From the observation that global education systems are failing to produce beaming adults, this article questions the meaning of the words generally used to discuss education and new teaching methods. Sidestepping the panacea of technology as the holy grail, it suggests ideas for exploring other possible educational forms, such as those guided by the renewal of humanism or neurosciences. Then, this article presents a model of understanding of man and his activities, leading to the conception of a work system that (...) makes the most of the evolution of contemporary sciences, such as transdisciplinary thinking and transpersonal psychology. It gives an example of a concrete organization in vocational training for future teachers and proposes an evaluation of five years of practices that have encouraged transformations towards individual and collective achievement. (shrink)

Researchers need the concept of agency to address diverse and urgent social problems of our time. Cultural-historical activity theory, originally started with Vygotsky, is widely used in education, psychology, sociology, and transdisciplinary contexts. Scholars and students in diverse disciplines will benefit from this volume.

Taking up Lemke’s (2000) critical questions of how moments add up to lives and social life, we articulate theoretical and methodological frameworks for _perezhivanie_ and becoming, challenging binaries that splinter entangled flows of _perezhivanie_ into frozen categories. Working from a flat CHAT notion of assemblage to develop an ontology of moments, we stress consequentiality, arguing it emerges in intersections of embodied intensities (not only affective, but also indexical, intra-actional, and historic), the dispersed bio-cultural-historical weight of artifacts and practices, and dialogic (...) resonances across moments. Methodologically, we take an ethico-onto-epistemological perspective to systematically study perezhivanie. The bio-ecological model of rich environments (centered around meaningful complexity, agency, and individual optimization) offers both a key framework for understanding becoming and a design framework for transdisciplinary realizations of ethico-onto-epistemological practice. We illustrate these frameworks with examples from four research projects: a university physics lab group doing and writing an experiment, a former pastor managing bipolar disorder and rejecting faith, a sustained social justice education program at a university, and intersections of aging policies, media representations, and stroke survival in Brazil. Finally, we argue that an ontology of moments centered on consequentiality can illuminate _perezhivanie's_ relationship to becoming and that the model of enriched environments offers metrics to assess and design environments. (shrink)

This book is not just about thinking or acting in transdisciplinary ways, but about being transdisciplinary. To achieve this requires a deconstruction of our current way of acting within the definition of being that others impose upon us. Transdisciplinarity is a phenomenological perspective of reality and its manifestation in the world in which we exist. The volume develops a widely based transdisciplinary understanding of the issues faced by higher education institutions and those who work within and with (...) these institutions to educate professionals. It incorporates international contributions from organisational theory, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, social sciences, philosophers and practitioners to create a volume that makes an important and distinct contribution to the literature on higher education and professional practice. "Transdisciplinarity provides one of our greatest challenges in higher education, both to the way it is organized and to the nature of the curriculum. This book is an important contribution to the debate about its implications." "Higher education is being challenged by the nature of knowledge and how it is organized-the world is transdisciplinary but out institutions are constrained by the disciplines. This book contributes to the important debates about the challenges transdisciplinarity provides to our institutions." Professor David Boud Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney. (shrink)

Finding solutions to complex health problems, such as obesity, violence, and climate change, will require radical changes in cross-disciplinary education, research, and practice. The fundamental determinants of health include many interrelated factors such as poverty, culture, education, environment, and government policies. However, traditional public health training has tended to focus more narrowly on diseases and risk factors, and has not adequately leveraged the rich contributions of sociology, anthropology, economics, geography, communication, political science, and other disciplines. Further, students are often not (...) sufficiently trained to work across sectors to translate research findings into effective, large-scale sustainable actions. During the past 2 decades, national and international organizations have called for more effective interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and translational approaches to graduate education. Although it has been difficult to work across traditional academic boundaries, some promising models draw on pedagogical theory and feature cross-disciplinary training focused on real-world problems, linkage between research, professional practice, community action, and cultivation of leadership skills. We describe the development the Doctor of Public Health program at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and its efforts to improve transdisciplinary and translational research education. We stress the need for international collaboration to improve educational approaches and better evaluate their impact. (shrink)

Contributing to a rising number of Critical Data Studies which seek to understand and critically reflect on the increasing datafication and digitalisation of governance, this paper focuses on the field of school monitoring, in particular on digital data infrastructures, flows and practices in state education agencies. Our goal is to examine selected features of the enactment of datafication and, hence, to open up what has widely remained a black box for most education researchers. Our findings are based on interviews conducted (...) in three state education agencies in two different national contexts, thus addressing the question of how the datafication and digitalisation of school governance has not only manifested within but also across educational contexts and systems. As our findings illustrate, the implementation of data-based school monitoring and leadership in state education agencies appears as a complex entanglement of very different logics, practices and problems, producing both new capabilities and powers. Nonetheless, by identifying different types of ‘doing data discrepancies’ reported by our interviewees, we suggest an analytical heuristic to better understand at least some features of the multifaceted enactment of data-based, increasingly digitalised governance, within and beyond the field of education. (shrink)

In the accompanying article contributed by Robert B. Lawson, proposals are made for revising the curriculum for doctoral students in biology in order to enhance a transdisciplinary awareness of biological science. The article is written mainly in the context of Dr Lawson's role as a scientist and educator in the United States. BioEssays will welcome articles along similar lines from educators in other countries. These should be sent to the Staff Editor, Dr Adam S. Wilkins.

The main goal of this article is to explain the transdisciplinary training model developed at the National University of Education in Ecuador, based on the ancestral worldviews of Buen Vivir. Good Living is a philosophical and political concept of the Kichwa indigenous peoples in the Andean Region, where human beings are interconnected with planet Earth and the whole cosmos. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its Constitution, in order (...) to face climate change and to restore the ecological footprint. This article first unifies scientific knowledge with ancestral wisdom, creating an inter-epistemological dialogue using a transdisciplinary approach. Second, the article explores the epistemological notions of transdisciplinary education: self-training, hetero-training, eco-training, and onto-training. Third, the article argues that as a result, Educational Sciences of Good Living emerged to design regenerative cultures that face socio-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene age. In sum, the article argues that training transdisciplinary educators implies an intercultural, decolonial, and biocentric approach that promotes their inner spiritual self-awareness, among other perceptive, affective, emotional, rhetorical, poetic, epistemic, creative, artistic, cognitive, and philosophical dimensions. (shrink)

This article applies change agency to the institutions of higher education in South Africa – referring here to all the post-school institutions and educators in general and more specifically focused on the unique opportunities and responsibilities towards change agency in theological training. The focus is on the characteristics of a change agent, which could be an individual or a group. Seemingly, change is not going to be initiated in a ‘top-down’ approach; therefore, this article suggests a ‘bottom-up’ approach, starting with (...) a change agent (an individual or a group) to become enthusiastic and active to bring about change. The method of constructivism is used, complemented by a general literature review of the past 70 years, filled with definitions of change agents and change agency. After the discussion of a few models, the researcher ventures to propose a way in which change agency can find a foothold among theological educators in higher education institutions in South Africa. (shrink)

How can we understand human agency, and what does it mean to educate character? In this essay Klas Roth develops a Kantian notion, one that suggests we render ourselves efficacious and autonomous in education and elsewhere. This requires, among other things, that we are successful in bringing about the intended result through our actions and the means used, and that we act in accordance with and are motivated by the Categorical Imperative. It also requires that we are or strive to (...) become virtuous and that we engage in moral reflection, and, furthermore, that actions are done for the sake of duty, that is, out of respect for the moral law. We accomplish such aims by developing our predispositions, namely the technical, the pragmatic, and the moral predisposition in a society. The extent to which we achieve this, Roth contends, demonstrates what we are prepared to make of ourselves. (shrink)

In this paper the authors take up James Marshall's work on the individual and autonomy. Their suggestion is that although the liberal notion of the autonomous individual might give us a standard of reference for the freedom of persons, the liberal tradition also circumscribes that freedom by prescribing it both as an attribute of persons and as a necessity for persons to exercise, in the form of choice, even though the range of choice is in fact limited. Starting from an (...) account of James Marshall and Colin Lankshear's respective work on the nature of the individual, and using Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau‐Ponty and others, they reintegrate the individual into society as it were, and finally, search for means of escape from the determinism of ‘governmentality’. Drawing on notions such as ‘technologies of the self’, hysteria and excess, integration of body and mind, individual and environment, subject and object, they describe the difficult, hesitant work of bringing existing parameters of thought and behaviour into consciousness. Some consequences for the relations of teachers and students within the school context are suggested. (shrink)

Traditional analytical philosophy of education assigns a peripheral place to physical education, partly because orthodox epistemology finds its cognitive claims implausible. An understandable but dubious response to this state of affairs is the attempt to relocate physical education within the academic curriculum, with its characteristic emphasis on theoretical knowledge and formal assessment. Dissatisfaction with this response suggests an analysis of physical activity in terms of practical knowledge or knowing how, but the results of this seem inconclusive. More recently, the development (...) of neurocomputational and embodied-cognition approaches in cognitive science appears to offer alternative ways of understanding motor skill and physical activity, and thus of rescuing physical education from its marginal status. But these strategies are not unproblematic, particularly where questions of personal agency and motor control are concerned. Examination of these issues prompts a radical reconsideration of the traditional problem of physical education, and consequently of some familiar assumptions in the philosophy of education. (shrink)

Derek C Meakin; Physical Education: an agency of moral education?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 241–253, https://d.

Democratic school systems are expected to equip students with the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes needed for life as citizens, particularly through social science education. Disciplinary knowledge, derived from the academic counterparts to school subjects, is essential in developing these skills. However, research has also emphasized the importance of life-world perspectives, where students’ experiences are included and taken seriously in teaching. This study suggests that the theory of (civic) narrative competence can function as a bridge between the disciplinary domain and the (...) life-world domain in its focus on how students’ civic reasoning can be developed through teaching. The article uses narrative theory to explore how the students’ civic narratives changed and became more nuanced after a teaching segment focusing on social and political trust. In the article, we demonstrate how the students’ personal experiences colored their interpretations and orientations before the teaching segment and how their civic narratives were developed through the implemented teaching, which provided them with concepts, a theoretical model, and empirical examples. We found that the students did not discard previous perceptions after the teaching segment, but integrated them into their new knowledge and orientations, thus integrating the life-world and disciplinary domains. (shrink)

Drawing on recent debates about the relationship between propositional and practical knowledge, this article is concerned with broad concepts of agency. Specifically, it is concerned with agency that involves the forming and putting into effect of intentions over relatively extended periods, particularly in work contexts (called, for want of a better term, ?project management?). The main focus of interest is thus not on ?know-how? in the sense of ability to perform types of tasks but on the ability to form and (...) carry through projects. Much, although by no means all, of the limited literature on this topic assumes that such abilities are largely independent of social interaction. This article will challenge that assumption. The article concludes with a reflection on the implications of an adequate account of project management ability for contemporary debates on the relationship between propositional and practical knowledge, and examines the implications for vocational and professional education that prepares people for this type of broadly based agency for their personal development. (shrink)

Theorising the interplay of structure and agency is the quintessential focus of sociological endeavour. This paper aims to be part of that continuing endeavour, arguing for a stratified social ontology, where structure and agency are held to be irreducible to each other and causally efficacious, yet necessarily interdependent. It thus aims not to be part of that on-going journey in search of the 'ontological holy grail'. Instead, it offers a way of linking structure and agency which enables the practical education (...) researcher concretely to examine their relative interplay over time. The methodological key to teasing out their relative interplay is held to be analytical dualism. It will be argued that such a methodological device is precluded by Giddens' structuration theory. (shrink)

An enduring concern for educational policy in many affluent countries is the endemic nature of educational inequalities that are predominately located in poor urban contexts. Given the inabilities of school reform per se to deal with these inequalities, the paper focuses on issues of scarcity and spatial processes that are implicated in the formation of young people's educational identities – identities that then mediate the conversion of educational resources into educational attainments or achievements.

In typical monotransitive verbs, such as "to touch," the patient is a passive recipient of action. In this paper, I discuss a special class of monotransitive verbs in which the patient is not, and cannot be, just a passive recipient of action. These verbs, such as "to educate," hinge on intersubjective experience. This intersubjectivity throws a wrench into classical descriptions of grammatical transitivity, transforming the recipient of action from a passive patient receiving the action into an active agent accepting the (...) action. As such, light is thrown on other "intertransitive" verbs and the experiences they describe, with special attention paid to education. (shrink)

This collection of essays brings together an international roster of contributors to provide historical insight into women’s agency and activism in education throughout from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Topics discussed range from the strategies adopted by individual women to achieve a personal education and the influence of educated women upon their social environment, to the organized efforts of groups of women to pursue broader feminist goals in an educational context. The collection is designed to recover the variety of (...) the voices of women inhabiting different geographical and social contexts while highlighting commonality and continuity with reference to creativity, achievement, and the management and transgression of structures of gender inequality. (shrink)

While calls to integrate ethics into computer science education go back decades, recent high-profile ethical failures related to computing technology by large technology companies, governments, and academic institutions have accelerated the adoption of computer ethics education at all levels of instruction. Discussions of how to integrate ethics into existing computer science programmes often focus on the structure of the intervention—embedded modules or dedicated courses, humanists or computer scientists as ethics instructors—or on the specific content to be included—lists of case studies (...) and essential topics to cover. While proponents of computer ethics education often emphasize the importance of closely connecting ethical and technical content in these initiatives, most do not reflect in depth on the variety of ways in which the disciplines can be combined. In this paper, I deploy a framework from cross- disciplinary studies that categorizes academic projects that work across disciplines as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary, depending on the degree of integration. When applied to computer ethics education, this framework is orthogonal to the structure and content of the initiative, as I illustrate using examples of dedicated ethics courses and embedded modules. It therefore highlights additional features of cross-disciplinary teaching that need to be considered when planning a computer ethics programme. I argue that computer ethics education should aim to be at least interdisciplinary—multidisciplinary initiatives are less aligned with the pedagogical aims of computer ethics—and that computer ethics educators should experiment with fully transdisciplinary education that could transform computer science as a whole for the better. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 72, Issue 1, Page 47-64, February 2022.

This paper argues that the impact of individual higher education institutions’ strategies on system diversity should be explored. By looking at how universities respond strategically to governmental policies as well as to the actions of other (competing) institutions, our understanding of determinants of diversity can be enriched. A conceptual framework focusing on institutional positioning is explained using the dimensions deliberateness of organizational actions versus environmental influence, on the one hand, and differentiation versus compliance, on the other. We posit institutional positioning (...) as the mechanism through which organizational and environmental levels are linked. Our model features multiple dimensions and relations reflecting how higher education institutions locate themselves in specific niches, i.e. positions where they are able to gather the necessary resources for their core activities. The implications for research on diversity and for policymaking are discussed. (shrink)

In her book Experience Embodied Anik Waldow devotes a chapter to “Locke’s Experimental Persons.” Her chapter aims to show how Locke’s views on persons, personal identity, and moral agency in his Essay concerning Human Understanding build on his esteem-based approach to education that he develops in Some Thoughts concerning Education. After outlining main contributions that Waldow makes in her chapter, I turn to three issues that in my view deserve further consideration. First, I draw attention to the question of how (...) Locke’s esteem-based education can be reconciled with his moral views in the Essay. I propose that the question of how children become persons or moral agents who see their actions bound by divine law is worth examining with more detail. Second, I contrast Waldow’s interpretation of what a Lockean action is with an alternative interpretation and show that this has implications for how we understand the role of consciousness in Locke’s account of persons and personal identity. Third, I take a closer look at Waldow’s view that consciousness has an epistemic function in Locke’s account of persons and personal identity and highlight advantages of also acknowledging a metaphysical function of consciousness. (shrink)

This paper argues that the agency/structure dichotomy thatpredominates in racism discourse is problematic because itobscures how racism is produced and resisted at the local sitesof relations between individuals and between individualsand institutions. Racism permeates social relations,ensured by `knowledge' and guaranteed through self-regulation. Resistance to racism requires arecognition of racism's `local' character. As aresult, educators, particularly in classrooms,play important roles in resistance-practices.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

As the hospice movement continues to grow, caregivers are increasingly required to interact with dying patients for longer periods and in more intimate and more meaningful ways. Practical models of competent and compassionate communication and understanding need to be developed to accommodate the changing environment of the patient and caregiver and their relationship. We therefore: examine current death education trends in hospice care and education; and describe the need for a more expansive and transpersonal view, and ways of fulfilling that (...) need. The aware patient and the aware caregiver can learn much during the dying trajectory. We hope that someday the potential for expansiveness during the dying trajectory will be more commonly recognized and accommodated as a doorway to the transpersonal. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas argues that principles of justice should be decided through rational agreement as opposed to force or coercion. Christopher Martin argues in this essay that the success of such a project presupposes sufficiently developed capacities for discursive agency equally distributed within a diverse public sphere. This epistemic presupposition is not explicitly recognized in Habermas's current formulation of his theory and as such the theory implicitly excludes the interest that future citizens have in the development of their own capacities for (...) competent deliberative engagement. Martin argues that this omission is serious enough that Habermas's principle of universalization should be modified, and he articulates this modification in terms of a prohibition against “developmental coercion.” Martin concludes by elaborating on the concept of developmental coercion, and he points to the implications of this addition to discourse ethics for the institutionalization of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Ethically significant consequences of artificially intelligent artifacts will stem from their effects on existing social relations. Artifacts will serve in a variety of socially important roles—as personal companions, in the service of elderly and infirm people, in commercial, educational, and other socially sensitive contexts. The inevitable disruptions that these technologies will cause to social norms, institutions, and communities warrant careful consideration. As we begin to assess these effects, reflection on degrees and kinds of social agency will be required to make (...) properly informed decisions concerning the deployment of artificially intelligent artifacts in important settings. The social agency of these systems is unlike a human social agency, and this paper provides a methodological framework that is more suited for inquiry into artificial social agents than conventional philosophical treatments of the concept of agency. Separate aspects and dimensions of agency can be studied without assuming that agency must always look like adult human agency. This revised approach to the agency of artifacts is conducive to progress in the topics studied by AI ethics. (shrink)

An enduring concern for educational policy in many affluent countries is the endemic nature of educational inequalities that are predominately located in poor urban contexts. Given the inabilities of school reform per se to deal with these inequalities, the paper focuses on issues of scarcity and spatial processes that are implicated in the formation of young people's educational identities - identities that then mediate the conversion of educational resources into educational attainments or achievements.

Teacher emotion, an important aspect of language teacher psychology, has recently drawn growing attention in language teacher development studies. Previous research has shown that language teachers, typically pressured by heavy workloads, may face emotional challenges from multiplied sources, especially in the context of educational changes such as curriculum reform and the COVID-19 emergency. Current literature on teachers’ emotions largely centers around ordinary language teachers, with teacher leaders whose agentic actions often exert greater influence on the effectiveness of educational changes rarely (...) examined. Situated in a top-tier research university that has been promoting an English for Academic Purposes reform to enhance its science students’ multilingual competence in academic contexts, this longitudinal case study tracked the emotional trajectory of an English teacher, Lea, for 5 years. Adopting an ecological perspective, our study confirms that language teachers’ emotions vary across the reform ecosystems and extends the current inquiry by conceptualizing the intricately interrelated teacher emotion, agency, power, and identity as dynamic constructs. This study also reveals how the reform-inflected emotional changes were associated with Lea’s EAP teacher and teacher leader identity construction, with both identities reinforcing each other, which to some extent reconciled Lea’s emotional tensions. Our study bears significant implications for language teachers involved in educational reform, teacher leaders, and school administrators. (shrink)

In Badges and Incidents, Michael J. Kaufman undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation of American education law and pedagogy. By weaving together the invaluable insights of law, education, history, political science, economics, psychology, and neuroscience, this book illuminates the ways in which the design of the American educational system does not reflect how human beings live and learn. It examines the principles of the nation's Founders and demonstrates how a distorted presentation of the Founders' views curtailed the development of a truly democratic (...) educational system. The influence of this distortion on several critical Supreme Court decisions is exposed, and these decisions have largely failed to facilitate the educational system the Founders envisioned. By placing contemporary challenges in context and endorsing social constructivist pedagogy as the best path forward, Kaufman's study will prove invaluable to advocates of equity in education, helping them navigate a contentious political climate with an eye toward future reform efforts. (shrink)

In South Africa, the majority of the population suffers from the inadequacy of learning opportunities and poor access to the higher education system. This causes the widening of the knowledge gap and increased socio-economic marginalisation, which threatens community agency. Critical knowledge created by academics at South African higher education institutions often culminates in access-controlled, costly scientific publications, thus limiting public access. On the other hand, because of the distance between universities and communities, community knowledge and intelligences are never fed back (...) into the university to enrich scholarship and enhance relevance. This paper explores the need for higher education to be freed from its elitist captivity in order to widen access to knowledge that would enhance community agency and revitalise academic agency for social change. The paper starts with a discussion on the need for change in the elitist nature of higher education. I will recount how essential shifts in thinking and action created the Chance 2 Advance programme hosted by the largest provider of higher education on the continent, the University of South Africa. This programme was designed in an attempt to re-vision academic scholarship for the benefit of the poor. Chance 2 Advance is an engaged scholarship and community-learning programme designed to bring communities and academics closer, in a mutual and reciprocal process of knowledge creation and knowledge mobilisation for social change. The programme has been replicated in urban and rural areas with success. At the end of 2018, the programme is poised to reach 100 000 participants, since its inception in 2010. (shrink)

In this paper the authors take up James Marshall's work on the individual and autonomy. Their suggestion is that although the liberal notion of the autonomous individual might give us a standard of reference for the freedom of persons, the liberal tradition also circumscribes that freedom by prescribing it both as an attribute of persons and as a necessity for persons to exercise, in the form of choice, even though the range of choice is in fact limited. Starting from an (...) account of James Marshall and Colin Lankshear's respective work on the nature of the individual, and using Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau‐Ponty and others, they reintegrate the individual into society as it were, and finally, search for means of escape from the determinism of ‘governmentality’. Drawing on notions such as ‘technologies of the self’, hysteria and excess, integration of body and mind, individual and environment, subject and object, they describe the difficult, hesitant work of bringing existing parameters of thought and behaviour into consciousness. Some consequences for the relations of teachers and students within the school context are suggested. (shrink)

Abstract:One of the themes that runs through Dewey’s Experience and Education is an argument to the effect that education aims at self-control. The details of this argument reveal close affinity between Dewey’s philosophy of education and the ideals of the Enlightenment. They are also strikingly similar to John Locke’s thoughts about freedom and education published in the seventeenth century. Comparison of their texts shows that Dewey and Locke worked with similar distinctions between positive and negative freedom. They both saw freedom (...) and guidance as compatible, and conceived of self-control as dependent on autonomy-friendly habits instilled through education. (shrink)

Preview: In this essay, drawing on the case of Australia in particular, we develop the argument of “schools for democracy” as part of communities that prioritize developing people’s civic agency for human flourishing. We begin with the concept of social capital – norms, values, and practices of trust and reciprocity essential to vibrant civic life and healthy democratic society – and discuss social capital’s decline in recent years as well as its relationship to what we call public work. Declining social (...) capital and growing demands for politicians and experts to “fix things” turn citizens into spectators, largely devoid of responsibility for addressing public challenges like AI and erode hope for the future. Here, we concentrate mainly on a specific danger related to this dynamic that threatens the cultural and social foundations of democracy and is directly connected to schools and their potential for addressing the danger: In the context of declining community life, social media and other digital platforms shaped by AI can spread an “us-versus-them” mindset that feeds polarization and inflamed divisions, far beyond the formal electoral system. (shrink)

In this short essay I express my own deep sympathy with Nel Noddings’s ethic of care and applaud her stubborn resistance in Happiness and Education to what John Dewey would have called false dualisms, such as those between intelligence and emotion, theory and practice, or vocation and academic studies.However, I question whether the sort of caring relation she depicts so beautifully in this and many other books is sufficiently robust to alone carry the weight of the moral life that she (...) supports, and whether her suspicion of community, while sounding important cautions, does not leave us with an ethical vision that is too thin to deliver the sort of education she prescribes. To this end, I argue that she judges Victor Frankl’s conception of freedom too harshly and his response to human suffering with an uncharacteristic lack of charity. Following well-known communitarian arguments of MichaelWalzer and CharlesTaylor I suggest that some account of a situated human agent who can choose freely to enter into relation is necessary to sustain the role of caring in education that has been Noddings most significant philosophical contribution. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of the quantification of higher education by introducing a theoretical framework for power relations and agency within this process. Instead of treating evaluation regimes as external and imposed on the sector, it argues for a relational approach to the problem of exercising power over the higher education sector through means of evaluation. To develop such an approach, the article draws on two sources: Guy Neave’s account of the evaluative state and Bob Jessop’s strategic–relational approach (SRA) (...) to the state. By using the latter to further develop our understanding of the logic under which the evaluative state operates, the article offers a general framework for inquiring about the conditions that shape power relations and impact the degree of agency at the disposal of the actors involved in the evaluative state. For this purpose, the article operationalises the six general dimensions of the state developed on the grounds of the SRA in the context of the evaluative state. In turn, to demonstrate its heuristic value, the article refers to the emergence of the evaluative state in Poland and how scholarly communication was quantified and made commensurate in this process. (shrink)

Employability has developed into a key component of the policies of higher education institutions worldwide, whereby students convert into consumers and knowledge morphs into a marketable co...

The human relation to things in the world is at stake in the so-called post-humanist era where the distinction between human and non-human is blurred, as indicated in a term like ‘the nano-self’. How should we understand the nature of our relation to things in this era? Or how can we describe an educationally meaningful relation we as human agents can make in relation to things, artificial and natural, in the face of this technologically hybrid and ever-dehumanizing tendency of society? (...) Well-known for his actor-network theory, Bruno Latour, an influential materialist and philosopher of technology, says that ‘objects’ have agency as much as humans; so we need to be able to translate the language of things into the language of men or vice versa as a way of co-shaping the world we live in. What does this mean and how can we do so? In carefully examining his theory, the essay attempts to explore and reformulate his account of the mediating role of human agency to see if it can provide us with an educationally plausible post-humanist concept of human agency, which can lead us into an ecologically ethical and politically responsible approach to education in general, and science education in particular. (shrink)

Our EcoDialogue Center is an educational space for human sustainability within the University of Veracruz. We propose that creating sustainable knowledge requires re-thinking how we conceive ourselves as human beings. This requires paying attention to what we call “the quality of being,” which means caring about and attending to the physical–emotional–mental–spiritual as the foundation of education. This way we can create a space where we can dialogue contemplatively where all dimensions of our lives interact; the physical, the emotional, the communitarian, (...) the social politic, the planetarium, and the spiritual being act with social–environmental responsibility. (shrink)

The novelty of the article is related to the use of the resources of the philosophy of transdisciplinarity to justify the relevance and heuristic importance of the concept of "Mathetiks", introduced by the Czech pedagogue-humanist Jan Amos Comenius (Komensky) to refer to practices of self-education. The aim of the article is to use resources of the philosophy of transdisciplinarity to justify the relevance and heuristic importance of the concept of "Mathetiks", introduced by the Czech pedagogue-humanist J. A. Kоmensky three centuries (...) ago to distinguish and establish coordination in the unified educational process of pedagogical practices of teaching and self-learning of students. The modern interpretation of the ideas of mathetiks (on the example of the problems of bioethical education) is carried out with the implementation of the concepts of the philosophy of science Th. Kuhn and R. Merton in the context of post-nonclassical studies. The notion of "paradigmatic syndrome", which arises as a result of philosophical reflection on the peculiarities of the formation of the post-classical matrix of the development of modern scientific knowledge, is introduced. One of its defining factors is the conceptualization and institutionalization of processes to ensure continuity of knowledge (education) and constant innovative changes taking place in society. The most adequate form of philosophical and methodological reflection in this situation, according to the author, is the philosophy of transdisciplinarity as an integrating mechanism not only of the disciplinary knowledge, but also of education and innovation, the necessary components of the social system aimed at self-renewal. The philosophy of transdisciplinarity and the philosophy of education have in many ways similar paradigm structures, oriented target cause of the actor on self – education -mathetiks. The target specifies the reason for the project-based nature of the paradigmatic constructs in education and bioethics. First of all, this is the clarification of the problem field, training and teaching to act in it according to the existing rules and the creative nature of project activities. Orientation to the value priorities of the community expressed both in symbolic generalizations and implicit forms (M. Polanyi) of personal knowledge and practice. (shrink)

Over a decade after publication of Thinking Again: Education After Postmodernism (1998) contention still emerges among Foucaultians over whether discursively made‐up things really exist, and whether removal of the constituent subject leaves room for agency within techniques of caring for the self. That these questions are kept alive shows that some readers have not rethought Foucault, finding what possibly comes after postmodernism. Using Wittgenstein to ‘reciprocally illuminate’ Foucault (after Tully and Marshall), I open teacher inspection and reforms to problematization, as (...) relations to bedrock rules governing games of truth. ‘How, upon entering classrooms, do inspectors know “teaching” is taking place and not crazy and fuzzy things in its name?’ Taking up Hirst's vexing question, I move beyond liberal‐analytic concept‐mapping and neo‐liberal individualism to more fully assay the political ground for judging teaching practices through genealogy. Epistemological, political and ethical concerns intersect as we approach the problem through Foucault's three axes of an historical‐ontology of the present: knowledge(s), power relations, and arts of the self. Drawing on recent Governmentality Studies in Education (Peters., 2009), we aver the impasses of postmodern relativism while finding limited ranges of agency along each axis, as teachers practice freedoms by critiquing and renegotiating rules. (shrink)