Philosophy of Education

This introduction to the special issue ‘The Education of the Whole Person’ begins by setting out some of the difficulties that attach the use of the terms ‘whole’ and ‘whole person’ in relation to education and to the need, in the light of the prominence and rhetorical force of the terms, for caution. Yet this does not preclude acknowledgement of the importance of the impulse behind this use, across a variety of curriculum practices. Some of this range is explored in (...) the articles that follow. Grouped under the three headings of ‘Philosophical analysis of the whole’, ‘The idea of the whole from cross-cultural perspectives’, and ‘Learning to die’, the articles offer a variety of perspectives from different cultural vantage-points, addressing questions that go to the heart of the nature of education and its purposes. (shrink)

In order to maintain an open society, many Political Liberals, whom I will refer to as ‘Integralists’, advocate for some form of normative civic education—education designed to equip children with attitudes and values favourable to the liberal state. Opponents of normative civic education argue that coercively steering children towards particular controversial conceptions of the good violates the child’s right to autonomy; but because every form of education has this effect, this objection essentially rules out all forms of education. Thus, the (...) question arises: how can opponents of normative civic education draw the line between permissible and impermissible forms of education in such a way that does not prohibit intuitively permissible forms of education? In this article, I challenge the Integralist assertion that virtually any form of education is permissible so long as it equips children with the capacity to rationally deliberate. Using the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), I argue that children possess a right to autonomy that imposes a constraint against intentional non-rational influence towards particular conceptions of the good, even if that influence may still occur through other means. In doing so, I posit that whether the child’s right to autonomy has been violated by a given form of education should be judged in light of all morally relevant considerations and tailored to the child’s particular context. If I am correct, my argument will significantly question the legitimacy of normative civic education—and perhaps the legitimacy of certain forms of parental education as well. (shrink)

The article argues that there is a need, in the wake of the various crises we are experiencing, including the ongoing crisis in mental health, for greater awareness of the limitations of an overly narrow conception of education that has focused predominantly on academic achievement and cognitive development, at the expense of a more holistic approach to the development of the young and their well-being. Some have argued that what is missing, in particular, is a spiritual dimension to education. Attention (...) to this would help the young develop the inner resources they need in order to deal with the challenges they face, and a holistic conception of education would be well placed to provide this. That said, the idea of wholeness is not evident in mainstream education for well-being, perhaps reflecting a long-standing suspicion of such ways of speaking. However, amongst holistic educators, who have generally been marginalized, there is a conception of well-being that emphasizes the idea of wholeness through a concern for the spiritual dimension of our lives. Drawing on the work of American educators bell hooks and Christopher Higgins, who both speak of the spirit and soul, the article will argue that wholeness—understood as a shared, ongoing process between individuals and educators of integrating those aspects of the self, and its relation to others and the world, that are of most significance—can be both a process of discovery and recovery. Wholeness can thus be retrieved as a meaningful expression of educational purpose and lived experience. (shrink)

Legal challenges to affirmative action in college admissions practices are on the rise, in the US and elsewhere. Defenders of the practice tend to point to affirmative action’s efficacy as a means of creating more equal societies, or to the political motivations of those who would stop it. This article takes a different approach. It argues that college admissions procedures are a cultural practice of adjudication, and as such share key attributes with other cultural practices of adjudication, such as sporting (...) and musical competitions. The articles advocates for analogous thinking between these different adjudication sites as a way to understand affirmative action as fundamentally fair. It draws comparisons between affirmative action in college admissions and mechanisms for fair competition in two ‘serious leisure’ sites: crown green bowling competitions, and brass band contests. In so doing, the article argues that affirmative action is not a radical proposition, but one deeply embedded in everyday ideas about fairness. (shrink)

This article explores the corrosive effects of overexposure to the visual in the digital world—or in other words, what Stiegler called the symbolic misery—through a pharmacological approach to the digital image, understood as both poison and remedy. The starting point is the new popular phenomenon of Italian brain rot on TikTok and the iconoclastic responses of various national governments, such as banning social media use among young people. I argue that, rather than moralizing the issue or approaching it in binary (...) terms, we need a new framework for engaging with images that considers not only their toxic power but also their capacity to open up new possibilities of the imagination. This type of visual literacy cannot be achieved through censoring but through educating the gaze to interpret, deconstruct, and imagine alternatives to the images that surround us. (shrink)

UK research security is built around a downstream problem: valuable research capability exists, and hostile or strategically adverse actors seek access to it. MI5’s Espionage Alert of 30 September 2026 on the China General Technology Research Institute is a clear example. This paper argues that research security also has an upstream problem. A research system can lose strategically consequential capability not because another state acquires it, but because the domestic conditions that reproduce it disappear. The idea that capability is slow (...) to rebuild once continuity is broken is familiar from defence-industrial planning; what is missing is its application to the research system. The paper distinguishes the stock of capability a system holds from its ability to reproduce that capability and to regenerate it after loss, and proposes that endogenous capability loss becomes a research-security matter only where three conditions coincide: the capability supports a strategically consequential function; its reproduction or regeneration is materially impaired; and regeneration would plausibly take longer than the warning time within which the capability may be needed. It shows that the UK’s legal framework for research security is triggered almost entirely by external acts, such as acquisition, export, transfer and assistance to a foreign intelligence service, and that the framework for university market exit is directed at students and taxpayers rather than research capability. Following the abolition of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in July 2026, the paper identifies the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade as the natural home for a limited, diagnostic regeneration assessment, notes the tension between that department’s growth mission and the problem it would be asked to see, and proposes an independently evaluated three-case pilot. Security diagnosis, it argues, does not imply security control over research. Remedies should remain with the ordinary policy institutions responsible for the underlying cause, and no new statutory powers are required. (shrink)

Abstract‘Education after progress’ is a historical argument because it declares the end to a period in which human beings believed in progress. On the question of origins, the discourse is right to locate the emergence of progress in eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought and, in particular, a philosophy of history of inexorable progress. On the question of endings, however, the discourse is fundamentally mistaken. ‘Education after progress,’ I argue, is as old as progressive education itself. Progressive education came into being when the (...) concept of progress, after a brief hiatus in abstract universalism, reclaimed its former domain specificity. The article distinguishes progress from developmental improvement, absolute progress from relative progress, progress from progression and progressivism, all while elucidating the importance of approaching progressive education in domain-specific terms. A key feature of present-day progressivism is a confusion over its progressive intellectual inheritances. I call on progressive educationalists to regard progressive education as a form of social transformation and to identify the sites in the social world where gains can be evaluated alongside losses. (shrink)

This article explores the role of ideas of progress within the secondary geography curriculum. It addresses the challenge of balancing the teaching of global issues with the cultivation of a sense of constructive hope and the evaluation of human progress. It begins by outlining two key ideas of progress, followed by the psychological, social and educational context of the research. The paper then outlines the author’s PhD study, which investigated geography teachers’ interpretations and enactment of ideas of progress, and how (...) students form their understanding of such ideas. Findings suggest limited explicit discussion of progress in classrooms, but a general student support for the notion. Teachers also expressed a desire for more curriculum space to explore ideas of progress and the future. The subject’s reputation of being problem-oriented may play a role in the underplaying of ideas of progress. The paper concludes by proposing discussions about shifting emphasis from ‘development’ to ‘progress’ and interrogating the notion of ‘grounds for hope’. It also emphasises the importance of a ‘big picture’ geography that provides students with a foundation of up-to-date knowledge that can underpin critical thinking and discussions about issues related to progress. (shrink)

While progress is an ‘essentially contested concept’, with the spread of modernism and liberalism, most societies have come to believe that human actions should move them forwards in a desirable direction. Since Saint Augustine, a linear idea of moral and intellectual progress of society in Europe has been linked with educating the child. In viewing the education of young people as an investment in the future, progress is implicit to the idea and practice of education. In different periods of European (...) history, social progress has been tied to religion, values of reason and freedom, the nation state and modernity, including material and political progress. In the twenty first century a growing ‘crisis of culture’ has spawned post-progress thought, disrupting the relationship between the past, present and future, which has filtered into education. Here, I explore how contemporary expressions of post-progress thinking in the history and geography curriculum in England exhibit presentism, disrupting the boundaries between the past, present and future. Finally, I consider the scope for teachers and students to articulate alternative narratives of social progress, which run counter to our post-modern times. (shrink)

This contribution deals with central theoretical and practical problems of education for sustainable development and its justification. The educational and political justifications of most conceptions of sustainable development are in one way or another grounded in negative judgements about regressive states of affairs and developments (such as the effects of anthropogenic climate change). These judgements, however, usually remain implicit and – despite their centrality for the justification of the project of sustainable development – are seldom laid out in the open (...) and discussed in detail. This is why it is usually taken for granted that the normative worldviews underlying these judgments about regression should be both taken at face value and accepted by both students and teachers. In my contribution I will analyze these normative preconditions of the debate about education for sustainable development and the educational as well as political pitfalls and challenges that go along with them (e.g. charges of indoctrination or moralism). I will argue that an educationally and politically justifiable conception of education for sustainable development grounded in the value of personal and political autonomy as educational aims has to be transparent concerning its normative assumptions and preconditions and has to clearly distinguish between genuinely controversial judgments about regression and such claims that we have reason to qualify as non-controversial. In so doing I will show that the normative and justificatory basis of education for sustainable development is much thinner than usually assumed. (shrink)

This special issue explores the relationships between knowledge, education and progress. The papers for this special issue were originally presented in 2025 at a symposium hosted by University Coll...

This paper enquires into the rise of a particular precursor of the notion of progress in the sixteenth century through the lens of the work of French scholar Peter Ramus whose amendments to the classical curriculum – rhetoric and dialectic or logic – introduced a method and a pedagogy into the organisation of extant knowledge for learning for the first time. Ramus’ method was stoutly resisted by the scholastic professors in Paris at the time, and his belligerent style made enemies (...) wherever he went. Nevertheless his method spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and arguably lies at the heart of the modern curriculum. Two large question marks hang over his legacy. The first is, why was his work so successful at that particular time; the second is, why does his legacy to this day continue to divide scholars as to its value and worth. What is easily lost in the debates is that progress in knowledge in the sense of progression through the curriculum, and in the sense of a programme for constant curriculum renewal and reinvention, enters the curriculum for the first time and begins to usher in the beginnings of modern education. (shrink)

The modern alliance between knowledge, education, and progress has fractured. Once celebrated as the engine of emancipation and collective betterment, curriculum today is too often reduced to technical planning for uncertain futures. This paper argues that in an age after progress we need a different orientation: not compulsory optimism or endless innovation, but hope, fidelity, and variation. Drawing on pragmatist and post-critical pedagogy, I reimagine curriculum as an act of educational fidelity: the deliberate offering of shared contents as cultural inheritance, (...) preserved as common goods yet open to reinterpretation. Teaching in this frame rests on epistemic hope and a pedagogy of waiting: gestures that resist cynicism, technicism, and audit culture by sustaining the possibility of meaning without guarantees. Fragile though it is, such hope is nurtured by the environments and rhythms of schooling that affirm the world as still worth caring for and sharing. (shrink)

Is there any point in education if there is no better future to look forward to? This essay addresses this question by distinguishing two different ways of linking education and progress. Firstly, education can be viewed as facilitating social progress in a causal manner. Secondly, the concept of education itself can be considered to encompass some notion of progress. Against this backdrop, the concept of ‘education after progress’ (or ‘postprogressive education’) is examined. Regarding the latter, it is argued that the (...) concept of postprogressive education is meaningless because ‘education’ is inherently ‘progressive’. Furthermore, it is argued that an education for progress is only pointless if the possibility of a normative evaluation of social developments is denied. (shrink)

This article carves out a specific kind of meeting between philosophy and qualitative inquiry, particularly in the form of participatory philosophical qualitative inquiry. I describe an inquiry group project formed to explore the normative concerns of a group of disabled activists surrounding the concept of epistemic agency. The inquiry group was designed to work against the grain of able-minded norms of inquiry, particularly in terms of verbal communication, linear processing, and independent reasoning. I describe and analyze the design, implementation, and (...) interpretation of this empirical research project through the framework of legibility. I analyze two interrelated questions that I was asked during the research process, and which pull in different directions. The first, asked by several reviewers from the field of philosophy, was about what makes the inquiry work philosophical. The second, asked of me during an inquiry group meeting by a member of that group, is “Are you getting what you need?” I explore how these questions are methodological and conceptual, but also, and crucially, questions of legibility—about how to create new paths within unmapped epistemological and ethical territory. (shrink)

Contrary to a dominant, instrumental way of thinking about education, there has been a growing focus in recent years on the problem of the intrinsic logic of education. This article argues that the German-speaking tradition of General Education (Allgemeine Pädagogik) provides valuable insights for critically engaging with recent attempts to conceptualize this logic. Against this background, the article highlights key challenges which, if addressed, could advance the enquiry into educational questions about education. The first challenge concerns the plurality of theoretical (...) perspectives on the logic of education. The article contends that this plurality does not undermine General Education but calls for explicit reflection on one’s presuppositions and critical engagement with existing positions. The second challenge lies in distinguishing between the logic of education in general and the logic of modern education in particular. The article argues that modern education is closely linked to a concept of Bildung, which reflects a specific understanding of human beings as indeterminate beings whose existence unfolds within a shared world that is open to the future rather than oriented towards a predefined end. To articulate the logic of modern education as the enabling of Bildung in more detail, the article draws on the principles of Bildsamkeit and summoning to self-action. A third challenge consists in differentiating between basic forms of Bildung-oriented education. The article proposes reinterpreting Johann Friedrich Herbart’s triad of discipline, teaching, and Zucht as a possibility of integrating contemporary positions into a more comprehensive theoretical framework for clarifying the logic of modern education. (shrink)

A central aim of democratic education is enabling students to critically engage with past, present, and future sociopolitical struggles. Doing justice to this temporal dimension requires providing an epistemically adequate and normatively apt understanding of history, including the directive teaching of criteria for moral-political progress and regression. This contribution defends these claims in three steps. First, it introduces an educational framework for teaching for and about progress. Second, it outlines a deliberative and liberal-perfectionist conception of moral-political progress, distinguishing it from (...) classical and contemporary alternatives. Third, drawing on the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, it conceptualizes democratic education as a historically situated normative learning process that combines two core features. The first feature involves the acknowledgement of past wrongs and injustices and of structural continuities that connect the past with the present. The second, closely related, feature refers to the explication and justification of the normative criteria that should underlie and guide our evaluation of past developments and events as indicators of regression or of progress. A critical and progressive notion of teaching for and about progress in the context of democratic education should therefore go beyond the uncritical reproduction of contemporary negativistic doomsday scenarios or triumphalist notions of progress and instead provide the next generation with a differentiated view on progress and regression in history. (shrink)

In this collective writing, leading scholars of United States and global history, sociology, and philosophy of education critically examine what it means to ‘never forget’ global war and violence in education. While 9/11 serves as one case, scholars reflect more expansively on the history of war, violence, and civil society, the dream of a world without nations, and the vital need for education for global understanding and action. How can we learn from history and understand its importance today? How can (...) we shift out of cycles of racist, ethnonationalist, and xenophobic violence and warfare through education policy, pedagogy, and curricula? Authored by diverse global experts, this collective text can serves as a resource and foundation for deeper future studies (i.e., a special issue and book project) that further reflect on war, terrorism, and education. (shrink)

Knowledge plays a vital role in promoting human flourishing, democratic citizenship, and in enabling societies to pursue justice. The opportunity to acquire much of this knowledge depends on the joint operation of institutions such as the news media, science, and education—what Kurtulmus and Irzik call the epistemic basic structure of society. When coupled with the widely shared commitment to political equality and equal opportunity to flourish, these truths carry an overlooked but profound implication: societies must be assessed not only by (...) how they distribute income, rights, and opportunities, but also by how well and fairly their epistemic basic structure serves citizens' and society's knowledge needs. -/- The book develops an account of distributive epistemic justice centered on two requirements. First, a just epistemic basic structure must provide citizens with a fair opportunity to acquire the knowledge they need to deliberate about their individual good, the common good, and how to pursue them. Second, it must produce and disseminate the knowledge that citizens and public officials require to comply with the demands of justice. -/- Bringing political philosophy into conversation with philosophy of science, and drawing on extensive empirical research on institutions within the epistemic basic structure, Kurtulmus and Irzik diagnose structural forces that privilege some groups' knowledge needs, compromise the reliability of knowledge production, and undermine warranted trust. Through real-world cases and empirical studies, they show how distributive epistemic injustice limits access to central goods, entrenches political inequality, and hinders the pursuit of justice. In doing so, the book advances a unified framework for evaluating the epistemic basic structure, together with concrete reforms aimed at remedying existing injustices and securing a more just society. (shrink)

En este artículo pretendo analizar la segregación escolar socioeconómica como un entorno donde se generan injusticias epistémicas. Mi conclusión es que la privación de contacto con otros colectivos de otros ámbitos sociales, culturales y económicos desde el entorno escolar puede convertirse en un grave obstáculo para corregir los prejuicios de la sociedad, ya sea hacia la condición social de otras personas o hacia nosotros mismos. La segregación socioeconómica escolar sería un entorno donde se difumina la capacidad de la infancia como (...) sujeto de conocimiento, y cuyas consecuencias podrían llegar a ser dañinas para el desarrollo cognitivo y socioemocional del alumnado, llegando a limitar efectivamente la capacidad de la infancia para conocer y conocerse. (shrink)

This essay argues that Stanley Cavell's philosophy of Emersonian perfectionism amounts to a reconceptualization of education, one responsive to the challenge of each individual living a whole life. In response to our sense that conventional school learning can be alienating and dispiriting, this philosophy opens up a way for us to appreciate the education we may receive from our true friends. Their conversation can lead us each back to the adventure of being born. Such a conception of education, however, calls (...) out to be balanced by a corresponding appreciation of our mortality. Accordingly, my essay also explores how Cavell's thinking may be supplemented by György Lukács's philosophical reflections on the meaning of tragic fate. (shrink)

One thing the moral educator does is to bring people to subscribe to moral standards—that is, norms that purport to reflect morality’s requirements. So a theory of moral education must answer the moral standards question—that is to say, it must incorporate an account of what a moral standard is. The following three claims about the moral standards question are defended in this article. First, the moral standards question is an important choice point in theorizing about moral education that bears significantly (...) on both the theory and practice of moral education. Second, there is reason to reject an influential recent answer to the moral standards question, given by Michael Hand, according to which to subscribe to a moral standard is simply to subscribe to any standard but in a particular way—in Hand’s phrase, to ‘morally subscribe to a standard’. Third, reflection on the defects of Hand’s ‘moral subscription to a standard’ account points towards a promising alternative account of what it is to subscribe to a moral standard—the ‘moral fixed points’ account—which identifies the moral standards by their distinctive content. (shrink)

This attractively written and beautifully produced book explores an under-studied dimension of the English Reformation. Harry Spillane traces the development of the English Bible from the first tra...

This paper asks how AI ethics education should respond when technologies do not merely extend professional activity but participate in reshaping the practices through which professional identities are formed. It argues that AI ethics literacy, while necessary, does not adequately address the complexity of these conditions and instead, develops a formative, character-based approach to AI ethics education centered on professional identity formation. First, I reconstruct an extensionist account of technological change and develop the concept of constitutive power to explain how (...) some technologies reshape the norms, roles, and standards that define core professional practices. I then develop a character-based account of professional formation in which the work of moral cultivation and technological mediation continuously shape one another, with technomoral virtues enabling professionals to remain morally oriented within, and responsive to, the technological conditions that help form them. I conclude by developing a staged framework for AI ethics curriculum design that begins from differences in students’ capacities and moves through habituation, moral discernment, and ultimately lifelong professional formation oriented toward the common good. (shrink)

Bringing Walter Benjamin into dialogue with the urgent issues facing educational institutions today, this is the first comprehensive exploration of his philosophy of education and pedagogy. -/- In recent years, problems concerning the practice of education have become central to the critical discourse in the humanities: from debates regarding “deplatforming” and the redefinition of free speech on campus to the digitization of learning and the ethics of mentorship. But where do we go from here? This volume argues that Walter Benjamin's (...) writing offers critical tools to rethink the purposes of education and the institutional forms it should assume. -/- Reaching from his earliest writings during his involvement with the antebellum German Youth Movement to his late essays on history, theatre, and new media, the authors here explore how Benjamin argued against education as an institutional task subject to a scientific discipline. They show instead how he took his cue from language as a medium of subtle understanding to critically analyze the forms of violence inherent in the concept and history of education. For Benjamin, education was the lever to political reform. For him, the experience of youth should always be at the centre of considerations. -/- Written by leading international scholars, Walter Benjamin and Education both contextualizes Benjamin's pedagogy in the trajectory of his own thought and also offers an astute analysis of the value and relevance of his student-focused ideas to the institutional and political challenges of today. (shrink)

This paper charts Walter Benjamin’s philosophical and political revisions to his idea for a free school community in response to the First World War. His initial project appeals to a co-operative form of association that could exercise the value-creating power of study in order to counter nostalgic invocations of a natural idyll of fraternity that dominate the youth movement. When his own mentor calls for a youth army to serve as the vanguard of a cultural state at the outbreak of (...) war, Benjamin confronts the blind spots of their shared vision for the student community. He not only criticizes the apocalyptic theopolitics that justifies the mass sacrifice of youth on the front, but also recognizes that proletarian children were the missing term in the antagonism between youth and adults. This reckoning unearths the hidden topography of the commons that alters his way of conceiving an intergenerational justice at stake in education. (shrink)

Against the prevailing instrumentalization and outcomes-based education, there is a resurgence of claims for a holistic conception of education. What does it mean to see a person as a whole—without succumbing to assimilation into the whole or falling into any hardened dichotomy of the inner and the outer? Is there no way of avoiding a withdrawal into subjective innerness and doing justice to inner meaning while at the same time opening ourselves to the public and to the world? In response (...) to these questions, this article will explore an alternative sense of the holistic through a reading of American transcendentalism. As an illustration of a certain mode of suppression disclosed in holistic education, I shall first examine John Miller’s appropriation of American transcendentalism in the scheme of holistic education. Second, in search of a different conception of the holistic and its significance for education, I shall examine Cavell’s reading of the American transcendentalism of Thoreau and show how his reading radically differs from Miller’s. Via an aspect-shift in the reading of Thoreau’s text, I shall, in conclusion, present a vision of perfectionist educational anti-foundationalist and anti-dualist conception of the education of grown-ups. (shrink)

This article re-examines the normative status of consent in sex education by bringing into dialogue two contrasting positions: the mutuality framework proposed by Lamb, Gable, and de Ruyter and Hand’s justificatory account. The central issue is not whether consent is necessary, but which moral standards educators may legitimately promote directively. While Lamb et al. propose mutuality to address interpersonal disregard within consensual acts, Hand maintains that schools may only teach robustly justified standards, specifically consent, harm-avoidance, and promise-keeping. This article accepts (...) Hand’s justificatory restraint but addresses a prior educational question: how individuals acquire the practical judgement required to recognize the circumstances in which justified standards apply. Drawing on philosophical accounts of embodiment and attention, it argues that applying such standards depends upon an ability to perceive possible harms, relevant interests, and commitments within particular encounters. Sex education should neither impose substantive ideals of intimacy nor confine itself to formal rules of permissibility. Rather, it must support the interpretative capacities through which consent and other justified standards are exercised responsibly. Ultimately, the debate concerns whether consent is sufficient on its own, and how education enables consent to become a genuine expression of autonomy in intimacy. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill would appear to be a natural ally of contemporary appeals to educating the whole person. His critique of one-sided intellectual training and his reflection on feelings and the importance of their cultivation seem to support holistic approaches that oppose narrowly rational and instrumental models of education. Yet this article argues that such readings flatten the significance of Mill’s example and mischaracterize the nature of educational harm that his own life example both reveals and addresses. More specifically, the (...) article argues the central problem of Mill’s early education is not simply that it foregrounded reason and analysis at the expense of feeling, but the way it blocked expressiveness and, with it, possibilities of intelligibility. To make its case, the article will draw upon lines of thinking from Stanley Cavell, particularly his account of the expressiveness of language. It will undertake a close reading of certain passages from Mill’s Autobiography—from which accounts of his one-sided education are often drawn—to examine the work of rendering oneself legible in words. The article will conclude that what educational thinking learns most from Mill is not the need to balance rational with emotionally orientated instruction—but rather a conception of the whole person as autobiographical text. (shrink)

A decade after ‘post-truth’ was selected as Oxford Dictonaries’ Word of the Year, events like the global pandemic, wars across the globe, and the rise of generative AI have further eroded the sense of a common world. In response to this instability, this paper advocates a shift of emphasis in critical media literacy education from an instrumental to a hermeneutic orientation. Rather than assuming that addressing epistemic issues of mis- / dis-information enhances our capacity to navigate ethical issues of cohabitation, (...) I argue that ethical relationships enable the achievement of knowledge. Constructing such relationships requires cultivating literacy as semantic and axiological sensibility. For this critical and constructive project, I argue that critical literacy must encompass a capacity that has hitherto been under-appreciated—negative capability. It is the ability to endure uncertainty without irritably resorting to explanation. To support this claim, I examine the concept of negative capability through its origins in the letters of John Keats and its subsequent uptake in educational literature. I then show how Paulo Freire’s conception of critical literacy already presupposes the importance of negative capability and make the case for explicitly incorporating it as a component of critical literacy through three heuristic ‘sus’ words:suspicion, suspension, and sustenance. (shrink)

This paper seeks to critique constructivism and realism from the perspective of students with pneumatic disabilities. Pneumatic disabilities are defined as disabilities that have limited or no physical cause such as Emotional Disturbance, Other Health Impairment, and Learning Disability. Constructivism and realism are criticized as having an undesirable perspective for educating students with pneumatic disabilities and being epistemologically invalid. An alternative of phenomenology is laid out to potentially create a framework for students with pneumatic disabilities. This centers on three areas, (...) understanding thinking in time, dialogic goals, and common language as a contractual framework. The potential of an alternative approach to understanding and teaching students who often struggle with general education could help reform educating these and other students. An application of how this approach would look in practice is also included to bridge the gap between the theoretical and the practical centering on the students perspective being understood. (shrink)

Being able to evaluate the quality of a subject’s attention is important for students in a contemporary technological society where attention is a highly sought after commodity. I argue that evaluating attention can be particularly effective through engaging with film, especially considering the increasing challenges that undergraduate students face in relation to attention and technology (e.g., pausing the scroll and staying immersed in reading and writing). This pedagogical approach empowers students to be able to philosophically evaluate attention in the context (...) of contemporary technological use by engaging with relevant examples from film. (shrink)