In this article I bring Giorgio Agamben's notion of "whatever singularity" into critical pedagogy. I take as my starting point the role of identity within critical pedagogy. I call upon Butler to sketch the debates around the mobilization of identity for political purposes and, conceding the contingent necessity of identity, then…

Scholars of childhood and child-centered education draw attention to the multiple accounts of the child that have attended its brief history. In this article I read George Orwell's "Such, such were the joys" as a demonstration of the contradictions inherent in our notions of childhood, but also as a possible model for understanding…

Rabelaian carnivalesque provided philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin with a means of exploring the significance of humour through an examination of Middle Age peasant culture and the influence of the Renaissance on its legitimacy. This article argues that a similar phenomenon exists in modern educational settings and provides evidence to suggest that very…

This paper explores the concept of subjectivity from the perspective of a nonnative-English-speaking teacher educator at a Midwestern university in the USA. It begins with a literature review on the role subjectivity plays in education. It argues that acknowledging the existence of subjectivity allows us to investigate its enabling and disabling…

It is sometimes said that we are strangers to ourselves, bearers of internal alterity, as well as to each other. The profounder this strangeness then the greater the difficulty of giving any systematic account of it without paradox: of supposing that our obscurity to ourselves can readily be illuminated. To attempt such an account, in defiance of…

In this article I attempt to engage with Charlotte Bronte as both a teacher and a philosopher. In her depiction of two impoverished gentlewomen as teachers Bronte is, as is often pointed out, drawing on her own history, but she is also exploring two conflicting contemporary philosophic notions: the romantic ideal and the ideal of rationality, as…

Motivation is a concept more frequently found in venues concerned with educational psychology than in ones concerned with educational philosophy. Under the influence of psychology, and its typically dualistic way of making sense of the world, motivation in education has tended to be viewed in dichotomous terms, for example, as intrinsic or…

This article means to investigate the philosophical concept of human embodiment in relation to physical education. As human beings not only do we have a body that we can control, but we "are" our body and live embodied in the world, as the German thinker, Helmuth Plessner, puts it in one of his many contributions to the philosophical…

This paper provides examples of how a teacher and a principal construct their "ethical selves". In doing so we demonstrate how Foucault's four-part ethical framework can be a scaffold with which to actively connect emotions to a personal ethical position. We argue that ethical work is and should be an ongoing and dynamic life long process rather…

"Bildung," a German pedagogical term with the sense of "educating oneself" refers to some of the most complex human activities. It is constitutive for human existence, because it is related to the characteristic of meaning. Because of the great relevance of Bildung for people, education is essential for furthering it. The two purposes of this…

While the concept of internationalization plays a key role in contemporary discussions on the activities and outcomes sought by universities, it is commonly argued that it is poorly understood or realised in practice. This has led some to argue that more work is needed to define the dimensions of the concept, or even to plot out stages of its…

This paper extends the dialogue of educational philosophy to the experience of beginners entering the teaching profession. Rather than impose the ideas of any specific philosopher or theorist, or indeed official standard, the exploration presented here owes its origins to phenomenology and the use of grounded theory. Working from a narrative data…

In this paper I explore the shared interest of John Dewey and Carl Jung in the developmental continuity between biological, psychological, and cultural phenomena. Like other first generation psychological theorists, Dewey and Jung thought that psychology could be used to deepen our understanding of this continuity and thus gain a degree of control…

Over a decade after publication of "Thinking Again: Education After Postmodernism" (1998) contention still emerges among Foucaultians over whether discursively made-up things really exist, and whether removal of the constituent subject leaves room for agency within techniques of caring for the self. That these questions are kept alive shows that…

In this article we argue that "ubuntu" (human interdependence) is not some form of essentialist notion that unfolds in exactly the same way as some critics of "ubuntu" might want to suggest. Rather, we offer a philosophical position that (re)considers the situation of the self in relation to others. The article starts from the general issues at…