Volume 23, Number 1, 2015

EN:

Grade inflation is a global phenomenon that has garnered widespread condemnation among educators, researchers, and the public. Yet, few have deliberated over the ethics of grading, let alone the ethics of grade inflation.  The purpose of this paper is to map out and examine the ethics of grade inflation. By way of beginning, we clarify why grade inflation is a problem of practical ethics embedded in contemporary social practice. Then, we illuminate three different aspects of grade inflation—longitudinal, compressed, and comparative—and explore the ethical dilemmas that each one raises.  We demonstrate how these three aspects may be seen as corresponding to three different victims of grade inflation—individuals, institutions, and society—and hence also to three potential agents of harm—teachers, schools, and educational systems. Next, we reflect upon various compelling reasons that these agents inflate grades, whether from an ethic of care, fiduciary responsibility, or simple self-preservation. Subsequently, we consider a variety of means of combatting grade inflation, and invite more educators and philosophers to delve into the complex practical ethics of grade inflation.

EN:

Situationists have suggested that educational efforts to improve character and instill virtues should be abandoned, as individuals’ behavior is predicted by contexts and situations rather than by character traits. More recently it has been suggested that civic education and especially the effort to cultivate civic virtues are ineffective for similar reasons and should be replaced by the introduction of desirable social norms and institutions. After surveying the debate on this topic in the first part of the essay, we suggest that in fact virtues should not be judged as existing within one person and absent from another based on their behavior in a single instance. Rather, virtues should be understood as composite and probabilistic and therefore strengthening them is a valuable endeavor. In considering civic virtues specifically we argue that the social and public nature of their expression make schools excellent contexts for cultivating and practicing democratic civic virtues. Even the best institutional structures of a well-functioning democratic society rely on the compliance of virtuous citizens, and the situationist preference for desirable social norms is implicitly predicated on virtuous citizens to institute and follow those norms. Moreover, civic education in a democracy strives to cultivate more than compliance with norms of conduct. It aspires to nurture youth who see themselves as responsible to, and capable of shaping the norms of the society in which they live. We thus incorporate some of the insights from situationism into a revamped view of civic education.

EN:

This essay examines the concept of performativity in relation to what are perceived to be reasonable and unreasonable affective responses to discourse. It considers how discourse, especially in classrooms and other educational contexts, produces effects, and how it is that those effects are sometimes seen as attached to the discourse, and sometimes as attached to the person who perceives and displays the effect. When discourse produces strong affective responses, sometimes the discourse itself is seen as unreasonable and in need of socializing (e.g., racist and homophobic slurs), and sometimes the person is perceived as “overreacting” to language that is not considered inherently affectively charged. Such distinctions, whether made explicitly or not, shape educational contexts and offer a hidden curriculum of “appropriate” affect. The essay traces the concept of performativity through the work of Austin, Derrida, Butler, and Cavell, and then extends it to affect theory to see how performativity can help us think through the provocation or production of feelings beyond individual psychological explanations.

EN:

This paper considers the difficulties that accompany projects in education variously configured around a multicultural or intercultural label, particularly when they are built upon, for example, idealised conceptions of humanity, notions of the common good and dialogue, or ideas of recognition.  My premise here is that, while such idealisations may be constructed with the best of intentions, they occlude discussions of how to face the violent realities that can also be part of social interaction. My focus here is on the existential conditions that frame our encounters with other people, and how such existential concerns lead us to confront more openly the violence that can inhere in such encounters. Beginning from this existential position, I argue, actually invites alternative ways of formulating transformative work in education, namely a focus on the present. Secondly, I turn to explore the transformative spaces created by performance artist Marina Abramovic, and how her projects reveal what we are up against existentially when it comes to facing humanity in the here and now, in all its messiness. And, finally, I make the suggestion that an education committed to the existential conditions of facing humanity can be built on a reconceptualization of conversation, as opposed to dialogue. Here I argue that conversation offers the kind of potential for transformation in its open-endedness and anarchic sensibilities.

EN:

What is at stake in high school philosophy education, and why? Why is it a good idea to teach philosophy at this level? This essay seeks to address some issues that arose in revising the Ontario grade 12 philosophy curriculum documents, significant insights from philosophy teacher education, and some early results of recent research funded by the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada. These three topics include curricular disputes, stories of transformation from philosophy student to philosophy teacher, and preliminary research findings. All underscore the importance and complexity of philosophy education, as well as its challenges and benefits, including the cross-curricular benefits philosophy education imparts to the study of other subject areas. Collectively, these serve as a springboard for asking some larger and broader philosophical questions about the teaching and learning of philosophy, and they demonstrate that this is a promising new area of study and of teaching for philosophers of education. I will raise some questions about philosophy that will help frame the next stage in the SSHRC research into the teaching and learning of philosophy in Ontario, and which I contend are new and fundamental questions to ask about philosophy itself.