(1992). Immanuel Kant, Jean Piaget and the Rage for Order: Ecological Hints of the Colonial Spirit in Pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 28-43.

This paper is an exploration of the Cartesian paradigms of clarity and univocity and how these inform contemporary educational theory and practice. Phenomenology is discussed as a way of disrupting Descartes' visions of clarity and distinctness as paradigms of knowledge and as a return of inquiry to life as it is actually lived. Analogical discourse is examined as a way of giving a voice to this sort of inquiry. Heidegger's notions of inquiry as obedience and thanksgiving are discussed.

This paper is a combination of a grandfather's musings over his grandson's drawings, combined with a reconsideration of hermeneutics as an early childhood educational theory.

Re-examines the fundamentals of teaching and learning and explains how the interpretive-hermeneutic approach to the basics translates in the modern classroom.

This text articulates how and why suffering can be pedagogical in character and how it is often key to authentic and meaningful acts of teaching and learning. This collection threads through education, nursing, psychiatry, ecology, and medicine, and blends together affinities between hermeneutic conceptions of the cultivation of character and Buddhist meditations on suffering and its locale in our lives.

This paper explores the relentless character of writing in elementary education. We begin with the reflections of a Grade Three teacher on incidents in her classroom regarding writing and the leaving of traces, followed with a consideration of the deep cultural investment we have in leaving such traces. A brief examination of the latest work by Lucy Calkins is followed by a discussion of the paradoxical relations between writing, remembering and forgetting and the forging of community as an “order of (...) memories.” The issue of writing as the rendering of experience into cultural capital is followed by concluding remarks on the pleasures of “walking around unwritten.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper is an interpretive exploration of the figure of the monstrous child as it appears in the experiences of student‐teachers entering the community of teaching. It also considers how interpretive work is itself haunted by this figure and how, therefore, teaching itself might be considered an interpretive activity.