This essay explores the concept of epistemic courage and examines its relevance to high school education, with a particular focus on literature instruction. Epistemic courage refers to the willingness to adopt beliefs in the absence of complete verification or universal consensus, while dialogical courage represents the communicative extension of this disposition—the readiness to articulate one’s beliefs in dialogue with others. Together, these forms of courage encompass the capacity to seek, embrace, and express knowledge and belief—an essential democratic ability, particularly in politically turbulent times.The essay relates epistemic and dialogical courage to literature education, with the aim of contributing to a theoretical dialogue about the role of positive epistemology and the development of strategies to activate student engagement in Swedish high schools. The author has a background as a high school teacher and as a supervisor in teacher education. These experiences have informed the exploratory arguments presented in this essay, which are intended to stimulate discussion among both fellow researchers and practitioners. The article situates epistemic and dialogical courage within the framework of transformative literature education, with the aim of contributing to an ongoing theoretical dialogue about the role of positive epistemology and the development of strategies to activate student engagement in low-energy, reticent, or overly conformist learning environments.
Swedish special education is currently shifting towards increased organisational differentiation, as reflected in political proposals to expand the use of special teaching groups. This article examines this shift through Nancy Fraser’s redistribution–recognition dilemma. It argues that contemporary developments are best understood against the background of earlier shifts in the Swedish inclusion discourse, in which responses to educational disadvantage have repeatedly relied on affirmative strategies. Whereas earlier reforms sought to reduce stigma by integrating pupils into mainstream classrooms, current debates increasingly justify differentiated provision through a redistributive logic centred on targeted support and resource allocation. Drawing on Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative remedies, the article shows how both historical and contemporary responses address inequality without transforming the organisational and normative conditions that produce it. Rather than representing fundamentally different approaches to inclusion, these responses can be understood as variations of a shared affirmative logic, reflecting the tensions between redistribution and recognition in current debates on special education. This, in turn, opens up questions about what a more transformative approach to educational justice might require.
This essay draws on recent work on artificial intelligence (AI) in education. Using education fiction as a mode for discussion, the essay explores a future shaped by datafication, rationalization, effectivization and management-by-data. It begins by looking at the social dynamics of AI and its implementation in educational settings. Additionally, the essay introduces two education fiction narratives inspired by common sociotechnical imaginaries on AI in education, as well as the authors’ previous engagement with interviewing teachers on the subject. These narratives highlight the role of AI designers and the EdTech Industry, revealing how the machinations of data sciences are influencing the educational landscape. Lastly, we emphasize the importance of involving teachers in defining what technology should, and should not, be in the educational infrastructure of the future.
The text discusses the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence, robotics, and art, emphasizing a shift from traditional human-centered approaches to a more integrated, posthuman perspective, arguing for a radical rethinking of the role of the artist as part of a larger, technoecological system where creativity emerges from collaboration between humans, machines, and the environment.
I first began seriously thinking about the term “mutual recognition” after reading bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress when I was a doctoral student in 2007. Since then, it has been central to my pedagogical practice at the City University of New York where I teach beginning and pre-service teachers as well as doctoral candidates. The writings of hooks, alongside those of Paulo Freire and Lisa Delpit, and with a tradition that extends back as far as Socrates, embrace dialogical engagement to guide students to know themselves and each other. With that awareness, as Freire writes, they have the potential to “intervene in their reality” and “emerge from submersion.” Mutual recognition also, vitally, requires teachers, who are in a position of official power in the classroom, and who often come from radically different backgrounds and life experiences than their students, to purge themselves of their beliefs and biases, at least temporarily, so that they can guide their students and themselves in this process of acknowledgment and empathy. This is very difficult to do well. Though much has been written about mutual recognition within educational scholarship, my recent reading of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad, and the current state of the world which the Iliad well reflects though it was composed over 3000 years ago, impressed upon me the urgency of practicing mutual recognition in the wider world that we share.
