What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final 'future-focused' collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futuresplural and multiple-of the intersections of 'philosophy' and 'education?' What is 'Philosophy'; and what is 'Education', and what role may 'enquiry' play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing-or at least taking seriously-and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that 'Future'? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose (and do not categorise under forced headings) diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially 'strange and unusual bedfellows'. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience.
The recent resurgence of extreme-right movements and the nationalist turn of many governments across the world have reignited the relevance of discussions within educational philosophy about the teaching of national identity in schools. However, the conceptualisation of national identity in previous iterations of these debates have been largely Western and Eurocentric, making the past theoretical literature about these questions less relevant for post-colonial settings. In this paper, I imagine a new approach for teaching national identity in postcolonial contexts, founded on postcolonial conceptions of identity and in particular, the concept of hybridity. I first develop a postcolonial account of national identity by drawing on Homi Bhabha's thinking about cultural identity, drawing on his concepts of liminality, splitting, and ambivalence. Then, building on Bhabha's notion of hybridity, I propose a distinction between national identity portrayals as either fixed or malleable. Finally, I demonstrate the implications of such a conceptual distinction on the way that national identity is taught in post-colonial schools; by way of an example, I envision a concrete approach to teaching national identity that views national identity as malleable rather than fixed, set in a hypothetical postcolonial school in the Philippines. By beginning from postcolonial assumptions about national identity, I hope to indicate new directions that the debates about the teaching of national identity in schools might proceed.
Within the spirit of conspiration, this article brings together contributions from participants of the PhD-led UCL Reading and React Group ‘Colonialism(s), Neoliberalism(s) and Language Teaching and Learning’, which ran in 2019/20. Weaving together various perspectives, the article centres on the dialogic nature of the decolonial enterprise and challenges the colonial concept of monologic authorial voice. Across the reflections on participants’ own engagements with questions of decolonising language teaching and learning, we pull together three threads: the inherent coloniality of the concepts that shape the very disciplines we seek to decolonise; the need to place decolonial efforts within broader contexts and to be sceptical of projects claiming to have completed the work of decolonising language teaching and learning; and the affordances and limitations offered to us by our positionalities, which the reflexivity of the conspirational encounter has allowed us to explore in some depth. The article closes with a reflection on the process of writing this article, and with the assertion that decolonising the curriculum is a multifaceted and open-ended process of dialogue and conspiration between practitioners and researchers alike.
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