Encyclopaideia

A Special Issue for the 25 years of Encyclopaideia

Daniele Bruzzone — 2023-05-30

Rediscovering the Meaning of Education: The Aims of Teaching in an Era of “Learnification”

Daniele Bruzzone — 2023-05-30

The aim of education is a key question; in a certain sense it is a traditional question — viewed by some as a given. Indeed, perhaps because it appears to be self-evident, it has long since ceased to be a focus, with a number of undesirable consequences. Education invariably remains an action that is explicitly or implicitly imbued with intentionality, but if it loses sight of its goals (or, worse still, does not acknowledge them expressively), it risks becoming ethically and politically ambiguous, if not downright corrupted or distorted.

Good Education in an Age of Measurement: On the Need to Reconnect With the Question of Purpose in Education

Gert Biesta — 2023-05-30

In this paper I argue that there is a need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education, particularly in the light of a recent tendency to focus discussions about education almost exclusively on the measurement and comparison of educational outcomes. I first discuss why the question of purpose should always have a place in our educational discussion. I then explore some reasons why this question seems to have disappeared from the educational agenda. The central part of the paper is a proposal for addressing the question of purpose in education—the question as to what constitutes good education—in a systematic manner. I argue that the question of purpose is a composite question and that in deliberating about the purpose of education we should make a distinction between three functions of education to which I refer as qualification, socialisation and subjectification. In the final section of the paper I provide examples of how this proposal can help in asking more precise questions about the purpose and direction of educational processes and practices.

The Obsession with Measurement and Construction of Possible Futures in Education

Massimiliano Tarozzi — 2023-05-30

Over the last decade, there has been a growing consensus, including in Italy, that it makes sense to provide an objectively measurable empirical basis for educational policies and practices in order to escape from the uncertainty of practices based on individual experience or subjective values. The quantification of the social sphere, the “metric society” (Mau, 2019), and data-driven models of governance have led not only to “learnification”, a culture of performativity and standardised testing as the dominant model (Biesta, 2010), but also to a loss of future-oriented visions as these latter are overwhelmed by statistical models of anticipation. The main aim of this paper is to critique the post-positivist epistemological assumptions of so-called Evidence Based Education as well as the neoliberal organisational models whose indiscriminate application to professionals in education robs these roles of professionalism. Secondly, based on the recent UNESCO report on the “Futures of Education”, it intends to discuss the dimension of the future as a key direction of meaning for educational policies and practices, held up as an alternative to anticipatory governance models (Robertson, 2022).

The Haunting Question of Values in the Era of Measurement, Assessment and Evidence-Based Education: Towards a Moral Accountability of Educational Decision-Making

Letizia Caronia — 2023-05-30

The evidence-based turn in education reveals renewed consensus on empiricism and shared trust in science as if it were the allegedly value-free basis for decision-making: good, justifiable governance should be a non-discretional corollary of scientific knowledge. The article focuses on some risks implied in pursuing the de-moralization of educational decision-making, namely the realistic, the reductionist, and the perspective fallacies, as well as the minimization of individual responsibility in favor of the third-person perspective implied in following protocols and guidelines. In the discussion I address some possible reasons for the appeal of the evidence-based turn despite these risks: the contemporary pressure for “accountability” and the need to justify social policies and practices with consensual criteria. In the conclusion, I claim that educational decision-making should deploy rather than conceal its moral bases despite their being potentially highly divisive. Consequently, I make a case for “moral accountability”: making publicly inspectable what evidence-based education tries to conceal, i.e. the unavoidable value-ladeness of educational policies and practices.

Some Considerations on the Educational “Situation”, Between Performativity and Commitment

Elena Madrussan — 2023-05-30

Considering the distortion of meaning to which the word lends itself in the neo-liberal use of the expression “stay-at/in-situation” with reference to school and educational contexts, my brief analysis will focus on the meaning the word originally assumed in the phenomenological-existential vocabulary. Here, in fact, ‘situation’ does not only identify the necessary anchorage to the already-given contingency, but mainly describes the relation of meaning between subject and reality. In the first case, the prescription of being constrained (even morally) by the real prevails, which corresponds to the action-outcome nexus; in the second case, intersubjectivity as a field of forces that creates the changing meanings of the real prevails, which corresponds to the ability to project oneself. In the first case, reality can be described by indicators that measure it, based on which it is necessary to measure the expected outcome. In the second case, reality consists of elements with different meanings for each of the contributors, the mutual influence of which determines reality itself. The same discourse also applies to the confusion between result and project: project, phenomenologically understood, does not correspond to the result, but to the broader horizon that maintains the relation between different existential and social situations.

Revitalising Empirical Research in Education with Citizen Science: From (Solving) Misinterpretations to (Embracing) Opportunities

Luca Ghirotto — 2023-05-30

Empirical research in education needs to be revitalised. However, there are some misunderstandings to solve: I) experts must refrain from expropriating the teachers from any possibility of voicing about scientific research that matters; II) considering scientific evidence as incontrovertible fact is erroneous; III) believing that the only research worth being conducted at school is that that delivers certainty and political/ethical impartiality is the last misconception. A couple of obstacles to counter these misunderstandings subsists: I) the teacher training, which does not equip teachers to comprehend and conduct scientific research; II) the practices of accountability of scientific production in academic institutions pushing researchers to publish low-quality/interest studies. In this context, Citizen Science (involvement of non-researchers in interactions with researchers as equals) can be a promising resolving direction.

Beyond the Rhetoric of Participation: Youth and New Forms of Political Acting

Elisabetta Biffi — 2023-05-30

The importance of youth participation is underlined by international policies, which widely stress youth’s fundamental role in developing more just and sustainable societies. At the same time, disaffection from the more traditional democratic processes is registered by young people, who instead seem to be looking for forms of expression of a different nature. This paper aims to question the forms of participation of young people, offering to consider them as resources for the broader society within the perspective of public pedagogy (Biesta, 2012), suggesting that the institutions let themselves be informed by what is happening.

Is Failure the Best Option? An Untimely Reflection on Teaching

Stefano Oliverio — 2023-05-30

After outlining the renascent interest in teaching within contemporary educational theory, the present paper engages with a reflection on teaching beyond the predominant learnification and the related emphasis on efficacy as a primary value. In this endeavour, the theme of teachers’ demoralization is introduced in a philosophical-educational key, by deploying an existential perspective. Within this horizon, a special focus is on failure construed as intimately linked with the ‘essence’ of education qua an encounter of free beings and as a possibility inherent to the dignity of teaching. In conclusion, some implications of this recognition of the ‘significance’ of failure are indicated in regard to teacher education.

Before the Classroom. Translation as Internship

Mino Conte — 2023-05-30

What are the problems that teaching encounters today? In what way today is teaching spoken of? The words that speak of the school today, which words are they and where do they come from? What rationality more generally informs them? The Essay tries to answer these questions by employing a critical-theoretical perspective. Starting from the presupposition that teaching has principally to do with the knowledges deposited in the disciplinary contents, the first step, following Lyotard, considers the conditions of knowledge in the more developed societies, examining in particular what knowledge is expected to be and who takes this decision. Then the Essay moves further critically examining the hegemonic advent of neo-liberalism and the paradigmatic horizon of connections and economical-political presuppositions that follows. The analysis continues by focusing on the words that characterize the Neo-Language that today insists on education and teaching, proposing the practice of a ‘foreignizing’ translation as a premise to rethink the emancipatory education.

What is not Teaching? Levinassian Notes on Maieutics and Contemporary Education

Giuseppina D'Addelfio — 2023-05-30

The paper orbits around Lévinas’ idea of teaching as opposite to Socratic maieutic method. According to the phenomenologist, pursuing only the goal of drawing out of the students what is already contained in them relegates teaching to a secondary role and, first and foremost, underlies an anthropology centered on the ego and not on the relationship. The aim of the paper is to show how this anthropology is unable to respond to many “emergencies” of contemporary education.