Yotam Hotam

Education in post-secular society

Three transformative social movements stand out in the present. The first is the digital revolution. Digitalization, and its network infrastructures, is more than an ‘upgrade’ in the economy. It is a revolution in the forces of production and a total societal transformation that reaches the far corners of inner as well as outer worlds – no less an upheaval than was the industrial revolution when it supplanted feudalism. Simultaneously, a new ecological awareness induces a second salient transformation. This awareness aims to reverse the alienation and disembodiment encouraged by modernity – the loss and destruction of the body and of nature, of the organic integrity of the self and ecological totality at the planetary level – in an environmental movement. Along with this, there is a third movement, which is a social revitalization of the premodern, though in almost unrecognizable, post post secular, new ways. This social revitalization is evident with the return of religion and religiosity, in almost all social, cultural, and political arenas. This social change, as Gorski, Kim, and Torpey (2012, p. 1) argued ‘has surged onto the academic agenda, marked by the increasing scholarly use of the notion of the “post-secular” ’. A ‘post-secular’ emergent society is about the return of religion. While the debates concerning ‘post-secular’ emergent society have been prominent in critical thought in the humanities and social studies of the last decades, this topic is only now beginning to enter the field of education (Fischer, Hotam, & Wexler, 2012; Jacobsen & Jacobsen 2008). Questions about the relations between ecology and pedagogy, and technology and pedagogy are more evident in current educational discussions. The call for ‘taking religion seriously’, however, has remained, until now, under-discussed in education. Yet, a ‘postsecular’ social change, like the digital and ecological revolutions, carries with it the possibility of different regimes of knowledge and education, and in so doing brings back ‘society’ and a critical approach to education – although in ways unfamiliar and anathema to the modern, industrial, de-socializing world of secular instrumentalism. At the same time, a religious turn is internally connected to the digital and ecological social movements, by providing them with some of the most intimate notions within their vocabulary of human change, social transformation and meaning. In the introduction to this special issue, we outline central aspects of the ‘post-secular’ emergent society, referencing contemporary scholarly debates. We then transgress the historical and geographic borders of these debates, and challenge the taken for granted dichotomous relations between the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’. We aim to open the door to analyses of the implications of such a revised version of the ‘post-secular’ for

Democracy and Education in Postsecular Society

Classical social theory, and even more radically critical social theory, is historical and holistic. Neither politics nor education can be understood without grounding in society. Sociologists of education know about the contemporary tendency, rooted in the instrumentalist and rationalizing side of modernity, to abstract educational phenomena from social life, recoding them as individual attributes and increasingly as cognitive processes (Wexler, 2008, 2009). The forgetting of the social in the digital age continues and intensifies the “dialectic of Enlightenment,” where the promise of pure reason, above society, unexpectedly returns a desocialized, means-oriented, technical form of thought and a complementary mythical and stereotypical way of thinking, in place of wisdom (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1971). Forgetting the social constitution of political, educational, and, for that matter, economic, aesthetic, and erotic phenomena (Weber, 1946) is only the first step, although the major one, in an amnesia about the sources of collective life. When meaning is reduced to a combination of advertising-like slogans and numerical indices, we lose all sense of the importance of culture, both in everyday life and in social understanding. Religion, which was the first to go in the long shadow of modernity’s triumph, was more easily vanquished in the names of science, rationality, and Enlightenment. It survived mostly in compartmentalization, as the separate sphere of “the sacred.”

Pedagogy in practice: the pedagogy of a learning setting as students experience it

This paper opens a theoretical discussion regarding the pedagogy of a learning setting as students experience it. Students’ experience of learning deserves particular attention because it may differ from the pedagogy that is designed and campaigned for by the school, or even from the one that is ‘experienced’ by the teacher in the same situation. In order to open up such a discussion, we introduce the term ‘pedagogy in practice’ (PiP). This new term describes the pedagogy that actually acts on students’ thought and affects; it relates to the interaction between the school’s pedagogy and students’ experience of it. In this paper, we define the concept of PiP and examine its implications and differentiation from related pedagogic concepts. By doing so, we question educators’ and policy makers’ ability to understand, evaluate, make sense of, and eventually improve pedagogies or curricula in general without looking at PiP in particular.

Pedagogy in Practice: School Pedagogy from Students' Perspectives.

This paper introduces the concept of ‘pedagogy in practice’ (PiP), referring to the immediate interaction between students’ learning experiences and school’s pedagogy and distinct from the pedagogy advocated ‘from above’ by the school. We bring the concept of PiP into focus by analysing students’ open‐ended discourse about their learning experiences in 24 open group conversations, comparing two holistically different learning environments (conventional and an alternative arts and sciences (A&S) high school in Israel). The results show that A&S students described their learning experiences as ones wherein they actively steered and navigated their own learning process. Students’ experience of the conventional school’s pedagogy implies that the conventional school’s PiP considers its students as passengers joining a ride over which they have little control. Traditionally, research has looked into students’ perceived learning experiences for the purpose of better understanding their learning processes. We suggest that students’ talk about their experiences is also informative for understanding their interaction with the schools’ pedagogy.

Religion, Education, and Secularism in International Agencies.

Author(s): Amy Stambach, Katherine Marshall, Matthew J. Nelson, Liviu Andreescu, Aikande C. Kwayu, Philip Wexler, Yotam Hotam, Shlomo Fischer, Hassan El Bilawi Source: Comparative Education Review, Vol. 55, No. 1 (February 2011), pp. 111-142 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Comparative and International Education Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657650 . Accessed: 15/04/2011 10:47

Theory and measure in the psychological field: The case of attachment theory and the strange situation procedure

In this article, we pose a question about the link between theory and measure within the field of psychology and use an influential psychological theory—attachment theory—as a case study to test our question. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we incorporate broad historical, sociological, and philosophical perspectives to support our thesis that in today’s psychological field there is pressure to achieve instantaneous empirical answers to broad theoretical questions and without due awareness of this state of affairs, a confusion could occur between theoretical and empirical constructs. In our review of attachment theory, we look at the connection between the theory and the empirical definitions of the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) and conclude that the use of the terminology “gold standard” in relation to the SSP is an imprudent characterization of what is otherwise a robust measurement tool. We theorize that this type of terminology may result in overreliance on the measure instead of on the theory.

Ecology and Pedagogy: On the Educational Implications of Postwar Environmental Philosophy

Environmentalism, an ethical imperative to preserve and protect nature, has become in the last decade a central ethical and political theme. A rising attention to humankind’s responsibility over nature, environmentalism echoes today’s dreads of global warming and its catastrophic ecological implications. These current, post-modern, environmental apprehensions contend that nature has to be shielded from modern technological and industrial destructive progress; they oppose to the modernist approach that contended that nature is to be exploited for the benefit of humankind. At the same time, one can say that in contemporary environmental fears, ‘Annihilation’ as a fundamental component of postwar memory culture, is transformed into anxiety vis-a-vis “Ecocide”, meaning an ecological catastrophe that signifies the end of human civilization.

Theocracy and Pedagogy: Public Education in a “Postsecular” Israel

The return of religion and religiosity, on almost all social, cultural, and political fronts, has informed the academic agenda of the last decade. It is marked by a growing scholarly use of the concept of the “postsecular.” Against this background, this article brings the concept of the postsecular to bear on the transformation of contemporary Jewish national education in Israel. Its main argument is that the arrangements currently on display between secular and sacral notions in national Jewish education illustrate the rise of a new theocratic vision for Israel. This neoreligious thrust challenges the former interplay between secular and religious notions, which has served as the basis for Jewish national (i.e., Zionist) education. The article also places the notion of a postsecular emergent society within a particular social and political context, pointing to a broader and much richer phenomenon than hitherto suggested.