Here I shine light on the concept of and call for safe space and on the implicit argument that seems to undergird both the concept and the call, complicating and problematizing the taken for granted view of this issue with the goal of revealing a more complex dynamic worthy of interpretive attention when determining educational response. I maintain that the usual justification for safe space covers rather than clarifies the logic of safe space and makes it difficult for an educator (...) to respond to harassment in a constructive and fitting way. I also claim that calls for safe space can only be properly interpreted—and responded to—when the link between fear and safety is uncovered and deconstructed. In the process, I note that the assumption of “safety” as a “positive condition” for education is problematic and warrants careful consideration. (shrink)

Here I craft a case for recognizing the roots and patterns that ground the possibility of contemporary com-posting—as outlined in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble—by New Materialists and critical pragmatists, especially those who are affected by the social injustices and ill-advised practices of today’s formal education. I explore both Spinozan Ethics and American pragmatism in order to fashion a pattern that affects educational thought and action. That pattern of affect/affecting is one Haraway calls “attunement”, a state of co-relation that (...) makes “unexpected feats possible.” My goal is to encourage those educational theorists who dwell in a critical pragmatist archive and those who dwell in a New Materialist archive to “make kin,” to learn to play string figures with a companion species, as they com-post educational possibility in a world where agency is both more limited and more widely-distributed. (shrink)

We humans laugh often and it is not always because something is funny. We laugh in the face of the pathetic or the powerless; sometimes we laugh at our own powerlessness or pathos.In short, we laugh at both the comical and the difficult. Here I am especially interested in the laughter that is sparked by what is difficult and how that laughter—and all laughter—breaks through to mark a range of emotional states: fear, nervousness, shame, confusion and others not viewed as (...) positive, as well as joy, delight, interest, relief and other states that are viewed as positive. I also am interested in understanding what and how laughter reveals and what and how it conceals. As I explore both interests in this article, I make a compound point about laughter in educational settings: that laughter marks a breakdown of experience and that same laughter creates space for reflective listening and thinking, for diffusion of difficult affect, and for the disruption of habit that makes growth possible (and even likely) if that laughter is taken seriously. (shrink)

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things.""I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."In the wake of the November 2016 presidential election, countless commentators recognized what Richard Rorty knew in 1998, that the U.S. democratic system would crack under the weight of social and economic inequalities and inequities— (...) and that those cracking the safe would be not the historically marginalized but the historically privileged. Hear Rorty nearly 20 years ago: [M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled... (shrink)

At present, the structures, practice, and discourse of schooling are anchored to a “commercial spirit” that understands students, educators, and parents as economic operators trading competitively in human capital and to a discourse of failure that is disabling those who seek to understand and enact John Dewey's notion of education as democratic practice. Here Barbara Stengel illustrates both the commercial spirit in public schools and the discourse of school failure across two geopolitical settings: Shanghai, China, and urban U.S. schools. She (...) argues that framing the educational enterprise in terms of economic success and failure makes it difficult for educators to address Dewey's vision of democracy and education substantively. Stengel concludes with an acknowledgment that, regardless of putative political commitments, these two public school systems are schooling — though not often educating — the same neoliberal subject, but that Dewey's vision of democracy and education nonetheless remains critical and compelling. (shrink)