Educational Theory, Volume 75, Issue 1, Page 1-4, February 2025.

Abstract

In this article, derria byrd contends that more robust interrogation of the organizational contribution to inequity in higher education would be aided by understanding higher education organizations as social actors. Organizational social actor theory demonstrates that colleges and universities are more than inert contexts in which marginalized students' experiences and outcomes play out. They are entities that possess unique dispositional orientations, motives, and inclinations toward action. This conceptual article argues that engagement with institutional habitus, grounded in Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, situates colleges and universities as social actors whose structural positions generate interests, beliefs, and behaviors that tend to constrain opportunity for students. The concept shifts the empirical gaze from students to colleges and universities in examinations of education inequity and facilitates analysis of how colleges' social position and the organizational identity, opportunities, and limitations it engenders support and/or inhibit organizational practice, including transformation toward equity. byrd crafts this argument in five parts: (1) exploration of organizational social actorhood theory, (2) overview of Bourdieu's theoretical framework and key conceptual tools, (3) expansions on Bourdieu's foundational formula to demonstrate how institutional habitus supplements the theorist's framework, (4) purposeful engagement with critiques of how institutional habitus has been employed in educational research, and (5) guiding principles for empirical engagement with institutional habitus. Throughout, byrd employs a collective case study of three college campuses to ground the theoretical review in empirical realities and uncover the invisible influence of social power on organizational practice. Given Bourdieu's attention to higher education and broad concern for systemic inequities reproduced at this level, this article focuses on higher education but has implications for educational research more broadly.

Educational Theory, Volume 75, Issue 1, Page 153-159, February 2025.

Educational Theory, Volume 75, Issue 1, Page 160-165, February 2025.

Abstract

This study aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversation about education through the lenses of the German philosophy of Bildung and the American philosophy of pragmatism. More concretely, in this article, the two philosophies are represented by the traditions of critical-constructive Didaktik, based on Wolfgang Klafki's work, and transactional realism, based on John Dewey's. Against the background of the widespread outcomes-based modes of education today, the authors seek to shed light on the necessary reconceptualization of schooling and teaching and to explore the possibilities for constructive routes forward for curriculum theorizing. They outline the aspects of knowledge and the learning concepts that the two philosophies share and those about which they differ. The authors also analyze the consequences that these similarities and differences have for the educational approaches of critical-constructive Didaktik and transactional realism. Finally, the authors present an empirical example from a Swedish year-eight classroom, drawing conclusions based on their findings and considering corresponding implications about the two traditions' potential to contribute to an understanding of teaching as a pedagogical responsibility.

Abstract

In this article Antti Moilanen assesses criticisms of Wolfgang Klafki's model of exemplary teaching made by Meinert Meyer and Hilbert Meyer and by Chi-Hua Chu. “Exemplary teaching” is a style of discovery-based teaching in which students study concrete examples of general principles in such a way that they acquire transferable knowledge and skills. Put differently, the aim of exemplary teaching is to foster categorical Bildung. Klafki's model of exemplary teaching is based on Martin Wagenschein's didactics and his own theory of the categorical Bildung. Here, Moilanen explicates and analyzes Klafki's theory of categorical Bildung, Wagenschein's concepts related to exemplary teaching, Klafki's conception of the conditions and principles of exemplary teaching, and criticisms of Klafki's didactics set out by Meyer and Meyer and by Chu. He then examines whether Meyer and Meyer as well as Chu have adequately understood Klafki's model of exemplary teaching and whether their criticisms are justified, concluding that their criticisms do not credibly question the validity of exemplary teaching.

Abstract

Fostering transformative experiences is a central goal of education. In this article, Marieke Schaper examines the relationship between doubt and transformation in education, specifically problematizing the idea that doubt can serve as a catalyst for transformative experiences in the classroom. Schaper's thesis is that doubt is not valuable by itself; it must encompass certain characteristics if it is to support meaningful transformation while avoiding the risks of transformative education. In making this argument, Schaper proposes the concept of aspirational doubt as an educationally valuable subcategory of doubt. She begins by engaging with the vast philosophical and psychological literature on doubt and, based on this analysis, identifies five main conceptions of doubt that wield influence. Next, she points to the ethical risks of using doubt as an educational catalyst, particularly for transformative purposes, but instead of rejecting the role of doubt in transformative education, she explores the potential of aspirational doubt to circumvent these risks. She concludes with a discussion of the practical implications for fostering aspirational doubt in the classroom.

Abstract

While some researchers argue that theories and abstract knowledge are unreliable bases for teachers' work, a wide range of research stresses the need to overcome the gap between theory and practice, or abstract academic knowledge and experience-based knowledge. Here, Silvia Edling maintains that it is relevant to ask why the relationship is necessary in the first place and in so doing revive the notions of teacher seeing in education. The purpose of this article is to contribute knowledge about the role of teacher vision by turning to how two different theoretical researchers, John Dewey and Hans-Georg Gadamer, approach the notion of vision and its related concepts in relation to science. Aided by a hermeneutic conversation, the article provides a roadmap of similarities and differences between Dewey and Gadamer that can facilitate more nuanced reflections and deliberations among teachers and educational researchers on the meaning and usefulness of stimulating a broad and deep repertoire for teacher's professional vision.

Abstract

This article explores the work of Rethinking Schools (RS). RS is at one and the same time a grassroots movement of teacher-activists, a quarterly journal, and a publishing house. For almost four decades the movement has sought to enact Freirean-inspired curricular/pedagogical initiatives within US public schooling. What makes the work of RS significant is the way it connects critical pedagogy to specific examples of concrete practice. It thus provides an invaluable corrective to the abstruseness and high levels of theoretical abstraction one finds in critical pedagogy as an academic field. Of particular interest is the explicitly utopian dimension to the work of the movement. Underpinning all the curriculum materials, resources, lesson plans, reading lists, and pedagogical strategies is a desire to provide children and young people with an opportunity to flex their utopian imaginations. Drawing on Freirean theory to reflect on the practice of the movement, Webb highlights the ways in which RS finds utopian possibility blooming in that most unpromising of grounds — public schooling. While the context for utopian praxis feels unpropitious to say the least, Rethinking Schools offers a corrective to doom-laden assessments of the scope for radical pedagogical initiatives within public schooling, not only in the US but more widely.

Educational Theory, Volume 74, Issue 6, Page 799-802, December 2024.

Abstract

In this article Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon and Megan Jane Laverty discuss Jean-Luc Nancy's conception of listening as presented in his seminal work, À l'écoute. The authors argue that Nancy uses the term “listening” to refer to the experience of coming to an idea of sound(s) initially encountered as puzzling. They illustrate Nancy's conception with teaching/learning situations involving a pianist and teacher, Deborah Sobol, and two aspiring players, Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon and Rosalie Romano. The article has four parts. In part 1, the authors ask: Do we see Deborah trying to make meaning of Sophie's performance on October 2, 1998? In part 2, they ask: Do we see Sophie trying to make meaning of Deborah's words and demonstrations on the same occasion? In parts 3 and 4, they explore Sophie's and Rosalie's listening when they are coached by Deborah on January 15, 1999. In so doing, Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty illustrate Nancy's conception of listening and demonstrate its usefulness for theorizing about and studying actual situations.

Abstract

This essay by René Arcilla examines Jean-Luc Nancy's understanding of the “spirit of 1968.” It argues that Nancy's concept can guide a humanist approach to educating citizens for participation in democratic self-government, one that responds to the political challenges facing us today. In particular, it develops a critique of factionalizing identity politics and seeks to renew what it means to address, and be addressed by, “we the people.” The essay proposes an idea of what democracy seeks to affirm: our social being.

Educational Theory, Volume 74, Issue 6, Page 963-967, December 2024.

Abstract

Sometimes we hear music (when we play it or hear it, whether live or recorded) and that experience is felt as a singular event. In those moments we find ourselves in an existential situation that, because it is singular (rare, unique, unintended), reveals the formative power of an aesthetic experience of listening to music, what we might call learning how to be poetic. Here, Eduardo Duarte Bono explores how engaging with Jean-Luc Nancy can enable us to deepen our appreciation for music's aesthetic education. Specifically, Nancy's category of “resonant subjectivity” describes the existential place where this education is occurring during those singular experiences with music, what Nancy describes as “‘to be all ears’ [être à l'écoute], to be listening.” As a way of amplifying Nancy's writing on listening to music, Duarte Bono takes up three distinct cases in this paper: the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Pablo Picasso's sculpture Guitar, and Ralph Ellison's musings on living with music as a writer.

Educational Theory, Volume 74, Issue 6, Page 840-848, December 2024.