Education and knowledge have never been more important to society, yet research is segmented by approach, methodology or topic. Legitimation Code Theory or ‘LCT’ extends and integrates insights from Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein to offer a framework for research and practice that overcomes segmentalism. This book shows how LCT can be used to build knowledge about education and society. Comprising original papers by an international and multidisciplinary group of scholars, _Knowledge-building_ offers the first primer in this fast-growing (...) approach. Through case studies of major research projects, Part I provides practical insights into how LCT can be used to build knowledge by: - enabling dialogue between theory and data in qualitative research - bringing together quantitative and qualitative methodologies in mixed-methods research - relating theory and practice in praxis - conducting interdisciplinary studies with systemic functional linguistics Part II offers a series of studies of pressing issues facing knowledge-building in education and beyond, encompassing: - diverse subject areas, including physics, English, cultural studies, music, and design - educational sites: schooling, vocational education, and higher education - practices of research, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment - both education and informal learning contexts, such as museums and masonic lodges Carefully sequenced and interrelated, these chapters form a coherent collection that gives a unique insight into one of the most thought-provoking and innovative ways of building knowledge about knowledge-building in education and society to have emerged this century. This book is essential reading for all serious students and scholars of education, sociology and linguistics. (shrink)

In this age of multiculturalism, global travel and terrorism, it is vital that citizens be inculcated with the fundamental values of democracy and equipped with the cognitive skills to further those values. Plato critiqued the democratic character for its potential selfishness and lack of civic engagement---this was true in ancient Athens and is still true today. Using a primarily philosophical but also an interdisciplinary approach, I discuss the historic and social contexts of moral education in democracies both ancient and modern. (...) My topic contributes to this inquiry about democratic education by discussing Virtue Ethics and Communitarianism, with attention to empirical matters as dealt with in Sociology and Psychology. This dissertation explores the Neutral Liberalism-Communitarian debate about moral education to explicate current social and educational circumstances, both theoretically and practically. I propose a model for teaching morality based on self-knowledge, without a traditional religious grounding, without competing with religious authority, resorting to dogma, or indoctrination. I draw on the works of Plato, Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William James, Charles Taylor and others, supporting my proposals with current research from Social Cognitive Psychology. Research in Psychology has shown that some ways of thinking about the self are more efficacious and functional than others. By grounding moral education in self-knowledge and virtue theory, we can ensure the preservation of our democracy by improving the ability of our citizens to reason well about personal, practical and political matters. (shrink)

This book will appeal to sociologists, educationists and higher educators internationally and to students on sociology of education, curriculum and policy ...

Abstract‘Raising aspirations’ for education among young people in low socioeconomic regions has become a widespread policy prescription for increasing human capital investment and economic competitiveness in so-called ‘knowledge economies’. However, policy tends not to address difficult social, cultural, economic and political conditions for aspiring, based in structural changes associated with globalization. Drawing conceptually on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Arjun Appadurai and authors in the Funds of Knowledge tradition, this article theorizes two logics for aspiring that (...) are recognizable in research with young people and families: a doxic logic, grounded in populist–ideological mediations; and a habituated logic, grounded in biographic–historical legacies and embodied as habitus. A less tangible third ‘logic’ is also theorized: emergent senses of future potential, grounded in lived cultures, which hold possibility for imagining and pursuing alternative futures. The article offers a sociological framework for understanding aspirations as complex social–cultural phenomena, and for capacitating emergent and hopeful aspirations through school- and community-based research and dialogue. (shrink)

This review essay evaluates Karl Maton's Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education as a recent examination of the sociological causes and effects of education in the tradition of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu and the British educational sociologist Basil Bernstein. Maton's book synthesizes the scholarship of Bourdieu and Bernstein and complements their work with “discoveries” from the world of systemic functional linguistics to produce a new “realist sociology of education.” It does so (...) by means of Legitimation Code Theory, defined as a “toolkit” to analyze knowledge construction in cultural fields, especially education. The authors of this review essay take a polyphonic approach in assessing this ambitious synthesis, offering four perspectives on Maton's book. Brian Barrett provides a Bernsteinian perspective; Dan Schubert approaches the book from his grounding in Bourdieu; and Susan Hood contributes a view from systemic functional linguistics. Michael Grenfell weaves these three perspectives together and provides introductory and concluding reflections. They aim, through their combined expertise, to use Maton's book as an occasion to take stock of the state of the field of sociology of education generally and to reflect on the questions: What is its nature and what type of knowledge does it express? To what uses may it be set and what is its place within the larger project of educational theory? (shrink)

From teaching content and the social, cognitive and linguistic aspects of education, to changes in the political climate in the early twenty-first century, this ...

The World Wide Web is often touted as a way to distribute expertise, thus decentering knowledge creation and dissemination. However, conceptualizing ex pertise as multiple does not sufficiently problematize the unitary expertise model that considers expertise as something held by someone (the "expert") and trans ferred to someone else (the "novice "). The author makes the claim that expertise has been primarily theorized by various psychologicalframeworks; these ways of conceptualizing expertise are largely ignorant of the ways that they position (...) the student as a passive receptor of knowledge and do not fully allow for the problematization of the nature of knowledge. Recon ceptualizing expertise then would require movingfrom a narrowly construed psychological conception of ex pertise to a notion of expertise more sociological in character. This article explores conceptualizations of expertise within some dominant psychological frame works. The author explores how the new information technologies compel a reexamination of these notions of expertise. (shrink)

This article focuses on some of the central issues of philosophy of education, such as the problem of acquisition of knowledge, the essence of human potential, the question of the foundation for a viable upbringing, and social dimensions of education. The article discusses one of the key problems of the global world - the problem of man considered in all complexity of the XXI century that presents serious challenges to human sustainability through predictable and unpredictable extreme events of the (...) environmental, social and political nature. (shrink)

This book explores the development of practical wisdom, or phronesis, within the stories of four mature students studying for degrees in art and design. Through an analysis informed by the ideas of Basil Bernstein and Aristotle, the authors propose that phronesis – or the ability to deliberate well – should be an intrinsic part of a democratic education. As a number of vocational and academic disciplines require deliberation and the ability to draw on knowledge, character and experience, it is (...) essential that no student feels their experience puts them at a disadvantage. The authors argue that democratic education should allow each participant to feel enhanced, included and able to participate in order to create a constructive and reciprocal dialogue. This work will be of value to students and scholars interested in democratic education, the experiences of non-traditional students, and the sociology of education. (shrink)

Situating Karl Mannheim in a tradition of critical social philosophy, Iaan Reynolds argues that Mannheim’s early explorations in the sociology of knowledge offer a novel approach to this tradition, since they emphasize the need for social research to cultivate the critical self-awareness of social researchers.

Knowledge Societies offers both a critical examination of existing social theory, and a new synthesis of social theory with the actual study of knowledge relations in advanced economies. Some of the elements explored are scientization: the penetration not only of production but of most social action by scientific knowledge; the transformation of access to knowledge through higher education; the growth of experts (managers, accountants, advisors, and counselors) and of corresponding institutions based on the deployment of specialized (...) knowledge; and a shift in the nature of societal conflict from struggles about income and property to claims and conflicts about generalized human needs. Nico Stehr's argument amply demonstrates not only that all social theories now need to take into account the changing nature of social relations around knowledge, but also the parameters within which this analysis should take place. This book is essential reading for all those interested in social theory, sociology of knowledge and science, and the general issue of knowledge in the late 20th century. (shrink)

The book focuses on the status and role of social sciences in the current millennium. It critically examines the key debates on the social sciences and focuses on their ir/relevance in our times, especially in background of the changing state-market dialectics. It scrutinises knowledge politics of the global times by exploring how the neoliberal project aligns and fuses steep economic 'conditionalities' with professional cultural parameters of higher academia in order to constrain autonomy and weaken radical expressions in social science (...) pedagogy and research. Asserting that the humanistic core of social sciences has the potential to resist acts of reducing knowledge to a monochromatic form the book argues that social science stream can challenge and resist such hegemonic ambitions. It also identifies and analyses the contradictions, dilemmas, predicaments and false steps of social scientists and avoids a reductive approach based on the 'west versus non-west' binary. The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of the social sciences in general, and in the sociology/politics of knowledge, political theory, political sociology, and education in particular. (shrink)

A volume in Educational Leadership for Social Justice Series Editor Jeffrey S. Brooks, University of Idaho, Denise E. Armstrong, Brock University; Ira Bogotch, Florida Atlantic University; Sandra Harris, Lamar University; Whitney H. Sherman, Virginia Commonwealth University; George Theoharis, Syracuse University The purpose of this book is to examine and learn lessons from the way leadership for social justice is conceptualized in several disciplines and to consider how these lessons might improve the preparation and practice of school leaders. In particular, (...) we examine philosophy, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, public policy, and psychology. Our contention is that the field of educational leadership might consider taking a step backward in order to take several forward. That is, educational leadership researchers might re-examine social justice, both in terms of social and individual dynamics and as disciplinary-specific, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary phenomenon. By adopting this approach, we can connect and extend long-established lines of conceptual and empirical inquiry and thereby gain insights that may otherwise be overlooked or assumed. This holds great promise for generating, refining, and testing theories of social justice in educational leadership and will help strengthen already vibrant lines of inquiry. That is, rather than citing a single, or a few, works out of their disciplinary context it might be more fruitful to situate educational leadership for social justice research in their respective traditions. This could be carried out by extending extant lines of inquiry in educational leadership research and then incorporating lessons gleaned from this work into innovative practice. For example, why not more clearly establish lines of educational leadership and justice research into the Philosophy of Social Justice, Economics of Social Justice, Political Studies of Social Justice, Sociology of Social Justice, Anthropology of Social Justice, and the Public Policy of Social Justice as focused and discrete areas of inquiry? Once this new orientation toward the knowledge base of social justice and educational leadership is laid, we might then seek to explore some of the natural connections between traditions before ultimately investigating justice in educational leadership through a free association of ideas as the worlds of practice and research co-construct a "new" language they can use to discuss educational leadership. Such an endeavor may demand reconceptualization of both the processes and products of collaborative research and the communication of findings, but it will demand a breaking-down of methodological and epistemological biases and a more meaningful level and type of engagement between primary and applied knowledge bases. (shrink)

"The Knowledge Book" is a unique interdisciplinary reference work for students and researchers concerned with the nature of knowledge. It is the first work of its kind to be organized on the assumption that whatever else knowledge might be, it is intrinsically social. The book consists of 42 alphabetically arranged entries on key concepts at the intersection of philosophy and sociology - what used to be called "sociology of knowledge" but is now increasingly called (...) "social epistemology". The entries include concepts common to disciplines that in recent years have devoted more of their attention to knowledge: cultural studies, communication studies, information science, education, policy studies and business studies. Special attention is given to concepts from the emerging field of science and technology studies. Each entry presents a short, self-contained essay providing an overview of a concept and concludes with suggestions for further reading. All the entries are fully cross-referenced, allowing readers to both make connections and follow their own interests. (shrink)

I seek to answer the question of whether publicly funded higher education ought to aim intrinsically to promote certain kinds of ‘‘blue-sky’’ knowledge, knowledge that is unlikely to result in ‘‘tangible’’ or ‘‘concrete’’ social benefits such as health, wealth and liberty. I approach this question in light of an African moral theory, which contrasts with dominant Western philosophies and has not yet been applied to pedagogical issues. According to this communitarian theory, grounded on salient sub-Saharan beliefs and practices, (...) actions are right insofar as they respect relationships in which people both share a way of life, or identify with one another, and care for others’ quality of life, or are in solidarity with each other. I argue that while considerations of identity and solidarity each provide some reason for a state university to pursue blue-sky knowledge as a final end, they do not provide conclusive reason for it to do so. I abstain from drawing any further conclusion about whether this provides reason to reject the Afro-communitarian moral theory or the intuition that blue-sky knowledge is a proper final end of public higher education. I do point out, however, that the dominant Western moral theories on the face of it do no better than the African one at accounting for this intuition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.4 (2004) 32-45 [Access article in PDF] Ernst H. Gombrich, Pictorial Representation, and Some Issues in Art Education Nanyoung Kim Introduction This essay will deal with different ways of conceptualizing pictorial representation in art education and their implications. The philosophical issues involved in pictorial representation have fascinated philosophers since the time of Plato and Aristotle. In the first half of the twentieth century, the (...) issue of representation became a centerpiece of various theories among art historians in an attempt to explain representational styles of non-Western cultures that were vastly different from Western styles, and also in order to reinterpret less-valued Western styles that had deviated from the Classical and Renaissance traditions. In recent years, the field of aesthetics has seen a resurgence of interest in the issue, probably because of the demise of Formalism and the returning interest in representation among postmodernists.In art education, interest in pictorial representation has been limited to research on children's drawing (mostly unsolicited drawing) and to the alleged benefits of drawing activity on children's emotional and cognitive development. To understand art images made by adult artists, especially in the Western tradition, art educators must refer to art history or aesthetics. For non-Western images, an anthropological or sociological approach seems appropriate because, more than Western images, they seem to demand knowledge about the culture in which they originated. Art education therefore does not have one comprehensive model of pictorial representation to encompass all these different kinds of images.For more than a decade, the dominant theory of children's pictorial representation in art education has been a symbolic model, and it thrived and is thriving in the context of ever-growing cognitive claims on art. Replacing the long-held creative self-expression model of Viktor Lowenfeld of the 1960s and 1970s, the advocates for this model advanced their theory based on Nelson Goodman's symbolic interpretation of pictorial representation.1 [End Page 32] While their theory illuminated what had not been revealed by the previous creative self-expression model, its long-held dominance in the field lends it an aura of self-evidence and authority.My aim in this essay is to reintroduce Ernst H. Gombrich's theory of pictorial representation in order to balance the dominant theory and to provide a broad perspective for viewing children's drawings and adults' art images together.2 Despite its potential contribution to art education, Gombrich's theory has not been adequately interpreted for art educators. When Gombrich's theory was introduced in art education in the past, he was treated, along with Goodman, as a prime advocate of the concept of representation as a convention. His attention to cultural, psychological, biological, sociological, and art historical dimensions of pictorial representation has never been fully explored by art educators. Gombrich was first and foremost an art historian and theorist of art history of solid classical scholarship, but he was also a cultural historian equipped with extensive knowledge of diverse fields such as cognitive psychology, ethology, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of science. He was truly a scholar with an interdisciplinary penchant, which makes it difficult for his readers to categorize him. In addition, his elusive writing style tends to limit access to his theory.In this sense, Leslie Cunliffe's recent reintroduction of Gombrich's theories to art education is notable.3 Cunliffe covered the whole gamut of Gombrich's theories, including that on representation, by contextualizing him as a Social-Constructivist, and he expounded many potential benefits that art educators may gain through understanding and adopting his theories. My scope will be narrower than Cunliffe's. I will deal with Gombrich's theory of representation insofar as it illuminates the nature of children's drawings and other art images and helps us understand them within a coherent system. The order of discussion will be as follows: first, the linguistic model derived from Goodman and its continuing influence on art education; second, Gombrich's theory of pictorial representation, including his discussions of the conventional and biological aspects of... (shrink)

In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from (...) structures beyond their control? If both of these explanations are true, poverty experts will need to shift their focus to a hitherto under-theorized concept: coercion. I defend this claim by appealing to distinct areas of philosophical inquiry: social epistemology and moral theory. Poverty knowledge is directly related to both of these inquiries. The aim of poverty knowledge is clearly moral: to reduce suffering and to empower the weak. While the former aim is grounded in utilitarian thinking, the latter aim is grounded in the social contractarian insight that poverty is unjustly coercive, imposing excessive limits on the opportunities and choices of the poor that render them vulnerable to domination by others. Equally obvious is the social nature of poverty knowledge. All knowledge depends on the reliable testimony of others. Poverty knowledge not only ostensibly offers us the most reliable, scientific beliefs about the causes and effects of poverty, thereby determining how we morally judge the poor and their poverty, but it reciprocally bases its understanding of poverty on what the poor themselves have to say about it. What unites both social epistemology and moral theory – at least the social contract variants I will be examining here – is concern about the limits and possibilities of rational choice. As poverty knowledge came of age in the fifties and sixties, it absorbed the language of rational choice prevalent in economics, especially the Keynesian economics whose moral underpinnings can be found in Rawlsian social contract theory. Echoing a different economic theory supported by a different, more libertarian, brand of social contract theory, poverty expertise in the eighties continued to use an abstract model of rational choice. I submit that, in both early and later epochs of poverty expertise, reliance on rational choice reasoning prevented poverty experts from appreciating the coercive impact of poverty on the poor. Social epistemology explains this failure by demonstrating the poverty of rational choice thinking and its mistaken reliance on inflated commonsense expectations about the capacity of individuals to calculate their long-term interests, free from the distortions of social bias. Social epistemology not only exhibits the dangers of not relying on expert testimony, but it also exhibits the dangers of relying on an unreliable source of expert testimony that has removed itself from its human subject matter. In order for poverty experts to become more reliable educators about poverty’s coercive impact on the poor they must return to their discipline’s social epistemological roots. Only a more descriptive and explanatory sociology can narrate a comprehensive story about how the lived experience of poverty relates to the larger social system. The social contractarian model best suited to underwriting this kind of poverty knowledge, I submit, is the discourse theoretic model that has been championed by Jürgen Habermas. When applied as a pedagogical method of dialog and not as a social contractarian model of rational normative consent, discourse theory highlights the unique epistemological advantages of empathetic understanding that are so essential to dispelling stereotypes about the poor. Dispelling these stereotypes is the first step toward respecting the poor as free agents who are nonetheless forced to make suboptimal choices. My defense of these claims proceeds as follows: Part One argues that poverty expertise rightly deserves the opprobrium critics have heaped on it. The charge – leveled by progressives and conservatives alike - that such expertise is ideological is true to the extent that poverty knowledge has all-too-easily accommodated the political aims of the agency that has funded it: the federal government. The shift from the war on poverty to the war on the poor – and the resulting shift from blaming poverty on economic structures to blaming it on the culture of poverty – would not have been possible without an increased emphasis on data gathering aimed at measuring poverty rather than describing it. Part Two assesses the consequences of turning away from qualitative research to statistical analysis: the coercive nature of poverty becomes invisible beneath the surface of aggregate individual choices. The failure to grasp how voluntary choices, ostensibly based on rational, self-interested calculations, can be coerced by social structures - and thereby lead to sub-optimizing behavior – invites the conclusion that the poor have only themselves to blame for their misery. Part Three suggests that this pathologization of the poor directly controverts the major aim of poverty research: to empower the poor as free and equal parties to the social contract. I argue that the different varieties of social contract theory that have justified poverty expertise over the last forty years – the welfarist model pioneered by Rawls and the market-based model defended by Nozick – embrace the same rational choice models favored by poverty experts and so conspire with the latter in neglecting important dimensions of poverty-related coercion. While the welfarist model conceals the coercive nature of bureaucratically administered entitlement programs and top-down urban renewal policies, the market-based model conceals the coercive nature of economic class structures. The discourse-theoretic alternative proposed by Habermas endorses a populist, democratic response to the overly abstract rational choice assumptions embedded in these other models. Despite this advance over its counterparts, the chief advantage of discourse theory for poverty knowledge, I submit, resides less in its proposed procedure of rational collective choice than in its heuristic as a dialogical method of social learning. I demonstrate this claim in Part Four, where I turn to the social epistemological insights of Allen Buchanan. Social epistemology offers a much needed corrective to theories of knowledge that rely on the reasoning capacities of isolated individuals. By stressing the connection between moral response and social belief, on one hand, and the dependence of social belief on epistemic authorities, on the other, social epistemologists suggest ways in which we can learn to distinguish reliable from unreliable authorities and become aware of our own error-prone cognitive proclivities. Their insights need to be supplemented by moral epistemologists who stress the affective dimension of knowledge, above all, the role that empathy plays in understanding the plight of others. Drawing from victim narratives, Diana Meyers shows that switching between first-person experiences of one's own and third-person reconstructions of others' experiences is essential to appreciating the gravity of human rights violations and the seriousness of human rights claims. It goes without saying that such empathy is just as essential to understanding the plight of the poor. Meyers mainly has in mind empathetic understanding that has been facilitated by third-person observation and literary encounter, but the importance of visceral and corporeal representation suggests that face-to-face dialog may sometimes be a more effective way to facilitate empathetic understanding. (shrink)

This article explores disciplinary approaches to educational studies over the past fifty years, in particular those developed by exponents of the 'foundation disciplines' of history, philosophy, psychology and sociology. It investigates the establishment of the disciplines during the first half of the period, and their consolidation, survival, and adaptation since the 1970s in a rapidly changing educational and political context. The nature of the contribution of the disciplines, both separately and together, to the study of education is (...) assessed. The article also considers the role of the disciplines in stimulating a pluralist and eclectic approach to the study of education, as opposed to the notion of a unitary and autonomous field of knowledge represented as 'educational research'. (shrink)

Heralding a push for higher education to adopt a more global perspective, the term "globalizing knowledge" is today a popular catchphrase among academics and their circles. The complications and consequences of this desire for greater worldliness, however, are rarely considered critically. In this groundbreaking cultural-political sociology of knowledge and change, Michael D. Kennedy rearticulates questions, approaches, and case studies to clarify intellectuals' and institutions' responsibilities in a world defined by transformation and crisis. _Globalizing Knowledge_ introduces the stakes (...) of globalizing knowledge before examining how intellectuals and their institutions and networks shape and are shaped by globalization and world-historical events from 2001 through the uprisings of 2011–13. But Kennedy is not only concerned with elaborating how wisdom is maintained and transmitted, he also asks how we can recognize both interconnectedness and inequalities, and possibilities for more knowledgeable change within and beyond academic circles. Subsequent chapters are devoted to issues of public engagement, the importance of recognizing difference and the local's implication in the global, and the specific ways in which knowledge, images, and symbols are shared globally. Kennedy considers numerous case studies, from historical happenings in Poland, Kosova, Ukraine, and Afghanistan, to today's energy crisis, Pussy Riot, the Occupy Movement, and beyond, to illuminate how knowledge functions and might be used to affect good in the world. (shrink)

The part that the university plays is increasingly of external and economic value, ignoring the importance of the value of knowledge in itself. By analyzing the university's current relationship with knowledge, this book tackles the problem head-on. It considers how the concept of knowledge can be reclaimed in an era of post truth and alternative fact, provides conceptual tools for people to think and debate about knowledge and education in new ways and offers a clear focus (...) for the future development of academia. This fascinating book is recommended reading to anyone engaged with the idea of rethinking universities in the 21st century. (shrink)

Nurses in all practice roles and settings need to understand the therapeutic use and potential for abuse of prescription drugs. Nursing roles, which include the administration and prescription of medication, health teaching and the implications of application, and the detection of drug-related problems, require that such education be timely and comprehensive. This paper discusses the state of knowledge dissemination about prescription drugs within the general context of nursing education. It highlights educational needs and explores the attitudinal factors and (...) knowledge deficits that influence the nursing practices of prescribing, pain management, nursing assessment, and care of persons with drug problems.Standard educational requirements in all nursing curricula undergird teaching about licit and illicit drugs and medication, as well as their therapeutic use, misuse, and abuse. It has been recognized widely since the early 1980s, however, that clinical experiences and didactic content on licit and illicit drugs presented in nursing programs is inadequate. (shrink)

Postdisciplinary Knowledge is the first book to articulate postdisciplinarity in philosophical, theoretical and methodological terms, helping to establish it as an important intellectual movement of the 21st century. It formulates what postdisciplinarity is, and how it can be implemented in research practice. The diverse chapters present a rich collection of highly creative thought-provoking essays and methodological insights. Written by a number of pioneering intellectuals with a range of backgrounds and research foci, these chapters cover a broad spectrum of areas (...) demonstrating alternative ways of producing knowledge. Essays are interspersed with dialogue, encouraging a comprehensive and engaging discussion on this emerging movement. Not limited to a specific field or discipline, this will be of great interest to upper level students and researchers in a wide range of subject areas, including: tourism, sociology, education, psychology, physiotherapy, fine arts, architecture and design, as well as those with a general interest in epistemology and methodology. (shrink)

Phenomenology is a philosophical approach to the study of consciousness and subjective experience. In recent years it has become a more prominent element of the social scientific study of sport and a core component of the important emergent concept of physical literacy. This book is the first to offer a philosophically-sound investigation of phenomenological perspectives on pedagogy in physical education. The book argues that phenomenology offers a particularly interesting theoretical approach to physical education because of the closely embodied relationship between (...) the knowledge object and the knowing subject. Drawing on the work of key phenomenological thinkers but also exploring the implications of this work for teaching practice, the book helps to illuminate our understanding of important concepts in physical education such as practical knowledge, skill acquisition, experience and ethics. This is fascinating reading for any serious student or researcher working in physical education or the philosophy or sociology of sport. (shrink)

Reappraising ideas associated with Ernst Bloch, Roland Barthes and Gaston Bachelard within the context of a utopian pedagogy, Hope, Utopia and Creativity in Higher Education reframes the transformative, creative and collaborative potential of education offering new concepts, tactics and pedagogical possibilities. Craig A. Hammond explores ways of analysing and democratising not only pedagogical conception, knowledge and delivery, but also the learning experience, and processes of negotiation and peer-assessment. Hammond shows how the incorporation of already existent learner hopes, daydreams, and (...) creative possibilities can open up new opportunities for thinking about popular culture and memory, learning and knowledge, and collaborative communities of support. Drawing together theoretical and cultural material in a teaching and learning environment of empowerment, Hammond illustrates that formative articulations of alternative, utopian futures, across sociological, humanities, and education studies subjects and curricula, becomes possible. (shrink)

Seeking to reinstate the importance of knowledge, truth and curriculum in contemporary intellectual debate, this book fills a major gap in the literature and greatly advances an exciting area of research.

What is the trouble with schools and why should we want to make ‘school trouble’? Schooling is implicated in the making of educational and social exclusions and inequalities as well as the making of particular sorts of students and teachers. For this reason schools are important sites of counter- or radical- politics. In this book, Deborah Youdell brings together theories of counter-politics and radical traditions in education to make sense of the politics of daily life inside schools and explores (...) a range of resources for thinking about and enacting political practices that make ‘school trouble’. The book offers a solid introduction to the much-debated issues of ‘intersectionality’ and the limits of identity politics and the relationship between schooling and the wider policy and political context. It pieces together a series of tools and tactics that might destabilize educational inequalities by unsettling the knowledges, meanings, practices, subjectivities and feelings that are normalized and privileged in the ‘business as usual’ of school life. Engaging with curriculum materials, teachers’ lesson plans and accounts of their pedagogy, and ethnographic observations of school practices, the book investigates a range of empirical examples of critical action in school, from overt political action pursued by educators to day-to-day pedagogic encounters between teachers and students. The book draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to make sense of these practices and identify the political possibilities for educators who refuse to accept the everyday injustices and wide-reaching social inequalities that face us. _School Trouble_ appears at a moment of political and economic flux and uncertainty, and when the policy moves that have promoted markets and private sector involvement in education around the globe have been subject to intense scrutiny and critique. Against this backdrop, renewed attention is being paid to the questions of how politics might be rejuvenated, how societies might be made fair, and what role education might have in pursing this. This book makes an important intervention into this terrain. By exploring a politics of discourse, an anti-identity politics, a politics of feeling, and a politics of becoming, it shows how the education assemblage can be unsettled and education can be re-imagined. The book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars in the fields of education, sociology, cultural studies, and social and political science as well as to critical educators looking for new tools for thinking about their practice. (shrink)

The purpose of this research report is twofold: First, we analyze a complex of attitudes about rape myths, adversarial sexual beliefs, and gender-role conservatism; and second, we evaluate the impact of rape-education intervention strategies on American college students' attitudes. Using the Solomon four-group design, we randomly assigned 14 classes of Sociology 101 students to three different treatment conditions: a live rape-education workshop, a video of the workshop, and a control group. We found significant gender differences in students' attitudes on (...) all the scales, with women being more knowledgeable about rape, less likely to blame the victim, and less accepting of adversarial sexual beliefs and gender-role conservatism. Most important, we found that within the limits of the study, rape-education intervention works in changing some attitudes about rape for both men and women students. We examine the impact of the different educational strategies and explore curricular implications, including the need to teach about rape within a feminist context. (shrink)

Two varieties of constructivism are distinguished. In part 1, the psychological or “radical” constructivism of von Glasersfeld is discussed. Despite its dominant influence in science education, radical constructivism has been controversial, with challenges to its principles and practices. In part 2, social constructivism is discussed in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Social constructivism has not been primarily concerned with education but has the most direct consequences in view of its challenge to the most fundamental, traditional assumptions in the (...) philosophy of science and to the practice of science itself. (shrink)

This book is about values education in early years settings and discusses theory and concepts, as well as methodological and empirical perspectives. It explores issues such as the kinds of values that are communicated between educators and children and the kind of future citizens we foster in early childhood settings. It illustrates by way of cases involving many participants, including children, educators, and researchers, who have their roots in diverse contexts, and reside in different parts of the world, including Australia, (...) Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Slovenia, and Sweden. The book carefully considers the contextualized character of the cases presented, yet argues that the questions, theories, and methodologies emphasized do inform the international debate in manifold ways. Communication of values in a broad and diverse sense is central in any pedagogy, especially for the youngest children in the educational system. Still, values education has been neglected as a research field, in education in general and particularly in the early years. This book addresses this lack of knowledge by scrutinizing various questions about values education in ECEC settings. (shrink)

This book systematically elaborates Scott Eacott's "relational" approach to organizational theory in education. Contributing to the relational trend in the social sciences, it first surveys relational scholarship across disciplines before providing a nuanced articulation of the relational research program and key concepts such as organizing activity, auctors, and spatio-temporal conditions. It also includes critical commentaries on the program from key figures such as Tony Bush, Megan Crawford, Fenwick English, Helen Gunter, Izhar Oplatka, Augusto Riveros, and Dawn Wallin. As such, the (...) text models an approach to, or social epistemology for building knowledge claims in relation rather than through parallel monologues. Eacott's relational approach provides a distinctive, post-Bourdieusian variant of the relational sociological project. Shifting the focus of inquiry from entities (e.g., leaders, organizations) to organizing activity and recognizing how auctors generate - simultaneously emerging from and constitutive of - spatio-temporal conditions unsettles the orthodoxy of organizational theory in educational administration and leadership. By presenting its claims in the context of other approaches, the book stimulates intellectual debate among both relational sociologists and opponents of relational approaches. Beyond Leadership provides significant insights into the organizing of education. As it does not fit neatly into any one field, but instead blends educational administration and leadership, organizational studies, and relational sociology, among others, it charts new territory and promotes important dialogue and debate. (shrink)

Over the past ten years, we have worked in a collaboration between educators and computer scientists at the University of Illinois to imagine futures for education in the context of what is loosely called “artificial intelligence.” Unhappy with the first generation of digital learning environments, our agenda has been to design alternatives and research their implementation. Our starting point has been to ask, what is the nature of machine intelligence, and what are its limits and potentials in education? This paper (...) offers some tentative answers, first conceptually, and then practically in an overview of the results of a number of experimental implementations documented in greater detail elsewhere. Our key finding is that artificial intelligence—in the context of the practices of electronic computing developing over the past three quarters of a century—will never in any sense “take over” the role of teacher, because how it works and what it does are so profoundly different from human intelligence. However, within the limits that we describe in this paper, it offers the potential to transform education in ways that—counterintuitively perhaps—make education more human, not less. (shrink)

This book addresses the following question: What is a sustainable society, and how can higher education help us to develop toward it? The core argument put forward is that the concept of sustainability reaches much farther than just the direct aspects of environmental threats and carbon emissions. Using higher education as a point of departure, the book shows that sustainability involves a broad range of disciplines, from nursing and nutrition to technology and management. It argues that a sustainable society entails (...) a distinct perspective on society that influences our social thinking in terms of ethics, democracy and knowledge development. The book also discusses if (and if so, how) higher education can and should contribute to such a development based on the principles of the freedom of science in a liberal, democratic society. The book presents Mutual Competence Building as a concept higher education can adapt in order to contribute to a sustainable Society. (shrink)

PHOTO ID 121339257© Designer491| Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT When physicians use their clinical knowledge and skills to advance the well-being of their patients, there may be apparent conflict between patient autonomy and physician beneficence. We are skeptical that today’s medical ethics education adequately fosters future physicians’ commitment to beneficence, which is both rationally defensible and fundamentally consistent with patient autonomy. We use an ethical dilemma that was presented to a group of third-year medical students to examine how ethics education might be (...) causing them to give undue deference to autonomy, thereby undermining their commitment to beneficence. INTRODUCTION The right of patients to choose which treatments they prefer is rooted in today’s social mores and taught as a principle of medical ethics as respect for autonomy. Yet, when physicians use their clinical knowledge and skills to advance the well-being of their patients, there may be a conflict between patient autonomy and physician beneficence. We are skeptical that today’s medical ethics education adequately fosters a commitment to beneficence, which is both rationally defensible and fundamentally consistent with patient autonomy. I. An Ethical Dilemma The impetus for this paper arose when students who were completing their third clinical year discussed a real-life ethical dilemma. A middle-aged man developed a pulmonary hemorrhage while on blood thinners for a recently placed coronary stent. The bleeding was felt to be reversible, but the patient needed immediate intubation or he would die. The cardiologist was told that the patient previously expressed to other physicians that he never wanted to be intubated. However, the cardiologist made the decision to intubate the patient anyway, and the patient eventually recovered.[1] Students were asked if they believed that the cardiologist had acted ethically. Their overwhelming response was, “No, the patient should have been allowed to die.” We looked into how students applied ethical reasoning to conclude that this outcome was ethically preferred. To explore how the third-year clinical experience might have formed the students’ judgment, we presented the same case to students who were just beginning their third year. Their responses were essentially uniform in recommending intubation. While there is likely more than one reasonable view in this case, we agree with the physician and the younger medical students that intubation was the ethically appropriate decision and will present an argument for it. But first, we explain the reasoning behind the more advanced medical students’ decision to choose patient autonomy at the expense of beneficence. II. Medical Ethics Education and the Priority of Autonomy Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics, first published in 1979 and now in its 8th edition, is a significant part of the formal ethics education in medical school.[2] Students learn an ethical decision-making approach based on respect for four ethical principles: autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. While Beauchamp and Childress officially afford no prima facie superiority to any principle, the importance of respect for patient autonomy has increased through the editions of their book. For example, early editions of their book opposed the legalization of physician-assisted death compared to recent editions that defended it.[3] As another example, Beauchamp and Childress make paternalism harder to justify by adding an autonomy-protecting condition to the list of conditions for acceptable paternalism.[4] Authority, they contend, need not conflict with autonomy—provided the authority is autonomously chosen.[5] “The main requirement,” they write, “is to respect a particular patient’s or subject’s autonomous choices, whatever they may be.[6] In the principlism of Beauchamp and Childress, autonomy now seems to have a kind of default priority.[7] However, the bioethics discourse has strong counternarratives, noting some movement to elevate the role of beneficence and to respect the input of stakeholders, including the family and the healthcare team. Ethics education achieves particular relevance in the third clinical year when students become embedded in the care of patients and learn from what has been called the informal curriculum. They observe how attending physicians approach day-to-day ethical problems at the patient’s bedside. In this context, students observe the importance of informed consent for serious treatments or invasive procedures, a practice that highlights the principle of patient autonomy. In both the formal and informal curriculum, medical students observe how, in the words of Paul Wolpe, “patient autonomy has become the central and most powerful principle in ethical decision-making in American medicine.”[8] In short, students appear to learn a deference for patient autonomy. This curricular shift in favor of autonomy coincides with legal developments that protect patients’ rights and decision-making with respect to their healthcare choices. The priority of autonomy in medicine benefits patients by reflecting their choices and, in some cases, their fundamental liberty. III. The Practice of Medicine and the Commitment to Beneficence There are many critiques of the dominant place that autonomy has in biomedical ethics,[9] especially considering that autonomy seems to be biased toward individualistic, Western, and somewhat American culture-driven values.[10] In addition, many bioethical dilemmas are cast as a conflict between autonomy and beneficence. Our point is that medical students bring to their study of medicine a commitment to beneficence that seems to be suppressed by practical ethics education. We think this commitment is rationally defensible and should be nurtured. It is striking that young medical students have a pre-reflective commitment to beneficence at all. For, as we mentioned, it is not just medicine but Western culture generally that prioritizes autonomy in settling ethical dilemmas. In wanting to act for the good of others (rather than simply agreeing to what others want), physicians are already swimming somewhat against the cultural tide.[11] However, doing so makes sense, given the nature of medicine and the profession of healing. When prospective medical students are asked why they wish to become physicians, the usual answer is some variation on caring for the sick and preventing disease. It is unlikely that a reason to become a physician is to respect a patient’s autonomy. It would be easy to dismiss medical students’ commitment to beneficence as a mere intuition and contrary to a more reasoned and deliberative approach. Beauchamp and Childress seem to minimize the value of physician intuition, stating that justifications for certain procedures are “…supported by good reasons. They need not rest merely in intuition or feeling.”[12] Henry Richardson writes that “situational or perceptive intuition…leaves the reasons for decision unarticulated.”[13] We think this is a crude and rather thin way of understanding intuition. Some bioethicists have defended intuition as essential to the practice of medicine and not something opposed to reason.[14] In the case we describe, we believe the ethical justifications s for the patient’s intubation are fundamentally sound: the patient did not have a “do not intubate” order written in the chart, the emergency intubation had not been foreseen, so the patient did not have the opportunity to consent to or reject intubation; the patient had consented to the treatment for his cardiac disease so his consent for intubation could have been assumed;[15] and the consequences of respecting his autonomy did not justify allowing him to die.[16] While it is possible to have more than one reasonable view on this case, we think the case for beneficence is strong and certainly should not be dismissed out of hand. We do not deny that if a patient makes a clearly documented, well-informed decision to forgo intubation that this decision ought to be respected by the physician (even if the physician disagrees with the patient’s decision). But, in this situation, as in many others in the practice of medicine, the patient’s real wishes and preferences are not well-articulated in advance. There are many cases where a physician acts based on what she believes the patient, or the surrogate, would want, sometimes in situations that do not allow much time for reflection. An example might be resuscitation of a newborn at the borderline of viability. In their ethics education, beneficence would mean acting first to save a life. If the patient or surrogate makes an informed decision to the contrary, a beneficent physician respects that autonomous decision. In the case presented, the patient expressed gratitude to the cardiologist when extubated. But what if he had expressed anger at the physician for violating his autonomy? There are those who could argue that not only was intubation ethically wrong but that the cardiologist put himself in legal jeopardy by his actions (especially if there had been a written refusal applicable to the specific situation). In the example we use, we point out that the cardiologist may not have escaped a lawsuit if the patient had died without intubation. His family, when hearing the circumstances, may have sued for failure to act and dereliction of the cardiologist’s duty to save him. Beyond a potential legal challenge for either action or inaction, there is an overriding ethical question the cardiologist had to address: what course would be most satisfying to his conscience? Would he rather allow a patient to die for fear of recrimination, or act to save his life, regardless of the personal consequences? In the absence of real knowledge about the patient’s considered wishes, it is most reasonable to err on the side of promoting patient well-being. A physician’s commitment to beneficence is not necessarily a way of undermining a patient’s autonomy. In acting for the patient's good, physicians are also acting on what it is reasonable to believe a patient (or most patients, perhaps) would want, which is obviously connected to what a patient does want. Pellegrino and Thomasma argue that beneficence includes respect for a patient’s autonomy since “the best interests of the patient are intimately linked with their preferences.”[17] Instead of conceptualizing ethical dilemmas in medicine as conflicts between autonomy and beneficence, it is possible that medical schools could teach students that truly practicing beneficence is a way of valuing patient autonomy, especially when the patient’s wishes are not specific to the situation and are not clearly expressed. CONCLUSION It is important for students and practicing physicians to understand the principle of respect for patient autonomy in a pluralistic society that demands personal self-determination. However, the role of the physician as a beneficent healer should not be diminished by this respect for autonomy. Respecting a patient’s autonomy is grounded in and manifested by physician beneficence.[18] That is, seeking what is good for the patient can only be good if it respects their personhood and dignity. We propose that a commitment to beneficence, incipient in young medical students, should be developed over time with their other clinical reasoning skills. Such a commitment need not be sacrificed on the altar of patient autonomy. Beneficence needs greater relative moral weight with students as they proceed in their ethics education. - [1] S. Jauhar, “When Doctors Need to Lie,” New York Times, February 22, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/when-doctors-need-to-lie.html. [2] T. L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019). [3] Louise A. Mitchell, “Major Changes in Principles of Biomedical Ethics,” The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14, no. 3 (2014): 459–75, https://doi.org/10.5840/ncbq20141438. [4] Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 238. [5] Beauchamp and Childress, 103. [6] Beauchamp and Childress, p. 108. [7] For other accounts that prioritize autonomy, see e.g. Allen E. Buchanan and Dan W. Brock, Deciding for Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38–39; R Gillon, “Ethics Needs Principles—Four Can Encompass the Rest—and Respect for Autonomy Should Be ‘First among Equals,’” Journal of Medical Ethics 29, no. 5 (October 2003): 307–12, https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.29.5.307. For examples of critiques of these accounts, see footnote 9. [8] P. R. Wolpe, “The Triumph of Autonomy in American Bioethics: A Sociological View,” in Bioethics and Society: Constructing the Ethical Enterprise, p. 43. [9] V. A. Entwistle et al., “Supporting Patient Autonomy: The Importance of Clinician-Patient Relationships,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 25, no. 7 (July 2010): 741–45; C. Foster, Choosing Life, Choosing Death: The Tyranny of Autonomy in Medical Ethics and Law, 1st ed. (Oxford ; Hart Publishing, 2009); O. O’Neill, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, The Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh 2001 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). [10] P. Marshall and B. Koenig, “Accounting for Culture in a Globalized Bioethics,” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics: A Journal of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics 32, no. 2 (2004): 252–66; R. Fan, “Self-Determination vs. Family-Determination: Two Incommensurable Principles of Autonomy,” Bioethics 11, no. 3–4 (1997): 309–22. [11] Arguments stressing the importance of beneficence, as ours does here, certainly approach paternalistic arguments. We set aside the complex issue of paternalism for purposes of this paper and simply note that the principle of beneficence as such does not say anything specifically about acting against the patient’s will. In the case study that focuses this paper, we do not believe the patient’s will or wishes were clearly indicated. [12] Beauchamp and Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, p. 20, see note 2 above. [13] H. S. Richardson, “Specifying, Balancing, and Interpreting Bioethical Principles,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 25, no. 3 (January 1, 2000): 285–307, p. 287. [14] H. D. Braude, Intuition in Medicine a Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning (Chicago ; University of Chicago Press, 2012). [15] R. Kukla, “Conscientious Autonomy: Displacing Decisions in Health Care,” The Hastings Center Report 35, no. 2 (2005): 34–44. [16] M. Schermer, The Different Faces of Autonomy: Patient Autonomy in Ethical Theory and Hospital Practice, vol. 13, Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002). [17] E. D. Pellegrino and D. C. Thomasma, For the Patient’s Good - the Restoration of Beneficence in Health Care (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 29. [18] Pellegrino and Thomasma, For the Patient’s Good. 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This book considers the place and value of knowledge in contemporary society. “Knowledge” is not a self-evident concept: both its denotations and connotations are historically situated. Since the Enlightenment, knowledge has been a matter of discovery through effort, and “knowledge for its own sake” a taken-for-granted ideal underwriting progressive education as a process which not only taught “for” and “about” something, but also ennobled the soul. While this ideal has not been explicitly rejected, in recent decades (...) there has been a tacit move away from a strong emphasis on its centrality, even in Higher Education. The authors address the values that inform knowledge production in its present forms, and seek to identify social and cultural factors that support these values.Against the background of increasingly restrictive conditions of academic work, the first section of this volume offers incisive critiques of Higher Education, with examples drawn from Australia and New Zealand. The second group of chapters considers how academics have viewed, and have tried to adapt to, present circumstances. The third section comprises papers that consider epistemological issues in the generation and promulgation of knowledge. The chapters in this volume are indicative of the work that needs to be done so that we can come to comprehend – and perhaps try and improve – our relationship to learning and knowledge in the 21st Century.This timely book will be of particular interest to workers in higher education; it should also inform and challenge all those who have concerns for the future of the intellectual life of our civilization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editorial Reflections on Philosophizing in Music EducationEstelle R. Jorgensen and Iris M. YobIn this article, we reflect on issues that go to the heart of teaching and scholarship in the philosophy of music education. After thirty years of editing Philosophy of Music Education Review, it is a good time to take stock of the philosophical work that has been and is being published and of challenges that remain.Over the (...) years, there has been a growing quality of philosophical articles published in the journal, due in significant part to the efforts of reviewers and the willingness of writers to work with their suggestions. Authors regularly express appreciation for the informed, critical, and constructive reviews their work receives. An exemplary body of philosophical scholarship in music education has been published over this time and PMER is regarded as a premier journal internationally devoted exclusively to the philosophy of music education. In thirty volumes of uninterrupted publication, we have sought to be responsive to important issues in music education. Our writers have engaged relevant subjects of interest to our readers, citations of articles remain strong, and articles are included in [End Page 109] university and college course reading lists. PMER is available in print and online via subscription; it has a wide digital exposure in search engines and leading indexes, and our readership continues to grow.Despite this progress, although the number of submissions has increased, their quality has sometimes been uneven. Our pedagogical commitment to foster philosophical writing and the philosophical inexperience of some writers has significantly impacted the work required to bring submissions to publication standard. Submissions sometimes evidence a lack of attention to formulating a tight argument, citing relevant sources, and polishing and editing the manuscript. The published style guidelines are too often ignored, creating a poor first impression with reviewers and editors. Writers are occasionally in a hurry to publish and less willing to entertain multiple revisions of their articles required to produce work of lasting value. The growing number of music education journals that publish philosophical work, while opening more fora, in some cases perversely result in ideologically driven, polemical, and philosophically uninformed articles in the name of philosophy. This is a good moment to reconsider the importance of philosophical fundamentals that should undergird our philosophizing in music education and what these mean for our academic responsibilities. To this end, we suggest several principles that need to be central to our philosophizing in music education. These principles also have broader implications for the expectations of scholarship in music education generally.WRITING PHILOSOPHYLike other subject areas in the academy, philosophy has its own intellectual structure, a canon of significant writings, its own interpretative methods, and its distinctive role and purpose. A philosophical paper in music education reads differently from papers in the history of music education, methods of teaching music, sociology of music education, empirical research in music education, multi-cultural, gender, and ethnic studies, music education curriculum building and policy making, and so on. And yet, the boundaries between these disciplines, which are artificial constructions when human knowledge is considered wholistically anyway, are somewhat porous with concepts and ideas and claims seeming to move easily from one discipline to another.To help distinguish between philosophy and other areas of study and research, it may be helpful to consider philosophy as a second-order activity. That is, first-order activity examines the raw data of research and experience and attempts to make sense of them. Using inference, pattern-seeking, deduction, hypotheses, statistical analysis, and so on, these activities result in claims, interpretations, and theories that give meaning to what we see, hear, and feel. [End Page 110]The second-order activity takes a step away from these first-order activities. It does not concern itself so much with raw data or with creating theories about them, but critically analyzes the claims and inferences that are made in regard to them. Where first-order disciplines analyze inputs from observation and experimentation, second-order disciplines analyze these analyses—that is, they function as meta-analyses. Philosophers do not need laboratories or fieldwork (which makes applications for grants to support philosophical research difficult to secure!). They need libraries... (shrink)

While it is common in social epistemology, philosophy of education and sociology to speak of theoretical knowledge, the concept of theoretical knowledge used in ordinary discourse has not been properly examined, and its relations to other types of knowledge remain unclear. This article argues that this ordinary language notion of theoretical knowledge has a distinct meaning different from the meanings of terms for other knowledge types, for example, knowledge‐that, and meta‐cognitive knowledge, and (...) provides an analysis that characterizes theoretical knowledge as distinguished by its indirectness. The article then discusses the implications of this view for the practical role of theoretical knowledge and suggests that a reappraisal of its epistemic significance is due. (shrink)

This study takes up Paul Gilroy’s recent call to take seriously the political problem of fascism in the contemporary conjuncture as an educational problem. Specifically, the study will begin with analytic work to identify a set of guideposts that delineate the political logics of fascism. It will then examine the still under-developed theoretical work examining the political problem of contemporary fascism as an educational problem. And, it will attempt to advance this necessary work by tracing the outline of (...) an antifascist educational project. It will be argued that an anti-fascist educational project must, in the short-term, develop polemical strategies that articulate a new set of political logics to challenge the increasingly cemented fascist logics at work today and, in the long-term, advance structural changes to educational institutions organized around normative aims of humane and humanizing education, morality and responsibility, and sociological knowledge. (shrink)

This article addresses two main questions: what is excellence and should epistemic excellence be the main purpose of education? Though references to excellence have become increasingly frequent in the UK education policy, these questions are perhaps especially important in Scotland where the curriculum is explicitly for excellence. Following Hirst and Peters, it is hypothesised that if the term ‘education’ implies possession of a certain breadth of general knowledge and understanding, then the term ‘excellence’ may imply a deep grasp of (...) a specific body of knowledge. However, after consideration of Dewey's suggestion that being present in the moment is an excellence of childhood, it is concluded that the development of epistemic excellence should be regarded as an educational purpose rather than the only educational purpose and pupil engagement with public traditions of knowledge provides necessary but not sufficient conditions for education. (shrink)