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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 this paper I explore the connection between narrative ethics and the increasing emphasis on historical consciousness as a way to cultivate moral responsibility in history education. I use Timothy Findley’s World War I novel, The Wars, as an example of how teachers might help students to see history neither simply as a collection of artefacts from the past, nor as an effort to construct an objective view about what went on in those other times and places, but rather as something that makes ethical demands on us here and now. Theoretically, this paper draws on Adam Zachary Newton’s conception of narrative ethics and Roger Simon’s conception of historical consciousness, both of which rest on the Levinasian themes of irreducible difference, the face, and subjectivity as a position of ethical responsibility to and for the other.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a shift in history education away from a view of history as the pursuit of an objective, universal story about the past toward ‘historical consciousness,’ which seeks to cultivate an understanding of the past as something that makes moral demands on us here and now. According to Roger Simon, historical consciousness calls us to ‘live historically’ – to live in a particular kind of ethical relationship with the past. However, no matter how much educators might believe in the importance of learning to live historically, if students do not see it that way, even the most thoughtfully designed program in history education will never get off the ground. This paper is an attempt to see whether the notion of ‘caring for the past,’ based on Nel Noddings' ethic of care, might help us begin to address the problem of moral motivation in educating for historical consciousness.

Education has long been charged with the taskof forming and shaping subjectivity andidentity. However, the prevailing view ofeducation as a project of producing rationalautonomous subjects has been challenged bypostmodern and poststructuralist critiques ofsubstantial subjectivity. In a similar vein,Emmanuel Levinas inverts the traditionalconception of subjectivity, claiming that weare constituted as subjects only in respondingto the other. In other words, subjectivity isderivative of an existentially priorresponsibility to and for the other. Hisconception of ethical responsibility is thusalso a radical departure from the prevailingview of what it means to be a responsible moralagent. In this paper, I use jazz improvisationas a metaphor to focus on three interrelatedaspects of ethical responsibility on Levinas'saccount: passivity, heteronomy, andinescapability. I then point toward some waysin which reframing responsibility andsubjectivity along this line might offer newpossibilities for conceiving subjectivity andmoral agency in education.

In this symposium, we highlight the importance of critical engagement with philosophical traditions in philosophy of education. On one hand, it is important to critique the exclusionary nature of canons of knowledge that have shaped both philosophy and education; on the other, we believe it is important to acknowledge that our thinking, as well as the thinking of philosophers of education before us, is undeniably and indelibly marked by these traditions. Framed by Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the “figure of the philosopher” and Michael Naas’s conception of “taking on the tradition,” David Burns invites us to revisit the Stoic conception of character as a counterpoint to current discourses of character education in Canadian schools; David Waddington examines how Thomas Jefferson’s writings influenced John Dewey’s conception of democracy and democratic education; and Ann Chinnery proposes acknowledgement of intellectual indebtedness as an essential scholarly disposition, looking specifically at the “difficult inheritance” of Emmanuel Levinas’s debt to Martin Heidegger.