‘Not-being-at-home’: Subject,Freedom and Transcending in Heideggerian Educational Philosophy

In my paper, by drawing on the writings Heidegger developed in the late 1920s, I wish to display what we may refer to as the thorough educational nature of Heideggerian reflection. It is my argument that the analysis of Dasein we find in the early Heidegger displays an extraordinary deep and dense reflection on selfhood and subjectivity, a reflection that is rooted in subject’s freedom and transcending. By paying attention to the interplay between these two features, I argue that in the late 1920s, while challenging the notion of an all-encompassing consciousness as the place where everything should be understood and managed, Heidegger built a conception of selfhood and subjectivity in terms of freedom, responsibility, and ongoing transformation. Such a conception, I argue, is in and of itself educational.     

The Eclipse of Imagination Within Educational ‘Official’ Framework and Why It Should be Returned to Educational Discourse: A Deweyan Perspective

In recent decades, the shift towards the “learnification” of educational discourse has de facto reframed educational purposes and schooling practice, thus reframing what students should know, strive for, and, in a sense, be. In this paper, given the efforts to disrupt the dominance of learning discourse, I seek to engage regarding a specific concern, namely, the progressive removal of imagination within educational official framework. Indeed, imagination has virtually disappeared from the documents, publications, web pages and recommendations of major educational agencies and institutions worldwide, with important and potentially damaging consequences for schooling, teaching and learning. Employing a Deweyan perspective, I argue that imagination plays a crucial role in the creation of pivotal educational features and phenomena, such as knowledge, inquiry, choice and deliberation, critical agency, meaning creation, and, importantly, the openness of possibilities. Therefore, the eclipse of imagination becomes, at the very same time, the eclipse of education; nurturing imagination is about nurturing education.