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This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

In his 2006 essay, “Moral Education’s Modest Agenda,” Robin Barrow argues for a clearly bounded conception of morality; he presents the moral domain as concerned with moral principles, and moral education as the cultivation of moral understanding. Barrow rejects behaviourism, character education, values clarification, developmentalism, and what he calls “the insidious influence of political and moral correctness” as practices and ideas that are irrelevant and inappropriate for moral education. While I share some of Barrow’s concerns about some of these approaches, I believe he over-restricts the scope of legitimately moral concerns and what educators ought to do in the name of moral education. In this paper, I make a case for a broader and bolder agenda for moral education, putting the question of what constitutes a human life (which Barrow takes to be a non-moral question) at the very heart of morality and moral education.

Cultivating critically reflective practitioners is a vital professional competency for social work students. However, few reflective models support undergraduate students to foster nonconce...

Kinship care is increasingly a first option for children in need of protection across all international child welfare jurisdictions, and predominantly grandparents assume this responsibility (Winokur, Holtan, & Valentine, 2009). A New Zealand study of grandparent caregivers found that a number of their marital relationships were disrupted following grandchild placement (Worrall, 2009). Relational crises of this nature have been previously little discussed in kinship literature. The emotional quality of couple connections affects care provision. Drawing on attachment theory, this article argues that the grandparent couple's relationship must be a key focus of practitioners' preplacement assessments and highlights five domains of relational functioning and four reliable measures for assessing these qualities.

INTRODUCTION: Social work practice knowledge was seminal to the evolution of attachment theory. This disciplinary connection is little known to many social work practitioners. This article seeks to remind care practice social workers specifically of this association, as the social work skills upon which early attachment knowledge was premised remain important to contemporary care practice.METHOD: Through a three-part discussion, this article aims to deepen care practice social workers’ understanding of attachment theory and its practical relevance for care practice assessment. The first section outlines the watershed moments of the theory’s development. The second highlights social work’s connection to this development. The third and final section reviews the construct of the internal working model and its value for distinguishing emotional differences in an adult’s relational biography.FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS: A key care practice goal is to facilitate the healthy growth and development of children and young people who have been placed in foster care due to maltreatment. A growing number of attachment researchers have found that the internal working model of a child’s new caregivers, with respect to attachment, is an important element in the revision of the child’s internal working model of relationships (Pace Zavattini, 2011). Thus, care practice social workers need to pay close attention to relational facets in prospective caregivers’ assessments as some literature suggests that practitioners struggle to understand the role attachment orientation plays in the care relationship (Bick Dozier, 2008).CONCLUSIONS: This article highlights and elaborates upon the utility of attachment theory for present-day care practice and argues that a deep understanding of this theory is likely to be instrumental to achieving better relational outcomes in foster care. This knowledge is foundational to conceptualising the different relational expectancies that prospective foster parents might bring to a new relationship.

Purpose – This paper outlines a teaching and learning collaboration between information literacy (IL) professionals and a social work academic at The University of Auckland. The collaboration was developed for the purpose of introducing evidence-based practice (EBP) and related IL skills to a third-year social work cohort preparing for their first practicum. Embedding the research–practice connection in the minds of students at this level of study is essential, as using evidence in practice is considered to be a fundamental professional objective. Despite this perspective, it is not uncommon for research to be viewed as an ancillary, if not discretionary skill in social work, with the research–practice gap well recognised in the social work literature. EBP offers students a clearly defined, systematic research framework imminently suited to the novice learner which emphasises the importance of research for practice. Research skills, in particular IL and the ability to find, evaluate and apply information, are essential to the development of effective EBP. Apart from the practical skills of being able to find evidence, critical thinking and reflective skills are key skills also inherent to IL processes and practice, and mastery of the evidence-based approach is impossible without mastery of these key IL competencies. Taking a solution-focused frame, theoretically underpinned by a constructivist teaching philosophy, we detail specific EBP and IL teaching practices, challenges and the remedies applied. The paper concludes with key lessons learned and future directions for teaching EBP and IL skills to social work students at The University of Auckland. Design/methodology/approach – A solution-focused frame is theoretically underpinned by a constructivist teaching philosophy. Findings – This paper offers insights derived from seven years of teaching EBP and IL skills to social work students and investigates specific teaching challenges and details the remedies applied. Research limitations/implications – As a case study, this article deals with one instance of EBP and IL teaching. Focusing specifically on EBP in the social sciences, this may not be relevant for other disciplines. Practical implications – This paper offers insights into methods for merging EBP and IL skills teaching in the social sciences, providing practical examples of activities which can be used in teaching, underpinned by relevant theory. Social implications – To be effective practitioners, social workers must understand the importance of research to practice, in particular how this can improve their professional knowledge and practice. Forging the research–practice connection aids the development of competent practitioners and enhances the well-being of social work clients. Originality/value – The authors outline constructivist–connectivist learning activities that can be used to advance students’ IL skills, develop research capacity and enhance the importance of the research-practice connection in social work practice. While much research has been done on EBP and IL connections in the medical and nursing literature, there is limited literature discussing EBP and IL integration in social work.

It is both a pleasure and a privilege to have this opportunity to review Clarence Joldersma’s recent book, A Levinasian Ethics for Education’s Commonplaces: Between Calling and Inspiration (hereafter LEEC). Joldersma has participated in and contributed to the scholarship on Emmanuel Levinas and education for the past 15 years or so, and I see this book in part as a consolidation of that work. I must admit that, on first reading, I was puzzled that he had chosen not to engage more explicitly with the work of other philosophers of education whose work is also informed by Levinas. I am thinking, for example, of Sharon Todd, Gert Biesta, Paul Standish, Claudia Eppert, Denise Egea-Kuehne and others (although several are named in the acknowledgments). But when I read the book a second time, I noticed a brief comment in the preface where he says that in the process of working and reworking the manuscript over a period of many years, what emerged—to his surprise—was his own voice. And indeed, as I returned to the body of the text, I started to see the book as a sort of pedagogical creed—an unpacking of Joldersma’s own fundamental beliefs about teaching, learning, curriculum, and the larger projects of schooling and education, as inspired by Levinas’s ethics. We learn, for example, that, for Joldersma, education is not about competition or primarily about passing on disciplinary knowledge, but rather a response to the call to justice—a fundamentally other-centered vision of education oriented toward the poor and marginalized, and to a commitment to human flourishing in our local communities and around the globe. Joldersma’s Levinasian-inspired education is obviously a radical departure from other conceptions of what education ought to be about, such as the pursuit of ‘‘academic excellence, personal development, finding truth, or the American dream’’ (p. 107). When I approach LEEC as a pedagogical creed, it becomes less important whether or not I agree with Joldersma’s interpretations of Levinas on particular points, or whether his interpretations align with or depart from that of other philosophers of education. Rather, reading the book through that lens allows me to

In contrast to the Kantian principle that we are morally accountable only for those actions over which we have control, Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, and others have argued that luck plays a significant role in the moral life. Put briefly, moral luck is at play when we are appropriately praised or blamed for our moral actions despite the fact that at least some aspects of what we are being judged for lie beyond our control. In this essay, Ann Chinnery discusses the concept and various types of moral luck, and draws on two news stories from the summer of 2013 (one involving an incident in the United States and the other in the United Kingdom) in order to suggest that a nonideal approach to moral education could go some way toward mitigating the morally limiting effects of “constitutive bad luck.”

Debate is arguably a central aspect of philosophy. There are a number of topics, however, on which the weighing of argument and counter-argument does not reach a final conclusion, but only a temporary settlement before the issue raises itself again. Understanding the historical development of such debates in philosophy of education is crucial to an appreciation of contemporary discussions in the field of education more broadly. They are debates that seem to have been always there and that continue to challenge new developments. Each chapter in Section 3, Revisiting Enduring Educational Debates, situates the debate related to a particular topic, considers its relevance, and highlights how it continues to influence educational theory and practice today.