Session Information
04 SES 08C, Identity and Difference
Paper Session
Time:
2008-09-12
08:30-10:00
Room:
AK2 138
Chair:
Anne-Lise Arnesen
Contribution
Framing inclusive education in the negative, in terms of problems to be solved and barriers to be overcome, offers a conception of reality as a comprehensive and comprehensible totality. Educational problems, fixed and static, examined with a passive consciousness, presents themselves to the educator as things to be confronted and tackled. This paper draws upon the thinking of Erich Fromm and Ernst Bloch, along with the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, to consider an inclusive education in the positive. The paper suggests that hope in education involves engaging a participatory consciousness, not to discover and overcome problems, but rather to be in and with a still unfinished reality that can be altered for the better through that being. Coming to inclusion in education involves distinguishing optimism from hope. Optimism takes a hold of us, lifts us from what is and might be – passively we allow ourselves to be diverted from the conditions of our lives and from the world we might shape. Being in hope is being in the present in such a way that we are always and at the same time poised to future possibility. The inclusive educator teaches in liminality, in the distance between the Now and the New, the anticipation and the realisation – they are between what is and what is not yet imagined and are alienated from neither. This educator is moved by hope’s distinct ontology to connect reflection with action in a praxis of hope that illuminates the convergence of our awareness of our becoming in our being with the becoming of this world in its being.
Method
A philosphical study of hope, engaging a critical imagination.
Expected Outcomes
To bring attention to the absence of hope in much of the literature about inclusive education and to the consequences of a praxis of hope, the convergence of the wished for and the world wished upon, for inclusive education.
References
Akhmatova, A. (1957/2000) The complete poems of Anna Akhmatova (trans. J. Hemschemeyer, Boston, Zephyr Press) Bloch, E. (1986) The principle of hope: Volume One (Trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice & P. Knight, Oxford: Blackwell) Fromm, E. (1979) To have and to be (London: Routledge) Fromm, E. (1997) Fear of freedom (London: Routledge)
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