The article refers to anthropological, sociological and pedagogical aspects of reframing – in a creative way – the rituals addressed to children at the threshold of puberty. Based on a presentation ...of a new ritual of farewell to childhood, the paper is a theoretical reflection on the need of introducing new rituals that create ground for animation-educational practice. This practice – by revivifying creativity in areas considered so far closed and exclusive – makes it possible to overcome socially unfavourable structures of performance, and the inceptions of new, legitimized and empowering forms of subjective representations. Ritual’s creative qualities – in Victor Turner’s conceptualization – have inspired the authors to emphasize the need to replace a hegemony of thinking with a heterogeneity of thinking about the rites of passage. This undertaking is directed towards creating a space in social consciousness for rituals that are other than religious ones. Following Gert Biesta’s thinking, we argue that the farewell to childhood in the form we propose can be seen as an expression of pedagogical interruption and a practice of commonality which is a common good, one endlessly fragile and requiring cultivation. The secular children’s rite of passage and other secular rituals that arise not in opposition to religious rituals, but alongside them, are such common goods.
Abstract Basing on several cases, this paper develops a thought inspired by the content of the JOPE special issue on the educational value of monuments. It is a reflection about the locations which ...make the statues able to be transformed materially and semiotically, and which provoke discussion towards what is to be learnt by understanding the monument as a fragment and semiophore. I argue that the monument – located in a specific place which makes its contextual meaning - represents fragments, in Latin fractures or cracks, as expression of violence inflicted on an imaginary whole. Defining and accepting a monument as a fragment allows us to understand each change concerning it - including new location or relocation - as an incentive to learn about the meanings of new wholes and to consciously respond to them. On the one hand, it can effectively stop mimetic pressures to reproduce aggression towards monuments. On the other, it can create a ground for shaping an ethical attitude of co-responsibility for a common world that is not exclusively human. The strictly educational sense of the proposed redefinition of the monument would be to radicalize the sensitivity to its inherent feature, which is fragmentary nature, resulting in the fragility of the heritage it co-creates in the space of commonality. In the proposed understanding of the monument, apart from the emphasis on significant fragmentation, an important role is played by the decisive abandonment of the anthropocentric perspective. In the new perspective of the common world, the monument becomes an ephemeral heritage, and its most current educational value seems to lie there.
On Retroactive Instrumentality Mendel, Maria
Educational theory,
June 2022, 2022-06-00, 20220601, Letnik:
72, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The topic of instrumentalism has engaged many scholars of contemporary educational thought. One can distinguish the positions of anti‐instrumentalism from those that stress noninstrumental values of ...education, both conceived in the context of neoliberal/neoconservative and consumption‐driven reality. In this text, Maria Mendel enters into this engagement from the perspective of the current political consumption of memory. While taking up the problem of the role public pedagogy plays in contemporary nation‐states — especially in the current turn toward the past — Mendel focuses on both educational and sociopolitical issues in the context of what she calls “retroactive instrumentalism.” When return to the past is the “principle of the contemporary,” she argues, instrumentalism does not necessarily result from intentional planning ex ante. If education is broadly understood as a practice of public space formation, it may be composed of experiences that do not have to be “traditionally” purposeful and oriented toward the future. They may gain their instrumental character ex post. To illustrate this possibility, Mendel analyzes snippets of Polish reality concerning the construction of “the good nation.” Many of the elements of public pedagogy in this case contain unifications that pertain directly to the instrumental character of the learning experiences employed by a society as it transforms into a nation. The instrumentalism of those elements is discovered post factum. In its ontological dimension, then, education may gain or solidify its instrumental character ex post. Based on the analysis proposed in this text, one could say that when instrumentality is retroactive, it becomes displaced intentionality — that is, it provides an instrumental story that disguises the intentions of the one writing the narrative. Mendel concludes by using the Aristotelian notion of phantasia, which regards “being without a matter,” to encourage productive thought about how to create public narratives that are free of instrumentalism. This grounds a version of public pedagogy that is oriented toward the animation of people's active imagining and thus becoming public. By epistemologically shifting learning into a public space, such public pedagogy serves to recultivate society and humanity as plurality, diversity, and coproduction of the public.
I investigate what is ‘public’ in public education, mostly in Poland, discovering in its sense something elusive, difficult to capture in the traditional way, that nevertheless has a noticeable ...impact – the specters. The text is framed by Derrida’s hauntology. Whereas traditional ontology provides taxonomies of things that exist, hauntology references those things that do not exist, but which nonetheless exert an influence. Thus my ‘conducting’ hauntology means attending to the non-existent/unacknowledged phenomena upon which our positive categories rely for their existence. I show first how the ghost of the public haunts the present situation in Poland and causes a strange return of elitism thanks to (or in spite of) a discourse of egalitarianism and democracy. Then I link it to a discussion about the kind of global society we live in today (‘the post-social’), and how our collective lives (the bubbles in which we are trapped) are haunted by a misunderstood idea of humanity (which we refuse to face). The ever-recurring ghost of humanism, in relation to the public in public education, requires a new perspective. The idea of cosmopolitan learning, which is associated with the ethical postulates of posthumanism, seems to be promising in this context.
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