a dialectical reading of the works of Martin Luther King Jr., Daisaku Ikeda, and Paulo Freire, and considers these philosophies in relation to her own activism, specifically in the context of dealing with White postracial myths and more overt acts of racism. This essay outlines what she learned from her dialectical reading across several works by King, Ikeda, and Freire, and how these philosophies of peace and protest informed (...) the ways in which she has been able to initiate and sustain conversations across the chasm that separates her antiracist positioning from the stance of friends and family members who deny and enact racism and White supremacy. The three theorists Vanderbilt focuses on here all point to ongoing engagement among individuals as necessary to sustaining the collective. Drawing on their work, Vanderbilt suggests that we have to begin with a critical understanding of Whiteness in our efforts to engage someone, in radically loving acts, in confrontation with their own words and behavior. Opportunities for this sort of confrontation have the potential to bridge the conversational chasm and to open discussions wherein one can practice the virtue of justice, and importantly racial justice. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the affective dimension of epistemic injustice — specifically, the affective harms and burdens of epistemic injustice on individuals and groups — and examines how pedagogy may help disrupt the affective injustice that epistemic injustice entails. This theorization facilitates the ability to recognize that affective wrongs are not separate from epistemic wrongs but are instead embedded in them. Here, Michalinos Zembylas brings recent philosophical inquiry on affective injustice into conversation with considerations of epistemic injustice in order to (...) discuss how affect-related conceptions of epistemic injustice help education scholars to illuminate the entanglement of the epistemic and the affective in the wrongs of testimonial, hermeneutical, and other forms of epistemic injustice. His analysis outlines how some theoretical concepts concerning “affective goods” — including affective freedoms, affective resources, and affective recognition — have important pedagogical implications for the role educators can play in rupturing epistemic-affective injustices. (shrink)

How do educators talk about trauma with young children? Specifically, how do they address children's secondhand experiences of crimes against humanity? In this article, Cara E. Furman argues that classrooms for young children must witness these experiences. A genre of picture books that Furman terms “eavesdropping texts” offer testimony that both witnesses and invites children's secondhand experiences of crimes against humanity. Here, Furman couples a close reading of the books with literary criticism and trauma theory in order to showcase the (...) nuances of the genre and the pedagogical potential of eavesdropping books for young readers. (shrink)

In this essay, Soyoung Lee explores the theme of mourning as a way of attending to a fundamental aspect of human experience that is bound to negativity. The essay helps readers to see that experience in a different light by drawing on what is shown to be an internal connection between mourning and having language. The dominant culture of contemporary education is preoccupied with management and control, and this renders hollow the understanding of the negative experience children go through. Such (...) experience, if it is acknowledged at all, is regarded as requiring intervention and perhaps correction. Yet negative experience, as Lee tries to show, is the very source of personal growth. This is to take human experience as wounded, and the wound as the very place for the creation of our own words. A hasty approach toward an individual's suffering, whether in the name of “healing” or “knowledge,” becomes a suppression of voice. In its denial of the otherness within the self, it neglects the possibilities of self-transformation. The essay pursues these ideas through a reading of contrasting works of art: some poetry by Paul Celan (in conjunction with Jacques Derrida's response to it) and Still Walking, a film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Both artworks deal with their own wounds and words in ways that are instructive. (shrink)

This article develops a conceptual framework of the dynamics of trust between parents and professionals in early childhood education and care. In contemporary Western society, the heightened risk awareness with respect to early childhood has led to an increased focus on the collaboration between home and daycare. Mutual trust is a core aspect of this collaboration, resulting in a trust imperative. Drawing on Knud Eilar Løgstrup, Noomi Matthiesen, Paula Cavada-Hrepich, and Lene Tanggaard argue here that trust is a spontaneous, relational (...) phenomenon rooted in practice and emerging in a normatively structured order. They develop a conceptual framework of trust that has two dimensions: a basic dimension and a competence dimension. The basic dimension is connected to the willingness of the other to do what is good and right according to the normative order, while the competence dimension has to do with the ability to do so. The authors contend that, while trust is a spontaneous and sovereign phenomenon outside of individuals' control, parents and professionals in daycare perform in ways that are recognized as more or less trust-worthy. They also perform in ways that signal they are trust-ful. However, these conscious performances can paradoxically reduce the possibility of spontaneous trust. (shrink)

In an increasingly globalized world, empathy has been identified as a core competency of future global citizens and thus as an important skill to be fostered in global citizenship education (GCE). Despite this, however, what empathy is, and how it can play the pivotal role often claimed for it in the literature, have not been adequately explored. Here, Eirik Risberg argues that, pace the common conception of empathy, empathy should not be construed narrowly, as an affective concept, but broadly, as (...) a cognitive and epistemic concept. Drawing on recent work in philosophy and psychology, Risberg explores a suggestion that construes empathy as a complex self-directed perspective-taking of the situation of another. While this may constitute a conception of empathy that is more modest than the most ardent proponents of empathy would like, it has the benefit of avoiding the objections that have been leveled against empathy as a moral concept and thus allows us to maintain that empathy is a valuable skill to be cultivated in educating global citizens for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This essay opens on the streets of Rome in 2019 among displays of fascist relics, architecture, and memorial sites. Each display speaks to Italy's violent colonial and fascist history, one that continues to be entangled with and to overdetermine Italy's contemporary restrictive citizenship laws and anti-immigrant policies. Here, Paula M. Salvio turns to a psychoanalytic understanding of omnipotence, and to Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory, in order to pursue the half-spoken history of Italian fascism that is hauntingly absent from (...) Italy's public school curriculum, as well as from sites of public pedagogy such as museums, cinema, memorials, and social media platforms. This absence raises important questions about the ethical obligation education has to teach against omnipotence in conventional classroom settings and sites of public pedagogy. Salvio concludes with a reading of a socially engaged project, the Holocaust Memorial located in the Milan Central Railway Station on Platform 21, that is aimed at teaching against omnipotence. The memorial stands as a site of conscience that is committed to making visible what was hidden for years — the deportation between 1943 and 1945 of Italian Jews from the Milan Central Railway Station to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. (shrink)

In this article, Emil Sætra examines how teachers and students construct and experience aims and goods in classroom discussions of controversial issues. This study is situated within the emerging tradition of empirical ethics, and the research strategy comprised two main steps. First, Sætra used interview data to analyze, via the experiences of teachers and students, the following two empirical questions: (1) What goods normatively constitute educative discussions of controversial issues? (2) How are these goods constructed in time and space? Second, (...) in the concluding discussion, Sætra makes explicit some normative implications of the empirical findings and discusses theses in relation to previous research. In brief, what emerges from the conjoined experiences of teachers and students is the notion that practice comprises multiple aims and drives. Moreover, because aims and drives are multiple, decisions regarding priorities will sometimes have to be made, and teachers may be subject to conflicting expectations. This means that practitioners must be able to make reflective judgments about what comprises acceptable ends, what projects should be undertaken to achieve those ends, and what actions ought to be performed as part of those projects. (shrink)