Reviving Social Hope and Pragmatism in Troubled Times.

Review of: Pragmatism and Social Hope: Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts. Judith M. Green. New York, Columbia University Press, 2008. Pp. x 1 292. Hbk. $34.50, d24.00. This article commends Judith Green for reviving pragmatism as a persuasive basis for deepening democracy in her latest book Pragmatism and Social Hope. It highlights her criticisms of neopragmatist Richard Rorty and describes the useful directives she provides for developing a unifying and mobilizing hopeful vision for the future. Finally, it spells out the educational implications resulting from Green’s inspiring call to participatory democracy

Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism. [Review]

Review of: Shannon Sullivan, Living across and through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. 204 pp

The National Research Council Recommendations: Education as Intervention?

The National Research Council’s (NRC) recent report, Scientific Research in Education, issues an important call for increased scientific rigor within educational research. There is more at stake in the question of how to achieve good, scientific educational research than just science and how it can best be done in a community of educational researchers, however. The meaning and aims of education itself are at issue. I set out here to delineate the implicit conception of education underlying the NRC report, namely education as intervention. I will show how the committee conceives education as an instrumental intervention for solving social problems and achieving specific predetermined goals. Importantly, this understanding of education allows certain approaches to scientific research to rise to the top as most trustworthy and valuable. Specific methodological approaches to studying education, particularly causal analysis by random experiment, logically follow as recommendations for examining education as intervention. Suggesting that educationists may not agree on this premise, I draw attention to one recently emphasized alternative, the postmodern notion of education as bildung. I will show how education as bildung is incompatible with NRC proposals for scientifically studying education. This alternative and the lack of consensus on the best conception of education calls into doubt the generalizability and legitimacy of NRC supported research

The Demands of Liberal Education. [Review]

Oxford-trained liberal theorist and practicing teacher, Meira Levinson, offers a well-articulated argument for her vision of the ideal liberal education in The Demands of Liberal Education. Particularly helpful for those of us who struggle to convey the aims of liberal education to our children and students, she provides an eloquent explanation as she describes her ideal school and the steps necessary for its realization: The aim of liberal education is to teach children the skills, habits, knowledge, and dispositions for them to be thoughtful, mature, self-assured individuals who map their path in the world with care and confidence, take responsibility for their actions, fulfill their duties as citizens, question themselves and others when appropriate, listen to and learn from others, and ultimately lead their lives with dignity, integrity, and self-respect—i.e. to be autonomous in the fullest sense of the word (1999, p. 164). As her words paint a portrait of an educated individual, we can see that it is colored by autonomy, a central tenet throughout her work

See no evil, hear no evil, stop no evil: How do we uncover and combat the loss of educational opportunity for American poor?

In my position paper, I will urge Americans to fulfill the promise of equal educational opportunity and to avoid further entrenchment of the cycle of poverty. Some residents of largely homogeneous New Hampshire tend to be less knowledgeable about issues of racial resegregation, because racial difference is rarely seen and cries of racial inequality are not heard. Additionally some view social class struggles as a problem of remote northern NH or of particular dilapidated cities in the south. My paper will combat these shortsighted views by foregrounding the pervasive lack of educational opportunity for local poor. This will initiate conversation between students and faculty who must be prepared to live in increasingly stratified areas. This paper will also alert citizens to the punitive effects of tax-funded laws, like No Child Left Behind, which are closing down failing schools in poor areas, further abandoning poor children. Finally, it will point toward collective ways in which these problems can be overcome and will highlight relevant coursework as a starting point for concerned students

Replacing the ‘View from Nowhere’: A Pragmatist-Feminist Science Classroom.

ABSTRACT Despite the importance of having an appropriate, coherent, and defensible philosophy of science, many science teachers have either given this part of their profession little thought or adhere to problematic and outdated philosophies. This article begins by tracing a brief history of the view from nowhere and its adoption by many teachers as the epistemological framework for teaching science. This conception of objectivity and its corresponding philosophy of science are shown to be problematically masculinist, disembodied, and aperspectival. Within this discussion, a new notion of pragmatist-feminist objectivity, as the socially conscious intersection of multiple and diverse perspectives in regard to the lived world, is developed. Finally, suggestions are offered on how this type of objectivity and larger understanding of science could be used in both the pedagogy and curriculum of the science classroom

Political Agency and the Classroom: Reading John Dewey and Judith Butler Together.

In Toronto last year, several PES members joined a panel session to discuss “agency after Foucault.” Many philosophers of education, in the wake of Foucault and other recent poststructuralists, often struggle to make sense of agency, intention, and the individual subject, particularly within social justice education. Some participants in this session and others challenged certain assumptions about human subjects as autonomous, self-made, efficacious agents of social and political change, many of which were held by the pragmatists whose work largely began and continues to influence our field. In many cases, the views of pragmatists and poststructuralists are stubbornly opposed to one another. In this essay, however, I suggest that constructing an amalgam through dialogue between them offers solutions to particular problems within each tradition, especially in regards to agency. John Dewey and Judith Butler, significant philosophers within each tradition, show considerable similarity as well as important points of difference in their theories of agency. The fruitfulness of reading them together has largely been overlooked, and I offer here such a reading as a contribution to the philosophical struggle that continues from last year’s conference. I will describe each theory separately before showing how, when taken together, each theory rescues the other from certain pitfalls, and a more robust vision of agency and political change through education is formed. I will end by highlighting some educational implications that follow from the resulting view

Performing Life Stories: Getting By in Teaching for Social Justice

Response to Philosophy and the Art of Teaching for Social Justice by Kathy Hyttenn. Philosophy of Education, 2006. pp 441-449

Fifty Years of Equality?

Fifty years after the Brown decision monumentally drew issues of equality to the fore, equality continues to occupy the theorizing of educational philosophers, the practice of teachers, and the decisions of judges. Within the past year, questions regarding race and schooling, including the intention to eliminate racial inequality, were raised once again in Grutter v Bollinger, the case of a disgruntled white law school applicant who suspected that she was denied admission based upon the criteria of race. In this article, I will trace the history of equality as a concept, a working goal, and an educational right over the past fifty years in PES’s house journal, Educational Theory. This benchmark journal offers a unique opportunity to better understand equality as debated within a specific context of scholars and also exposes the attempts and inadequacies of this journal to fully address the issue. Within the journal, however, I extend my concern with equality to include issues of class and gender, suggestive of the multiple and changing ways in which the topic has been engaged over the years. I recognize, however, that the dynamics unique to each category vary and that none should be entirely collapsed into the other. The Congressional equality reports of the 1960s, the women’s movement of the 1970s, and affirmative action movements within more recent decades, have provoked changes in the philosophical understanding of equality. It has been recast in terms of numerical distribution, equal educational opportunity, inclusiveness of difference, equality of resources, and equality of educational outcomes, just to name a few. I aim to elucidate these changes here in hopes of conveying the significance of the Brown decision, the complexity of the concept, and the pressing task of eradicating problematic inequalities that linger within our schools