Philosophy of Education in Practice - Böcker

Students, parents, teachers, leaders, and policy-makers generate and take responsibility for their efforts, often without understanding the nature of the responsibility they hold. Barbara S. Stengel argues that every educational interaction is a call to and opportunity for responsibility for all involved. In short, responsibility represents the goal for students, the guiding vision for educators’ practice, and a useful design principal for leaders and policy makers. Using a critical pragmatist framing of the concept of responsibility, Stengel shows how greater attention to responsibility allows for a deeper understanding of diversity and equity as well as individual and common goods. It enables a deeper understanding of the moral dimensions of teaching and learning prospectively in growth rather than retrospectively in blame. The philosophical discussion of responsibility is coupled with discussion of the lived experiences of students, teachers, aides, and administrators and draws evidence from a case study of a middle school turnaround in Nashville, USA. The Bailey Middle School community developed a reading of responsibility that matched educators’ intuitions and experiences of their work, while enhancing students’ understanding of their place in the world. The book represents a call for educators to be, and become, responsible for their and their students’ lives-in-common and the individual well-being of all in the community.

Students, parents, teachers, leaders, and policy-makers generate and take responsibility for their efforts, often without understanding the nature of the responsibility they hold. Barbara S. Stengel argues that every educational interaction is a call to and opportunity for responsibility for all involved. In short, responsibility represents the goal for students, the guiding vision for educators’ practice, and a useful design principal for leaders and policy makers. Using a critical pragmatist framing of the concept of responsibility, Stengel shows how greater attention to responsibility allows for a deeper understanding of diversity and equity as well as individual and common goods. It enables a deeper understanding of the moral dimensions of teaching and learning prospectively in growth rather than retrospectively in blame. The philosophical discussion of responsibility is coupled with discussion of the lived experiences of students, teachers, aides, and administrators and draws evidence from a case study of a middle school turnaround in Nashville, USA. The Bailey Middle School community developed a reading of responsibility that matched educators’ intuitions and experiences of their work, while enhancing students’ understanding of their place in the world. The book represents a call for educators to be, and become, responsible for their and their students’ lives-in-common and the individual well-being of all in the community.

Collaboration is widely celebrated as an ability schools should teach children to practice. Yet collaboration has a darker side, as its use to refer to those complicit with Nazi occupiers and with colonial oppressors of many kinds suggests. In effect, “collaboration” is a contranym, a word that can mean something or its opposite. To collaborate can mean to work with one’s friends and colleagues for the common good. It can also mean to sell out one’s friends and colleagues for the sake of personal gain. What can schools do to encourage the first and discourage the second? The loyalty and commitment to shared ends that collaboration implies may seem a positive good only insofar as those loyalties and ends are also good – but how to judge?This book asks: to whom should one be loyal and what are the limits of loyalty? What responsibility do collaborators bear for the outcomes of their joint projects? Should I make those friends and those responsibilities my own? These are questions children learn to answer in schools, through the formal and informal education that happens there. Amy Shuffelton explores those questions in the context of children’s lives in schools, including examples from films, literature, and children’s own accounts of moral dilemmas they face around questions of friendship, authority, and their own developing agency. She argues that rather than collaboration being a simple, good practice, considerable care is needed to ensure it serves individuals and their communities well.

Collaboration is widely celebrated as an ability schools should teach children to practice. Yet collaboration has a darker side, as its use to refer to those complicit with Nazi occupiers and with colonial oppressors of many kinds suggests. In effect, “collaboration” is a contranym, a word that can mean something or its opposite. To collaborate can mean to work with one’s friends and colleagues for the common good. It can also mean to sell out one’s friends and colleagues for the sake of personal gain. What can schools do to encourage the first and discourage the second? The loyalty and commitment to shared ends that collaboration implies may seem a positive good only insofar as those loyalties and ends are also good – but how to judge?This book asks: to whom should one be loyal and what are the limits of loyalty? What responsibility do collaborators bear for the outcomes of their joint projects? Should I make those friends and those responsibilities my own? These are questions children learn to answer in schools, through the formal and informal education that happens there. Amy Shuffelton explores those questions in the context of children’s lives in schools, including examples from films, literature, and children’s own accounts of moral dilemmas they face around questions of friendship, authority, and their own developing agency. She argues that rather than collaboration being a simple, good practice, considerable care is needed to ensure it serves individuals and their communities well.

Schools and other forms of education have significant impacts on people’s views about emotions and emotional experiences. This book helps students and educators to better understand emotions and their significance in social life and in education. It shows how we often take it for granted that certain emotions, such as happiness, are ‘positive’, while others are ‘negative’ and how personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, and race, can make an unfair difference when it comes to what emotions are expected or accepted. It also focuses on how emotions are understood as functional and as moral by different theoretical traditions, from psychology to philosophy. Written in an accessible format, the book encourages broad reflection on what emotions are and why they matter, in relation to the aims of education, what it means to be a good person, and equality and social justice.