Rampage school gun violence elicits strong public reaction but often results in stop-gap policies that do little to address the violence. Such policies include but are not limited to zero-tolerance discipline, employing school resource officers, installing metal detectors, arming teachers, and active shooter drills. What nearly all of these post-rampage policies share is a desire to secure the school by making the school impenetrable to would be assailants. These policies have an effect on the democratic education in the United States. To this end, the educational and democratic significance of post-rampage policies “harden” schools. Post-rampage schooling of this sort turns children into soldiers and schools into bunkers at the expense of democratic education for the renewal of a democratic society. Thus it is critical to introduce methods and practices that “soften” schools and sustain education for democratic citizenship.
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Gun Violence and Democratic Education in America
Samantha Deane
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Masculinities and School Gun Violence in the United States
Samantha Deane
Schools are sites of personal, political, and symbolic violence. In the United States acts of rampage school gun violence, themselves symbolic, are connected to acts of personal violence via the inscription of social gender norms. Carried out by White teenage boys rampage school shootings call us to grapple with the ways in which schools form and discipline gendered subjectivities. Central to the field of masculinity studies is R. W. Connell’s theory of masculinity which draws on a Gramscian theory of hegemony rather than a Foucauldian theory of power. Whereas Gramsci focuses the ways in which power moves down, Foucault studies the impact of small interaction on our subjective sense of self. When addressing the phenomena of rampage school gun violence where White teenage boys target their schools in acts of gendered rage, a Foucauldian theory of power helps us to take seriously the significance of everyday interaction in legitimating gendered ontologies. Jointly Foucault and the contemporary works of Jane Roland Martin, Amy Shuffelton, and Michel Kimmel point towards an avenue that may afford us the opportunity to root out practices and environments wedded to hegemonic masculinity (and thus rampage school gun violence): the everyday celebration of gender-inclusive and egalitarian ways of learning and living.
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Mindfulness and “Educational New Ageism”
Marina Schwimmer and Kevin McDonough
Mindfulness meditation is a growing social phenomenon in Western countries and is now also becoming a common part of life in public schools. The concept of mindfulness originated in Buddhist thinking and meditation practices over 2,500 years ago. Its original purpose was mainly to alleviate people’s suffering by providing a path to inner wisdom and vitality, which implied the development of compassion, patience, and forgiveness, as well as other values conducive to inner peace. In the 1970s, this practice was popularized in the West as it was adapted to and integrated with secular intervention programs aimed at reducing stress and dealing with chronic pain.
Packages promoting mindfulness practices are disseminated commercially, backed by research in neuroscience and developmental psychology, for use in schools through programs like MindUp and Mindful Schools. In recent years, there has been a marked uptick of interest from educational researchers in mindfulness education. Several distinct research orientations or approaches can be discerned—mindfulness-based intervention (MBI), an instrumental approach that views mindfulness practices in clinical or therapeutic terms; a spiritualist approach, which emphasizes the rootedness of MBIs in ancient religious traditions and focuses on the benefits of mindfulness practices for individual spiritual growth; and a political approach, which highlights the potential benefits of MBIs to develop students’ capacities for democratic deliberation and participation.
Contemporary mindfulness education in schools also sometimes reflects the cultural influence of New Age values, an orientation distinct from the instrumental, spiritualist, and political approaches, and whose impact may raise troubling questions about the purported educational benefits of MBIs. Accordingly, the alliance between New Age values, neoliberal economic and cultural values, and mindfulness practices in contemporary democratic societies and schools should be given due consideration in assessing the relative educational costs and benefits of MBIs. In particular, cultural and educational values at the intersection of neoliberal values entrepreneurialism and New Age values of personal and spiritual growth may have corrosive rather than benevolent effects on the pursuit of democratic values in schools.
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The Philosophy of Mathematics Education
Catherine Henney and Kurt Stemhagen
The philosophy of mathematics education (PoME) is a field of inquiry that pursues questions arising from the long tradition of mathematics as a school subject. An integrated area of study, PoME draws on other established disciplines such as philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of education. However, propositions and theses within PoME also have implications for the theory and practice of mathematics education. Rather than actively blurring boundaries among contributory disciplines, PoME is a subdiscipline that reflects their inherent interdependence.
Many of PoME’s core questions address the very nature of mathematics, how we come to learn it, and the historical and contemporary aims of mathematics education. Though not the first to address these individual lines of inquiry, Paul Ernest’s The Philosophy of Mathematics Education (1991) may be regarded as PoME’s inaugural text. His landmark publication also demonstrated how philosophical inquiry may guide critical analysis of educational practices and policies. Questions about what mathematics is are not disentangled from those about its teaching and learning. Thus, PoME demonstrates a kind of internal elasticity: how we answer one question has a bearing on how we might answer another. For example, is mathematics something “found” or “made”? The perception of mathematics—how we tend to characterize its nature—can underscore beliefs about mathematics pedagogy. The view of mathematics as a cultural construct (rather than an absolute body of knowledge and related skills) likely dovetails with a constructivist pedagogical approach. But at the same time, such a view of mathematics may encounter ideological tension, if not outright resistance, in sociopolitical arenas. Reconceptualizing mathematics and mathematics education may be considered philosophical endeavors that challenge dominant assumptions and build frameworks with the potential to make mathematics fundamentally more inclusive. The story of PoME is the story of its genesis, its role in imagining a more equitable and humanistic school math experience, and the need to make room for new, alternative approaches and viewpoints that honor the radical spirit in which PoME was developed.
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Lateral Thinking and Learning in Arts Education in the Post-Internet Art
Lynda Avendaño Santana
Lateral learning in the last two decades can be seen in peer-to-peer learning that is being promoted by new technologies where there are apps that allow students to work together in real time through virtual space, a method which thereby shifts the focus from the solitary self to the interdependent group which lives an educational experience of a collaborative and distributed nature, whose focus lies in instilling the principle of the social nature of knowledge.
The ideological bases of lateral thinking are sustained by issues such as emancipation of the student from the authority of the teacher, the relationship of collaboration, permitting the development of individual appreciations and ideas, based simultaneously on those of their peers, on the democratization of knowledge, and so on, which ultimately refers to a collaborative creative education, to a democratic education, and to an education for democracy that assumes the new technologized context in which we live.
Because of this, lateral thinking is increasingly influencing everyday life and areas such as education and the arts, as it happens in the post-Internet art, and more specifically net.art (i.e., an online art), which is a collaborative creative experience that has become an instrument which allows us to see a “new type of art in the 21st century.”
Net.art, Internet art and the most experimental design, therefore constitutes a community experience that hypertextualizes computerized languages and generates poetic perspectives as artistic practices of lateral thinking. It has bestowed upon us a series of mechanisms to devise collaborative development strategies for lateral learning based on those creative ludic educational experiences of using and interacting with new technologies.
This is essential to bear in mind because, as Jeremy Rifkin says, collaborative learning helps students to expand their own self-awareness, including their “self” in reference to diverse “others,” and promotes in-depth participation in more interdependent communities. It extends the territory comprised within the boundaries of empathy.
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Opposition to Curriculum Structured by Neoliberal Globalization
Kenneth J. Saltman
Curriculum has been structured in antidemocratic and inegalitarian ways by neoliberal globalization in terms of economics, politics, and culture. Thus it is necessary to discuss how curriculum structured by neoliberal globalization can be opposed. The struggle for democratic and egalitarian forms of curriculum is taken up in terms of cultural politics, political economy, subjectivity formation, technology, and social movements opposed to neoliberal control and corporatization.
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Race, Social Justice, and University Language Programs From an International Perspective
Elisa Gavari Starkie and Paula Tenca Sidotti
The democratization of university access made possible the arrival of new university students from different backgrounds. At this time access was opened to all individuals coming from all different backgrounds. The new student population had a strong impact on the university life. Some university professors complained that although some students were talented, they could not communicate in complex scenarios. The article will focus on the theoretical principles that inspired the democratic curriculum and the psychological approach that allowed new individual cognitive perspectives and a new vision of the university population. At this time the education principles by Freire and Dewey generated an impulse for democratic education. From this framework the article will analyze the research and educational principles that inspired the Writing Across Curriculums (WAC) movement and the supplementary Writing in the Disciplines (WID). Both programs were very successful and led to the establishment of the Writing Academic Centers that since then and until now guarantee a democratic university education. These centers have fostered WAC, which developed into WID. The need to address global classrooms has inspired Writing Across the Communities, which considers race and social justice within language programs. The university scientific approach is aligned with the international organization’s objectives for the 20th century.
