This article examines the concept of dialogue in the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, with a focus on the context of education. Its aim is to create a conversation between the Lévinasian theory and the theories of other philosophers, especially Martin Buber, in an effort to highlight the ethical significance that Lévinas assigns to the act of…

In line with familiar portrayals of Kant's ethics, interpreters of his philosophy of education focus essentially on its intellectual dimension: the notions of moral catechism, ethical gymnastics and ethical ascetics, to name but a few. By doing so, they usually emphasise Kant's negative stance towards the role of feelings in moral education. Yet…

In this essay, Judith Suissa draws on the tradition of radical and alternative education, and on some philosophical literature on democratic politics and the role of the political imagination, in order to suggest some ways of thinking about what constitutes an educational counterpublic that are different from those suggested in recent work by…

Many symposia and special journal issues over the last several decades have been devoted to concerns about the decline of philosophy in teacher education programs. I pursued an answer for my doctoral project and found institutional explanations are rarely invoked in the "decline literature." I have sketched here the theory and have shown…

This article explores the wider critical and creative powers of education to bring about a society where no one person is valued more than another and where each person is celebrated for their differences -- this the author calls the 'society of equals'. It is argued that discourses of equality are not only co-extensive with democracy; they are…

Despite the widespread promotion of the global school, it remains unclear as to how citizenship education (global citizenship education, GCE) is developed. Educational bodies such as UNESCO, Oxfam, and the International Baccalaureate are in the full throws of developing models for GCE yet questions remain as to how such a sweeping notion might…

This article explores how different philosophical models and pictures of learning can become dogmatic and disguise other conceptions of learning. With reference to a passage from St. Paul, I give a sense of the dogmatic teleology that underpins philosophical assumptions about learning. The Pauline assumption is exemplified through a variety of…

This paper explores the relation between poststructuralist theorising and new materialism with a particular focus on the work of Barad. Tracing the lines of thought, particularly as they relate to ethics, through the works of Foucault, Butler, Cixous and Deleuze the paper finds a range of concepts that anticipate and link directly with Barad's…

We take the reception of Wolfgang Klafki's didactics in Russia as our example for the difficult relations between knowledge transfer and knowledge transformation. We start with a description, analysis and evaluation of Klafki's two didactical models, categorical didactics and critical-constructive didactics, and then describe and evaluate their…

In Bourdieu's early work on education, he declares that "All pedagogic action (PA) is objectively symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power". This article rethinks Bourdieu's proposition. It questions whether all PA is symbolic violence and the very notion of a cultural arbitrary upon…

This paper draws on sociological and philosophical work on educational knowledge and expertise to consider what is distinctive about different traditions of educational inquiry. It is argued that an examination of the character of educational knowledge benefits from scrutiny of the relations between specialised and non-specialised forms of…

Under the current neoliberal paradigm, the discussion of "good teachers" often centers on a very limited aspect of "best practices" used to effectively transmit pre-packaged knowledge to students. Soka, or value-creating education as expounded by Japanese educators Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Josei Toda, and Daisaku Ikeda, is an…

After criticising the solutionist drift, this article argues for the need for three gestures, in order to build a more problematised Comparative Education: "estrangement," that is, the ability to see the unknown and therefore to distance ourselves from what is already known; "intercession," that is, the ability to perceive the…

How does the work of the Nobel Prize novelist J.M. Coetzee bear on the question of the relations between philosophy, literature and education? This paper extends recent discussion of the ways Coetzee's literature can speak to a broad range of philosophical questions by showing how the novel "Disgrace" is open to exploration in relation…

In this article, I argue that we are witnessing a new phase or 'theory turn' in the field of educational leadership. These more critical perspectives in the field of educational leadership have typically been marginalised by the larger body of orthodox approaches due to a perceived lack of focus on best practice and 'what works' discourses, and…