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The authors explore children's symbolic play that involves themes of fear and darkness, and they investigate the nature of children's binary oppositions, particularly between self and other. Their account is based on a year-long qualitative study they conducted with seven children, four to ten years of age. They observed the children engage with play materials, including toys and dolls, at home and on virtual sites such as "Roblox." The play episodes they analyze highlight children's dyadic roles and scenarios and the pleasure of their play involving themes of fear. The authors also address the media and cultural representations that provide roles and narratives for the children to extend this dark play.

This paper examines the notion of tolerance in education. In general, tolerance is perceived as a means to resist hostility, raise awareness of cultural differences, mitigate violence, and maintain liberal and democratic values. In education, there are various initiatives, such as the International Day for Tolerance (UNESCO in Declaration of principles on tolerance, 1995), that aim to build resilience against different forms of hate and cultivate openness and acceptance of the other. Yet the idea of tolerance includes different understandings and interpretations. This paper argues that cultivating an embodied sense of tolerance among students, in particular in divisive communities, requires us to move beyond deliberative interpretations of tolerance and to advance a pragmatic understanding of tolerance through an agonistic lens. This paper starts with a review of several dominant interpretations of tolerance. The heart of the paper focuses on interpreting Dewey's pragmatism as a theoretical basis for advancing tolerance. The final part of the paper explores how pragmatism through an agonistic lens can support a more flexible and humane approach to dealing with political conflicts.

Reflecting on the current political atmosphere, the increasing incidents of hate speech and hate crimes, and the rampant mass shootings in the United States inevitably requires educators to consider ways to confront the divisive political zeitgeist and to help students recognize the intricate layers of political life. It is not surprising that a recent study in the U.S. found that nearly 9 percent of school principals (who participated in the study) reported that the contentious political environment negatively affected the sense of community in the school, and more than 80 percent reported that there is a great inflation of racial remarks in their schools. In general, the study found an increase of uncivil behaviors among students and a growing sense of fear and anxiety among students from minority communities. In this article, Dan Mamlok considers ambivalence, or "the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone," as a means for mitigating contentiousness and advancing a more critical understanding of political and social matters. Namely, in addition to being in the state of uncertainty, ambivalence encompasses a dilemma that is grounded in an opposite disposition toward something. Drawing from Bauman's accounts of ambivalence or, more exactly, the rejection of ambivalence by modernity, Mamlok considers the construction of the other. He first reviews some key ideas of Bauman's thoughts on modernity, ambivalence, and the other. He then focuses on two prime aspects of Bauman's theory: (1) The authority of knowledge in a liquid world; and (2) socializing and indoctrinating members of society. Mamlok contends that both aspects render pedagogical implications. He argues that realizing how the mechanism of knowledge has been shifted is crucial for galvanizing a pedagogy that will move beyond instrumental reasoning and allow students to develop a more critical worldview of social and cultural issues.

This article explores the potential of digital technology to advance democratic citizenship. Drawing on critical theory and following a critical, comparative qualitative study which examined the relationships among digital technology, education, and democracy in the US and Israel, the authors explore epistemological assumptions of teaching and learning with digital tools. The article examines the tension between the promise of digital technology to transform education, and the instrumental hegemony of the neoliberal imperative. At the heart of this article, the authors contend that current teachers' understanding of using digital technology, and the practices used in classrooms constrain the promotion of digital citizenship. The authors argue that transforming education through digital technology and advancing civic aims require epistemological transformation which will move beyond instrumental understanding of digital tools. They conclude with a recommendation of a theoretical framework for digital citizenship.

In the context of global mobility research, this study explores agency and identity formation among mid-career teachers who travel abroad to experience teaching in a new country. We conducted in-depth interviews with 16 Israeli teachers and examined their retrospective narratives of their teaching experience. Our findings reveal a complex nexus of identity and agency, whereby identity formation echoes agency choices. We conceptualise forms of agency and point to possible connections between agency types and their use in identity formation. We conclude that under circumstances of rapid change, agency plays an important role in identity formation.

In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz and Dan Mamlok consider the arguments for agonist political education in light of a case study based in the events of the 2018 mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the subsequent activism of its survivors. We use this case to examine agonist expressions of citizenship, and to present an argument for framing agonist politics through the lens of Deweyan transactional communication combined with the critical concept of articulation. A major lesson in this case is the significance of citizenship learning that prioritizes challenging the political status quo along with working to reestablish new political relations on grounds that are more just. The authors argue that the endgame of agonist-informed political education should be that which helps students, as present and future citizens, reconstruct existing political conditions. Knight Abowitz and Mamlok conclude with suggestions for four domains of knowledge and capacities that can productively shape agonist citizenship education efforts: political education, lived citizenship, critical political literacies, and critical digital literacies.

The concept of freedom is one of the key ideas in political philosophy. In a liberal society one can do, live, and like whatever he/she pleases, but at the same time there are certain constraints on the individual that balance between one's desires and the common good. In this paper, the author examines the notion of freedom in the age of digital technology, and argues that attaining freedom requires reconsidering the traditional liberal distinction between "negative" and "positive freedom." The author introduces the distinction between the two concepts of freedom, discusses Dewey's notion of freedom, and examines freedom, technology, and the quest for democracy. This paper argues that rather than focusing on mechanisms of control and limiting digital freedom, educators should foster students' critical literacy of digital technology and provide them learning environments that enable the development of social responsibility capacities and active citizenship.

The allegory of the cave illustrates one of the central problems in philosophy: the gap between reality as it appears to be and the reality in itself. The allegory of prisoners in the cave, as opposed to being free out of the cave, symbolizes the gap between illusion and truth--between the thing and the thing in itself. The moment of getting out of the cave is an educative act, a unique moment of illumination that requires one's action toward awareness. Benjamin interprets the unique moment of experience as "aura". In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility," Benjamin elucidates the disappearance of aura as a result of technological progress that entails social reproduction. His analysis focuses on the sociological and cultural aspects of the changes in human experience that are a result of technological and socio-economical processes. Since Benjamin's essay, the influence of technology has increased, becoming an integral part of everyday life. While Benjamin portrayed the influences of the revolution of the camera on human perception, people currently live in a cyber-world in which individuals, at least in the western world, have become increasingly more dependent on digital technology. It is suggested that digital technology has changed the way learners perceive information--the unique moment of appreciating an experience is missed. Rather, technology offers a ready-made formula for learning that is based on standardized methods. In the first part of this paper, the author will draw on Walter Benjamin's notion of "aura," and discuss the relationship between aura and education. Then he will elaborate on the notion of reproduction by following Jean Baudrillard's concept of "simulacra." Finally, the author will examine the ramifications of globalization and consumerism on knowledge reproduction in a simulated world, following Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of globalization. The intent of the author is to argue that the decay of "aura" in education in a simulated globalized world may lead to two opposite trajectories: indoctrination or social emancipation.

Civic culture is a term for how citizens actively live out, perform, and create public life through our habits, actions, words, and public work. A vital civic culture, with an engaged citizenry, is one of the measures of a healthy democratic republic. In this inquiry, we explore how civic education--holistically envisioned across disciplines and types of curriculum--might be imagined in light of civic cultural engagement and creation. We use the recent #NeverAgainMSD youth activism against gun violence as a single case study through which to examine what educators can learn from youth enacting citizenship in real time, contributing to a vital civic culture in an era when many lament youth apathy and disconnection from public life. We argue that much civics education ignores the worth of political emotion, and we describe both the important role of affect in civic culture and curricular possibilities for working with students around the intersections of affect, civic culture, and public work as citizens.

In June 2019, Québec passed Bill 21, entitled: 'An Act respecting the laicity of the State'. This bill bans public servants from wearing religious symbols in the workplace. Among the affected employees are judges, teachers, and government officers. This paper considers the ethical ramifications of Bill 21 on education. Particularly, this paper examines some prime arguments for and against abridging religious rights for teachers and public servants. Then, the paper explicates the immanent tension between the desire to advance tolerance and the exercise of intolerant practices against minorities. In this sense, the case of Bill 21 exemplifies the fragility of tolerance. Drawing from Dewey's pragmatic understanding and agonistic models of democracy, the concluding section of this paper argues for the development of a more inclusive understanding of tolerance that will offer students educational experience and encourage them to constantly consider their predispositions and biases towards the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which provides insights on the 2009 article "Educating Political Adversaries: Chantal Mouffe and Radical Democractic Citizenship Education," by professor Claudia Ruitenberg. Topics discussed include the way Ruitenberg distinguished the associative and dissociative forms of the political theory of agonism, the political emotions and literacy to be considered in the education of adversaries, and the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.