Sharon Todd

Teachers judging without scripts, or thinking cosmopolitan

A cosmopolitan ethic invites both an appreciation of the rich diversity of values, traditions and ways of life and a commitment to broad, universal principles of human rights that can secure the flourishing of that diversity. Despite the tension between universalism and particularism inherent in this outlook, it has received much recent attention in education. I focus here on one of the dilemmas to be faced in taking cosmopolitanism seriously, namely, the difficulty of judging what is just in the context of an increasingly divergent public—and classroom—discourse about values, rights and equality. I propose in what follows that judgement cannot rely on any script, even one as attractive, perhaps, as cosmopolitanism. To explore what is at stake in making judgements in an educational context, I draw on both Hannah Arendts and Emmanuel Levinass notions of judgement and thinking. The paper discusses the educational significance of thought and judgement as conditions for reframing the universalism–particularism problem found in a cosmopolitan ethic. My argument is that there is a world of difference between educating for cosmopolitanism, which entails a faith in principles, and ‘thinking cosmopolitan’, which entails a hope in justice for my neighbours.

Teaching with Ignorance: Questions of Social Justice, Empathy, and Responsible Community.

This paper explores the limitations of empathy for the formation of community, particularly within social justice education. I begin with a discussion of the major tension within the idea of community — that it is founded at once on commonality and difference. Building in particular upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the paper articulates an understanding of community as a signifying encounter with difference that is not founded upon knowledge about the other, but upon a being-for and feeling-for the other. Focusing upon the explicitly educational commitment to working out forms of relationality conducive to establishing community and social justice across social differences, I ask how might teaching with ignorance, as opposed to teaching for empathy, bring us closer to the being-for others that marks our ethical engagement with other people and engenders our responsibility to the collective?

Promoting a Just Education: Dilemmas of rights, freedom and justice

This paper identifies and addresses some dilemmas to be faced in promoting educational projects concerned with human rights. Part of the difficulty that human rights education initiatives must cope with is the way in which value has been historically conferred upon particular notions such as freedom and justice. I argue here that a just education must grapple head‐on with the conceptual dilemmas that have been inherited and refuse to shy away from the implications of those dilemmas. To do this I address the fundamental fictions upon which rights are based and view those fictions as nonetheless useful for opening up the ethical terms of human rights education. With reference to the work of Arendt, Lyotard and Levinas, I conclude that the real potential of human rights education lies in its capacity to provoke insights that help youth live with ambiguity and dilemma, where freedom, justice, and responsibility cannot be dictated to them, but rather involve tough decisions that must be made in everyday life.

A Fine Risk To Be Run? The Ambiguity of Eros and Teacher Responsibility

Teachers are often placed in a space of tensionbetween responding to students as persons andresponding to students through theirinstitutionally-defined roles. Particularlywith respect to eros, which has becomeincreasingly the subject of strictinstitutional legislation and regulation,teachers have little recourse to a language ofresponsibility outside an institutional frame. By studying the significance of communicativeambiguity for responsibility, this paperexplores what is ethically at stake forteachers in erotic forms of communication. Specifically, it is Levinass own ambiguousunderstanding of the ethical significance oferos, and what we have to learn from it, thatoffers a way of reading the place of eros inresponsibility. I conclude my discussion withsome thoughts on what a renewed understandingof responsibility might mean at the personaland institutional levels.

Introduction: Levinas and Education: The Question of Implication

Reading the texts of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) often means entering a strange and lyrical world, a world rife with poetic invocation and profound sensitivity to the suffering of humanity, a world where the philosophical cardinal points of ethics and ontology are repositioned in laying out the terms of responsible subjectivity. Such a world, in its poignant lyricism and philosophical reorientation, has brought us a language of ethics that is deeply resonant with the experience of human relationality.

Between Body and Spirit: The Liminality of Pedagogical Relationships.

This article explores the pedagogical, transformative aspects of education as a relation, viewing such transformation as occurring in the liminal space between body and spirit. In order to explore this liminal space more thoroughly, the article first outlines a case for why liminality is of educational and not only of pedagogical concern, building on James Conroys notion of the liminal imagination and his emphasis on the importance of metaphor for calling our attention to the ontological spaces that make up educational practice. I then use this metaphor both substantively and methodologically, offering a reading of Clarice Lispectors novel The Stream of Life as a performance of the liminal imagination in its attempt to put into focus the embodied and transcendent aspects of becoming, both of which I see as central to defining what is pedagogical about human existence. The article then turns to developing how different metaphors may be mobilised to signify the particularly relational quality of becoming, drawing on Luce Irigarays work to explore more closely the corporeal and spiritual aspects of becoming in relation. I then turn my attention to a more fulsome discussion of the significance of approaching pedagogical relationships in education in this way and what this signifies for the teacher-student encounter in particular.

Experiencing Change, Encountering the Unknown: An Education in ‘Negative Capability’ in Light of Buddhism and Levinas

This article offers a reading of the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Theravada Buddhism across and through their differences in order to rethink an education that is committed to ‘negative capability’ and the sensibility to uncertainty that this entails. In fleshing this out, I first explore Buddhist ideas of impermanence, suffering and non-self (anicca, dukkha, and anatta, respectively), known as the three marks of existence, from the perspective of Theravada Buddhism. I explore in particular vipassana meditations insistence on openness to the transient nature of experience and self, and the notion of ‘encounter’ that is implied therein. I then interweave this with Levinass notion of an ethics of alterity. I argue that taken in tandem, both provide the condition through which another kind of ethical sensibility can be developed—that is, one that is attuned to our encounters with the world. In conclusion, the article reflects on how this sensibility as ‘negative capability’ can re-inform an ethics of educational practices, which are by nature themselves necessarily involved with change and uncertainty.

Shifting education's philosophical imaginaries: relations, affects, bodies, materialities

As Michele Le Doeuff pointed out in her classic feminist work, The Philosophical Imaginary, images function in philosophical writing to enact certain political and theoretical possibilities and limitations. She draws our attention to the relationship between images and concepts throughout the history of philosophy, and philosophy’s forgetting and occlusion of its own imaginaries. We wonder with Le Doeuff about the image that philosophy gives to itself of what it is to do philosophy. So too we wonder about the images that orient and inflect both educational practice and research. What images do educational researchers give to themselves of education, the practice of education and of research in education? This issue examines the ways in which diverse educational imaginaries operate. It thinks from and with recent feminist work in both philosophy and education.

Facing uncertainty in education: Beyond the harmonies of Eurovision education

One of the most pressing concerns identified in current European educational discourse is about the transitions of students from school to higher education and from educational institutions to the labour market. Government anxieties over the precariousness of the future has led to increasing regulation and measurement of ‘skills’ and ‘competences’ for students in an attempt to suture over these transitions. However, in doing so, policies risk further alienating and dehumanizing students in turning classrooms into testing zones and places of high risk assessment that pigeon-hole students into limited futures. I argue in this paper that if youth are to contribute meaningfully to a future that is, by definition, not something that is certain or knowable in advance, a more appropriate response will be to think about the kinds of sensibility that would help students orient themselves toward a changing and unpredictable world. This paper outlines how a project of facing uncertainty (what the poet John Keats referred to as ‘negative capability’) actually shifts the terms upon which policies and curricular reform can be constructed.

New ethical challenges within environmental and sustainability education: a response

One of the major points to grow out of the four papers presented in this issue is how to think of education in relation to the various challenges facing the biosphere, facing the future of human and other than human life forms, and facing the sheer difficulties of planning what to do about them. One might frame such challenges variously in terms of the inevitability of human extinction at the closing of the anthropocene, in terms of the burden being placed on youth and future generations to fix the planet, or in terms of hopeful plans to not only minimise the damage already done but to begin the work of reparation required to ensure the planet’s future inhabitability. What is evident from this staging is that the future is by no means secure, and that education plays a central role in facing this insecurity. The differences in the role of education, of course, are reflected in the various terminologies used in these papers, from Environmental Education (EE) to Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Each one embodies its own complex story, its own partialities, its own blindspots and possibilities. Each of the papers seems to be dissatisfied with ‘business as usual’ and raises questions about the limits of these perspectives. There is a palpable frustration with the theoretical arguments that do not take sufficiently teacher’s practices into account (Louise Sund’s paper), with the anthropocentrism that infects much writing on EE and ESD (Helen Kopnina and Brett Cherniak’s contribution), with the mixed discursive orientations that inform policy on internationalisation and sustainability (Karen Pashby and Vanessa Andreotti’s work) and with the lack of facing the paradox and controversy in which ESE is embedded (Katrien Van Poeck, Gert Goeminne and Joke Vandenabeele’s paper). This dissatisfaction is also marked by a desire (and even hope), more or less profound in the various papers, that education can indeed ‘do’ something: that is has some aim – or mission, even – to contribute to the future in a way that matters to the environment, however that term is conceived. Now, I want to investigate critically precisely the relationship to education that is manifest in these papers, not because I want to criticise the projects of EE, ESE or ESD as ‘normative’ and therefore as a result view them as being somehow automatically problematic. (This accusation of ‘normativity’ is a rather tiresome