Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end I (...) take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries. (shrink)

This short paper responds to the essays by Shilpi Sinha, Shaireen Rasheed, and Lyudmila Bryzzheva. It considers how racial inequality between teachers and students affects the possibilities of educational hospitality, both in cases of white teachers teaching racialized students and in cases of racialized teachers teaching white students. The response takes a phenomenological turn, considering the relative vulnerability of bodies that encounter each other in educational spaces which, themselves, are not neutral.

This essay examines the concepts of ‘professionalism’ and ‘ethics’ as they are used in health professions education and, in particular, medical education. It proposes that, in order to make sense of the construct of ‘professional ethics,’ it would be helpful to conceive of professionalism and ethics as overlapping but not identical spheres. By allowing for areas of professionalism that are not directly pertinent to ethics, and areas of ethics that are not directly pertinent to the professional sphere, ‘professional ethics’ as (...) a focus of medical education can come into sharper relief. The essay argues that professional ethics should be understood not only in relation to major ethical issues such as end-of-life decisions, but also in relation to everyday actions and decisions. The essay ends by raising questions about how and by whom professional ethics is best taught. (shrink)

In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase 'ways of knowing', which, for linguistic and conceptual reasons, confuses discussions about epistemological diversity. I here expand this inquiry by considering languages in which more than one equivalent exists for the English verb 'to know'. French, for example, (...) has both savoir and connaître , and German has wissen and kennen . This interlinguistic translation thus allows for a reconsideration of the inquiry into the phrase 'ways of knowing': do problems arise with 'ways of knowing-in-the sense-of connaître ', or with 'ways of knowing-in-the-sense-of savoir ', or both? Displacement is, more generally speaking, a method used by philosophers. Shifting the concept or phenomenon under consideration into a different context or discursive register allows one to defamiliarise it and see it in terms of something else. Through translation, whether interlinguistic or interdiscursive, philosophers ask what questions and understandings become possible when we see A in terms of B. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the concept of disposition is often unclear in teacher education programs, sometimes referring to general personal values and beliefs, and sometimes referring to professional commitments and actions. As a result, it is unclear whether teacher education programs should focus on selecting the right kind of person, or on educating the student for a profession. I suggest that a clearer distinction should be made between predispositions (value commitments that a person may or may not act (...) upon) and professional dispositions (characteristics attributed to a person based on actually observed actions), and that teacher education programs should focus their attention on the latter, not the former. The question is not whether student-teachers have the ?right? personal beliefs but whether, if the dispositions required by the profession are at odds with their personal beliefs, the former will override the latter. (shrink)

The perceptibility and intelligibility of queer students and teachers have been a central theme in queer politics in education. Can queer teachers be ‘out’ to their colleagues and students? Can queer relationships be seen at the school prom? Can queerness be seen and heard? At the same time, perceptibility and intelligibility are by no means uncontested political goals. This paper analyzes different school initiatives by and/or for queer students and asks how political these initiatives are from the perspective of Jacques (...) Rancière's conception of politics. In particular, it employs Rancière's work on the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (partage du sensible) to analyze conditions of visibility and sayability and the political risks and benefits that gaining visibility and sayability carries for queer students and teachers. The paper brings Rancière's distinction between identification and subjectification into conversation with Judith Butler's work on the governing of intelligibility by social norms, and the promise of ‘insurrectionary speech’. Finally, Rancière's work on the role of allies in political interventions that shift the distribution of the sensible provides a fresh reading of Gay‐Straight Alliances in schools and the work of queer allies more generally. (shrink)

In recent years the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has addressed the predicament of artists and curators who, in their eagerness to convey a critical message or engage their viewers in an emancipatory process, end up predetermining the outcomes of the experience, hence blocking its critical or emancipatory potential. In this essay I consider Rancière’s writing on this topic and draw out the parallels with the predicament of teachers and curriculum designers who have critical and emancipatory objectives. The risk of education (...) that strives for emancipation is that it can become so directive in steering students to the “right” outcomes that it does not leave these students any intellectual room. Rancière’s work is helpful in reminding us that teachers and curricula with explicitly critical, political, emancipatory objectives can defeat their own purposes and become stultifying if they do not leave the student room to use her or his own intelligence. (shrink)

(2008). B Is For Burqa, C Is For Censorship: The Miseducative Effects of Censoring Muslim Girls and Women's Sartorial Discourse. Educational Studies: Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 17-28.

In this review essay, Claudia Ruitenberg discusses Trevor Norris's Consuming Schools, René Arcilla's Mediumism, and Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit. While the primary focus of each book is different — with Norris concentrating on the pressures of consumerism and commercialism on K–12 schooling, Arcilla analyzing modernist art and existentialist education, and Nussbaum emphasizing the role of the humanities in educating for democratic citizenship — each of the books in some way addresses the question of how people can be (...) educated to resist consumerism and how education itself can resist being absorbed by consumerism. Here, Ruitenberg considers this common theme as well as the more specific question of what special role — if any — the arts might play in anticonsumerist education. (shrink)

This essay argues that there are educational situations in which interlocutionary misbehaviour in the form of withholding ‘good will’ can have educational value. It describes an exchange between a teacher and a student in which the teacher withheld good will, and analyzes this exchange through conceptual frameworks of performative contradiction and differend, provided by Derrida and Lyotard, respectively. It further analyzes how context, power, and ethical considerations affect the evaluation of instances of interlocutionary misbehaviour. The essay ends with the ironic (...) observation that even in cases in which refusing to extend good will to one's interlocutor is educationally pertinent, good will is not absent from the exchange altogether. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Visibility's Vicissitudes The Distribution of the Sensible Identification and Subjectification How Political is ‘Coming Out’? Queer as the New Proletarian? Allies and Alliances Conclusion Notes References.

This handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education combined with an up-to-date selection of the central themes. It includes 95 newly commissioned articles that focus on and advance key arguments; each essay incorporates essential background material serving to clarify the history and logic of the relevant topic, examining the status quo of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discussing the possible futures of the field. The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of philosophy (...) of education, covering a range of topics: Voices from the present and the past deals with 36 major figures that philosophers of education rely on; Schools of thought addresses 14 stances including Eastern, Indigenous, and African philosophies of education as well as religiously inspired philosophies of education such as Jewish and Islamic; Revisiting enduring educational debates scrutinizes 25 issues heavily debated in the past and the present, for example care and justice, democracy, and the curriculum; New areas and developments addresses 17 emerging issues that have garnered considerable attention like neuroscience, videogames, and radicalization. The collection is relevant for lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of education as well as for colleagues in teacher training. Moreover, it helps junior researchers in philosophy of education to situate the problems they are addressing within the wider field of philosophy of education and offers a valuable update for experienced scholars dealing with issues in the sub-discipline. Combined with different conceptions of the purpose of philosophy, it discusses various aspects, using diverse perspectives to do so. Contributing Editors: Section 1: Voices from the Present and the Past: Nuraan Davids Section 2: Schools of Thought: Christiane Thompson and Joris Vlieghe Section 3: Revisiting Enduring Debates: Ann Chinnery, Naomi Hodgson, and Viktor Johansson Section 4: New Areas and Developments: Kai Horsthemke, Dirk Willem Postma, and Claudia Ruitenberg. (shrink)

Addressing studying as a distinct educational concept and phenomenon in its own right, the essays in this volume consider study and studying from a range of perspectives. Countering dominant educational discourses, which place a heavy emphasis on learning and instruction, the contributors explore questions such as: What does it mean to study something? How is studying something different from being taught about it, or learning something about it? What does the difficulty demanded by study mean for the one who studies (...) and for the teacher? What mode of existence does study induce? The book highlights the significance of study not only, or even primarily, for its educational outcome, but as a human activity. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

It is possible to raise and solve philosophical problems with no very clear idea of what philosophy is, what it is trying to do, and how it can best do it; but no great progress can be made until these questions have been asked and some answer to them given ( Collingwood, 2005 , p. 1).

In response to Helmut Heid's critique of domesticated philosophical critique, I focus on the metaphor of domestication, which is central to his article. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, I offer a deconstructive critique of the opposition between domesticated and undomesticated critique, arguing that a clear conceptual demarcation between the two is impossible, and that ‘domesticated’ and ‘undomesticated’ critique always carry each other's traces. I explore connections between the undomesticated and das Unheimliche (Freud's ‘Uncanny’), as well as differences between (...) Helmut Heid's and Paulo Freire's interpretation and use of the concepts of ‘domestication’ and ‘liberation’. Lastly, I examine how educators might go about a pedagogy of critique. I argue that critique can and should be understood and taught as a tradition, but one that is heterogeneous rather than monolithic. A careful reception of this translated and metonymic tradition of critique will enable students to see the spaces in which new critique—and critique of critique— is possible. (shrink)

Based on the experiences of one of the authors teaching philosophy for children in Iran, the paper asks whether respecting children's rationality, in the form of cultivating their ability and disposition to think critically, is in their best interest in an authoritarian context such as Iran. It argues that, in authoritarian contexts, respect for children's capacity for rational thought must be balanced with responsibility for their safety in their community. In other words, children's ‘best interest’ must consider children both as (...) individuals and as members of communities. The paper proposes that P4C should be used not only to teach analytic critical thinking and foster a ‘critical spirit,’ but also to help students develop the practical wisdom to judge where, when, and how best to use these skills and dispositions. (shrink)

Based on archival research, this article analyses the pedagogical gestures in Derrida's (largely unpublished) lectures on hospitality (1995/96), with particular attention to the enactment of hospitality in these gestures. The motivation for this analysis is twofold. First, since the large-group university lecture has been widely critiqued as a pedagogical model, the article seeks to retrieve what may be of worth in the form of the lecture. Second, it is relevant to analyse the pedagogy of lectures that address the topic of (...) hospitality, as there would be a performative contradiction in teaching inhospitably about hospitality. (shrink)

In this article, Claudia Ruitenberg argues that the debate for or against instrumentalism in education is less fruitful than (a) a debate about the ends worth striving for, regardless of whether education is the best means to that end; and (b) a debate about the educational practices that are currently valued in and of themselves, regardless of whether these will turn out to serve other ends in the future. Using examples from visual art and examining arguments for and (...) against “art for art's sake” and “education for education's sake,” Ruitenberg argues that education designed for instrumental purposes is already infected by a certain uselessness, while education that supposedly serves no purpose outside of itself “suffers” from a certain usefulness. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that solutions to normative challenges associated with autonomous driving, such as real-world trolley cases or distributions of risk in mundane driving situations, face the problem of reasonable pluralism: Reasonable pluralism refers to the fact that there exists a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive moral doctrines within liberal democracies. The corresponding problem is that a politically acceptable solution cannot refer to only one of these comprehensive doctrines. Yet a politically adequate solution to the normative challenges (...) of autonomous driving need not come at the expense of an ethical solution, if it is based on moral beliefs that are (1) shared in an overlapping consensus and (2) systematized through public reason. Therefore, we argue that a Rawlsian justificatory framework is able to adequately address the normative challenges of autonomous driving and elaborate on how such a framework might be employed for this purpose. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Interlinguistic Translation Distance and Defamiliarisation Translation and the Human Condition Interdiscursive Translation What Is a Good Translation? Application and Translation Translating ‘Relevance’ Notes References.

This chapter contains sections titled: What is to be Gained? What is to be Lost? This Volume Acknowledgements Notes References.