This essay seeks to show that teaching and learning are to be properly understood, not as an undertaking carried out on the will of a higher power or party, but as a way of life with an integrity of its own, arising from its own integral purposes. The essay thus seeks to provide an understanding of educational practice and of educational thought that contrasts in key respects with Alasdair MacIntyre's understanding, though also with a some notable parallels. A largely forgotten 'Socrates of Athens' is identified as furnishing the original inspiration for the understanding of education explored in the essay. Some influential modern (and postmodern) negations of this understanding are then reviewed. Arising from its investigation of teaching and learning as a singular kind of relationship, the essay concludes with a brief sketch of some virtues that might constitute the way of life in question, in its more active and its more reflective moments.
This article is the second of a two-part investigation, the first part of which was published in Ethics and Education, vol. 5, issue 2, 2010, under the title 'Preface to an ethics of education as a practice in its own right'. Although it builds on the arguments of that 'preface', this second part of the investigation can be read as a stand-alone essay. It begins with a brief review of a new subordination of educational practice achieved by a neoliberal tenor in international educational reforms in recent decades in Western societies. The practical context for the essay however is that failure of many of these reforms, like the failure of neo-liberal dominance in socioeconomic policy, has given rise to emergent opportunities where inspirations for educational debate and policy-making are concerned. Arguing for the uptake of such opportunity, the ethical tenor of education as a practice in its own right is explored under four headings: (1) review and clarification of the inherent purposes of education as a practice; (2) investigation of educationally productive pathways that are characteristic of education as a practice in its own right; (3) elucidation of a recognisable family of virtues that arise from that practice itself; (4) exploration of the kinds of relationships through which these virtues, and their educational fruits, are nourished.
We begin by arguing that the continuing dominance of ‘evidence‐based’ thinking in educational policymaking does serious harm to the notion of evidence itself; also that it brings a loss of coherence to education as a practice that might wish to be regarded as a coherent and research‐informed one. The second section of the article suggests that the invidious consequences of ‘evidence‐based’ thinking are likely to continue unless energetically challenged by a vibrant and robust understanding of education as a practice in its own right. In elucidating such an understanding, we investigate closely the notions of practice and practitioner, and their intrinsic connections, drawing on landmark researches on practice by authors like Alasdair MacIntyre and Joseph Dunne. Building on the understanding of education as a practice in its own right, the third section argues that the Dewey‐inspired notion of justified warrant, rather than proof or replicability, is more appropriate to research claims made in education. Here we focus in particular on action research, which has experienced recurring difficulties in having its research credentials recognised.
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