Search

This paper discusses the relation between the poetic and teaching. Drawing on Heidegger's question of Being and his turn to poetry as the site through which Being is brought forth through an interplay between revealing and concealing, I address the intricacies of poetic thinking in teaching. I argue that thinking 'about' teaching needs to go beyond the calculative frames of reflection, prevalent in practices of teaching today. I refer to three poems to explain the deeper modes of thinking that emerge from poetry and how these can inform teaching in a manner that releases students' openness to learn and teachers' meditation on what confers their being in teaching. I conceive teachers' work as poesis, pointing to their responsibility to attend to the call of thinking as beings who 'occasion' relations with/in the world in the advents of being and becoming.

This paper argues for the active participation of women in philosophy of education and the importance of their sexually differentiated positions in pluralising knowledge. Drawing on the philosophical work of Luce Irigaray it explains how the feminine as other, has been symbolised as a dark epistemological cave from which those seeking universal truths ought to escape. Within such phallogo-centric systems of knowledge, women's thoughts have been excluded from philosophy, and the feminine became un-representable as philosophical. This scenario raises important political and ethical questions related to women's place in philosophy of education and calls for deconstructive strategies aimed at using feminised locations to challenge phallogocentrism. The paper argues that a simple inclusion of women's thoughts or the replacement a masculine-dominated philosophy with feminine ones do not suffice to disrupt the order that establishes what counts as philosophy. It therefore explores how sexual difference can rethink the traditional tenets of philosophy. The idea that women need a place that they can call home for such practices and whether this space can really differentiate knowledge is debatable and controversial. In considering this possibility, however, sexual difference is not considered a subject for thought in philosophy of education but a question that rethinks and engenders it.

This paper demystifies reflective practice on teaching by focusing on the idea of reflection itself and how it has been conceived by two philosophers, Plato and Irigaray. It argues that reflective practice has become a standardized method of defining the teacher in teacher education and teacher accreditation systems. It explores how practices of reflection themselves can suggest ways out of dictated pathways of reflection in teaching. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's and Plato's ideas on reflection, the paper includes a critical overview of how reflective practice can contradict its own aims and become non-reflective, shutting off possibilities for transformations and educational differences that it has set out to achieve. Keeping up the deconstructive mood, the paper draws on Irigaray's re-reading of Plato's parable of the cave to argue that reflective teaching that merely reflects phallogocentric educational systems and that attempts to universally reproduce standardized forms of reflective practice can never be conducive to the diversification of educational spaces.The paper seeks to re-think Plato's idea of reflection as mere copying and takes up Irigaray's strategic mimesis to explore ways through which reflective practice can regain its critical edge and reactivate teachers' reflective voices. It argues for the repetition of the practice of reflection by drawing on a feminist critique that challenges phallogocentric reflective tendencies in education and for mimetic strategies that engender difference.

The use of narratives in making oneself known to others has various political and ethical aims. Narrative is considered to be effective in revealing the particular knowledge of differently positioned persons that have been subjugated. It is hoped that through these subjects' representations of their differently situated lives and selves, dominant others can be moved: to open, diversify and enlarge their thoughts. Without disavowing the conscientising effect and the political usefulness of narratives, one has to take note of the times readers or listeners remain indifferent to stories of subjugation and oppression. In such cases, the expected movement towards an enhanced understanding of the different other does not happen. This paper presents a reading in class of a narrative about a migrant, to bring out the various ethical and political aspects of relating narratives and the pedagogical experiment of imagining oneself as other. It refers to the thought of Paul Ricoeur and Iris Marion Young, reflecting on pedagogies that seek to enhance relations between self and other through reading and listening to narratives. The paper proposes the idea of migrating narratives in thinking about the possibilities and impossibilities for readers in moving towards the other without negating their difference.

The paper discusses Iris Marion Young's idea of asymmetric reciprocity that rethinks typical understandings of gift giving. Iris Marion Young's proposals for asymmetric ethical relationships have important implications for democratic contexts that seek to take differences seriously. Imagining oneself in the place of the other or expecting from the other what one expects from oneself levels out differences between people and hinders possibilities of interaction. The conditions of asymmetry and reciprocity of Iris Marion Young's communicative ethics, as well as that of the unexpected as understood within situations of gift giving, bring about new readings of learning and teaching situations. The paper discusses issues of power and knowledge that have important ethical implications for how the relationships between the teacher and student could be imagined and how the teacher and student imagine themselves. Following Derridean underpinnings to Young's notion of asymmetric reciprocity the paper questions pedagogic attempts that seek to minimize the asymmetric positions of the teacher and the student and challenges educational practices based on the reproduction of knowledge and reproduction of persons. The paper follows Young's arguments against Derrida's reading of asymmetry as being one sided. It argues that such a reading does away with the idea of teaching and learning altogether as teaching necessarily involves acts of responding. It continues to argue that Young's conceptualizations of gift giving as reciprocal and asymmetrical open up alternative understandings of the pedagogic relationships between teachers and students.

This paper argues for the active participation of women in philosophy of education and the importance of their sexually differentiated positions in pluralising knowledge. Drawing on the philosophical work of Luce Irigaray it explains how the feminine as other, has been symbolised as a dark epistemological cave from which those seeking universal truths ought to escape. Within such phallogo-centric systems of knowledge, women's thoughts have been excluded from philosophy, and the feminine became un-representable as philosophical. This scenario raises important political and ethical questions related to women's place in philosophy of education and calls for deconstructive strategies aimed at using feminised locations to challenge phallogocentrism. The paper argues that a simple inclusion of women's thoughts or the replacement a masculine-dominated philosophy with feminine ones do not suffice to disrupt the order that establishes what counts as philosophy. It therefore explores how sexual difference can rethink the traditional tenets of philosophy. The idea that women need a place that they can call home for such practices and whether this space can really differentiate knowledge is debatable and controversial. In considering this possibility, however, sexual difference is not considered a subject for thought in philosophy of education but a question that rethinks and engenders it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with 'A little Memoir of a Good and Pious Woman Educator', namely Emmanuela Azzopardi, a headteacher living in the second half of nineteenth century Malta. The memoir - written by Canon Paolo Pullicino, the Director of Education at that time - is a very important one as it uniquely tells the story of a woman's life, outlining the official duties of the teacher and defining her ideal characteristics. My interests in this particular archive do not only lie in examining the virtues expected of the woman teacher; a reading which is very useful in tracing the formation of the teacher as we know it today. Feminist poststructuralist theories lead me to question the uses of the memoir itself, its politics of representation and the spaces it opens for the theoretical considerations of the portrayal of this teacher. As a feminist exploring knowledge/ power and gender relations, I will be discussing issues of women's voice and representations, particularly the possible uses of the space created by the memoir for subversive purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]