Alice Monypenny

Recent proposals for a “critical character epistemology” attend to the ways in which environments, institutions, social practices, and relationships promote the development of epistemic vice whilst acknowledging that the contexts of differently situated agents demand different epistemic character traits. I argue that a tension arises between two features of critical character epistemology: the classification as “epistemically corrupting” of environments, institutions, or structures which promote the development of epistemic vice; and commitment to normative contextualism—the doctrine that the normative status (the status of a trait as a virtue or as a vice) of some or all epistemic character traits is context-dependent. I show how these two features lead to the claim that certain traits both are epistemic virtues and hinder the development of epistemic virtues. To make such an evaluation consistent, I propose a modified form of normative contextualism: dual-level normative contextualism.

In 1998, Robert Boostrom wrote that ‘safe-space’ was an emerging metaphor in educational discourse but was not yet a ‘topic of educational inquiry’ (p.398). Whilst there has been a great amount of work since then exploring the topic (for example, Holley and Steiner; Stengel; The Roestone Collective and Callan), a lack of clarity still clouds the debate around the place of safe spaces in the classroom. In this paper, I address this lack of clarity by addressing the fundamental question: what does it mean for a classroom to be safe? I do so by considering the variety of meanings which have been ascribed to ’safety’ in educational contexts in light of the purpose for which the concept is used. I’ll defend a particular refinement of the concept – what I call an ’objective approach to safety’ - on the grounds that it most effectively captures the conditions we value, and can appropriately describe as safety, in the classroom.

In this paper, I argue that focusing on resilience education fails to appropriately reflect the socio-political nature of character. I define protective epistemic character traits (PECTs) as epistemic character traits which aid students in avoiding, limiting or mitigating harm in the classroom. I argue that the relationship between epistemic character and protection in hostile classrooms is importantly influenced by context in two main ways: (1) the exercise and development of some PECTs may carry significant cost for some students and (2) social and developmental factors may promote or obstruct the development of virtuous PECTs for individual students. I employ two principles from Ian James Kidd’s Critical Character Epistemology – aetiological sensitivity and normative contextualism – and propose a revised approach to resilience education. I argue that this revision requires an increased focus on changing underlying structures of oppression and cautions against teaching a standardised list of epistemic virtues.