Gonzalo Jover

Restructuring university degree programmes: a new opportunity for ethics education?

This article explores the possibilities of reinforcing ethics education at the university level within the context of new internationalisation processes. The situation in Spain is used as a case study. The article begins with a review of the rationale behind this issue and goes on to analyse the place of the ethical dimension in education in the proposals for adapting Spanish university degree programmes to the European Higher Education Area. Fieldwork carried out at three higher education institutions reveals that, while professors accept the institutional function of the university in ethics education, their hazy conception of the matter weakens the likelihood of a pedagogical approach in‐keeping with the level of importance given to such a function.

The Ethical Dimension of Teaching: A Review and a Proposal.

Abstract This paper attempts to show the existence of an ethical dimension of teaching as an educational activity. In order to achieve this, two main errors must be avoided: on the one hand, the idea that the ethical dimension of teaching is an alternative approach to a technological paradigm; on the other hand, the idea that this dimension constitutes only an external factor in regulating educational activities. After analysing the arguments most frequently used in justifying the ethical dimension of teaching, the authors argue for the need to reconstruct a concept of pedagogical effectiveness in which the ethical component constitutes an intrinsic element. Finally, content for the ethical dimension of teaching from the viewpoint of socialisation through human rights is suggested.

Biographical Research in Childhood Studies: Exploring Children’s Voices from a Pedagogical Perspective

Current research on childhood insists on the need to listen to the children’s own voices. The line of research being pursued over the last 12 years by the Research Group on Pedagogy of Children’s Values (University Complutense of Madrid, Spain) has been sensitive to that issue. The rise of biographical research is set within what some authors call the “narrative turn” that has been taken in the knowledge of education. This turn has led to a rediscovery of the subjects’ own life experiences, in sharp contrast to the objectivist attempts of positivist methodologies in which the educator and the student are treated as replaceable representatives of some prototype. Thus, rather than being a specific research method, the narrative and biographical approach is considered in pedagogic circles as a paradigm. It is recognized as a new way of understanding education and pedagogical knowledge that fans out into different lines of research. Going on from our previous work on exploring children’s voices, our last study tries to delve deeper into the way children experience happiness.

Rethinking Subsidiarity as a Principle of Educational Policy in the European Union

For Europe, the turn of the century has meant the end of a decisive decade full of hopes and disappointments. The euphoria following the events that unfolded in the eastern countries at the end of the 1980’s, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, was in turn followed by a much lower moment of European ideals, worsened by the uncertainty that usually follows ‘revolutionary’ processes (Dahrendorf, 1991), by the recurrent war in former Yugoslavia, the return of xenophobic attitudes and neo-fascist movements, political scandals, economic ups and downs, etc. In this irresolute context, the European Union has often been perceived by the citizens of its Member States as a distant bureaucracy that affects our daily lives through regulations, taxes, the currency we use to buy and sell,... and yet we fail to see ourselves reflected in its decisions. Those who drew up the Treaty of the European Union signed in Maastricht in February 1992 were well aware of this ‘democratic deficit’ and largely responded to it with the Treaty’s appeal to the principle of subsidiarity. It is also probably part and parcel of the new role that the Treaty conceded to education.

What Does the Right to Education Mean? A Look at an International Debate from Legal, Ethical, and Pedagogical Points of View

Working from a concept of politics of education that encompasses legal,ethical and pedagogical levels of analysis, this paper presents theresults of a field work project on the meaning and current state of theright to education with a larger philosophical discourse. Talk ofeducation as a human right presupposes taking part in a horizon ofinterpretation. Projected is a view of person as a subject, i.e., assomeone not only placed in a specific context, but also as someone whois capable of distancing him/herself from local and culturalconditioning.

Philosophy of Education in Spain at the Threshold of the 21st Century – Origins, Political Contexts, and Prospects

This article analyzes the evolution of Philosophy of Educationin Spain and its situation at the dawn of the 21st century. Spainspeculiar socio-historical circumstances have largely conditioned thedirection this discipline has taken over the last several decades. So,although during a period there was some approximation towards themethods of analytic philosophy, Philosophy of Education has never fullyrelinquished its normative vocation. To do so would have meant spurningthe hopes and fears that had filled Spanish society by the mid 1970supon the reinstatement of civil liberties and democracy. Indeed,attention to the circumstances and that normative orientation have foundtheir best fit in a practical Aristotelian-based philosophy meant toendow Philosophy of Education with a normative character that do notshun the educators need for reflection, practical decision-making, andresponsibility. Since the 1990s, new directions have been marked by thechallenge of postmodernism, inasmuch as it affects not only thetechnological positivist model but also the reflective educators modelof a practical Philosophy of Education. The new directions spread out invarious ways, yet they all fall into a common denominator of narrativetrends. The problem posed by these new languages lies in the extent towhich they are consistent with pedagogic intent. In turn, the answerstake on different profiles depending on whether the stance leans moretowards the philosophical or the pedagogical point of view withinPhilosophy of Education. The complementary nature of both perspectivescharacterizes the current state of the field in Spain.

Continuities and discontinuities in the origins of the institutionalisation of pedagogy in Spain

This article applies the current international interest in the institutionalisation of pedagogic knowledge to the study of its origins as an academic discipline in Spain. The focus of attention lies in the unexplored issues, the ideological tensions and the recurrent discontinuities that surrounded this process. The starting point is a cryptic reference to the pedagogical seminar in Prague in a report from the Spanish Council on public instruction regarding the appointment of Manuel Bartolomé Cossío to take the chair in Higher Pedagogy in the doctoral studies of the Faculty of Philosophy, created at the Central University in Madrid in 1904. The inclusion of pedagogy in Spanish universities made a longstanding wish come true but, as often happens when adapting to new circumstances, it was also the effect of a mutation that added a degree of discontinuity, which in this case was both institutional and doctrinal. The appeal to the seminar in Prague – arguably at the initiative of the Catholic Herbartian Otto Willmann – may then be interpreted not only as a way to justify the pertinence of the theoretical and practical knowledge of education, but also as a nod to placate traditional minds and act as a bridge between tradition and modernity.

Constructing Creative Democracy at School by Reading the Classics: A Dialogue between Martha Nussbaum and John Dewey

Abstract The year 2016 marked the 100th anniversary of Democracy and Education, one of John Dewey’s most widely translated and published books around the world still in the author’s lifetime. Nowadays, in a context in which pedagogy is bogged down in ‘economicism’ and suspicion towards any proposal that hints of value, Dewey’s ideas once again provide a ray of hope for a possible future. One of the contemporary authors that has fostered this hopeful reading of Dewey is Martha C. Nussbaum, whose appeal to bringing the humanities back to schools motivated a project on approaching the classic texts with the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which we have developed during the past years with secondary education students from three schools in Santiago de Chile, Madrid and London. The project is based on an open reading of Sophocles’s Antigone through an online application that enables students from the participating schools to interact. This chapter delves deeper into the theoretical bases of the project. In the first two sections, we analyse the interpretation that Nussbaum and Dewey each made of Antigone. Then, in the third, we present the Antigone project as a learning experience promoting a creative democracy, as Dewey called it.

Educational Policy in Spain: Between Political Bias and International Evidence

In Spain since the Constitution was ratified in 1978, eight laws have been passed regulating the education system in non-university stages, thereby subjecting education to continual upheaval. In the first laws, from the 1980s and early 1990s, the debate was primarily political, but by the year 2000, coinciding with Spain’s taking part in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), legislation had apparently become more technical in nature. The objective of this paper is to analyse the type of political reading made from the results of these international assessments. It focuses on the three general laws on education that have been passed in Spain in the last 15 years. The sources for the study are the debates that took place while the laws were being drafted, especially during the parliamentary proceedings. The analysis shows the submission of the political debate under the pressure to achieve a more internationally competitive system. In the realm of the political right this step gave victory to neo-liberalism over neo-conservativism. In the realm of the political left, it represents the rise of neoliberal socialism and the surrender to the forces of the economy. Both tendencies dramatically affect the notion of the common good, a notion that does not fit comfortably in either one.