The concept of responsibility is both omnipresent and highly ambivalent in the field of education. On the one hand, the term is considered to be one of the key concepts of pedagogical ethics, intended to enable a reflection on pedagogical authority. On the other hand, it is inextricably linked to the concept of accountability, which, in fact,…

Recent calls by legislators to exclude "divisive concepts" and histories from our curricula pose a challenge to the development of students' epistemic responsibility and agency in classrooms. In this paper, Martha Perez-Mugg examines the classroom as a space for the development of epistemic responsibility, ultimately suggesting that…

Addressing the problem of rampage school gun violence, this article aims to problematize how we think about agency, in this case when we assign agency to individual shooters but not to networks or objects. In it, Samantha Deane, working within the new materialist and critical vein of pragmatism, situates agency as both limited and widely…

In this essay, Elizabeth Campbell reviews three recent books that address the ethical nature of professional practice: "Knowledge and Virtue in Teaching and Learning: The Primacy of Dispositions," by Hugh Sockett; "The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice," by Chris Higgins; and "Towards Professional…

The current educational discourse on Emmanuel Levinas's concept of subjectivity has focused on the pure openness and subjection of the self to the other. Based on such an understanding, some educational theorists hold that Levinas's work has given us new hope for the mission of education, while others deny its relevance. I suggest that this…

Paper attempts to show that the complexities involved in explaining the concept of responsible action have led educational theorists to emphasize certain aspects of that concept at the expense of others. (Author/RK)

In this essay, Peter Trifonas tries to show that there is no overcoming of the techno-philosophical grounding of intellectual freedom and academic responsibility or research action within the speculum of an all-seeing, all-knowing university. Instead, he argues that through Derrida's notion of an open "community of the question," deconstruction…

This paper responds to Jacques Derrida's essay on Paul de Man, discussing three aspects of responsibility and exploring their implications with respect to teaching: responsibility as vulnerability, responsibility as autobiography and memory, and responsibility as the structure of iterability in writing. (SM)

In this paper, I first examine the three justifications most often provided for differentiating, discounting, or even disclaiming the present generation's moral responsibility to future generations. I then discuss ideological critiques of, and educational solutions to, the complicity of formal educational institutions in propagating these…