Abstract Universities today face accelerating instability, shaped by audit cultures, performance metrics, and constant pressures for adaptation. Leadership is often framed in managerial terms of strategic control and technical problem‐solving, yet such models risk obscuring the ethical responsibility that sustains institutional life. This article develops an alternative account of leadership as a hermeneutic‐ethical practice. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's conception of narrative identity, I argue that leaders are responsible for holding together the idem of institutional continuity with the ipse of transformation and promise. Leadership is not exhausted by decision‐making but entails the narrative labor of keeping faith with an institution's story while opening it to new possibilities. Hannah Arendt's reflections on responsibility and judgment further deepen this account by highlighting the plurality and contestability of institutional narratives. The article concludes by proposing leadership as a practice of narrative responsibility: sustaining coherence while remaining open to critique, plurality, and renewal.
Abstract Challenging the dichotomy of nature and culture is broadly seen as a key aim of environmental art education. Some of the literature on the topic focuses on the question of what metaphor for the relationship between nature and culture environmental art educators should adopt and attempt to convey to their students. In this article, I argue that such a focus reflects a problematically instrumental conception of art education, a conception that seems to partly stem from confusion about the epistemological status of art. To bring clarity to this matter, I will examine John Dewey's ideas about the nature of aesthetic qualities and aesthetic experience. According to Dewey, aesthetic qualities are culminations of human‐environment transactions. He believed that art, contrary to science or other forms of declarative knowledge, operates indirectly, qualitatively, and imaginatively. In light of this, it seems implausible that the arts could be used to convey a specific metaphorical worldview to students. I argue that the aim of environmental art education should rather be to cultivate students' ability to experience the world aesthetically.
Abstract The success of an inquiry dialogue depends on the quality of its central question. Yet, evaluating inquiry dialogue questions is harder than it appears. One approach is to maintain that inquiry dialogue questions are philosophical questions, but there is no successful method of identifying all and only philosophical questions. Another approach is to appeal to Peter Worley's influential taxonomy of grammatical and conceptual openness, which builds on Philip Cam's question quadrant model. I advance an alternative that addresses the limitations of previous models while preserving their benefits. This model includes two dimensions: grammatical scope, the extent to which a question's grammar constrains what could count as an answer, and disputational scope, the extent to which a question is subject to reasonable and actual disagreement among the inquirers. Questions fail as inquiry dialogue questions when either dimension is too wide or too narrow, and I show how facilitators can apply this framework when selecting questions and in the midst of an inquiry itself.
This article considers the pedagogical relation as a relation to a nonhuman educator, wherein the educatee is a member of the Homo sapiens species. My aim is to clarify the extent to which a nonhuman-human relation can be understood as pedagogical. The argument takes leave from the "pedagogy of relation" discourse in philosophy of education. Through the thought experiment of substituting nonhuman entities into the educator-educatee relation in the position of educator, the anthropocentric aspect of the other/educator in a relation is probed to conceptually clarify what sort of "other" is required for the relation to be considered a pedagogical relation. The nonhuman others pondered are place, as developed by Michael Marker; forests, as theorized by Eduardo Kohn; and solitary confinement, as considered by Lisa Guenther. These three foci suggest that a nonhuman-human relation can be considered a pedagogical relation when it is constitutive for the self and enables the self to retain a sense of continuity through a minimal awareness that endures through time. Conversely, if there is the annihilation or dissolution of the self/person, then the relation is anti-pedagogical.
Climate change poses a threat to young people's capacity to flourish both now and in the future. In response, Aristotelian Climate Change Education (CCE) aims to cultivate radicalized climate virtues in students and give them structured opportunities to contemplate Socrates's question-"How should one live?"-amidst conditions of unprecedented ecological uncertainty. However appealing this approach may be to environmentalists, it faces a serious objection from political liberals who appeal to the principle of neutrality toward competing conceptions of the good life. In this article, we draw from critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi's Critique of Forms of Life to address the concern about liberal neutrality while deepening our account of Aristotelian CCE. Jaeggi's work helps us diagnose liberal neutrality as an ideological avoidance strategy and offers an alternative, context-transcending standard for legitimacy grounded in whether a form of life can learn from crises and overcome its own blockages to learning. After showing why Aristotelian CCE should not be held to liberal neutrality as a standard of legitimacy, we argue that it is nevertheless legitimate because it cultivates capacities, such as problem recognition and good deliberation, necessary for successful learning. Along with structured time and space for contemplation about the good life, an education in radicalized climate virtues prepares students to flourish as they and their forms of life learn from a continually evolving climate.
Civic virtues are character traits according to which people are disposed to act for the right reasons, at the right times, and in the right ways with the political sphere of life. Inculcating these virtues is often taken to be an important part of civic education, and therefore understanding what these virtues are is of pedagogical importance. One important question about civic virtues is how they relate to more general virtues of character. We consider two likely possibilities: civic virtues may be sui generis virtues with distinctly political content, or they may be the political instantiation of general virtues of character. We find both alternatives wanting, but argue that these philosophical difficulties can be leveraged for pedagogical purposes in order to engage civics students and help them learn to tolerate complexity.
This article suggests that questions of process are integral to considering the role of conceptual engineering in education. Using a case study of a collaborative inquiry-based project of conceptual engineering with a group of disability activists, I will argue that particular epistemic and moral considerations of methodology arise when the concepts being re-engineered are implicated in past and ongoing epistemic injustice. In particular, a participatory conceptual engineering methodology points to key normative commitments and does well at addressing considerations of hermeneutical justice, repair, and utility. I will argue that philosophers of education have good reasons to pursue participatory forms of conceptual engineering, that they have a vital role to play in conceptual engineering more broadly, and that they may in fact be necessary to avoid entrenching forms of injustice.
In recent years, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education have become the focal point of intense political and academic contestation. While these developments are frequently described as a "backlash," the concept of backlash itself has rarely been theorized in education. Drawing on recent affect and political theory, this article offers a conceptual framework for understanding contemporary resistance to DEI initiatives as a distinct form of affective-political mobilization rather than a simple reaction to specific policies. Situating current disputes within a longer history of contestation over liberal educational reforms, the article argues that backlash to DEI operates as an affective-political dynamic shaped by perceptions of elite overreach, loss of voice, and challenges to institutional legitimacy. By applying the lens of backlash politics to higher education, the article illuminates why DEI has become such a charged object of struggle and what this reveals about the limits and tensions of liberal educational projects under conditions of polarization.
In this article, I develop a systemic theory of educationalization based on Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory. I define educationalization as a process of semantic expansion through which education absorbs a wide range of societal themes, overextending its structural capacities. Analyzing social, factual, and temporal dimensions of meaning, I argue that educationalization constitutes a structural paradox. As society tasks education with resolving problems originating in other systems, such as economic inequality or environmental crises, educational organizations become simultaneously indispensable and insufficient. This contradiction fuels recursive cycles of reform, where the system reaffirms its relevance through its inability to fully satisfy external demands. Ultimately, this article suggests that educationalization is a constitutive condition of modernity. Rather than solving the problems it absorbs, the system manages social contingency by rendering contradictions observable, ensuring its own institutional permanence through the persistent deferral of fulfillment within a permanent state of reform.
Matthew Lipman's Philosophy for Children (P4C) has been hailed as a valuable pedagogical program for addressing the nuanced questions raised by the Anthropocene. As many have proposed, its emphasis on reason-based thinking, community philosophical reflection, and inclusivity of diverse perspectives offers youth a chance to develop the thinking and dialogical skills necessary to address the environmental crisis we are facing. Despite the clear value of programs like P4C (or Philosophy with Children [PwC]), I argue that the current landscape of inquiry (i.e., the text and the community of philosophical inquiry) lacks an ecological dimension. That is, it is too abstract and detached from the non-ideal, immanent conditions of inquiry to purposefully cultivate thinkers who can make ecosocial decisions under the material conditions of the Anthropocene. Considering this narrowness, I resituate P4C within the broader program I call "Ecosophy with Children": a purposeful reterritorialization of P4C's thinking systems as a transversal community of philosophical inquiry that conceptualizes participants' subjectivities in relation to their mental, social, and environmental ecological contexts.
In recent years, scholars working in the tradition of critical pedagogy have warned that the field is failing to maintain its relevance in our postdigital age, where the boundaries between humans and technology have grown blurrier. In this article, I take up such warnings by arguing that critical pedagogy can be reinvigorated for the postdigital age by making-kin with insights from critical posthumanism. By focusing on Freire's notion of humanization, I explore the problems that emerge for traditional critical pedagogy in the postdigital age, arguing that a postdigital critical pedagogy must embrace the notion of post-humanization if it is to maintain its usefulness. I argue that postdigital critical pedagogy must reject the threads of human exceptionalism and assumptions surrounding tidy distinctions between humans and technology that run through Freire's conceptions of humanization in order to reinvigorate the tradition for our postdigital age.
This article theorizes predictive curricula: the reorganization of schooling around data extraction, dashboards, and algorithmic governance that translate learners into dividual profiles and narrow inquiry to what is computable. It maps how protocol and platform logics preempt pedagogical judgment, route bodies and knowledges through thresholds and alerts, and sediment a predisteme-an epistemic order that renders deviation a form of computational error and illegibility. Tracing a pipeline from surveillance capitalism, algorithmic governance, and the mediation of flesh and technology to classroom practice, the article details mechanisms of control, somatic and ontic effects on students' bodyminds, and the reproduction of inequity when predictive signals stand in for knowledge and/or being. Classroom vignettes intermittently ground the analysis, showing how readiness scores, data tracking, and auto-scheduling evacuate the present tense-both epistemically and ontically. In response, the article advances destitution and prefiguration as counter-designs: deactivating apparatuses that foreclose study and enacting consent-paced and opaque practices that reopen curricular time.
In this article, we approach the old philosophical question about the relatedness of image and reality, language and world, and word and thing from a pedagogical point of view by attending to how teachers work to present the world out there to students in the school classroom. We begin with Mollenhauer's distinction between educational regimes that present the world to the young with very little mediation and his diagnosis of the contemporary Western educational regime as one that reproduces the world through stylized re-presentations that are shown to students in the separate pedagogic arrangement of the classroom. Drawing on a passage from Foucault's This is Not a Pipe, we argue that the (theoretical) divide between educational regimes of presentation and representation might be too strong in the context of the school because it fails to pay attention to the key components of classroom education, including the objects of the classroom, activities of students, and pedagogical work of the teacher. In the classroom, there is a vibrant school life, and there appear to be atmospheric forces at work that can bring represented worlds to life. These atmospheric forces are able to turn the world out there into an exciting place that is worthy of discovery and curiosity.
In this article, I discuss the educational relevance of civil disobedience as a form of political dissent in contemporary democracies demonstrating signs of significant democratic decline. The article challenges the plausibility of the impactful Rawlsian understanding of civil disobedience in societies in a state of democratic backsliding. As an alternative, the article builds on Candice Delmas's definition of civil disobedience as a form of political action that is justified by citizens' political duty to resist injustice. I argue that to enable citizens to effectively discharge this duty, public schools should teach civil disobedience as part of democratic education. This argument is founded on the presumption that civil disobedience is a particularly effective means, first, for inducing the type of systemic change needed to support democracy in the long run and, second, for resisting serious forms of injustice in nonideal societal circumstances. The article further describes what teaching for civil disobedience should entail and defends this form of education against potential objections.
This article centers on Adorno's negative dialectics to account for experiences of alienation and marginalization within the world history classroom. It begins with the problem of how marginalization occurs in high school world history classrooms with predominantly Black and Latinx students. Adorno's negative dialectics helps answer the following questions: How can one attend to difference within world history in a manner that does not essentialize difference? For teachers with many students of color, how can one address experiences of marginalization without reducing that experience to an identity of inferiority? I introduce the prevailing "Hegelian" dialectical model of world history and how it informs curriculum. This provides the backdrop for Adorno's reinterpretation of the dialectic through the terms "identity" and "nonidentity." Negative dialectics enables attention to difference in all its complexity, not just folding difference into the dominant narrative but examining the relationship between identity and difference.
The tendency to silence higher education teachers and students around the globe who express opinions that others regard as wrong is increasing. This lack of interest in listening to, and at times silencing, people with opposing views raises the question of what makes higher education unique and worth protecting. The aim of this article is to revisit the writings of John Dewey with regard to a) the purpose of higher education; b) the relationship between science, faith, and (academic) freedom; and c) threats to the purpose of academic freedom as a way of being more vigilant towards the current challenges to academic freedom. Drawing on Dewey's writings, the article contributes a conceptual orientation for educators and educational researchers to help them observe nuances in the public space of universities before making judgments drawing on knowledge from the past, an awareness of the human condition as a basis for science and education, and intelligent inquiry.
This editorial introduction marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Educational Theory , reflecting on the journal's historical contributions while looking forward to the future of philosophy of education and educational theory. This anniversary issue of the journal features two complementary sets of essays: five revisited articles in which authors return to notable work from the past twenty-five years to assess its ongoing significance, and nine forward-looking reflections that consider the present and future roles of philosophers and theorists of education amid political, social, and technological change. Together, these contributions illuminate enduring questions about democracy, educational purpose, global engagement, public scholarship, and the challenges and possibilities posed by artificial intelligence. The introduction argues that educational philosophy and theory remain vital for interrogating educational aims, sustaining democratic commitments, and cultivating critical and imaginative thought, and it calls for continued reflection on the field's responsibilities and possibilities as Educational Theory enters its next era.
Over twenty years after her article “Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project” was published, Dr. Sandy Grande gathered other Indigenous women across disciplines and stages of career to discuss how the feminist project has been taken up or resisted in the field of Indigenous studies. They start with a definition of Indigenous feminism and then move on to discuss whether a decolonial feminism is possible, what “feminism” as a politics and analytic does for Indigenous Studies, what are the current and consistent aporias in feminism, particularly as practiced in the academy and finally, what is the horizon for (anti-colonial) feminist futures.
