Editorial: Critical pedagogies and philosophies of education

This special issue originated at the 4th International Critical Pedagogies and Philosophies of Education Conference hosted by the Centre for Philosophy of Education at the University of Winchester in July, 2017. Building on the successes of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd conferences held at Liverpool Hope University by Alex Guilherme and David Lewin, this conference brought together scholars from across the globe to consider, debate and discuss the significance of critical pedagogy and philosophy of education to international contemporary debates across educational theory and practice.

In times when the intellectual curiosity, criticality and forms of dialogue intrinsic to the liberal values of the Academy are, as Henry Giroux argued, ‘increasingly perceived with suspicion by the new corporate university’ (Giroux, 2013: 30) the continuance and protection of spaces for rigorous, intellectual, educational debate become ever more urgent. As the Academy and thus the education it claims to stand for, comes ever more under threat from what Giroux calls, ‘the emergence of a form of powerful and ruthless if not destructive, market driven notion of governance, [where] teaching, learning, freedom, agency and responsibility’ directly threaten what is truly educational about education (2013: 87) disciplines and areas of interest such as critical pedagogy and philosophy of education have an important role to play. They provide the opportunity to not only reconsider what and how educational theory and principles might be applied to educational practices and debates, but also to reflect on the meaning of education ontologically and epistemologically – that is, to consider the meaning and purpose of education in the context of being human. Thus, while discussions about the particularities of systems, institutions, processes and practices are integral to the advancement of education as a practice, so too is attention to the moral, ethical, political, philosophical and historical implications of educational practices and ideas that constitute critical pedagogy and philosophy of education.

The depth and breadth of educational reflection made possible at the intersection of critical pedagogy and philosophy of education are reflected in the papers that follow. Set across a variety of international, cultural and disciplinary contexts, these five very different papers are wedded by their questioning of the meaning of and the necessity to consider the implications of educational experience beyond the confines of institutional settings. In short, each of the papers demonstrates not only the essence of criticality that underpins critical pedagogy and philosophy of education but also what it means to comprehend what is educational about education.

Situating their paper in the historical context of the education of girls in the Congo, Marc Depaepe and Annette Lembagusala Kikumbi not only carefully examine the specific environment of the Congo and post-colonial and decolonial discourse but also articulate, and contribute answers to a range of questions for education and critical pedagogy more generally. Moving through a consideration of the history of education for girls in the Congo, including the fallacies of emancipatory projects, the authors show the limitations of the discourses of critical pedagogies and the explicit dangers they can pose. Their paper acts as a warning against ‘imposing emancipation through a dictatorial flick of the wrist’ (Depaepe and Lembagusala Kikumbi, 2018: 950). They show how historical approaches can help to situate critical pedagogies and philosophies of education, so as to expose the failures, problems and successes of their application. The intersection between history and philosophy of education is crucial in developing the latter in a manner that brings the effects of its more prescriptive proclamations in to the light of day. What we then see might not always be what might have been expected or hoped for but is almost certainly of critical significance for exactly those reasons.

In his article, Alexis Gibbs contextualises issues of educational philosophy within a critique of the ‘tautology’ of educational policy in the UK. Gibbs questions the ‘given nature’ of childhood and the taken as given knowledge of the child which is then represented ‘in educational research and policy making’ (Gibbs, 2018: 956). Arguing that the government’s Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) ‘offers a picture of childhood… [that] can only be made as long as that picture remains static’ (Gibbs, 2018: 955), Gibbs guides the reader through a convincing argument that, looking ‘at representations of childhood that are surprising for their unfamiliarity’, might contribute something meaningful to the capacity to ‘do justice to the voice of the child in educational policy and practice’ (Gibbs, 2018: 958). He demonstrates this through a comparison of the ‘Hollywood picture of childhood’ where the ‘audience comes to see the child star not as a person in their own right, but the embodiment of whatever we take childhood to be at the time’ (Gibbs, 2018: 959) – that is the notion of childhood that we have a pre-existing knowledge of – and the ways in which Iranian cinematic representations of the child operate ‘at an intersection of art and observation, rather than knowledge’ (Gibbs, 2018: 959). Unexpectedly perhaps, it is the cultural embodiment of the child actor as protagonist in Iranian ‘‘children’s films’ who refuse the direction of an adult gaze’ (Gibbs, 2018: 960) that offers a re-education in childhood. It is, concludes Gibbs, ‘the challenge of […] inadequacy in the face of an image [of the child]’ (Gibbs, 2018: 962) that we do not ‘know’ that ‘invites us as viewers and educators’ to not only question our own knowledge of the child and childhood but to ‘rethink the degree to which we do, and should, direct who [children] become in life’ (Gibbs, 2018: 962).

A reconsideration of the value of cosmopolitan education in local settings is undertaken by Eli Vinokur and makes an important contribution to a special issue which, along with many other aims is, to coin a phrase from Vinokur, interested in ‘[t]he complexities of life in a globally interconnected world’. These complexities are explored through a review of ‘the rival trends and competing discourses within the cosmopolitan tradition’ (Vinokur, 2018: 964). Moving against ‘colonial, elitist, Eurocentric’ conceptions of cosmopolitanism which are ‘insensitive to difference’ (Vinokur, 2018: 965), Vinokur seeks a notion of cosmopolitan education that ‘promotes openness to different human traditions though a profound invitation to a major civic, cultural, spiritual or religious tradition […] sustained through a prism of local culture and heritage’ (Vinokur, 2018: 965–966). Working through a consideration of moral, political, economic, sociological and anthropological cosmopolitanisms leads Vinokur to a view of ‘cosmopolitanism integrated’ which comprehends cosmopolitanism as ‘an orientation; an attitude emanated from one dweller of the world to another, which builds upon a sensation of shared fate or identity’ (Vinokur, 2018: 970). Such an ‘orientation’ leads to an understanding of cosmopolitan education ‘as an umbrella concept that includes various educational perspectives that aim to nurture case, respect concern and commitment for the other, both locally and globally’ (Vinokur, 2018: 971). Vinokur’s argument is extended further through a political, communitarian, religious, cultural and educational critique of cosmopolitanism, which culminates in a consideration of rooted cosmopolitanism and education. In refusing to avoid the discomfort of the cultural responsibility for the wrongdoings that have issued from values of closed notions of cosmopolitan, Vinokur presents an argument for the necessity to ‘bring to the classroom a critical evaluation of the extent to which this vision was actually cosmopolitan, or only served as a lip service’ (Vinokur, 2018: 976). As difficult as such recognition of the cultural wrongdoings of one’s own culture is, it is, argues Vinokur, essential if students are to learn ‘about their country’s or culture’s cosmopolitan bearing, [and] also about what isn’t cosmopolitanism in their culture/history and thus allow for a moment of transformation, both in the self and in the culture (Delanty, 2008)’ (Vinokur, 2018: 977). It is the development of a ‘critical outlook’ that extends, argues Vinokur, beyond the confines of cultural critique to the practice of teachers in ‘local educational settings’ and the ‘process of educational policy making’ (Vinokur, 2018: 979).

Lauren Clark’s paper turns our attention to the very familiar setting – the traditional lecture. Taking an ‘interpretivist approach’ (Clark, 2018: 987) and situating her critique of the lecture within the Freirian notion of ‘banking education’, Clark asks ‘can a lecture ever be critical pedagogy?’ or should it be written off ‘as an obsolete way of teaching in higher education’ (Clark, 2018: 995). This initial dichotomy becomes increasingly problematised as Clark progresses her consideration of the ‘inter-connected relationship between method and content’ drawing on data collected from ‘self-identifying critical pedagogues (SICPs)’ (Clark, 2018: 934). Keeping the focus on the relation between theory and practice as the focus of the paper, Clark draws on Webster’s ‘In Defence of the Lecture’ to consider the ways in which the shifting landscape of higher education is increasingly determined by the threat to the ‘critical and transformative potential of the lecture’ (Clark, 2018: 987) that accompanies the ever increasing instrumentalisation and standardisation of higher education. Clark highlights the ways in which ‘critical educators are increasingly pushed to the margins [as] their academic freedom to teach as they want is being supressed by large class sizes and fewer contact hours with students’ (Clark, 2018: 987). Gert Biesta’s ‘pedagogy of interruption’ (Clark, 2018: 996) offers Clark insights into the ways in which the lecture could provide space for an ‘encounter that might interrupt “normal” ways of being and might provoke a responsive and responsible response’ (Clark, 2018: 996) and leads Clark to acknowledge that the lecture still has a place in higher education. Returning to consider the practice of self-identifying critical pedagogues, Clark moves her argument to Aronowitz and Giroux’s (1985) ‘four intellectual classifications’ to ‘better understand the practice of SICP’s’. Clark’s conclusion, that to fully achieve the aim of critical pedagogy, a Freirian approach with the student as ‘critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher’ as a ‘co-constructivist’ approach is called for (Clark, 2018: 998).

The final paper in this special issue takes a theological turn. Stanley Goh explores the theological concept of conversion as a form of ‘intellectual’ transformation. ‘Intellectual’ conversion, argues Goh, ‘is a process where a person grows to recognise the structure of how one learns which in turn allows the same person to be more critical of the world around’ (Goh, 2018: 1001). Goh extends Clark’s consideration of the lecture as a site for critical pedagogy to ask whether and how the classroom and the teacher might contribute meaningfully to a personally transformative education understood as a form of ‘immediate and personal’ conversion (Goh, 2018: 1001) and considers some of the many challenges faced. Longergan’s theological and philosophical works on the ‘four stage structure of human understanding’ (Goh, 2018: 1001), provide Goh with a point of departure which claims that ‘one who truly understands something not only knows the object that is known but the process by which this knowing occurs' (Goh, 2018: 1002). It is this that leads Goh to contextualise his argument within Lonergan’s theory of ‘radical intending’. This form of intention is active and radical because it is self-justifying ‘the intention to know takes one beyond what is just experienced to seek the hows and whys of one’s knowledge’ (Goh, 2018: 1002). What is particularly important for Goh is that, ‘radical intending’ is not ‘the objectification of knowledge’ (Goh, 2018: 1002) in the negative, instrumental sense. That is, ‘radical intending’ does not seek to know an ‘object’ that appears distanced and alienated from the thought that seeks to understand it, but is rather ‘a dynamic process’ in which ‘the process of understanding becomes in itself an object of knowledge with the recognition and internalisation of it becomes part of the end of conversion’ (Goh, 2018: 1002).

We hope these papers are of interest to readers of Policy Futures in Education and that they illustrate what might be achieved by drawing together critical pedagogy and philosophy of education at the edges of education policy studies.