Session Information
13 SES 11 B, Pedagogy of the Act, Justice and RCTs
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper takes its name from Mikhail Bakhtin’s extended essay Towards a Philosophy of the Act, and looks at how the Russian theorist’s notion of “answerability” might be explored in relation to educational situations and experience. Somewhat in tune with what Holquist (1990) has termed Bakhtin’s earlier “Goldilocks” formula, in which he addresses the “too hot” and “too cold” sides to any one argument, I want to look first at how social justice and rights-based approaches to education only take theory as far as the school gates, preparing the egalitarian ground for fair provision without actually engaging with the content and character of provision itself. In this first section, I will consider how the Rawls-influenced capabilities theories put forward by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen reduce educational issues to ones of societal redress and redistribution – which concede to cultural differences but not difference at the level of the individual subject. The assumption of rights and substantive freedoms may satisfy empirical notions of transition through education, but cannot be said to evidence existential change in the same way. I then turn to those approaches that are concerned with an ethics of hospitality (derived principally from Derrida and Levinas) as a fundamental principle in education, which distinguish themselves from the universal morality that underpins rights-based approaches by not departing from understandings of previous injustice, but by being open and attentive to a justice still-to-come. Here I will consider how Sharon Todd (2009) has critiqued the work of Martha Nussbaum in this respect, arguing that the latter’s cosmopolitanism generalises the subject of education in favour of a rights (or capabilities) discourse, without confronting the problems posed by individual difference. Todd’s view is that Levinas presents a counter in “an orientation (a responsibility) that responds to human difference” (p.21). I will question at this stage whether this responsibility constricts educational action on the part of a subject through fear of not doing sufficient justice to this notion of an absolute Other.
The idea I will work towards is that approaches to education need not be divided into issues of access, participation, and equality on the one hand (i.e. approaches premised upon a notion of substantive rights), or an ethics of openness towards difference on the other hand (i.e. approaches premised on a particular notion of responsibility), in order to be considered educationally fair. Rather, education provides institutions and frameworks in which both of these play a part, but only by taking both into account as equal considerations can ‘answerable’ action on the part of individuals in education (teacher and student) occur. The Bakhtinian notion of answerability also goes some way towards describing how educational practices differ according to institutional or environmental circumstance, and therefore higher education is cited throughout in terms of the tension between rights and responsibilities in university pedagogy, to show how acting upon that tension gives meaning to educational activity in higher education today.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1990). Art and Answerability. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barnett, R. & Standish, P. (2003). Higher Education and the University. In Blake, N. et. al. (Eds.) The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Education. Oxford: Blackwell. pp.215-233. Nussbaum, M. (1992) Human functioning and social justice: In defence of Aristotelian essentialism. Political Theory, 20 (2) pp.202-246. Nussbaum, M. (2009). Education for profit, education for freedom, In Liberal Education 95 (3) pp.6-11. Nussbaum, M. (2010). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. London: Belknap. Sen, A. (2009). The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Standish, P. (2013). Social Justice and the Occident. In R. Ames and P. Hershock (Eds.) Value and Values: Economics and Justice in an Age of Global Interdependence. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press. Todd, S. (2009). Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism. London: Paradigm Publishers.
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