Learning Our Concepts

Making liberal democratic values meaningful to study in schools is a more complex issue than being a question of turning values into explicit educational goals (Schleicher) or of curing a motivational deficit (Critchley). Since values seem to play an important role in the practices and commitments of people's everyday lives, values are calling for a continual refinement of our words in relation to the world (Laverty). The purpose of this article is to offer contours of an educational language about values that acknowledges this refinement and the pedagogical work that teachers might do-by way of language-in order to sustain the living-on of what is valued and valuable to us as individuals and as societies. To this end, the article is divided into two parts. The first part takes the temperature of the current political and educational debates, offering thereby a sociopolitical background to the need of a renewed language about values. Drawing on ordinary language philosophy (Moi, Murdoch and Forsberg) and the idea that there is an intimate relationship between how we look at the world (attention) and the words we use in describing it (language). The second part of the article places the emergence of values in a particular time in history before suggesting a more existential vocabulary about values for the purpose of teaching values in schools. We have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and a political vocabulary.

Section: Aims and Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Language Of Values: What Does Evaluative Language 'Do'?mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Sustaining What is Valuable: Contours of an Educational Language About Values

Bergdahl¹,

Langmann²

2020

“…11 11 For a discussion of the unity of learning that a particular concept applies here and acquiring an enriched understanding of that concept more generally in Murdoch's thought, see Laverty, 2010. …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Case of M and D in Context: Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell and Moral Teaching and Learning

Jamieson¹

2020

Iris Murdoch's famous case of M and D illustrates the moral importance of learning to see others in a more favourable light through renewed attention. Yet if we do not read this case in the wider context of Murdoch's work, we are liable to overlook the attitudes and transformations involved in coming to change one's mind as M does. Stanley Cavell offers one such reading and denies that the case represents a change in M's sense of herself or the possibilities for her world of the kind exemplified by Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. In this essay, I challenge Cavell's reading, suggesting that the case, while it may not be an exemplar of the perfectionist outlook as described by Cavell, can and should be interpreted in perfectionist terms. To see this, I reflect on Murdoch's views on the endless perfectibility of language, the importance of humility, and the role of love and attention in moral learning. I conclude that Murdoch's work uniquely sheds light on how we might cultivate a perfectionist outlook in ourselves and others, and describes the distinctive role that some novels can play in moral education.

“…can become the object of study in PwC teacher training. It could be argued, for example, that concept analysis prevents an imaginative and creative use of concepts and does not take into account the alternative point of view: that understanding a concept involves a situated knowing of how a concept shapes the lives of people who use it, and that therefore such enquiries are always relational and not the result of an atomistic, individualistic philosophical analysis (see, e.g., for an interesting discussion, Laverty, 2010).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Provocation of an Epistemological Shift in Teacher Education through Philosophy with Children

Haynes

Murris

2011

Experience indicates that the questioning and democratic nature of the community of enquiry can be demanding and unsettling for teachers, presenting unaccustomed challenges and moral dilemmas. This paper argues that such significant episodes in the practice of Philosophical with Children (PwC) offer rich opportunities for wider critical reflection on epistemological and pedagogical questions for teacher education and continuing professional development. We illustrate the nature of this ongoing work through noticing and focusing on critical incidents drawn from our lived experience of PwC with learners, students, teachers and fellow practitioners in the UK and in South Africa, identifying common themes and offering an account of their origins. The article proposes a way of developing and refining educational practice through a grounded and collaborative practitioner action research orientation, investigating common themes that emerge from significant events in practice and mirroring the process of PwC itself. We conclude that the recurrent themes we identify show the value of PwC in opening up a transformative critical space in teacher education that disrupts prevalent epistemological frameworks and suggest that a deconstruction of the role of the educator, and the epistemological shift it provokes, is the hub of the project of bringing philosophy into schools and universities, and into the professional development of PwC teacher educators. POSITIVE CHALLENGESPhilosophy has not been part of the school curriculum in most countries. Over the last three decades interest in Philosophy with Children (P4C/ PwC) 1 has grown. It has stimulated rich debate about the nature of philosophy, philosophy with children and philosophy in school curricula. The practice has been dismissed by some as faddish, therapeutic navel-