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Philosophical anthropology is philosophical inquiry into human nature that seeks to answer the fundamental question of what generally characterizes human beings and differentiates them from other creatures and things. Political theories considerably influence educational theories. We call attention to the fact that the three main political theories currently influencing education (liberal, neo-liberal, and neo-conservative) each have a distinct philosophical anthropology. This fact has especially significant implications for pedagogical social constructivism since it influences the kind of individual and society they strive to construct. We will propound a version of social constructivism we call 'critical constructivism.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educators frequently fret over how to bridge the gap between theory and practice. In an important sense, it is a false problem. Theory is simply the thoughtful, reflective phase of good practice. We will approach Dewey's philosophy as one of continuous creation and re-creation or even more precisely, social co-creation, that requires making meaning, knowledge, and value together. We will look at each one of these three in some detail along with the ways they transact with one another. Fundamentally, we can only distinguish them for some purposes, but never fully separate them. Everywhere we look, we will see we cannot entirely pull theory and practice apart. Therefore, the paper will conclude that if we unify theory with practice, we may use the same paradigm for the intelligent production of meaning, knowing, and valuing, thereby obviating the functional independencies among them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on philosophy professor Deron Boyles with his view on the epistemology of Mind-Brain Education. Topics include the statement of philosopher John Dewey regarding the cognition involves the sociocultural construction of meaning and the social psychology, the sense of mental functioning, and the neuropragmatism.

The author argues that equality is the opposite of sameness by focusing on essays by educational reformer John Dewey. He discusses how standardization degrades creative democracy, critiques the assumptions of feudalism, and analyzes Dewey's views of individualism. He believes in moral equality in education and argues against the U.S. educational reform legislation No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

The article discusses primordial, animal, and nonlinguistic artistic communication and consummatory aesthetic experience in the work of American poet Walt Whitman. It examines the relationship between Whitman and American philosopher John Dewey, particularly commenting on Dewey's theories of communication, language, and democracy and reflecting on his book "Art as Experience." The author analyzes Whitman's poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” He also considers continuity in Darwinian evolutionary theory.

This essay describes the role of metaphysics and theology in understanding the existential concerns of human and in exploring the ideals that can make life more meaningful. The author discusses John Dewey's reply to the crisis of late modernity and early postmodernity by presenting two events that challenge ontotheology. These events include the publication of the book "The Origin of Species," by Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche's claim that God is dead. The author presents Dewey's response to these events.

Background/Context: The reconsideration of reverence was proposed by Paul Woodruff's 2001 book, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. In examining reverence, we draw on moral philosophy, particularly the revival of virtue ethics, and acknowledge Woodruff's cross-cultural studies of reverence, particularly in ancient Greece and Confucian China. We propose the revival of reverence and reverential listening in teaching and leading in schools. Purpose/Focus of Study: We take Woodruff's philosophical and historical analysis of reverence and extend it to education, particularly for teachers and school leaders. We delineate the traits of reverential listening for teachers and describe the importance of ritual, ceremony, and shared deliberation for school leaders. Our purpose is to show what reverential listening is and how it can be part of best practices in schools. Research Design: The research design is a philosophical study of reverence and listening in the context of education. We analyze each term and describe its traits as we form a description of reverential listening in education. This analysis is supported by examples taken from our own experiences as teachers and from well-known theorists of reverence, teaching practices, and school leadership. Conclusions/Recommendations: We conclude that small acts of reverent kindness, like the acts of reverent listening accomplished by teachers and leaders in schools, can be transformative. As Albert Schweitzer noted, many of us do this modest though important work well every day. Reverent listening is certainly not a panacea for the concerns and problems of our schools, but it is part of a simple act of paying regard and attention to others that is too often ignored in today's schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Listening is largely overlooked in cultures constituted, on the basis of the freedom of speech, such as we find in the United States and elsewhere. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The article explores compassionate listening as a creative spiritual activity. Such listening recognizes the suffering of others in ways that open up possibilities for healing and transformative communication. It is particularly important for a caring profession like teaching and critical for good teaching and learning relationships. Research Design: Relying on philosophical reflection, the article mixes some of the basic ideas of Eastern thought revolving around the image of the Bodhisattvas as they who constantly ameliorate suffering. The article concentrates on the Bodhisattva "Perceiver of the World's Sounds." Conclusions/Recommendation: We can only relieve suffering if we attend carefully to the needs, desires, interests, and purposes of others and respond in terms of their best possibility in the situation. Such self-eclipsing allows caregivers to avoid the horrors of conditional love. Such listening lies beyond theory and ideology in the immediate, directly involving sympathetic response, but not pity. It is not the kind of sympathy that assumes that the pain in others has the same characteristics or source as our own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Our article develops insights from Paul Woodruff's book, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2001), to discuss reverence in teaching. We show how reverence is both a cardinal and a forgotten virtue by situating it within the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics, which involves traits of character as embodied predispositions to act in certain ways in concrete contexts. Virtue ethics sometimes conflicts with abstract, rule-governed ethics, much as the ethics of care does. Virtue ethics appeals to emotional conviction in ways that rule-governed ethics does not. This article looks specifically at the emotions of shame and respect that are associated with reverence for the high ideals that may bind together an otherwise diverse, even diverging, schooling community. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of this article is to understand spiritual dimensions of teaching by elucidating the cardinal and forgotten virtue of reverence. Reverence has a power beyond a typical understanding of it as something religious. The article shows reverence in a wider context that does not diminish its spiritual connotations, but rather shows its importance and relevance to teaching in today's classrooms. The study considers how the virtue of reverence is supported by appropriate classroom ritual and ceremony and discusses several examples of reverence and irreverence in classroom teaching. Research Design: Philosophical analysis combined with qualitative case study analyses as illustrations. Conclusions/Recommendations: To be reverent is to realize that we as humans are limited and imperfect, and the proper reaction to this state is humility, awe, and wonder. In subsequent articles, we will examine reverence in educational leadership and in a school's community. Our goal in this article and those to follow is to restore reverence to its rightful place in the ordinary daily activities of teachers in relation to administrators, students, and parents in school and in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses John Dewey's reconstruction of Western metaphysics and theory of education including the standard elements he rejects or reconstructs like essence, ultimate origin and foundation. The study is limited to three generic traits namely interaction, diversity and change. According to Dewey, otherness and difference are indispensable to learning and growth. The article explains Dewey's interpretation of the universe where people are creative participants whose action including student and teacher transactions leave an indelible mark.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss the life of philosopher John Dewey and tackled several essays on pragmatism, secularism and cosmopolitanism.

This is the third of four essays discussing John Dewey's short essay, 'Education as engineering', placing the essay into its historical context while also hinting at contemporary connections. This essay aims to show that one must not take the term 'engineering' in a narrow, technical sense. Dewey was concerned with how the beliefs and values of unreflective, customary thinking about education not only controls and limits and serious educational reform, but also the patterns of educational research carryied out. Because all inquiry is theory and value-laden, 'objectivity' in educational research depends on acknowledging the beliefs and values that are assumed in inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are a multitude of powerful cultural archetypes and images of the school teacher. These include nurturing caregiver, guardian of morality, champion of the global economy, self-sacrificing do-gooder, cultural worker, intellectual, tyrant, and many more metaphors. Jim Garrison’s essay introduces another figure, a mythological persona, to the pantheon of images depicting the school teacher — the Trickster. Tricksters are masters of multiple interpretation that cross, bend, break, and redefine borders. Garrison concentrates on prophetic tricksters that create openings in closed structures to reveal hidden possibilities. In practice, many teachers are tricksters. They know how to maneuver in, around, and through rigid bureaucratic structures and standards to connect with their students and make a difference while exercising creative autonomy in the classroom. Garrison’s essay provides examples of trickster teachers drawn from literature depicting classroom practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Our article examines some of the philosophical underpinnings of knowledge-producing schools (KPS). KPS is an Australian initiative advanced by such researchers as Chris Bigum, Colin Lankshear, and Michael Knobel. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: We examine the epistemology and the theory of new literacy that KPS scholars put forth, which we strongly endorse, and address a lack of attention to embodiment and the emotions that KPS epistemology would seem to require. Our article is devoted to addressing this omission, which we frequently find in other approaches to literacy studies as well. Research Design: We call on the philosophy of Deweyan pragmatism to provide a friendly critique and reconstruction of KPS epistemology. In doing so, we will rely on the perspective of Deweyan pragmatism supplemented by some of the insights of pragmatist feminism. Conclusions/Recommendations: In our reconstruction of KPS, we offer a Deweyan performance epistemology that resembles the epistemology championed by KPS in some important ways, but by emphasizing the role of embodiment and emotion ("bodying") in making meaning and making knowing, it allows us to better comprehend what it entails to be a member of a community of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's reaction to Charles Joseph Meinhart's essay on boys and masculinity. Meinhart suggests that the masculinity experience is a religious experience for men. He uses William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience," as a tool for thinking about the myriad ways in which boys react to the miseducation that comes with brutalization. To further explain these varieties, the author explores one of James's tools Meinhart omitted.

This chapter is a collection of essays presented at the AATC annual conference as a retrospective on the career of David Hansen. None of these stands alone, but taken as a group, the authors create a portrait of Hansen as an educator, teacher educator, and scholar focusing on his contributions in the areas of teaching, learning, and curriculum. Included are list of Hansen's writings as well as several questions the authors are pondering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the application of principles of critical constructivism in enhancing learning and teaching in democratic societies. It examines school-based education, particularly instruction and curriculum in science and social studies, using a critical constructivist perspective. Critical constructivism emphasizes reflection, social consciousness, imagination and democratic citizenship and enables students to develop intellectual skills and attitudes in understanding society.

The distinction between apophatic and cataphatic listening is defined and analyzed. Apophatic listening is more or less devoid of cognitivist claims, whereas cataphatic listening involves cognition and questioning. Many of the papers in this volume are discussed along the continuum determined by these two types of listening. Haroutunian-Gordon’s claim is that every act of listening involves the listener in questioning, thus listening is solely cataphatic. We discuss apophatic listening as a limiting ideal case and conclude that not every act of listening involves a question. Though in acknowledging this limiting case we disagree with Haroutunian-Gordon’s assertion, we are indebted to her work and believe her model forms an important part of any comprehensive theory of listening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Jim Garrison explores the emerging scholarship establishing a Hegelian continuity in John Dewey's thought from his earliest publications to the work published in the last decade of his life. The primary goals of this study are, first, to introduce this new scholarship to philosophers of education and, second, to extend this analysis to new domains, including Dewey's theory of inquiry, universals, and creative action. Ultimately, Garrison's analysis also refutes the traditional account that claims that William James converted Dewey from Hegelian idealism, after which Charles Sanders Peirce inspired him to rebuild his instrumentalism along radically different lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We concentrate on four questions among the many posed by this special collection of papers on Pragmatism and the Hispanic world. They are, first, what took pragmatism beyond the borders of the United States and into the Hispanic world? Next, what are the ideas of Dewey (or pragmatism) that have had the greatest impact on Hispanic culture? Third, what are the past and present obstacles that has kept the Hispanic world from using pragmatism to deal with many of their educational and social problems? Finally, why does pragmatism still hold great promise and potential for the Hispanic world? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper concentrates on Peirce’s late essay, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” which identifies “critical common-sensism” and Scotistic realism as the two primary products of pragmaticism. I argue that the doctrines of Peirce’s critical common-sensism provide a host of commendable curricular objectives for democratic Bildung. The second half of my paper explores Peirce’s Scotistic realism. I argue that Peirce eventually returned to Aristotelian intuitions that led him to a more robust realism. I focus on the development of signs from the vague and indeterminate to the determinate and universal. The primary example will be the evolution of the very idea of number. I believe we will never arrive at the end of number history because we can never fully contain creativity. I draw similar conclusions for the idea of curriculum. Whether or not there is an end to the evolution of signs in Peirce is a matter of debate. I incline toward the opinion there is not, though I am unsure. I conclude by arguing that rationality itself is but the form and structure of poetic creation and that we should embrace paradox and even contradiction rather that become caught in totalizing and totalitarian end of history stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on listening to emotional expressions regarding dialogues across differences in personal identity. Affective states associated with need influence selective attention. Pragmatists like philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce posit that habits wove together cognition, emotion and action. To understand another person, one must put his habits of interpretation, explanation and conduct at risk. People who hold power are those who have the social ability to refuse to listen to, to dismiss, or to interpretatively redesignate another's emotional expression.