Elizabeth O'Brien

This book offers a novel approach to teacher education through the philosophy of education. The book is structured around the themes of Voice, Risk, and Care, wherein the author engages with the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, Gert Biesta, and Nel Noddings respectively, to develop six central capabilities of the educator: Acknowledgement and Autobiography, Imagination and Interruption, and Attention and Uncertainty. The work culminates in a final chapter proposing that the essential, unifying capability that new educators should be supported towards is The Ordinary. This book will appeal to those interested and engaged in initial teacher education, practising educators, and those engaged in the professional development and support of educators from early years to higher education.

In writing 'How to Disagree', Ferner and Chetty aim to bring to light those assumptions we make about the world, its structure and the lived reality of what we assume to be real, in order to see how these assumptions affect the ways we engage with each other. It is a fascinating endeavour and very well done through this thoughtful text. 'How to Disagree' is part of the 'Build and Become' series, a community of texts adopting a particular shared approach to enacting their commitment to ‘building knowledge that helps you navigate your world’. The emphasis, as reiterated by the authors, is on finding enjoyment in thinking and talking about difference.

In this paper we consider some of the problems inherent in the attempt to define and circumscribe an exclusively ‘educational love’, as presented by Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski in a recent paper for this journal. In seeking to move beyond the confusing interpersonal relations involved in student-centred discourses on teaching, the authors aim to articulate an ‘educational love’ that is more oriented towards subject matter than the student subject. In the process, the concept of love itself becomes increasingly abstract and open to interpretation. Further, the attempt to reconcile these elements in an uncomplicated ‘love for the object’, following the example of Alain Badiou's St Paul, constitutes an injustice to the other subjects—the students—involved in the teaching situation. We consider the ways in which such abstractions might sit with student teachers, to demonstrate how and why the intersubjective dimension—with some of the possible emotive messiness that is implied therein—must not fade from view, if we are to avoid conceiving of education as something that can be purified of individual interest, motivation and desire.

This paper engages the philosophical concepts of subjectification and acknowledgment in conversation with Philip Pullman’s young adult novel, Northern Lights. Our particular focus is Lyra Belacqua, Pullman’s central character. Precarious in her vulnerability and in her unknown significance, we read Lyra as usefully negotiating the dangerous transition from childhood to adolescence. In her negotiation of this complex liminality, we argue that Lyra models those difficult-to-define moments encountered by children as they learn to be in and of the world. Situating our reading in a Philosophy of Education discourse, we draw theoretically from the work of Gert Biesta and Stanley Cavell. With Biesta as the primary focus of our paper, we generalize beyond Northern Lights to argue that the reading of fiction constitutes “a weak educational event” in Biesta’s intriguing understanding of that phrase. Partly as a theoretical framing for the Pullman text, we begin with an outline of Biesta’s philosophy.