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The US uses an evidence-based approach to education (US-EBE) as a strategy for pursuing two major goals: (1) to raise achievement in the US overall by facilitating improvement among all students, including students in disadvantaged groups; (2) to narrow achievement gaps between socially advantaged and disadvantaged groups by levelling up achievement among disadvantaged students. While both goals prioritize improvement among disadvantaged students in absolute terms, only the second attempts to address unequal achievement by prioritizing improvement among disadvantaged students relative to advantaged students. I argue that US-EBE can be reasonably expected to advance either the first goal or the second goal but not both simultaneously, as intended. This descriptive point raises a normative question: which goal should we pursue using US-EBE? I explore moral considerations that bear on this question, focusing on costs and benefits for students. I argue, provisionally, that we ought to use US-EBE to narrow gaps because the costs associated with doing so are morally justifiable whereas those associated with the alternative are not.

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In this paper I draw on my work as a pedagogista to discuss the pedagogical promise of critique, estrangement, and what I call speculative envisioning. I argue that these concepts are themselves modes of engagement, practice, and thinking that are pedagogical and that they can help educators engage with the nondeterministic work of creating conditions for otherwise educational worlds. To do so I reassert critique’s promise by tracing the ways Michel Foucault and Judith Butler ask us to engage with it and consider what it might offer to education and, more specifically, to early childhood education. I then introduce estrangement as a pedagogical disposition towards otherwise educational worlds and as a means by which to consider speculative envisioning. I propose speculative envisioning as a mode of pedagogical thought that works as a necessary supplement to the renewal value of critique and how this constitutes a pedagogical and ethical move toward otherwise educational worlds.

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In this paper, I draw together myriad theoretical and philosophical sources to think through the intensification of emotion amid and emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. I begin with three narratives from my own teaching and learning, which ground the subsequent conversation. I then characterize the current movement in educational theorizing known as the affective turn. The affective turn, I suggest, attunes educational inquiry to small, yet vital, moments of classroom interaction often taken for granted in public education. Toward considering those vital moments in more nuance, I discuss psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion’s notion of the alpha function – a nonconscious digestion of emotion we perform for others when they are overwhelmed. When coupled with Nel Noddings’ evocation of the ethics of care in education, the alpha function offers an understanding of the hidden emotional labour in teaching. This hidden dimension of the teacher’s task, the portion of the job that deals in regulating our own emotions and in helping students make sense of theirs, I suggest, is becoming more difficult amid the affective situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. I conclude the paper by gesturing toward a threefold response to be taken up more fully elsewhere: humility before the task of teaching, a reverence for the work of feeling, and a willingness to organize toward a more caring school system.

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This paper investigates the core moment of cosmopolitan education by considering trust in education. Critical and postcolonial approaches recognize that dialogue plays a crucial role in cosmopolitan education. However, dialogue is not possible without sharing a fundamental platform. Trust could encourage us to construct this platform, and should thus be examined in an educational context. Previous studies on trust in education have mainly focused on the asymmetric relationship between educators and children, offering the impression that trust strengthens authoritarian order. However, in this paper I propose that trust in education needs to be recognized for containing a spatial and contextual nature, that is, a vertical trust between educators and children, and a horizontal trust especially between friends. Such spatial trust is based on trust in matters and therefore an open trust that embraces all matters in the world. This spatial trust could contribute to reinforcing cosmopolitan education, and furthermore, to formulating a post-anthropocentric cosmopolitan education.

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This paper identifies and considers issues of perspective taking and communicative agency in applying Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory to policymaking in educational settings. The central question is whether Habermas provides an epistemic framework that supports reciprocal and sincere expressions of the views and interests of individuals in a heterogeneous society. Examining this question leads to a discussion of “practical discourse” in light of a willingness of participants to reach mutual understanding and agreement, and the centrality of perspective taking and communicative agency in such discourses. Also examined is a conceptualization of “application discourses,” the implications of such discourses for perspective taking and communicative agency, and the role these discourses might play in further assuring the overall inclusivity and context sensitivity of applying education policies in specific circumstances. The paper then gives a brief re-analysis of an empirical study that used Habermas’s concept of the “ideal speech situation” as a normative framework for interpreting data. The re-analysis means to illustrate the practical value of practical discourse for guiding and assessing educational policymaking. The paper ends with a short justification of the necessity of attending to perspective taking and communicative agency when viewing education as a basic human right.

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In contrast to both behaviourist and cognitive approaches to moral development, neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics has had recent fairly distinctive impact on thought about the practice of moral education. On this view, insofar as moral development is a matter of the cultivation of moral virtues, and virtues are basically qualities of character conducive to good or admirable conduct, virtue formation is reducible neither to behaviour training nor to (mere) intellectual acquaintance with knowledge or principles, and requires essentially practical initiation into the distinctive (Aristotelian) moral wisdom of phronesis. In turn, such focus on the cultivation of practical wisdom has led to large emphasis on the contribution of moral exemplars and role modelling for the moral education of (particularly) young people. This paper argues that such emphasis is seriously overstated, if not wholly misplaced, and that role modelling and exemplification can have only a secondary place at best in any reputable moral educational project or program.