Clarence W. Joldersma

Embodiment, nursing practice, and religious faith: a perspective from one tradition.

Using a descriptive sketch of embodiment as experienced in the nursing encounter in an acute care setting, this paper examines aspects of the embodied encounter using the resources of the Christian, Reformed tradition. Offering or receiving nursing care has a spiritual dimension, and recognition of this allows care to be sensitive to and respectful of this dimension of human embodied experience. The encounter can be understood and lived out as (partially) sacramental, and understanding the sacramental quality of the health care encounter allows both nurse and client to offer and accept dependency without a loss of dignity or humanity.

Not Only What or How, but Who? Subjectivity, Obligation, and the Call to Teach

THIS PAPER ARGUES that the call to teach ought to be conceptualized not so much in terms of subject matter (‘what’) or teaching method (‘how’) but with respect to the subjectivity of the people involved – that is, of the one who teaches and of the one who is taught. Building explicitly on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the essay develops the idea of a responsible subject as the condition that makes visible the distinctiveness about the call to teach, suggesting that Gods call to teach manifests itself through the face of the student, in the asymmetric relation between the teacher and the student as the other. In doing so, the teacher becomes a responsible subject for and to the student, instead of merely for the subject matter and the methods of teaching. Familiar tensions in teaching illustrate this call to responsibility.

Educating for Social Justice: Revisiting Stronks & Blomberg's Idea of Responsive Discipleship:

RESPONSIVE DISCIPLESHIP – INCLUDING unwrapping gifts, sharing joys and burdens, and seeking shalom – is a good framework for thinking about Christian education. However, this approach does not address adequately issues of social justice in the context of education. The lens of social justice take education further beyond the vestiges of individualism that ‘gift’ language carries and also beyond the enclosed classroom that sharing joys and burdens might suggest. Reframing those two in the context of seeking shalom brings out the social justice dimensions of unwrapping gifts and sharing joys and burdens.

Doing justice today: A welcoming embrace for LGBT students in Christian schools

The article argues for welcoming LGBT students in Christian schools. The article develops an idea of justice based on Nicholas Wolterstorffs idea of claim-rights of vulnerable groups that have been wronged, and applies this to the security and recognition of LGBT students in Christian schools. The article presents empirical evidence about the harm faced by such students, concluding that Christian LGBT students suffer wrongs that call out for doing justice today. The article argues that doing justice means welcoming LGBT students, and ends with a description of what that might entail in Christian schools.

The Temporal Transcendence of the Teacher as Other

Abstract Over the last decades, education has shifted more clearly to a learner-centered understanding, including particularly constructivism, leaving little room conceptually for a substantive role for the teacher. This article develops a Levinasian framework for understanding the teacher as other. It begins by exploring the spatial metaphors of Levinas’s idea of the teacher as transcendent but shifts to Levinas’s idea of time as instants (durations) that come to the ego as a gift from the future. The article employs these temporal metaphors to understand better the transcendence of the teacher.

Philosophical Questions and Opportunities at the Intersection of Neuroscience, Education, and Research

Education is a fertile ground for neuroscientific applications. However, at the scholarly level this has predominantly been addressed by cognitive psychology and the emerging field of neuroeducation. Although in its very early stages, there is also now a nascent interest by philosophers of education with respect to the intersections of neuroscience, education, and research. The chapter uses neuroscience to provide phenomena for philosophy of education to think and ask questions about, while remaining philosophical and educational. The chapter begins with a survey of the various ways of critical philosophical engagement with neuroscience’s and neuroeducation’s empirical literature, including suggested improvements on the concepts and ideas that frame the neuroscience-education intersection. This includes neuromyths, commercialization, neuroimaging, scientific reductionism, and technological enhancements. It then surveys the opposite direction, where engagement with neuroscience unsettles familiar philosophical concepts, resulting in new lines of philosophical thinking within the discipline. This includes cultural differences, plasticity, and open dynamic systems. It ends with a call for further philosophical inquiry in this emerging intersection.

Promise and Peril of Neuroscience for Alternative Education

Alternative education exists because there are deep differences in visions of a good society, what counts as normative social interaction, and thus what constitutes good education. Alternative educators, like all educators, need to deal with novel developments that impact educational practices. Generally speaking, new developments often offer new and innovative possibilities to enhance alternative ways of educating, but they also sometimes threaten to undermine existing educational spaces carved out as alternatives. The recent decade of the brain catapulted neuroscience into the public imaginary, with applications to a dizzying array of social practices, including teaching and learning. Alternatives to traditional educational practices and organization might be impoverished if they ignore neuroscientific discoveries, but neither would they be best served to uncritically embrace its innovations. Neuroscience offers both promise and peril for alternative education.

Calling and Inspiration

This chapter develops Levinas’s idea of the ethical as the structural call to responsibility for the other’s good. I first develop an idea of transcendence, especially as relates to what I term ‘time immemorial’ and ‘time unforeseen.’ I concretize this by elaborating two types of indirect experiences, one that I name call and the other that I refer to as inspiration. My goal is to interpret education’s commonplaces in light of these two experiences. I argue that these form the structural conditions of those commonplaces, namely, being called to normative responsibility and being inspired with a hope that motivates to action. Te idea of a regulative function uncovers the ethical orientation that gives rise to education.