ABSTRACT This paper invites us to reconsider our usual understanding of infancy, no longer as something that passes but as infantia. The Latin word infantia, which is not easy to translate, means a lack of speech, a lack of eloquence, and also infancy, babyhood, and dumbness. Drawing on Barbara Cassin’s works on the untranslatables, I propose to translate infantia, starting by not-understanding, and then by taking detours by different texts, in-between languages. Exercising translation allows us to expose ourselves to the (...) differences between languages. The exercise in translation that unfolds will help to challenge some familiar distinctions such as infant/adult and uneducated/educated. (shrink)

In recent decades, the shift towards the “learnification” of educational discourse has de facto reframed educational purposes and schooling practice, thus reframing what students should know, strive for, and, in a sense, be. In this paper, given the efforts to disrupt the dominance of learning discourse, I seek to engage regarding a specific concern, namely, the progressive removal of imagination within educational official framework. Indeed, imagination has virtually disappeared from the documents, publications, web pages and recommendations of major educational agencies (...) and institutions worldwide, with important and potentially damaging consequences for schooling, teaching and learning. Employing a Deweyan perspective, I argue that imagination plays a crucial role in the creation of pivotal educational features and phenomena, such as knowledge, inquiry, choice and deliberation, critical agency, meaning creation, and, importantly, the openness of possibilities. Therefore, the eclipse of imagination becomes, at the very same time, the eclipse of education; nurturing imagination is about nurturing education. (shrink)