13 research outputs found
Ethics in Teaching for Democracy and Social Justice
In this essay, I offer provocations toward an ethics of teaching for democracy and social justice. I argue that while driven by compelling macro social and political visions, social justice teachers do not pay sufficient attention to the moral dimensions of micro, classroom-level interactions in their work. I begin by describing social justice education. I then discuss the ways in which social justice educators have talked about issues of ethics in their work in terms of broad political visions, and in response to resistant students and charges of liberal bias. I illustrate gaps in these efforts, particularly in relation to work in teacher ethics. I end with some ethical considerations for activist teachers, framed in three area of virtue and offer examples of a powerful ethical habit related to each virtue
Building and Sustaining Hope. A Response to âMeaningful Hope for Teachers in a Time of High Anxiety and Low Moraleâ
In this essay, I respond to Carrie Nolan and Sarah M. Stitzleinâs article âMeaningful Hope for Teachers in a Time of High Anxiety and Low Moraleâ and support their argument for meaningful hope grounded in pragmatist philosophy. I agree that while hope is routinely called for in the educational literature, it is often done so in superficial and vacuous ways. Moreover, hope is often conflated with wishful thinking or naive optimism. A pragmatist vision of hope is different. It is a hope that compels us to act thoughtfully and creatively in the present so as to open up yet unimagined possibilities for the futureâa hope that is generative, resourceful, engaged, and communal. To complement Nolan and Stitzleinâs vision, I argue that pragmatist hope also requires of us habits of community building and social and political activism to challenge unjust systems. Only when we act on both individual and systemic levels can we sustain the kind of pragmatist hope that is so necessary in schools
Learning How to Hope: Reviving Democracy through Our Schools and Civil Society by Sarah M. Stitzlein. Oxford University Press, 2020
Cultivating Democratic Hope in Dark Times: Strategies for Action
In this essay, I reflect on the need for an activist notion of hope as an antidote to the social, political, and educational challenges we face in our current times. I first discuss some of these challenges as well as emergent signs of hope based upon different ways of telling the stories of our present. I then define hope as a way of being and intervening in the world, as opposed to a personal character trait or optimistic demeanor, and discuss some enemies of hope. In the heart of the essay, I discuss four important habits of hope that can be cultivated and taught in schools: storytelling, creativity, mindfulness, and community building. I end by discussing ways in which schools can help cultivate the kinds of democratic, critical, and activist forms of hope that can buoy and sustain us in dark times, as well as transform our world
Philosophy of education in a new key:future of philosophy of education
What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars
and thinkers in this final âfuture-focusedâ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futuresâ
plural and multipleâof the intersections of âphilosophyâ and
âeducation?â What is âPhilosophyâ; and what is âEducationâ, and what role
may âenquiryâ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracingâor at least taking seriouslyâand thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that
âFutureâ? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this
collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose (and do not categorise under
forced headings) diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We
have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these
philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and
ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially âstrange and
unusual bedfellowsâ. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and
how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the
future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is
embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experienc