Eros as the Educational Principle of Democracy

This paper explores the value of the eros motif for critical pedagogy and citizenship education. The conceptual affinities between eros and democracy are identified and integrated into a theory of democratic political education. Long recognized as vital to the process of self knowledge, the ancient Greek concept of eros has nevertheless been largely erased from contemporary educational debate. By retrieving eros from the fringe of academic discourse and integrating it with critical pedagogy, the aims of radical democracy can be more fully achieved. The essay emphasizes the civil society or cultural dimensions of democracy as against its legal or procedural aspects. Renewed emphasis on the associational qualities of democracy underscore the importance of eros as an educational principle. The ancient pedagogical motif of educating the desires is posited as an alternative to the liberal/modernist paradigm of education which de-values affective domains of knowledge.     

Pedagogy and educational democratization: The problem of alienation

Education is viewed as not merely a particular domain of social life. It is more a universal process than a mere learning of sciences and arts; it is richer than an individual's socialization. The educational democratization turns out to be a prerequisite of humanization of the entire social life. The orientation at the supreme humane values as a strategic direction of democratic evolution of education is opposed to the authoritarian tendencies as an antivalue of pedagogical relations.Being a significant step towards a genuinely humane society, democratization is unable, however, to resolve the fundamental problem of human formation: that of alienation. The opportunity to resolve it is dependent upon proper conditions for a free self-determination of a personality in culture.     

Judge not? The pedagogical puzzle of right interpretation and wrong interpretation

When studying the reception history of the Bible, should students be asked to suspend judgment on a particular interpretation for the sake of the pedagogical goals of the course? Or is their judgment essential to the process of learning and understanding? This essay explores the pedagogical puzzle of right interpretation and wrong interpretation through the context of my classroom, where neither the troubling events of a nation in turmoil nor our own social, religious, and cultural locations as readers could be bracketed from the learning environment, despite my best efforts. In particular, this essay integrates the approach outlined by Gary Weissman, who argues for an embrace of student misreading in his book The Writer in the Well. His suggestion that misreading and rewriting are fundamental to the process of understanding is provocative, and its application to biblical studies presents special challenges, but this paper argues for its relevance to the pedagogical puzzle at hand.     

Pedagogical cliff‐jumping

This article chronicles how Introduction to the Study of Religion has become my favorite course to teach. In it, I narrate my process of pedagogical reinvention and syllabus redesign. Framed by professional and personal backstories, I share my pedagogical desires, list some pedagogical cues I took, and articulate pedagogical decisions and associated wagers. (Along the way, I draw on a range of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and pedagogical materials as guides.) Then I tell how my Intro course realized these elements in its design and its execution. By doing so, I make a case for taking pedagogical risks and for reinventing Intro courses as performative responses to the practical and disciplinary question “how might we study religion?”     

The Relationship Between Artificial and Second Language Learning

Artificial language learning (ALL) experiments have become an important tool in exploring principles of language and language learning. A persistent question in all of this work, however, is whether ALL engages the linguistic system and whether ALL studies are ecologically valid assessments of natural language ability. In the present study, we considered these questions by examining the relationship between performance in an ALL task and second language learning ability. Participants enrolled in a Spanish language class were evaluated using a number of different measures of Spanish ability and classroom performance, which was compared to IQ and a number of different measures of ALL performance. The results show that success in ALL experiments, particularly more complex artificial languages, correlates positively with indices of L2 learning even after controlling for IQ. These findings provide a key link between studies involving ALL and our understanding of second language learning in the classroom.     

Confronting Confrontation in Clinical Supervision: An Analytical Autoethnography

Through an analytic autoethnography, the authors detail an experience of confrontation within the context of supervision of supervision. In the coconstructed narrative, the authors describe the events taking place before, during, and after the confrontation experience from the perspective of both the faculty supervisor and beginning doctoral‐level supervisor. Finally, the authors provide an analysis of the narrative based in supervisory models and theories of change.     

Pedagogical issues in the teaching of classroom guidance curriculum—a hybrid Hong Kong case

Unlike many other places in the world, guidance lessons in Hong Kong are taught mainly by class teachers rather than school counsellors. Given the unique educational context of Hong Kong as East meets West and given that guidance is essentially a concept from the West, it is important to investigate what kind of pedagogy is suitable for teaching guidance in Hong Kong. This paper examines what teaching guidance lessons are like in Hong Kong for the researcher and for some primary teachers. A qualitative case study methodology is used. Data are drawn from the author's own experience in a primary school teaching attachment and interviews with guidance professionals, primary school principals, teachers and students in three selected primary schools in Hong Kong. Pedagogical issues for the teaching guidance curriculum are explored and discussed. The researcher argues for a hybrid guidance pedagogy for the teaching of classroom guidance in Hong Kong. Findings are applicable to countries facing similar issues in parallel mixed cultural settings.     

On Paulo Freire's Debt to Psychoanalysis: Authority on the Side of Freedom

Paulo Freire's major work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, owes adebt to psychoanalysis. In particular, as this paper argues,Freire's account of teacher authority needs to be understoodthrough psychoanalytic sensibilities. Paulo Freire maintains thatteacher authority can be ``on the side of freedom.' This is ahighly charged claim given that liberalist traditions generallycast authority as the enemy of freedom. Breaking with liberalunderstandings of authority, Freire's ``authority on the sideof freedom' is a matter of maintaining the delicate psychicbalance that leads neither to domination nor to submission.This paper investigates how such an authoritative balance functions.