Volume 16, Number 3, 2007

EN:

School architecture is a vital part of the learning environment: An educational facility should actively support learning processes which are grounded on an applied, multidisciplinary curriculum. This paper argues, accordingly, that a school should provide flexible educative spaces which properly enable multiple forms of teaching and learning. Support for this thesis is drawn from spatial theory, John Dewey’s writing on educative spaces, architectural writing and ecological design theory. It is finally posited that we need move beyond certain industrial-era assumptions about learning, in order to lay the conceptual foundation for a dynamic notion of architecture for education.

EN:

This essay describes the growing interest in and use of concepts such as phronesis and authenticity in educational research and practice. While phronesis seems to be connected to the ethical dimension of education and educational guidance, the concept of authenticity seems to be connected to the existential dimension. This essay shows the relatedness between those two concepts and the relevance of an “existence philosophical” perspective on phronesis and authenticity. The author points to the importance of an ontological approach where phronesis and authenticity are understood as two ways of respectively sensing and understanding the Being-dimension. This existence philosophical approach opens up for a new kind of praxis of Philo-Sophia, which could be realized in teacher training, when the focus is on how to become more mindful and aware of the Bildung-process in education and guidance. The essay suggests that this Being-dimension can be approached through the emergence of Communities of Wonder between the teacher and teacher student in the classroom or guidance session.

EN:

Individual and collective identities always develop in relation to the other as different, and in this process, the otherness is always subjected to the attempts of cultivation/domestication. In the history of European thought, we can recognize three metaphors which express the impossibility of seeing the other as different: the metaphors of The Leper, The Court Fool and The Noble Savage. They developed on the basis of the relationship between the difference and common rationality, which means that a more inclusive relationship to otherness as a conversational ideal could be formed if we were able shift the emphasis of ethical discourse from the universal concept of autonomy to respect for authenticity and to Levinas’s ethics of “the face of the other”. Such a step requires a radical change of discursive practices of all involved in the educational processes. That is why I propose the principle of observing the face of the other as different in both real-life experience and in expressive images of art, as well as the recognition and acceptance of otherness at the very core of our own identity.

EN:

This paper advances Portelli and Vibert’s (2001) concept of a ‘curriculum of life’ as a central organizing concept in education. A curriculum of life, defined as a “curriculum that is grounded in the immediate daily world of students as well as in the larger social, political contexts of their lives” (Portelli & Vibert, 2001, p. 63) is, de facto, at the centre of student learning. I argue that teachers can engage with this immediate daily world and enact a curriculum of life by practicing mindfulness and complexity thinking as ways of valuing relationships and engagement. Complexity thinking in education, which draws upon themes of emergence, self-organization and non-linearity, leads us to a relational ethics that compels educators to take mindful responsibility for how our actions and responses affect the world.

EN:

Many contemporary theories of “complex” dynamical phenomena have been used to explain and understand a wide range of matters pertaining to the health of learning organizations; however, a more sensitive approach is required which also takes into account the lived-experience of health where the experiencing subject is also a part of an epistemological framework which Letiche1 describes as “phenomenal complexity theory.” To be sure, there is a need for a complexity-related framework which also studies human consciousness by attending to the structures of lived-experience—in the case of this paper, the lived-structures of health. To this end, this paper examines: the notion of “health” through a circulation of lived-experience; the concept of dynamical systems in an emerging framework for studying healthy learning organizations.

EN:

In this essay I aim to convey in text and photographs what it might mean to experience medieval architecture with some degree of connectivity or what Wittgenstein calls, poetically, “resonance.” I provide examples of personal experiences of medieval architecture, and argue for the importance of historical knowledge, sensuous acquaintance, and a sympathetic imagination in gaining a resonant affiliation. Photography, I want to show, is a way of engaging aesthetically with medieval architecture that can, on occasion, lead to the making of images that serve as authentic reminders of the original experience.