Fostering Inclusion in Education: Alternative Approaches to Progressive Educational Practices 3031074912, 9783031074912

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Fostering Inclusion in Education Alternative Approaches to Progressive Educational Practices Edited by Enrico Postiglione

Fostering Inclusion in Education

Enrico Postiglione Editor

Fostering Inclusion in Education Alternative Approaches to Progressive Educational Practices

Editor Enrico Postiglione Naples, Italy

ISBN 978-3-031-07491-2    ISBN 978-3-031-07492-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Enrico Postiglione Part I Inclusive Education: Reasons and Possibilities  21 2 Education  in Modernity: The English Experience 23 Geoffrey Hinchliffe 3 Implementing  Inclusive Education: What Are the Levers to Support Teachers? 53 Elke Struyf, Aster Van Mieghem, and Karine Verschueren 4 Elaborated  Dialogic Feedback and Negotiated Action in Peer Assessment: Metacognitive Benefits for Assessor and Assessee 79 Keith James Topping 5 School,  Jail and the Pandemic: What Can Philosophical Education Actually Do?105 Walter Omar Kohan and Marcio Nicodemus

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Contents

Part II Turning Classes into Dialogic Communities: Theoretical Horizons Towards the Goal of Inclusion 121 6 Philosophical  Inquiry with Children: Inviting Uncertainty into the Classroom123 Kerstin Michalik 7 The  Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education. An Analysis to Its Inclusive Perspectives and Their Relationships to Aesthetic Aspects145 Lorenzo Manera 8 For  the Purpose of a Better Future Society: Advancing Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy in Today’s World155 Amber Strong Makaiau Part III Practices, Effects and Results: A Pedagogical Path to Pursue 177 9 Philosophizing  with Children in the Community of Inquiry: Uncertainty as Medium for Connected and Complex Thinking and Speaking179 Katrin Alt and Kerstin Michalik 10 Inclusive  Science Education Through Metaphors and Narrative195 Annamaria Contini and Alice Giuliani 11 Fostering  Kindergarteners’ Scientific Reasoning in Vulnerable Settings Through Dialogic Inquiry-Based Learning229 Maite Novo and Zoel Salvadó 12 The  Single-Word Response Method: Expanding the Efficacy of a Community of Inquiry245 Enrico Postiglione

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13 Effects  of “Philosophical Debates” at Preschool on the Recognition of Sex-­Stereotyping: An Ongoing Double-Level Participatory Intervention Research265 Ingrid Verscheure Correction to: Fostering Kindergarteners’ Scientific Reasoning in Vulnerable Settings Through Dialogic Inquiry-Based LearningC1 Maite Novo and Zoel Salvadó Conclusion285 Index287

List of Contributors

Katrin Alt  Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany Zoel Salvadó  Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain Annamaria  Contini  University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy Alice  Giuliani University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy Geoffrey Hinchliffe  University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Walter Omar Kohan  State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Amber Strong Makaiau  University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA Lorenzo Manera  University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy Kerstin Michalik  University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Maite Novo  Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain Marcio  Nicodemus State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Enrico Postiglione  Naples, Italy Elke Struyf  University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium Keith James Topping  University of Dundee, Dundee, UK

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Aster Van Mieghem  University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Ingrid Verscheure  Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France Karine Verschueren  KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 11.1

‘Educational exclusion’ ‘Segregation’ ‘Integration’ ‘Inclusive education’ Four themes placed in the model of Kyriazopoulou and Weber (2009) The Seed-model for investigating the implementation of inclusive education Percentage increase in correct answers to close-ended questions from pre-test to post-test within each class Percentage of correct answers to open-ended questions on the post-test Phases of inquiry-based learning activities for kindergarteners. Adapted from Pedaste et al. (2015)

9 10 10 11 56 70 212 212 236

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List of Tables

Table 8.1 Table 9.1 Table 9.2 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 12.1 Table 12.2 Table 12.3 Table 12.4 Table 12.5 Table 12.6

Progressive philosophy and pedagogy Master’s thesis portfolio 169 Children’s strategies for dealing with uncertainty in the discussion189 Share of discussion and selected speech acts in the two discussions190 Analogical correspondences between “The world of Ellulandia” / “cell” 206 Analogical correspondences between “fortress” / “nucleus” 207 Analogical correspondences between “King-leader” / “DNA” 207 Cumulative data from Study 1 control groups 254 Cumulative data from Study 2 control groups 255 Cumulative data from Study 3 control groups 256 Cumulative data from Study 1 SWRm groups 260 Cumulative data from Study 2 SWRm groups 261 Cumulative data from Study 3 SWRm groups 261

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Enrico Postiglione

Philosophy of education and pedagogy are as old as education itself. Indeed, even if being at pains to provide the most basic and coarse understanding of what education actually is—as an example, say ‘teaching someone about something’1—one is still forced to identify stable criteria according to which the educational process will finally be deemed as successful or not.2 Since the dawn of education, then, the quest for those criteria constitutes the nucleus around which educational strategies,

1  Playing this game is actually more difficult than expected: no matter how broadly one is willing to define education, its definition keeps wriggling. There are many equivalent descriptions that might be equally basic, coarse and still unsatisfactory. 2  No criteria would cause education to be a purposeless activity not worth to be fulfilled.

I have to start by thanking everyone on the Palgrave team for their support and precious work, including the anonymous referees for their valuable comments. Special thanks to Sujatha Mani, Project Coordinator for Springer Nature, and Senior Editor Milana Vernikova.

E. Postiglione (*) Naples, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_1

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analyses and research develop. Narrowing the field to the modern era,3 when it comes to discussing current education as well as planning its future developments, often inclusion holds the stage as the most stringent of goals. Nevertheless, longstanding issues—which have been affecting different schooling systems in various ways—or say, among others, the contemporary challenges connected with the recent pandemic outbreak, disclose how far many contemporary everyday educational dynamics are, from actual inclusivity. Real inclusion is a widely recognized goal4 and is considered as a necessary characteristic of future education in a better world. Besides its common-sense reading, though, the meaning of ‘actual inclusivity’ remains largely obscure. Sure enough, as soon as the very seminal idea of a book explicitly devoted to the implementation of ‘inclusion’ into ‘education’ springs to mind, one is immediately faced with a first and fundamental problem: regardless of their extensive use in the literature, these terms are not clearly defined and their precise meanings are eventually vague. Not by chance, there are plenty of references to ‘inclusive education’ in both academic and mainstream databases, but this expression is always used in a specific—and peculiar—way. A detailed explanation of its meaning in a given context must always and necessarily be provided as a theoretical premise. The nature of inclusion in education—and the ways in which it is understood and enacted— is contested, as well as the independent meaning of the single terms composing it. When assessing inclusion rates in a given school, for example, what values are we supposed to take into consideration, and why? Whether or not ‘actual inclusivity’ can be considered as a necessary characteristic of future education largely depends on its actual definition (what it means), on the criteria we adopt to deem a given scenario as inclusive, on the values we look at as the theoretical cornerstone of education and on our understanding of the nature of the mutual relationship between education and society. None of these factors can be taken for granted nor defined by principle. Having in mind concepts such as ‘equity’, ‘social justice’, ‘participation’, ‘diversity’ and so on, this statement might look like a mere nitpicking. Of course, one is tempted to admit that inclusive education must account for diversity, foster participation and so on, and that an education based on such theoretical assumptions is likely to be ethically just: there is ground for a rather 3  Considered in relation to a possible, conventional date (1762) corresponding to the publication of Rousseau’s Émile, ou De l’éducation. 4  Some exemplary references are provided below.

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universal agreement here. But on a closer look, what social justice is (where is the limit between a just and unjust educational process, etc.), is open to debate. Likewise, the nature of participation, diversity and so on is disputable. These apparently conciliatory terms are to be exactly defined. For all of them, a slight semantic shift is likely to result in a significantly different orientation towards educational change.5 In other words, our understanding of what education is and should be, our interpretation of the mutual relation it holds with society and the definition of inclusion we endorse determine our analysis of current education as well as our proposal towards educational change. Moreover, the definition of inclusion itself rests on the definition of the values and criteria we adopt to define it. And of course, the attitude toward inclusive education changes in relation to the different categorization of its definitions (Mireille et al., 2019). Failure to question any ring of this theoretical chain necessarily causes education to reiterate pre-existing theoretical perspectives grounded on a pre-existing social scenario: an education like this can never be a factor in the process for change. Imagine a dystopian world where tyrants hold the power and the set of ethical values unifying society is turned upside down; in this morally awful place, all students have equal access to education and are equally involved in the learning processes. However, schooling curricula presents ‘supremacy of the social group a over the social group b’ as a truth (as knowledge to be learned). Even if school is not leaving students behind, as they all have the possibility to reach the goals set up for them by the educational institution, the sort of education they have access to is made up of pre-existing and unquestioned values which (in absolute terms) can hardly be said to amount to inclusion. In such a dystopian world, all students are included into an exclusive and discriminatory educational process. To avoid paradoxical scenarios as such, a critical interpretation of education and society should lie at the core of research in philosophy of education and pedagogy and any work in the field has to make an explicit reference to its educational change orientations and to the ways in which this proposed process presupposes the adoption of alternative, inclusive approaches and pedagogies, along with the development of new understandings of the education–society relation, learning and teaching, student engagement, critical and reflective thinking and so on.

5  If ‘X’ reads the value ‘y’ as ‘y’ and ‘Z’ reads the concept ‘y’as ‘w’, the ideal education ‘X1’ put forth by ‘X’will be different from education ‘Z1’ put forth by ‘Z’.

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Of course, this book makes no exception. Yet, it has been inspired by the idea that the purpose and nature of education cannot be satisfactorily described unless in connection with the concept of inclusion and vice versa. What education is and should be can only emerge from a reflection on its inclusive dimension. Therefore, in order to explain purposes, spirit, premises and structure of the present volume, it might be useful to first glance at some general and widely used definitions6  of ‘education’ and ‘inclusion’. The adopted strategy, however, will be that of starting from the latter to reach at least a broad understanding of the former. Let us start with a very general definition of inclusive education provided by ‘Inclusive Education Canada’ (IEC):7 Inclusive education means that all students attend and are welcomed by their neighbourhood schools in age-appropriate, regular classes and are supported to learn, contribute and participate in all aspects of the life of the school. Inclusive education is about how we develop and design our schools, classrooms, programs and activities so that all students learn and participate together. Inclusive education is about ensuring access to quality education for all students by effectively meeting their diverse needs in a way that is responsive, accepting, respectful and supportive. Students participate in the education program in a common learning environment with support to diminish and remove barriers and obstacles that may lead to exclusion. Inclusive education is carried out in a common learning environment; that is, an educational setting where students from different backgrounds and with different abilities learn together in an inclusive environment. […] A common learning environment is not a place where students with intellectual disabilities or other special needs learn in isolation from their peers. (https://inclusiveeducation.ca/about/ what-­is-­ie/)

This might be called a ‘modest approach’ to inclusion. Despite its evident and commendable spirit, the idea of inclusive education proposed resembles the abstract idea of education tout court. Even according to common sense, by definition, a school appears to be the place that 6  These are quoted for purely explanatory reasons. There is no necessary relation between my remarks about the quotes and the actual work (both practical and theoretical) of the sources I mention. I merely use these excerpts to highlight tendencies that can possibly be identified when a possible definition of inclusion is given. 7  As stated on their own website: ‘Inclusive Education Canada (IEC) is a national nongovernmental organization (NGO) committed to quality education for all students in inclusive schools and classrooms in Canadian schools’ https://inclusiveeducation.ca.

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welcomes students and provides them with a supportive environment to learn. Modestly, inclusive education would be nothing but a school which is just not terrible or openly discriminatory. According to this view, what educationists have to plan is a school where all students learn and participate together.8 Defining inclusion as ‘removing non inclusive obstacles’ is certainly successful but less helpful towards a definition of what inclusion is. Likewise, describing the perfect inclusive environment is helpful but still anchored to the modest view of inclusion as merely the joint, nondiscriminatory enterprise of learning. The work of ALLFIE, a disabled people-led organization aiming to ‘promote a wider understanding of the benefits of inclusive education for all’,9 is more specifically focused on the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN). Inclusive education – also called inclusion – is education that includes everyone, with non-disabled and Disabled people (including those with “special educational needs”) learning together in mainstream schools, colleges and universities. This means the system must adapt to include Disabled people – they should not have to adapt to the system […]. The education system must recognise that it creates barriers for Disabled learners, for instance if parts of the school are inaccessible. Disabled pupils and students may require adaptations and support to access the curriculum. Special schools and colleges just for Disabled children and students. This is called segregation. Separate units in mainstream schools and colleges. This is segregation too. Disabled children and students in mainstream education, but without enough support for them to be truly included. This is called integration. Disabled learners are in mainstream education, but their needs are not met. Inclusive practice can be defined as attitudes and methods that ensure all learners can access mainstream education. Everyone works to make sure all learners feel welcome and valued, and that they get the right support to help them develop their talents and achieve their goals. When education is truly inclusive it can actually benefit all learners, not only Disabled learners. (https://www.allfie.org.uk/definitions/what-­is-­inclusive-­education/)

8  Again, this seems tautological. According to Merriam-Webster, a school is—among its many meanings—‘an organization that provides instruction: such as a: an institution for the teaching of children; b: College, University; c(1): a group of scholars and teachers pursuing knowledge together […] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/school. 9  https://www.allfie.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/.

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This is the ‘mainstream approach’ to inclusion. According to this view, educational institutions must first and foremost adapt to the needs of all students and account for their needs. This means all learners access the mainstream education by being granted equal access to the school facilities and equal acquaintance with the standard curricula (i.e. the knowledge expected to be acquired by standard students) regardless of their status. While recognizing the nuanced dimension of inclusion—highlighting that, in absence of support, inclusion occurs but is not actual—the mainstream approach is gap-oriented: it focuses on a certain group of people who suffers educational exclusion and defines ‘inclusion’ as the act of equalizing their educational experience to that of other students. It provides no clues on the quality, nature and impact of the mainstream curricula and is really close to a common-sense idea of what inclusion should actually be. Here is a declaration by UNESCO: Ensuring that each individual has an equal opportunity for educational progress remains a challenge worldwide. Sustainable Development Goal 4 on Education and the Education 2030 Framework for Action emphasize inclusion and equity as laying the foundations for quality education. The UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960) and other international human rights treaties prohibit any exclusion from, or limitation to, educational opportunities on the basis of socially-ascribed or perceived differences, such as by sex, ethnic/social origin, language, religion, nationality, economic condition, ability. Reaching excluded and marginalized groups and providing them with quality education requires the development and implementation of inclusive policies and programmes. In this context, UNESCO promotes inclusive education systems that remove the barriers limiting the participation and achievement of all learners, respect diverse needs, abilities and characteristics and that eliminate all forms of discrimination in the learning environment. UNESCO works with governments and partners to address exclusion from, and inequality in, education. Among marginalized and vulnerable groups, UNESCO pays special attention to children with disabilities as they are overrepresented in the population of those who are not in education. Indigenous people also continue to experience exclusion within and from education. (https://en.unesco.org/themes/inclusion-­in-­education)

This might be called the ‘policy approach’ to inclusion as it focuses primarily on access to education. In the face of the many structural, political and financial problems which prevent a significant number of children

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throughout the world from accessing education physically (i.e. lack of educational infrastructures, transportation, political discrimination, etc.), this perspective considers educational inclusion mainly as the set of actions aimed at filling the qualitative and quantitative gap existing around the world and within individual countries between open and free education, on the one hand, and education limited by barriers of sort, on the other. However, while facing a relevant—and urgent—need, the policy approach faces only one leg of the problem, leaving the other aside. Once a policy-­ inclusive education occurs, social hierarchies and educational exclusion can still emerge at the level of the multi-faceted dynamics of the learning experience. In a more comprehensive statement, UNICEF tries to summarize all approaches in a complete understanding of educational inclusion. The ‘comprehensive approach’ to inclusion would read as follows: An estimated 240 million children worldwide live with disabilities. Like all children, children with disabilities have ambitions and dreams for their futures. Like all children, they need quality education to develop their skills and realize their full potential. Yet, children with disabilities are often overlooked in policymaking, limiting their access to education and their ability to participate in social, economic and political life. Worldwide, these children are among the most likely to be out of school. They face persistent barriers to education stemming from discrimination, stigma and the routine failure of decision makers to incorporate disability in school services. Disability is one of the most serious barriers to education across the globe. Robbed of their right to learn, children with disabilities are often denied the chance to take part in their communities, the workforce and the decisions that most affect them. Getting all children in school and learning: • Inclusive education is the most effective way to give all children a fair chance to go to school, learn and develop the skills they need to thrive. • Inclusive education means all children in the same classrooms, in the same schools. It means real learning opportunities for groups who have traditionally been excluded  – not only children with disabilities, but speakers of minority languages too.

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• Inclusive systems value the unique contributions students of all backgrounds bring to the classroom and allow diverse groups to grow side by side, to the benefit of all. • Inclusive education allows students of all backgrounds to learn and grow side by side, to the benefit of all. But progress comes slowly. Inclusive systems require changes at all levels of society. At the school level, teachers must be trained, buildings must be refurbished and students must receive accessible learning materials. At the community level, stigma and discrimination must be tackled and individuals need to be educated on the benefit of inclusive education. At the national level, Governments must align laws and policies with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and regularly collect and analyse data to ensure children are reached with effective services. (https://www.unicef.org/education/inclusive-­education)

Despite the differences among them, these approaches have something in common. In the face of the complex and controversial nature of both existing educational dynamics and inclusivity, the context of their operation and impact are not explicitly discussed; they seem to disanchor their definitions of inclusion from a reflection about the nature and scope of education. Inclusion is hence reduced to a set of teaching strategies and schooling policies that equips all students with equal access to education. How education can effectively be free from the constraints of a problematic (and often non-inclusive) society appears only as a corollary problem. According to this reductionist understanding, inclusive education is the happy island in a sad archipelago. Building an inclusive environment on the island of school would be enough to enable future adults to go back to the other islands making up our controversial society and change them for good. This is disputable, but let us put skepticism aside for a moment and suppose it is actually the case. How can one be sure the social, financial, cultural and political barriers affecting inclusion on other islands will actually be erased on the happy island of scholar inclusion? In an inclusive educational environment, teachers and students are asked to commit to a certain set of values and to a certain attitude: they are asked to put background knowledge and habits inherited from a non-inclusive society apart. This cannot be taken for granted. Moreover, assuming they do commit to an inclusive procedure in an inclusive environment, this will not necessarily cause them to export an inclusive attitude outside it. Furthermore, since the set of information, values and ideas composing the schooling

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curricula emerges from complex and often problematic societies, it is hard to understand why we should accept them by principle as a resource towards a better future. Schooling curricula reflects the values existing outside the school and serve societal needs.10 Finally, in reaction to this, a set of alternative pedagogical curricula and techniques is being proposed and is object of a fervid debate; however, a reductionist understanding of inclusion undermines the critical analysis of the nature of education and its relation with those societal needs and, consequently, it undermines the implementation and capacity of such alternative policies and practices to foster actual inclusion: we should constantly resist the temptation to take for granted what good values are and inquiry in the principles of things, constantly acknowledging the limitations of our definitions and consequently those of our strategies to promote inclusion and of our general understanding of education. Inclusion and exclusion are relational concepts: the idea of ‘something included into something else’ requires the existence of 2 dimensions (in and out) and—at least—2 entities holding a certain relationship among them. Visually, see Fig. 1.1:11 Here is a representation of educational exclusion, the dots representing children. Of course, those outside the circle are excluded, whereas the ones within it are included into the educational processes. The black circle is education (learning process/teaching methods + learning content/educational curricula + pre-existing educational goals/values). The reasons why some children have no access to education—the reasons why they are outside the circle— can vary and correspond to any point of education. Fig. 1.1  ‘Educational exclusion’

10  And of course, definitions of actual schools as inherently conservative, repressive and so on abounds. 11  Images are taken from https://www.giocabilita.it/blog/inclusione. The last one is proposed in a different version following my edit.

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Any single point composing the circle participates in the building of a circular barrier excluding them. If a group-specific, andlikely second-rate education is provided to the students left outside the circle of mainstream education (learning process/teaching methods + learning content/educational curricula + pre-existing educational goals/values) in presence of a standard model (bigger circle), education is segregational (see Fig.  1.2 below). The reasons for this scenario can vary too: as an example, segregational education can be the result of politically discriminatory views. In such a case, mainstream education is forced to be explicitly conservative in all of its dimensions, in order to preserve the status quo. Sometimes, integration (see Fig. 1.3 below) occurs as the unforeseen— and unseen—consequence of a weak educational strategy. In the effort of including all students into the main educational process (bigger circle), educational techniques—sometimes resulting from integrational theoretical beliefs—cut out a smaller educational space, tailored on the needs of the group/individual students which are to be included. At this stage, it is important to note that the explanatory value of these images is manifold. They can be a representation of educational dynamics occurring within a classroom, within a schooling system but also, say, of Fig. 1.2  ‘Segregation’

Fig. 1.3  ‘Integration’

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the relationship between different educational systems in different countries. This being said and going back to the above-mentioned approaches to inclusion, one would note that none of these representations applies to them. And indeed, all of those definitions provided an attempt to overcome the models visually presented here. If asked to represent inclusive education in accordance with those definitions, one would likely be tempted to draw a single circle containing a plurality of students, so to represent how all students are included in the educational process. Fostering inclusion inside the circle is necessary. Yet, it might not be enough to amount to actually inclusive education. If we draw a circle — which is still made of single points—that is, if we fix our comprehensive definition of education considering all of its dimensions (its reasons, content, goals and so on), we harness the dynamics of communication, intersubjective interaction, self-expression as well as the fluidity of learning and interacting with the outer world, with a static and rigid structure answering the call of the current societal values. In the worst case, this education is unquestionable. In the best case, it is heavy, gnarled and difficult to change.12 Actual inclusion cannot be reached in the presence of a bi-­ dimensional relation (in-out): as the dynamics of learning13 are unpredictable, static education is bound to follow frantically in the attempt to keep itself up. If actual inclusion can only take place once the in-out dichotomy is broken, and this dichotomy in turn depends on the idea of static education, the idea of static education is also to be broken. The emerging idea of inclusive education must look similar to Fig. 1.4.

Fig. 1.4  ‘Inclusive education’

12  The way in which education resist change is at once sad and interesting. Despite the efforts of pedagogy, philosophy education, social sciencesand so on, which managed to point out its weakness, most of the times, education from decade to decade keeps resembling itself. 13  This is even more evident in the case of joint/participative learning.

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Once the circle is erased—that is, once education is no more made up of a static set of instances (no matter how good they were)—the dichotomy is erased too. The only possible education emerging from a comprehensive reflection about the nature of inclusion is constituted by a living community where participants are equally involved14 in the joint enterprise of learning, in accordance with the results of a joint process of education-­ building. All aspects of education are constantly questioned and critically analysed from within (the circle is drawn and re-drawn by the members of the community). Inclusive education is open and doubtful. Individuals participate in the joint enterprise of inquiry, creating an environment where there are no truths to be docilely accepted but rather questions to be asked and arguments to be given. Within inclusive education, as Lyotard puts it, there are no masters nor monsters and the knowledge possessed by some members of the community (say, a teacher or a student) is shared in a collective exercise of mutual listening, argumentation and theoretical de-­ stabilization (cf. Fry, 2014). Let us now see how this understanding of inclusive education copes with a general definition of education: education, discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships). Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation.[…] Research has found that education is the strongest determinant of individuals’ occupational status and chances of success in adult life. However, the correlation between family socioeconomic status and school success or failure appears to have increased worldwide. Long-­ term trends suggest that as societies industrialize and modernize, social class becomes increasingly important in determining educational outcomes and occupational attainment. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/education)

If education concerns ‘transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society’, then it is inherently not inclusive and purely conservative. Indeed, ‘there’s no such thing as neutral education. ‘Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom’ (Freire, 1972). No matter how good our learning processes/teaching methods, learning content/educational curricula and pre-existing  As all the above-mentioned approaches to inclusion hold.

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educational goals/values look to us: to amount to inclusion, the structure itself of education must be constantly questioned. The majority of works in pedagogy, educational sciences and philosophy of education focus on exclusion-specific analysis (e.g. exclusion on the basis of race/gender, disability, learning gap, cultural background, etc.). Namely, most of the time, they concern inclusion within the circle of education. Yet, once the seminal problem of education is recognized (i.e. once the contradiction between the dynamics of learning/interaction and the rigidity of criteria/ content emerge), the problem of inclusion appears to be structural rather than merely exclusion-specific. There are many social/financial/cultural factors causing phenomena of exclusion within the educational process; none of these phenomena, however, can be faced as a stand-alone problem if future education is to be actually inclusive. In standard schooling systems, the learning process is a frontal transmission model. Frontal teaching is a vertical process in which someone (i.e. the teacher), who knows something, transmits it to those who do not (e.g. children/students). Notably, many concerns about this method have been raised (e.g. Dewey, 1933; Freire, 1972) regarding the involvement of children into the process: as a matter of fact, exclusion is set forth by language itself.15 To indicate the early stages of a human being’s life, romance languages use the words infanzia, enfance, infancia, and so on. These descend from the Latin term infans. English has ‘infancy’ as well, but this term is flanked by another one: ‘childhood’. The meanings of the two are very similar; nevertheless, the slight difference between them is of paramount importance for our purposes. In English, ‘infancy’ indicates the very first stages of life, while ‘childhood’ is more broadly referred to early youth. Infans has a particular meaning in Latin (in+fans = non-­ speaker). English refers to ‘infancy’ as the time when the baby is not yet a speaker and ‘childhood’ as the general time of youth, when the child is a speaker. Oddly, both Latin and Romance languages lack an equivalent of ‘childhood’. This means, in the framework of such languages, the child will necessarily be a non-speaker until finally becoming an adult (that is, a speaker). It follows that being an infant is not the condition of being physically unable to perform the act of speaking (otherwise, there should be a term accounting for ‘the stage of youth when the child is able to speak’ as it is in English). Rather, it is the alleged condition of unsuitability to speak, to do it expressing appropriate meanings. And indeed, a number  This argument has been already presented in Postiglione (2021).

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of Romance languages distinguish between ‘childhood’ and ‘infancy’ by recurring to the adjective ‘early’: so, there is infancy (read ‘childhood’ in English) and early infancy (read ‘infancy’). Differences between these life stages are biological (as the child is growing up), anthropological and social, yet (at least linguistically) the status of being an inappropriate speaker persists. If this is true, then, ‘infancy’ might be extended to many adults who are physically able to speak but are not recognized the right to do so, or go unheard or are considered unable to speak expressing something worthy. Infancy is the status of exclusion in education and beyond it. As an alternative to frontal teaching—which emphasizes the role of the teacher and is based on a mere knowledge transfer (Hedayati & Ghaedi, 2009)—group discussion has been found to be efficacious to enhance children’s learning processes as well as to nourish their social skills and critical attitude (e.g Mercer et al., 1999). Yet, how speakers are supposed to look like in inclusive education, which explicitly aims to turn infants into included subjects? According to Matthew Lipman’s compelling theory of good dialogues (LIPMAN, 2003), non-infants in an inclusive environment: . show both critical and creative thinking 1 2. care about others’ feelings and inclusion 3. make claims supported by evidence 4. use the ideas of others as a starting point to further inquiries 5. make the concepts they use clear 6. make judgements that enrich the lives we have yet to live If we accept the definition of inclusive education as open and doubtful about any aspect of education, and if we accept Limpan’s account of an inclusive and fertile dialogic attitude, standard schooling is self-evidently inadequate. Nowadays, several approaches are being proposed worldwide in the so-­ called field of progressive education to address group-specific cases of educational exclusion. For the sake of scientific accuracy, they are often bound to be focused on age-specific ranges, category-specific inclusion (e.g. of SEN students, of discriminated minorities, of students from socially deprived contexts, etc.), and so on. Anyway, the shared importance of such methods lies in their focus on argumentation, collaboration, jointly constructed thinking and mutual dialogue which promotes engagement in problem-solving, fosters critical thinking and contributes to an inclusive

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community. From various theoretical perspectives resulting in a variety of educational practices, this repertoire of criticisms about current education and alternative pedagogies advocates for educational reforms aligned with the principles of inclusion. Likely the mutual influence between different approaches emerging in response to different educational needs and scenarios represents a unique opportunity for future research in the field. Yet it needs to be improved. Any specific inclusive strategy is an opportunity to threaten the rigid system of education overall. Any attempt to include a specific group within education can be a precious opportunity to include all students in a more comprehensive inquiry into the reasons and scope of inclusive education; it can be explanatory of the flexible nature of education which can be fully acknowledged only through open, doubtful and joint dialogue. Consequently, while presenting a balanced blend of theoretical and practice-based considerations that can bring about peculiar approaches unified by a non-reductionist idea of both inclusion and education, the present volume is not specifically devoted to educational inclusion at a specific age, for a specific group, or in a specific context. On the contrary, it aims to foster stronger exchanges between the different approaches to inclusion presented and to turn each of them into additional means to foster inclusion within the educational circle and put pressure on a rigid understanding of education itself. The themes explored encourage professional deliberation and educational conversations by providing multi-perspectival insights into the ways in which schools can achieve sustainable inclusive education goals. From a cross-cultural perspective, it provides cross-cultural insights from different countries but also encourages reflection upon the ways in which the various pedagogical theories can be adopted across diverse socio-political systems while taking into consideration the challenges and possibilities that exist depending on local educational histories, socio-political exigencies and dynamics. Once a comprehensive definition of the pedagogical and value-based underpinnings of inclusion is given (e.g. we focus on the process rather than products of learning: there is no truth to learn but inquiries to be pursued together) and its relationship with the notion of educational change is made clear, bearing such information in mind might help to develop informed understanding of what every single perspective presented might contribute towards these goals. In this path, the first section Inclusive Education: Reasons and Possibilities tackles the problem of teachers’ training and schooling policies besides providing stimulating theoretical insights into the potential and benefits

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that a change in education could bring towards a future and more just society. It opens with Geoffrey Hinchliffe’s Education in Modernity: The English Experience. By drawing upon Weber, Foucault, Lyotard and MacIntyre, this comprehensive and sharp chapter presents a solid criticism of the English educational policies resulting in an essential preservation of the dominant role of state over education. Supported by a strong theoretical analysis, in the chapter England becomes a useful case study to point out the limits of the instrumental trend affecting global education worldwide. In the following chapter, Elke Struyf, Aster Van Mieghem and Ingrid Verscherueren report the main findings of a variety of studies resulting from an extensive implementation of inclusive education in Flanders. Their brilliant Implementing Inclusive Education: What Are the Levers to Support Teachers? focuses on the nature, quality and impact of teachers’ support to overcome reluctance from practitioners, improve the impact of their interventions toward educational inclusion and plant the seeds of inclusive practices ‘which, if sufficiently cared for, will germinate and thus grow further in society’. Reasoning on negotiated action and dialogic feedback, Keith Topping’s thought-provoking chapter acknowledges their potential, value and reliability in support of educational inclusion. Elaborated Dialogic Feedback and Negotiated Action in Peer Assessment: Metacognitive Benefits for Assessor and Assessee provides an in-depth analysis of the nature, variety and actualization of peer assessment, described as a stable key tool for inclusive education regardless of the fluctuation of educational trends. The first section ends with Marcio Nicodemus and Walter Kohan’s School, Jail and the Pandemic: What Can Philosophical Education Actually Do? in a fascinating philosophical analysis at the intersection of biopolitics and necropolitics; the authors address the problematic relation between prison and education, disclosing some of the saddest contradictions of the allegedly civil society. Accepting ‘otherness’—and uncertainty along with it—is identified as the core aspect of philosophy and its crucial value is recognised as  pivotal toward future change, in prison and far beyond it. Including chapters which present a variety of pedagogical frameworks unified by the fil rouge of dialogic inquiry, section II entitled Turning Classes into Dialogic Communities: Theoretical Horizons Towards the Goal of Inclusion puts different perspectives and strategies at play in the shared enterprise of inclusion. Kerstin Michalik gets the ball rolling with his Philosophical Inquiry with Children—Inviting Uncertainty into the Classroom. While reassessing the value of Philosophy with

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Children—where uncertainty is turned into an educational resource—this noteworthy chapter perfectly aligns with the spirit of the volume and calls for the need to question educational aims and processes, in the face of an uncertain future. As the empirical results presented show, Philosophy with children—as other progressive approaches to education—is proposed as ‘the pedagogy for the future’. Michalik passes the baton to Lorenzo Manera who brings the conversation a step forward and introduces the reader to the experience and theoretical framework of the Reggio Emilia approach. In his brief but clear-cut The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education: An Analysis of its Inclusive Perspectives and Their Relationships to Aesthetic Aspects, the theoretical and practical horizon of Reggio Children becomes visible as does its inclusive dimension. Topping the survey of slightly different and yet mutually enhancing experiences, Amber Makaiau’s For the Purpose of a Better Future Society: Advancing Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy in Today’s World acquaints the reader with Philosophy for Children Hawai’i (p4cHI) and its many efforts to nurture progressive education. Thanks to a considerable analytic accuracy, the chapter compares the educational experience in traditional classrooms and communities of inquiry, highlighting the potential and promise of progressive education in a more and more concerning time. The concluding section Practices, Effects and Results: A Pedagogical Path to Pursue includes chapters reporting on the results and effectiveness of progressive practices, calling for the cross-fertilization of diverse theories and perspectives, as it provides food for thought and encourages a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue about the challenges and possibilities of a unified education reform agenda towards inclusion. Katrin Alt and Kerstin Michalik co-author Philosophizing with Children in the Community of Inquiry—Uncertainty as Medium for Connected and Complex Thinking and Speaking. In their convincing comparative analysis of language, dialogic inquiry is proven to be an asset towards language development in complex circumstances. Integrating in an intriguing manner philosophy with children and learning goals/practices, thanks to its solid arguments, the chapter has the merit to show how non-traditional approaches are not just more inclusive but also educationally productive, obtaining impressive results—in the specific case—toward the acquisition of complex thinking/speaking skills and linguistic categorization. The following two chapters go in this same direction, assessing the promising nature and learning effectiveness of more refined and inclusive pedagogical techniques. Inclusive Science Education Through Metaphors and

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Narrative by Annamaria Contini and Alice Giuliani reports on a longstanding and highly significant project concerning the use of metaphors and narrative in science education. Drawing upon both theoretical argumentation and analysis of empirical interventions, the chapter intriguingly unfolds how the presented ‘narrative-metaphorical’ method results in a more inclusive educational dynamic (i.e. knowledge is more evenly distributed) but also in a remarkable improvement in the individual acquisition of complex concepts. In these footsteps, Fostering Kindergarteners’ Scientific Reasoning in Vulnerable Settings Through Dialogic Inquiry-Based Learning reports on a study on inquiry-oriented and literacy-rich science learning activities that facilitates both inclusion and scientific reasoning. The authors of this meaningful study, Maite Novo and Zoel Salvadó, present a variety of classroom activities following the inquiry-based learning methodology aimed to foster kindergartener’s scientific reasoning; the following dialogic interactions, as well as their results, appear to be both remarkable in themselves and representative of the consistency of dialogic and progressive education. Recalling Philosophy with children once again, the following chapter—The Single-Word Response Method: Expanding the Efficacy of a Community of Inquiry—briefly reintroduces a variation upon the standard PwC session plan. Data seems to demonstrate the effectiveness of the SWRm but, most importantly, serves to show that, if progressive education has to be proven effective in the actual educational scenario—equipping those working in educational contexts with a theoretically and methodologically wide range of tools is of paramount importance. The section is closed by Effects of ‘Philosophical Debates’ at Preschool on the Recognition of Sex-Stereotyping: An Ongoing Double-Level Participatory Intervention Research, a remarkable work by Ingrid Verscheure who reports on a research project addressing sex stereotypical representations at preschool level. Aiming to provide students with ‘non-­ stereotyping’ experiences through dialogue, data reveals that the intervention impacted positively reaching the impressive goal of creating ‘conditions for a transformation of the teaching practices, as well as a modification of students’ gender representations’. Besides their individual values, the many rivulets composing the book will hopefully be enhanced by an overall reading. The idea is that, wandering around diversified theoretical and practice-based perspectives that are discussed with reference to different educational systems, the single chapters will finally turn into a global landscape, that is the horizon of a network of researchers and scholars currently engaging with the task of

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developing a more informed and evidence-based understanding of the multidimensional and empirically validated nature of pedagogical reforms that need to be pursued in order to foster actual inclusion in education. Hopefully, the reading will be appealing to academics and students, teachers and readers interested in exploring current and emerging pedagogical theories and perspectives that can facilitate the process of change towards inclusion.16 This being said, however, when weighing anchor in the face of a tumultuous sea, one is not granted a dock in the expected harbour. Not knowing whether these expectations have been met, please let me express in advance my most sincere gratitude to all colleagues and friends who contributed to this book with their works and share with me the idea of exchange, debate and diversity as the most precious of resources in academia and beyond it.

Bibliography Allfie. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://www.allfie.org.uk/definitions/ what-­is-­inclusive-­education/ Britannica, ‘education’. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www.britannica. com/topic/education Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Heath. Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Seabury. Fry, K. (2014). Lyotard and the philosopher child. Childhood & Philosophy, 10(20), 233–246. Giocabilità. Retrieved March 3, 2022, from https://www.giocabilita.it/blog/ inclusione Hedayati, M., & Ghaedi, Y. (2009). Effects of the philosophy for children program through the community of inquiry method on the improvement of interpersonal relationship skills in primary school students. Childhood & Philosophy, 5(9), 199–217. Inclusive Education Canada. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://inclusiveeducation.ca Lipman, M. (2003). Thinking in education. Cambridge University Press. Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Dawes, L. (1999). Children’s talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 95–111.

16  As well as in educational leadership, special education, sociology of education and psychology of learning.

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Merriam-Webster. ‘School’. Retrieved March 3, 2022, from https://www.merriam-­ webster.com/dictionary/school Mireille, K., Powell, J.  J. W., & Pit-Ten Cate, I.  M. (2019). What is meant by inclusion? On the effects of different definitions on attitudes toward inclusive education. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 34(5), 632–648. https://doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2019.1580837 Postiglione, E. (2021). Questions and performatives—communities of inquiry as conventional contexts in ‘moral and political discourses. In P.  Iyer & I. Bhattacharjee (Eds.), Philosophy of education. Routledge. Unesco. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://en.unesco.org/themes/ inclusion-­in-­education Unicef. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://www.unicef.org/education/ inclusive-­education

PART I

Inclusive Education: Reasons and Possibilities

CHAPTER 2

Education in Modernity: The English Experience Geoffrey Hinchliffe

2.1   Introduction In this chapter, I aim to show how certain ideas associated with Weber, Foucault and Lyotard can be seen as exemplified in the English experience of education in the past 40 years or so. These ideas, in their different ways, show us how certain organisational practices shape behaviours, construct mentalities and establish expectations. In so far as these practices, in the process of producing benefits and new futures, are profoundly and deeply hostile to notions of emancipation, the promise of the imagination and the possibility of free agency, they are indeed dystopian but, nevertheless, an indelible feature of our experience of modernity. (In passing I should note that I place no particular emphasis on postmodernity, since I regard the Note: It should be noted that education systems in the four nations of the United Kingdom vary and although all of them exhibit the aforementioned tendencies, it is in England where these are the most pronounced.

G. Hinchliffe (*) University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_2

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latter as merely a phase in the march of modernity, which still very much envelops us.) I need to be clear also, that these technics, these technics of prescription, have not emerged out of unintended processes. They are not merely the effects of practices, analogous to changing price ‘effects’ arising from the operations of a market. On the contrary, they are employed quite deliberately and purposefully, even if not all of their effects are intended. That is why I refer to these practices as prescriptive technics and they are organised by the state, in its various manifestations. Of course, modernity contains a number of narratives and, as one might expect, there is an educational counter-narrative to the technics of prescription. The particular counter-narrative I shall explore is drawn from Alistair MacIntyre’s formulation of what might be termed a value-laden practice. Here the idea is that education, viewed as a practice, has its own internal goods (for example, the good of enquiry) which define and exemplify the intrinsic features of educational practice. I shall ask if such a practice has any real future and, as is perhaps to be expected, I conclude by being pessimistic. Its prospects of success depend very much on the role of the state and its taking on less of a prescriptive role and more of an enabling role. I have to say that the prospects of this happening any time soon in England are extremely dim. Although I take the idea of an ‘ethical practice’ as a counter-narrative to state-directed technics this should not be seen as the only counter-narrative. There are others, of course—for example, those associated with critical pedagogy or even those associated with the idea of a ‘liberal’ education or Bildung. It seems to me that whatever counter-narrative is adopted, the prospects of its success are similar, that is, small to vanishing. I speak of the ‘English’ experience simply because the four nations of the United Kingdom have their own educational systems and in some cases (e.g. the Scottish system) have considerable independence and autonomy that, in the Scottish case certainly, have historical roots. Although the experiences of the other three nations do indeed reflect something of what has gone on in England, it is never a good idea to offend local sensibilities by assuming that they all partake of Englishness. So the examples I cite are promulgated from Westminster but apply mainly to just England. But before I go on to describe in more detail what Weber et al. have to say that is so pertinent to our current educational plight, I need to say just a little of the history of education in England, because an understanding

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of the political context is vital for appreciating how and why the technics of prescription were able to take hold so easily and quickly.

2.2  Trajectory of Post-1944 Education in England If we look at the trajectory of educational policy since 1944, three clear phases emerge: selective education, progressive education and state-­ directed education. They do not, of course, neatly separate off from each other. Thus, vestiges of selective education persist throughout the period under review, and progressive education managed to hang on until the early 1990s in many places (and some schools are still, even now, committed to its principles—but not that many, mind). Selective Education (1944–1964) Education in England had been the responsibility of democratically elected local education authorities (LEAs) since 1902, but in the 1944 Education Act, their responsibilities were more clearly defined. In particular, they were asked to establish a schooling system, the underlying assumption of which was the division of capabilities into academic, technical and manual. This broadly reflected the realities of the work situation in which millions of unskilled and semi-skilled labourers and operatives were needed. What might be termed ‘the three mentalities’ merely expressed what was commonly seen as a natural and social order. Thus were established the grammar schools, catering for an academic ‘elite’, the selection of which consisted of a standard ‘intelligence test’ that most children were obliged to take at the age of 11. This 11+ examination (eleven plus) had the effect of segregating children into separate schools, with some 15–20% going to academically based grammar schools and the remainder sent to non-­ academic secondary modern schools. In practice, very few technical schools were actually set up. The advantage of the secondary schools was that teachers were pretty much free to set their own curriculum and pedagogy: the disadvantage was that children left at the age of 15 with no qualifications. The 11+ examination caused great division and consternation in middle-­class families because of the sheer arbitrariness of an examination that, in effect, directed a person’s path from childhood into mature

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adulthood (Batteson, 1999, p. 11; Tomlinson, 2005, p. 16). It appeared that one’s prospects were decided at the age of 11 and it took a very determined young adult who had failed the 11+ to make use of the few opportunities there were of gaining academic qualifications that had been denied to them as a child. Yet the grammar schools had, at the time, great prestige. They were usually managed as collegiate establishments with teachers able to teach how and what they wanted, within the constraints of national examination systems. Grammar schools did indeed furnish a ‘liberal’ education of languages and literature, of maths and physics. It was a time when, by dint of state-endorsed selective education, the advantages of a liberal, academic education were now made available to a section of the middle classes and, of course, to those working-class boys and girls who had managed to pass the 11+. Even today there are those who regard the period of selective education as a fine period in the life of the nation, though needless to say, not those unlucky enough to have failed to pass the selective examination. Progressive Education (1964–1980) It is one of the historical oddities that it was the Labour Government (1945–1951) who presided over and endorsed this system of educational apartheid. But it was also a Labour Government (1964–1970, under Harold Wilson) that dismantled the system. For it was Wilson who won the 1964 general election, partly with the support of disaffected middle-­ class parents who despaired of a selective education that seemed bent on ruining the life chances of their children, through the lottery of the 11+. Interestingly, Wilson did not scrap the 1944 Act because that piece of parliamentary legislation, as already noted, established local authorities as the providers of education (even if it was funded by the state). Instead, change was initiated through the famous circular 10/65, which was agreed by the House of Commons as follows: That this House, conscious of the need to raise educational standards at all levels, and regretting that the realisation of this objective is impeded by the separation of children into different types of secondary schools, notes with approval the efforts of local authorities to reorganise secondary education on comprehensive lines which will preserve all that is valuable in grammar school education for those children who now receive it and make it available to more children; recognises that the method and timing of such reorganisation should vary to

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meet local needs; and believes that the time is now ripe for a declaration of national policy. (Tomlinson, p. 20)

Thus local authorities were encouraged to scrap the 11+, which most (not all) accomplished over the following decade. In the process, non-­ selective ‘comprehensive’ schools were established in most parts of the country. Two further developments of note also took place which are sufficient to characterise this period as ‘progressive’. The first was the publication of a wide-ranging report into primary education, chaired by Lady Plowden. This report emphasised the importance of play as part of learning, and, with a nod to Rousseau, proclaimed that ‘at the heart of the educational process lies the child’, maintaining that childhood had a value in its own right and was not a mere preparation for adulthood. It even went so far as to say that “the importance of evaluation of children’s progress (should be) based on the principle that not all that is valuable can be measured” and also endorsed learning through discovery and cast doubt on standard transmissive pedagogy (Dept of Education, 1967). There seems little doubt that many teachers—and quite a few parents—welcomed the Plowden Report and its publication helped to foster the belief that a new era in educational provision had begun. Behind the scenes was another development, less publicised than Plowden but still of considerable significance—the Schools Council. Set up in 1964 with the blessing of the government of the day (still Conservative), it was an advisory body intended to support the development of the curriculum and good practice in schools. It was made up of teachers, local authority representatives and teacher educators. Its deliberations were duly recorded by civil servants (especially a pro-active reforming civil servant called Derek Morrell who helped set it up). It was stipulated that teachers should be in the majority. The Schools Council thus represented a collaborative approach to education in which the voice of the professional teacher was heard. It spent a lot of time in identifying and spreading ‘best practice’ in the new comprehensive schools that were replacing the old Secondary Modern schools (Plaskow, 1985). This progressive era of education was not without its critics and nor was it entirely successful. Perhaps the greatest failure was to produce a national curriculum and by the end of the 1970s, there was a widespread perception that this was needed; schools needed curriculum guidance that went beyond the curriculum as laid down by national examinations, a curriculum that could enable progress in learning from the age of five onwards.

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State-Directed Education (1980–Present) Any lingering hopes that the newly elected government of Mrs. Thatcher would continue with the progressive policies encouraged in the 1960s were soon extinguished (Lowe, 2007, pp. 79–98). This initially took the form of ideological attacks on progressive education (which extended over the next 20 years and still continue in the present time), including its supposed progenitors, Rousseau and Dewey. Thus it was that a journalist for the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips, wrote a popular book that discussed the aforementioned thinkers (All Must have Prizes, 1997) which was the culmination of a series of hostile newspaper articles directed against comprehensive schools.1 The fact that her understanding of educational theory as well as Rousseau and Dewey was utterly woeful made, of course, no difference to the success of the book. In addition, the work of the Schools Council was quickly wound down, pursuant to its abolition in 1984. In the years that followed the demise of the Schools Council, the role of local authorities was progressively emasculated. Initially, this was through the establishment in 1992 of a national inspection body Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) with powers to inspect both schools and local education authorities. Ofsted established greater central control and also continued the struggle against progressive education (it’s first head, Chris Woodhead scorned ‘child-centred teaching’ and strongly advocated ‘whole class teaching’), in particular marking out the teaching profession for criticism (Tomlinson, p.  83). His pronouncements were duly published in mainstream media, sometimes on a daily basis. Schools which were deemed unsatisfactory following an inspection were subject to enforced re-organisation by the Department of Education. Poor inspections were often contested, with little effect; they could and did wreck lives, especially of head teachers. Ofsted continues to this day to be a powerful force in the lives of all teachers, even though its initial hard-edged approach has been softened somewhat. It currently has over 1200 employees. But it was the formation of Academies that finally laid low the role of local authorities. For in 2010, schools were now incentivised through financial inducements to take the opportunity of cutting ties with LEAs and form a contract directly with the central government. This meant that the tentative democratic accountability that LEAs provided was 1

 Phillips now spends most of her time writing anti-woke articles for The Times.

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eliminated, with many academies now formed into consortiums or ‘trusts’. The contract gives schools management considerable autonomy regarding finance and the control of staff (especially the hire and fire of teachers) and also gives them control over curriculum and pedagogy. There is a great emphasis on strong leadership and discipline for both teachers and children with the focus on standards of attainment (Hilton, 2018). At the same time, academies make no pretence at being democratic, whether this is internally or in terms of relations with the community (Heilbronn, 2016). What of the national curriculum? This was established, with great publicity, in 1988 and initially was a comprehensive document, though possibly over-prescriptive (Tomlinson, 61). But since 1988 it has been progressively whittled down (e.g. in 2005, the Labour Government made languages non-compulsory) and since 2010 academy schools are not obliged to follow it. Instead, they are required to deliver core subjects of maths, literacy and science. In terms of pedagogy, the aim has been to make learning ‘teacher-proof’ so that the teacher emerges as kind of technician who ‘executes’ a series of pedagogical procedures (see Winch, 2017, pp. 115–133). At the same time, however, the figure of the ‘charismatic’ or ‘inspirational’ teacher is trotted out on a regular basis in order to bolster the idea of education as exciting and worthwhile. It should be noted that in respect of education policy there has been little difference between Labour and Conservative approaches. New Labour (under Tony Blair) considerably increased expenditure on education (bringing it briefly in line with spending in European countries), but apart from that it continued and strengthened the approach laid down by the Thatcher Government. Given that focus has been on raising ‘standards’, has state intervention succeeded? The answer must be a qualified ‘yes’: the main PISA reports of 2018 showed the UK in the top 20 for mathematics, science and reading. A not poor set of results (ranked 18, 15 and 15 respectively, better than both France and Germany) but scarcely spectacular. One wonders if the much-despised ‘progressive’ approach, underpinned by LEA governance, would have achieved that much different in the end, if it had been properly supported. As it is, what is known as the ‘banking’ concept of education (made well-known, of course, by Freire) is for most persons in England the only conception of education they know. By ‘banking’ I do not necessarily refer to an orthodox transmissive pedagogy; these days, Ofsted does not necessarily want classrooms dominated by the teacher’s voice. Nevertheless, the concept of education is one of banking in the sense that teaching is seen as the purveying of a

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collection of skills, information and knowledge that can be bundled up and transferred, through pedagogical means, from the school into the child-learner or ‘student’. Whether the pedagogy is transmissive or more interactive, the overall effect is the same: learning is something to be banked.

2.3  The Development of Technics of Prescription How should we make sense of these developments? It seems to me that the kind of political narrative that I have just provided doesn’t really give a full understanding of them. Why was it that Labour and Conservative governments pursued near-identical policies? Why was progressive teaching held in such disregard in an ostensibly liberal democracy? Why was it that the teaching profession was seen as the problem? Indeed, why was it that education was widely seen as a ‘problem’ by the 1980s? Why did the nature of the ‘solution’ to this problem take the form it did? The answers to these questions lie deep in societal processes, although as I shall show, such processes were periodically endorsed and encouraged by a variety of principal actors. I will use Max Weber’s notion of ‘rationalisation’ to provide an initial perspective. I will then turn to Foucault’s notion of disciplinarity and Lyotard’s concept of what I term ‘transactional knowledge’ in order to deepen and broaden Weber’s initial analysis. Max Weber and the Rationalisation of Education It is perhaps something of a paradox, or at least a surprise, that a thinker and researcher who died in 1920 can still provide the tools which enable us to work out what has been happening to English education these past 40 years or so. Indeed, the concept of rationalisation as found in Weber can prove somewhat elusive to pin down and certainly, the current author is in debt to a range of Weberian scholars who have provided us with a workable concept. Perhaps a suitable starting point is Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy, which follows, at any rate initially, familiar lines—that is, a form of organisation that is bound by rules and procedures, in which the office or role rather than the person is rewarded, that is characterised by ubiquity as well as reliability and predictability (Weber, 1948, pp. 196–198). In his own words: “The objective discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and without regard for persons” (p.  215). As Weber makes clear, ‘without regard for persons’

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refers to a person in their own individuality or subjectivity; in so far as a person occupies a role (a patient, a customer, an employee, a learner) then, of course, bureaucracy is extremely interested in ‘persons’. Weber thought that the methods and techniques of bureaucracy were all-pervasive in a modern industrial society. These techniques were by no means confined to the state: bureaucracy colonised all forms of commercial and institutional behaviour—including education. And these techniques were also accompanied by a certain habit of mind which Weber called rationalisation. This term in part refers to the ‘external’ organisation of the world but also refers to what might be termed its ‘internal’ organisation in terms of subjectivities: Weber believed that the process of rationalisation, in effect, ‘drove out’ irrational domains “of surprising ideas, of spontaneous notions, of supernatural powers, of mystery, of the inexplicable” (Kaesler, 2017, p. 320). In a fascinating analysis of Weber’s concepts of rationality and rationalisation, Kalberg (1980) emphasises that ‘rationality’ is not the preserve of western capitalism and that, therefore, neither is rationalisation as such. Rather, rationalisation is seen as the way in which the different types of rationality—practical, theoretical, substantive and methodical (Kalberg, 1151–1158)—become systematised. For example, according to Kalberg, Weber thinks that practical rationality, as means–end reasoning, is a rationality that has characterised human beings everywhere, whatever their circumstances and beliefs. It is often accompanied by a disdain for theoretical rationality (1151–1152). One could say that ‘practical rationality’ becomes ‘rationalised’ when ‘pragmatism’ becomes a systemised creed that elevates the ‘practical man’ above all others (e.g. pragmatism re-surfaces regularly as a motif in British politics). By contrast, substantive rationality (which is a collection of values and beliefs that underpin a life-perspective) can become ‘rationalised’ through theology, assuming the life-perspective is one of a religious character. It may also become rationalised through the application of detailed moral codes delineating modes of dress, speaking and behaviour. In one sense, then, rationalisation can be seen as the “moulding of amorphous values into increasingly comprehensive and unified world views” (Kalberg, 1166). Thus, the growth of bureaucracy can be seen as the rationalisation of the fourth kind of rationality identified by Weber, namely a rationality of method and rule-governed processes; but this phenomenon is by no means confined to the Judeo-Christian world. If this analysis is correct, then for Weber the term ‘rationalisation’ does not only refer to processes that characterise late capitalism. With these caveats

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in mind, we can turn to the process of rationalisation in more recent, familiar times. For what we are concerned with now might be called a passion for rationalisation that is ubiquitous and inescapable and which manifests itself in all walks of life. Alan Sica (2000) refers to the ‘McDonaldisation’ of restaurant service as one of these manifestations, in which there is a drive to minimise the delivery of an order (90 seconds at rush hour, Sica tells us (p.  44)). The transformation of the professional footballer is another example: the monitoring of diet and exercise, the use of metrics for player analysis is, we are told, a long way from the hard-drinking player of the 1970s and 1980s. The benefits are unarguable: faster food in the one case, greater player fitness and reliability in the other. But it should not be thought that these processes are somehow inevitable, an indelible feature of modernity, the unintended consequences of actions devoted to beneficial results. For, as Richard Hilbert (1987) has emphasised, rationalisation is not only intended, it can often be celebrated as a creative human activity. For example, he notes that Competency-Based Teacher Education (CBTE), which arose in the USA in the 1970s aimed at analysing teaching into competencies: “a discrete behavioural routine that can be unambiguously identified and transmitted by prescription” (p.  81). Hilbert goes on to comment that “CBTE enthusiasts believe their pronouncements and take them quite literally, or publish as though they do” (p.  82). In time, over 2000 CBTE competencies had been identified. Hilbert also notes that rationalisation is a continual process of ‘repair’, as systems of rationalisation are continually critiqued, re-engineered and disseminated. Whereas it could be said that modern life depends on bureaucracy (Fantuzzo, 2015, p.  51), the process of rationalisation takes this phenomenon up to a new level. Jurgen Habermas (1991) has conveniently summarised the process of rationalisation as follows: (a) the development of techniques to reproduce predicted behaviours; (b) a social and vocational world configured so that the efficacy of such techniques become progressively easier to achieve; (c) and crucially, the construction of a self whose personality is characterised by methodical conduct (e.g., the requirement that one be constantly ‘pro-active’)—see Habermas, pp. 168–171.

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In his book, the 28, Weber famously invokes the ‘iron cage’ which modern man had constructed for himself, signifying the development of procedures and behaviours necessary for a modern economic order whilst “the rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems to be irretrievably fading” (Weber, 1930, pp. 181–182). This comment is interesting: far from rationalisation being the outcome of the Enlightenment, it is the distortion of the latter. In England, the educational ‘iron cage’ invoked by Weber has become emblematic of progress itself with the paradox that those who do invoke ‘enlightenment values’ (for example, pedagogy inspired by Rousseau) are cast into the role of backward romantics, hopelessly out of touch with the ‘real world’. The iron cage has been transformed into a house of correction in the guise of a training centre, whose benefits are clear to anyone who follows the rules. We can see this mentality at work in any number of policy documents. Take, for example, the 2010 publication on school leadership (Hill & Matthews, 2010). It is a report that set out the kind of leadership struggling schools require. For example, on page 57 in a case study for one particular school, it is observed that there is “no evidence (that) targets have been set” and that therefore “targets are to be created from objectives by the end of the week”. One must learn to distinguish objectives from targets: but there is no discussion on how these are to be distinguished. The report is presented with a kind of arrogance in which terms are used and re-used throughout, leaving it up to the reader to figure out what is exactly meant. It assumes that ‘targetology’ is the norm that needs no explanation or justification. Yet there is no discussion, anywhere in this 120-page document, on what is to be taught, on the kind of values to be promulgated and on how these are linked to pedagogy. It is assumed throughout that ‘struggling schools’ have a deficiency of rationalisation, a rationalisation deficit, in which ‘weak’ leadership fails to plan and set measurable targets. Rationalisation also is evinced in a curiously restrictive view of the curriculum, a view encouraged by the reliance on PISA reports which themselves focus on mathematics, literacy skills and science. Statements such as these, taken from the PISA report of 2015, illustrate very well the mentality of rationalisation: By age 15, students in the United Kingdom perform above the OECD average in science (509 score points) and reading (498 points) and around the OECD average in mathematics (492 points). As is the case across OECD countries, the

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average science, mathematics and reading performance of 15-year-olds in the United Kingdom has remained stable since 2006. (p. 1) In England, 12% of students are top performers, as are 8% of students in Scotland (8%), 7% of students in Northern Ireland and 5% of students in Wales. (p. 2)

These kinds of statements can be read and understood by anyone: no understanding of education is necessary. Rationalisation has the effect of effacing the value of learning and knowledge. With its three-year assessment cycle, PISA encourages short-term planning designed to help a country (in this case the UK) quickly climb the rankings. But by emphasising a relatively narrow range of measurable aspects of education, attention is taken away from those less measurable aims of creativity or moral and civic development. The effect is that of narrowing the collective conception of what education is about. The case of New Labour (under Tony Blair) is instructive. On the one hand, Labour’s commitment to education is undeniable: spending increased from 4.5% of GDP to 6.2% between 1997 and 2007, bringing it in line with the European average; the number of teachers increased by 12% from 400,000 to 450,00. The numbers of support staff tripled to nearly 200,000. For many parents and children, the improvement in school buildings, playgrounds and so on was both visible and welcome. Yet these improvements were accompanied by a vision of education competently spelt out by Michael Barber, an influential Prime Ministerial advisor in the early days of Blair’s government: So from 1997 to 1999 we went at this first phase with enormous energy and drove reform with great speed. It was a completely mission-driven agenda … Large-scale reform driven from the top down; designing all the materials at the national level and training everybody in a cascade out; using the accountability system to publish results and school inspection to check that people were adopting better practices … A lot of people within the system say we went too far too fast and should have made more effort to get buy-in. I personally don’t believe that. (Quoted in Bates, 2012, p. 94)

Exactly like the Hills & Matthews report, this quote shows that a senior figure of educational reform is actually uninterested in education as such: the practice of education has been rationalised into the practice of prescription in which the foot soldiers—teachers—are given ‘marching orders’

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from the centre. And many of these soldiers willingly take up the brief that has been handed down to them. Here, for example, are the words of the Deputy Head: So the children have their targets, and they’ll say ‘these are the level 3 targets,’ so they’ll be able to see how they’re getting on towards those … Say for example one of our year 5 classes, they’ll have their targets and they’ll know they need to look out for where they’ve done that in their work, because their teacher will be saying, ‘How have you met this target? Show me in your work that you’re using commas to demarcate your clauses. (quoted in Bates, 2015, p. 175)

Notice here that the teacher is introducing target-talk with her children so that they too, will think of education in terms of measurable targets and results, rather than the slow, uncertain and difficult development of understanding. Universities may have escaped the iron cage for many years—until now. This is illustrated, for example, in a standard text of pedagogy addressed to university teachers in which the strategy of ‘constructive alignment’ is commended, that is, the alignment of learning outcomes, learning activities and assessment. We are told that as a consequence “students are ‘entrapped’ in this web of consistency optimising the chance that they will engage appropriate learning activities” (Biggs & Tang, 2011, pp. 97–98). Over one hundred years on, this does indeed eerily echo the metaphor of the iron cage. Once again, we can see how the process of rationalisation transforms pedagogy itself so that learning becomes defined in terms of activities geared towards measurable results. The text cited is widely used in British universities in academic development programmes. Foucault and Disciplinarity By ‘disciplinarity’ I refer to those practices of monitoring and surveillance that do not focus uniquely on ‘mentalities’ but which also construct behaviours in which the body comports itself. In one of his interviews, Foucault very aptly described this process as ‘dressage’, a metaphor borrowed from the sport of horse show-jumping in which the horse must be ‘trained’ in order to adopt equine behaviours that must be learnt and acquired, that do not emanate from the horse’s instinctive preferences: rather, these are moulded, sculpted and refined (see Foucault, 1980, p.  161). The routines of dressage, are, of course, supplemented by the

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gaze, for which the panopticon stands as a metaphor. As Foucault himself describes it: This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings … all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. (Foucault, 1991, p. 197)

Foucault is describing a situation in which a plague is managed: he goes on to suggest that these techniques were not merely those of an ‘emergency’ but inserted themselves, to a greater or lesser degree, into the general lives of inhabitants. Thus it is that in England, the Ofsted inspectorate descends on a school. Woe betide that school if it has not adequately documented learning gain! Woe betide those teachers who have not sufficiently comported themselves and organised their lessons in such a way that learning outcomes are not clearly identified and aligned with learning activities! Woe betide that teacher if the students themselves are not given ample space to articulate their understanding of the learning targets set for them! Of course, as we would expect, the Ofsted process is never entirely seamless and resistances, of a low-level sort, do occur. Here, for example, is one teacher’s experience: We got very good at producing Ofsted satisfactory type lessons and I’m sure we did and I’m sure everybody in the school knows exactly what to do and if I had a clean slate and I wanted to really make a class fly I certainly wouldn’t write bloody lesson objectives on the board at the start, because the whole point is to keep them guessing what the lesson is—‘what is this about, where’s it leading to, what is he going to do’—and at the end it should all fall into place. This three-­ part lesson is all very well but teaching is an art as well as a science, and if you take all the artistry out of it where is it going to go? I think we got very, very good at doing it according to the Ofsted model and we had to do that and we did do that. (Ian, school senior manager, in Perryman, 2006, p. 157)

The point, of course, is that the unwilling ‘Ian’ is as ensnared in the process of disciplinarity as the willing ‘Miriam’ is ensnared in the process of target setting; in the end, both perform their allotted roles. As Foucault

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goes on to observe in a later work (1990), within the nexus of power networks, complete domination is never possible or even desirable; within the complex interplay of power relations, petty resistances are themselves an ‘effect’ of a particular power discourse. The unwilling Ian is ‘allowed’ his own thoughts; they provide a temporary therapeutic release from a process that is unstoppable and inevitable in his professional life. The third form of disciplinarity, in addition to the techniques of dressage and the gaze, is that of pastoral power. As he explains in his The Subject and Power (Foucault, 1982), pastoral power may have originated in the care that a priest once took over his flock, but in more recent times: the word ‘salvation’ takes on different meanings: health, well-being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents. A series of ‘worldly’ aims took the place of the religious aims of the traditional pastorate. (p. 784)

Pastoral power, under the guise of the well-being of the child, was promulgated in the UK under the auspices of SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning). Using the model of emotional intelligence, the Department of Education tells us that the following developmental goals are key: Self-awareness; Self-regulation (managing feelings); Motivation; Empathy and Social skills (DoE, 2007). We are also told that SEAL is “a comprehensive, whole-school approach to promoting the social and emotional skills that underpin effective learning, positive behaviour, regular attendance, staff effectiveness and the emotional health and wellbeing of all who learn and work in schools” (DoE, 2007, p. 4). We can see that the idea of the child’s happiness is entirely subordinated to learning goals that are themselves conceived in terms of measurable targets. There is no conception that the child’s happiness is a worthwhile goal in itself. The policy document states that “Helping pupils learn social and emotional skills is like helping them to learn any other skill” (p. 39) and this is then followed by a list of teacher-driven tasks, for example: • Make sure learners believe they can learn and that it is within their reach and capability. • Make sure that pupils know what is to be learned and how they will know when it has been learned. • Model the social and emotional skills that the pupils are being encouraged to learn.

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Not to be outdone, the Welsh Assembly followed suit with its own document, setting out goals for children at school: • I can identify advantages and disadvantages of the solutions or goals I set myself. • I can foresee obstacles and plan to overcome them when I am setting goals. • I can predict the consequences of my actions/solutions or goals for myself, other individuals or groups. • I can manage frustration by using a number of strategies. (SEAL— Welsh Assembly Government, 2010, p. 9) Here we can see how disciplinarity is used to inculcate in the child the skills for managing their own performativity. Indeed, well-being amounts to no more than the successful performance of a range of behaviours that have been identified as useful for attaining learning goals. I have a hunch that even Foucault might have been astonished to see how dressage, the gaze and pastoral self-management can be fused into a complex, sophisticated and integrated model of behaviour. It makes the techniques described in Discipline and Punish seem crude and outdated. Lyotard and Transactional Knowledge Lyotard’s basic thesis is well-known and was elaborated in the 1970s before the demise of industrial economies and the rise of digital technologies. Already, he suggests, ‘postmodern times’ have shattered traditional ‘grand narratives’, such as Enlightenment, progress and humanism, and this has huge consequences for education. I do not propose, in this chapter, to discuss the wider issues of ‘post-modernism’; rather I wish to show just how prescient Lyotard has been concerning changes in the conception and use of knowledge. Nowhere has this been more so than in the UK, and even now, reading Lyotard almost half a century later, one is struck by just how much he ‘got right’. Essentially, Lyotard proposed that knowledge itself would be transformed into a commodity; knowledge is produced in order to be sold, it is consumed in order to be valorised in a new production (see Lyotard, 1984, pp. 4–5). In both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge therefore ceases to be an end in itself, it is there to be used up. This means that the link between education and emancipation is broken. The purpose of

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education in post-modern times is to enable people to use knowledge-­ bundles, which, he notes, are often owned by international corporations (rather than nation states). The question to be asked of knowledge is no longer ‘is it true?’ but ‘what use can be made of it?’ Thus transactional knowledge problematises the idea of ‘knowledge for its own sake’. There are a number of consequences that follow. For one thing, if knowledge is essentially transient, it doesn’t make sense for individuals to spend years learning. In-depth understanding is rarely required: what is needed is a ‘smartness’ to see what use can be made of a piece of knowledge, what resources are needed and what the demands on time are likely to be in terms of learning. The upshot is that anyone who takes ‘knowledge and learning for its own sake’ too seriously are themselves not to be taken too seriously. I propose to call this conception of knowledge ‘transactional’. And in educational terms, the organisation of knowledge reflects its transactional nature. For example, the modular structure of a curriculum easily lends itself to the view that learning can be neatly packaged into small, separate, digestible chunks. It is also reflected in the way that teaching can usefully be split up into pedagogy and ‘content’, such that, given the appropriate pedagogy, any content can be taught. Moreover, with transactional knowledge, learning no longer transforms the individual: for the aim of such knowledge is to transform organisations: once these are in place, individual motivations will follow accordingly. This is very important: in a person’s lifetime, he/she will be called upon to learn something, use it and then move on to the next learning task. The essential transiency of knowledge is something that the learner must appreciate. The learner must be adept at learning new knowledge-bundles, but any transformation of the self is merely otiose and, indeed, self-indulgent. Of course, it has always been the case that some knowledge is used pragmatically for specific ends in view. What is new, according to Lyotard is that the essential feature of knowledge is its transactional character. The quicker the learner appreciates this, the more easily will they be able to operate in these new times. Finally, Lyotard brings to our attention the idea of ‘performativity’, the ability to use knowledge-bundles for a particular purpose, to achieve a prescribed result through skill or competency (pp. 47–53). Hence, education is to focus more on performance and less on discursive understanding. This entails a focus on learning outcomes that can be translated into measurable competencies and skills, in order to make students ready for the ‘knowledge economy’. The upshot of ‘performativity’ is that teachers

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should abandon traditional intellectual ideas concerning an ideal of education as developing the ‘whole person’ (compare the idea of Bildung). Through performativity, education is subsumed to the efficient functioning of the wider system of transactional knowledge. Education is no longer concerned with the pursuit of ideals such as emancipation or personal autonomy, but with the means, techniques, mentality and skills that contribute to the efficient operation of the marketplace. As a consequence of transactional knowledge and the growth of performativity, the teacher is transformed into what Christopher Winch has termed an ‘executive technician’ whose job is to execute pre-programmed ‘packages of teaching’ (see Winch, 2017, chapter 7). Winch observes that “the activities of teaching are decomposed into elements, and the teacher in the classroom is only given a part of them, namely the execution of tasks in the classroom that are prescribed by others” (Winch, p. 121). He goes on to say: “The extra-classroom functions of planning, communication and evaluation may be removed to the hands of other specialists, curriculum designers and middle managers” (p. 121). The purpose of the teacher as a technician is to execute a pedagogy supremely fitted for skills-based learners who can demonstrate their ability to manage knowledge-bundles. This view of educational content rapidly made its way to all levels of education, both in England and in the UK more widely. It took the form of an emphasis on skills development. Thus it was that 1997 Report on higher education stated that: We recommend that institutions of higher education begin immediately to develop, for each programme they offer, a ‘programme specification’ which gives the intended outcomes of the programme in terms of: • the knowledge and understanding that a student will be expected to have upon completion; • key skills: communication, numeracy, the use of information technology and learning how to learn; • cognitive skills, such as an understanding of methodologies or ability in critical analysis;

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• subject specific skills, such as laboratory skills. (Dearing Report, 1997, p. 372)

The Dearing Report was perhaps the most influential report on higher education in the UK, after the Robbens Report in 1964. We can see from the above recommendation how subject disciplines are encouraged to be dissected and re-formed in terms of the skills they provide; how the student will be equipped with knowledge-bundles (‘learning outcomes’); and how these skills will equip him or her for employability. Some 12 years later, a report on skills was produced, with full government endorsement, entitled Personal Learning and Thinking Skills. This time, the emphasis on skills as the chief educational outcome was even more pronounced: The framework for PLTS emphasises the importance of acquiring and improving skills that enable young people to cope with change and to learn effectively. These skills, together with the functional skills of English, mathematics and information and communication technology (ICT), play a crucial role in preparing learners for successful learning, work and life.

The report then goes on to enumerate what school students need, namely: • independent enquiry skills • creative thinking skills • reflective learning skills • team working skills • self-managing skills • effective participating skills. (LSIS, 2009, pp. 1–2) We can see that now the whole of learning is cast in terms of skills and performance, and the report goes on to break down each of the components listed above into a grand total of 37 sub-components. This particular report emphasises the responsibility of learner to provide evidence and reflection in order to demonstrate each of the skills. Thus, Lyotard’s vision is complete: the learner transforms himself through a kind of auto-­ pedagogy into an efficient performer. So dominant was ‘skills-talk’ at all levels of education that by 2010, there was some push-back. This was partly (perhaps mainly) politically

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inspired since the push-back came from the Coalition government that replaced the Labour government in that year. Thus, it was that the Conservative Nick Gibbs, who was Schools Minster, revealed that he had been converted through the writings of E. D. Hirsch, the American educationalist. Skills were to no longer receive the prominence they had received hitherto; what was now needed was a greater emphasis on subject knowledge. The National Curriculum of 2013 was now revised in order to delineate in more detail just what needed to be learnt. For example, 11-year-olds now needed to know about the following geographical facts: “the position and significance of latitude, longitude, Equator, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Arctic and Antarctic Circle” (Department of Education (DoE), Geography Programme of Study, 2013, p. 3). But whilst these developments are a welcome corrective to the over-­ emphasis on skills, the overall effect, in terms of Lyotard’s analysis, is simply to pivot away from performance-related skills towards demonstrating that knowledge bundles can be handled. The gains of a subject-led curriculum, so enthusiastically endorsed by Gibbs (see 2015, pp. 12–20) have recently been exposed by Robert Eaglestone (2021). The latter suggests that the reading of literature (for example) cannot be reduced to chunks of knowledge since one needs an appreciation of the significance of the whole text; furthermore, the reading of, say, a poem is subjective to the extent that an understanding of the poem is in part mediated by how one experiences the poem. Eaglestone advocates ‘holistic’ understanding rather than breaking up poems into ‘units of meaning’. In addition, he observes that since literature is value-rich, an appreciation of the values articulated in a literary work is essential for achieving understanding. The Hirsch-led approach gives too greater priority to ‘basic knowledge’ at the expense of understanding, and it does not even start to address the place of interpretation and criticality (See Eaglestone, especially pp.  9, 12, and 17). In surveying the articulations of Weber, Foucault and Lyotard, and how their writings help us to understand developments in the UK, especially England, it must not be thought that nothing of any good has happened. For example, the Dearing Report made several recommendations regarding widening participation in the HE sector that have been acted upon; Hirsch’s conception of a knowledge-led curriculum does have some merit, if only to secure some basic knowledge; the importance of skills in learning—‘knowing-how’—can be acknowledged; there are times when it

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is useful to define learning in terms of outcomes; —all these have their merit, taken individually and separately. Indeed, even Ofsted has been responsive to change and no longer advocates the ‘three-part lesson’ as a standard approach. One may also acknowledge the professionalism of many HMIs (Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Education) whose institutional history extends back to the nineteenth century. And of course, one must also acknowledge the professionalism and creativity of many teachers up and down the country who ‘keep the show on the road’. The problem is that there is no wider vision of education in terms of its aims and values. There is no national conversation on this topic, a conversation which would respect the voice of teachers and researchers. As I hope to have shown, the evidence is that government ministers, parents, employers and many school leaders simply conceive of education in terms of instrumental and demonstrative learning (Hinchliffe, 2020) whether this be the demonstrating of skills or of facts. The result is a concept of education that, in practice, is too often joyless, mean, narrow and arid. The child learner becomes little more than a child worker.

2.4  Alternative Conceptions of Education What are the alternatives to the instrumental conception of education? I am going to present one particular way of thinking because it has been influential and avoids undue prescription in terms of aims and values. I think this way of thinking about education has a lot of merit to it, but as I will point out, more is needed. The starting point is the idea of education as a ‘practice’. What would such a practice look like? In particular, if we are not simply to replicate the processes of rationalisation, disciplinarity and transactional knowledge, what form could such a practice take? It is at this point I think we need some philosophical help which will perhaps enable us to stand back a little and take in a better view. Alistair MacIntyre (1981) is, I believe, of great help here because he has managed, in his book After Virtue, to articulate the main features of a practice. For what we want is a conception that incorporates values. It is this that is missing from the instrumental conception. He suggests the following: By a practice I mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence

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that are appropriate to, and partly definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved are systematically extended. (MacIntyre, p. 175)

We can see that the aims of a practice as outlined here are not pre-­ defined: the practitioners themselves determine those standards of excellence that MacIntyre talks about. At the same time the values—or goods—which constitute a practice are themselves subject to interrogation and development through the conduct of those engaged in a practice. It should be noted that teachers and learners are jointly seen as practitioners, and although each have different roles, they are all motivated by the same set of aims and values. The art of school management—even leadership—has its place within a practice, but on this conception no school manager (let alone a government minister or Ofsted manager) is in a position to unilaterally impose requirements regarding changes or new developments. This is not because a practice is bound by democratic rules but rather because the kinds of values and aims that are inscribed in a practice are also imbued within each of those engaged in it, including those who might be termed ‘leading’ practitioners. The latter have their position just because of the way in which they have fostered those excellences that are recognised within the practice. One fruitful way of thinking about all this has been suggested by Padraig Hogan. He asks us to think of what an educational practice might look like ‘in its own right’. He observes that, traditionally, education was at first provided by religious authorities, and then, in the nineteenth century (at least, in Europe), the state gradually supplanted the role of religion and became the chief, if not the sole, director of education and schooling. But what, Hogan asks, would education look like if neither the state nor religion were involved? What kind of ‘internal goods’ might such a practice foster and nurture? (Hogan, 2011, pp. 28–29). The answer, of course (given MacIntyre’s concept of a practice) can never be definitive but there are certain features that might be acknowledged: • A spirit of enquiry, that is shared with others—a ‘community of enquiry’ • The idea that both teachers and students are engaged in a process of discovery • That the process of learning in some way makes one a better person. This is partly through the discipline of learning

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• But also the idea that it is better to be knowledgeable: everyone benefits from this • Standards of attainment are important but to be pursued in conjunction with the other educational goods • The idea of having an open mind, that is not afraid of ‘unlearning’ if necessary.2 One might also add the idea of individual development in the sense that the process of learning fosters greater moral and emotional maturity. But this internal good is partly dependent on something else, namely that the ‘what’ is learnt is worthwhile and has value in its own right. This fuses together these two ideas, namely that individual development cannot be adequately fostered through learning that which is false, transitory or flippant. Indeed, one could go further and say that the subjects that are learnt (including those that are more vocational) are those that benefit not only the learner but the wider community. Whether those subjects are Kantian moral philosophy or the art of bricklaying, everyone benefits from their being taught. I emphasise this because it is in direct opposition to the idea of ‘transactional’ knowledge outlined above, in the previous section. An example of where these ideas of a practice are given more practical currency can be found in the Cambridge Primary Review (2009), a study of primary schools in England conducted by Professor Robin Alexander and his colleagues at the Cambridge University School of Education. The Review takes a fairly optimistic standpoint in respect of the attitudes and competencies of teachers on the ground: regarding the teaching profession itself, the report can be seen as favourable, despite noting the strictures under which teachers work. It refrains from endorsing any one ‘pedagogy’ and instead emphasises that good teaching involves a ‘repertoire’ of pedagogical techniques. In fact, this report was the first comprehensive report on primary education since the Plowden report of 1967. Amongst other things it suggests: • Uphold the principle that it is not for government, government agencies or local authorities to tell teachers how to teach; • void pedagogical fads and fashions and act instead on those aspects of learning and teaching, notably spoken language, where research 2  In his article, Hogan elaborates in much more detail the kinds of educational ‘virtues’ that a practice in its own right might foster.

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evidence converges. [Cambridge Primary Review (introduction), 2009, p. 8]3 But it would be fair to say that after initial interest in the mainstream media, it has been forgotten and completely ignored in government policy circles.

2.5  Two Kinds of State The idea of an educational practice ‘in its own right’ is somewhat misleading if it is taken to mean that somehow a practice can exist in its own right, sui generis. For if we take as one of its central tenets, a ‘community of enquiry’, then it is clear (assuming this community is in principle open to all) that such a practice presupposes a democratic culture with a fair degree of freedom of speech and research. Moreover, a practice also presupposes an institutional setting and support. It is worth contrasting two kinds of state at this point. The Corporate State The state may incorporate citizens (including its teachers) so that the latter become its instruments. The overall aims of the state may have varying degrees of democratic accountability, but either way, citizens are tasked with carrying out the aims of the state. We can think of it as having a constitutive role—it constitutes the citizenry through its own discursive practices, characterised by performativity. It is true that the corporate state may achieve its aims through a hierarchical control of administrative instruments, but this method is beset with practical difficulties. More straightforward is the achievement of aims through the promotion of quasi-autonomous agencies which are tasked with the role of engendering and monitoring performance. A brief look at the academy system in England exemplifies this. Thus a recent policy document published by the Department of Education on multi-academy trusts (i.e. academy ‘chains’) suggests that governance involves “structures that reinforce clearly defined roles and responsibilities” coupled with “accountability that drives up standards” (DoE, 2016, p. 19). Everyone—governors, sponsors, teachers and children—have assigned their allotted roles. The zeal with which 3

 The complete report is over 600 pages long—see Alexander (2010).

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successive Ministers of Education have promoted these policies shows that they, too, have their allotted role. The Instrumental State But suppose the state was merely an instrument in the promotion of educational aims—what would this look like? The thought here is that the state is necessary for the funding and regulation of education (e.g. ensuring schools have fair admissions procedures). Moreover, the state is instrumental in safeguarding basic educational aims, but these aims are determined outside state structures. In a society characterised broadly as liberal-democratic, educational aims would be decided through the legislature. We might suppose that educational aims consist of the promotion of freedom; equality for all; the well-being of children, students and teachers; and the expectation that education contributes to national prosperity. These aims are to be attained through the promotion of literacy, learning and the dissemination of knowledge. We might also suppose that schools would be asked to consider a range of pedagogies within a broad curriculum that sets guidelines. For example, educational activities would need to take into account the importance attached to freedom: to this extent, educational practice could be seen as the ‘practice of freedom’ (hooks, 1994), reflected in the learning culture within schools and colleges (the practice of freedom would then become one of the ‘internal goods’ mentioned in the previous section). We can think of the instrumental state as being at the service of its citizens who are no longer obliged to play their allotted roles provided for them, as in the corporate state. That is, the legislature provides for its citizens the state as an instrument for furthering educational aims which are determined external to the state apparatus. Nevertheless, we would expect the state to have an ‘enforcement’ role in two crucial respects. First, there needs to be a professionalised inspection function that ensures standards of teaching are adequate. And second, the state must have powers of intervention in cases where over-zealous local communities skew basic educational aims (e.g. by instituting pedagogic and curricular regimes that undermine freedoms). That is, the instrumental state is there to defend values within civil society: these values are broadly agreed by a citizenry through legislative proceedings. The instrumental state thus enables the kind of educational practice envisaged by Hogan to flourish: but if this has any prospect of happening,

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more attention needs to be paid by philosophers of education (amongst others) to the role of the state in supporting such practice as well as the role of the legislature in establishing broad educational aims for society. We need to become a little more political in our thinking and spend a little less time talking to each other about putative educational practices that at the moment exist only precariously in England and have no prospect of any permanence unless the role of the state changes.

2.6  Conclusion Many years ago, around 1963, a certain Dr. Beeching headed up the national railway system in the UK. He was a well-known figure at the time. In order to address the problem of falling revenues, he proposed that the railway network be cut by a third, which, with government support, is what happened. Scores of branch lines were axed and many small towns found their railway station sold off and the lines dug up. It was said at the time that the age of the train had now been replaced by the age of the motor car. Despite opposition, the proposals were supported by both the Conservative and subsequent Labour governments. Supporters of the closures held that it was only hopeless romantics and a few railway ‘nuts’ who opposed the plans which were carried through speedily, within a few years. One of the consequences was that in order to go to Oxford from Cambridge by train, you had to go via London. Later on, in 1993, the entire railway system was placed in private hands, despite the hideously complicated arrangements that ensued. What happened? Today there are very few people who think that Beeching got it right. In fact, there are plans to re-open some of the lines he closed,4 including plans to re-open the line between Oxford and Cambridge (this will not be straightforward as new construction will be necessary). And recently, the Conservative government have published plans that in effect reverse the privatisation of 1993. Almost no one of any note is prepared to stand up and defend rail privatisation, let alone Beeching. I mention all of this just to show that sometimes bad ideas that seem eminently reasonable and full of common sense at the time do not necessarily last. If one were to look at the way in which education and schooling 4  For example, the line between Edinburgh and Galashiels in the Scottish Borders has been recently re-built.

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is organised in England, knowing nothing of the history and culture of that country, one would assume that it was all the product of an authoritarian mode of governance that had been inflicted on an ignorant and apathetic citizenry. To be told that this system of education exists in a country which was once home to such figures as John Stuart Mill, Virginia Woolf and Byron would seem astonishing. It is as if the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had never happened. At the moment there seems no prospect whatsoever of change. Both main political parties appear to be wedded to the current system. Nevertheless, I think change will come eventually, and people will ask of previous generations: ‘what on earth were they thinking of?’

Bibliography Alexander, R., et al. (2010). Children, their world, their education: Final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review. Routledge. Bates, A. (2012). Transformation, trust and the ‘importance of teaching’: Continuities and discontinuities in the Coalition government’s discourse of education reform. London Review of Education, 10(1), 89–100. Bates, A. (2015). Transforming education: Meanings, myths and complexity. Routledge. Batteson, C.  H. (1999). The 1944 education act reconsidered. Educational Review, 51(1), 5–15. Biggs, J., & Tang, C. (2011). Teaching for quality learning at university. Open University Press. Cambridge Primary Review. (2009). Short report. Retrieved July 16, 2021, from https://web.archive.org/web/20120201215116/http://www.primaryreview.org.uk/downloads/CPR_revised_booklet.pdf. For complete report (over 600 pages), see Alexander, R. in this Bibliography. Dearing Report. (1997). Higher education in the learning society. Retrieved July 14, 2021, from http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/dearing1997/dearing1997.html#ana Department of Education. (2016). Multi academy trusts: Good practice guidance and expectations for growth. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/28029/1/Multiacademy_trusts_good_practice_guidance_and_expectations_for_growth.pdf DoE. (2013). Geography programmes of study. Retrieved July 14, 2021, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/239044/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-­_ Geography.pdf

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DoE—Department of Education. (1967). The plowden report: ‘Children and their primary schools’. Retrieved July 14, 2021, from http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/plowden/plowden1967-­1.html DoE—Department of Education. (2007). Social and emotional aspects of learning for secondary schools. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/6663/7/f988e14130f80a7ad2 3f337aa5160669_Redacted.pdf Eaglestone, R. (2021). Powerful knowledge’, ‘cultural literacy’ and the study of literature in schools (Impact Pamphlet 26). Wiley. Retrieved July 14, 2021, from h t t p s : / / o n l i n e l i b r a r y. w i l e y. c o m / d o i / e p d f / 1 0 . 1 1 1 1 / 2 0 4 8 -­4 1 6 X.2020.12006.x Fantuzzo, J. (2015). A course between bureaucracy and charisma: A pedagogical reading of Max Weber’s social theory. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 49(1), 45–64. Foucault, M. (1980). Of knowledge/power. C. Jordan (Ed.). Harvester Press. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality (Vol. 1). Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and punish. Penguin Press. Gibbs, N. (2015). How E.D Hirsch came to shape UK government policy. In J. Simons & N. Porter (Eds.), Knowledge and the curriculum. Policy Exchange. Retrieved July 14, 2021, from https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-­content/ uploads/2016/09/knowledge-­and-­the-­curriculum.pdf Habermas, J. (1991). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 1). Polity Press. Heilbronn, R. (2016). Academy schools in England. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 50(3), 306–318. Hilbert, R. A. (1987). Bureaucracy as belief, rationalisation as repair: Max Weber in a post-functionalist age. Sociological Theory, 5(1), 70–86. Hill, R., & Matthews, P. (2010). Schools leading schools II: The growing impact of national leaders of education. National College Publishing. Hilton, A. (2018). Academies and free schools in England: A history and philosophy of the gove act. Routledge. Hinchliffe, G. (2020). What is an academic judgement. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(5), 1206–1219. Hogan, P. (2011). The ethical orientations of education as a practice in its own right. Ethics and Education, 6(1), 27–40. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. Kaesler, D. (2017). Universal rationalisation: Max Weber’s great narrative. Irish Journal of Sociology, 25(3), 315–323. Kalberg, S. (1980). Types of rationality: cornerstones for the analysis of rationalisation processes in history. American Journal of Sociology, 85(5), 1145–1179. Lowe, R. (2007). The death of progressive education: How teachers lost control of the classroom. Routledge.

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LSIS, Learning and Skills Improvement Service. (2009). Personal learning and thinking skills in foundation learning. Retrieved July 14, 2021, from https:// repository.excellencegateway.org.uk/Personal_learning_and_thinking_skills_ in_Foundation_Learning.pdf Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition. University of Manchester Press. MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue. Duckworth. Perryman, J. (2006). Panoptic performativity and school inspection regimes: Disciplinary mechanisms and life under special measures. Journal of Education Policy, 21(2), 147–161. Phillips, M. (1997). All must have prizes. Warner Books. PISA. (2015). Country report on UK.  Retrieved July, 12 2021, from http:// www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-­2015-­United-­Kingdom.pdf Plaskow, M. (1985). Life and death of the schools council. Falmer Press Ltd. Sica, A. (2000). Rationalisation and culture. In S. Turner (Ed.), Cambridge companion to Weber (pp. 42–58). Cambridge University Press. Tomlinson, S. (2005). Education in a post-welfare society. Open University Press. WAG—Welsh Assembly Government. (2010). Primary social and emotional aspects of learning—Cymru theme 4 going for goals! Years 3 and 4. Weber, M. (1930). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Weber, M. (1948). From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. Winch, C. (2017). Teacher’s know-how. Wiley.

CHAPTER 3

Implementing Inclusive Education: What Are the Levers to Support Teachers? Elke Struyf, Aster Van Mieghem, and Karine Verschueren

3.1   Introduction For decades, inclusive education has been subject to the reform agendas of many countries (UNESCO, 2000; United Nations, 2006). Even though the shift towards inclusive education is an international global phenomenon, it must be achieved in the local context and within the existing educational system (Göransson & Nilholm, 2014; Vansteenkiste et al., 2020). In 2009, also Belgium ratified the UN convention on the Rights of

E. Struyf University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] A. V. Mieghem (*) University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] K. Verschueren KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_3

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Persons with Disabilities. Consequently, a new legislation—called the M-decree—was implemented in 2015–2016  in Flanders, the Dutch-­ speaking part of Belgium, aiming to reduce the current segregated school system. In Flanders, practitioners find it challenging to implement inclusive education and tend to show resistance to it (Children’s Rights Commissioner, 2016; Rekenhof, 2019). This resistance may reflect a negative attitude of educators towards inclusive education or suggest that teachers “may not see solutions to problems they feel are outside their competence or control” (Avramidis & Kalyva, 2007, p. 385). The enrolment of students with special educational needs demands teachers to adjust their daily practices and take on new tasks that come along with teaching these students (Pijl & Frissen, 2009). In other words, teachers are closely involved with these students and are therefore considered pivotal for the implementation of inclusive education to succeed (Burke & Sutherland, 2004; de Boer et al., 2011; Rouse, 2017). However, Burke and Sutherland (2004) acknowledge that teachers’ concerns, related to the adjustments teachers have to make, can undermine the implementation of inclusive education. In this chapter, we report on an extensive research project in Flanders on levers to support teachers in realizing inclusive education. The general aim of this project was to obtain more insight into how teachers can be supported in realizing inclusive education. In order to do so, we addressed three research aims. The first research aim was to get an overview of what themes have already been studied regarding inclusive education. The second research aim was to examine whether leadership and professionalization can be a lever for realizing inclusive education. The third research aim was to examine teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs towards specific students with and without special educational needs and the role of sources of teacher support. In order to address these research aims, a multi-method approach was used. A meta-review was conducted to investigate the first research aim. A case study research and a large-scale survey study were outlined to examine the second and third research aims, respectively. In this chapter, we will present the main findings of these studies. For more information on these studies, we refer to other articles (Van Mieghem, Struyf et al., 2020; Van Mieghem, Verschueren, Donche et al., 2020; Van Mieghem, Verschueren, Petry et al., 2020; Van Mieghem, Verschueren, & Struyf, 2020).

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3.2   What Themes Have Already Been Studied Regarding Inclusive Education? A first study aimed to analyse existing reviews of inclusive education regarding what themes have been studied, what can be learned from these themes and what gaps in the research can be addressed (Van Mieghem, Verschueren, Petry et al., 2020). In order to structure the obtained information from the selected reviews, we used the input-process-outcome model of Kyriazopoulou and Weber (2009). This model identifies core areas that contribute to the realization of inclusive education. ‘Input’ refers to elements provided to the system to achieve a certain outcome; ‘process’ to educational activities and procedures; and ‘outcome’ to efficiency measures (e.g., academic and functional literacy or independence). A thematic analysis of 26 reviews revealed five main themes. The results relating to the first main theme, ‘attitudes towards inclusive education’, showed that in general the attitudes of teachers are rather negative, in contrast with the attitudes of parents and peers (Bates et al., 2015; de Boer et al., 2010, 2011, 2012). The results relating to the second main theme, ‘professional development of teachers’, taught us that teacher professionalization is more effective when it focusses on specific student needs or disabilities, rather than on inclusive education in general (Kurniawati et al., 2014). The third main theme, ‘practices enhancing inclusive education’, revealed two types of practices that enhance inclusive education: additional support for teachers, which can be provided by other teachers (co-teaching) or teaching assistants and support from peers for students with special educational needs (Fluijt et al., 2016; Giangreco et al., 2010; Qi & Ha, 2012). The fourth main theme, ‘student participation’, focuses on the social and academic participation of students with special educational needs within mainstream education. More results were reported on social participation, which can be fostered by making mixed classes (Parker et al., 2015; Pijl et al., 2010). The fifth main theme, ‘reflection on conducting research on inclusive education’, claims that an operative definition of inclusive education should be included in each study (Göransson & Nilholm, 2014). In order to elaborate on what can be learned from these substantive main themes found, we placed the four substantive themes within the input-process-outcome model of Kyriazopoulou and Weber (2009); see Fig. 3.1.

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Fig. 3.1  Four themes placed in the model of Kyriazopoulou and Weber (2009)

Attitudes towards inclusive education and Professional development relate to ‘input’, Practices enhancing inclusive education relate to ‘process’ and Participation of students with special educational needs relates to ‘outcome’. The model of Kyriazopoulou and Weber (2009) states that input influences the process and outcome, suggesting us to focus on attitudes of teachers and their professional development to facilitate the implementation of inclusive education. In addition, the results of our meta-review show that knowledge of disabilities and positive experiences regarding inclusive education have a positive impact on the attitudes of teachers (de Boer et al., 2011; Qi & Ha, 2012). This implies that professional development of teachers can help to change attitudes and increase teachers’ capability and willingness to teach students with special educational needs in mainstream education, as stated by Kurniawati et  al. (2014). In accordance, we inferred from these findings that professional development initiatives should provide effective pedagogical strategies and focus on specific student needs or disabilities, specific teachers’ concerns and their teaching context. In addition, we subscribe that it is important to bear in mind that the sense of professional self-efficacy of teachers is aligned with the endorsed attitudes in the wider school environment, as mentioned by Armstrong (2014). Therefore, one of the main conclusions of the meta-review is that teacher professional development on

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evidence-informed inclusive education practices leading to successful teacher experiences is vital for the implementation of inclusive education. In addition, the meta-review revealed some research gaps. For example, it was found that the selected reviews did not report on the attitudes of students with special educational needs and school leaders towards inclusive education. However, inclusive education is for all children, therefore, the voices of students with and without special educational needs should be highlighted (e.g., Göransson & Nilholm, 2014; Messiou, 2017). Also, the role of school leaders in implementing inclusive education should not be underestimated (Ainscow & Sandill, 2010). Apparently, future research that includes an analysis of the attitudes of all children and school leaders is required. Also, teacher professionalization supporting inclusive education is only considered within training programs, whereas teacher competences can also be generated at the workplace, for example, through learning communities that include special teachers or co-teaching (Fluijt et al., 2016; Rieser, 2012). More research on the impact of a variety of professional development initiatives regarding the implementation of inclusive education could therefore be interesting. Furthermore, we noted that the topic of academic participation is less investigated than social participation. In addition, only (aspects of) the participation of students with special educational needs were mentioned, whereas the participation of all students in inclusive education should be considered, so further research on this topic, especially on the impact of inclusive education on academic participation, is required.

3.3  Can Leadership and Professionalization Be a Lever for Realizing Inclusive Education? The second research aim was to examine levers for realizing inclusive education. Specifically, relying on Fixsen et al. (2013), we focused on leadership and professionalization as two potential drivers for implementation of inclusive education. For both topics we were interested in how they are related to the willingness of school teams to include students with special educational needs and consequently foster the realization of inclusive education. To address these questions, a twofold research design was established. First, a comprehensive case study research was conducted in 10 primary and 10 secondary schools in Flanders. The case schools were visited during the period of September 2017 and December 2017, two years

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after the new legislation (the M-decree) was voted. Within each case school, informal observations, semi-structured interviews with members of the school leader team (n = 26) and two focus groups (one with teachers (n = 78) and one with counsellors (n = 71), with on average approximately 4 participants in each focus group) were held. During these focus groups, a vignette method was used to reflect among the respondents on the enrolment of hypothetical but realistic vignettes of students with special educational needs and the measures the school would take to meet the needs of these students. The use of vignettes implied that the willingness to include students with special educational needs was measured and not the actual enrolment of such students. Relying on the theory of ‘Planned Behaviour’ of Ajzen (1991), willingness can be seen as the intention to perform a given behaviour. It is acknowledged that the stronger this intention, or in this case the willingness of school team members to include students with special educational needs, the more likely they will translate this intention into behaviour (Ajzen, 1991). Second, a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) was carried out to analyse the data systematically. QCA is a case-based, qualitative, comparative analysis method that combines the in-depth insight of case studies with the inferential power of ‘large-N’ studies. Consequently, QCA allows the generalization of findings from a relatively small number of cases and offers the ability to identify conditions, or combinations thereof, that are associated with a similar outcome (Ragin, 1987). Leadership First, we wanted to gain deeper insight into how educational leadership is associated with the willingness to include students with special educational needs in mainstream schools (Van Mieghem, Verschueren, Donche et al., 2020). We tested this hypothesis using the leadership dimensions of Robinson and Timperley (2007): (1) providing educational direction, (2) ensuring strategic alignment, (3) creating a community that learns how to improve student success, (4) engaging in constructive problem talk, and (5) selecting and developing smart tools. It was found that the combination of three leadership dimensions was particularly important in this regard. In schools where leaders provide a strong educational direction in favour of inclusive education, engage in constructive problem talk with school team members regarding this evolution, and select and develop smart tools to support inclusive education,

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more willingness to include students with special educational needs was observed. Based on these findings, we argue that providing educational direction towards inclusive education can be seen as the starting point to create willingness amongst school team members to include students with special educational needs in their school. This is in line with previous research that states that creating positive attitudes among all members of the school team is crucial to establish inclusive education (Kugelmass & Ainscow, 2004; Loreman, 2007). In addition, constructive problem talks offer school team members the opportunity to discuss obstacles that have occurred within their daily practices with their school leader. When doing this, joint problem-solving occurs, which is seen as a feature of inclusive schools in earlier research (Kugelmass & Ainscow, 2004). Leithwood et al. (2008) state that emotional understanding is key in successful leadership because this influences teachers’ motivation to adapt their daily practices and beliefs about working conditions. Also, smart tools offer school team members directions to cope with students with special educational needs. Within our case schools, we identified that these tools (e.g., policy documents, student-tracking software, classroom furniture, etc.) are used as a guideline to look at the needs of students with special educational needs and to examine how a powerful learning environment can be created for these students. Elaborating on this finding, we further argue that especially the leadership dimensions of engaging in constructive problem talk and selecting and developing smart tools are relevant for realizing inclusive education. School leaders can influence these three leadership dimensions the most, compared to ensuring strategic alignment and creating a community that learns how to improve students’ success. These two dimensions rely more on the engagement of school team members, as they need to adapt their daily practices in favour of students with special educational needs (Kugelmass & Ainscow, 2004; Loreman, 2007) and provide the input for professional learning communities (Stoll et al., 2006). Additionally, in five of the six case schools in which providing educational direction, engaging in constructive problem talk and selecting and developing smart tools were observed, strategic alignment in favour of inclusive education was also found. Moreover, in two of these case schools, all five dimensions were observed, also a learning community in favour of students with special educational needs. It was interesting to note that within these two case schools, a high number of students with special

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educational needs were enrolled. Therefore, we conclude that in these schools, school team members have significant experience with students with special educational needs. Moreover, in comparison to the other case schools, these schools seem to have the most positive experiences with students with special educational needs and already had a long tradition of adjusting school practices to meet the needs of these students. Professionalization Second, we wanted to examine the way in which professional development initiatives aimed at supporting inclusive education are associated with the willingness to include students with special educational needs in mainstream schools (Van Mieghem, Verschueren, & Struyf, 2020). To describe differences in professional development initiatives, we used the framework of Merchie et al. (2018) that distinguishes four core (referring to the content) and five structural features (referring to the design) of a professional development initiative. The four core features are: (1) content focus, (2) pedagogical knowledge, (3) coherent and evidence-based, and (4) ownership. The five structural features are (1) duration, (2) collective or collaborative participation, (3) school- or site-based, (4) active learning, and (5) trainer quality. It was found that the absence or presence of the four core features, or a combination thereof, could not be associated with the willingness of school team members to include students with special educational needs. Also, the absence or presence of the five structural features could not be associated with the willingness of school team members to include students with special educational needs. In addition, we studied case schools in which the presence of similar features was observed, but different outcomes were retained with regard to their willingness. The results of these additional analyses trying to solve the contradictory findings indicated that positive experiences with students with special educational needs seem to have more impact on the willingness to include these students than the features of professional development initiatives, as described by Merchie et al. (2018). Therefore, we conclude that indirectly a professional development initiative can be a lever to create more willingness to include students with specific special educational needs when this initiative leads to positive experiences of teachers. We can relate this conclusion to the self-efficacy theory of Bandura (1977). According to Bandura (1997), self-efficacy refers to a person’s beliefs in his capabilities to execute a certain task. He mentions four

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sources for shaping self-efficacy beliefs: (1) enactive mastery experience, prior experiences with the tasks; (2) vicarious experience, performances of similar others on the tasks; (3) verbal persuasion, feedback from significant others; and (4) physiological reactions, physiological arousals and emotional reactions. In line with our findings, ‘enactive mastery experience’ is considered to be the strongest source of self-efficacy (e.g., Malinen et al., 2013). Moreover, previous research has shown that teachers with high self-efficacy beliefs are more likely to adjust and improve daily practices in favour of students with special educational needs (e.g., Caprara et  al., 2006). This made us suggest that it would be interesting if positive experiences with students with special educational needs accompany the professional development initiative. In addition, all sources of Bandura (1997) could be taken into account when designing professional development initiatives, for example, by also using role models who have positive experiences with students with special educational needs, giving feedback and addressing negative emotions. Therefore, the results of this study seem to indicate that a professional development initiative can enhance the willingness of school team members to include students with specific special educational needs. Therefore, we hypothesize that multiple professional development initiatives with a content focus on different special educational needs need to be provided so that teachers can participate in the professional development initiative that meets their needs.

3.4  Examining Teachers’ Self-efficacy Beliefs Towards Students With and Without Special Educational Needs and the Role of Sources of Teacher Support The third research aim was to examine teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs towards students with and without special educational needs and the role of sources of teacher support for teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in relation to students with special educational needs (Van Mieghem, Struyf et  al., 2020). Teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs can be defined as teachers’ perceptions of their own teaching competence (Brownell & Pajares, 1999). Within the third research aim, two subgoals were distinguished. First, we wanted to gain insight into the self-efficacy beliefs of teachers in Flanders with regard to students with and without special educational needs, and

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how teacher- and student-related variables influence these beliefs. Second, we were interested in how sources of teacher support influence these self-­ efficacy beliefs towards students with special educational needs. In order to answer these research goals, a large-scale survey study (N = 692) among primary school teachers (n = 291, from 59 schools) and secondary school teachers (n = 401, from 61 schools) was conducted in Flanders as part of a broader survey (Struyf et al., 2019). To measure teachers’ self-efficacy in relation to students with and without special educational needs, teachers were asked to complete the Dutch version of the Student-Specific Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale of Zee and Koomen (2015). Teachers are asked to fill out this scale twice, once for a (randomly selected) student without special educational needs (i.e., who does not receive additional care) and once for a student with special educational needs (i.e., for whom the additional care within the school is not sufficient). Several quantitative analysis techniques were used in order to examine these sub goals (e.g., multilevel modelling, single-level factor and regression analysis), depending on the data at hand. Teachers’ Self-efficacy Beliefs Towards Students With and Without Special Educational Needs The first main aim of this study was to identify teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs towards students with and without special educational needs. The results showed that teachers have significantly lower levels of student-specific self-­ efficacy when teaching students with special educational needs compared to typically developing peers. This is in keeping with findings in the literature (e.g., Schwab, 2019), showing that even when examining experienced levels of self-efficacy toward a specific student with special educational needs, teachers feel in general less efficacious teaching these students. This finding raises interest in examining student- and teacher-­ related variables towards teachers’ student-specific self-efficacy beliefs. Two student-related variables were examined: diagnosis (none, one or multiple diagnoses) and the type of disability of students with special educational needs. The main finding with regard to the diagnoses of these students is that teachers have in general higher student-specific self-­efficacy beliefs when teaching students with one diagnosis compared to students with multiple diagnoses. This finding is in line with the idea that more diagnoses, usually indicating more severe special educational needs, generate lower self-efficacy beliefs (e.g., Schwab, 2019). However, we also found teachers felt more efficacious in instructing and engaging students

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with one diagnosis, compared to students with special educational needs without any diagnosis. We therefore hypothesize that these findings may indicate that having a diagnosis can provide additional information or guidelines for teachers to work with these students. When looking at specific disabilities, we found that, compared to students with learning disabilities, teachers have in general lower self-efficacy beliefs towards students with socio-emotional and/or behavioural disorders. In addition, we also found lower self-efficacy beliefs regarding managing the behaviour of students with socio-emotional and/or behavioural disorders, compared to students with an autism spectrum disorder or a learning disability. The study of Schwab (2019) also revealed low self-efficacy beliefs for mainstream teachers towards students with hyperactivity and attention deficits. With regard to the teacher-related variables that affect these levels of self-efficacy, some remarkable results with regard to gender and grade level were shown. With regard to gender, it was found that, compared to male teachers, female teachers have in general higher self-efficacy beliefs towards students without special educational needs, but not for students with special educational needs. At the grade level, we found that, compared to secondary school teachers, primary teachers have in general higher self-efficacy beliefs towards students without special educational needs, but lower towards students with special educational needs. We hypothesize that in line with the differences in the organizational structure of primary and secondary education in Flanders, the load of teaching students with special educational needs is more shared within secondary education. The importance of a shared responsibility among all school team members with regard to teaching students with special educational needs is revealed in a study by Theoharis and Causton (2014). In addition, with regard to experiences of teachers, we found that only experience in special education positively affected teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs with regard to instructing students with special educational needs. Experience as a care teacher or internal counsellor, years of teaching experience in general, and training (an additional degree in care) had surprisingly no effect or a negative effect on teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. We argue that it is possible that teachers with experience in special education may have had more successful experiences with students with special educational needs than care teachers or internal counsellors within mainstream schools, because of the additional teacher support offered in special education. Moreover, we address the possibility that having mastery experiences with students with special educational needs is more crucial for teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs

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than their general training or teaching experience. This is in line with insights from our previous studies that highlighted the importance of having mastery experiences with students with special educational needs. Impact of Sources of Teacher Support on Teachers’ Self-efficacy The second aim of this study was to examine how sources of teacher support can influence teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs towards students with special educational needs. Avramidis and Norwich (2002) distinguish two types of teacher support at the class level for students with special educational needs: physical support (e.g., teaching materials, IT equipment, adjusted physical environment) and human support (e.g., learning support assistants). Relying on these two types of support and on availability within the Flemish education system, we surveyed several forms of teacher support. An exploratory factor analysis showed that these forms of support could be divided into, what we named, ‘Cooperative sources of support’ (team teaching, observation and feedback, supervision and student support within and outside the classroom for students with special educational needs) and ‘Easily accessible sources of support’ (information and advice, materials and emotional support). When relating these sources of support to teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs towards students with special educational needs, we found that more use of ‘Cooperative sources of support’ predicted higher levels of self-efficacy. No predictive value for ‘Easily accessible sources of support’ on teachers’ student-specific self-efficacy was found. Chiner and Cardona (2013) confirm that teachers who have more human support and material resources, comparable to physical support, are more positive towards inclusive education than those who have less support and fewer resources. However, our finding differs from Chiner and Cardona (2013), because no positive relationship with physical support was found. Avramidis and Kalyva (2007) point out that “teachers may not hold ‘negative attitudes’; rather they may not see solutions to problems they feel are outside their competence or control” (p. 385). We hypothesize that solutions for these problems seem to be generated from Cooperative forms of support, and less from Easily accessible sources. In addition, we examined whether the use of Cooperative or Easily accessible sources had similar effects across groups of students with special educational needs with no diagnosis, one diagnosis, and multiple diagnoses. Although similar effects of the use of Cooperative sources of support

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on teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs were found when considering students without any diagnosis and with one diagnosis, no significant effects of these sources were found on the student-specific self-efficacy beliefs regarding students with multiple diagnoses. We hypothesize that using Cooperative sources of support might not be sufficient for teachers in realizing an inclusive learning environment for students with such severe special educational needs. In sum, our last study indicates the importance of sources of support, and particularly of Cooperative sources, in improving teachers’ self-­efficacy beliefs. We assume that making these forms of support more available to teachers will make them more competent to deal with students with special educational needs and might, therefore, also reduce resistance to a more inclusive education system. However, the use of Cooperative sources of support may not be sufficient to realize an inclusive environment for all students (e.g., students with multiple diagnoses) or all teachers. Further research on boundary conditions of Cooperative sources of support is needed. In the next section of this chapter, we will elaborate on three themes that emerged when reflecting on the main findings of the studies described above. A first theme provides insights into the complementary top-down and bottom-up strategies that are necessary to realize inclusive education. A second theme offers insights into the importance of positive teacher experiences in educating students with special educational needs. A third theme elaborates on teacher support that can enhance these positive experiences. Finally, the concepts and insights retrieved from these general reflections are integrated and visualized in the Seed-model.

3.5  Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies Are Necessary to Realize Inclusive Education Flanders has a highly segregated school system with a high enrolment of students with special educational needs in special schools (Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, 2014). The enrolment of students with special educational needs in mainstream schools is a prerequisite for achieving inclusive education. As stated by Fullan (1994), school change is generated by a mix of top-down and bottom-up strategies. A top-down strategy is giving students with special educational needs the legal right to enrol within mainstream schools. This right has been endorsed in Flanders with

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the implementation of the M-decree (Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, 2014). One of the main national guidelines of this decree is that all students with special educational needs have the right to register in a mainstream primary or secondary school, unless the necessary adaptations are assessed as unreasonable by the school. Recently, in 2019, the Flemish Government announced in their coalition agreement that it would replace the M-decree for students with special educational needs with a new guidance decree (Flemish Government, 2019). In October 2019, the Flemish Government approved a number of principles concerning the elaboration of the guidance decree, whereby it wants to continue and optimize the realization of inclusive education (Flemish Government, 2019). To achieve this, it is crucial to continue to guarantee the right of students with special educational needs to enrol in mainstream education. So, a government can give incentives to realize inclusive education through legislation, but it is the teachers that have to educate these students on a daily base, and consequently make inclusive education happen. Within this research project, we defined inclusive education as the commitment to include students with special educational needs in mainstream education by improving and adapting specific classroom practices to the individual needs of the learner (Coates & Vickerman, 2008; de Boer et al., 2010; Lindsay, 2007), where students should not only be physically integrated but also socially included. In sum, the enrolment of students with special educational needs is not enough. They also have to be supported to fully participate to their extent within the school. This implies a shared responsibility among all school team members (Theoharis & Causton, 2014) and is done through bottom-up strategies. These strategies originate at the school.

3.6  Teachers Have to Acquire Positive Experiences in Educating Students with Special Educational Needs In Flanders, teachers do not feel competent to teach students with special educational needs and tend to show resistance to the implementation of inclusive education (Children’s Rights Commissioner, 2016; Rekenhof, 2019). One study confirmed that teachers in Flanders have reduced self-­ efficacy beliefs towards students with special educational needs compared to their typically developing peers. Brownell and Pajares (1999) suggested

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that positive experiences of teachers with students with special educational needs might increase teachers’ willingness to include these students and persistence to educate them. Our findings elaborate on these suggestions. The meta-review revealed that positive experiences regarding inclusive education have a positive impact on the attitudes of teachers (de Boer et al., 2011; Qi & Ha, 2012). Furthermore, the results of our case study indicated that positive teacher experiences with students with specific special educational needs seem to be related to their willingness to include future students with similar educational needs. We related this finding to the self-efficacy theory of Bandura (1977), and more precisely to what is considered to be the strongest source of self-efficacy: mastery experiences (e.g., Malinen et al., 2013). Mastery experiences refer to prior experiences with the task; if these are successful then higher self-efficacy beliefs will be obtained. So, positive experiences of teachers in educating students with special educational needs will increase their self-efficacy beliefs to enrol and educate these students. Previous research has indeed shown that teachers with high self-efficacy beliefs are beneficial for students with special educational needs; they are more likely to adjust and improve daily practices in favour of these students (e.g., Caprara et al., 2006). However, we should bear in mind that we found indications for a relation between the enrolment of students with specific special educational needs and the willingness of school team members to enrol future students with similar special educational needs. This endorses recent insights in the research field, that teachers develop specific self-efficacy beliefs in relation to individual students, including students with special educational needs they teach. Consequently, researchers have started to assess teachers’ self-­ efficacy beliefs at a student-specific level instead of a general level (e.g., Love et  al., 2019; Schwab, 2019; Zee & Koomen, 2015). Within our quantitative study, we assessed these student-specific teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs towards students with and without special educational needs. We found a positive impact of cooperative sources of support on teachers’ student-specific self-efficacy beliefs with regard to educating students with special educational needs. Building further on the fact that mastery experiences are considered the strongest source for shaping teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, we assume that positive experiences are gathered when engaging in cooperative sources of support. All these findings indicate the importance of positive teacher experiences with students with special educational needs to successfully implement inclusive education.

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3.7  Support for Teachers Can Enhance Positive Experiences by Educating Students with Special Educational Needs As Avramidis and Kalyva (2007) already pointed out, it is possible that teachers may not see solutions to the difficulties they experience when teaching students with special educational needs. This implies a need for support. Brownell and Pajares (1999) acknowledge the importance of support structures that foster mainstream teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and successes in teaching students with special educational needs, in order to successfully implement inclusive education. In Flanders, teachers express the need for support to implement inclusive education but experience a lack of it (Struyf et al., 2019). Teacher support can be realized in several ways, but elaborating on our main findings, the school takes centre stage in providing and facilitating it. We can distinguish the following three aspects to invest in: leadership, professional development initiatives and cooperative sources of support. With regard to the first aspect, leadership in relation to inclusive education, one of our studies revealed that in particular, an interplay of three leadership dimensions is important to create more willingness amongst school team members to include students with special educational needs. In schools where school leaders provide strong educational direction in favour of a more inclusive school system, engage in constructive problem talk with the school team members with regard to this evolution, and select and develop smart tools to support the implementation of inclusive education, more willingness was observed. This finding endorses the importance of the role of school leaders in the implementation process of inclusive education and gives more insight into how a school leader can foster the realization of an inclusive school. Especially the leadership dimensions of engaging in constructive problem talk and selecting and developing smart tools can be influenced by the school leader. These leadership dimensions require specific skills, in which a school leader can be strengthened, for example, through professional development initiatives. Furthermore, in line with the model of Fixsen et al. (2013) that distinguish three implementation drivers: (1) the supporting role of the management or leadership (leadership driver), (2) supporting structures and procedures or (changes in) the organization (organization driver), and (3) professionalization of the school team (competency driver), smart tools

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(e.g., policy documents, student-tracking software, classroom furniture, etc.) can also be related to the organization driver. With regard to the second aspect, professional development initiatives supporting inclusive education, our studies revealed that focussing on evidence-informed inclusive education practices leading to successful teacher experiences is vital for the implementation of inclusive education. Also within these professional development initiatives, positive experiences ought to be created. If this is the case, then the professional development initiative can be a lever to create more willingness among the participants to include students with specific special educational needs. This is in line with the findings of Kurniawati et al. (2014) who stated that teacher professional development can help to change their attitudes towards inclusive education and increase their capability and willingness to teach students with special educational needs in mainstream education. Furthermore, Leithwood and Riehl (2005) addressed that developing school team members by providing intellectual stimulation is one of the core practices of effective leaders. School leaders can do this by referring teachers to professional development initiatives. In order for a school leader to refer a teacher to a particular professional development initiative, the school leader has to gain insight into the teachers’ concerns with regard to teaching students with special educational needs. The school leader can achieve this, by taking the time to engage in constructive problem talks with that teacher (which was one of the important leadership dimensions). The importance of professional development initiatives to achieve inclusive education was also highlighted by Armstrong (2014), who made us aware that a teacher’s sense of professional self-efficacy is aligned with the endorsed attitudes in the wider school environment. With regard to the third and last aspect, cooperative sources of support in relation to teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs towards students with special educational needs, our results showed a positive impact of these sources on the levels of self-efficacy of teachers towards students with special educational needs. The following forms of support were referred to as cooperative forms of support: team teaching, observation and feedback, supervision, and student support within and outside the classroom for students with special educational needs. The cooperative aspects within these forms of support vary from consultation (student support outside the classroom) to intensive cooperation (team teaching) among teachers, or among teachers and counsellors.

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3.8  Conclusion: The Seed-Model for Supporting the Implementation of Inclusive Education To integrate the concepts related to the main themes of our research project, we developed the Seed-model, presented in Fig. 3.2. This model represents how processes at different levels (micro, meso and macro) interact with each other within the implementation process of inclusive education. The reason we named this model the Seed-model is twofold. The first reason is that its shape resembles a seed. The second, and more symbolic, reason is that the realization of inclusive education can be seen as a stepping stone towards an inclusive society (Booth & Ainscow, 2016). Consequently, schools can be considered as fertile ground in which seeds

Fig. 3.2  The Seed-model for investigating the implementation of inclusive education

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for an inclusion mindset and conditions can be planted, which, if sufficiently cared for, will germinate and thus grow further in society. The model visualizes aspects in support of inclusive education at the micro, the meso and the macro level. This is in keeping with the Ecological theory of Bronfenbrenner (1977), which conceives the environment as a set of nested structures and compares this with a set of Russian dolls. All these structures, also called levels, interrelate with each other and affect the ‘developing person’ who takes centre stage. Within the Seed-model, teachers take centre stage and are seen as the developing persons or learners. As already mentioned, teachers have to make inclusive education happen and adapt and adjust practices to individual educational needs of students (Pijl & Frissen, 2009). Consequently, we placed the dyadic relationship between a teacher and a student with special educational needs (SEN-student) at the heart of the Seed-model, the micro-level. Positive experiences for students with special educational needs and their teachers have to be created here, in order for inclusive education to succeed. Positive experiences for teachers with educating students with special educational needs seem to enhance their self-efficacy beliefs and also seem to foster their willingness to include future students with similar special educational needs in their school. Also, positive experiences with inclusive education for students with special educational needs are important. The improvements and adaptations made within the classroom practices are aimed to benefit the student with special educational needs (Pijl & Frissen, 2009). To this end, the voice of these students needs to be highlighted to receive more insight into how they experience these adaptations and how these practices can possibly be further improved. Next, support sources for teachers to gain positive experiences in educating students with special educational needs are placed around this dyadic teacher–student relationship at the meso level. These sources of support have the important goal of developing teacher competencies in creating inclusive learning environments and enabling teachers to have positive experiences, which at the end will also result in positive experiences for students with special educational needs. More use of cooperative sources of support (team teaching, observation and feedback, supervision and student support within and outside the classroom for students with special educational needs) predicts higher teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs towards students with special educational needs. Furthermore, our findings suggested that two implementation drivers identified by Fixsen et al. (2013), leadership and professionalization, may enhance school team

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members’ willingness to include students with special educational needs in their school. School leaders, therefore, need to provide educational direction in support of a more inclusive school, engage in constructive problem talk with the school team members with regard to this evolution, and select and develop smart tools in support of the implementation of inclusive education. When these smart tools are selected and developed, they can become part of a school organization, the third implementation driver identified by Fixsen et al. (2013). Although we did not find support for an impact of core and structural features of professional development initiatives on the general willingness of school team members, our findings suggested that professional development, focussing on specific special educational needs of students, seems to enhance the willingness to include future students with similar needs. At the macro level of the Seed-model, the prerequisite to enable inclusive education is displayed: the right for students with special educational needs to enrol within mainstream schools. In order for teachers and students with special educational needs to gain positive experiences with inclusive education, as a first step, these students have to be enrolled within mainstream schools. In addition, the macro level can be facilitative to provide and strengthen support at the meso level. In sum, the Seed-model combines insights into how the resistance of teachers against the implementation of inclusive education can be reduced, based on the main findings of our extensive research project on the implementation of inclusive education in Flanders. The model symbolizes the school as fertile ground in which seeds for an inclusion mindset and conditions for creating inclusive practices can be planted, which, if sufficiently cared for, will germinate and thus grow further in society.

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CHAPTER 4

Elaborated Dialogic Feedback and Negotiated Action in Peer Assessment: Metacognitive Benefits for Assessor and Assessee Keith James Topping

4.1   Peer Assessment—What Is It? Here we define peer assessment and elaborate the characteristics of peer assessment, so you can be clear what kind of peer assessment you are talking about. Peer assessment can be defined as “an arrangement for learners to consider and specify the level, value, or quality of a product or performance of other equal-status learners, then learn further by giving elaborated feedback to and discussing their appraisals with those who were assessed to achieve a negotiated agreed outcome” (Topping, 2018, p. 1). Products to be assessed could include writing, oral presentations, portfolios, test performance, or other practical skilled behaviours in a complex environment.

K. J. Topping (*) University of Dundee, Dundee, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_4

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Peer assessment occurs in kindergarten/nursery, primary/elementary schools, secondary/high schools, university/college, and in the workplace and other community settings. So, who exactly is a “peer”? Someone in the same class? Someone in the same year? Someone of the same ability in the subject in question irrespective of their chronological age? All of these are possible, except of course any member of staff is excluded and the “peers” all have the status of officially being learners. Equal status can be interpreted exactly (sometimes termed “near-peer”) or with flexibility. In the latter case, a peer can be any student within a few years of schooling (far-peer). Peer assessment is used in a very wide range of subjects, including some which might surprise the reader. For example, Lin et al. (2006) reported the use of a web-based portfolio for appreciation and peer assessment of visual art education in elementary school. Valle et al. (2016) showcased the work of three elementary music specialists who had innovatively incorporated formative peer assessment in their music lessons in grades three and four. Peer assessment is also used in physical education (Bores-García et al., 2020). Students could be asked to “specify the quality” by giving a mark or grade for the assessed item. This is a kind of summative assessment which imitates teacher assessment, and teachers using it might be concerned about its reliability and validity. But it gives no information to the learner about how to improve. These days the second part of the definition above is much more important—it is through giving elaborated feedback with a rationale and examples and discussing other points of view that most learning is achieved. Subsequently (and after further independent reflection), the assessee revises the work in the light of the discussion. This is the kind of peer assessment we will discuss in this chapter. Thus, the formative view of peer assessment is emphasized here, in which students help each other identify their strengths and weaknesses, target areas for remedial action, and develop metacognitive and other personal and professional skills. Both giving and receiving feedback develop these. Peer feedback is available in greater volume and with greater immediacy than teacher feedback. A peer assessor with less skill at assessment but more time in which to do it can produce an assessment of equal reliability and validity to that of a teacher. You might think that elaborated peer assessment sounds rather time-­ consuming, and initially you would be right—setting up peer assessment certainly takes some time. But during the peer assessment process, both

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assessor and assessee are presented with many intellectual challenges, set in the context of a piece of work that the assessee feels rather strongly about. As a result, both assessor and assessee have to think quite deeply, as well as negotiate a settlement, so not only are their thought processes stimulated but their social skills as well. Consequently, they both learn—and not just in one domain. Peer assessment methods are designed so all can benefit, including assessors as well as assessees, irrespective of age, ability, or disability. They are inexpensive to use, require no special materials or complex technology, are flexible and durable in a wide range of settings, and are compatible with professional instruction of almost any type.

4.2   Varieties of Peer Assessment There are many varieties of peer assessment, and below a typology is offered which enables teachers to clearly categorize what they want to do—while reminding them of variables which they might have forgotten. It is as important to be aware of what you are not doing as what you are. Different kinds of peer assessment are more or less suitable for particular classroom contexts, different levels of maturity in the students, different subjects, and assessed activities. As indicated above, a key difference is whether the peer assessment is formative or summative or both. Will it serve to give students indications of how to improve their work (formative), so the final version can be better? Or will it just indicate to the students how good or bad their work was (summative), with no opportunity for improvement? Similarly, the peer assessment can be quantitative (assigning a number with respect to a grade) or qualitative (giving rich verbal feedback on positive and negative aspects and possibilities for improvement) or both. If students are merely to give a grade, they will need considerable experience in grading before their grades can be accepted as reliable. And even if they are reliable, they do not give the assessee any clues on how to improve their work the next time. By contrast, qualitative feedback gives rich ideas on how to improve the current piece of work, let alone future pieces of work. The assessee may not agree with all of these, and some negotiation of the nature of improvement is to be expected. Other differences between types of peer assessment are more subtle. For example, are the peer assessments of single pieces of work, or are they of several pieces of work? One piece of writing is relatively easy to assess, as it has a beginning and an end. Other products of work may be more

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complicated. For example, in peer assessment of a group presentation, should the quality of discussion prior to the presentation itself be peer-assessed? And are peer assessments of the same kind of product? The product or output assessed can vary enormously—writing, portfolios, presentations, oral statements, and so on. Assessment of writing is very different to assessment of an oral statement, which is in turn very different to peer assessment in music or physical education. Students will need some experience of each kind of peer assessment before they have confidence that they can manage the necessary roles. Peer assessment can operate in different curriculum areas or subjects, which may impose different demands. For example, in physical education classes, can peers be trained to investigate differences in the way the other student runs, catches a ball, throws a javelin, and so on? In foreign language learning, how quickly might students be able to accurately respond to the comments or questions of a peer in the foreign language, and how complex might those questions be? Will peer assessment be voluntary or compulsory? When it is used in a class, it would be a normal expectation that all students would participate, but if it is compulsory from the beginning, some students might be very resistant to participation. It might be a better idea to say that it will be voluntary at the beginning. So few students are likely to opt out that after a short while they will realize that their opposition is unusual, and agree to join in. Will it be anonymous or not? Of course, if you have reciprocal face-to-­ face peer assessment in one classroom, it is impossible to make it anonymous. But if you have one class assessing the work of another class, and giving feedback in writing or over the internet, it might be much more possible. But will you actually want the feedback to be anonymous? Peer feedback from somebody you know might be more powerful than that from somebody who is anonymous, depending on the quality of the relationship. Clarification of the assessment criteria is essential, and in general, peers should always be involved in the development of the assessment criteria, even if the teacher has their own ideas or there is some external assessment system that needs to be acknowledged. The fact that the peer group will eventually come up with very similar criteria to those you would have given them does not take away from the value to the peers of feeling

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engaged in the process. As a result, they know the criteria better from the outset. Rubrics or structured guidelines for feedback may or may not be provided. Assessment rubrics almost always help the assessors and the assesses, even though not all items will be used and some may be modified. As above, they should be developed by the peer group. Peers not used to giving elaborated feedback may need a feedback script to choose from. In any case, having these criteria written down will help the consistency of the peer assessment. Training in peer assessment may be given to assessors and/or assesses to a greater or lesser extent. It is surprising how many projects in the literature appeared to give no training to the peer assessors. The only question is: how extensive will it be? It can’t go on too long or the peer group will become restless to get some “real” activity. However, it should not merely involve the teacher talking. Some encounter with real-life examples and some practice in actually applying peer assessment should also feature. Is the feedback provided expected to be balanced between positive and negative, or only one of these? When you are starting with peer assessment, you might be inclined to ask the peer assessors to provide only positive feedback. Then you get them used to the idea of being positive. Later you can also ask them to give “suggestions for improvement”, which of course are open to discussion. Once students are competent with both aspects of feedback, you can give them free rein, except that every piece of assessed work should have some positives and some negatives. Is feedback expected to lead to opportunities to rework the product in the light of feedback, or is there no opportunity for this? Of course, we all hope that the current version of our work is the final one, so there might be some resistance to (apparently endlessly) reconsidering (writing this chapter was no exception to this general rule)—although this is almost always going to result in a better piece of work. Negative feedback indicates where the work needs improving, and hopefully, there will be time available to achieve this. A related question here is that of audience—why should the peer assessee try to improve the work? Who will tell the difference? Students need to see what the point is in improving the work. Is feedback expected to include hints or suggestions for improvement? Negative feedback will be much more acceptable if it is accompanied by some suggestions for improvement, even if those suggestions are not accepted. They give the assessee something to think about, and maybe they will then come up with a completely different way of doing things.

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The nature of peer assessment activity may be very precisely specified or it may be left loose and open to student creativity. Again, this may be a developmental issue, in that at the beginning, peer assessors and assessees may need a fairly strict procedure to support them. Later, however, this may become looser, so that assessors may begin to give more varied and personalized feedback, as they develop a sense of responsibility towards their assessee. Does the interaction involve guiding prompts, sentence openers, cue cards, or other scaffolding devices? At the beginning of peer assessment, one, some, or all of these are a good idea, as some learners (especially the shy ones) will have little idea how to begin a peer assessment conversation. Giving them some questions to use to get them started is an excellent idea. The participant constellation can vary, with consequent variation in joint responsibility for the assessed product. Assessors and the assessed may be individuals, pairs, or groups. Will you have one assessor and one assessee? And will their peer assessment be reciprocal? Or will you have one cooperative group assessing another cooperative group—again, reciprocal or not? Be careful in supposedly cooperative groups that all members of the group have contributed. You could invite the group to assess each of its members on the degree of their contribution to the group proceedings. Then the responsibility for the finished product is not unfairly apportioned to the lazy members of the group. Peer assessment can be one-way, reciprocal, or mutual within a group. If you have an older class assessing a younger class, directionality is likely to be one-way. If you are working with same-ability pairs in one class, directionality is likely to be reciprocal. If you are working with groups, does the group decide on a mutually agreed assessment for another group, or are the separate peer assessments of the other group to be taken into account? Requiring an agreed group assessment gives the group another valuable learning experience. Matching of students may be deliberate and selective or it may be random or accidental. If you are new to the class or group, it may need to be random. If you know something about the group members you can be more careful. Matching may take account only of academic factors, or also involve social differences. You may decide that you want the most able assessing the least able (not recommended). Or you may decide that you want the top half of the class assessing the bottom half of the class (better). Or you may decide that you want learners to be matched based on having similar abilities. Or you may decide that while ability is relevant,

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personality and social issues are also relevant. So, you may wish to avoid matching a dominant but stupid boy with a timid but clever girl, for instance. Assessors and assessed may come from the same year of study or from different years. If you have a colleague from another class of similar or dissimilar age who is also interested, you could certainly see if the two classes could be matched up for the purposes of peer assessment. If the classes are more or less of the same size, you have an ideal opportunity, otherwise you might have to have some triads as well as pairs. But most teachers will want to experiment first within their own class. The assessors and assessees may be of the same ability, or deliberately of different abilities. If they are of the same ability, you can expect a rich dialogue between them. If they are of different abilities, the flow may be more one-way, but the more able child should learn to elicit thoughts (even half-formed thoughts) from their partner. The amount of background experience in peer assessment can be very variable. Peer assessment may represent a considerable challenge to, and generate considerable resistance in, new initiates. If they have previous experience, it may have been positive, negative, or both. So, bear in mind the previous experiences that these students might have had in previous classes. They are not blank slates. You might want to ask them about that right at the beginning. Students from different cultural backgrounds may be very different in acceptance of peer assessment. In particular, students from a Middle-­ Eastern or Asian background may have great difficulty accepting peer assessment. In the case of Asian students, the idea that there is not one right answer can be rather startling and lead to resistance. In the case of Middle-Eastern students, resistance has a lot to do with gender, as boys might be very reluctant to accept advice from a girl. Gender may thus make a difference, and thought should be given to the implications of same-sex or cross-sex matching. With Middle-Eastern students, same-sex matching might be easier to start with. We have some evidence from peer tutoring that same-sex matching is generally more effective for boys, but of course, that leaves you with the question of what to do with the girls. So, there is no easy answer here. Of course, if there is no face-to-face contact (as in an online environment or perhaps where you have peer assessment between classes of different ages), gender may not be apparent.

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Place can vary: most peer assessment is structured and occurs in class, but it can also be informal and occur outside of class. Or it can develop from the former to the latter as learners become more experienced. Once students become really involved in it, you may find they are having peer assessment conversations in break time. And indeed, in some cases, taking peer assessment into their homes and using it with older and younger siblings. Similar variation occurs with respect to the time when the peer assessment takes place: How long are the sessions, how many sessions? Generally, the morning is best for thinking activities, but maybe peer assessment could also fit into the afternoon when the timetable might feel a little looser. If a big and complicated piece of work is being peer-assessed, a good deal of time might be needed, but this should be broken into smaller sections of no longer than one period, and some structure provided so that students do not go off track. Make sure you give enough time so that the peer assessment is actually finished in the time specified. The objectives for the exercise may vary—the teacher may target cognitive gains, metacognitive gains, teacher time saving, or other goals. We hope that teacher will mainly target cognitive and metacognitive gains, but there may be other gains, such as social gains or attitudinal gains. Do you see peer assessors and assessees talking more in the playground? Do you feel that some students are more engaged in what they are doing as a result of peer assessment? What degree of justification for opinions is expected of the assessor? In the beginning, it will be hard enough to get peer assessors to give suggestions for improvement, without expecting them to say why they think what they think. But with experience, peer assessors may become more adept at this—and also be more careful about not giving an opinion until they are sure they can justify it. Will all peer assessments be confidential to the assessing pair and the teacher, or will they be made publicly available? At the start, you will want to keep the peer assessments confidential to each assessing partnership and yourself. Once you have checked some of them for reliability, and you are satisfied about this, you may wish to operate a more open system. This could of course become competitive, and you would not wish to see a positive social experience degenerate into a competition, but then that is up to you. Another issue is the extent to which the process of peer assessment is monitored by supervisory staff. With peer assessment in one class, it is

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relatively easy for the teacher to keep an eye on the situation. But peer assessment between classes can become trickier in terms of keeping an eye on the situation. And peer assessment outside of classes or schools can be trickier still. Obviously, you will want to be alert to any problems and be able to nip them in the bud. The extent to which the reliability and validity of the peer assessment is moderated by supervising teachers is also an issue. While this issue generally surfaces mainly with summative quantitative peer assessment, it can also be relevant where students are giving elaborate verbal feedback. Sometimes this feedback may seem so tangential that you are tempted to intervene—but remember, it is for the assessee to comment first, so give them the chance to say that the peer assessment is not focused on the issue to be assessed—or simply that it is nonsense. Inspecting a sample of the assessments is particularly important where the assessment is summative. Is the task a simple surface task requiring limited cognitive engagement, or a highly complex task requiring considerable inference on the part of assessees, or does a simple initial task develop into increasingly complex tasks? If it is complex, you might be particularly inclined to pay some attention to the process. In relation to this, what quantity and quality of feedback is expected, and is this elaborated and specific, or more concise and general? Time will be a major factor here. Initially, you might want to ask your assessors to give two positive points of feedback and two negative points. Do you want to also ask for two suggestions for improvement? Should this be about a minute point (such as a spelling) or much broader (such as the structure of a piece of writing), or do you want to say that one should be broad but the other can be small? To what extent is the feedback tending toward the objective and definitive, as it might be in response to a simple task, or to what extent more subjective, as it might be with a more complex task? What effect might this have on the amount of disputation that ensues? Is there time for the assessees to actually make all the suggested improvements? How are assessees expected to respond to feedback; are their revisions to be none, few or many, simple or complex? Again, given the time constraints, you may wish to put some sort of quota on this—perhaps a maximum of three revisions to be done in 20 min, or some such. What extrinsic or intrinsic rewards are made available for participants? The US has been much criticized for its use of extrinsic rewards, to the point that American students seem incapable of doing anything without

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getting a pizza. Of course, this is an exaggeration, but this is an issue the teacher must address. It is worth thinking about what the students might get out of peer assessment in intrinsic terms. Once over their first shock, do the assessors get more pride in what they are doing, more involvement as they engage their assessee(s) in conversation, and so on? Do assessees seem to respond at all to the deeper and quicker suggestions for improvement they get from a peer assessor (as compared to a teacher)? Encourage learners to reflect on this and give you their considered thoughts. Might this activity become self-sustaining without it having to be inflicted on the students? Another issue is whether the peer assessment is aligned with the traditional forms of assessment. Will the peer assessment be taken into account when grading students at year-end, for example, or does all of the assessment information for this have to be generated by the teacher? Do all students have to sit formal examinations irrespective? If so, is there any way you can use peer assessment to help them prepare for these examinations? What transferable skills relevant to other activities might be measured as by-products of the process? Are you seeing improved social or communicative skills which might generalize beyond the peer assessment situation? Or writing skills or presentation skills? Or music skills, art skills, or physical education skills? Might any of these endure beyond school? These are important by-products which should be taken into account when you are considering the success or otherwise of your peer assessment project. Finally, is the peer assessment being evaluated, as one would hope with any new venture, or is its success or failure just assumed? Time spent evaluating is costly, and could be spent doing something else, but if you are to persuade the powers that be (within your school or wider than that) that peer assessment is worthwhile, you are going to need some evidence that looks objective.

4.3  Training Initially, there may be student reluctance to participate, especially if the students have never experienced any form of peer learning in the past. They may feel that the teacher is just passing a job or work which is rightfully theirs over to the students, and while the students are busy peer assessing the teachers will be enjoying coffee in the staff room. Or the students may be embedded in a conception of teaching and learning which

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is wholly teacher-directed and essentially imitative and leaves no room for student creativity or initiative. It may take some time to overcome such prejudices, by repeatedly pointing out that peer assessment is an important process rather than a product, which has cognitive and metacognitive benefits for both assessor and assessee, and relevance to what students will be expected to do in the subsequent world of work. Obviously, it is important that participating students are clear about the form and nature of peer assessment to be undertaken. Assessors will need training in what are the variables of concern that they should be looking out for and making a judgement on. Indeed, if the participants can be involved in a discussion about what these variables might be, so much the better. Assessing these variables might be supported by a rubric, to remind assessors to consider all of them. They will also need training in how to give positive, negative, and neutral feedback, and maintain a balance between these. Training should not only rely on the teacher giving information—a visual model or preferably a video of what is expected (and maybe what is not expected) will be very valuable, followed immediately by some practice on sample tasks, with coaching and feedback from the teacher. Equally, it is important that the recipient of feedback is ready to respond to it thoughtfully, decide what points to accept and what not to accept, and use this selected information to improve the existing piece of work. The research literature supports the importance of training. For example, Li et al. (2020) synthesized findings based on 134 effect sizes from 58 studies. A meta-regression analysis indicated that the most critical factor was training. When students received training, the effect size was substantially larger than when students did not receive such training.

4.4  Reliability and Validity Any group can suffer from negative social processes, such as social loafing (failing to participate), free-rider effects (having the work of others accepted as one’s own), diffusion of responsibility, and interaction disabilities—and this applies to teachers as well as students. Social processes can influence and contaminate the reliability and validity of peer assessments. Peer assessments can be partly determined by friendship bonds, enmity, or other power processes, the popularity of individuals, perception of criticism as socially uncomfortable or even collusion to submit average scores, leading to a lack of differentiation. Both assessors and assessees can

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experience initial anxiety about the peer assessment process. All of these will affect reliability and validity. However, once students are somewhat used to peer assessment and have overcome their initial fears and hesitations, reliability is likely to be quite high (indeed, similar to teacher reliability) (Topping, 2003, 2009). Reliability can be increased by making model student work available to the assessors—a master version of correctness against which the work to be assessed can be compared. Students need to know whether the peer assessments will be entered in any kind of high-stakes assessment, such as end-­ of-­year overall grades. Where this is the case, they will need to know what proportion of the total grade is determined by the teacher and what proportion by peer assessment. For example, Sung et  al. (2010) explored peer assessment with 110 eighth-graders who constructed student web pages. Reliability and validity increased with the number of raters. There is a message here for teachers—it may be better to have peer assessment groups of at least three, where each student assesses at least two products and receives assessments from at least two assessors, in order that some balance may be achieved between possibly conflicting peer assessments. Of course, it becomes difficult to expand the group size beyond three as the burden of work for the students becomes unmanageable. Sung et al. (2010) also found that lowand high-achieving students tended to over- and under-estimate the quality of their work, respectively—a feature found widely in the literature.

4.5  Elaborated Dialogic Feedback Of course, the quality of feedback is important. Hattie and Timperley (2007) conducted a meta-analysis to investigate whether feedback impact varied as a function of different information content in the feedback. The effect sizes for feedback were highest when students received feedback about the task and how to perform the task effectively; the effect sizes were lower when feedback focused on goals; and the effect sizes were the lowest when students just received praise, reward, or punishment. Initially, peer feedback should highlight positive aspects of the work in question. Then it should move on to aspects that might be improved (one hesitates to say “negative”). For instance, this may involve not merely indicating the number of errors but saying exactly where they are, how they are wrong, and suggesting one way they might be put right. Then the pair can address features that may be errors but are open to discussion.

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Then the pair can discuss what aspects are missing from the product that perhaps should be there. All of this involves extensive dialogue, possible between pairs but perhaps in a group of three or more. The need for both helper and helped to elaborate goals and plans, the individualization of learning and immediacy of feedback possible within the small group or one-on-one situation, and the variety of a novel kind of learning interaction are all features which can create benefits to both parties. They also focus on the need to loosen cognitive blockages formed from old myths and false beliefs by presenting conflict and challenge. Teachers focus on learning as if the pupil was a blank slate, but in fact, the pupil’s head is full of all kinds of stuff, much of it factually or conceptually erroneous. So, unlearning wrong stuff is as important as learning new stuff. Peers can be good at rooting out misconceptions in their partner— they certainly have more time for it than the teacher does. For example, the impact of synchronous discussion between assessors and assessees on writing performance, qualitative feedback quality, metacognitive awareness, and self-efficacy in web-based peer assessment were investigated by Zheng et al. (2018). A total of 64 undergraduate students participated, randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Experimental participants conducted synchronous discussion after peer assessment, while control students did not. Synchronous discussion significantly improved writing performance, content writing skills, affective outcomes, metacognitive feedback quality, metacognitive awareness, and self-efficacy. Similarly, Boon (2016) studied student uptake of feedback during peer assessment in primary school writing, finding that pupils made better use of feedback if it was task-involving and useful; there was sufficient time given for them to act on it and discuss it with their peers; and they were asked to reflect on how it was used to improve the quality of the assessed work. Relatedly, Tseng and Tsai (2007) found that with 184 16-year-old students, reinforcing peer feedback was useful in the development of better projects, while suggestive feedback was helpful at the beginning of peer assessment. However, didactic feedback, and to an extent corrective feedback, were negatively correlated with student achievement. Wu and Schunn (2020) found that feedback containing explanations directly predicted the implementation of feedback in subsequent revisions. Learners were approximately twice as likely to implement a change when the comment included an explanation, and less likely to implement a change when the suggestion/solution was made with hedges (supplementary comments

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weakening critical comments). Importantly, Li and Grion (2019) found that giving feedback had a more powerful effect than receiving it.

4.6  Negotiated Action Feedback might be expected to influence subsequent action and products, but it is not expected to determine these things. This is particularly true when feedback is received from more than one assessor, as in the case of peer assessment in groups of three, where some aspects of the feedback from each assessor might be in conflict. Even if there is no conflict, the assessee will have to choose what aspects of the feedback to accept. Where the feedback is positive, there is not likely to be much problem. Where it points to aspects that might be improved, only some of these are likely to be accepted. Acceptance is likely to be partly a function of the extent to which the assessor can justify why that feedback has been given. One of the issues is that assessees often develop a product which is purely an expression of their own thought processes—the very act of creation assists their thinking. What results may be quite egocentric. The assessors are likely to be valuable as an external audience, to help the assessee think more about what is being communicated and how this might be received by different kinds of audiences. For example, Chang and Chou (2011) examined the effects of reflection quality in peer assessment on learning outcomes with 14-year-old students (n = 45) during a web-based portfolio process. The immediate influence of reflection quality on learning outcomes was small but positive and statistically significant. Follow-up contrasts found reflection quality significantly related to an achievement test, work, and attitude outcomes. Relatedly, a Belgian team (Gielen et al., 2010) examined the effectiveness of certain characteristics of peer assessment feedback in a repeated measures study of 13-year-old students (n = 43). Written assignments showed that receiving justified comments in feedback was related to improvements in writing performance. The effect of accuracy of feedback was less than the effect of justification. Relatedly, Alqarni and Alshakhi (2021) conducted a qualitative study with 20 randomly selected participants, investigating the negotiation technique that EFL students employed in EFL writing peer assessment sessions. Results showed that students’ negotiation skills positively impacted improvements in writing skills. Moreover, the negotiations and discussions actively engaged students and considerably increased their

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participation and language practice. Bürgermeister et al. (2021) worked with 129 student teachers, finding that compared to controls, they perceived higher self-efficacy regarding assessing learning strategies and giving feedback after repeatedly giving and receiving peer feedback. Feedback quality was higher when students were supported in writing the feedback. Receiving and resolving feedback into action also leads the assessee to think more widely about their product, and may well lead them to improve it in other ways than those which are the subject of feedback.

4.7  Metacognitive and Other Benefits for Assessor and Assessee There are immediate benefits of peer assessment for learning and achievement, but also longer-term benefits with respect to transferable skills in communication and collaboration. There may also be metacognitive benefits and ancillary benefits in terms of the self-regulation of the student’s own learning. These benefits accrue to both assessors and assessees. Expanding peer assessment to include both learning and social behaviours sharpens and broadens the assessor’s capabilities. Combining assessment of product and process can enhance student understanding of the consistency or mismatch between these, and different ways of learning beyond their own. The helper seeks to manage and modulate the information processing demands upon the learner—neither too much nor too little—to maximize the rate of progress. The helper can also provide a cognitive model of competent performance, especially if the peer matching is cross-ability. The cognitive demands upon the helper in terms of monitoring learner performance and detecting, diagnosing, correcting, and otherwise managing misconceptions and errors are great. Herein lies much of the cognitive exercise and benefit for the helper. Peer assessment also makes heavy demands upon the communication skills of both helper and helped, and in so doing can develop those skills. All participants might never have truly grasped a concept until they had to explain it to another, embodying and crystallizing thought into language— a Vygotskian idea, of course. Listening, explaining, questioning, summarizing, speculating, and hypothesizing are all valuable skills of effective peer assessment, which should be transferable to other contexts.

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The affective component of peer assessment is also very powerful. A trusting relationship with a peer who holds no position of authority might facilitate self-disclosure of ignorance and misconception, enabling subsequent diagnosis and correction that could not occur otherwise. Modelling of enthusiasm and competence and belief in the possibility of success by the helper can influence the self-confidence of the helped, while a sense of loyalty and accountability to each other can help to keep the pair motivated and on-task. This can lead to a larger onward process of extending each other’s declarative knowledge, procedural skill, and conditional and selective application of knowledge and skills by adding to and extending current capabilities, modifying current capabilities, and, in areas of completely new learning or cases of gross misconception or error, rebuilding new understanding. This can further lead to the joint construction of a shared understanding between helper and helped which is adapted to the idiosyncrasies in their perceptions (i.e., is inter-subjective), is firmly situated within the current authentic context of application, and forms a foundation for further progress. Peer assessment enables and facilitates a greater volume of engaged and successful practice, leading to consolidation; fluency and automaticity of thinking; and social, communicative, and other core skills. Much of this might occur implicitly, that is, without the helper or helped being fully aware of what is happening. Simultaneously or subsequently, peer assessment can lead to generalization from the specific example in which a concept is learned, extending the ability to apply that concept to an ever-widening range of alternative and varied contexts. As some or all of these processes occur, both helper and helped give feedback to each other, both implicitly and/or explicitly. Indeed, implicit feedback is likely to have already occurred spontaneously earlier. Peer assessment increases the quantity and immediacy of feedback to the learner very substantially. Explicit reinforcement might stem from within the partnership or beyond it, by way of verbal and/or non-verbal praise, social acknowledgement and status, official accreditation, or even more tangible reward. However, reinforcement should not be indiscriminate or predominantly focused on effort. As the learning relationship develops, both helper and helped should become more consciously aware of what is happening in their learning interaction, and more able to monitor and regulate the effectiveness of their own learning strategies in different contexts. Development into fully

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conscious explicit and strategic metacognition not only promotes more effective onward learning, it should make the helper and the helped more confident that they can achieve even more, and that their success is the result of their own efforts. In other words, they attribute success to themselves, not external factors, and their self-efficacy is heightened. As the peer assessment relationship develops, the learning moves from the shallow, instrumental, surface level of learning to the strategic level and on to the deep level, as the students pursue their own goals rather than merely those set for them. Similarly, learning proceeds from the declarative (statements of existing fact) into the procedural (indicating how a situation developed and came to be) and conditional (suggesting what other alternatives might have been possible). These affective and cognitive outcomes feed back into the originating sub-processes—a continuous, iterative process. As an example, Yu and Wu (2016) sought to examine the individual and combined predictive effects of the quality of online peer feedback provided and received on primary school students’ quality of question-­ generation. Performance data from 213 fifth-grade students engaged in online question-generation and peer assessment for six weeks were analysed. Results indicated that the quality of peer feedback provided and received predicted students’ quality of question-generation. Relatedly, Chin and Teou (2009) used concept cartoons with two parallel experimental classes of younger (9–10-year-old) and older (10–11-year-old) students. The cartoons presented opposing viewpoints about scientific ideas to stimulate talk and argumentation among students in small peer assessment groups. The dialogic talk and interactive argumentation of the students provided diagnostic feedback about students’ misconceptions about scientific principles to the teacher and was helpful in moving students towards better understanding. Lu and Law (2012) studied 181 high school students engaged in online peer assessment. Peers graded and gave feedback, which was analysed. Lu and Law found that the provision by student assessors of feedback that identified problems and gave suggestions was a significant predictor of the performance of the assessors themselves, and that positive affective feedback was related to the performance of assessees. Hsia et al. (2016) used a web-based peer-assessment method for performing arts activities, applied to 163 junior high students (with an experimental group and a control group). Controls learned with a web-based streaming video-supported environment. Peer assessment using a rubric significantly improved the

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students’ performance, self-efficacy, and motivation. Performance ratings were highly related to the students’ self-efficacy. Giving positive feedback first will reduce assessee anxiety and improve subsequent acceptance of negative feedback. In addition, students should be told that peer assessment can promote a sense of ownership, personal responsibility, and motivation. Teachers can also point out that peer assessment can increase variety and interest, activity and interactivity, identification and bonding, self-confidence, and empathy with others. When carefully organized, any negative social issues can be ameliorated and students can develop social and communication skills, negotiation and diplomacy, and teamwork skills. Learning how to give and accept criticism, justify one’s own position, and reject suggestions are all useful, transferable social skills. Not only do helpers learn the subject better and deeper, but they also learn transferable skills in helping and cooperation, listening, and communication. All of this influences the school ethos, potentially developing a widespread cultural norm of helping and caring. Peer assessment contributes to a sense of cohesive community and encourages personal and social development. Eventually, it can permeate the whole ethos of a school and be deployed spontaneously in many areas of the curriculum—a learning tool as natural as opening a book or turning on a computer. When you see your students explaining to a newcomer from another school or district what peer assessment is all about and showing amazement on discovering that everybody doesn’t do it everywhere, you will know you have got it embedded.

4.8   Peer Assessment Supporting Inclusion Many teachers will be worried about the neediest children, whether their neediness arises from a continuing learning disability or from a more transient learning problem. Will such children be able to cope with peer assessment, either as assessees or indeed as assessors? Sometimes teachers are tempted to exclude such children from a project and have them work with adult helpers instead. However, this is not recommended. All children should have the opportunity to participate in and benefit from peer assessment. Even a pair with a weak assessor working with a weak assessee can learn! Actually, you may find that they learn more than more able pairs. The fact that the pair is required to interact will certainly place demands upon them, and these demands will help them to learn. Peer assessment

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methods, once accepted by the students, are usually enjoyable, and sociable and intrinsically rewarding—not only for the children but also for the teacher. They can help to create a cooperative and positive social ethos and promote social inclusion and citizenship. Studies have found that students who score high on measures of academic achievement are more accepted, less rejected and disliked by peers, viewed by teachers as less deviant, and engage in more positive interactions than those who score low on achievement (e.g., Malecki & Elliott, 2002). This may suggest that able students would make the best peer assessors. However, Bryan’s (2005) research demonstrated that certain types of social skills interventions (particularly those focused on self-­ perceptions, self-attributions, and locus of control) had consistent positive effects on academic achievement. The implication of this is that by engaging all students in peer assessment, it should be possible to raise the self-­ esteem and social-connectedness of rejected children and raise their academic achievement. Peer assessment has been used successfully with special needs children (e.g., Scruggs & Mastropieri, 1998) as young as grade four (9 years old). Importantly, there were gains from functioning as either assessor or assessee. Studies in this category also have implications for matching students involved in peer assessment. As long ago as 1991, O’Keefe examined sociometric surveys and peer assessments of social behaviour in 51 third- through sixth-grade mainstream classrooms in order to identify accepted and rejected intellectually challenged and non-challenged children. Rejected intellectually challenged children were perceived by their peers as aggressive/disruptive and/or sensitive/isolated. In contrast, accepted intellectually challenged children were perceived as sociable. The same relationships were found for typical children. This is encouraging, since it suggests that special needs status is no prohibition for involvement in peer assessment, although disruptive or isolated behaviour might be. Similarly, Rockhill and Asher (1992) examined gender differences in the types of behaviour that distinguished between low-accepted children and their better-accepted classmates. Third- through fifth-graders (n = 881) in five elementary schools completed a sociometric scale and a peer nomination measure. The same behaviours were important for boys and girls. Both aggressive and withdrawn low-accepted children received lower peer ratings for prosocial behaviour. Children seemed to be blind to the condition or label of the problem individuals and took their behaviour

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at face value. This is encouraging, though the effect may diminish as children grow older.

4.9  Follow-Up and Sustainability Initiating a project (especially in an unfavourable or inert environment) is very demanding in terms of time and energy, although that capital investment is almost always considered worthwhile later. Once things are up and running smoothly, it is tempting to either relax, or rush on and start another project with a different group. Rushing on is dangerous—don’t spread yourself too thinly. After a few weeks or months, most initiatives need some rejuvenation—not necessarily an organizational improvement, just a change to inject some novelty and provide your project with new oxygen. Fortunately, peer assessment is very flexible and offers many ways for injecting variety and novelty—a change of partners, subject topics or activities, format of operation, and so on. However, please do not try to use peer assessment for everything, or you will overdose the learners. It can enhance productivity to give the learners a rest for a certain period and then return to a modified format not too long afterwards. In any event, close consultation with the students always adds extra momentum to their motivation—even if their suggestions are contradictory and cannot all be implemented, the feeling that their views are valued increases commitment to the onward process. You might wish to consider to what extent you can give away some of the organization and management to the participants themselves. Obviously, you would still need to check on this from time to time, especially with younger children. Of course, you would wish positives to be accentuated and negatives to be balanced. In this respect, keeping the feel-­good factor going is important. However, a degree of self-­management (which can include self-monitoring) can heighten self-esteem and responsibility and help to make initiatives self-sustaining. There is no better apprenticeship for being an assessor than being an assessee. Many schools with cross-year class-wide peer assessment programs actively promote the equal opportunity and apprenticeship advantages of this model. Every student who is helped in a lower grade fully expects from the outset to become an assessor when in a higher grade. As students are helped in preparation for becoming helpers, any ambivalence about receiving help decreases and motivation to learn often increases.

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The asymmetry between assessor and assessee is reduced, and the stigma sometimes otherwise associated with receiving help disappears. All the students have the chance to participate and the opportunity to help, which makes them all feel equally valuable and worthwhile. Sometimes students who are helped in one subject are simultaneously helpers to students in a lower grade in the same subject. Those who are helped in one subject might be helpers to their own-age peers in another subject. Even the most able student in any grade can be presented with problems that require the help of an even more capable student from a higher grade, and thereby learn that no one is as smart as all of us. The symbiosis of the assessor and assessee roles is something upon which to consciously capitalize. However, there is little research literature on the effectiveness of peer assessment at long-term follow-up, although there are a few studies that have used peer assessment over a longer period. For example, Sergi (2007) discussed university film and video students undertaking group-based projects. One-off peer assessments were subject to the vagaries of chance relationships, whereas long-term peer assessment, where students undertook several small peer-assessed group projects in a semester each with a different set of students, was a useful instrument for deriving a more moderated peer assessment mark. Similarly, Thomas et al. (2011) report on the developmental use of peer assessment in three consecutive initiatives, involving self- and peer-assessment in mathematics education for first-year pre-service teachers; then peer assessment of individual contributions in a group project using a Wiki; then self- and peer-assessment to help students learn about leadership. Likewise, Woodhouse and Wood (2020) reported a project in which part-time doctoral researchers were engaged in a process of peer assessment and review, with a view to improving their critical writing skills. The participants developed an online journal, which ran for over three years, during which time they were continuously engaged in writing, editing, and peer-reviewing.

4.10  Conclusion Here we define peer assessment as involving elaborated peer feedback and negotiation of onward revision, not simply quantitative grading. It occurs in many different settings and beyond educational institutions, and also in many different subjects. Reliability is quite high, and certainly as high as for teacher assessments. Both assessor and assessee gain in cognitive skills,

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and sometimes metacognitive, social, and emotional skills. There are many varieties of peer assessment, including whether it is reciprocal or not, and whether it is anonymous or not. Clarification of the peer assessment criteria is essential, should involve the participants, and may be offered in a rubric. Training is essential and the nature of feedback should be scaffolded, including justification of any positive or negative comments. Matching of partners requires some thought, and peer assessment might be conducted in groups of three to help deal with feedback between individuals. Peer assessment should be aligned with other forms of assessment in use. Discussion of the peer assessment judgements in the pair or three is essential, and different studies have found different effects for different kinds of feedback and discussion. Reflection by both assessor and assessee should lead to some changes in the product, but not all feedback will be accepted or considered important. Dialogic talk and active argumentation are important. Negotiation skills should improve over time with consequent effects on self-efficacy. Effects are likely to be metacognitive as well as cognitive, leading to subsequently improved ability in related areas. Peer assessment can be used effectively with students with special needs and language or cultural disadvantages. However, there is limited research literature on the long-term effects of peer assessment. Will peer assessment save time? Well, probably not when you are just figuring out how to implement it, and devoting time to training the participants and monitoring their efforts. But later, when they are experienced and peer assessment is running smoothly, you might save a good deal of time otherwise spent in massive amounts of assessment—especially of written products. It thus makes “continuous assessment” a very real and also very practical way of proceeding. Readers may also be interested in related texts: Topping, Buchs et al. (2017) (peer tutoring and cooperative learning in many subjects), Topping, Duran et al. (2017) (peer tutoring in reading), and Duran and Topping (2017) (the principles underlying learning by teaching).

Bibliography Alqarni, T., & Alshakhi, A. (2021). The impact of negotiation as a social practice on EFL writing peer assessment sessions. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 11(10). https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1110.23

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Boon, S. I. (2016). Increasing the uptake of peer feedback in primary school writing: Findings from an action research enquiry. Education 3–13, 44(2), 212–225. Bores-García, D., Hortigüela-Alcalá, D., González-Calvo, G., & Barba-Martín, R. (2020). Peer assessment in physical education: A systematic review of the last five years. Sustainability, 12(21), 9233. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su12219233 Bryan, T. (2005). Science-based advances in the social domain of learning disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 28, 119–121. Bürgermeister, A., Glogger-Frey, I., & Saalbach, H. (2021). Supporting peer feedback on learning strategies: Effects on self-efficacy and feedback quality. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 20(3), 383–404. https://doi. org/10.1177/14757257211016604 Chang, C. C., & Chou, P. N. (2011). Effects of reflection category and reflection quality on learning outcomes during web-based portfolio assessment process: A case study of high school students in computer application course. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 10(3), 101–114. Chin, C., & Teou, L. Y. (2009). Using concept cartoons in formative assessment: Scaffolding students’ argumentation. International Journal of Science Education, 31(10), 1307–1332. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09500690801953179 Duran, D., & Topping, K. J. (2017). Learning by teaching: Evidence-based strategies to enhance learning in the classroom. Routledge. Also in Spanish. Gielen, S., Peeters, E., Dochy, F., Onghena, P., & Struyven, K. (2010). Improving the effectiveness of peer feedback for learning. Learning and Instruction, 20(4), 304–315. Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 Hsia, L.  H., Huang, I., & Hwang, G.  J. (2016). A web-based peer-assessment approach to improving junior high school students’ performance, self-efficacy and motivation in performing arts courses. British Journal of Educational Technology, 47(4), 618–632. Li, H. L., Xiong, Y., Hunter, C. V., Guo, X. Y., & Tywoniw, R. (2020). Does peer assessment promote student learning? A meta-analysis. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 45(2), 193–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/0260293 8.2019.1620679 Li, L., & Grion, V. (2019). The power of giving feedback and receiving feedback in peer assessment. All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 11(2), 1–17. Lin, K. C., Yang, S. H., Hung, J. C., & Wang, D. M. (2006). Web-based appreciation and peer-assessment for visual-art education. International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 4(4), 5–14.

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Lu, J., & Law, N. (2012). Online peer assessment: Effects of cognitive and affective feedback. Instructional Science, 40(2), 257–275. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11251-­011-­9177-­2 Malecki, C. K., & Elliott, C. N. (2002). Children’s social behaviors as predictors of academic achievement: A longitudinal analysis. School Psychology Quarterly, 17, 1–23. O’Keefe, P. F. (1991). Relationship between social status and peer assessment of social behavior among mentally retarded and nonretarded children. Educational Resources Information Centre document reproduction service ED340500. Rockhill, C. M., & Asher, S. R. (1992). Peer assessment of the behavioral characteristics of poorly accepted boys and girls. Educational Resources Information Center document reproduction service ED346372. Scruggs, T. E., & Mastropieri, M. A. (1998). Tutoring and students with special needs. In K.  J. Topping & S.  Ehly (Eds.), Peer-assisted learning. Lawrence Erlbaum. Sergi, M. (2007). Evaluating short-term and long-term peer assessment of student teamwork. e-Journal of Business Education & Scholarship of Teaching, 1(1), 41–58. Sung, Y. T., Chang, K. E., Chang, T. H., & Yu, W. C. (2010). How many heads are better than one? The reliability and validity of teenagers’ self- and peer assessments. Journal of Adolescence, 33(1), 135–145. Thomas, G., Martin, D., & Pleasants, K. (2011). Using self- and peer-assessment to enhance students’ future-learning in higher education. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 8(1), 52–69. https://doi. org/10.53761/1.8.1.5 Topping, K., Buchs, C., Duran, D., & Van Keer, H. (2017). Effective peer learning: From principles to practical implementation. Routledge. Topping, K., Duran, D., & Van Keer, H. (2017). Using peer tutoring to improve reading skills: A practical guide for teachers. Routledge. www.routledge. com/9781138843295 Topping, K. J. (2003). Self and peer assessment in school and university: Reliability, validity and utility. In M. S. R. Segers, F. J. R. C. Dochy, & E. C. Cascallar (Eds.), Optimizing new modes of assessment: In search of qualities and standards. Kluwer Academic Publishers. (Also in Hebrew in Zohar, T. (2006), Alternative assessment. Raanana: Open University of Israel). Topping, K.  J. (2009). Peer assessment. Theory Into Practice, 48(1), 20–27. (themed issue on classroom assessment). Also in K.  Cauley & G.  Panaozzo (Eds.), Annual Editions: Educational Psychology 11/12. McGraw-Hill. Topping, K. J. (2018). Using peer assessment to inspire reflection and learning. In J. H. MacMillan (Ed.), Student assessment for educators series. Routledge. ISBN: 978-0-8153-6765-9 (pbk). www.routledge.com/9780815367659 (also in translation in Chinese by Zhejiang University Press)

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Tseng, S. C., & Tsai, C. C. (2007). On-line peer assessment and the role of the peer feedback: A study of high school computer course. Computers and Education, 49(4), 1161–1174. Valle, C., Andrade, H., Palma, M., & Hefferen, J. (2016). Applications of peer assessment and self-assessment in music. Music Educators Journal, 102(4), 41–49. Woodhouse, J., & Wood, P. (2020). Creating dialogic spaces: Developing doctoral students’ critical writing skills through peer assessment and review. Studies in Higher Education, 47(3), 643–655. https://doi.org/10.1080/0307507 9.2020.1779686 Wu, Y., & Schunn, C. D. (2020). From feedback to revisions: Effects of feedback features and perceptions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 60, 101826. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2019.101826 Yu, F.  Y., & Wu, C.  P. (2016). Predictive effects of the quality of online peer-­ feedback provided and received on primary school students’ quality of question-­ generation. Educational Technology & Society, 19(3), 234–246. Zheng, L. Q., Cui, P. P., Li, X., & Huang, R. H. (2018). Synchronous discussion between assessors and assessees in web-based peer assessment: Impact on writing performance, feedback quality, meta-cognitive awareness and self-efficacy. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(3), 500–514. https://doi. org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1370533

CHAPTER 5

School, Jail and the Pandemic: What Can Philosophical Education Actually Do? Walter Omar Kohan and Marcio Nicodemus I see the grass growing on the rock, and I see, in my heart, Love sprouting like a glare in the storm. (A Espera, Manoel de Barros)

5.1   The Evidence for Anti-civilization The pandemic hasn’t been the end of the world. At least not of the natural world, but maybe the end of the human world we call civilization—a nice name for a great theft: (…) the peoples of the Caribbean, Central America, Guatemala, the Andes and the rest of South America were aware of the misconception that civilization was. They did not give up since the proposed program was a mistake: ‘We do not want this theft’. And the gentlemen, ‘No, take this theft. Take the Bible, take the cross, take the college, take the university, take the road, take the railroad, take

This research is supported by CAPES and CNPq, Brazil.

W. O. Kohan (*) • M. Nicodemus State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_5

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the mining company, take the beating’. To that, people replied, ‘What is this? What a strange program! You don’t have another one, do you?’ (Krenak, 2019, p. 14)

Civilization is a weird scheme providing us with the illusion of control over nature, of being somehow enlightened, whereas we can’t see within an inch of our lives; the illusion of freedom, while we are imprisoned in our own creations; the illusion of progress, while we are going around in circles; the illusion of knowledge, while we are drowning in a sea of arrogance; the illusion of being able to survive the end of the world, while the end of the world is ourselves, managing and spreading barbarism within the same civilization that makes us sick, weakens us and kills us day after day. The common thread that weaves the history of civilization is not the production of enlightened knowledge as ‘a direct project towards a better world’ which allows freedom in terms of intellectual autonomy and political emancipation in search of social peace, but a unity that is built in the production of knowledge ‘starting from the domination of nature, which becomes domination over men’ (Adorno, 2009, p. 266), obscuring reason instead of clarifying it, imprisoning instead of liberating, and generating social conflict, because ‘the knowledge that is power knows no barriers, [neither in the dominion of nature] nor in the slavery of the creature’ (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1985, p. 18). Thus, barbarism is, in relation to civilization, ‘an immanent tendency that characterizes it’ (Adorno, 1995, p. 155) and which establishes that ‘the power of progress entails the progress of power’ (Adorno, 1995, p. 41). ‘The curse of irrepressible progress is irrepressible regression’ (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1985, p. 41) and this constitutes the so-called ‘fatal dialectic of civilization: the very progress of civilization leads to the release of increasingly destructive forces’ (Marcuse, 1975, p.  65) toward itself. We only need to look at the history of the country we have built and inhabited to see the error called civilization taking concrete shape before us: Brazil as a colonial state, was designed by men of power to be exclusionary, racist, macho, homophobic, income centralizing, enemy of education, violent, murderer of its people, intolerant, bigoted, misogynistic, castrating, ravenous and vulgar. We are in part all of these things, aren’t we? In this sense, we suspect that our problem is not that something has gone wrong. Brazil as a project, so far, has worked. (Simas & Rufino, 2020, p. 11)

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The project of civilization is a process of barbarism and its “history, with all that from the beginning it has of extemporaneous, suffered, failed, is expressed in a face—not, in a skull” (Benjamin, 1986, p. 22). The current face of the barbaric project of civilization called Brazil is President Jair Messias Bolsonaro. With his government, he has given continuity to this mistake called civilization, intensifying its catastrophic results with his policies of death, a sort of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2018) that violates, excludes and kills. Bolsonaro’s government does not take care of the lives of the most vulnerable, the poorest and, as Mam’Etu Kafurengá tells us, those who do not take care of life, take care of death. In political theory, the transit from power of sovereignty to biopower, around the eighteenth century, is described as a transit from the motto ‘let the people die and let them live’ to the motto ‘let the people live and let them die’ (Foucault, 2006, p. 285ff.). On the one hand, there is supposed to be an increasingly strong intervention in the individual ways of life; on the other hand, a kind of privatization of death. With the expansion of capitalism on a global scale, in the centuries that followed, this technology of power over people’s lives expanded and refined: here in Brazil, in the twenty-first century, it is, at the same time, a form of intervention in life and a form of application and management of death. It is the necropower, the power of death, which acts in the political-social and economic spheres; to serve the perverse system in place, in order to save the strongest (politically and socially) and the most economically useful. In this way, the system is cleansed of unproductive and burdensome lives, reducing expenses and increasing profits. The productive is let to live and the unproductive is left to die. Perhaps this is the central point of the genocidal policy of the Bolsonaro government. Governments think that if all the people who represent an expense died, that would be great. This means: you can let those who are at risk die. It is not an erroneous act of the person speaking; the person is not crazy, he is lucid, he knows what he is saying. (Krenak, 2020, p. 7)

The minds who run the Brazilian state choose to reproduce a system of policies of death, injustice and social massacre. Prison Times Brazilian governments seem to believe that ‘to rule means making people disappear’ (Safatle, 2017, pp. 56–65). Youth and adults, men and women, poor and miserable, black and indigenous, landless and homeless, LGBT,

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disappear every day under the violent action of the state government, whether directly or conniving, through police and military operations in the suburbs and favelas, through invasions of villages, quilombos and encampments, through eviction of urban occupations, through laws, trials and condemnations of the poor, through silencing minorities and outraging the vulnerable. They disappear … Not only because they are invisible in the practices of citizenship, having neither their voices heard nor their most basic social rights ensured and respected in the daily democratic processes of society, but also because they are invisible in their existence: their bodies disappear. One of the biggest and most efficient structures in making bodies disappear is prison. The writer Graciliano Ramos, arrested in 1936 and confined to the penal colony of Dois Rios, in Ilha Grande, reports in his Memórias do Cárcere the welcoming speech to the inmates delivered by a guard who used to tell inmates they were not there to better themselves but to die (Ramos, 1975, p. 65). The guard, like a sovereign of modern biopolitics who decides about the value or non-value of one’s life (Agamben, 1998, p. 137), made it clear that what awaited them there was not re-education, for later political and economic re-employment in society (Foucault, 1987, p. 185). What awaited them was the ultimate outpost of an unjust, violent and exclusionary model of social management, aimed at suppressing difference, silencing contestation and criticism, and making resistance impossible. If power still depends on strict control over bodies (or their gathering), new technologies of destruction are less concerned with inserting bodies into disciplinary apparatuses than with inserting them, at the appropriate time, into the order of maximum economy. (Mbembe, 2018, p. 59)

Therefore, the policy of imprisonment is not about deprivation of liberty. This is perhaps the most false narrative of the state which adopts a neoliberal model of government, since you cannot take freedom away from people who have never been, in fact, free. And most of the people currently in prison have never enjoyed (economic, political and social) freedom. They have always been socially despised and unwanted people, victims of a social management model based on ‘reducing the state’s social welfare sector and concomitantly increasing its criminal justice arm’ (Wacquant, 2003, p. 89) using ‘the prison as a social vacuum cleaner to

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clean up the dross/dust produced by ongoing economic transformations and remove the waste of market society from public space’ (Wacquant, 2003, p. 455). The criminalization of a crowd of miserable, poor, unemployed, abandoned at the margins of the social safety net is an economic and political project conceiving of life as an individual, competitive, meritocratic and profitable enterprise. This ‘extreme form of punitive management of misery consists in suppressing it through the physical elimination of the wretched’ (Wacquant, 2008, p. 114). The policy of incarceration is actually about erasing socially undesirable bodies and is made up of two stages: imprisonment and elimination. The assumption is as follows: the disappearance of these people’s bodies will also make the social problems they highlight disappear. Emergency housing, unemployment, drug dependency, mental illness, and illiteracy are just a few of the problems that disappear from the public eye when human beings struggling with these issues are relegated to cages. Thus, prison ends up being a ‘feat of magic,’ or rather, people who defend prison and seem tacitly supportive of a network of prison and jail proliferation are led to believe in the magic of imprisonment. But in prisons, problems don’t disappear; they disappear with human beings. And the practice of making large numbers of poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities disappear has literally become big business. The magic of prisons creates an absence of effort to understand social problems, thus hiding the reality behind mass incarceration. Prisons disappear with human beings to convey the illusion that they can solve social problems. (Davis, 1998)

‘The criminal justice system of a given society is not an isolated phenomenon subject exclusively to its own special laws. [But] It is part of the whole social system’ (Kirchheimer & Rusche, 2004, p. 282). Thus, the prison is the final and most abject structure of a political process that begins outside its walls and bars and unjustly and violently promotes, as a form of social management, punishment in the form of disappearance, imprisonment and elimination of extremely vulnerable people in society. We moved from the society of torture to the disciplinary society (Foucault, 1987); from the disciplinary society to the society of control (Deleuze, 1992); from the society of control to the society of disappearance (Safatle, 2017); from sovereign power to biopower (Foucault, 2006), from biopower to necropower (Mbembe, 2018); and we arrive at the society of disappearance that realizes the politics of death.

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The prison population in Brazil is composed of about 750,000 inmates.1 Most of them are between 18 and 29 years old, are black, have not completed primary education, and have ended up in prison for the crimes of theft, robbery, or drug trafficking.2 To better understand the life trajectory of these people we will consider data from a survey3 conducted by the NGO Observatório das Favelas. Most of these young black people without any complete formal education, dropped out of school because of economic difficulties needed to ‘earn money to help and support their families’, that is, they dropped out of school because they were poor and had to choose between spending their time studying or spending their time working for their own livelihood and that of their families. Most of them had previously worked in jobs related to construction, trade and informal activities with precarious ties and difficulty in establishing themselves in the labour market, that is, they gave up work because of its precariousness and their difficulty in staying at this pace. Many of them declared they entered the drug trade looking for a job to earn money and help their families, given the difficulty of finding any other job and the difficulty of studying. In other words, most of these young people, who are black and have an incomplete basic education, dropped out of school to work for their own livelihood and that of their families and gave up work because of the precarious conditions or lack thereof. And that is where they end up disappearing into prison: incarcerated and eliminated (Favelas Observatory, 2018). Unfortunately, in Brazil, ‘being incarcerated is a very common and recurring reality for young people in the country who are poor and black’ (Pimenta, 2018, p. 103). These inmates inhabit 2272 penal establishments including penitentiaries, agricultural and industrial colonies, foster homes, observation centres, custody and psychiatric treatment hospitals and public prisons.4 Of these penal establishments, according to the assessment of the judiciary

1  INFOPEN, 2019. https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZTlkZGJjODQtNmJ lMi00OTJhLWFlMDktNzRlNmFkNTM0MWI3IiwidCI6ImViMDkwNDIwLTQ0N GMtNDNmNy05MWYyLTRiOGRhNmJmZThlMSJ9. 2  INFOPEN, 2017. http://depen.gov.br/DEPEN/depen/sisdepen/infopen/relatoriossinteticos/infopen-jun-2017-rev-12072019-0721.pdf 3  Novas Configurações das Redes Criminosas após a Implantação das UPPS. http:// of.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/E-BOOK_Novas-Configura%C3%A7% C3%B5es-das-Redes-Criminosas-ap%C3%B3s-implanta%C3%A7%C3%A3o-das-UPPs.pdf 4  Geopresídios. https://www.cnj.jus.br/inspecao_penal/mapa.php retrieved June 9, 2020

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authority5 itself, more than half are in a situation of degradation with serious problems related to the general conditions in terms of facilities and administrative functioning. Factors such as the prisoners’ housing infrastructure and the services offered such as legal aid, employment, medical care and education are taken into consideration for this assessment. To get an idea of the severity of the situation, there is a deficit of 313,239 places, there are 229,823 provisional prisoners, and there are just 144,211 working prisoners,6 that is, there is overcrowding, people being held who should not be imprisoned because they are still awaiting trial, and lack of employment opportunities—an absurd policy, since most of the people being held are there because they did not have jobs outside. To highlight how the Brazilian government’s necropolitics operates in prisons in times of pandemic, consider the medical care services offered to prisoners. A considerable portion of those arrested are in penal institutions that do not have health care platforms, and those that do have them are in precarious spaces for basic and/or emergency medical care. The result is a worsening and increasing rate of sick prisoners. The most common diseases in the prison system are HIV/AIDS, syphilis, hepatitis, tuberculosis, leprosy, hypertension and diabetes. An estimated 235,628 people in prison have some of these diseases, most of which are infectious.7 Moreover, the lack of care for the lives of people imprisoned in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic only intensifies a policy of death through the disappearance (incarceration and elimination) of certain people (young, black, and poor for the most part). Considering the precarious conditions of penitentiary facilities, the overcrowding of cells and the high number of people with infectious diseases, the risk of contagion and the proliferation of coronavirus created an extremely vulnerable group at imminent risk of death. In the current Brazilian state government, imprisonment is the core of civil barbarism.

5  Relatório de gestão 2017—Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ). http://gmf.tjrj.jus.br/ documents/10136/5929327/relatorio-gestao.pdf Retrieved June 9, 2020 6  INFOPEN, 2019. https://app.powerbi.com/view? r=eyJrIjoiZTlkZGJjODQtNmJlMi00OTJhLWFlMDktNzRlNmFkNTM0MWI3IiwidCI 6ImViMDkwNDIwLTQ0NGMtNDNmNy05MWYyLTRiOGRhNmJmZThlMSJ9 7  Relatório de gestão 2017—Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ). http://gmf.tjrj.jus.br/documents/10136/5929327/relatorio-gestao.pdf (Accesso il 09/06/2020)

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5.2   School Times: The Wisdom of Love How to deal with the barbarism of civilization and its disastrous effects in times of Covid-19 pandemic? School stood up in this struggle, even though the conditions of its resistance are minimal and the possibilities for the propagation of ideas are limited due to the conditions of the moment (Adorno, 1995, p. 117). One possible path, then, might be to (re)think school in prison. Let us consider the educational assistance services offered to prisoners. Of all Brazilian prison personnel, only 124,000 inmates are involved in some educational activity: 14,190 in literacy, 40,386 in elementary school, 19,077 in secondary school, 796 in higher education.8 That is, the rate of inmates involved in some educational activity, at any level, is very low and there is a significant number of illiterate inmates. Most Brazilian penal institutions have no schools and their physical structure and administrative functioning are very precarious: classrooms are inadequate, damp and without ventilation or lighting; no books, notebooks, pencils, pens, erasers; no computers. In addition, educational activities stop when there are rumours and/or risks of riots and rebellions or searches; class time is shortened; psychological problems such as stress, depression and burnout occur due to exposure to situations of extreme violence; screening of incarcerated people with good behaviour in order to study; collective punishments of inmates that prohibit students from attending school in prison; conflicts regarding people’s time to study and work as students and as prisoners; prison guards not releasing prisoners from the cells of the penal institution to the classrooms of the school (both out of punishment itself and the belief that education in prison is a privilege and not a right of the incarcerated person9). Moreover, in times of the Covid-19 pandemic, the state government has withdrawn the right to education from prisoners,

 INFOPEN, 2019. https://app.powerbi.com/view? r=eyJrIjoiZTlkZGJjODQtNmJlMi00OTJhLWFlMDktNzRlNmFkNTM0MWI3IiwidCI 6ImViMDkwNDIwLTQ0NGMtNDNmNy05MWYyLTRiOGRhNmJmZThlMSJ9 9  Relatoria Nacional para o Direito Humano à Educação: Educação nas Prisões Brasileiras. São Paulo: Plataforma DhESCA, 2009. https://www.cmv-educare.com/wp-content/u ploads/2013/07/FINAL-relatorioeduca%C3%A7%C3%A3onasprisoesnov2009.pdf (retriefed June 9, 2020 8

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suspending classes in prison schools indefinitely and without the implementation of any alternative educational activities.10 Under these conditions, it may be appropriate to rethink the meaning of schooling in prison. On the one hand, it is worth noting that people in prison are ‘men and women who have been denied basic human rights throughout their lives, and who find themselves before an institution, which claims to be educational, in the sense of wanting to build a life project with them’ (Julião & Onofre, 2013, p. 64) and that ‘even in a repressive space, such as prisons, the school has its meaning and essence maintained, in the establishment of constraints and intersubjectivity’ (Onofre, 2011, p. 119). On the other hand, several authors show that the school, as a form and not as an institution, is the realization of another possible time (skholé: free time) that ‘manages, temporarily, to suspend or postpone the past and the future, thus creating a breach in linear time’ (Masschelein & Simons, 2018, p. 36) conducive to the reflection of other possible times, spaces and meanings. In this school time of suspension and desecration, social time is interrupted for reading, studying, thinking and questioning the world. The school in prison can also be the realization of another possible place, because ‘the place is a space full of time, which becomes singular for the relationships that spread there’ (Ferraro, 2018, p. 29). Thus, we can think of ‘making space for philosophy’ in this time called school, that is, making possible a reconfiguration of one’s relationships over time on the basis of freedom and love, insofar as ‘philosophy is a bond based on affect, rather than an affect based on bonding’ (Ferraro, 2018, p. 113) and its practice is ‘being together’ (Ferraro, 2018, p. 114)11

10  The CNE/CP memorandum no. 5/2020 of the National Council of Education (CNE) made some proposals regarding the guarantee of schools with adequate physical structure in relation to maintenance, ventilation and lighting in all prison establishments; the provision of books, notebooks, pencils, pens, erasers to all prisoners; the guarantee of access to computers with internet access for online classes; guarantee of unrestricted and permanent access to educational activities for all prisoners; work-compatible hours, plus, of course, the distribution of information and preventive protective equipment such as masks, gloves, soaps and alcohol gel. This opinion has been ignored by the current government. 11  Despite the fact that the educational institution in prison is closed by government decree, the right to education for prisoners is claimed through a manifesto as a space for affirmation and maintenance of affective ties, voices heard and bodies seen (ALMEIDA, Sandra; BARBOSA, Adriana; HERNÁNDEZ, Jimena; MELO, Vanusa; RODRIGUES, Fabiana; UZIEL, Ana., 2020); that is, it can and should be maintained.

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Philosophy is a commitment to love with the act of thinking. A philosophy education in prison schools could assume and foster this commitment and, more than that, could establish a teaching of philosophy with this commitment: teaching philosophy as an act of thinking that is the result of a way of loving. Philosophy is ‘the only expression of knowing that there is a feeling [or desire] in its naming’ (Ferraro, 2018, p. 113) and we who inhabit philosophy love wisdom and, more than teaching a discipline, teach the experience of loving wisdom. From Socrates, it is all we know and all we teach: tà erotikà, the things of love. (Plato, 2003, 177d)

One could think the love of wisdom cannot be taught to the extent that a feeling or desire cannot be transmitted from one person to another. Philosophy would then be impossible to teach. In this case, it would be necessary to transform the teaching of philosophy from the teaching of the love of wisdom to the teaching of the wisdom of love. And we could say: philosophy is an act of thought with a commitment to love. So, we would be teaching an act of love that is the result of a way of thinking, and we would be teaching wisdom that affirms a feeling or a desire that is not theoretically an end in itself but always needs a practical realization and someone else to exist. This, perhaps, is teaching philosophy: teaching the wisdom of love by practicing it with another. In other words, the teaching of philosophy can be, in the school in prison, the experience of knowing how to love: the teaching of a knowledge that allows one to feel, desire, realize, practice and promote the loving discovery of the other with the other. In this case, from inside the school in prison, through the teaching of philosophy, we would oppose to the force of hate that makes disappear, the wisdom of love that makes reappear. And, perhaps, this might be a great affront to this society of disappearance and its politics of death, because to teach philosophy philosophically, that is, to teach philosophy as a way of life that affirms the act of thinking with the commitment to love, is precisely to declare difference, to create a space of contestation, critique and resistance. To better examine this conception of teaching philosophy, we can replace the question ‘what is philosophy?’ with the question ‘why philosophize?’ The latter question presents a negative discontinuity of philosophy with itself, a possibility that philosophy is absent to the extent that it can be forgotten and be lost very easily (Lyotard, 2013, p. 24). This question presents a positive discontinuity of philosophy with itself, the possibility of it being absent and having, in addition to itself, another that must be constantly remembered or can be forgotten. The teaching of philosophy as

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teaching the wisdom of love originates in the event that takes place in a place and time (always a here and a now) in the encounter with the other (and in another) through the question ‘for whom to philosophize?’ Thus, thinking philosophically cannot be a solitary activity, but rather an activity that begins precisely when we look at the other and the other looks at us, as Jacques Derrida already told us (Derrida, 2011). To philosophize is not to dialogue with oneself, imprisoned in oneself. To philosophize is to dialogue with the other, free beings with the other. The problem is that we often avoid this exchange of glances, this dialogue and this freedom, because all this generates an annoyance, a discomfort, a malaise. Why? Perhaps because the instituted teaching of philosophy often leads to the denial of the other. However, if we want to educate, to do philosophy, to teach philosophy, there is no way to look away when it intersects with the gaze of the other and with other gazes, other bodies, because educating is a way of loving the other; and the crisis of education is the crisis of the love relationship with the other (Ferraro, 2018). And it is interesting to note that in the very discussion of the other, the singular and generic noun ‘other’ is used, and a gap is exposed: with whom do you intersect your gaze, with whom do you dialogue, with whom are you free? It is not only with an other, but with many others, crossed by different colours, genders, classes, ages, cultures, histories. The other is not an abstract, homogeneous and unique being, but a multiplicity of heterogeneous and concrete beings, beings with their own unique and irreplaceable experiences. This other has a face. These others are faces: they are their beliefs, their desires, their stories, their frustrations, their joys, their needs, and so on exposed. According to Lévinas, when I recognize myself in the face of others and others recognize themselves in my face, we come close and realize the ethics of encounter. The teaching of philosophy as teaching the wisdom of love can and should initiate and promote the ethics of encounter: Since eternity, one man responds to another. From unique to unique. Whether he looks at me or not, ‘it concerns me,’ I must respond to it. I call face that which, thus, in another, concerns me—concerns me—remembering, behind the posture he shows in his portrait, his abandonment, his helplessness and mortality, and his appeal to my ancient responsibility, as if he were unique in the world—loved. Appeal from the face of the neighbor which, in its ethical urgency, resets or cancels the obligations that the ‘questioned self’ owes to itself, and where concern for the death of the other may nevertheless be more important to the self than concern for itself. (Lévinas, 2010, pp. 260–261)

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Thus, the teaching of philosophy as teaching the wisdom of love can affirm that the only absolute value is the human possibility of giving, in relation to itself, priority to the other (Lévinas, 2010, p. 136) in the ethics of encounter, because that is where philosophy begins. The teaching of philosophy as a teaching of the wisdom of love with others, by others, and for others begins precisely when we make others understand that they are not alone in the world, that there is dialogue, that there is freedom, that life is not a game in which everyone is for themselves, that it is possible to assume an ethical position of mutual responsibility consolidated by the gaze among all, by all, and for all. However, in Derrida and Lévinas, as in other authors of the Western European tradition, the predominance of one sense over the others appears. Beginning with Aristotle, gaze is praised as the most important sense insofar it allows us to know and perceive more differences between things than the other senses (Aristotle, 2008, I 980a). However, African traditions closer to our Brazilian reality show us other, broader possibilities for thinking about this relationship with others (Oyěwùmí, 2002). We could then extend this vision of Derrida and Lévinas to a broader perception, moving from the logic of looking at others to that of perceiving otherness. Through this movement towards otherness, we can be closer to reaping the most beautiful fruit of love: justice. According to Derrida, justice is the impossible decision through an incalculable calculation (Derrida, 2010, pp. 46–47) and for Lévinas when we think that ‘to do justice, it is necessary to know: to objectify, compare, judge, form concepts, generalize, etc. (…) such operations are imposed and responsibility for others—which is charity and love—is lost’ (Lévinas, 2010, p. 244). In relation to persons, justice is an impossible calculation that loses love if it is the fruit of a love to wisdom, as a desire for a truth that is achieved by rational decision and application of a logical rule on someone’s action and not as the fruit of a wisdom of love, as an authentic desire (with, for and from others). Justice can be achieved through the practice of philosophy as a relationship of openness and connection with otherness, as the establishment of a beingfor-otherness, assuming a responsibility towards them, towards love. In relation to the state, justice is done when it assumes a commitment to mutual responsibility with all otherness and guarantees the occurrence of the relationship of the ethics of encounter in the search for freedom, justice and social peace. However, when the state not only fails to commit to responsibility, but also prevents the occurrence of the ethic of encounter

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by promoting social conflict through unjust actions to invisibilize, exclude, imprison, and eliminate alterities, ignoring the feelings, desires and needs of each of them, and making them disappear through policies of death, it is not, for that very reason, even a legitimate state (Lévinas, 2010, p. 132). In this case, we can resist and fight it, since ‘a state in which interpersonal relationship is impossible, in which it is by direct anticipation from the determinism proper to the state, [that] is a totalitarian state’ (Lévinas, 2010, p. 132). As we have already mentioned, today the Brazilian government acts as a totalitarian state, which has used the Covid-19 pandemic to pursue a policy of death by the force of hatred in a society of disappearance, especially within the prison, the ultimate symbol of the barbarism of civilization. In this context, teaching philosophy in prison schools can teach more than a love of wisdom, it can teach a wisdom of love with, for, and from otherness, to restore the politics of people and life, with a dose of hope in the struggle for freedom, justice and social peace.

Bibliography Adorno, T. (1995). Educação e Emancipação. Traduzione di Wolfgang Leo Maar. Paz & Terra. Adorno, T. (2009). Dialética Negativa. Traduzione di Marco Antonio Casanova. Zahar. Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1985). Dialética do esclarecimento: fragmentos filosóficos. Traduzione di Guido Antonio de Almeida. Zahar. Agamben, G. (1998). O poder soberano e a vida nua: homo sacer. In Traduzione di Antônio Guerrero (1st ed.). Editorial Presença. Almeida, S., Barbosa, A., Hernández, J., Melo, V., Rodrigues, F., & Uziel, A.  Manifesto educação em tempos de pandemia para os sujeitos privados de liberdade no Rio de Janeiro. Retrieved June 9, 2020, from http://forumeja. org.br/rj/sites/forumeja.org.br.rj/files/Manifesto%20Educa%C3%A7% C3%A3o%20em%20Tempos%20de%20Pandemia%20para%20os%20Sujeitos% 20Privados%20de%20Liberdade%20no%20Rio%20De%20Janeiro.pdf. Aristotle, M. (2008). livros I, II e III. Traduzione di Lucas Angioni. In Clássicos da filosofia: cadernos de tradução no 15. UNICAMP/IFCH. Benjamin, W. (1986). Documentos de cultura. Documentos de barbárie. Escritos escolhidos. H. M. Traduzione di Celeste & R. de Sousa (Eds.). Cultrix, USP. Brasil. (2009). Relatoria Nacional para o Direito Humano à Educação: Educação nas Prisões Brasileiras. Plataforma DhESCA.  Retrieved June 9, 2020, from https://www.cmv-­educare.com/wp-­content/uploads/2013/07/FINAL-­rela torioeduca%C3%A7%C3%A3onasprisoesnov2009.pdf

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Brasil. (2017). Relatório de gestão e supervisão do departamento de monitoramento e fiscalização do sistema carcerário e do sistema de execução de medidas socioeducativas. Conselho Nacional de Justiça, CNJ.  Retrieved June 9, 2020, from http://gmf.tjrj.jus.br/documents/10136/5929327/relatorio-­gestao.pdf Brasil. (2020a). Parecer CNE/CP no 5 /2020. Conselho Nacional de Educação (CNE). http://portal.mec.gov.br/index.php?option=com_docman&view=do w n l o a d & a l i a s = 1 4 5 0 1 1 -­p c p 0 0 5 -­2 0 & c a t e g o r y _ s l u g = m a r c o -­2 0 2 0 -­ pdf&Itemid=30192 Brasil. (2020b). Recomendação n° 62/2020. Concelho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ). Retrieved June 9, 2020, from https://www.cnj.jus.br/wp-­content/ uploads/2020/03/62-­Recomenda%C3%A7%C3%A3o.pdf Brasil. (n.d.) Geopresídios—radiografia do sistema prisional. Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ). Retrieved June 9, 2020, from https://www.cnj.jus.br/inspecao_penal/mapa.php Brasil. INFOPEN. 2019. Levantamento nacional de informações penitenciárias. Ministério da Justiça e da Segurança Pública (MJSP); Departamento Penitenciário Nacional (DEPEN), 2019. Retrieved June 9, 2020, from https:// app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZTlkZGJjODQtNmJlMi00OTJhLWFlMDktNzRlNmFkNTM0MWI3IiwidCI6ImViMDkwNDIwLTQ0NGMtNDN mNy05MWYyLTRiOGRhNmJmZThlMSJ9 Brasil. INFOPEN 2017. (2019). atualização junho—Levantamento nacional de informações penitenciárias. Brasília: Ministério da Justiça e da Segurança Pública (MJSP); Departamento Penitenciário Nacional (DEPEN). Retrieved June 9, 2020, from http://depen.gov.br/DEPEN/depen/sisdepen/infopen/ relatorios-­sinteticos/infopen-­jun-­2017-­rev-­12072019-­0721.pdf Davis, Angela. (1998). O racismo mascarado: reflexões sobre o complexo penitenciário industrial. Traduzione di Jaque Conceição. https://kilombagem.net.br/ pensadores/artigos-­textos/o-­racismo-­mascarado-­reflexoes-­sobre-­o-­complexo-­ penitenciario-­industrial/ (Il testo tradotto non è più disponibile in internet. Il testo originale fu pubblicato il 10 di settembre del 1998  in http://www. colorlines.com/articles/masked-­racism-­reflections-­prison-­industrial-­complex). Deleuze, G. (1992). Post-scriptum sobre as sociedades de controle. Conversações: 1972–1990, 34, 219–226. Derrida, J. (2010). Força de lei: o fundamento místico da autoridade. Martins Fontes. Derrida, J. (2011). O animal que logo sou (a seguir). Traduzione di Fábio Landa. Editora Unesp. Favelas Observatory. (2018). Novas configurações das redes criminosas após a implantação das UPPS. Rio de Janeiro: Observatório das Favelas. http://of. org.br/wpcontent/uploads/2018/07/E-BOOK_Novas-Configura%C3% A7%C3%B5es-das-Redes-Criminosas-ap%C3%B3s-implanta%C3%A7%C3% A3o-das-UPPs.pdf. (Acess in: 09/06/2020). Ferraro, G. (2018). A escola dos sentimentos. NEFI. Foucault, M. (1987). Vigiar e punir: o nascimento da prisão. Traduzione di Raquel Ramalhete. Vozes.

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PART II

Turning Classes into Dialogic Communities: Theoretical Horizons Towards the Goal of Inclusion

CHAPTER 6

Philosophical Inquiry with Children: Inviting Uncertainty into the Classroom Kerstin Michalik

6.1   Education for Uncertainty and the Future: Challenges for Teaching and Learning The challenges presented to education, both in the present and the future, by a world that is increasingly characterised by complexity and uncertainty, and threatened by climate change, environmental destruction and political and economic crises have been discussed at the international level over the last two decades, including in the context of education for sustainable development. In this latter context, there are calls not only for education to have new goals and content and for new forms of teaching and learning (Barnett, 2000;  Barnett,  2012; Fecho, 2013; Hall, 2006) but also for “radical change” to the entire educational system (Tauritz, 2016, 101). At the centre is the issue of which skills, capabilities, competencies, attitudes and approaches are required in order to meet present and future global challenges in a constructive manner and to remain capable of building a democratic and peaceful coexistence.

K. Michalik (*) University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_6

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A core competency is the ability to deal with uncertainty (of knowledge) so as to promote the development and advancement of “uncertainty competencies”, defined as a “specific set of skills, knowledge, attitudes and capabilities needed to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity in diverse contexts” (Tauritz, 2016, 90). More precisely, this refers to skills such as using uncertainty as a catalyst for creative action, empathising with people with different perspectives, cultivating an enquiring mind, accepting not knowing what will happen, logical reasoning and reflecting on and changing one’s own beliefs (Tauritz, 2012, 307; Tauritz, 2016, 94). In the context of education for sustainable development, further core competencies have been formulated (de Haan et al., 2008, 188, 237ff.) on the basis of the OECD concept of key competencies (2005): • the competence to deal with ambivalence and ambiguity as the basis for actions and decisions in the face of incomplete and overly complex information; • the dilemmatic competence required for individual and collective decision-making based on the tolerance of ambiguity (the ability to formulate decision-making processes on the basis of contradictory information) and ambivalence (the emotional willingness to admit contradictory definitions of problems); • the competence to act ethically on the basis of concepts of fairness. Uncertainty competencies, as discussed here in the context of sustainability and climate change education, are also relevant for dealing with new information and communication technology and artificial intelligence, and in particular for democratic education. The proliferation of populist movements in Europe can be construed as a form of complexity reduction, a reaction to the increasing uncertainty both of the situation in which individuals find themselves and of global developments. Uncertainty competencies have become a key aspect of the discussion about education for the future, and there is a growing consensus that this will have profound implications for teaching and learning and curriculum design because the current education system is not capable of delivering these kinds of competencies or teaching this kind of content. The aim of inviting uncertainty into the learning process is in tension with the “Culture of Certainty” (Rowley, 2004, 88) that informs the existing system. Education for sustainable development and climate change education have been introduced into curricula since the OECD’s 2009–2014

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education campaign, but school systems and teaching continue to be mostly or even—since PISA—increasingly based on certainty: reduction of the complexity of content in view of the need to reproduce knowledge for the purpose of assessment, a focus on students giving the right answers, standardised curricula, standardised skills and competencies, a focus on output and evidence in the design of teaching and learning processes, individual rather than cooperative learning processes. By contrast, a range of concepts has been developed for educational approaches that create the space to explore complexity and uncertainty, in order to prepare children for the current and future challenges. Learning to handle uncertainty requires learning environments that have been described by different authors as follows: safe learning environments, in which learners can discuss different perspectives and where judgement is suspended, where learners can accept that for most complex problems there is no single right answer; process-centred and open-ended, critical and reflective inquiry approaches to teaching; collective meaning-making and reflective practice; inter-disciplinary topics and complex problems; teachers and students who are willing to switch roles, with teachers becoming experts in not knowing (Gordon, 2006, Barnett, 2012, Hall, 2006, Davies 2012; Tauritz, 2012, 2016, 2019; Marcussen et al., 2021a, 2021b; Kavanagh et al., 2021; Waldron et al., 2021). There is a broad consensus that preparing children to cope with an uncertain world cannot consist in isolated training of competencies; it must be an interdisciplinary, holistic approach that is applied throughout the curriculum, and based on a profound shift in pedagogical paradigms. The challenges for education and schooling have been identified, and the requirements of teaching and learning described, but research to further elucidate the concept of teaching students how to handle uncertainty and complexity is still in its infancy (Hall, 2006; Jordan & McDaniel, 2014; Beghetto, 2017; Tauritz, 2019, Davies, 2012) and little is known about how to prepare teachers for such a profound and complex change, not only in educational practice but also with regard to the role of the teacher (Tauritz, 2016, 101). In discussion about education for the future and education for uncertainty and sustainability, philosophising with children has thus far attracted limited attention as a method and a specialist pedagogy, although experts in philosophical inquiry have been highlighting its relevance to environmental and sustainable issues for quite some time (Birch, 2020; Künzli David et al., 2015; Lyle, 2018; MacDonald et al., 2017; MacDonald &

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Bowen, 2016; Marcussen et  al., 2021a, 2021b; Müller, 2011; Rowley, 2004; Rowley & Lewis, 2003; Sukopp, 2020). Uncertainty is a key element of philosophising and the process of philosophical inquiry is a playground where both students and teachers can experience and deal with uncertainty—philosophical uncertainty.

6.2  Uncertainty as a Key Element of Philosophical Inquiry Philosophising with children puts engagement with open questions centre stage; it embraces and works with uncertainty. In what is known as the Community of Philosophical Inquiry, children discuss philosophical questions such as “Can plants be happy?”, “What is friendship?”, “What does being fair mean?”, or “How did the world begin?” Philosophising focuses on open questions and complex content that is open to different interpretations. Uncertainty is central to the PwC method because there are no straightforward right or wrong answers to philosophical questions. Ultimately, there is not necessarily even consensus. Philosophical inquiry can conclude with new questions or controversial positions. The outcomes, the process of philosophical inquiry and the direction it takes are all uncertain. In the community of philosophical inquiry, pupils and teachers have to deal with uncertainty and complexity; multi-perspective thinking is a central feature. Learning for an unknown future not only calls on us to deal with the uncertainty of knowledge, it is also an ontological challenge to our epistemological assumptions about the world and highlights the limitations of our understanding. This kind of uncertainty is fundamental and is explicitly addressed in philosophical inquiry because children gain insight into the complexity of the world and the epistemic limits of our understanding. What we can know, what we may hope for, what we should do, what is it to be human—these fundamental issues identified by the philosopher Kant as the primary questions of philosophy (Kant, 1968) are also the subject matter of philosophising with children and are central to the issue of how we want to live on the planet, now and in the future. Other features of philosophical inquiry are also linked to uncertainty and are relevant to education for the future. As a method of exchanging views and developing ideas, philosophising with children aims to promote critical, cooperative, creative and caring thinking (Lipman, 2003; Lipman

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et al., 1980). Children learn to scrutinise things critically, to develop and justify their own opinions and viewpoints; they learn how to develop and evaluate arguments, to question assumptions and conclusions. Critical thinking skills are important for the collaborative exploration of controversial and unresolved issues across all curriculum areas. Cooperative thinking is at the heart of the community of inquiry, which is concerned with the exchange of ideas, collective meaning-making and the accommodation of alternative perspectives; it is about self-reflection, changing your perspectives and opinions in the light of other perspectives and arguments. This also fosters creative thinking—there are no limits to thinking because of the openness and uncertainty of potential answers to philosophical questions. The community of inquiry is designed to be a safe place where all voices are important and all voices are heard. The development of caring thinking—socially and ethically responsible thinking—is another important aim (Morehouse, 2018; Sharp, 2018) and of particular relevance for dealing with the complexity and uncertainty of decision-­ making processes in an increasingly complex and interconnected world (Lyle, 2018). The community of philosophical inquiry provides a learning environment that is quite the opposite of mainstream, certainty-based education—it has been characterised as a “counter-cultural-practice” (O’Riordan, 2016, 658). Philosophising with children also has a considerable impact on student–teacher interaction and the relationship between students and teachers. In philosophical inquiry, the role of the teacher as the provider of knowledge is suspended. The unpredictability of the dynamics and outcomes of philosophical inquiry is an opportunity to step beyond the traditional student/teacher dyad and for teachers to enter instead into meaningful, intensive, authentic conversations with children on an equal footing (Scholl et al., 2014, 2016; Michalik, 2019). Teachers do not know the answers to philosophical questions; they have to deal with the uncertainty of possible answers as well as the uncertainty of the direction of inquiry. In discussion on education for sustainable development, it has been pointed out that the values and practices involved in the interdisciplinary themes of sustainable development and uncertainty competencies, in general, cannot be taught by means of a traditional top-down approach. There is an urgent need to rethink relationships between teachers and learners and move towards more dialogic forms of teaching and learning; towards

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the cultivation of “not knowing”, on the part both of learners and teachers (Marcussen et al., 2021a, 2021b, 18; Tauritz, 2016, 101). In this respect, philosophising with children should not be considered an activity that sits alongside subject teaching, but as an integral part of teaching and learning throughout the curriculum. Not only because critical, cooperative, creative and caring thinking cannot be developed in isolated lessons; the capacity for ethical reflection and judgement is particularly important in the context of education for the future.

6.3   Ethical Inquiry In times of global crisis, sustainability issues and challenges to democracy, ethical issues must become an important part of teaching and learning and be infused into all topics and subject areas (Lyle, 2018). The central overall question is: How do we want to live, now and in the future? Discussion of this question, in particular with regard to the environmental crisis and the associated economic, ecological, social and cultural challenges, is linked with many normative issues on which ethical reflection is required. These include the relationship between humans and the natural world, intergenerational and international justice and fairness, responsibility for current and future generations and questions of economic development and consumption; the specialist discipline of philosophy addresses these under ecological ethics, environmental ethics and climate ethics (e.g., Birnbacher, 2016; Reder et  al., 2019; Roser & Seidel, 2015). Discussions on education for sustainability have stressed the central role played by ethical decision-making and the ability to reflect on moral norms and ethical concepts with regard to the ability to take action. This falls within dilemmatic competence, the ability to handle dilemmas relating to individual and collective decision-making in conditions of uncertainty, and generally to the capacity for moral behaviour—value-based decision making—based on concepts of justice (de Haan et  al., 2008, Künzli David et al., 2015). In terms of content, philosophical inquiry with children can provide the basis for reflection on fundamental issues, on terms and concepts that are of central importance for sustainability, such as justice and in particular social justice (Kavanagh et al., 2021). Justice is a complex philosophical term that cannot be used in an unqualified manner to evaluate conflict situations; it requires a specific approach to learning that aims to clarify terminology and promotes learners’ ability to form judgements:

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What is justice? What does justice actually mean for present and future generations, and might it have different meanings in different cultural contexts? Meanings have to be negotiated, requiring intercultural communication skills and the ability to change one’s own perspective, to question critically and to reflect on one’s own cultural values. In a pluralistic and democratic society, values and norms are not merely simulated, they must become the subject of communicative processes (Weber, 2013; Gebhard & Michalik, 2017). The paradox of passing on values in a pluralistic society can only be addressed by viewing open dialogue about values themselves as a prerequisite: “The pedagogical environment is not only a place of transmission; rather, it constitutes a values culture in itself, it is a place where values are acquired and transformed” (Weber, 2013, 20.). Alongside core terms and concepts, values and norms can also be scrutinised, discussed, clarified and endowed with meaning and significance. This kind of open process for dealing with norms and values is also relevant to the specific problems and dilemmas that are addressed in educational discourse around sustainability. The shift from Environmental Education to the concept of Education for Sustainable Development (UNESCO Decade 2005–2014, UNESCO, 2005) has been criticised for foregrounding a one-sided, anthropocentric and economic-centred ethic (Kopnina, 2012, 2014, 2020; Kopnina & Cherniak, 2015; Kopnina & Meijers, 2014). It has been argued that whereas the central preoccupations of the environmental education that emerged in the 1970s and 80s—in response to concerns about “limits to growth” (Meadows et al., 1972)—were an understanding of basic ecology and an awareness of the need to protect nature, the Sustainable Development Goals (UNESCO, 2017) have emphasised the social and economic aspects of sustainability because it is assumed that the triple objectives of sustainable development—social, economic and environmental—will be achieved through economic growth and development (Kopnina, 2020, 1 f.). This may create a particular dilemma because “critics have noted that it is precisely economic growth and industrial development, with the associated population and consumption growth, that are the root causes of environmental unsustainability” (Kopnina, 2020, 2). In view of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the sustainable development goals, Kopnina and others call for new forms of “ecocentric education” or an “eco-pedagogy” (Kahn, 2010), “encouraging learners to develop a consciousness for

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planetary inclusiveness, where collaboration and sharing with other species becomes the norm” (Kopnina, 2020, 5). In the context of these problems and discussions, philosophising with children can provide a platform for critical learning, reinforcing the plurality of possible perspectives (anthropocentric, biocentric, pathocentric, holistic) and the scrutiny of existing paradigms relating to the relationship between humans and nature and current forms of consumption, by dealing with philosophical questions such as: • What is nature? Are human beings part of nature? Does non-human nature, such as plants, animals or stones, have rights? Does nature need humans or do humans need nature? • What is the difference between humans and other beings? • Do species have a right to continue to exist? Are we responsible for animals and plants? • What do we need to live? Are human needs more important than those of other species? What is important in life? These series of questions (Brüning, 2021; Brüning & Nachtsheim, 2021; MacDonald et al., 2017; MacDonald & Bowen, 2016; Michalik & Schreier, 2017; Müller, 2011) are open-ended and offer learners the opportunity to develop alternative ideas. Because in order to resolve the increasingly urgent problems of the environment and the distribution of resources, might it not perhaps actually be important and necessary to explore a completely new way of thinking, and to question both the prevailing anthropocentric perspective and established patterns of living, trading and consuming? Philosophising can develop students’ ethical reflection skills and strengthen their moral judgement without requiring predetermined moral values or attitudes. It meets the requirements of an ethical education “that can challenge dominant frameworks and ideologies that sustain current structures of oppression and environmental degradation, empowering children to think differently about the word and the world and their capacity for action” (Kavanagh et al., 2021, 11). The openness of philosophical inquiry is also important in the context of another area of tension that gives rise to controversy in discussions on education for sustainability: the tension between the need to address urgent environmental problems on the one hand and to promote pluralistic and democratic learning for an uncertain future on the other.

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6.4  Learning for an Open and Uncertain Future?! How open is the future and how open does education need to be? There is debate not only about the specific goals and underlying ethics of Education for Sustainable Development but also about philosophical assumptions relating to what education is or should be—in general and in particular with regard to a future that is perceived as being increasingly uncertain. The role of education also needs to be critically reviewed in the light of the Fridays for Future movement, through which young people are expressing their concern and anger about the unsustainability of societies’ current practices—which might lead us to question whether the present generation still has the moral authority to discuss education for sustainability on behalf of younger generations. The discussion on Education for Sustainable Development centres on the tensions around its implications for the ethics of educational practice in the light of the democratic role of public education: “On the one hand, there is a deep concern about the state of the planet and a sense of urgency that demands a break within existing non-sustainable systems, lifestyles, and routines, while on the other hand there is the conviction that it is wrong to persuade, influence, or even educate people towards pre- and expert-determined ways of thinking and acting” (Wals, 2010, 150). Although arguments have been made for a return to “instrumentalism”, on the basis that ecological problems are severe and urgent and that the creation of ecologically minded students could help resolve them (Kopnina, 2012, 2020), others stress that education should not be instrumentalised or turned into a political tool in order to create any specific, pre-determined society. As a normative form of education that aims to promote the sustainable transformation of society as defined by specific sustainable development goals or as characterised by the corresponding educational aims in the form of values, attitudes or specific competencies, education for sustainable development is seen as being in conflict with democratic, pluralistic and emancipatory approaches to education (Öhman, 2007; de Haan et al., 2008; Tauritz, 2016; Holfelder, 2019). It is also seen as being in notable contrast with the general perception that we are living in an age of uncertainty and that in our post-modern era, the future has come to be understood as contingent, non-linear, non-­ teleological—and uncertain and unpredictable. Holfelder has pointed out that the implication of the Education for Sustainable Development campaign is that a sustainable future can be

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achieved if people are properly educated, and that this future is something that can be shaped. She argues that this understanding of education, which sees it primarily as training to achieve specific aims, closes down the future by prescribing the kind of future learners should be educated for; the future is not open or left to the next generation (Holfelder, 2019, 944). She also argues that the notion that the future is completely uncertain and contingent, and that children have to be prepared for such contingency through the acquisition of flexible competencies, is also a predetermined and closed concept and therefore points in the same direction. Both visions of future imply a “short-sighted view of the individual and of education itself which misses the real potentials of education for the desired societal transformation” (Holfelder, 2019, 950). As a consequence of these conflicts, critical voices in the discussion of Education for Sustainable Development are calling for different, emancipatory and pluralistic approaches to education that free it from specific aims and predetermined outcomes, instead creating the potential for self-­ determination and promoting critical thinking, pluralistic meaning-­ making, communication and cooperation, discursive dialogue, participation in democratic dialogue and decision-making (Öhman, 2007; Rowley, 2004; Wals, 2010). These pluralistic visions of education for an open future, which consider education as a platform for critical and new ways of thinking, aim to create the conditions and opportunities for the development of alternative futures, the transformation of established ways of thinking and new forms of living. They are based not only on the demands made of education in a democratic society but also take into account the uncertainty about the “right” aims of education in the context of an unknown future and the limits of education itself, namely the uncertainty, non-causality and unpredictability of pedagogical processes. Discussion about the contradictions and problems inherent in education for sustainability in the face of an uncertain and open future underlines the importance and potential of philosophising with children; it is a critical pedagogy where uncertainty plays an important role in a variety of respects, as already explored in the foregoing sections of this chapter. Philosophising with children can be considered a critical and democratic pedagogy because it provides for democratic thinking and experiences, the outcomes of which are not predetermined. Philosophical discussion provides a space for freedom of ideas, freedom of thought and freedom of speech. It should not educate learners about an already

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existing society, or about a future that is already fixed by virtue of predetermined values, approaches and attitudes; it is a democratic practice that creates the conditions for new and democratic ways of living in the future; ways of living that are not predetermined but thoroughly uncertain and open. The philosophical research community is preparing to live with uncertainty and its open output opens up space for new ideas. This openness and uncertainty are central to the demands of democratic education and critical pedagogy because in principle they also have the potential to transform society (Haynes, 2016; Echeverria & Hannam, 2017; Burgh 2018). Philosophising as a critical pedagogy meets the requirements for a “future education” in a variety of respects. Empirical research findings underline the specific potential of philosophical inquiry for new forms of teaching and learning.

6.5   Empirical Findings: Philosophical Inquiry as a Space for Mutual Learning and the Transformation of Pedagogical Paradigms There has thus far been little research into the extent to which uncertainty can be integrated into learning processes and how students and teachers can learn to deal with it. Research into the teaching of “uncertainty competencies” is still in its infancy (Tauritz, 2016, 95, 101), but a number of studies indicate that reflective practice and collaborative learning environments can help learners to cope with uncertainty (Davies, 2012; Jordan & McDaniel, 2014). My own research into the role of uncertainty in philosophical inquiry, based on interviews with German primary school teachers and discussions with groups of children in the city of Hamburg (Michalik, 2019), provides some evidence that children meet the uncertainty of philosophical inquiry in a positive and playful way, and that it creates the opportunity for teachers to rethink and change their ideas about children, and about teaching and learning in general.

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What Do Students Think About Uncertainty in Philosophical Inquiry? Group discussions were held with a total of 70 primary school children from three different groups of mixed-age learners (6–12 years of age) at a Hamburg primary school (Michalik, 2019). Discussion focused on what the children thought was good or less good about doing philosophy and what the differences were compared with the lessons they usually had. A particularly positive aspect for the children was that there were no definitive answers and so the outcome of discussions was not prejudged (all citations from Michalik, 2019, 1367  f.): “I think it’s good that no opinions are wrong and none are right, either. So it could be one way, but it could be the other way as well.” “I think it’s good that there isn’t any right or wrong.” The openness and uncertainty of philosophical questions and discussion topics were seen as a particularly positive aspect of philosophy sessions by the majority of children. The children explicitly viewed the whole process of doing philosophy as an opportunity to broaden or modify their own thinking. “I also think it’s good because you can be influenced by other children and then think about your opinion, which may not be quite right, because then other people might say something that you have to think about some more.” “Well, I also think it’s very good when someone says, that’s right and someone else says, well maybe not. Then you have to think again. I like that—I think it’s good.” Many comments related to the openness of the process of philosophising and the variety of opinions and perspectives in philosophical discussion, where uncertainty as to the “right” answer was predominantly seen as an interesting challenge and an opportunity to reconsider and differentiate one’s own position. The group discussions were a striking illustration of children’s willingness and ability to get involved with collective reflection, and to view the variety of opinions and perspectives, and the uncertainty of the results of philosophical enquiry and research, as a positive experience and as an opportunity to develop their own thinking and reflect further. Exchanging views with other children, the collective search for meaning and significance, was of particular help when it came to dealing productively with uncertainty. “If there are different opinions, I think again, is that right? Then I just say it and we all think about it again together.” Having their own thinking questioned and challenged as part of an open and uncertain philosophical process was what made philosophy

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particularly enjoyable for the children. In this sense, philosophical inquiry can be regarded as an appropriate approach for inviting uncertainty into the learning process. How Do Teachers Deal with Uncertainty as a Central Element of Philosophising? Coping with uncertainty both epistemically and pedagogically was a continually recurring theme in interviews with German primary teachers held in 2012 and 2015 in the City of Hamburg (Michalik, 2019). Uncertainty is evident in different respects: in relation to philosophical issues, the range of possible answers, the unplanability of philosophical discussion and the loss of control that arises from this for the teacher. The following statement directly linked the experience of uncertainty with a different perception of what it means to be a teacher: “What happens of course, is that the image of you as the teacher changes […], because you step out of the role of being the provider of answers […] and you have to come to terms with the fact that you aren’t providing them, just as the children do” (all citations from Michalik, 2019, 130 f.). Teachers who philosophise with children directly confront traditional expectations of their role, by emphasising, for example, that productive engagement with lack of knowledge is a key component of the learning process and that in this, too, teachers function as role models: “It’s OK to make mistakes and not know things, and that has to start with me.” This kind of attitudinal change is also evident in changes to lesson planning, where children’s issues and interests outside of philosophy are increasingly used as the basis for sessions. “Before, if you were tackling the topic of puberty, for instance, you’d have decided in advance what the content of the discussion with the children would be, whereas now you turn it round and ask, what are you interested in? What goes through your mind when you think about this topic? So you’re working more on the basis of the children’s questions, and what interests them.” Philosophising with children affects the role of the teacher and also impacts on the power gap between pupils and teachers. What teachers particularly value about philosophy sessions is the depth and intensity of the discussion and the authentic dialogue of equals, in which the traditional role of the teacher as knowledge provider is suspended. Teachers place particular emphasis on the broadening of their horizons and the changes in their thinking triggered by the challenges inherent in

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philosophical enquiry and more particularly by their exchanges with the children and the children’s view of the world. “It’s always a great gift for me at a personal level to do philosophy with children, because I see the world through the children’s eyes and get their perspective on it. And that always reminds me of what life’s all about.” Analysis of a new set of interviews with nine primary teachers, undertaken in 2019, provides further and more detailed insight into the relevance of philosophising with children for learning processes that benefit from a constructive approach to uncertainty. Although none of the interview questions focused on the social challenges, a number of teachers made direct links to these when asked why they thought it was important to philosophise with children. On the one hand, they pointed out that encouraging children to ask questions and think for themselves was important to enable them to decide how they wanted to live in the future: “I’d like to help the children develop into responsible people who are able to make conscious decisions about how they want to live and who they want to be. And I think you can only do that if you’ve learned how to think.” Another teacher considered that the importance of philosophising lay in “the children learn[ing] to be conscious. Conscious of themselves, conscious of others, conscious of their environment […]”. Teachers also expressed the view that philosophising could help children to assert themselves in complex situations: “There are so many everyday situations where there isn’t any answer, or that are unsettling or contradictory […] and these kinds of discussions, without any expectation of a fixed result, can help, they’re almost like an educational intervention that prepares learners for life as it is today […]. And that’s why I think it’s important to practise this kind of openness, and to practise dealing with contradiction and controversy. Because I believe it prepares us to live in the world as it is today.” Teachers had some interesting observations relating to children’s development as they dealt with uncertainty. Several teachers reported on children who had problems with the openness of philosophical questions and philosophical reflection to begin with, and in particular with the openness of answers, but who within only a few months learned to cope with, and even to value, such openness: “What is very clear to me is that some children find it difficult at first not to be getting answers from me, and that goes on for quite a while […] but then it’s wonderful to see how that changes over the course of the six months, and how the children become happier with posing questions and talking about them, and listening to

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each other’s ideas and reflecting on them, and then they don’t want to be given the answers any more.” Another teacher reported that engaging with uncertainty could also lead learners to engage with different opinions and perspectives: “Some of them still find it quite difficult to tolerate the fact that we aren’t working with yes and no here, or with right and wrong. […] if we do it for a longer period, pretty soon that stops. And then they suddenly discover how wonderful it is not to be looking for answers. And it’s lovely to see how children who were so adamant about their viewpoint in the first session suddenly change.” A further effect of philosophising described by teachers was a change in children’s overall attitudes, evidenced by a new openness to issues and to a range of approaches. Even in the context of a school culture that is based on certainties, it is obviously possible to provide children with the space for new experiences and learning processes that allow them to engage with openness, diversity and uncertainty. A number of interviews made clear that this could initially be a challenge, not only for the children but also for their teachers: “It’s also to do with the loss of control, with not knowing exactly what the children will come up with.” Another teacher underlined that it was “difficult” to reconcile philosophising with the “conventional role of the teacher”. But it is also clear that teachers who allowed themselves to play with uncertainty and were able to admit their own uncertainties also taught differently outside of sessions that included philosophising. This was evident on the one hand from the openness of such sessions to children’s questions and a readiness to make spontaneous changes to session plans: “I think I’m listening even better to the children’s questions, taking in even more ideas and suggestions from the children and then using them as stimuli and in sessions.” Where questions arose in the course of the session—questions that might previously have been considered interruptions—“you step out of your plan and generally just go with it”. And on the other hand, teachers said that philosophising enabled them to “take bolder or more controversial approaches to certain issues” because they had realised that they could have more confidence in the children. The results of the interviews with teachers in the city of Hamburg are consistent in large part with existing research findings, indicating that from the point of view of teachers, philosophising with children can lead to changes in teachers’ perception of, and therefore attitude to, children; this, in turn, has an impact on their pedagogical practice, even in other teaching situations. Scholl, Nicholls and Burgh, who interviewed teachers

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in Australia about the impact of philosophising on their own subject sessions, talk of “experiences of dissonance” (Scholl et al., 2014, 437) that lead teachers to reflect on their conception of themselves to date and their role as teachers. This leads to changes in the way they relate to and interact with children in the classroom, which they characterise as allowing more space for children’s questions and interests, greater autonomy and lower levels of control on learning, and much more collaborative, interactive, dialogically orientated and generally more democratic teaching (Scholl, 2014, 93ff.; Scholl et al., 2014). As part of the community of philosophical inquiry, teachers also benefit from the collective thinking process and the originality of the children’s thoughts. Teaching and learning become a two-way process and generate space for the reflection and transformation of paradigms (Scholl, 2014, 100; Scholl et al., 2014, 439). Philosophising with children is a pedagogy that challenges teachers and the space of philosophical uncertainty invites them to rethink the relationships between children and adults, moving towards more dialogic and democratic forms of teaching and learning (Haynes, 2016; Murris, 2008). In this way, PwC can be regarded as a means for embedding uncertainty in educational practice and providing an educational environment that helps both students and teachers to manage uncertainty in a constructive, critical, creative and ethically responsible way. Philosophising with children is not the isolated training of competencies but a pedagogical approach that has far-reaching effects on teaching and learning in general. In this respect, Philosophising with children can provide important input into the redesign of education to take account of the challenges presented by an increasingly uncertain word.

Bibliography Barnett, R. (2000). Supercomplexity and the Curriculum. Studies in Higher Education, 25(3), 255–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/713696156 Barnett, R. (2012). Learning for an unknown future. Higher Education Research & Development, 31, 65–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2012.642841 Beghetto, R. A. (2017). Inviting uncertainty into the classroom. Five strategies to help students respond well to uncertainty and foster complex problem-solving skills. Educational Leadership: Unleashing Problem Solvers, 75(2), 20–25. Birch, R. (2020). Discerning hope: Intra-actions of a philosophy for children workshop and the eco-socially just potential of practicing hope. Journal of

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Lyle, S. (2018). Education for sustainable development and global citizenship through philosophical enquiry: Principles and practices. Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, 39(1), 1–12. MacDonald, M., & Bowen, W. (2016). Sharing space with other animals: Engaged philosophical inquiry, and sustainability. Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, 37(1), 20–28. MacDonald, M., Bowen, W., & Hill, C. (2017). Using engaged philosophical inquiry to deepen young children’s understanding of environmental sustainability: Being, becoming and belonging. Journal of Philosophy in Schools, 4(1), 50–73. https://doi.org/10.21913/jps.v4i1.1419.29 Marcussen, E. H., Weiss, M. N., & Helskog, G. H. (2021a). How philosophizing the dialogos way can promote sustainable development in education. Teacher education in the 21st century-emerging skills for a changing world. IntechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96198 Marcussen, E. H., Weiss, M. N., & Helskog, G. H. (2021b). How philosophizing the dialogos way can promote education for sustainable development. Retrieved June 14, 2021, from https://www.intechopen.com/online-­first/ how-­p hilosophizing-­t he-­d ialogos-­w ay-­c an-­p romote-­e ducation-­f or-­ sustainable-­development?jwsource=cl Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W., III. (1972). The limits to growth. Universe Books. Michalik, K. (2019). Teacher and learner perspectives on philosophical discussion. Uncertainty as a challenge and opportunity. Childhood and Philosophy, 15, 125–144. Michalik, K., & Schreier, H. (2017). Wie wäre es, einen Frosch zu küssen? Philosophieren mit Kindern im Grundschulunterricht (2nd ed.). Westermann. Morehouse, R.  E. (2018). Caring thinking, education of the emotions and the community of inquiry: A psychological perspective. In M.  R. Gregory & M. J. Laverty (Eds.), Community of inquiry with ann margaret sharp. childhood, philosophy and education (pp. 197–208). Routledge. Müller, H.-J. u. M. v. S. S. (2011). Mit den Kleinen Großes denken. Mit Kindern über Nachhaltigkeitsfragen philosophieren—Ein Handbuch. Leuchtpol. Murris, K.  S. (2008). Philosophy with children, the stingray and the educative value of disequilibrium. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 42, 667–685. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­9752.2008.00640.x O’Riordan, N. J. (2016). Swimming against the tide: Philosophy for children as a counter-cultural practice. In Education, 3(13), 648–660. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/03004279.2014.991415 OECD. (2005). Competency framework. Retrieved April 14, 2021, from competency_framework_en.pdf (oecd.org) Öhman, J. (2007). The ethical dimension of ESD—navigating between the pitfalls of indoctrination and relativism. In I. Björneloo & E. Nyberg (Eds.), Drivers

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CHAPTER 7

The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education. An Analysis to Its Inclusive Perspectives and Their Relationships to Aesthetic Aspects Lorenzo Manera

7.1   The Key Elements of the Reggio Emilia Approach The educational philosophy of Reggio Emilia, known as Reggio Emilia Approach, is internationally considered as one of the most relevant educational perspectives in early childhood education (Fleer & van Oers, 2018; Edwards & Gandini, 2018).1

1  In the International Handbook of Early Childhood Education (2018), the Reggio Emilia Approach is mentioned as of the most relevant educational approaches to early childhood, together with Fröbel, HighScope, Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), Waldorf kindergarten and Montessori (Pramling & Samuelsson, 2018, p. 1311).

L. Manera (*) University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_7

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In the Reggio Emilia Approach, the practical work of teachers refers to an interpretative theory that integrates research stories with real-life contexts. Practice is not only a field of action but also an active part of the theory itself: it both generates the theory and is generated by it. Furthermore, the educational philosophy of Reggio does not provide a single operational methodology: rather it is a structure, a constantly evolving paradigm that is closely linked to the contexts in which it takes place. Within this paradigm, the inclusive dimension plays a relevant role. In order to better understand how the inclusive dimension is conceptualized, it is possible to identify the main aspects that define the approach of Reggio, in particular with regard to learning contexts, critical competences and work strategies. Fernández-Santín and Feliu-Torruella (2020) examined the key elements of the Reggio Emilia Approach through an integrative review of the most relevant international literature. The core areas or axes that emerged from the literature review are (1) the environment as a third teacher, meaning that learning environments “take on the role of one of the main and necessary educators” (Cavallini et al., 2017). (2) The extension of the term “language” to the different ways that children use to represent, communicate and express their thoughts through the different media and symbolic systems. (3) Long-­ term projects, related to children’s interests and to their exploration and to the questions they develop about the world that surrounds. (4) The teacher-researcher, meaning that teachers are intended as researchers who document their work and children’s learning processes. (5) The image of the “competent” child, meaning the idea that children are able to construct complex communications and interactions thanks to a plurality of languages. As we will underline in the next paragraphs, this aspect of the Reggio Educational Philosophy has important consequences for conceptualization of the inclusive pedagogical aspects. (6) Negotiated learning, meaning the process of ideas and theories negotiation that allows children to co-construct their learning through social interaction. (7) Pedagogical documentation, which includes the notes and images that teachers use to make visible children’s learning processes as they take place. Documentation is aimed at exploring the strategies implemented by children in order to elaborate the following educational paths by taking into consideration the hints shared by children. (8) Social relations, meaning the idea that children build knowledge from their relationships with teachers and peers through forms of cooperation.

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By comparing the results of the integrative literature review conducted with the key values that constitute the Reggio Emilia Approach, it is possible to add some further aspects, including the ones that are most related to an inclusive perspective. (9) Progettazione (design), meaning the design process that applies to the didactics, the learning environments, the professional growth of the teachers, as opposed to the idea of applying pre-­ defined didactic programs. (10) Evaluation, intended as a collective process that structures the educational project, understood as a public act of dialogue and interpretation. (11) Participation, “which informs the culture of solidarity, responsibility, and inclusion by valorizing the hundred languages of children”.2 As we can notice, the culture of participation is intertwined with the culture of inclusion that characterizes the Reggio Emilia Approach. Within the research project “Cluster. Educating city”,3 promoted by the Reggio Children Foundation, the main aspects that characterize the learning environments in the Reggio Emilia Approach have been further discussed and defined within a framework that includes three main aspects: learning contexts, critical competence and work strategies. As for the learning contexts, knowledge is considered as the result of a cognitive construction by an aware subject, and learning environments are aimed at creating relationships between learners and learning objects. Learning contexts allow children time to explore, formulate problems and then try to resolve them individually or with others. Research contexts foster a wide variety of perceptions (visual, sound, tactile), images, mental representations, metaphors and relationships.4 With regard to the critical competences, the Reggio Emilia Approach is characterized by the fact that the meaning of experiences is promoted through group reflection. Furthermore, the original thinking processes of children are encouraged in order to elaborate initial interpretative hypotheses about the phenomena observed and relate their thoughts to those of others. Children’s ability to structure their thinking is supported to allow them to communicate it to others, to support their ideas and to link different registers of representation.

 Available at https://www.reggiochildren.it/en/reggio-emilia-approach/valori-en/.  https://www.frchildren.org/en/research/projects/cluster-educating-city. 4  To deepen the relationship between metaphorical learning processes and the Reggio Emilia Approach, please refer to Contini (2018). 2 3

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As for the work strategies, the main characteristics are the facilitation of creative learning processes, comparison, evaluation and self-evaluation. Furthermore, children’s learning processes are documented, and the documentation process is considered as a learning context. In particular, learning contexts tend to offer children and adults the possibility to ask questions and formulate and test hypotheses. Finally, opportunities are created for reflection, for carrying out surveys and re-elaborating the knowledge acquired, thus activating knowledge prior to new phases of research.

7.2   The Inclusive Perspective in the Reggio Emilia Approach In order to further define the roots of the inclusive perspectives in the Reggio Emilia Approach, it is possible to refer to Carla Rinaldi’s analysis of the most relevant protagonists of this educational experience. Rinaldi (2020)5 mentions (1) the Municipal Administration of Reggio Emilia, that allowed the creation of a city-run system of infant-toddler centres and preschools. (2) The women’s movements such as UDI (Unione Donne Italiane), that contributed to the development of democratic popular preschools.6 (3) The many teachers, pedagogists and citizens who contributed to the educational experience of the City.7 (4) Loris Malaguzzi, a progressive pedagogist who fostered the development of democratic educational experiences, whose relevance in the development and evolution of the Reggio Emilia Approach is internationally recognized.8 An aspect not yet explored in the scientific literature in relation to the topic of the inclusive perspectives of the Reggio Emilia Approach regards the role that Malaguzzi’s 19 years of experience as co-administrator of the Municipal Psycho-Pedagogical Medical Centre in Reggio Emilia played in the development of an inclusive pedagogical model that included the use 5  President of the Reggio Children Foundation (Fondazione Reggio Children – Centro Loris Malaguzzi). 6  For an historical analysis of the role played by women movements in the development of the Reggio Emilia Approach, please refer to Lingenauber (2017). 7  For an historical perspective on the collective development of the Reggio Emilia educational experience, please refer to Baldini et al. (2012). 8  For a complex and detailed analysis of Loris Malaguzzi’s pedagogical view and his role in the development of the educational experience of Reggio Emilia, please refer to Cagliari (2019).

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of artistic languages as means to foster children’s development and social inclusion. At the Pedagogical Medical Center, which Malaguzzi considered as an institution aimed at fostering the development of society (Malaguzzi, 1951), he studied drawings made by children aged 4 to 10. Influenced by the theories of the German psychologist Charlotte Bühler, he developed the conviction that the evolution of their drawings corresponded to a broader linguistic, cognitive and social process of development. In 1953, Malaguzzi stated in fact that the correspondence between drawing competence and intellectual development should lead to a significant reconsideration of “the traditional problems and methods of teaching art, just as in a broader sense it shifts the entire, integral issue of education” (Malaguzzi, 1953, p. 43). Furthermore, Malaguzzi’s friendship and direct collaboration with several exponents of the Italian Neo Avant-garde movement,9 together with the growing interest in the democratic educational perspectives and the aesthetic reflections developed by John Dewey (1980), contributed to define some of the main instances that characterize the central role assigned to visual arts intended as an instrument that allows considering reality with a different eye, exploiting connections and relation not yet explored. In fact, Dewey’s aesthetic perspective, which binds meaning to the interactive nexus with the environment and conceives the relationship between the environment and the human organism and in a pluralistic sense (Matteucci, 2021), reinforced in Malaguzzi the concept of an educational environment opened to plurality and diversity. In 1963,10 Malaguzzi became a consultant for the Reggio Emilia’s Municipal preschools, and then served as director of the early childhood educational services (which would later become Preschools and Infant-­ toddler Centres—Istituzione of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia) from 1970 to 1986. In 1971, the Italian Parliament passed a law concerning educational rights for children with disabilities and established the right to a desegregated education of children in public schools (Smith, 1998). As argued by Ivana Soncini, the former responsible for the children with special rights11 who are enrolled in the municipal preprimary schools and infant-toddler centres of Reggio Emilia, “inclusion began to occur in the 9  For a critical analysis of the collaboration and relationship between Malaguzzi and the exponents of the neo avant-garde movement, please refer to Hoyuelos Planillo (2004). 10  The first Municipal preschool “Robison Crusoe” was inaugurated the same year (1963). The first Municipal toddler center “Genoveffa Cervi” opened in 1971. 11  Expression used in the Reggio Emilia instead of children with special educational needs.

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preprimary schools in Reggio Emilia before it was decreed by the 1971 national law” (Smith, 1998, p.  201), with the aim to go beyond the description of deficits, looking instead at the child’s preferred strategies for learning.

7.3   The Defining Characteristics of the Reggio Emilia Approach Inclusive Model More recently, Soncini (2009) developed an analysis of the central elements of the inclusive perspective that characterize the infant-toddler centres and preschools of Reggio Emilia, where children with special rights are ensured priority access.12 In her analysis, Soncini defined four main elements. Firstly, the political context as the roots of the inclusion of children with special rights are set within a specific historical context. According to her analysis, in the late sixties, the need to revise the concept of “psychic distress” and to redefine it in inter-personal, non-segregating terms, influenced the development of an inclusive perspective that shifted the focus on the characteristics, values and conceptions of “special rights” children. Secondly, a pedagogical approach that welcomed the idea of allowing all children to have access to the same schools stemmed from a clear educational perspective. Such perspective was based on the idea that all children had the right to live in a school that, by valuing all subjectivities and all differences, allows children to build inter-subjectively their own constantly evolving knowledge and a positive image of themselves. Secondly, the organizational characteristics, meaning the fact that each classroom of the preschool has no more than one child with special rights, in order to allow him/her to get the best out of his/her encounters with the other children and adults. Thirdly, the practice of documentation is fundamental for the relationships with the families and parents who have to cope with the effects of the child’s difficulties. Providing special rights to children with a different kind of visibility in a social context opens the way towards interpretations that can create new equilibriums in the daily lives of the families, contributing to develop the identities within a system of relationships, within a dialectic of reciprocal recognitions. Finally, the idea of welcoming diversity 12   Charter of Services of the Reggio Emilia Municipal Infant-toddler Centres and Preschools (2017).

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as a new source of information can broaden the scope of interaction, thereby stimulating the emergence of new working hypotheses and the use of open communication methods that are in line with the complexity of each individual.

7.4   Difference as Generative Dimension A further element that defines the inclusive perspective in the Reggio Emilia Approach is the concept of diversity, intended both as an opportunity to break down the routinised forms of understanding reality and to explore new possibilities of understanding the world. Malaguzzi developed this concept also by drawing on Viktor Shklovsky’s theories. In Shklovsky, 1917, Shklovsky published the essay “Art as Device”, where he first proposed the neologism ostranenie (estrangement), which suggests distancing, dislocation and something becoming strange. The concept of estrangement refers, in fact, to a device that breaks up the routinized forms of perception, a displacement from what a certain element appears with respect to how it appears because of an estranging detail (Chernavin & Yampolskaya, 2019). Looking back at his most famous essay “Art as Device” (Shklovsky, 1990), first published in 1917, Shklovsky confirmed his conception of estrangement as an exercise of wonder, of thinking of the world as a question (Boym, 2017). In one of his reflections on the role of the Atelier, a space dedicated to children’s aesthetic education, Malaguzzi referred to Shklovsky’s idea of art being a process that removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways (Malaguzzi, 1988). In the interview, he also declared that children’s aesthetic education should be a form of escape from rhetoric and stereotypes. Furthermore, Malaguzzi’s view on the role of art in children’s education was interpreted as an opportunity to contrast “the boredom of habit and the rejection of the mundane, intended as necessary aesthetic requirements” (Artioli, 2001, p. 206). This openness to diversity, to divergence, has had a relevant impact on the ability to open up about inclusion. Gilman (2007) underlined how, in the Reggio Emilia Approach, the attitude of openness to diversity, promoted as well through the exploration of artistic languages, plays an important role in creating an environment where participation and communication are encouraged. Furthermore, Vakil et  al. (2003) underlined how the inclusive perspective that defines the Reggio Emilia Approach fosters a holistic view of the child, who develops an understanding of the world within social interaction context. Finally, as underlined by

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Runswick-Cole and Hodge (2009), the Reggio Emilia Approach-inclusive perspective stresses the value and strengths of differences, celebrating the breadth of learning styles.

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V. Vecchi, & P. Moss (Eds.), Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia (pp. 42–44). Routledge, 2016. Malaguzzi, L. (1988). If the Atelier is part of a long history and an educational program. Bambini, 12, 26–31. Matteucci, G. (2021). On dewey’s trail. From aesthetic meaning to aesthetic meaningfulness. Pragmatist Legacies in Aesthetics, XIII–1, 1–15. The Municipal Infant-Toddler Centers and Preschools of Reggio Emilia. (2017). Charter of services of the municipal infant-toddler centers and preschools, Reggio Emilia, Reggio Children srl and Narea (North American Reggio Emilia Alliance). Pramling, N., & Samuelsson, I. (2018). Pedagogies in early childhood education. In N. Pramling & I. Samuelsson (Eds.), International handbook of early childhood education (pp. 1311–1322). Springer. Rinaldi, C. (2020). The child as citizen: Holder of rights and competent. The Reggio Emilia educational experience. Miscellanea Historico-Iuridica, 19(1), 11–22. Runswick-Cole, K., & Hodge, N. (2009). Needs or rights? A challenge to the discourse of special education. British Journal of Special Education, 36(4), 198–203. Shklovsky, V. (1990). Art as device (1917), in theory of prose (pp. 1–14). Dalkey Archive Press. Smith, C. (1998). Children with “Special Rights” in the preprimary schools and infant-toddler centers of Reggio Emilia. A dialogue with Ivana Soncini and Tiziana Filippini. In C. Edwards, L. Gandini, & G. Forman (Eds.), The hundred languages of children. The Reggio Emilia approach. Advanced reflections (pp. 199–215). Praeger Publishers. Soncini, I. (2009). The project for the inclusion of special rights children in the infant-toddler centres and preschools of Reggio Emilia. In Childhood: Reggio Emilia (pp. 77–79). Reggio Children. Vakil, S., Freeman, R., & Swim, T. J. (2003). The Reggio Emilia approach and inclusive early childhood programs. Early Childhood Education Journal, 30(3), 187–192.

CHAPTER 8

For the Purpose of a Better Future Society: Advancing Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy in Today’s World Amber Strong Makaiau

8.1   The Progressive Education Movement and Philosophy for Children Hawaii In the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States experienced a scale and scope of change that rivals life in the current COVID-19 pandemic age. Coined the Progressive Era, the time period between the end of the Civil War (1865) and World War I (1917) was defined by “dramatic, accelerated growth as industrialization took off” (Campbell, 2000, p. xiii). There was a burst of material development and innovation, millions of immigrants streamed into the country, cities doubled in population, entire systems of industry were created, huge disparities between rich and poor emerged, systems of government proved corrupt, and tremendous environmental destruction occurred (Bruce & Eryman, 2015; Campbell, 2000). Much like today, “Americans were aware that their

A. S. Makaiau (*) University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_8

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society was in transition, and they endlessly discussed the implications of this realization” (Campbell, 2000, p. xiii). The progressive education movement was born out of this particular time in history and was one response to their rapidly changing world. Progressive education “is defined in different ways, but generally it aims to develop self-actualizing individuals who can take charge of their own lives and participate fully in the creation of a greater public good” (Bruce & Eryman, 2015, p. 1). Early progressive education philosophers and reformers included: Francis Parker, John Dewey, Ella Flagg Young, William H. Kilpatrick, Caroline Pratt, and Lucy Sprauge Mitchell. “They conceived students as active learners with an experimental disposition, in large part because they saw those qualities as necessary for a rapidly expanding economy with dramatic social changes” (Bruce & Eryman, 2015, p. 4). The pioneers in the movement envisioned progressive educators as scientists who had “an attitude of eager, alert observation; a constant questioning of old procedure in the light of new observations; a use of the world, as well as of books, as source material; an experimental open-­ mindedness” (Mitchell, 1931, p.  251). They saw progressive schools as “sites in which the education process itself was more democratic, with the assumption that democratic schooling was a necessary precondition for a democratic society” (Bruce & Eryman, 2015, p. 7). In an effort to distinguish progressive education from more traditional approaches, Dewey (1938) explained: If one attempts to formulate the philosophy of education implicit in the practices of the new education, we may, I think, discover certain common principles amid the variety of progressive schools now existing. To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world. (Dewey, 1938, pp. 19–20)

It is this keen awareness of the relationship between schooling and a democratic society, a serious attentiveness to how children learn, and an overall responsiveness to the ever-changing world, which makes progressive philosophy and pedagogy enduring and relevant in today’s world.

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The contemporary expression of the almost 150-year-old American progressive education movement has stayed true to its origins while evolving with the times. Recent progressive education authors and advocates have introduced new language to the movement in line with developing educational scholarship and research. Among them is Alfie Kohn (2008), who describes eight values that characterize progressive education: attending to the whole child, community, collaboration, social justice, intrinsic motivation, deep understanding, active learning, and taking kids seriously. Additionally, the Progressive Education Network (2021) explains: Progressive educators support their students’ deep intellectual development and healthy identity formation—as developing individuals, as active learners within a school community, and as engaged citizens in the broader world. They believe that education must: • amplify students’ voice, agency, conscience, and intellect to create a more equitable, just, and sustainable world. • encourage the active participation of students in their learning, in their communities, and in the world. • respond to the developmental needs of students, and focus on their social, emotional, intellectual, cognitive, cultural, and physical development. • honor and nurture students’ natural curiosity and innate desire to learn, fostering internal motivation and the discovery of passion and purpose. • emerge from the interests, experiences, goals, and needs of diverse constituents, fostering empathy, communication and collaboration across difference. • foster respectfully collaborative and critical relationships between students, educators, parents/guardians, and the community. (Progressive Education Network, 2021)

Common in these contemporary iterations of the progressive philosophy and approach is a commitment to social justice, sustainability, and the total well-being of individuals and communities. In the wake of current fights for racial justice, a political insurrection, the emergence of a post-­ truth society, looming forecasts from environmental scientists, and pressing questions about the impact of artificial intelligence and new technologies—it is clear that the institutional systems, structures, and rituals of progressive schools, and the accompanying philosophy and pedagogy might be needed now more than ever.

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But what exactly constitutes a successful progressive pedagogy? What might teaching look like when it effectively translates progressive philosophy into flourishing practice? In general, the “pedagogy cannot be a simple rule-driven procedure. All participants must have the opportunity to ask questions; to investigate through reading, observation, and participation; to create, to collaborate and learn from others; and to reflect on experiences” (Bruce & Eryman, 2015, p.  25). The teacher-as-single authority model must disappear and power should be distributed amongst and negotiated between the members of the classroom community of inquiry (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994). A progressive pedagogy must be flexible, responsive, and open to ambiguity. At the same time, it demands extensive planning and the acute ability to design learning experiences that are situated in the “real world,” stimulating, resource-rich, challenging, and that build off of the natural interests of children (Dewey, 1938). Additionally, a progressive pedagogy calls on teachers to have the moral courage to introduce children to “some of the most difficult issues in our society” (Derman-Sparks & Edwards, 2016, p. 16). A progressive pedagogy must emerge from “watching children and life alertly” (Palmer, 1937, p. 1) and requires intelligence and artistry on behalf of the teacher. Philosophy for Children (P4C), and more specifically, philosophy for children Hawaii (p4cHI) is one example of a progressive philosophy that transforms the schooling experience by engaging students and teachers in the activity of philosophy. The p4cHI approach aids students and teachers in converting traditional classrooms into intellectually safe communities of inquiry. Together, they develop their ability to think for themselves in responsible ways by exploring “big questions” that arise from their interests, experiences, and learning contexts.

8.2   The Philosophy for Children Hawaii Approach to Progressive Pedagogy In 1969, Matthew Lipman, the founder of the P4C movement, began his own experiment in education. A Columbia University philosophy professor at the time, he was deeply disenchanted with the US school system. He believed that children did not think as well as they could or should for life in a democratic society (Lipman, 1988; Sharp, 1993), and he was concerned that schools actually encouraged children to have a negative view of their own intellectual abilities. The “standard paradigm of normal

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practice” in US schools, wrote Lipman (1991), “drains” intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and the ability to reason from perfectly “curious, imaginative, and inquisitive” (p.  9) children and “before long, [they] become aware that schooling is enervating and dispiriting rather than animating or intellectually provocative” (p. 10). To address these concerns, he created a curriculum that incorporated the skills of logic and reasoning found in the activity of philosophy to improve students’ thinking in the K-12 setting (Lipman, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1993). This was the birth of P4C—a now worldwide approach to education that “cease[s] to treat children as passive blotters whose education consists merely of learning of inert data and instead stimulate[s] their capacity to think” (Lipman, 1988, p. 110) In an effort to extend Lipman’s original curriculum and vision to a variety of geo-cultural contexts, innovative approaches to P4C are now practiced across the globe. p4cHI is one of these culturally responsive offshoots of Lipman’s early P4C program. It evolved in response to the tensions that arose while doing P4C in a multicultural community context, and from the way in which the Hawaiian concept of aloha is used to mediate these tensions and build community between diverse groups of people in the islands. Pukui (1986) defines aloha as meaning many things, including “love, affection, compassion, mercy, sympathy, pity, kindness, sentiment, grace, and charity” (p. 21). In p4cHI, the creation of a community, in which participants engage in the deep practice of showing aloha for one another, is not just a classroom nicety. It is essential to inquiry and learning how to think. Directly in line with the culturally responsive teaching movement (Gay, 2000), p4cHI practitioners emphasize the creation of “intellectually safe” (Jackson, 2001, p.  460) communities of inquiry in which participants’ cultures, languages, histories, socio-economic backgrounds, and other aspects of their identities are included and validated during the building of relationships and the co-construction of knowledge (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008). As a result, practitioners of p4cHI don’t rely on Lipman’s original texts as the starting point for inquiry. Instead, they use what they know about their students’ varied backgrounds to actively select philosophically rich stimuli (e.g. fiction and non-fiction texts, multi-media resources, and outdoor learning trips), that both mirror the diverse backgrounds of their pupils and provide windows into people and places that are different (Style, 1988). This emphasis on authentic and meaningful relationships between p4cHI teachers and their students is at the heart of the approach.

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p4cHI teachers listen to children, learn from them (Pratt, 1948), engage in co-inquiry (Jackson, 2001), and make teaching an “expression of their own intelligent observations” (Dewey, 1916, p. 168) in the context that they find themselves teaching in. Also unique to p4cHI is the way in which it responds to the overall culture of schooling found in most American State Departments of Education. Rarely practiced as a stand-alone school program, p4cHI is now thought of as a “philosopher’s pedagogy” (Makaiau & Miller, 2012, p. 8) or an approach to teaching and learning that can be used by classroom teachers to incorporate the “activity of philosophy” (p.  10) into required “school subjects” (Lewis & Sutcliffe, 2017, pp.  202–203). In addition to six teacher commitments (see Makaiau & Miller, 2012, pp. 11–17), a conceptual base and a set of classroom practices define the philosopher’s pedagogy. The conceptual base is made up of the four pillars of p4cHI: community, inquiry, philosophy, and reflection. These four pillars are fundamental and function as the theoretical framework from which p4cHI classroom practices and assessments are built upon. The most popular of these classroom practices are (Jackson, 2001): • Creating Intellectual Safety (p. 460) to make sure that all participants in the community feel like they can ask any question or state any point of view as long as they are being respectful of everyone in the group. • Making a Community Ball (p. 461) to help mediate turn taking during classroom dialogue and inquiry. This yarn ball is created by students and teachers on one of the first days of class. The rules of the community ball are: (1) only the person with the community ball speaks, (2) the person with the community ball chooses who speaks next, and (3) you always have the right to pass. These rules distribute power in the classroom and ensure that all of the classroom participants listen and have the chance to be heard. • Using the language of the Good Thinker’s Tool Kit (p.463) to articulate questions, claims, and thinking in general. • Participating in Plain Vanilla (p. 462) discussion-based inquiries that use the following structure: question, vote, inquiry, and reflect. It is named Plain Vanilla because it is the most basic format for structuring this type of classroom inquiry. As teachers become more experienced in the process, they often design their own variations of the strategy. • Using Magic Words (p. 461) to support student facilitation during the Plain Vanilla inquiries. Examples of Magic Words include OMT (One

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More Time), IDUS (I Don’t Understand), and POPATT (Please One Person At a Time). • Reflecting on the Community of Inquiry (p. 464) with a set of evaluation questions to help measure progress.

Always sensitive to context, and hence rarely, if ever, enacted in the exact same way across diverse cultural and institutional settings, the translation of p4cHI from theory to practice depends on the professionalism and values of K-12 teachers who must adapt the philosopher’s pedagogy so that it can meet the needs of their particular teaching context. In contrast to Lipman’s original approach, the success of p4cHI does not rely on the presence of an academic philosopher in the K-12 teacher’s classroom. Instead, p4cHI classroom teachers develop a philosopher’s pedagogy of their own by engaging in professional development with experienced p4cHI practitioners. Described in detail by Makaiau and Lukey (2013), this three-part professional development model includes: (1) an initial educative experience (e.g. an Introduction to Philosophy with Children college course or professional development workshop), (2) the ongoing support of a philosopher in residence (i.e. an experienced p4cHI practitioner/coach who participates in p4cHI sessions lead by the teacher), and (3) regular engagement in a professional p4cHI community of inquiry. This community-based and participatory approach to professional development supports K-12 classroom teachers’ thinking together about the best ways to integrate—into both their classrooms and overall school culture—the rigorous thinking and reasoning that the activity of philosophy affords. Now, as I work to meet the call of the current moment and prepare to launch a brand-new Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy MEd Interdisciplinary Education, Curriculum Studies program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, I can’t help but reflect on the important ways in which p4cHI helped me and countless other educators advance the worldwide progressive education movement from the bottom-up.

8.3   p4cHI: A Bottom-Up Approach to Advancing Progressive Education The furtherance of the American progressive education movement has not always been easy. From the start, the original founders of early nineteenth-­ century progressive schools met great adversity and criticism. For

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example, at its founding the now 100-year-old progressive elementary school that I attended in Honolulu, Hawaii—Hanahau’oli School—faced a number of the same challenges that John Dewey experienced with the experimental school at the University of Chicago. Louisa F. Palmer, a former principal of Hanahau’oli School, writes: To break with tradition has always been a difficult thing to explain. Words have many different meanings to people. To label work at this new school in 1918 as ‘joyous work’ immediately meant only play to many, as well as the lowering of academic standards. And when phrases like self-expression, creative work, and freedom were added, this immediately was translated by the school’s critics as ‘children doing as they please, no discipline, etc.’ The idea was not yet accepted that school work utilizing a child’s real interests and abilities gave him the motive power to do his best. Few could conceive that a child’s school should be, not a thing apart, but a vital element of youth and growth—‘a process of living and not simply a preparation for future living’—as Dr. Dewey expressed it in My Pedagogic Creed. (Palmer, 1968, p. 15)

Perhaps it is because “progressive projects [in general] are timeless, non-linear, interpreted, and shape shifting” (Hogan, 2015, p. 514). That is, they have no straightforward path and cannot make their influence on society via authoritarian mandates or orders from the top. It also might be because they are aiming to address some of humanity’s biggest questions and greatest troubles, in a way that will not deliver a quick fix, but rather longstanding and meaningful change. This is true of the American progressive education movement, and “despite mid-20th-century proclamations that progressive education fell apart in the United States (see Cremin’s discussion, 1959) … they indeed still exist, though not without challenges, both in the US and around the world” (Hogan, 2015, p. 515). This long history of scepticism around the promise and potential of the progressive education movement must be taken into consideration in the context of the current moment. Educational institutions—systems, schools, administrators, teachers, students, families, and communities— have been shaken to their core by the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, State Departments of Education shuttered offices except for essential functions, which resulted in schools across the United States closing their doors to students. With no coordinated distance learning plans in place, many systems and schools adopted an “enrichment” stance towards the education of children, and lost hold of their ability to support the

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emotional and physical safety of kids, let alone ensure that they had access to devices and the internet, and were educationally engaged. Researchers, like those at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute forewarned of a “learning cliff” concluding that “few American youngsters are going to be well educated for an extended period of time” and that COVID-19 will have a “devastating effect on student learning” (Chu, 2020). If it is true that progressive educators, institutions, pedagogies, and practices can help to lead us out of the current crisis—given the challenges faced in the history of the movement and those we face because of the pandemic—what might be the best pathway forward? One answer is to create more progressive schools. This is what the pioneers in the progressive education movement did. Many founded forward-­ thinking institutions which are still in operation today: John Dewey’s Lab School in Chicago; Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s Bank Street School in New  York City; Francis Wayland Parker’s Francis W.  Parker School in Chicago; and Caroline Pratt’s City & Country School in New York City. While starting new schools like these is an important and bold endeavour, the current moment might also require a concurrent bottom-up approach to educational reform to help advance more progressive approaches to education and schooling, especially in traditional systems and institutions. Bottom-up approaches to changing school systems, structures, and cultures are those that are initiated and carried out by students, teachers, and school communities. They are “radically situated” (Hogan, 2015, p. 515) and “realized through an educational practice that itself is both liberatory and participatory, that simultaneously creates a new society and involves the people themselves in the creation of their own knowledge” (Horton & Freire, 1990, p. xxx). Bottom-up approaches are most necessary for educators working at more traditional or non-progressive institutions and schools because they empower individuals to make small changes that will eventually build to something bigger. From my experience, the progressive philosophy and pedagogy of p4cHI is one example of a bottom-up approach to advancing progressive education—and more importantly meeting the needs of children and society—one classroom at a time. bell hooks (1994) tells us that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (p. 12). I found this out personally, as I experimented with p4cHI while teaching social studies at a small public school on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu. I originally learned about p4cHI while working on a Master’s in Education and Teaching degree at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. As a child, I had attended Hanahau’oli

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School (the Honolulu-based progressive elementary school grounded in the philosophies of Francis Parker and John Dewey), and as I made my way through my teacher education program I found myself searching for concrete strategies that would help translate my own emergent progressive philosophy of education into an actual classroom practice (Makaiau, 2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Makaiau & Lukey, 2013; Makaiau & Miller, 2012). Steadfast in my belief that education should provide opportunities for students and teachers to develop their ability to think for themselves in responsible ways, I was immediately attracted to the ways in which p4cHI “enlisted the social impulses of the child by creating classroom communities of inquiry” (Lipman, 1988, p.  110). I experimented with p4cHI in my social studies classroom, and when I was eventually hired to teach at the same high school that I did my student teaching at, Kailua High School (KHS), p4cHI became a mainstay of my educational practice. It is important to mention that KHS was very traditional when I started there. Similar to Hayes’ (2007)) summary of the traditional approach, “the specific curriculum and educational outcomes as well as the majority of the classes to be taken were prescribed by the state or local district.” The primary function of teachers was to introduce “students to content knowledge and skills outlined in the mandated curriculum.” And teachers primarily used “textbooks and workbooks” as resources for classroom instruction (p. xiii). Most of the classrooms were arranged so that students sat in rows, and the teacher lectured from the front of the classroom. Rarely, were students asked to engage in learning activities that began with their questions, required participation in a community of inquiry, and that asked them to construct knowledge and reflect on their experience. I was determined to break from this particular type of instruction and p4cHI was the approach I adopted for doing so. I started out by facilitating a p4cHI inquiry every Friday in both my US history and psychology classes. In these sessions, students would generate and discuss questions they were interested in thinking about with their peers, and we would use p4cHI strategies (e.g. the Community Ball, the Good Thinker’s Toolkit, and Plain Vanilla) to further develop our community of inquiry (Strong, 2001). Next, I experimented with teaching my senior-level students how to facilitate their own p4cHI style inquiries, including establishing intellectual safety, using a community ball to facilitate turn taking, generating Good Thinker’s Toolkit questions, leading their peers in Plain Vanilla philosophical inquiries, and reflecting on their experience (Strong, 2003).

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I also started to think about how the p4cHI philosophy and pedagogy could be used to teach inquiry in general, and I expanded the p4cHI practices so that they supported every aspect of my social studies curriculum (Makaiau, 2013). Eventually, I developed an overall “philosopher’s pedagogy” (Makaiau & Miller, 2012, p.  8) and used this to teach all of my social studies classes, including Ethnic Studies (Makaiau, 2010, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Makaiau, 2018, 2021). For a few years, the impact of p4cHI as a successful progressive philosophy and pedagogy remained within the four walls of my classroom. Then, a student teacher and eventual colleague of mine, Chad Miller, started to experiment with p4cHI in his English Language Arts classroom. As a result of his work, the English Language Arts department at the school became interested in the practice and adopted p4cHI in their classrooms and department meetings. Soon, p4cHI was practiced in every English Language Arts classroom at the school and the department used it to lead professional development across campus. Eventually, the social studies department got interested, and through professional learning opportunities related to Ethnic Studies, every colleague who taught this required course for graduation used p4cHI as their pedagogical approach. While p4cHI was most heavily used by social studies and English Language Arts teachers, with the support of the school principal (who now became interested in the practice) and Benjamin Lukey, who served as the school’s Philosopher in Residence, p4cHI was eventually brought into the classrooms and curricula of teachers from other content areas. Miller took over as the Philosopher in Residence and worked with more than 35 teachers in order to promote rigorous thinking and deeper student engagement schoolwide. He also launched the philoSURFERS program, which engaged students at the high school in leading p4cHI inquiries at the elementary and middle schools in the area. Over the years, the practice of p4cHI at KHS transformed the school’s mission, deeply impacted the school culture and climate (Makaiau et  al., 2019), and inspired other schools in the area to adopt the progressive philosophy and pedagogy as well. Today, KHS is known as a p4cHI model school and has a longstanding partnership with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education. There is a critical mass of teachers who still use the practice in their classrooms and the school continues to host numerous opportunities for professional learning on campus. This includes being a site for teacher education, where teacher candidates from

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the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa can learn about p4cHI, see it in action, and practice it on their journey to become educators. It also includes hosting international visitors who come to Hawaii to learn about p4cHI, and who want to think deeply about how they might apply the philosophy and pedagogy to their home contexts. As I now work with my colleagues at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa to launch a brand new Master’s program in progressive philosophy and pedagogy, I draw from the fearless determination of early progressive school founders and this bottom-up approach to advancing progressive education movement in more traditional school settings to support the next generation of progressive education leaders who will be equipped to respond to the challenges of our times.

8.4  Creating the Next Generation of Progressive Education Leaders It could be argued that if American schools had been more progressive, and if American educators had a strong command of progressive education philosophy and pedagogy then they would have been better able to handle the dramatic changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hogan (2015) explains, “progressive education is simultaneously about the unknowable and the possible and how these things connect to build a more equitable democratic society. It is not about knowledge transmission, but rather knowledge generation and problem solving in the moment” (p. 514). She goes on to say: Yet in today’s neoliberal school reform movements, with their accountability and audit regimes, top-down reformers are desperate to mandate, nail down, predict, quantify, and “measure” growth in order to somehow confidently prepare students for the “globalized world” and to “compete in the global economy.” They talk like oracles, believing their own sweeping discourse, like they know what the future will bring. In such a context, inquiry is smothered for the sake of conformity, profit and regimented control. (Hogan, 2015, pp. 513–514)

While no one could have predicted the unprecedented change brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and related social and political movements, it is safe to say that the prevalence of traditional approaches to schooling in the US (Dewey, 1938; Hayes, 2007), as well as top-down governance and control found in most American systems of education, did

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not serve us in 2020 and will most likely continue to fail our democracy as we move into the future. It is for these reasons (and more) that progressive educators, institutions, pedagogies, and practices are needed now more than ever. It is also the reason why we need to cultivate and nurture transformative progressive education leaders who have both top-down and bottom-up approaches to making change. Numerous scholars have written about leadership in the context of education, and it is Carolyn Shields’ (2011) transformative leadership model, which “emphasizes the need for education to focus both on academic excellence and on social transformation” (p. 3). Shields (2011, p.  6) describes the underlying principles and distinguishing features of transformative leadership as: • acknowledging power and privilege • articulating both individual and collective purposes (public and private good) • deconstructing social-cultural knowledge frameworks that generate inequity and reconstructing them • balancing critique and promise • effecting deep and equitable change • working towards transformation: liberation, emancipation, democracy, equity, and excellence • demonstrating moral courage and activism But how do we grow the next generation of progressive education leaders who embody the qualities and characteristics above? The brand-new Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy MEd Interdisciplinary Education, Curriculum Studies program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM) aims to answer this question. The MEd-CS Interdisciplinary Education track with an emphasis on Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy is a 30-credit graduate program designed for educators and scholars from diverse disciplines and contexts, who are interested in building our collective capacity for creating a better future society for today’s children. Unique to UHM, this program is grounded in Hawaii’s long and rich progressive education movement and is built upon the UHM College of Education’s partnerships with a number of local schools and organizations, who are bringing the theories and practices of early progressive educators into the twenty-first century. The main commitments guiding the program are:

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• Inquiry Education must awaken in students and teachers the wonder, questions, methods of inquiry, and initiative that cultivate and nurture the examined life—all of which lead to the discovery of passion and purpose. • Experience Education must make the most of the opportunities of present life by engaging students and teachers in experiences that promote active participation in learning and in society, stimulate critical and creative thought, trouble the status quo, reveal complexity, and elicit joy. • Dialogue Education must promote intellectually safe and empathetic communities of inquiry that use the art of dialogue and listening as tools for exchanging critical ideas, exploring multiple perspectives, in order to develop an understanding of one’s self and others as a pathway for creating a more equitable, just, and sustainable world. • Action Education must enlist the voice, agency, conscience, and intellect of students and teachers so they are equipped to respond to our changing world, make a better future society, and recognize their own responsibility to stand up individually and take collective action. • Reflection Education must embody constant and consistent philosophical reflection on experience, thought, and emotions through multiple forms of expression, in order to make meaning, build community, and honor individuality. Experiences in the program are framed around an initial series of face-­ to-­face summer seminars, distance learning, and a two-week immersive field experience so program participants can continuously apply what they are learning to their home schools and contexts. Grounded in an “intellectually safe philosophical community of inquiry” (Jackson, 2001 p. 460) learning model, participants wrestle with real-world problems first-hand, critically examine the progressive education movement and its relevance to Hawaii and collaborate to carry forward the larger project of social justice. At the program’s completion, participants submit a portfolio (see Table 8.1 below) that demonstrates individual and collective progress around the program’s core values of: experience, inquiry, dialogue, action, and reflection. In addition to earning a Master’s in Curriculum Studies, program completers will also earn a UHM College of Education philosophy for children Hawaii (p4cHI) Endorsed Certificate. Established in 2015, the

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Table 8.1  Progressive philosophy and pedagogy Master’s thesis portfolio 1. Inquiry: Scholarly Research Paper: The program provides teacher candidates with a number of opportunities to inquire and research progressive philosophy and pedagogy. Master’s candidates will pose an original research question, review relevant literature, select a methodology for investigation, collect and analyse data (if appropriate), summarize findings, and discuss the implications of research results. Evidence of completion will consist of a completed and polished piece of scholarly research writing and the submission of a portion of that writing for publication. Scholarly research papers will also be evaluated for: innovation and originality, interdisciplinary intersection (i.e. relating to more than one branch of knowledge and the intersection of diverse branches of knowledge) and contribution to a better future society. 2. Experience: Theory to Practice Exemplar: All Master’s candidates will earn a University of Hawaii at Mānoa (UHM) College of Education (COE) philosophy for children Hawaii (p4cHI) Endorsed Certificate. With roots reaching deep into American Pragmatism and the thought of philosophers such as John Dewey, William James, and Charles Peirce—p4cHI aids students and teachers in converting traditional classrooms into intellectually safe communities of inquiry. Together, they develop their ability to think for themselves in responsible ways by exploring “big questions” that arise from their interests, experiences, and learning contexts. All Master’s candidates will include the UHM COE p4cHI Endorsed Certificate requirements in this portfolio. 3. Dialogue: Conference/Un-Conference Presentation(s) and Community Discussion: Master’s candidates will share and dialogue with others about their scholarship, research, and experience in the program. They will present their research and/or experiences related to progressive philosophy and pedagogy at one local or national conference. This will include engaging audience members in community dialogue and discussion. Evidence for this portion of the portfolio will include a presentation abstract, letter of acceptance, and feedback from program peers that helped shape the presentation. 4. Action: Leaders of Social Justice in Education: Master’s candidates will apply what they know about social justice theory and practice to contribute to and shape a “progressive movement” of their choosing. Progressive movements are occurring and have the potential to occur in a wide variety of fields (e.g. education, philosophy, science, technology, futures, the arts, politics, the media, etc.) and sectors (e.g. public, private, governmental, etc.). For this portion of the portfolio, candidates will need to demonstrate their ability to be a leader of social justice in education by initiating collective change in a community that they work in. The change they spark must move beyond the classroom and have a broader impact on institutions, systems, and/or policies. Evidence of completion will consist of a written narrative, two letters of support from school and/or community partners, and artefacts of community engagement. (continued)

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Table 8.1 (continued) 5. Reflection: Philosophical Reflections on Experience: In a creative medium of their choice, Master’s candidates will meditate on the significance of their experiences in the program [both coursework and at partner schools] and communicate their reflections to a wider audience. Possible areas to explore in the reflection are: meaningfulness of the experience, explorations into the nature of knowledge, perspectives on art and beauty, and questions about the moral principles that guide self and others. Forms of communication may include artistic expression, spoken word, poetry, blogging, social media, etc. 6. Gallery: Use the Gallery portion of your Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy portfolio to include images, video, audio recordings, and so on that help to illustrate your experience in the program. Each gallery entry should ideally have a description at the top, above the thumbnails, explaining what the images, video, audio recording is all about. It can be a small paragraph of text, or a longer block of text if needed. The purpose of the text is to give some context to the viewer. 7. Annotated Bibliography: At the end of the portfolio, Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy Master’s candidates will include an “annotated bibliography.” The purpose of the annotated bibliography is to document the philosophers, theorists, scholars, researchers, educators, creatives, innovators, and activists who have shaped their thinking throughout the program and who will serve as the foundation of their progressive educational praxis (Freire, 1970). This annotated bibliography will be worked on throughout the program and should reflect the ongoing development of candidates’ progressive philosophy and pedagogy.

purpose of this certificate is to create an institutional pathway for developing, verifying, and officially recognizing the quality of p4cHI practitioners. As a part of the certification process, program participants: (1) Design, implement, video record, and collect student work from a p4cHI experience that they facilitate with children. (2) Invite a faculty member from the Uehiro Academy to formally observe and provide feedback on their facilitated p4cHI experience. (3) Use artefacts to engage in a three-­ part professional growth reflection of the impact of their p4cHI philosophy and pedagogy. (4) Present what they learn to a public audience. Incorporated into the p4cHI certificate process is coursework that includes an introduction to Philosophy for Children and a p4cHI teaching practicum. In sum, the program aims to build a community of professionals, who will further develop our collective capacity for creating a better future society through the work we do with children, schools, and the communities that we serve. Program candidates will have a strong foundation in the critical study of curriculum development and improvement from the

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perspective of progressive philosophers and educators. They will know deeply the foundational philosophers, scholars, researchers, school leaders, creatives, innovators, activists, and texts of the progressive education movement. They will have models of and practice being transformational progressive education leaders who have the moral courage to make meaningful change when they find themselves in positions of power. And they will also develop a philosophy and pedagogy that will support them as they work with classrooms and communities to transform schools and society from the bottom-up.

8.5  Final Reflections and Concluding Thoughts When reflecting on the successes and shortcomings of the experimental Laboratory School of the University of Chicago (1896–1903), Dewey (1965) wrote, “this educational movement is still going and is far from having reached its goal; its unsolved problems are still and many” (p. xiii). His prescient and humble words are an important reminder of the power and limitations of any educational theory or movement, including progressive philosophy and pedagogy. A project full of promise and potential, progressive education will never be a panacea or silver bullet for solving all of the social, political, economic, and cultural issues of our time. Instead, much like democracy itself, the movement is a living work in progress—an ever-evolving experiment in education—continually striving to meet the ongoing challenges and rewards of “associated living” (Dewey, 1916, p. 87). Focused on the creation of a better future society, the North Star in the forever unfolding progressive education movement is its laser-sharp attention to the promise and potential of children. Wisely stated by master p4cHI practitioner, Thomas Yos (2012), we “prepare a child to live well tomorrow by living well with them today” (p. 55). To accomplish this, schools must be “loving places” created “with the same amount of forethought and care that we devote to designing other instructional strategies—for all children and especially for children who do not experience love often enough” (pp. 55–56). While this is no easy feat, especially in a time of great sorrow, instability, and uncertainty for adults—this particular grounding principle of the progressive philosophy is critical to its success. The voices and narratives of twentieth-century progressive educators, all of whom faced the difficult task of navigating teaching and learning

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during the war years, echo this sentiment. The head of Hanahau’oli School during World War II, Louisa F. Palmer explained: The present emergency has made certain changes necessary in every school, but the principles upon which Hanahau‘oli was founded remain the same today — emotional stability as a fundamental need; learning by doing; intelligent appraisal of facts rather than blind acceptance; assuming of responsibility for the individual’s share in the future. To help children think straight and meet the present threatening world with sanity are Hanahau‘oli’s greatest tasks. (Palmer, 1935, p. 22)

Similarly, this is one of the greatest tasks today. If we are going to dramatically shift societies globally and create lasting positive change in the post-COVID-19 pandemic period, then we must “purposefully cultivate what many of today’s schools are unwisely leaving too far on the fringe: the loving, caring, fun-filled human relationships which are at the core of human flourishing” (Yos, 2012, p.52). Current head of Hanahau’oli School, Lia Woo, recently shared this with parents: As our world as we knew it unraveled from this global pandemic, we did what we know to do at Hanahau’oli. We looked to the past for inspiration and grounding, appreciating that our school’s founding principles are timeless and enduring. We garnered strength from the joy and power of learning and belonging. We mustered courage by trusting ourselves, one another and the process of learning, recognizing the infinite resources within our community and ourselves. We responded to our changing world by balancing tradition and innovation—all the while honoring the concepts that underpin a thriving democratic society: diversity, equity, relational trust and interdependence. Hanahau‘oli not only survived but thrived during the Covid-19 global pandemic—thanks to our collective creativity, dedication, flexibility and unwavering focus on doing what’s best for children. (Woo, 2021)

A testament to the significance of the movement in the modern era, progressive education has withstood the test of time, yet again in a moment of crisis, and it has proved itself critical to our collective pathway forward. In this chapter, I offer reasons why progressive philosophy and pedagogy are relevant now more than ever. I share how progressive approaches like p4cHI can become a means for educators to carry out the progressive mission of schools, even when they find themselves at more traditional or

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non-progressive schools and institutions. I also explain how the new Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy Master’s Program at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa is designed to support the development of the next generation of transformative progressive education leaders. Based on what you’ve read, I hope that you are as optimistic as I am, and that you are prepared to join this growing movement to further develop our collective capacity for creating a better future society through the work we do with children, schools, and the communities that we serve.

Bibliography Bruce, C. M., & Eryman, M. Y. (2015). Introduction: The progressive impulse in education. In M. Y. Eryman & B. C. Bruce (Eds.), International handbook of progressive education (pp. 1–52). Peter Lang Publishing. Campbell, B. (2000). The human tradition in the gilded age and progressive era. Scholarly ResourcesInc.. Castagno, A. E., & Brayboy, B. M. J. (2008). Culturally responsive schooling for indigenous youth: A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 78, 941–993. Chu, D. (2020). Can schools avert the coronavirus cliff? The Thomas B.  Fordham Institute. https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/ can-­schools-­avert-­coronavirus-­cliff Derman-Sparks, L., & Edwards, J.  O. (2016). The goals of anti-bias education clearing up some key misconceptions. Anti-Bias Education. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. The Free Press. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Macmillan Company. Dewey, J. (1965). Introduction. In K. C. Mayhew & A. C. Edwards (Eds.), The Dewey school: The laboratory school of the university of chicago 1896–1903, (pp. xiii–xiv). AldineTransaction. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press. Hayes, W. (2007). The progressive education movement: Is it still a factor in today’s schools? Rowman & Litterfield Education. Hogan, M. (2015). Introduction: Future of progressive education. In M. Y. Eryman & B. C. Bruce (Eds.), International handbook of progressive education (pp. 513–518). Peter Lang Publishing. Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Temple University Press.

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Jackson, T. (2001). The art and craft of ‘gently socratic’ inquiry. In A. L. Costa (Ed.), Developing minds: A resource book for teaching thinking (pp. 459–465). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Kohn, A. (2008). Progressive education: Why it’s hard to beat, but also hard to find. Independent School (Spring). Lewis, L., & Sutcliffe, R. (2017). Teaching philosophy and philosophical teaching. In M. Gregory, J. Haynes, & K. Murris (Eds.), International handbook of philosophy for children (pp. 200–207). Routledge. Lipman, M. (1988). Philosophy goes to school. Temple University Press. Lipman, M. (1989). The cultivation of reasoning through philosophy. In R. Brandt (Ed.), Readings from educational leadership: Teaching thinking (pp. 144–149). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Lipman, M. (1991). Thinking in education. Cambridge University Press. Lipman, M. (1993). Thinking children and education. Hunt Publishing. Makaiau, A., Sugimoto-Matsuda, J., Glassco, K., Honda, F., Rehurer, D., Hishinuma, E., Kida, L., & Mark, G. (2019). Ethnic studies now! Three reasons why ethnic studies should be a requirement for high school graduation in the United States. The Oregon Journal of the Social Studies, 7(1), 20–51. Makaiau, A. S. (2010). Adolescent identity exploration in a multicultural community context; An educator’s approach to rethinking identity interventions. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Hawaii, Manoa. Makaiau, A. S. (2013). Incorporating the activity of philosophy into social studies; A seven-part philosophical inquiry process. Questions: Philosophy for Young People, 13, 15–17. Makaiau, A.  S. (2015a). From school-culture-to-family-culture: Reflections on four generations of a deweyian education in Hawaii. Educational Perspectives, 47(1 & 2), 43–48. Makaiau, A. S. (2015b). Cultivating and nurturing collaborative civic Spaces. C3 Teachers. http://c3teachers.org/c3shifts Makaiau, A. S. (2016). The philosophy for children Hawaii approach to deliberative pedagogy: A promising practice for preparing pre-service social studies teachers in the college of education. Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, 36(2015–2016), 1–7. Makaiau, A. S. (2017a). Using a philosopher’s pedagogy to teach school subjects: The case of thnic studies at Kailua high school. Journal of Philosophy in Schools, 4(1), 4–26. Makaiau, A. S. (2017b). Philosophy for children Hawaii: A culturally responsive pedagogy for social justice education. In C.  C. Lin & L.  Sequiera (Eds.), Inclusion, diversity and intercultural dialogue in young people’s inquiry (pp. 99–110). Sense.

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Makaiau, A. S. (2017c). A citizen’s education: The philosophy for children Hawaii approach to deliberative pedagogy. In M.  Gregory, J.  Haynes, & K.  Murris (Eds.), International handbook of philosophy for children (pp. 19–26). Routledge. Makaiau, A. S. (2018). It’s being done in Hawaii: Ethnic studies as a requirement for public high school graduation. In L. Willox & K. Brant (Eds.), It’s being done in social studies: Race, class, gender and sexuality in the Pre/K-12 curriculum. Information Age Publishing, Inc. Makaiau, A. S. (2021). The good thinker’s toolkit: Engaging critical thinking and reasoning in secondary education. In D. Fasco & F. Fair (Eds.), Critical thinking and reasoning: Theory development, instruction, and assessment (pp. 168–187). Brill Sense. Makaiau, A.  S., & Lukey, B. (2013). A philosopher’s pedagogy: A three-part model for school betterment. Journal of Academic Perspectives, 3, 1–13. Makaiau, A.  S., & Miller, C. (2012). The philosopher’s pedagogy. Educational Perspectives, 44, 8–19. Mitchell, L.  S. (1931). A cooperative school for student teachers. Progressive Education, 8, 251–255. Palmer, L. (1935). Modern theories at Hanahauoli. Honolulu Star-Bulletin, p. 22. Palmer, L. (1937). Speech about progressive education at Hanahau‘oli. Palmer, L. F. (1968). Memories of Hanahau’oli: The first fifty years. Unknown. Pratt, C. (1948). I learn from children: An adventure in progressive education. Simon & Schuster. Pukui, M.  K. (1986). Hawaiian dictionary: Revised and enlarged edition. University of Hawaii Press. Sharp, A.  M. (1993). The community of inquiry: education for democracy. In M.  Lipman (Ed.), Thinking children and education (pp.  337–345). Hunt Publishing. Shields, C. (2011). Transformative leadership: An introduction. Counterpoints, 409, 1–17. Strong, A. P. (2001). Using philosophy for children to teach social studies and english language arts in the secondary setting. Master’s thesis. University of Hawaii. Strong, A. P. (2003). Voyaging to the outer limits of education: Reflections on P4C in the secondary classroom. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 17(1 & 2), 56–64. Style, E. (1988). Curriculum as window and mirrors. First published in istening for All voices. Oak Knoll School. Retrieved from https://nationalseedproject.org/ Key-­SEED-­Texts/curriculum-­as-­window-­and-­mirror Woo, L. (2021). Message to Hanahau’oli School parents. [Unpublished manuscript]. Hanahau’oli School. Yos, T. (2012). Raising the bar: Love, the community of inquiry, and the flourishing life. Educational Perspectives, 44(1 and 2), 52–57.

PART III

Practices, Effects and Results: A Pedagogical Path to Pursue

CHAPTER 9

Philosophizing with Children in the Community of Inquiry: Uncertainty as Medium for Connected and Complex Thinking and Speaking Katrin Alt and Kerstin Michalik

9.1   Introduction The particular importance of language education for children’s educational attainment is undisputed, and yet teaching is frequently characterized by forms of interaction that are not conducive to the development of children’s thinking and language. The classic pattern of interaction is IRE discourse, Initiation—Response—Evaluation, which was first described by Mehan (1979). In this context, a question from the teacher is followed by a (short) response from the pupil, which is then evaluated by the teacher.

K. Alt (*) Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] K. Michalik University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_9

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Teaching, in general, continues to be dominated by this pattern of interaction, as international research has demonstrated (see Howe & Manzoorui, 2013; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013; Vrikki et al., 2018; Lange, 2018). In this context, teaching focuses on closed questions and clear-cut answers; this reduces complexity and leads to restrictions not only of lesson content but also of thought and speech acts. Classes involving philosophical discussion stand in marked contrast to this. Philosophical discussion focuses on philosophical questions and complex content, which are open to differing interpretations and to which there are a wide range of potential answers. Do we always have to tell the truth? Do things always have a beginning and an end? Can animals think? What is friendship? Uncertainty is central to philosophical inquiry; the answers to philosophical questions are uncertain, and so is the course of the discussion, which depends on the children investigating the questions and what they are interested in talking about (Michalik, 2018). Life in a society characterized by constant change and pluralization is increasingly associated with uncertainty. Challenging situations such as the current coronavirus pandemic involve flexible behaviours and decisions, and uncertain outcomes. With philosophizing, there is no immediate pressure to act and this can help children learn to approach uncertainty without anxiety. At the same time, philosophical discussion enables children to acquire the necessary language to talk with each other about uncertain issues. Philosophizing with children about open questions necessitates complex, plurivalent thinking and can therefore make a particular contribution to language development. The present chapter takes a closer look at the relationships between philosophizing, communication in class and language development and identifies the productive role played by uncertainty in thinking and speaking in class. It then presents the results of a study comparing and analysing language and interaction patterns in both philosophical and conventional discussions in the classroom.

9.2  Communication in Class, Language Development and Philosophizing with Children Teaching often still focuses on a limited spectrum of interactions. This applies not only to communication between teachers and children, which is generally restricted to the Initiation-Response-Evaluation format. Interactions between children are also limited because as a rule, speaking in

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class is dominated by teacher talk and questions. The dominant discourse in today’s schools continues to be largely monologic, which means on the one hand that most of the talking is done by the teacher, and on the other that classroom communication is based on an instructional model of teaching and learning, with the teacher transferring “knowledge” to the students (Lange, 2018; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013). Sessions are monopolized by teacher questions that aim to elicit clear, unambiguous, reproducible answers and are often less cognitively challenging. This transmission model of education might work well for the teaching and memorization of simple facts, but it is not as suited to higher educational goals as complex, connected and critical thinking or argumentation (Alexander, 2012). And it is not a model for contemporary education, which has to prepare students for a diverse and pluralistic world full of uncertainties. Higher-order and multi-perspective thinking demand dialogic forms of teaching and learning (Mercer, 2003; Wegerif, 2018; Mercer et al., 2019; Littleton & Mercer, 2013), which are based on constructivist learning theories such as Vygotsky and emphasize the importance of the critical co-­ construction of knowledge through talk (Vygotsky, 1968, 1978). “Dialogic teaching is a pedagogical approach that involves students in the collaborative construction of meaning and is characterized by shared control over the key aspects of classroom discourse” (Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013; 114). When it comes to content, dialogic teaching and inquiry centre around questions that are open or divergent and allow for a degree of uncertainty about acceptable answers (ibid., 117). There is empirical and other evidence that dialogic teaching not only promotes higher-order thinking and a deeper understanding of subject knowledge (Alexander, 2018; Wilkinson et al., 2017); it is also a form of teaching and learning that promotes students’ language development. The simple question-and-answer format used in conventional teaching is also criticized by language researchers for being restricted and for limiting children’s thinking and speaking in class. “This kind of communication structure provides pupils with scarcely any opportunity to make active connections between linguistic and subject content” (Lange, 2018, 208). In contrast with this, dialogic teaching requires sessions to provide dialogic, interactive spaces with a high level of pupil participation, spaces that encourage learners to produce complex speech acts, give them time to reflect on and develop their own ideas and take a productive approach to the openness, uncertainty and unpredictability of the communicative processes in question (Fürstenau & Lange, 2013; Lange, 2018).

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Philosophizing with children is a particular form of dialogic learning because as a method and a pedagogical approach, it is centred on collective reflection by children and young people in the Community of Inquiry, where open questions and the uncertainty of potential answers play a key role. Methodologically speaking, the community of philosophical inquiry focuses on the following thought acts: • Posing questions • Analysing concepts • Constructing and testing arguments • The conduct of thought experiments involving speculation about what is and is not possible (What if…) Philosophical discussion provides the time and space for children to develop their own complex ideas and to contribute to the discussion, and thus also for more complex speech acts, which are promoted through interactions that promote language development. Uncertainty plays a particularly productive role here because there are no explicit right or wrong answers to philosophical questions. This does more than provide all children with the opportunity to participate and require children to engage in independent thinking and speaking. By definition, the uncertain space also leads to lasting changes in the fabric of interaction between teachers and pupils. Teachers are no longer the arbiters of knowledge; subject content and the conduct of discussions are open to all participants. A number of studies indicate that PwC is a two-way process and has an impact on teachers as well as learners: the uncertainty of the dynamics and the outcomes of philosophical inquiry can be seen as a special opportunity to step out of the usual role of the teacher and enter into meaningful, intensive, authentic conversations with children on an equal footing (Scholl et al., 2014 & Scholl et al., 2016; Michalik, 2018). A number of empirical studies provide clear evidence that regular philosophizing has an especially positive impact on children’s language development (see Michalik, 2018, 18ff.; Alt, 2019). Starting from these findings, we undertook a study to compare in more detail the linguistic features distinguishing philosophical discussion from the usual approaches to classroom communication in Social Studies lessons, which are more focused on clarifying issues and transferring knowledge.

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9.3  Empirical Findings on the Language Benefits of Philosophizing with Children Many studies on philosophizing with children have thus far focused either on children’s reasoning skills (Niklasson et al., 1996; Collins, 2005; Trickey, 2007) or dialogic skills (Daniel et al., 1999). The positive effects of philosophizing with children on the number of utterances are also well-­documented (Daniel et al., 1999, 435; Trickey, 2007, 189). The latter two studies also showed that in philosophical discussion, pupils’ share of the conversation increased over time, as did the length of their utterances. The quality of contributions to discussion also changed, according to a small study of 20 five-year-olds by Daniel and Delsol (2005, 23ff.). The children’s utterances became longer and longer, whilst the length of the teacher’s utterances remained constant. Daniel and Pettier (2011) investigated the discursive skills of four-year-olds and determined from the children’s contributions to discussion that they were already starting to philosophize. “The children’s discursive skills were simple, but their discourses were situated within a movement of decentering and abstraction. These discourses thus indicate that the children were beginning to philosophize” (ibid., 299). The control group discussions had a higher number of anecdotal contributions, with more frequent use of the personal pronoun “I” being observed, along with fewer generalizations and abstractions (ibid., 301). The authors ascribe the differences in the complexity of the children’s utterances to the nature of philosophical discussion and thus see their results as contradicting Piaget’s theory of children’s egocentrism, which states that children are not capable of such abstraction at this age (ibid., 302). Siddiqui et  al. (2017) undertook a large-scale study with 2722 pupils which showed that children who philosophized regularly were better able to evaluate their own communication skills after the intervention, in contrast to the children in comparison groups. The effect size was even stronger for the group of disadvantaged children (ibid., 6). Effects on metalinguistic skills have now also been well-documented. In the context of language acquisition, the length of an utterance is an important indicator of language quality in young children. Generally speaking, the longer children’s sentences become, the higher their grammatical complexity. However, there has been little investigation on morphological and syntactic skills in the context of philosophizing with children. Schleifer and Courtemanche (1996) compare the use of connectors (e.g. because, as, but) by a group of multilingual children at a school in Montreal with a non-philosophizing control group (Schleifer &

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Courtemanche, 1996, 31) and conclude that philosophical discussion promotes the use of connectors. A study from Iran by Gholamhossein and Siamak (2010) confirms the positive effect of philosophical discussion on students aged 19–25 studying in a second language. Here, improved reasoning skills were accompanied by an increased use of connectors to link ideas with conclusions (see Gholamhossein & Siamak, 2010, 721). According to a preliminary study by Gyger and Buchs looking at the language development properties of philosophical discussion (see Gyger & Buchs, 2016, 41–74), philosophical discussion should be seen as a “genre in which reasoning predominates” (ibid., 50). At the micro level, this requires the linguistic tools of the language of school and education (ibid., 50). With regard to syntax and morphology, the authors find that conditional clauses with “wenn” (“if”) play a prominent role (ibid., 61). Alt’s study (2019) confirms the influence of philosophizing with children on complex morphological and syntactic structures as evidenced by the use of connectors by five- and six-year-olds. Comparison of average results in language tests reveals two areas where the children in the study’s philosophizing group developed better: overall behaviour in discussion and the use of more sophisticated connectors. Deductive content analysis of the compared transcripts shows that in the philosophical discussions, the preschool teacher poses open questions that are particularly cognitively challenging for the children and that this provokes particularly complex speech acts. When philosophizing, the children engage in more complex speech acts, using more argumentation, speculating and deploying more complex morphological and syntactic tools (sophisticated connectors and verb forms) than in comparative dialogic situations without explicit philosophical content (Alt, 2019, 183). These findings led us to hypothesize that the content of discussion (philosophical/non-philosophical) has a significant influence on the complexity of children’s language. The present pilot study is now testing this for primary school-age children.

9.4  Empirical Study of the Features of Philosophical Discussion at Two Hamburg Primary Schools The empirical pilot study was conducted in the 2019/2020 school year and monitored four 45-minute class discussions in two school classes. These discussions were recorded as audio files, transcribed1 and their 1  The transcription of discussions was based on simplified transcription rules drawing on Kuckartz et al. (2008, 27). Since no analysis of phonological characteristics of statements was required here, there was no need for a complex transcription system.

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content analysed. A total of 28 children took part in the study. To provide a basis for comparison, two non-philosophical discussions held by the same teacher with the same class in the context of Social Studies sessions were analysed. The study focused on the following issues. • How do children deal with the openness of philosophical questions and research, and how is their handling of uncertainty reflected in their language behaviour? • What stimuli does the teacher use to encourage engagement with open questions and different forms of thinking? • What determines children’s language behaviour in philosophical discussion? The transcripts of recordings of a total of four class discussions were subjected to both quantitative and qualitative content analysis on the basis of Mayring and Kuckartz and the MAXQDA programme (Kuckartz, 2014; Mayring, 2015). Qualitative analysis focused on communications processes, interaction and content (Dwenger, 2020), whilst quantitative, linguistic analysis looked at the children’s and teacher’s speech acts (Worch, 2020).2 How Children Dealt with the Openness of Philosophical Questions and the Uncertainty Resulting from Them The goal of qualitative analysis was to show how children and discussion leaders dealt with uncertain issues in philosophical discussion. Comparison of the same class in a different Social Studies session that did not have explicitly philosophical content enabled us to investigate whether the conceptual framework of the discussions had an influence on how pupils dealt with and engaged with uncertainty. The deductive analysis was based on categories derived from the theory and supplemented with categories developed inductively from the material. The following table shows the categories arranged by frequency. Not all the categories are suitable per se for use when philosophizing with children; rather, they represent a first attempt to illustrate the strategies 2  The transcripts were analysed by Paulin Dwenger and Alexander Worch as part of their Master’s theses.

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deployed by the children in the discussions. The strategies deployed are set out below. Examples of the three most frequently deployed strategies are set out briefly below. Recourse to logic was defined as the formulation by a child of a premise that is then followed by a conclusion. “Natural things grow. A pencil doesn’t grow and it doesn’t just suddenly fall out of the sky either […] and that’s why I don’t think that it’s natural […].” (T2, Z. 322–325). Speculation is linked with introductory expressions such as “I think”, “perhaps” or “probably”, as in the following statement, for example: “Um, well, who’s allowed to decide who can live here and who can’t, I think it’s the government […]” (T1, 365–366). The third strategy, which along with the two above was most frequently noted, is the expression of one’s own opinion, defined as the expression of a point of view that is explicitly identified as personal, as can be seen here: “I think everyone has the right to decide for themselves what they believe in and what religion they want to belong to” (T1, Z. 29–30). These three most frequently deployed strategies are also covered in the theoretical literature on the application of philosophizing with children and are clear indicators of philosophical discussion. Other strategies presented here, such as formulation of a personal opinion as a given, can be viewed more as avoidance strategies in the context of uncertain issues. Further avoidance strategies also emerged, albeit to a lesser extent, when dealing with uncertainty. Children attempted to build a consensus amongst the participants, for example, or addressed speculation to the teacher—in the expectation of being validated as right or wrong. Further to the classification of all strategies deployed in the discussions, it can be seen that the following are particularly helpful in discussions on uncertain topics. • Explicit expressions of personal perspectives (I think that …; I believe that …) • Speculation (I presume that …; I could imagine that …) • Focusing on what has been read, heard, general values, laws or assumed facts—in which context, however, statements are questioned, and discussed and tested in discussion with other interlocutors. • Presentation of a range of positions without adopting one explicitly oneself (You could see it like this or also like that …)

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• Taking account of the utility or future relevance of specific actions • Description of conditions and situational dependencies (It depends on/if …) • Testing one’s own creative thought processes (imagining, speculating, thought experiments) Through the use of these strategies, the children demonstrated that they recognized the underlying uncertainty of the question they were dealing with and that they were engaging in philosophical discussion. In the context of the philosophical discussions, therefore, a range of possible interpretations were highlighted and the uncertainty of discussion content was acknowledged. In general, participants in the philosophical discussions took a reflective and inquisitive approach and were prepared to do without rapid solutions (cf. Dwenger, 2020, 87). Teacher Prompts During Discussion Teacher guidance and prompting of discussion in the two philosophical sessions were characterized by the following features. • Explicit presentation of the question as controversial and open (This is really a question where there are doubts) • Highlighting the potential for different interpretations (So, I’m interested to hear all your different ideas about this) • Identifying controversial positions and inviting participants to take a position (There were different opinions—if you’ve been particularly convinced by one of them, you can change your opinion again) • Encouraging pupils to express their own ideas and thoughts (What do you think about that? There’s no right or wrong here, it’s all about your opinion) • Encouraging pupils to justify their opinions and refer to each other (Can you try to justify that, please?) • Holding back from evaluating pupils’ statements (Hm and no direct comment) The contrast with the teachers’ behaviour in non-philosophical discussions is interesting because here the conduct of the discussion was very different.

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• Closed questions and tasks, structured in small steps and with a clear focus on knowledge (Who knows what an Imam is?) • Continuous validation of the children’s answers (I completely agree with you there?! Exactly right! Great!) • Teacher presentation of solutions that closed down any emerging uncertainty (Water is not alive) • Pupils were only encouraged to refer to others in the form of corrections and amendments (Can you tell me what wasn’t quite right about Leonie’s answer?) • Frequent correction of, addition to, and interruption of children’s verbal contributions (That’s not quite right. And what else is involved? We just need to fill in the picture now) The results show how clearly the prompts and guidance provided by the same (!) teacher differ in the different discussion contexts—a philosophical discussion and communication in a session focused on transmitting and developing knowledge—and how this affects the scope the children have to develop and exchange their own ideas. Linguistic analysis of the speech acts in the session and analysis of the teachers’ and the pupils’ share of the discussion also underline the impact of different forms of communication on the language used in the session.

9.5  Linguistic Features of Philosophical Discussion in Comparison with Social Studies Discussions: Results of Linguistic Analysis The second step involved linguistic analysis of pupils’ and teachers’ speech acts in the two philosophical discussions compared with those in the Social Studies discussions, where there was no explicit philosophical content. Here we focused on quantitative analysis of the children’s speech acts using the RaBi scale (Tietze et al., 2016) and micro-level analysis of morphology and syntax in line with the HAVAS 5 language profile analysis process (Reich & Roth, 2004). We analysed: • the length of contributions to discussion, measured by words spoken, • the proportion of simple and complex speech acts, • the proportion of complex verb placements and verb forms, • the use of the subjunctive and • the use of connectors.

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9.6  Results The number of utterances by pupils and teachers was largely evenly distributed, but analysis of the number of words showed that the pupils produced significantly longer contributions in the philosophical discussions. Over 70% of the words in the philosophical discussions were spoken by pupils compared with only 53% in the Social Studies discussion (see Table 9.1). The second stage categorized the children’s speech acts as either simple or complex in accordance with the RaBi scale. This contrasts simple speech acts, such as making statements, asking questions and making suggestions with complex speech acts such as explanation, justification and speculation. There were a total of 130 higher level speech acts by pupils in the philosophical discussions and 59 in the Social Studies discussions. This represented 90% of all speech acts in the philosophical discussions and 46% of all speech acts in Social Studies discussions (see Table 9.2 below). Complex speech acts require the use of more complex verb forms, and thus we undertook micro-level analysis of the use of verb forms and verb Table 9.1  Children’s strategies for dealing with uncertainty in the discussion Frequent (more than 15 occurrences)

Occasional (5–15 occurrences)

Rare (1–5 occurrences)

Recourse to logic

Formulation of a personal opinion as a given Child refers to knowledge

Attempt to build consensus

Speculating Expression of a personal opinion

Rejection of unfamiliar positions Questioning Focus on reading Focus on values, laws, social requirements Invocation of utility aspects Emphasis of future relevance Formulation of situational dependencies Contrasting points of view with each other Referring to statements by third parties Conduct and testing of thought experiments

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Table 9.2  Share of discussion and selected speech acts in the two discussions Philosophical discussion Frequency Pupils’ share of discussion (in words) Teachers’ share of discussion (in words) Complex speech acts by pupils (in acc. With RaBi) No. of complex verb formsa and placements used by pupils (in acc. With HAVAS 5) No. of past subjunctives and “würde” compound forms used by pupils No. of connectors used by pupils (acc. HAVAS 5) Simple connectors used by pupils (acc. HAVAS 5) Complex connectors used by pupils (acc. HAVAS 5)

%

Social studies discussion Frequency %

7843 3307 130 92

70 30 90 5

4558 4050 59 33

53 47 46 4

90

5

25

3

38 9 95

27 6 67

55 17 44

43 13 44

In accordance with HAVAS 5, “complex verb forms and placements” were defined as verbs in the passive form with both werden and sein, and the future and subjunctive forms a

placements. The children used complex verb forms and verb placements a total of 92 times in the philosophical discussions—compared with 33 times in the Social Studies discussions; a larger-scale survey is required here, in order to verify significance. This also applies to the subjunctive and its würde compound form, which were used 90 times in philosophical discussion and 25 times in Social Studies discussion. The absolute numbers of verbs used are also of interest here: there were 1841 in the philosophical discussions and only 892 in the Social Studies discussions. The tentative conclusion can thus be drawn that philosophical discussion encourages verb use generally. The children used sophisticated connectors a total of 95 times (67%) in the philosophical discussions, including weil (because), relative pronouns such as der, die and das (who/which/that), subordinate clause conjunctions such as wer, wie, was (who, how, what) and connectors such as denn, ob, als, wenn, damit (since, whether, when, so that). In the Social Studies discussions, on the other hand, the children used constructions without connectors 55 times (43%) and simple connectors such as und, und dann, und da (and, and then, and so) twice as often as in the philosophical discussions. Overall, the children made longer contributions in the philosophical discussions, and their speech acts were more complex. Micro-level analysis

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showed that the children used more complex structures when it came to connectors. This is in line with the findings of Katrin Alt’s study (2019) of preschoolers, but a larger sample needs to be examined, in particular, to check complex verb forms and the use of the subjunctive, and to assess statistical significance.

9.7  Conclusion The results of the study confirm previous findings that engagement with open questions and complex issues in philosophical discussion is accompanied by more complex speech acts. The limited number of discussions means that this is in the nature of a pilot study and will need to be expanded into a larger-scale trial in the future in order to achieve statistically significant effects. The effect of regular philosophizing on the language development of children with language support needs or multilingual backgrounds would also be worth investigating. On the basis of our results to date, we assume that it is the uncertainty of the issues in philosophical discussions that particularly encourages children to verbalize complex thought acts. These include thinking through possibilities, conditions and consequences, attempts at clarification and speculation. The engagement with philosophical issues inherent in the community of philosophical inquiry promotes thinking and language skills. Philosophizing is a method that implicitly contributes to the language development of all children and is therefore also important for inclusive learning. It entails new perspectives on classroom discussion that are also of relevance to the principle of continuous language development (Gogolin & Lange, 2010), which states that language development is not restricted to German language lessons but involves all grades and subjects.

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Educational dialogues—understanding and promoting productive interaction (pp. 48–63). Routledge. Mayring, P. (2015). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. Grundlagen und Techniken. Beltz. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons. Social organisation in the classroom. Harvard University Press. Mercer, N. (2003). The educational value of dialogic talk in whole class dialogue: New Perspectives on Spoken English in the Classroom. Discussion Papers, 73–76. QCA. Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Major, L. (2019). The routledge international handbook of research on dialogic education. Routledge. Michalik, K. (2018). Empirische Forschung zu Wirkungen philosophischer Gespräche mit Kindern. In H. de Boer & K. Michalik (Eds.), Philosophieren mit Kindern—Forschungszugänge und –perspektiven (pp. 13–32). Barbara Budrich. Niklasson, J., Ohlsson, R., & Ringborg, M. (1996). Evaluating philosophy for children. Thinking. The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 12, 17–21. Reich, H., & Roth, H.-J. (2004). Hamburger Verfahren zur Analyse des Sprachstands Fünfjähriger − HAVAS 5. Landesinstitut für Lehrerbildung und Schulentwicklung. Reznitskaya, A., & Gregory, M. (2013). Student thought and classroom language: Examining the mechanisms of change in dialogic teaching. Educational Psychologist, 48(2), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2013. 775898 Schleifer, M., & Courtemanche, L. (1996). The effect of philosophy for children on language ability. Thinking. The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 12, 30–31. https://doi.org/10.5840/thinking19961246 Scholl, R., Nichols, K., & Burgh, G. (2016). Connecting learning to the world beyond the classroom through collaborative philosophical inquiry. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 44(5), 436–454. Scholl, R., Nichols, K., & Burgh, G. (2014). Transforming pedagogy through philosophical inquiry. International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning, 9(3), 253–272. Siddiqui, N., Stephen, G., & See, B. H. (2017). Non-cognitive impacts of philosophy for children. Project Report. Durham University: School of Education. Tietze, S., Rank, A., & Wildemann, A. (2016). Erfassung bildungssprachlicher Kompetenzen von Kindern im Vorschulalter. Grundlagen und Entwicklung einer Ratingskala (RaBi). Retrieved May 4, 2021, from http://www.pedocs. de/volltexte/2016/12076/pdf/Tietze_Rank_Wildemann_2016_Erfassung_ bildungssprachlicher_Kompetenzen.pdf Trickey, S. (2007). Promoting social and cognitive development in schools. An evaluation of “thinking through philosophy”. In: The 13th international conference on Thinking. Retrieved March 17, 2021, from http://www.ep.liu.se/ ecp/021/vol1/ecp07021.pdf

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Vrikki, M., Wheatley, L., Christine, H., Hennessy, S., & Mercer, N. (2018). Dialogic practices in primary school classrooms. Language and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2018.1509988 Vygotsky, L. S. (1968). Thought and language. MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind and society. The development of higher psychological processes. MIT Press. Wegerif, R. (2018). A dialogic theory of teaching thinking. In L.  Kerslake & R.  Wegerif (Eds.), Theory of teaching thinking. International Perspectives (pp. 89–104). Routledge. Wilkinson, I. A. G., Reznitskaya, A., Bourdage, K., Oyler, J., Glina, M., Drewry, R., Kim, M.-Y., & Nelson, K. (2017). Toward a more dialogic pedagogy: Changing teachers’ beliefs and practices through professional development in language arts classrooms. Language and Education, 31(1), 65–82. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2016.1230129 Worch, A. (2020). Sprachhandeln von Kindern im Sachunterricht—eine empirische Untersuchung zum Philosophieren mit Kindern. Universität Hamburg.

CHAPTER 10

Inclusive Science Education Through Metaphors and Narrative Annamaria Contini and Alice Giuliani

10.1   Premises of Research The project “Knowing through metaphors” that is to be presented in this chapter concerns the use of metaphors and narrative in science education. Over the past few decades, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and scholars in the field of education have offered insights into the fundamental role of both narratives and metaphors. They are in fact considered fundamental instruments used by human beings to think, perceive, imagine, learn, and make sense of their experiences. Metaphor and

Annamaria Contini wrote paragraphs 1 and 6. Alice Giuliani wrote paragraphs 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A. Contini (*) • A. Giuliani University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_10

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narrative perspectives, nevertheless, have mostly been utilized separately.1 Today, growing interest in STEAM education makes it possible to promote the connection between metaphor and narrative as a strategy for effective and inclusive science education. In pursuing this objective, this strategy might help to realize the inclusive dissemination of science literacy as a focus of European research and innovation programmes as Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe. The Science with and for Society programme in Horizon2020 included the promotion and dissemination of science literacy as conditions to face the challenge of connecting science to society by making science education and careers attractive for young people. Based on the achievement of the programme, final recommendations stated the necessity to further improve investment in science education for all as a condition to ensure excellent Research and Innovation to tackle the challenges of today for a better future (European Commission, 2020). Today, Horizon Europe has implemented the recommendation from Horizon 2020 to promote science education mainstreaming in projects across the new European programme. Regarding science education as a standalone topic, the programme states the need to develop a STE(A)M roadmap for Science Education in order to promote and improve scientific careers and a science-literate society. The need for science literacy and scientific training has definitely been enhanced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has demonstrated the importance of Europe’s scientists and doctors in keeping our society safe and healthy. Also, EU policies such as the European Green Deal, the Digital transition and Health, call for more highly educated European scientists. In the Horizon Europe programme, the cluster “Culture, creativity and inclusive society” upholds the following goals with regard to education: 1  The project undertaken by Michael Hanne since the 1990s and named “Narrative Metaphor Nexus” is a pioneering work in this field: symposia and conferences were promoted on how narrative and metaphor function in disciplines and professional domains such as medicine, politics, law, education (Hanne, 1999; Hanne, 2011; Hanne & Kaal, 2019). The Center for Metaphor and Narrative in Science, which is hosted by the Department of Education and Humanities of the Modena and Reggio Emilia University, similarly aims to promote multi- and inter-disciplinary research relating to the role of metaphor and narrative in science communication, science education and mathematics (cf. Contini 2020a; Contini et al., 2020; Corni et al., 2018, 2019; Fuchs, 2007, 2015). In 2017, some members of the centre presented their recent research at “Look Both Ways: Narrative and Metaphor in Education”, the fifth conference in Hanne’s series, which took place at VU University in Amsterdam (Fuchs et al., 2018, 2020a).

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• to enhance interdisciplinary research for the construction of an aware and inclusive society and for the development of effective communicative and educational models; • to promote the diffusion of scientific culture and science education as a condition for inclusive and sustainable social growth and for the opening of science to the needs of the community. Even the Italian National Guidelines for the preschool and first cycle of education2 (2012), consider science education to be a resource to develop responsible and proactive citizens: the learning objectives are defined and addressed according to the competences of the first cycle of education (in particular, with respect to the critical use of language and the development of autonomy, expressiveness, and responsibility).3 In addition, the guidelines reiterate the need to respect the principle of inclusiveness in education. The project that this document presents is aligned with the premises and goals of the aforementioned European policy programming. “Knowing through metaphors” is meant to be an exploratory research project that aims to help establish criteria and operational approaches to define the impact of using integrated metaphors and narratives on the effectiveness and, consequently, the inclusiveness of science education. The research team that conducted the project shares the perspective that metaphor and narrative are an important resource for learning science concepts for two main reasons: • they are resources for a learning process conceived as an interactive construction of knowledge rather than as reception and adaptation of predefined contents; • they allow positive interaction between scientific and ordinary language, encouraging an attitude of complexity, the enhancement of the plurality of languages and the construction of relationships between different areas of experience. The inclusiveness of this educational strategy must be understood not so much as a goal but rather as a consequence of its effectiveness for learning. According to the perspective shared by the research team, an effective strategy for learning science is necessarily inclusive: for an authentic 2 3

 Preschool, elementary school, and middle school.  Cf. also Council of the European Union (2018).

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understanding of scientific concepts, it is necessary to make a plurality of languages interact and design cognitive pathways in continuity with students’ prior experiences and knowledge (Amin, 2015a, 2015b, 2020; Lancor, 2014, 2015). Inclusivity relies on effectiveness because the plurality of languages involved and the constructive mode of learning is reflected in the ability to involve different individualities and different attitudes. In the following paragraphs, the premises, the methods, and the results of this exploratory research will be presented. The research focused on the use of metaphor and narrative in the teaching of biology and was carried out in a comprehensive school in Reggio Emilia. The research compared the learning outcomes of classroom groups that were involved in two different ways of explaining the same scientific content (the cell and its components): on one hand, the exposition of learning content through the introduction of scientific language and the definition of concepts; on the other hand, the construction of a narrative in which scientific content becomes the object of an “encounter” and is described through metaphorical associations. The objective of the comparison was to identify significant differences in the effects of the two types of lesson on students’ learning. The researchers wanted to define indicators to support the claim that the combination of metaphor and narrative has specific cognitive value and can promote effective and inclusive learning. Underlying this idea are well-established theses about the cognitive value of both metaphor and narrative, and a perspective on learning that considers knowledge and creativity to be closely linked. Regarding the cognitive value of metaphor, we refer primarily to Max Black’s interaction view for its ability to justify both a cognitive and an innovative value of metaphor. Metaphor according to the interaction view is primarily a device that activates a variation of meaning or semantic innovation, understood as a variation in the application of a term (cf. Giuliani, 2020, p. 178). This variation, according to Black’s structural definition, is the result of the interaction between the meanings of—or systems of implications associated with—the terms that form the metaphor: the metaphoric interaction activates, by evoking them, these systems of implications and establishes connections that lead to a different reference of the term in question.4 In 4  For example, it becomes possible to say of a man that he is a wolf because a similarity is established between certain characteristics associated with the wolf and certain qualities of human behaviour, which are evoked, precisely, by the interaction (thus, we can speak of human aggression as a predator trait).

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this sense, metaphor is not reduced to a single word but is the result of the interaction between two factors in the context of an entire sentence (Contini, 2020b, p. 28).5 The aspect that characterizes the interactive metaphor, however, consists above all in the element of cognitive innovation: the fact that it induces those who understand it to construct a new system of implications with respect to the normal one (Black, 1962, pp. 40–41). For example, the metaphor-wolf, by emphasizing certain aspects of man, organizes the idea of man and highlights new possible relations in reality. Black emphasizes the heuristic and innovative value of the interactive metaphor together: the two values cannot be distinguished, since the implications and associations that flow from the metaphorical meaning are determined by the interaction itself. From his perspective, to affirm the creativity of metaphors is to argue that “some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor’s production helps to constitute” (Black, 1977, p. 454; cf. Contini, 2018). That justifies the affinity between the use of metaphors and the use of theoretical models in Black’s Models and Archetypes (1962): their characteristic is that of transferring, to an unfamiliar field that one wishes to explore, a set of implications belonging to a more familiar or better organized secondary domain (Black, 1962, pp.  230–233). Black proposes Maxwell’s example of the “imaginary incompressible fluid” as a model for the electric field that makes it possible to see and define its novel characteristics (Black, 1962, pp. 226–228). The original domain is not simply illustrated by the secondary domain but undergoes a restructuring from which new hypotheses and connections emerge. The model actually “shows” something unseen in the previous perspective, and so the metaphor refers to something that has no definition outside the interaction (cf. Giuliani, 2020, pp. 191–193).

5  The premise of Black’s view of metaphor  is a philosophical perspective that considers vagueness a property of common language that guarantees its versatility. The vagueness of a word, for Black, consists in producing borderline cases, to which it seems possible both to apply and not to apply the term (Black, 1949, p. 30); it is what is indicated by the assertion that “situations are conceivable in which its [= the term’s] application is doubtful”. A term determined according to Black, thus with a defined meaning, has a margin of indeterminacy in the variation of its application. This indeterminacy, however, does not make the term the bearer of some deficiency, thus a term to be replaced with a more “precise” term (Giuliani, 2020, pp. 177–178).

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Models and Archetypes started a series of successful studies that further investigated the function of models in science and their relationship with metaphors. Continuing the same investigation, Mary Hesse (1966) proposed her idea of the scientific model as a tool for redescription. Black’s argument was also taken as a basis by Ricoeur in 1975 to support the constitutive value of the use of imagination in scientific knowledge. Moreover, starting from Black’s studies on metaphor, in the 1970s, a transversal debate arose in different fields of study, with the participation of important authors, as emerges in the influential collected volume Metaphor and Thought, which first appeared in Ortony, 1979 edited by Andrew Ortony. Among others, the volume collected essays by Boyd and Kuhn, who undertook a confrontation on the role of metaphor for scientific explanation and discovery, as part of a debate on the epistemology of science, theoretical language, and discontinuity between theories. Moreover, Black’s notion that metaphor operates via an inter-domain connection became one of the crucial assumptions of the psycholinguistic approach to metaphor, from Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory (1980) to Gentner’s structure-mapping hypothesis (Gentner, 1983), to Tourangeau and Sternberg’s domain interaction hypothesis (Tourangeau & Sternberg, 1982), and to Glucksberg and Keysar’s definition of metaphors as class-inclusion assertions (1990; Contini, 2020a, p. 12).6 Similarly, in the 1970s, narrative became the focus of many studies in the field of cognitive psychologists and artificial intelligence researchers.7 It emerged that “many adults and children seem to use their knowledge of the structural features of narratives to understand and remember stories and to anticipate forthcoming information” (Contini, 2020a, p. 10). The results of these studies recall Jerome Bruner’s (1986) still-relevant theses about narrative as a means by which agents construct their knowledge of the world around them, their understanding of themselves, and their communicative interaction.8 Subsequently, since the mid-90s, a new wave in narrative theory has focused on the cognitive basis of creating and understanding stories. Narrative analysts have shown that quite complex  See also the contributions collected in Gibbs (ed.) Gibbs Jr. (2008).  Cf. Kintsch (1977), Mandler and Johnson (1977), Stein and Glenn (1979). 8  For Bruner (1986), narrative is a specific “mode of knowing” which deals with the intentionality of human actions (what and why?) and the context in which these actions took place (where and when?). From the narrative perspective, truth is to be approached as situated or contextual (cf. Contini, 2020a, p. 11). 6 7

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linguistic and cognitive operations are required to generate or comprehend even the most minimal stories and text in turn can force readers to modify the interpretative models on which they have hitherto relied (Emmott, 1997; Margolin, 2003). Moreover, narrative itself has been studied as an instrument for sense making and for the exercise of cognitive abilities. Regarding the cognitive value of metaphor, in order to reinforce the relevance of Black’s theory, the research took into account more recent developments in conceptual metaphor theory. The original core of Lakoff and Johnson’s theory is the claim that “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (1980, p. 3). Basic conceptual metaphors are cognitive structures by which we unconsciously organize and categorize our experiences. They are living metaphors in the sense that they play a central role in defining our everyday realities (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 55; Contini, 2020a, p. 10). The theses, debated over the years by Lakoff and Johnson, have found critical development in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies that cross the fields of cognitive science, philosophy and linguistics, and communication.9 Regarding the sense of the “creativity” of metaphor, Ricoeur’s study on the “living” metaphor (1975, trans. 1977) remains an important reference for research, as it contributed to making the hermeneutic and phenomenological approach more incisive by opening it up to comparison with the theses of cognitivist scope. The hermeneutic approach, on the other hand, allows us to justify a close relationship between metaphor and narrative. For Ricoeur, both the effects produced by metaphor and by stories depend on semantic innovation. In the case of metaphor, we have the production of a new semantic pertinence through an impertinent attribution.10 In the case of narrative, we have an intrigue which is the result of synthesis (Ricoeur 1984–1985, vol. 1). A new meaning is generated also because

9  Cf., e.g., Lakoff and Johnson (1999), Johnson (1981, 1987), and more recently Fauconnier and Turner (2002), Gibbs Jr. (2006), Johnson (2007), Kövecses (2015, 2020), Steen (2008), Steen et al. (2010), de Mendoza et al. (2011), Ervas et al. (2017), Prandi (2017). Cf. Ervas and Gola (2016) and Contini (2018). 10  For example, in the expression of Mallarmé “The sky is dead” the predicate “dead” is compatible only with individuals belonging to the category of living beings but metaphor gives rise to a new semantic pertinence on the ruins of the literal, producing sense from nonsense (Ricoeur, 1977, p. 296; cf. Contini, 2020a, p. 16).

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reading is a dynamic process which actively transforms the world of the reader as well as what is being read (Contini, 2020a, p. 16). The theoretical studies for which the contextual and communicative aspects are constitutive of the meaning of metaphor open a further avenue to deepening the relationship between metaphor and narration, if this is understood as a genre of discourse. In addition, the attention to the relationship with the narrative leads us to recover an aesthetic approach to metaphor as a “figure” that does not exclude but rather integrates its cognitive value. The importance of aesthetic categories in dealing with metaphor emerges especially in studies dealing with the specificity of visual metaphor (Forceville, 1996, 2006). Attention to aesthetic aspects also allows us to specify the meaning of the knowledge and creativity to which metaphor gives access. Regarding the role of metaphor in science education, our references were the results of some recent research in the field of cognitive science and learning studies: in particular, Amin and Lancor’s studies on metaphor as a resource for conceptual change and for the construction of complex knowledge. For the relationship between metaphor and narrative, the research was inspired by the idea that an interdisciplinary approach to metaphor and narrative analysis can help tackle problems, which seemed difficult to solve when metaphors and stories were studied as separate compartments (Contini, 2020a, p. 9). Specifically, the research is based on the proposal to consider metaphor and narrative as cognitive tools (Egan 1997) and relational constructs: just as metaphor operates through a projection and connection between domains, similarly, stories allow those who tell them and those who interpret them to establish spatiotemporal connections between different regions of experience (Fuchs et al., 2018). Narrative comprehension also requires situating participants within networks of beliefs, desires, and intentions. If metaphors stimulate the mind to construct a high-order connection between entities referred to, and consequently metaphors “are like bridges” (Beck, 1987, p. 13), stories are like “a network of bridges or like a network of links” (Contini, 2020a, p. 13). This relational conception of metaphor and narrative is situated, more generally, in a perspective that recognizes a continuity between science and the ordinary understanding of nature based on the imaginative mode of representing experience. The narrative mode, in this perspective, is compatible with scientific explanation and does not constitute its “naive” alternative: the nature object of science can be thought of as populated by agents with whom we can interact and communicate. An idea of

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continuity between knowledge that justifies the value attributed to narrative also belongs to the research of Zabel, another reference point for our study. According to Zabel, similar to Amin’s assertions about conceptual change, the student’s prescientific knowledge cannot simply be replaced by scientific conceptions that contradict his or her way of making sense of reality. Zabel agrees with Bruner that narrative plays an important role in meaning-making because it is close to human experience and behaviour: indeed, both in stories and in the interpretation of experience we trace reasons, rather than causes, and use normative patterns (Zabel, 2015, p.  37). The conceptual shift that allows access to scientific explanation must be a bridge between narrative construction and explanation in more strictly scientific terms: faced with the difficulty of learning, the need is not to avoid imaginative understanding and anthropomorphism but rather to “build a pathway” that relates the different modes of cognition (Zabel, 2015, p. 35).

10.2   Planning the Empirical Research Project The intertwining of the narrative, metaphorical and scientific dimensions that characterizes the research we are presenting is the result of an interdisciplinary project that has involved scholars of aesthetics, science education and pedagogy belonging to the “Metaphor and Narrative in Science” research centre at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.11 The interdisciplinary projects already conducted by the research group in previous years and months have been an important premise for the design of the contents and objectives of the research:12 in particular, a significant contribution was made by the research on the use of metaphors in the educational contexts of early childhood conducted in collaboration with “Reggio Children Preschools and Infant-toddler Centres—Institution of

11  Prof. Annamaria Contini, Prof. Tiziana Altiero, Prof. Roberto Guidetti, Prof. Maya Antonietti, researcher Andrea Pintus, and research fellows Alice Giuliani and Lorenzo Manera were part of the research group. 12  In particular, the project “A Festive Thought. Visual metaphors in children’s learning processes” constituted an important premise for evaluating the metaphors proposed by the children. For more in-depth information on the contents of the project, see the catalogue of the exhibition “A Festive Thought. Visual metaphor in children’s learning processes” (2022), edited by Claudia Giudici, Sara De Poi, Vea Vecchi, Annamaria Contini, Elena Corte, and published by Reggio Children srl.

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the Municipality of Reggio Emilia” and the international conference “Metaphor between education and scientific communication”.13 The research group aimed to find empirical indications in favour of the hypothesis that the metaphoric-narrative mode favours the acquisition of complex knowledge through the development of skills such as: being able to handle articulated content, making new inferences and implications, and activating new associations between different learning contents. A further aim was to evaluate the ability of the metaphorical-narrative teaching method to encourage the emergence of new questions, the medium-­ long-­term memorization of content and the original re-elaboration of content. Useful data were also collected to support the hypothesis that the teaching methods tested supported more effective learning processes even in the most fragile students. On the other hand, the first analysis of the data collected was carried out by keeping the research question open and looking for significant regularities for the classification and interpretation of the data. The research design was developed with consideration of the conceptual, linguistic, and communicative aspects that combine to determine the cognitive effectiveness of metaphors. For the metaphor identification process, the research team adopted, with some clarifications, the generic definition of metaphor as “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 5), generally shared in the literature in empirical research on metaphor. We have also followed the CMT perspective by organizing linguistic metaphors around conceptual cores while constructing the categories in a mostly inductive way. On the other hand, we have integrated the definition of metaphor with the concept of “interaction” between two different conceptual domains, which Max Black names systems of associated commonplaces, or systems of implications (cf. ch.1): the reference to interaction seemed effective to avoid excessive generality and at the same time maintain a balance between a linguistic and a conceptual approach in the criteria for metaphor identification. For the concrete identification of metaphors for quantitative and qualitative analysis, the general principles of the identification method developed by the research group of the University of Amsterdam were 13  The international conference “Metaphor between education and scientific communication” took place in 2018 at the Department of Education and Human Sciences of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, under the scientific direction of Prof. Annamaria Contini and Prof. Elisabetta Gola.

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adopted, also taking into account references to Cameron (2003). In particular, we considered the following cases as identification criteria: (a) a word is used metaphorically itself;14 (b) a word is a direct expression of a conceptual domain that functions as a source domain in a mapping that is explicitly expressed as some form of comparison (cf. Steen et al., 2010, pp. 768–771, my transl.). Based on these criteria, we looked for occurrences in which: (a) a term has a contextual meaning different from its base meaning—according to ordinary usage or to vocabulary—without regard to the meaning actually attributed by the student; (b) a comparison between two different objects is made to express meaningful concepts that count as indications of understanding. In the qualitative analysis, we tried to identify the metaphors that can be considered more promising from the cognitive point of view, following Max Black’s definition of “active” metaphor. Black defines an active metaphor as one that possesses “emphasis” and “resonance”: the metaphor possesses emphasis if it is perceived to be actively metaphoric and therefore its focus is not subject to modification by the producer and the “receiver” is willing to pause to grasp its “implications”, understood as what is “behind the words”; resonance, instead, is what the metaphor possesses when it “sustains a high degree of elaboration of implications”15 (Black, 1977, pp.  440–441). The strong metaphor for Black possesses both of these aspects in a marked way and is the one that is best described by the interactive conception. The strong metaphor thus understood is also a “creative” metaphor. Based on this definition, in our empirical research, we attributed a creative aspect to metaphors that had at least two of the following characteristics: the semantic enrichment power of the projection, the presence of semantic conflict, the role of a model, the dual direction of interaction, originality (having regard to the difference between originality and creativity16). 14  For example, in “He defends his claims well”: in this case, “the metaphorical meaning in use is defined as the indirect meaning of the word and arises from the contrast between the contextual meaning of a lexical unit and its more basic meaning, the latter being absent from the actual context but observable in others” (Steen et al., 2010, pp. 768–771). 15  In this way, Black brings back some qualitative aspects of classification to quantitative criteria: if in fact the emphasis measures with the degree of intensity of the metaphor the “seriousness” that distinguishes it from an ornamental and “passing” expression, the resonance measures as extension and articulation of implications, therefore as complexity, the particular “significance” of a metaphor. 16  Cf. Kohl et al. (2020).

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As for the scientific and conceptual aspects, these were integrated into a narrative designed by the research team as a reworking of a pre-existing text, Lo strano caso della cellula X: le avventure del Prof. Strizzaocchi (Monaco & Pompili,  2018).17 The narrative was entitled “Welcome to Ellulandia!”18 The fictional “world” that is visited by the protagonists of the story is intended to be a kind of model built to discover how the cell is made and how it works, an entity of which one cannot have direct ordinary experience. In addition to introducing the basic concepts to describe the characteristics and function of the cell, the narrative was intended to convey the overall idea of the cell as a universe-world and life as an open system. With regard to metaphors, we report below some associations structured on the basis of this model and their articulations (see Tables 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3 below): As far as the narrative dimension is concerned, the research was in continuity with the perspective that in the scientific literature is referred to as Table 10.1 Analogical correspondences between “The world of Ellulandia” / “cell”

The world of Ellulandia

Cell

Frontier Cell membrane Chief DNA Inhabitants (with roles, professions) Enzymes / organelles (with precise functions)

17  The experience of the project “Little Scientists” of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, led by Prof. Tiziana Altiero (member of the research group) together with Prof. Federico Corni, provided important indications for the creation of the stories and the testquestions (cf. Corni et al., 2015). 18  In the story, the science teacher takes the young students to a special room in the school, where they find a microscope that becomes the gateway to a special world that can be visited with a submarine. While exploring, the children see many things happen and meet several characters, and as the teacher explains what is happening, they begin to understand the structure of that world, only discovering at the end that it is the cell. Back in their classroom, they are able to see the world from a different perspective.

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Table 10.2  Analogical correspondences between “fortress” / “nucleus” Fortress

Nucleus

It’s hosting someone very important It is often surrounded by water It has walls with passageways controlled by guardians

It encapsulates the DNA It is immersed in the cytoplasm The nuclear membrane only allows recognized substances to pass through by opening or closing the pores of the nuclear membrane

Table 10.3  Analogical correspondences between “King-leader” / “DNA” King/leader

DNA

He knows what others have to do

Contains information for the functioning of the cell Tell everyone what to do Order which substances to synthesize It holds a code with the laws-rules of the The instructions are written in its nucleotide land sequence He is obeyed by everyone Particles perform operations based on the information it contains He’s an important person and must It is inside the nucleus, which in turn is inside reside in a safe place the cell

the new wave of narrative theory,19 which emphasizes the complex cognitive operations that are performed in the process of creating or understanding stories, as well as the central role that narratives play in the creation of new interpretative models of reality. The narrative dimension was not understood by the research group as a simple means of expression including pre-established metaphorical schemes, but rather as a cognitive tool, able to guide the conceptual understanding of metaphors, to extend their inferences and encourage the independent production of new metaphors and associations. In addition to the narrative aspect, the research team paid particular attention to the communicative context in which the metaphorical narratives would be presented to the students in the experimental classes. In 19  For a more in-depth analysis, see Herman (2010). A recent experience of science education designed on the basis of exploiting the cognitive potential of narratives and the heuristic potential of metaphors is described in Fuchs et al. (2018).

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order to ensure communicative effectiveness, the interaction between the expert teacher who presented the stories, and the students of the experimental classes was designed by alternating between the exposition of the narrative text and the active participation of the students: they were asked to comment and propose interpretative analyses of the content of the stories and the metaphorical devices contained therein. The exposition of the scientific contents was also interspersed with questions addressed to the students and aimed at ensuring their active participation in the control classes. This interactive mode of teaching was intended to encourage the autonomous generation of metaphors from the suggested analogies/metaphors, as an exercise in familiarization with the figures of language and the development of autonomous cognitive skills. Finally, workshops were designed to allow all the students involved to actively elaborate the contents through expressive languages. For this design, it was important to collaborate with Professor Ashley Gess,20 who was a source of important suggestions for the development of workshop activities, designed on the basis of the elements that structure the STEAM21 education.

10.3  The Empirical Research The research project involved six classes belonging to the Istituto Comprensivo “Leonardo Da Vinci” of Reggio Emilia. The teachers of each class involved participated in the planning phase. Students from six parallel classes took part in the activities: two from the fourth year of primary school, two from the fifth year of primary school, and two from the first year of secondary school. In this chapter, only the research in the lower secondary school is presented; the activities were carried out more completely and continuously for unrelated reasons. The researchers provided a pre-test to the classes, in order to verify the starting conditions with respect to prior scientific knowledge and level of comprehension of a text and consequent comparability of the

 Lecturer in STEAM education at Augusta University (Georgia, USA).  Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics. Here it is understood as a broad set of educational and design strategies aimed at promoting dialogue between scientific disciplines and the related intertwining of competencies from a global developmental perspective (De la Garza & Travis, 2018). 20 21

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experimental data. The administration of the pre-test22 was preceded by the presentation of the themes of the project and of the researchers directly involved: these activities took place during the first of the five meetings of the empirical research. The second and third meetings in the experimental classes were dedicated to the reading and discussion of the narratives developed by the research group.23 The control classes, on the other hand, were offered a traditional didactic text, which did not meet narrative or metaphorical expository criteria.24 At the end of the third meeting, the researchers administered the post-­ test in both the experimental and control classes to check the knowledge and skills acquired.25 In the fourth meeting, a workshop was conducted based on the STEAM Education paradigm, dedicated to a further elaboration of the contents presented during the previous meetings through the interaction of students in small groups and the use of expressive languages.26 In the fifth meeting, a follow-up test was administered online,27 aimed at collecting useful data to verify the differences between the students of 22  The pre-test consisted of two tests: the first aimed at verifying previous knowledge about the structure of the cell, consisting of four multiple-choice questions, followed by an open question. The second test, aimed at verifying the ability to understand a text, consisted of a short narrative text and five multiple-choice questions. Students with special educational needs or language difficulties were given a simplified version of the text. 23  In both cases, the interaction between the experienced teacher and the students was based on the reading of texts of a similar length, without images, which were video projected in the classrooms through the use of the interactive whiteboard. 24  In both cases, the content was presented by an experienced teacher, hired specifically for the experiment, and the interaction was documented by a researcher through the use of a microphone, a digital video camera, and an observation table. 25  The post-test included one open-ended question and four multiple-choice questions related to the structure of the cell, all followed by a request to add a comment. The questions concerned the cell in general and some of its components: ribosomes, the cell membrane, enzymes, and mitochondria. 26  In both the experimental and control class, the workshop involved dividing the students into small groups, each consisting of four to five members. Once divided into groups, the students were provided with graphic-artistic materials. The delivery of the materials was followed by the illustration of the workshop proposal, consisting of the question: “How would you represent the cell to a friend of yours who doesn’t know it?” The students were then invited to use the available materials to visually represent the cell, in order to creatively describe its structure. 27  Due to restrictions on in-person activities due to the ongoing pandemic, the test was administered by sharing a link that allowed students to access an online form rather than on paper.

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the experimental class and the control class with respect to the consolidation of learning and its permanence in the medium term. A second follow-­ up28 was carried out five months after the fifth meeting to collect further data on the consolidation of learning in the long term. For the evaluation of the answers to the open questions, the group decided to consider as wrong the answers which had at least one of the following characteristics: presence of serious errors, number of errors exceeding the number of correct elements, very generic answer, very incomplete answer.29 The rationale for this choice was twofold: to shift the comparison between the answers of the two classes to a qualitative level and not to exclude a priori some “imperfect” answers from the qualitative analysis. In the overall comparison between the results of the two classes, the percentage of decidedly wrong answers and of lack of answers was considered significant quantitative data for the evaluation of the methods’ efficacy.

10.4  Test Results30 Comparing Answers Firstly, the pre-tests administered in the two classes confirmed the validity of the comparison. The students showed a fairly similar level of initial knowledge.31 This initial equivalence makes the advantage of the 28  This second follow-up was also carried out to have more homogeneity with the first activities, as the first follow-up, due to restrictions resulting from the ongoing pandemic, had been carried out remotely. The follow-up consisted of a single open-ended question on the cell. 29  The evaluation rubric used included the following parameters: completeness, originality, relevance of the answer (selection of information), conceptual coherence (organization of knowledge), appropriateness of vocabulary (expressive mastery). Answers containing inaccuracies and errors were included only if they did not have a greater weight than the correct contents of the text. Following the same criterion, generic answers and repetitions of closed answers were included in correct answers. 30  For a  more in-depth analysis of  the  research results, cf. Giuliani and  Manera (2022), Conoscere per metafore. Aspetti estetici della metafora conoscitiva. Mimesis: Milano. 31  The percentage of correct answers to the closed questions out of the total number of participating students is in fact on average similar in the two classes, with deviations that do not exceed 15%. In particular, the answers about ribosome of the pre-test indicate a completely equivalent and very low level of previous knowledge in both classes. An exception is the question concerning the cell membrane, for which the percentage of correct answers is decidedly higher in the experimental class.

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e­ xperimental class particularly significant in the comparison between pretest and post-test: comparing the results obtained in the closed questions in the two classes, the improvement is found to be higher in the experimental class (see Fig. 10.1 below). The question about mitochondria seems to be a partial exception. However, the difference is reduced if we consider that the number of answers to the open-ended question on mitochondria is higher in the experimental class. If we look at the overall graph of correct open-ended answers on the post-test (see Fig. 10.2 below), if we look instead at the graph of correct open-ended answers on the post-test, the experimental class generally shows a better result in the answers to the questions about the components of the cell.32 This advantage concerns both the number of correct answers and the quality of the answers in terms of completeness, originality, and absence of misconceptions. If we compare the answers to the same questions in the two classes, the general advantage of the experimental class is better articulated. With regard, for example, to the question on ribosomes, in the control class, not only do we have a markedly lower percentage of correct answers over the number of students (12% instead of 38%), but also the use of repetition: the correct answers repeat the correct closed answer to the corresponding multiple-choice question with minimal changes. This difference indicates a possible gap in content processing and reinforces the significance of the quantitative differences in the responses to this question. Similarly, in the answers on mitochondria (n. 4) of the control class, a higher number of answers contains incorrect and irrelevant information, as well as a higher number of repetitions. We obtain, therefore, an indication of a lower diffusion and awareness of learning.33 Regarding the responses on enzymes, absence of misconceptions in the incorrect answers34 emerges in both the experimental and the control class. This finding, while not demonstrating an advantage of either class, is 32  The gap is rather sharp in the question on the ribosome (n. 2) and in the one on mitochondria (n. 4). 33  With respect to the quality of the answers, in this case in the experimental class a scarce originality is attested and, in many cases, the function of the mitochondrion is confused with that of the APT. This, however, does not diminish the significance of the difference between the results of the two classes; on the contrary, it can be interpreted as an index of a difficulty of the subject that reinforces the weight of the better result obtained in the experimental class. 34  Only one is really wrong while the other two are just too general.

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Fig. 10.1  Percentage increase in correct answers to close-ended questions from pre-test to post-test within each class

Fig. 10.2  Percentage of correct answers to open-ended questions on the post-test

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nevertheless important: it indicates that the different learning resources used in the two classes were in any case adequate and not misleading with respect to the content to be learned, and therefore comparable in terms of effectiveness. In answer to question 6 (“How would you explain the cell to a classmate who does not know it?”), the weak advantage of the control class with respect to the number of correct answers is compensated for by the better quality of answers of the experimental class. They show a more pronounced development of processing also compared to the answers to open question n. 1 (“Now try to describe the cell”): not only does a communicative and non-standardized expressive mode emerge but new associations and new conceptual implications can be identified. The answers of the control class have a more formulaic aspect and are all rather short and standardized (in particular, the formula “The cell is born, grows, reproduces and dies” is recurrent). The Use and Role of Metaphors Regarding the use of metaphors, the analysis of the contents of the answers gives an indication of a link between the better articulation, completeness, and originality of the answers of the experimental class and the use of metaphors. In the experimental class, we record, first of all, the quantitative data: more than 40% of the students use metaphors in their answers (we have a lower percentage only in the question on the cell membrane). While the predominantly metaphorical quality of the answers may be the consequence and simple reflection of the type of approach used in the lessons, it is more significant that almost all the answers that contain metaphors are correct. Moreover, the repetition of the metaphors in the story does not appear as a mechanical reflection of what was heard: metaphors tend to be open to autonomous elaborations and allow for new implications.35 35  For example, in the description of the membrane, the metaphors of “skin” and “frontier”, both present in the story and elaborated in the lessons and in the workshop, let the concepts of “cover”, “protection”, “filter” emerge. In addition, the metaphors allow further metaphorical associations: the connection between the image of the skin, of the frontier and the idea of protection allows the image of the “protective shield” to emerge and the analogy with the earth’s crust, as a further articulation of the “model” of the planet. In the answers to the question about enzymes, 82% of the answers have metaphorical elements: the metaphors of specialized work, care, and repair are taken from history. Also here, however, we find significant variations: repair is more visible than in the story, and new linguistic expressions emerge (the “handyman” enzyme, the “cure”, the “repair” of wounds) that can be the result of an individual elaboration or of the interaction occurred in the groups.

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The analysis of the content of the answers offers us further elements of observation regarding the type of metaphorical imagery that was involved in learning. As regards the first open question, which asked students to describe the cell, the prevailing metaphor used in the experimental class is that of the world, declined and elaborated as a sort of analogical model.36 Looking at the linguistic aspects, we observe that the most recurrent term in the story was “world”, while students in the post-test prefer the term “planet”. This could depend on the fact that “planet” is a term used by the children who were protagonists of the story, but also on the fact that the suggested correspondences between cell and “world” recalled to the children geographical knowledge learned in other lessons. Metaphor seems to have functioned as an attractor of prior knowledge, encouraging connections and elaboration for the benefit of complexity. On the other hand, the term “world” stimulated autonomous connections: the cell-world associations, in fact, went beyond the geographical-natural aspects suggested by the context of the story, orienting rather on world as an inhabited or populated place. In the answers to question n. 6 (“How would you explain the cell to a fellow student who doesn’t know it?”) the quality of the answers, including new implications and associations, corresponds to a further elaboration of the metaphors: for example, we have a mixture between planet and “city”, presented as a context of mixture between natural and human elements.37 In another answer, the world-metaphor promotes the recovery of the idea of an interdependence of things (“where each thing depends on another”): in the story there is indeed talk of help, collaboration, but the connection of this concept with being a “world” is a new connection compared to those established.38 Overall, the characteristics of the responses seem to indicate that this question, which contextualizes the request for an explanation in a peer communication, also stimulated, along with the activation of personal and

36  We speak of a world “where the fundamental units for living are the sea (cytoplasm), the forest (cytoskeleton) and the land (the organelles)”; elsewhere, DNA is “surrounded by a sea with land where there are trees”. 37  Typical elements of cities are mentioned along with “rivers”, “lakes”, and “cars”, albeit with a confusion between the terms microtubule/mitochondria. 38  The story, and the reference to the cell as “a part of us” but capable of its own self-sustenance, therefore autonomous: this idea was proposed by the teacher in after the workshop, but it is likely that the metaphors of the story constituted the premise for embracing this concept.

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metaphorical imagery, inferences and analogical reasoning and was revealed to be useful in organizing and connecting information. The supposed correlation, in the experimental class, between the use of metaphors and a better quality of the answers based on the parameters considered, is also supported by the comparison with the control class. On the whole, as we have said, in the control class we find a greater tendency towards repetition, a poor reworking of terminology and very little use of associations and comparisons. This result becomes even more significant in the answers to question 6. The invitation to simulate a conversation among peers seems to have stimulated a personalization and a greater “responsibility” in the answers, which are longer and richer in information, but the adequate resources to respond seem to be lacking: original language and conceptual elaboration are scarce, and the writing style is imitative with respect to the proposed didactic text (we already mentioned the frequent repetition of the formula “it is born, it grows, it reproduces, it dies, it reacts to stimuli”). However, it is worth noting that the few metaphors proposed seem to respond to those unfulfilled needs of communicative expression and elaboration.39 In particular, among the answers, we find one interesting and spontaneous “metaphorical exercise”: the idea of the floating particles brings to mind the image of the little boats “which give food to the cell”, as if they brought supplies; to this is added the idea of the membrane as a “cloth” which wraps the cell, as if it were a “cradle”. These are potentially evocative and effective connections which do not, however, seem to find an anchorage, a reference, in order to be articulated and developed. The rooting and relaunching of implication in the case of the lessons of the experimental class is offered by the narration; in the absence of this resource, the potential of the metaphor seems to remain unfulfilled. The Follow-Up Tests: Metaphors and Long-Lasting Learning The two follow-up tests that were conducted in the following months offered consistent and integrative indications with respect to what was observed in the post-test. In the first follow-up, contingent variables do 39  For example, a student from the control class, in order to explain his response on the cell membrane, uses the comparison with a familiar object (the cover of the exercise book) that responds to the idea of protection.  Moreover, the concept of the cell as a “living” entity seems to have stimulated the imagination by evoking the association with the human being and starting a search for correspondences: the metaphorical potential of the cell “similar to man” is therefore articulated in suggestive implications whereby the cell “breathes the air we breathe”, “the cell is us”.

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not allow a direct comparison with the previous results,40 but the variables (equal and randomized for the two classes) do not invalidate the comparison between the results of the two follow-ups. First, there is a greater number of answers to the question on enzymes in the experimental class.41 Another interesting element, if we compare the answers according to the other evaluation parameters (completeness, elaboration, originality), is that again, as for the post-test, the answers to the question on the ribosome in the control class are more uniform and repetitive.42 This greater uniformity and repetitiveness of answers may indicate, regardless of the correctness of the answers and the way they were found, a lesser elaboration of information. As regards the use of metaphors in the online follow-up test in the experimental class, it is worth noticing that the students, at that time, had carried out further activities and had access to additional information: it follows that here the eventual use of the metaphor becomes a conscious choice and then acquires additional value. The general tendency is a decrease in the use of metaphors with respect to the post-test:43 metaphors are little used in the follow-up, especially in the questions on the single components of the cell. Moreover, in general, compared to the post-test, descriptive aspects emerge compared to the functional ones: apparently, in the medium-term memory, other information prevailed over the metaphors of the story.44 But it should also be noted that instead metaphors are chosen, again, to answer question n. 6, which is individuated as an 40  Firstly, we have a change in modality: the follow-up was carried out remotely and online, thus leaving the students with potential access to further information. Secondly, there was an integration of the experiences and knowledge acquired by continuing with the workshop and further classroom lessons after those carried out within the project. Moreover, as regards the comparison between the two questions dedicated to the cell, 1b and 6, we have to consider that in no. 6 we asked to “tell” the cell, thus favouring the adoption of a different expositive register. 41  In the control class, the percentage of students who decide to answer this question is much lower (59% in the control class, 85% in the experimental). 42  They often have exactly the same incipit (“ribosomes are round in shape”). 43  For example, the association between the shape of the mitochondrion and that of the bean prevails throughout, while the reference to ships, to the power station, to batteries is absent; only the comparison with the peanut in the story or—confusing the mitochondrion with the ribosome—to the ball of yarn remains, with only one reference to the “workers” inside the mitochondria. 44  But it may also be assumed that the description requested is now associated with visual aspects, perhaps because of the visualization exercise carried out in the workshop.

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“authentic task”45 also because the question, unlike the post-test question, asks you to tell and not to explain the cell: here the language used recalls the concepts of world, life, work, machine, all brought into play in the story, which also seem to meet the direct experience of the students.46 Moreover, further metaphors emerge in addition to those suggested by the story. For example, the cell itself is presented as a small living being, “creating our body parts and making them work through helpers”. This is a metaphor loaded with potential implications and correspondences: the human body appears almost as a machine (that “must work”) and the cell as a living-worker. The original metaphor inverts the one of the cell as a “perfect mechanism. Where everything is in its place and everything works perfectly and if something goes wrong it can be easily replaced”. The indications emerging from the results of the experimental class are reinforced by the differences we find in the control class. Here, the answers to question n. 6 of the follow-up, despite the potential access to new information, tend to repeat the list of information already proposed to answer the descriptive question (1) and again offer a very standardized and less communicative language and way of expressing themselves (e.g., repetitive incipit with “The cell is the smallest living unit”) and a list-like writing style. It is also important to note that, as in the post-test, the answers with metaphors are also those where expression is more personalized and also where additional or more precise concepts appear.47 The aim of the second follow-up test, administered six months after the previous meeting, was to detect indications of the memorization of contents in the long term. To this end, the classes were asked a single open-­ ended question: “How would you tell the cell to a classmate who does not know about it?”48 45  It thus brings into play a competence, since the restitution of learning must be used for a further operation, aimed at a communicative and sharing purpose. 46  The metaphor of the “planet” returns (“it is very small but it is like a planet”, “I will tell it like a small world where everything happens like on earth but in a different and smaller way”), articulated in various correspondences and implications, again as an analogical model (“it is like a planet, which instead of the mantle has a gelatinous substance called cytoplasm, and the nucleus is not made of lava but has DNA strands, the crust is called cell membrane and inside the cytoplasm there are many organelles that together make the cell survive”). 47  In one case, a metaphor clarifies the command function of the nucleus, which in the other answers is always expressed rather generically; in the other case, an attempt is added to refer to the shape of plant cells with the image of “branches growing out of the corners” of the cell. 48  It was considered that time spent increases the variables, but also that this variability affects both groups equally randomly. Unlike the first follow-up, moreover, in this case the variable of the distance and online mode was eliminated, given that the activity was carried out in the presence, without therefore the possibility of access to external information.

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The results of the experimental class were positive overall.49 Just under half of the students formulated fairly complete answers, linking a plurality of information. Looking at the specific content of the answers, it is significant that the information includes the function of ribosomes, which had previously been an element of difficulty. Regarding inclusiveness, it is significant that students with Special Educational Needs and Specific Learning Difficulties (Italian BES and DSA) not only manage to give answers that are not wrong, but sometimes overcome the minimum objective of restitution. With respect to the use of metaphors, students who had already used the metaphors of the story, recover them in this context in a way appropriate to the concepts involved.50 Moreover, metaphors that were not present in the previous tests emerge in many answers (41%).51 It may be assumed that contents related to metaphors in the story have held up well in the long run, and they have encouraged the production of new metaphorical associations and their use as explanatory tools. The comparison with the October follow-up of the control class supports that interpretation of the results of the experimental class. The answers are more fragmented than those of the experimental class: we have a limited amount of information,52 little in-depth content, poorly structured discourses, and unconnected elements. More than half of the answers are very poor in content, compared to only 14% of the experimental class, and only 2 or 3 answers can be really considered complete. The answers also have a different expositional quality: the style is less communicative, with formulaic aspects, much uncertainty, and little activation of the imagination (only two answers propose metaphors and associations). In terms of errors, we find widespread and established conceptual  Approximately 80% of the students give answers in which the correct information prevails and can be considered correct according to the evaluation rubric adopted. 59% of the answers contain no errors or only minor errors. Only 14% of the answers are incomplete and/or mostly incorrect. 50  For example, the nucleus as heart or brain, the cell as a planet or a micro-world, the cell as a brick. 51  The country (rather than the planet); the nucleus as a mountain; the substances that enter as “allies” of the cell, developing the metaphor of defense and conflict; the “reading” of RNA. 52  We find the nucleus and the cellular membrane, but we never find mention of the mitochondria and the ribosomes, which do not appear therefore as an element of difficulty. Among the functional aspects, the defense of the DNA by the nucleus, its command role and the protection role of the cellular membrane are mentioned, but only 5/21 answers contain both this information. 49

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confusion regarding the relationship between body and cell, which emerges as a kind of organism contained within the body and not a constituent of it.53 Another interesting aspect emerges: many students (8/21, 38%) feel the need to integrate what they write with a drawing of the cell, taking up what had been done in the workshop. Students seem here to consciously choose the mode of visualization they experienced in the workshop. It might be assumed that drawing and visualization fulfil a need for communication and explanation, which in the experimental class is carried out mainly through metaphor. The general indication that can be drawn from these results is that images and metaphors were spontaneously used by students as a support for sharing and processing of learning but in the absence of a targeted listening and a structured guidance, for example through the narrative, their potentialities risk remaining unexpressed.

10.5  Observations on the Activities and Feedback from the Research Group After the conclusion of the activities in the classes and the analysis of the test results, a webinar was organized to give back the results of the research. The seminar was an opportunity to integrate the analysis of the test data with the comments of the expert teacher who conducted the experiments and those of the teachers of the classes involved.54 The feedback on the lessons and workshops helped to define the quality and role of interaction. The constant and discreet interaction during the lessons was said to be constitutive of the understanding and further elaboration of metaphors in the classes. It was noticed that the verbal expression during the interaction was in many cases richer than what the students were able to report in their written answers.55  A significant number of responses (8/21, 38%), in line with this ambiguity, state that the cell is a microorganism or a unicellular organism. 54  The seminar was held online on December 9, 2020, and was attended by the members of the research group and the teachers of the middle schools. The lack of other figures taking part in the research was due to the difficulties still related to the management of the Covid-19 emergency. 55  For example, with regard to mitochondria, a further metaphor emerged “they are like bakers, taking flour and making bread to give to people”; with regard to the communication among enzymes, the “word of mouth” metaphor, also, one pupil noted that with word of mouth, information changes, wondering about the consequence. 53

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Concerning the interaction in the workshops, it was reported that the works were the result of choices shared by the whole group, which proved to be adequate and consistent with the contents to be represented.56 The use of non-verbal resources showed a good understanding of the contents and metaphors proposed, in line with what emerged from many open-­ ended answers on the tests. In the control class, students with learning difficulties (BES and DSA) also participated effectively, as an indication of the inclusive value of the activity. It is significant that, in this case, even in the face of interaction and freedom of delivery, the work was very precise but constrained to formal and already structured aspects. In commenting on the results collected by the research group, the teachers who took part in the seminar declared that, on the basis of their previous professional experience as well, the narrative-metaphorical modality in the educative relationship is inclusive in favouring the educative relationship and better supporting attentional capacity. From their point of view, metaphor offers students a key to access their own experience and at the same time brings the teacher’s experience into play, supporting sharing and interaction between their respective experiences. In addition to facilitating comprehension, the experimented modality proved to be a support for the relationship, with the teacher and among the students. Finally, the teachers pointed out that metaphors, together with images, are also part of the contents to which children are exposed in textbooks and which they use spontaneously. This spontaneous generation of metaphors occurred, in fact, also in the control class, as we have already seen attested by some of the test answers. The proposal of metaphors in the experimental class was therefore an intervention that enhanced a tendency that spontaneously belongs to the students’ way of knowing and was not perceived as the introduction and imposition of an external element: metaphors and narration were rather seen as an encouragement and support for the effective use of a resource that, albeit in a limited way, is already used by the students. The research team agreed instead that the absence of structured metaphorical associations and narration in the control class meant that there was a lack of a means of guiding and structuring the

56  For example, the cell membrane represented with paper, which functions as a filter to get in and out, a sphere that is gradually discarded to find nucleus, the threads of the ball used for DNA strands.

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implications of the metaphors that nevertheless tended to emerge from students’ discourse. With respect to one of the possible criticalities of the narrative and metaphorical modality, that is, the risk of taking attention away from technical-­scientific language, the research group highlighted that in the written answers the students used different linguistic registers. A further indication with respect to the ability of metaphor to support correct use of scientific language also came from the October follow-up, which gave clear indications about the difference in the quantity of concepts memorized: the group observed that with the bridge of metaphor, with the same intervening variables, in the experimental classes, many concepts crossed a considerable temporal distance and variety and complexity were preserved. The research group also noted that narration, metaphors and visualization, especially when interconnected, can highlight misunderstandings better than literal language, especially in the context of formative assessment.

10.6  Conclusions The results of the research, including the results of the analysis of test responses and the results of the comparison in the research group, have provided indications to support the thesis that metaphors, if placed in a narrative structure that facilitates understanding and guides its implications, can favour: • the organization of contents; • the understanding of complex concepts; • an informed use of scientific language; • a long-term storage of learning content; • the original elaboration of learning content, similar to what happens in interaction and workshop activities; in addition, an analytical focus on the use of metaphors and the enhancement of their production encourages; • the recognition of misconceptions; • continuity with an attitude already present in the students and with their ways of learning; • an inclusive aptitude for participation, communicative exposition, and original elaboration of learning content.

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The results of the research have also strengthened the conviction that it is necessary to adopt aesthetic categories, in addition to specifically cognitive ones, in order to account for some specific aspects of metaphor: for example, an aesthetic approach is necessary to define the ability of metaphor to “make one feel” and “make one see” what it intends to say; the ability to “make present”, to put before one’s eyes, and not only to refer to something (Dahlin, 2001; Franzini, 2020; Messori, 2020; Ricoeur, 1977). The creative and cognitive power of metaphor in this sense is not only reflected in the possibility of making something known. In “strong” metaphors, the result of the interaction overcomes the analytical aspects of the projection. The metaphor that takes on this poietic value makes something happen, rather than “referring to something”. It establishes a virtuality in which the starting elements are no longer the same, something that has its own “sense” that is different from both, even though it finds its “reason” in the interaction. What conclusions can we draw provisionally for the educational and didactic field? The importance of educating with metaphors, of stimulating the exercise of their comprehension as a resource for knowledge is enhanced; at the same time, it becomes fundamental to educate to the metaphor, to exercise the imagination that presides over its construction, to accompany and relaunch the associations of the children themselves, cultivating competence in listening to themselves as well as to others. Both these aspects are fundamental if, in learning processes, creativity becomes another way of defining knowledge: if “to know” means to welcome and respect an “otherness” that is renewed in that relationship, education to metaphor becomes this form of education to give oneself new possibilities together and to generate together what to understand and take care of.

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CHAPTER 11

Fostering Kindergarteners’ Scientific Reasoning in Vulnerable Settings Through Dialogic Inquiry-Based Learning Maite Novo and Zoel Salvadó

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results. —John Dewey

The original version of this chapter was revised. The author names of this chapter have been changed from Maite Novo Molinero and Zoel Salvadó Belart to Maite Novo and Zoel Salvadó after the initial publication. The erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_14 M. Novo (*) Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] Z. Salvadó Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_11

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11.1   Building Science Capital Through Education Undoubtedly, we are living in a historic moment in which the rapid development of science and technology allows humanity to face the challenges of the future (and the present) through the creation of new and powerful tools. However, complex decisions appear on the horizon that connect science, technology and society. This perspective points out the need of a citizenship that should be more involved in the scientific issues that affect them. At the same time, we witness how the decline in student engagement in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers is a major concern in many countries around the world. This decline in student participation in post-compulsory STEM programs limits the development of a society that is science and technology based and it is directly related to the inadequacies of school science and its inability to spark student engagement (Tytler et al., 2008). The promotion of favourable attitudes towards science, scientists and learning science, which has always been a component of science education, is increasingly a matter of concern (Osborne et  al., 2003). Interestingly, different studies in Science Education have reported the so-called “doing/ being divide problem” in 10–14-year-old students. According to these findings, adolescents report enjoying science (“doing science”) but they may still do not choose to study it at higher level (“being a scientist is not for me”) (Archer et al., 2010; DeWitt & Archer, 2015; Jenkins & Nelson, 2005). Therefore, young students are generally interested in science, and lack of interest is not the problem. The concept of building an identity (in this case, science identity) is behind this dilemma since identity has a central role when considering aspirations to do science or to be a scientist. Identity is understood as a part of the Bourdieusian “habitus” (ways of acting and thinking that are shared by people with similar backgrounds and social positions), produced through socialization, which guides a person’s sense of what is normal, possible and desirable for “people like me” (Dewitt et al., 2016). Nowadays, the profile of the person most likely to choose a scientific career is still middle-class male, white, with a family with a high scientific capital and a family member working in science. Reality shows that women, people from low-income families and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in most science jobs, resulting in a significant loss of talent for the labour market and the progress of science itself (Byars-­Winston, 2014). Research shows that students from families with lower scientific capital are less likely to access or be interested in scientific careers. On the contrary, families with higher levels of science-related resources (capital) have been found to actively promote, develop and sustain their children’s

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science interest and aspirations. These science-related resources referred, for instance, to provide science kits, to watch science TV together, to discuss science in everyday conversations, to go to science museums, and so on (Archer et al., 2012). From the scientific community, there is a call to dedicate efforts to the construction of a new identity around who can “be” a scientist or even “be a good science student”. It is important to keep in mind that students begin to form ideas about “who does science” at a very young age and these ideas are heavily influenced by their families and their experiences with science in school. So much so that, with respect to gender, recent studies indicate that girls up to age 6 are considered equally capable as boys of pursuing science careers, which is not the case after that age (Bian et  al., 2017). Many interventions around science careers and science identity are targeted at students in high school when their aspirations are unlikely to change dramatically. It is therefore too late, and these interventions should be integrated into classrooms when children are still in the early stages of education (Aschbacher et  al., 2010; Dewitt & Archer, 2015; Maltese & Tai, 2010; Tai et al., 2006). Meaningful science education requires a transformative change in the philosophy of reference, in the foundations and models of our thinking, behaviour and action. The framework of the current paradigm of science education, which is generally characterized as disciplinary, decontextualized, teacher-centred, and oriented to lower-order cognitive skills, needs to shift to more adaptive paradigms. Science education must follow an interdisciplinary teaching approach, rooted in the reality that surrounds us and centred on the student, therefore promoting the development of higher-order cognitive skills in our students, critical thinking, problem solving and decision making based on knowledge and evidence. The underlying idea is to develop the knowledge and the mental habits that allow people to become science-aware citizens, able to create their own informed opinions, all the while living in a society that is becoming increasingly complex and more dependent on science and technology (Salvadó et al., 2013; Zoller, 2012).

11.2   Scientific Reasoning in Kindergarteners Early learning intervention for children is one of the most efficient ways to contribute to the development of the child and is especially relevant in the case of students at risk of social exclusion. For this reason, the European Union appeals to the need to promote access to high-quality early education for all children up to 6 years of age (European Commission/EACEA/ Eurydice/Eurostat, 2014). Children from families in very severe poverty have the greatest gains in outcomes such as reading or mathematics if they

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have received early childhood education training. Other research also shows that intensive, high-quality early education intervention has direct and persistent effects on cognitive development. These effects translate into higher levels of secondary school completion, increased access to college, reduced school failure and reduced health and social risks (Barnett, 2008; Blau & Currie, 2005; Nores & Barnett, 2010; Temple & Reynolds, 2007). In recent decades, new research on cognitive development has led to the recognition that preschool children have powerful cognitive competencies and thus greater learning potentials than previously thought (Carey, 2009; Carey, 2011). This includes early arithmetic skills, implicit understanding of cause-and-effect relationships, preliteracy writing, and some scientific knowledge (Eshach & Fried, 2005; Gelman & Brenneman, 2004). Furthermore, science can be a particularly important area at an early age, as it serves not only to lay the foundation for their future understanding of science, but also to build important skills and attitudes for learning in general. Children with a broad base of experience in domain-­ specific knowledge, such as science or mathematics, show an ability to acquire more complex cognitive skills more quickly. A key finding of cognitive psychology (and a tenet of constructivist approaches) is that it is easier to learn more of what we already know than to build concepts from scratch in a new domain about which we have little knowledge (Bowman et al., 2001; Gelman et al., 2010). Several research point to the fact that children at an early age have already started to build domain-relevant knowledge, that is, they are already on a learning path. Evidence has been presented that preschoolers are, and in fact have previously been, on learning paths for some science topics, in which we find topics related to biological sciences, that is, differences between animate and inanimate objects (Massey & Gelman, 1988), physical properties of objects (Baillargeon, 1995; Spelke, 2000), the ability to reason about cause and effect (Bullock et al., 1982), and to make inductions from what is known to what is not known (Bowman et al., 2001). The growing awareness and recognition of children’s early thinking and learning abilities leads to the need to provide much richer, more complex and challenging learning environments. The school should build on children’s capacity for scientific learning and provide them with experiences that have a significant impact on their future learning. Scientific inquiry provides the opportunity for children to develop a wide range of both implicit and explicit skills. The goal is to place children on relevant

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learning paths that provide increasingly relevant data for constructing coherent understandings of the world around them. Teachers can guide children in organized investigations of the everyday world, thereby fostering scientific skills such as making observations, asking questions, generating predictions, testing, using measuring instruments, identifying patterns and relationships, recording data, classifying, sorting, comparing, explaining, working cooperatively, sharing, discussing and generating ideas and perspectives (Gelman et al., 2010; Worth, 2010). However, although it is often said that children are natural little scientists, they need guidance, structure and practice to direct their curiosity and spontaneous exploratory activity into rich inquiry activity that leads to more scientific doing. Recently, there has been a great effort to develop inquiry-based best practices for the early stages of science learning. Some successful early science literacy performances have already been developed, such as the following: Head Start on Science and Communication Program, or HSSC (Klein et  al., 2000), ScienceStart! Program (French, 2004), Science Learning Assessment, or SLP (Samarapungavan et al., 2011), Preschool Pathways to Science, or PrePS (Gelman & Brenneman, 2004) and the Integrated Science Literacy Enactments, or ISLE (Varelas et  al., 2008; Varelas & Pappas, 2006). From this perspective, inquiry-based learning is proposed as a non-professional approach to the way scientists do science. This approach promotes procedural learning, where what is addressed are both the scientific skills previously mentioned and the scientific reasoning. It has been shown that when science is integrated into the curriculum in a comprehensive way, such as through inquiry-based activities, children achieve significant gains in their vocabulary (French, 2004), the use of explanatory language (Peterson & French, 2008), understanding of simple experiments and the ability to talk about and understand a range of scientific concepts (Gelman et al., 2010).

11.3  Dialogic Inquiry-Based Learning: A Suitable Methodology for Early Childhood Education A complete and detailed definition of “inquiry”, given by Linn et  al. (2004), is an intentional process of diagnosing situations, formulating problems, critiquing experiments and distinguishing alternatives, planning investigations, researching conjectures, searching for information, constructing models, debating with peers using evidence and representations

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and forming coherent arguments. Inquiry-based learning is an educational strategy that engages students in an authentic scientific discovery process which promotes reasoning and scientific competence. Thus, learning science is proposed as a constructive process where nothing is finished, and students “learn science by doing science” (Couso et  al., 2020; Pedaste et al., 2015). Inquiry-based learning allows the natural curiosity of children to foster the processes of asking questions and searching their own answers by observation, experimentation and thinking. Additionally, it allows a holistic learning, including skills and processes that promote their personal and social learning by integrating educative experiences from other disciplines, especially language and mathematics. As a result, all these processes support the cognitive development of the children (Alake-­ Tuentera et  al., 2012; Epstein, 2007; Greenfield et  al., 2009; Smolleck et al., 2006). Dialogic interactions are the core of inquiry methodology, characterized by asking authentic questions from both the teacher and the pupils, where answers are incorporated into subsequent dialogue. Inquiry-based activities consider the approach that learning through communicative interaction creates more and better knowledge. Students have voice and choice in each inquiry’s stage, being the main actors of the whole discovery process (Aubert et al., 2009). It is interesting to note that the dynamics of inquiry-based activities are perfectly aligned with the essential characteristics of dialogic classes proposed by Alexander (2006). According to this author, dialogic classes should be as follows: • Collective: teachers and children address learning tasks together, whether as a group or a class, rather than individually • Reciprocal: teachers and children listen to each other, share ideas, and consider alternative points of view • Supportive: children articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over “wrong” answers, and they help each other to reach common understandings • Cumulative: teachers and children build on their own and each other’s ideas and chain them into coherent lines of thinking • Purposeful: teachers plan and facilitate dialogic teaching with educational goals in view This dialogic approach to inquiry is especially important in early childhood education, a stage in which students are not proficient in reading

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and writing. Dialogue at this stage is the suitable vehicle to promote scientific reasoning, where we must minimize reading and writing and rely on oral communication. From a pedagogical point of view, the complex scientific process is divided into smaller, logically connected units that guide students through scientific reasoning. These individual units are called phases of inquiry, and their set of connections forms an inquiry cycle. Literature describes a variety of phases and cycles of inquiry, but we draw on the work of Pedaste et al. (2015) to show what these phases are, what goals they pursue and what actions they require on the part of learners (Fig.  11.1). The key moments within the inquiry activity for communicative interactions with the whole class group are centred on the co-creation of the research question, in the conceptualization phase, the +consensual design of the experiment to solve the research question, in the research phase, and the communication of its conclusions to the rest of the classroom groups, in the discussion phase. The adaptation of the inquiry cycle for early childhood education students, specifically 5-year-old students, is detailed below. This adaptation is the result of the research project “Inquiry in early childhood education: activities in the classroom to promote scientific reasoning, including collectives at risk of social exclusion”, funded by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) and carried out between 2018 and 2019. This was a scientific culture project, in which we implemented inquiry-based learning activities in Early Childhood Education classrooms. A total of 180 kindergarteners participated in this project, 150 of whom belonged to settings with a high risk of social exclusion (ethnic minorities, high immigration and low socioeconomic level), which are groups usually far away from scientific-technical environments. It is important to point out that in no case was the vulnerable situation of the students found as a barrier for the development of the scientific reasoning activities, being equally motivating and promoting interest in all the settings. The different participating schools endorsed the suitability of this educational methodology at an early age and the need to carry out these types of activities in any context, whether with vulnerable students or not. Inquiry-based learning activities make use of whole class interaction as well as small group and individual work. The different phases of the inquiry were developed in different areas of the classroom, depending on the grouping required to carry out each one. In our case, we used different combinations: the whole class (assembly), the usual small groups

Fig. 11.1  Phases of inquiry-based learning activities for kindergarteners. Adapted from Pedaste et al. (2015)

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established by the teachers for table work (4 children) and even individually. Specifically, the two initial phases (Orientation and Conceptualization) and the final phase (Discussion) are developed in a large group, so the ideal place is the assembly, forming a circle seated on the floor. On the other hand, for the Investigation phase, a place already set aside for science work (science corner) can be used if the classroom is already set up that way, or they can sit at their group work tables, as we did in our case. And for the Results and Conclusion phase it is more comfortable to work in small groups, as far as possible, so the group worktables are a good option. Orientation Phase: Contextualizing the Inquiry Activity Through Storytelling For inquiry activities oriented to early childhood education students, the storytelling strategy has been used at the initial contextualization of the inquiry activity (orientation phase). Storytelling has been defined as an interactive experience, both intellectual and emotional, between the storyteller and the listener (Robin & McNeil, 2019). When teachers use storytelling as an introduction or to present an activity, it helps learners imagine themselves in similar situations, generating a bond among teacher, activity and students, which stimulates their learning and retention (Kerby et al., 2018). We created short stories (in comic book format), in which the main characters had to solve different challenges1 (e.g. separating different substances that had been mixed, choosing which material protects us the most from the cold, choosing the material which absorbs the most water, identifying the characteristics of materials affected by magnets, etc.). The challenge of the protagonist became the challenge of the group. “What is the challenge facing our protagonist?” This question is used to introduce the second phase of the inquiry process: Conceptualization phase.

1  All the information regarding the Inquiry-based activities mentioned here can be found at Pérez-Martín, J. et  al. (2021) ¿Aprendizaje por indagación en Educación Infantil? Cuadernos de Pedagogía, 523 and Salvadó Belart, Z, Novo Molinero M., Amores, A. & Valls C (2020). “Absorción del agua”: una misma actividad de indagación desde P5 a 6° de Primaria. Aula de innovación educativa, 292, 37–43.

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Conceptualization Phase: Defining the Driving Question and Making Predictions In inquiry-based learning, contextualization and the identification of the research question are fundamental aspects in which teachers and pupils work together to build on their own and each other’s knowledge and ideas to develop coherent thinking. The generation of an appropriate research question is a pillar of scientific competence. At this point, the dialogic methodology is crucial, in which the students are accompanied collectively within the class group in the co-creation of the research question. The questions proposed by the students are discussed and modified until a suitable question is obtained, containing the dependent variable (DV) and the independent variable (IV) that are involved in the context challenge. Thus, some suitable model questions for inquiry activities might be: “Which material (IV) will absorb the most water (DV)?”, “How (by which method, IV) can we separate mixed substances (DV)”, “Which material protects us the most from cold?”, etc. Once the research questions have been obtained, students are given a simple dossier with a box in which they can draw or write their prediction on one side and the results of the experiment on the other side. At this point, students are asked the research question directly (e.g., “Which material do YOU think will absorb the most water?”), and when everyone has answered this question, they are informed that their answer is what is called a prediction or hypothesis. It is important to note that vocabulary is introduced gradually, only when the new word makes sense to the students and so they will integrate it into their cognitive structure, as they fully understand what we are referring to and comprehend its meaning. “How can we check which solution is the best?”—with this question we introduce the next phase of the inquiry process: Investigation phase. Investigation Phase: Designing an Experiment to Check Our Predictions and Address the Research Question To define the experimental design, all children in the class are encouraged to participate and share all their ideas. It is interesting to note that, by not giving a predetermined experimental protocol and being the students themselves who design it, the resulting experiment is perfectly adjusted to their cognitive level, to their understanding and is shared by all. The experiment should be carried out in small groups and with the materials as

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individualized as possible. In our case, we conducted the experiments in groups of 4 children at group worktables. The materials used are cheap and easy to find, transport and handle in the classroom, although the students have probably never used them for scientific research. In addition, we propose materials that are not dangerous for children, such as transparent glasses and plastic plates, spoons, funnels, strainers of different pore sizes, sand, water, food, feathers, leaves, zipper bags, etc. During the experimentation, events may occur or be observed that promote new mediating questions which must be addressed. Therefore, this is a variable phase depending on the children’s interests. Teachers guide the group, helping them to focus on contrasting the defined predictions. Once the results are obtained, they are drawn or written down in the specific table of the student’s dossier. At this point it is very important for the teacher to pay close attention to the students’ reactions, as they usually tend to erase their prediction if they see that it does not match the results obtained. This is a good moment to explicitly point out that predictions cannot be erased and that this is not a competition to see who chose the option that turned out to be the best for the given challenge. Once this task is completed, the students move to the classroom meeting area, all seated back in a circle and with their dossier in hand, so that they can work on it in the next phase. Results and Conclusion Phase: Comparing Predictions with Results This phase of the activity consists of a joint reflection on the results obtained in the experiment, in assembly format. The predictions noted in each student’s dossier are compared with the experimental results obtained, insisting on the idea that the predictions do not have to coincide with the results. A prediction that does not coincide with the experimental result is not a problem or a mistake, it is an opportunity to reflect and learn. It is very important to make it explicit to students that “wrong” predictions should not be “corrected” in their dossier. It is important to decriminalize the error at this point and reflect together on the experimental process and the results obtained.

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Discussion Phase: Communicating New Understandings This last phase, which takes place in the same place as the previous one, focuses on reflecting on everything that happened during the activity, both on the inquiry process and on the new knowledge acquired. The reliability of the experimental design and how it could be improved is discussed, what was learned in this activity and its application in daily life is shared. Finally, one way to conclude the inquiry would be to ask the students what advice they would give to the protagonist of the story to solve the challenge in front of them. The experience presented here is a practical example of how activities aimed at promoting scientific reasoning through learning based on dialogical inquiry can be implemented in early childhood education classrooms. The conclusion of this experience is that this methodology, if well contextualized and based on students’ previous knowledge, can be used with satisfactory results at an early age. As commented above, but very relevant is the fact that in no case was the vulnerability of the students a barrier to the development of the scientific reasoning activities, being equally motivating and fostering interest in all environments, whether with students at risk of social exclusion or not. This finding highlights the need to carry out these types of activities in any educational context.

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CHAPTER 12

The Single-Word Response Method: Expanding the Efficacy of a Community of Inquiry Enrico Postiglione

12.1   Introduction In the face of the challenges raised by the recent pandemic outbreak, a broader audience acknowledged the urgent need for re-thinking global education in an empowered and more inclusive way. This issue is not new, though. As an alternative to traditional teaching, within the variegated horizon of so-called progressive pedagogies, educationalists have been proposing a number of alternative educational practices based on group discussion for long. Broadly speaking, discussion-oriented education conceives of children as an educational community within which the learning process does not consist of an individual effort to acquire a certain set of information and skills, but rather of a joint enterprise of knowledge building, critical thinking and theoretical destabilization. In a community of inquiry there are no truths to accept, but rather questions to ask and ideas

E. Postiglione (*) Naples, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_12

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to share in an argument-based dialogic process promising of both an individual progress of participants (in terms of learning goals, improvement of critical argumentative/thinking skills and respectful/inclusive attitude) and a more inclusive educational environment. As the practice of dialogue is inherently intersubjective—it necessarily involves a relation to others when speaking and, insofar as one acknowledges others’ right to talk, when listening—the benefits of an education constituted by communities rather than classrooms are also expected to better society as a whole: the questioning/arguing/listening activities children implement within the community aims to provide a model they will export outside it. However, assessing our educational strategies in the unpredictable realm of actual educational dynamics is always necessary to make sure they live up to the expectations they raise. Indeed, while the overall aims of all such theories and methods are surely important in terms of educational inclusion, engagement with school curricula and for future citizenship, recent researches have also identified some issues with many of these current techniques. Narrowing the field to the Philosophy for Children (PwC) approach—which lies at the core of this present study—empirical observation suggests that Communities of Inquiry in complex educational environments can be more problematic than others, with frequent dialogic lockdowns having a crucial impact on the emotional experience of some community members, resulting in their social withdrawal and educational exclusion. For example, dialogic lockdowns have been found to affect communities of inquiry made up of members coming from heterogeneous backgrounds—in terms of language, gender, social/financial background, special/standard needs, etc. (Postiglione, 2021). Also, sessions involving untrained and non-specialized teachers often appeared to be ineffective (Kerslake & Rimmington, 2017). Issues as such—as well as the many unforeseen obstacles emerging from the unpredictable ocean of an actual, everyday classroom life—often frustrate the main purposes of methods such as (but not limited to) PwC. Indeed, regardless of the standard efficacy of a given pedagogy and resulting practices, the multifaceted social dynamics involved in the learning process sometimes present teachers with non-ideal scenarios that cause their inclusive efforts to be ineffectual. The educational experience of learning and confronting oneself with the school environment (made up of peers, teachers and, indirectly, family, society, expectations, etc.) is inherently unpredictable and, in a sense, multi-dimensional. For the individual subject, it involves self-­consciousness and cognitive development, self-confidence, communication, thinking

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and memory skills, emotions and so on so forth. Multiple social factors are at play—for example, other people’s behaviour in relation to us—and any problem affecting the happiness of the individual experience of education is likely to result in the subject’s educational withdrawal—that is, the subject ends up being excluded from the learning process. To change future education for good, inclusive pedagogical theories and practices must prove themselves to be efficacious in fostering greater inclusion in the unpredictable, multi-faceted dynamics of real educational contexts: in other words, expanding the efficacy of these techniques appears to be fundamental. Theoretical approaches and pedagogical practices are to be constantly reconceptualized and reconfigured in order to foster more effective, sustainable and inclusive communities of learning and teaching, in all sorts of exclusion. In this path, this chapter reports on some results from a long-term research which trials the ‘Single-Word Response method’ (SWRm), an alternative approach to the standard PwC session plan, in significantly problematic communities of inquiry. The SWRm tackles the divide between community members to overcome some of the problems that might arise in a complex social scenario, and equip those working in actual educational settings with an additional strategy to expand the efficacy of a community of inquiry, even in peculiar circumstances. Supported by Vygotsky’s analysis of concept formation (1986), the SWRm harnesses participants’ argumentation at certain stages of the session plan asking them to cover the process of complex categorisation backwards (i.e. climbing back from a complex idea to its core semantical nucleus). This process intends to put aside emotional/psychological risks for participants, mitigating the emergence of hierarchical group relations connected to the questioning activity, which is a key step of PwC (e.g. Lipman, 2009; Mohr Lone, 2011). Research is being carried out comparing traditional and SWRm-led sessions in different contexts with both children and adults. Analysis indicates, in SWRm sessions, questions have a higher distribution index (i.e. communities show higher tendencies to inclusion during the questioning process). Also, the percentages of epistemically open questions and speech distribution (during discussion-led inquiry) are bigger. Finally, opinions supported by argumentation and willingness to reason about others’ arguments appear to be more frequent. As data seem to suggest in the case of Philosophy with Children, constantly assessing progressive educational strategies in the unpredictable realm of actual educational dynamics is always necessary to make sure they live up to the high

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expectations they raise and equip teachers with a variety of practices to face the challenges of real classrooms and communities and allow for actual and greater inclusion.

12.2  Testing PwC’s Session Plan in a Problematic Community of Inquiry Philosophy with Children aims to strengthen individual inquiry, argumentative skills and concept formation but also to turn children into more reasonable individuals committed to societal change for good especially through distributed thinking. As Matthew Lipman puts it: Distributed thinking is sometimes also referred to as shared cognition. If we consider thinking to be composed of various kinds of mental acts causally or logically connected with one another, then a particular instance of thinking is distributed if those connected mental acts are spread out among a number of different individuals. (Lipman, 1998)1

Hence, if a number of individuals commit to a shared procedure to think about a given topic in a way which involves causal and logical connections, that is, welcoming any given utterance coming from others and responding to it with argumentation, a case of distributed thinking takes place. However: This is a fairly primitive stage of distributed thinking. It needs to be followed by internalization, whereby participants introject the behaviors of others, whom they wish to emulate, and by externalization, whereby participants synthesize what they have introjected and offer these newly created syntheses to the group. […] Education as inquiry represents an insistence that education begin with what students find problematical and that it build upon what they continue to find interesting, intriguing and important. […] The community of inquiry involves the claim that deliberative and collaborative communities are exceptional in their ability to foster critical, creative and caring thinking, leading to sounder reasoning, understanding, and judgment.

As, according to Lipman, only through educational change an individualist society can actually change, a traditionally led classroom might easily

1

 The following quotes are also from Lipman (1998) unless differently specified.

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be at pains to understand the value of distributed thinking. Children need a model. […] the usual model in Philosophy for Children is the novel-as-text and, within the model, a fictional community of inquiry. As children read the novel, they may not note that different children have different thinking styles or modes of intelligence, but they do notice that the fictional children do things that they themselves have not been doing but can do, such as asking questions instead of waiting to be called on to answer them […] most of the fictional texts consists of dialogue, so that the fictional children can be portrayed as taking responsibility for what they themselves say, rather than acting as the puppets of an off-stage interlocutor.

The interlocutor being, in Lipman’s mind, the narrator, the traditional session plan goes as follows: When the first stage of the session, the reading of the text, had been completed, the students in the classroom propose discussion topics or questions that will occupy the group until the reading of the next episode. Each contribution is written on the chalkboard and identified with the name of its contributor. A rereading of what has been written will confirm that the statements or questions represent a circle of points of view regarding the selection. […] In short, the emerging agenda for discussion suggests both a variety of perspectives and a sense of proportion.

The problem of reluctancy in children to participate in the discussion is solved since: Even the weaker or more reticent students realize quickly that the ability to question is related not to ordinary academic competencies but to experience, thoughtfulness, and imagination, so that they soon vie with one another to have their points of view included with the others. The dialogue moves in the direction of two kinds of wholeness. On the one hand, the mental acts form logical connections with one another. On the other hand, those who perform such acts form social relationships with one another. The first kind of wholeness is a completeness of meaning. The second kind, the interpersonal kind, moves toward a communal solidarity. Participants find this dual form of fulfillment highly gratifying and much to be preferred to the benefits of traditional pedagogies.

As the Philosophy for Children got increasingly refined, its standard session plan deriving from Lipman’s insights looks as follows (cf. https:// www.sapere.org.uk):

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• Getting Set, a short warm-up, often a ‘thinking game’; • Presentation of Stimulus, a story, video clip or news story; something designed to engage the young people’s attention, and which contains important and contestable ideas or values; • Thinking Time, a short time of reflection, alone, in pairs or in small • groups; • Question-Making, normally small groups each come up with a question • aimed at the heart of the matter...; • Questions aired, and celebrated, ambiguities discussed, links and • common approaches explored; • Question-Choosing, various voting methods to choose question to • address; • First Thoughts, often the group that proposed the question explains its • Rationale; • Building, the substance of the enquiry, building on each other’s ideas • and understanding—questioning, dialogic and collaborative; • Last thoughts, giving opportunity to those who have not spoken and • providing pointers for future enquiry; • Review, for example, what went well; what could have gone better. As Lipman himself explicitly states, the value of emulation is taken into high consideration in a community of inquiry. Whether emulative dynamics occur out of conscious or subconscious initiatives does not make any substantial difference in the construction of a distributed thinking experience. This is particularly true if we make reference to a fairly homogeneous classroom—in terms of social, cultural, financial background and educational needs. Yet, as soon as the community is built in a real educational scenario, the individual status of children outside the classroom is automatically reproduced within it. The reasons that expose students to a particular risk of social exclusion—i.e. gender/race stereotypes, low income students, SEN (special educational needs) students, students pertaining to a linguistic, religious or ethnic minority etc.—expose them to a particular risk of educational exclusion too. Regardless of the fact that the explicit pedagogical aim of distributed thinking is proving those reasons to be unreasonable, public opinions articulated within the community do not necessarily correspond to children’s actual, private opinions. Group dynamics, social hierarchies and the educational advantages some children have over others following a higher social status (i.e. education-friendly home environment, major degrees of pre-existing general knowledge,

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belonging to dominant social groups, etc.) are often reflected in the children’s reception within the schooling setting. In a short example: in the classroom, popular children distribute and receive more positive reinforcement than unpopular children (Gottman et  al., 1975), and this could potentially alter the emulative dynamics envisaged as a key aspect of Lipman’s shared cognition. To ensure Philosophy for Children maintains its efficacy especially in relation to educational inclusion, the results of implementations in the presence of significant differences dividing members of a given community should be constantly monitored and their pedagogy constantly questioned (cf. Billmann-Mahecha, 2005). In problematic circumstances,2 where participants hold a variegated range of backgrounds (social, cultural, educational, etc.), emulation leading to distributed thinking might  reflect the existing social hierarchies. Excluded children might give up their role as community members and come across uninterested and silent (so signalling their exclusion) or participate docilely into discussion by endorsing leaders’ passively (creating a divide between their actual involvement into the process of inquiry and their manifest contribution to dialogue). The analysis of control groups3 involved in this study was aimed at recognizing the latter case, through a series of parameters. Since, […] there is the attention given in some schools to the process of ‘problem-­ solving’. But in order to solve problems, a stage of formulation is needed, and prior to formulation, it is necessary that crucially relevant questions be raised. (Lipman, 1976)

Philosophy with Children ascribes great importance to the stage of question-raising (Lipman, 2003, 2009; Lipman et al., 1980; Mohr Lone, 2011). Hence, empirical observation focuses mainly on it (in regard to the discussion-stage only two parameters are considered here).4

 See Sect. 12.3 below for more accurate definitions.  Control groups underwent standard PwC sessions. 4  Data presented in this chapter are provisional as the study is ongoing and very essential for the sake of brevity. They have been included in an easy-to-consult way for purely explanatory reasons. A comprehensive data report and analysis of the studies mentioned here can be found in ‘Postiglione, E., Philosophy for Children outside classrooms—turning sport facilities into propagators of social inclusion, forthcoming 2022. 2 3

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As already stated, within a community of inquiry, participants are directly involved in identifying—among the many questions raised—a single, unanimously accepted question to kick-off dialogue. This does not mean distributed thinking occurs once the question is identified: shared cognition and inquiry are already underway as children internalize the stimulus (say, a reading), externalize thoughts in the shape of a question and express opinions about the question-agenda. They are already expected to disclose a sense of responsibility and care towards others, which in turn reflects the responsibility of citizens’ participation in the joint enterprise of living in society. However, the fact that distributed thinking during the discussion stage largely depends on the nature and quality of the identified question is also to be acknowledged. With this in mind, the following parameters have been set: • Question’s distribution index: it expresses the distribution of ‘chosen questions’ among the questions raised by single participants • Question-raising leaders: participants whose questions are used as the starting point of dialogue over 10% times overall • Trivial questions/epistemically close questions: questions asked by participants and put down on the chalkboard which are trivial or promise little discussion • Exclusion phenomena: moments occurring during the question-­ raising stage, when question-raising leaders discuss only among themselves and try to reach an agreement on their own • Extreme disagreements: question-raising stage resulting in a clash between individuals or sub-groups who suspend their epistemically open attitude towards others’ questions and endorse their own by principle (either because they just back up a peer belonging to their own sub-group or provide no argument in support of the question they prefer) • Blunders: ill-posited questions involving some sort of linguistic, semantic or knowledge-related mistake, causing inhibition by the individuals who see their question on the chalkboard causing peers’ reaction (i.e. scorn, embarrass, etc.) • Wise guy questions: questions implying a degree of pre-existing knowledge and not being within everyone’s reach, causing uncritical fascination of some members or inhibition of some others

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• Communication deadlocks: any time members of the community infringe Lipman’s definition of ‘good dialogue’5 resulting in a stalemate, during the discussion-stage • Exclusion phenomena at discussion: moments occurring during the discussion stage, when previous question-raising leaders discuss only among themselves These parameters have been applied to three different studies. Research is comparing traditional and SWRm-research-led sessions in community involving extreme cases of diversity within the members. The three studies took place in the surroundings of Naples (Italy), in a community field house and sports facility home to a sports-inclusive association. Didactic and cultural activities, fitness courses and sports training (the centre hosts many sport academies) are offered at controlled price to enable low-­ income children to access standard sports facilities and training.6 Since 2020 the centre is also including SEN and athletes with disability in all of its activities under constant monitoring of a specialized research team.7 Data are provisional as projects 2 and 3 are ongoing. Study 1 (Age 4 to 17; 6 Groups; 76 Participants, Including 15 SEN; 10 Sessions Per Group) The first study was conducted between September and December 2020, in the framework of a project to foster educational inclusion funded by the community council,8 thanks to which participants accessed the project for free. Participants where split into 6 groups (12 or 13 participants per group) according to age.  According to Lipman (2003) subjects involved in a good dialogue:

5

. 1 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

show both critical and creative thinking care about others’ feelings and inclusion make claims supported by evidences use the ideas of others as a starting point to further inquiries make the concepts they use clear make judgments that enrich the lives we have yet to live

 Activities also involve low-income children but are not limited to them.  Including two social workers, an educator, a psychologist and a philosopher of education. 8  ‘Quarto Polo After-school club 2021’. 6 7

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Table 12.1  Cumulative data from Study 1 control groups Question’s distribution index Question-raising leaders Trivial questions/epistemically close questions Exclusion phenomena Extreme disagreements Blunders Wise guy questions Communication deadlocks Exclusion phenomena at discussion

86.6% of chosen questions were raised by question-­ raising leaders 8 84 14 24 33 12 54 17

Group 1 and 2 = age 4 to 6 Group 3 and 4 = age 7 to 8 Group 5 = age 9 to 11 Group 6 = age 13 to 17 Groups 1 to 5 included at least 1 SEN participant, all groups included a relevant number of low-income participants.9 The social composition of all communities was significantly variegated. Groups 1, 3 and 6 were control groups (they underwent standard PwC sessions); 8 groups 2, 4 and 5 underwent SWRm sessions. Data shown below refers to the control groups and are considered globally for the sake of brevity (see Table 12.1). Study 2 (Age 5 to 12; 16 Groups; 160 Children, Including 27 SEN; Ongoing, 24 Sessions So Far) The second study started on September 2021 and will come to an end in July 2022. It is being conducted in the framework of project to foster SEN children’s inclusion in sports activities and academies.10 It includes young athletes enrolled in rhythmic gymnastics, taekwondo, wrestling and basketball courses. Sessions are implemented as an integration to the standard sports activity and are always triggered by a philosophical stimulus (e.g.  The exact number has not been included into research for privacy reasons.  ‘Quarto Polo—Sport for All 2021’. Being partially funded thanks to a tender published by the Waldensian movement, the project allows SEN children to be involved in the activities for free. 9

10

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reading, video, etc.) somehow related to sport. Groups were divided in accordance with the four disciplines (4 macro-groups), each discipline group is then split into two sub-groups on the ground of age (8 groups, 2 groups per discipline) reflecting the organization of the sports courses. Finally, the groups are split into 2 twin groups (16 groups: discipline 1 age a is split in groups ‘x’ and ‘y’, discipline 1 age b is split in groups ‘w’ and ‘z’, etc.). Each group involves at least 1 SEN participant, and all groups include a relevant number of low-income participants. The social composition of all communities was significantly variegated. Two age groups per discipline (8 groups) are control groups (they underwent standard PwC sessions); 8 groups are undergoing SWRm sessions. Data shown below refers to the control groups updated to March 15, 2022, and are considered globally for the sake of brevity (see Table 12.2). Study 3 (Adults; 4 Groups; 40 People; Ongoing, 16 Sessions So Far) The third study started on November 2021 and will come to an end in July 2022. It is being conducted in the framework of the same project of Study 2, involving some of the parents of children involved in Study 2, some of the workers of the centre and some of the attendees of cultural activities held at the centre. Some of the adult participants have SEN children, some are immigrants and encounter some problems with the Italian language.11 The social composition of the 4 communities (all composed of Table 12.2  Cumulative data from Study 2 control groups Question’s distribution index Question-raising leaders Trivial questions/epistemically close questions Exclusion phenomena Extreme disagreements Blunders Wise guy questions Communication deadlocks Exclusion phenomena at discussion

Approx. 75% of chosen questions were raised by question-raising leaders 41 402 59 57 78 44 159 36

 None of the participants is asked about their children, nor about specific personal information. They filled a pre-survey form which will be compared with an after-survey form at the end of the study. 11

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Table 12.3  Cumulative data from Study 3 control groups Question’s distribution index Question-raising leaders Trivial questions/epistemically close questions Exclusion phenomena Extreme disagreements Blunders Wise guy questions Communication deadlocks Exclusion phenomena at discussion

59.3% of chosen questions were raised by question-­ raising leaders 18 39 12 19 27 32 22 7

10 participants) is extremely variegated (e.g. highly skilled/educated individuals, non-specialized workers, immigrants, teachers, unemployed, uneducated, etc.). Groups were split on a random basis. Two groups are control groups (they underwent standard PwC sessions); 2 groups are undergoing SWRm sessions. Data shown below refers to the control groups updated to March 15, 2022, and are considered globally for the sake of brevity (see Table 12.3). The three studies share a significant degree of community heterogeneity. From a social and educational perspective participants have remarkably different backgrounds and lifestyles. In each single community of inquiry, a considerable number of members belongs to groups allegedly at high risk of educational exclusion (e.g. first- and second-generation immigrants, SEN, low income, socially deprived, etc.). Data should be read in light of the following consideration: given the role of the centre in the social community and the sort of inclusive activities normally held in it, all of the communities involve at least some participants from highly problematic environments and barely included into the schooling process.

12.3  The ‘Single-Word Response’ Method While traditional PwC asks participants to raise questions in response to a given stimulus, the Single-Word Response method (SWRm)12 consists of each participant framing thoughts and feelings into a single representative word. Discussion later moves on to the identification of one representative  Further information about the SWRm can be found in Postiglione (2021).

12

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word to be matched with possible epistemic paths (e.g. ‘what?’, ‘why?’) that will finally be reconditioned in the shape of a question and used as a kick-starter of the following dialogue. A SWRm PwC session plan looks something similar to what follows: • Getting Set, a short warm-up, often a ‘thinking game’. • Presentation of Stimulus, a story, video clip or news story; something designed to engage the young people’s attention, and which contains important and contestable ideas or values. • Thinking Time, a short time of reflection, alone, in pairs or in small groups. • Single-word response: ask participants to write down their word (normally small groups each come up with a word) aimed at the heart of the matter…, • Words aired and celebrated, ambiguities discussed, links and common words explored. • Collect and write words on a whiteboard. • Word-choosing: help the community towards the individuation of one representative word to be reshaped as a question to address. In alternative: draw ballots or hands-up votes. • The Community matches the chosen word with one of the possible epistemic paths you had previously put up on the board (e.g. ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘how’). • Compose the question. • First Thoughts, often the group that proposed the word explains its rationale. • Building, the substance of the enquiry, building on each other’s ideas and understanding—questioning, dialogic and collaborative. • In presence of communication deadlocks, frame dialogue and ask the community for a single-word response once again (this time, they are proposed to identify a single word that is representative, for them, of the inquiry they have been undergoing so far). The word is again reconditioned in form of a question. • Discussion building starts again. • Review, for example, what went well; what could have gone better. In his Thought and Language, Vygotsky (1986) claims that children’s use of speech plays a crucial role in their symbolization and formation of thinking and concepts. More recent research is substantially in line with

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this idea (cf. Helm & Katz, 2001; Wu, 2009, 2013). According to Vygotsky, the process of concept formation was divided into three major phases, with the first two phases characterized by synthetic images and thinking in complexes, constituting one root of concept formation, and the third phase marked by the formation of potential concepts, constituting another root in the process leading to concept formation. Vygotsky mentioned that the syncretic image or group is formed by the child’s immediate perception on the basis of the spatial, temporal, or other relational contiguity in the elements contained in a syncretic group, and then a refined syncretic image may be constituted by the child in a more complex base from the syncretic groups which have been already formed. Vygotsky stated that thinking in complexes are developed in the second major phase on the way to concept formation, and the individual objects in a complex are united not merely by the subjective impressions of the child but also by the bonds between the components of a complex. (Li-Yuan Wu, 2015)

In his own words: since a complex is not formed on the plane of abstract logical thinking, the bonds that create it, as well as the bonds it helps to create, lack logical unity; they may be of many different kinds. Any factually present connection may lead to the inclusion of a given element into a complex. That is the main difference between a complex and a concept. (Vygotsky, 1986, pp. 113)

Per this view, the process of concept formation has a trajectory from synthetic-experiential images towards complex abstraction and symbolic categorisation. Once the process reaches a sufficient degree of sophistication, a web of symbolic-semantic relationships among concepts emerges at a subject’s disposal enabling higher-order linguistic performances and, along with them, the emergence of the inter-subjective realm of dialogue. Since then, individual and shared cognition become possible. But a community inquiry is not solely grounded on members’ capability to deal with more and more abstract concepts, it acts as a continuing resource to bring the process upwards a step beyond, stratifying complex concepts and problematizing the relationships existing among them and, hence, problematizing reality. So far so good. Unfortunately, these processes are not homogeneous and the capacity to handle certain degrees of abstraction and problematization differs from subject to subject, depending on a variety of factors. Among them, some have to do with social exclusion

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phenomena and educational disadvantages that, while emerging outside the community, can pop into it at any time, regardless of the explicit aims of a community of inquiry. In short, while being a resource towards higher-order distributed thinking within a community, the quality of argumentation can also propagate phenomena of exclusion. If exclusion occurs in dialogue, it is not necessarily dependent on, but certainly reflected in the quality of argumentation of excluded members as well as in their participation in the argumentative process. The high argumentative skills of a member can impact on other members who realize their inability to meet that given standard; the poor argumentative skills of another member can impact on their inclusion, and so on and so forth. Acknowledging this contradiction or argumentation (being both the most relevant aspect of a community of inquiry and the most relevant field of exclusion), in radically complex contexts, where the argumentative skills of participants are significantly disproportioned, the SWRm aims to provide a pedagogy to ideally turn the process of concept formation upside down. By freezing argumentation, during the question-raising stage or at any time during discussion,13 it asks children to move backwards from the most complex argumentation to the semantical nucleus of their idea, to be identified with a single representative word. A word being inherently non-­ discriminatory (whatever it is) but also being inherently a text in itself (it possesses all of the possible ambiguities of an argument). A single word might not be an answer, but it surely involves an endless chain of questions. And if this is all a community of inquiry is about, it might be a promising move to preserve the epistemic openness of dialogue while significantly limiting phenomena of argumentative exclusion.

12.4  Results Study 1 (Age 4 to 17; 6 Groups; 76 Participants, Including 15 SEN; 10 Sessions Per Group) The social composition of all communities was significantly variegated. Groups 1, 3 and 6 were control groups (they underwent standard PwC sessions); groups 2, 4 and 5 underwent SWRm sessions. Data shown below refers to the SWRm groups and are considered globally for the sake of brevity. The definition of ‘question-raising leader’ does not apply (see  When communication deadlocks occur.

13

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Table 12.4  Cumulative data from Study 1 SWRm groups Question’s distribution index Single-word leaders Trivial questions/epistemically close questions Exclusion phenomena Extreme disagreements Blunders Wise guy questions Communication deadlocks Exclusion phenomena at discussion

28.6% of chosen words were proposed by ‘sw leaders’ (d.i. + 67%) 13 0 8 20 0 0 42 13

Table 12.4). It is substituted by ‘single-word leader’: the threshold to be defined as ‘sw leader’ derives from the 10% threshold fixed for ‘question-­ raising leaders’, which is re-calculated in light of the increased distribution index. As a result the threshold varies but is always significantly lower: from this it follows that the number of leaders is increased but the datum’s significance is significantly diminished. Study 2 (Age 5 to 12; 16 Groups; 160 Children, Including 27 SEN; Ongoing, 24 Sessions So Far) Each group involves at least 1 SEN participant, all groups include a relevant number of low-income participants. The social composition of all communities was significantly variegated. Two age groups per discipline (8 groups) are control groups (they underwent standard PwC sessions); specularly, 8 groups are undergoing SWRm sessions. Data shown below refers to the SWRm groups updated to March 15, 2022, and are considered globally for the sake of brevity (see Table 12.5). Study 3 (Adults; 4 Groups; 40 People; Ongoing, 16 Sessions So Far) As data from all of the three studies seem to suggest, SWRm sessions have a higher question’s distribution index. Given the structure of the SWRm session plan, the number of trivial and epistemically open question falls to 0. The same applies to blunders and wise guy questions. Exclusion phenomena during the question diminish significantly (and are limited to

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Table 12.5  Cumulative data from Study 2 SWRm groups Question’s distribution index Question-raising leaders Trivial questions/epistemically close questions Exclusion phenomena Extreme disagreements Blunders Wise guy questions Communication deadlocks Exclusion phenomena at discussion

21.4% of chosen words were proposed by ‘sw leaders’ (d.i. + 71.5%) 61 0 19 29 0 0 14 21

Table 12.6  Cumulative data from Study 3 SWRm groups Question’s distribution index Question-raising leaders Trivial questions/epistemically close questions Exclusion phenomena Extreme disagreements Blunders Wise guy questions Communication deadlocks Exclusion phenomena at discussion

32.7% of chosen questions were raised by ‘sw leaders’ (d.i. + 44.9%) 26 0 2 1 0 0 7 5

pre-existing social division among sub-groups in the classroom). Exclusion phenomena and communication deadlock diminish slightly but remarkably, suggesting the enhancement of participants’ inclusion into the process of discussion-building (see Table 12.6).

12.5  Conclusions: Dare Questioning… Within a Community, and About It According to Matthew Lipman, sophisticated thinking skills of citizens and their commitment to distributed thinking are hallmarks of higher-­ order societies. In his words,

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A higher-quality democracy is not achieved merely by attracting to it a plurality of individuals capable of higher-order thinking. It must itself engage in the cultivation of such thinking. (One would not have to look for long to find communities—often suburban—in which the intellectual level of the residents considerably outstrips the intellectual level of the schools). Nor is education for a higher-order thinking merely the education of a privileged elite […]. Education for higher-order thinking is quality education for all, and the criteria by means of which it is identified are critical thinking, creative thinking, and caring thinking. (Lipman, 1998)

If a populated community of educationalists keeps advocating for a change of orientation towards education, this is probably to be ascribed to the fact that, according to Lipman’s criteria, education is not of a higher order. Therefore, the same applies to democracy. In the attempt to better education and democracy through it, The community of deliberative inquiry—its formation and operation in the classroom—has been put forward as a method of teaching students to engage in shared cognition […]. (Lipman, 1998)

If efforts to better education through higher-order thinking still end up to be often unheard, and higher-order thinking is a hallmark of higher-­order democracies, it follows that extant democracies are not higher-order democracies and that behind their resistance lies something profoundly unthoughtful. As deliberative inquiry calls for bold thinking and daring questioning within the community, in the face of a fast-changing and sometimes unthoughtful world, it has to question itself too. Expanding the efficacy of alternative pedagogies—their continuous and mutual exchange, their capability to disseminate critical thinking, creative thinking and caring thinking—by constantly adapting them to the emerging needs of their communities, as the SWRm tries to do, appears to be the most effective way to cultivate higher-order education and, along with it, better democracies.

Bibliography Billmann-Mahecha, E. (2005). Social processes of negotiation in childhood— qualitative access using the group discussion method. Childhood & Philosophy, 1(1), 271–285. Gottman, J., Gonso, J., & Rasmussen, B. (1975). Social interaction, social competence, and friendship in children. Child Development, 46(3), 709–718.

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Helm, J. H., & Katz, L. G. (2001). Young investigators: The project approach in the early years. Teachers College Press. Kerslake, L., & Rimmington, S. (2017). Sharing talk, sharing cognition: Philosophy with children as the basis for productive classroom interaction Issues. Early Education, 1(36), 21–32. Lipman, M. (1976). Philosophy for children. Metaphilosophy, 7(1), 17–39. Lipman, M. (1998). Teaching students to think reasonably: Some findings of the philosophy for children program. The Clearing House, 71(5), 277–280. Lipman, M. (2003). Thinking in education. Cambridge University Press. Lipman, M. (2009). Philosophy for children: Some assumptions and implications. In E. Marsal, T. Dobashi, & B. Weber (Eds.), Children philosophize worldwide. Peter Lang. Lipman, M., Sharp, A. M., & Oscanyan, F. S. (1980). Philosophy in the classroom (2nd ed.). Temple University Press. Mohr Lone, J. (2011). Questions and the community of philosophical inquiry. Childhood & Philosophy, 7(13), 75–89. Postiglione, E. (2021). Questions and performatives: Communities of enquiry as conventional contexts. In I. Bhattacharjee, & P. Iyer (Eds.), Moral and Political Discourses in Philosophy of Education (pp. 153-169). London: Routledge India. Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wu, L. (2009). Children’s graphical representations and emergent writing: Evidence from children’s drawings. Early Child Development and Care, 179(1), 69–79. Wu, L. (2013). Understanding children’s concept formation and writing emergence from the perspective of graphical multi-signification: Evidence and pedagogical implications. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 26(3), 266–283. Wu, L.-Y. (2015). Thinking and concepts: Vygotsky’s theory of concept formation, review of global management and service Science, 1–7.

CHAPTER 13

Effects of “Philosophical Debates” at Preschool on the Recognition of Sex-­Stereotyping: An Ongoing Double-Level Participatory Intervention Research Ingrid Verscheure

13.1   Introduction Many works concerning the effects of teaching practices on the school construction of differences between genders show that the French school system participates in the reproduction of gender inequalities (Francis, 2006; Skelton et al., 2006). In educational sciences, pioneering research has shown that inequalities between girls and boys at school are constructed in classroom pedagogical interactions (Amade-Escot, 2019; Verscheure & Debars, 2019). The research that we are carrying out in didactics (Verscheure & Amade-Escot, 2007) uses qualitative approaches

I. Verscheure (*) Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_13

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at the scale of micro-didactic interactions to examine how the contents studied reproduce or, on the contrary, make it possible to fight against educational inequalities between girls and boys.

13.2  Theoretical Framework To study gender phenomena via Joint Action in Didactics (JAD), we analyse the variation in the epistemic gender positions of teachers and students in relation to the differential dynamics of the didactic contract (Sensevy & Mercier, 2007; Ligozat et  al., 2015). Before presenting these two concepts, we will clarify the meaning of the concept of Gender in our research. A Relational Approach to the Concept of Gender Gender research highlights the asymmetric and hierarchical assignments of roles and social functions of women and men (Davies, 1989; Francis, 2006). Gender therefore embraces the weight of the differentiation/hierarchy of the sexes in the construction of social order more generally. The gender system (Parini, 2006) defines asymmetric positions, interdependent and integrated patterns of personality traits, behaviours, tasks and activities that may or may not be endorsed by individuals. Judith Butler (1999) shows that Gender is a performative category; it is a relational concept: fluid, multiple and changing depending on the context, which cannot be reduced to the dichotomy of sex. However, the variability of performativity of gender is not independent of a set of gender norms at the origin of the gender system, a powerful tool for naturalizing the gender hierarchy legitimizing male domination in each symbolic universe (Butler, 1999). This naturalization is at the origin of stereotypes, which are developed from hierarchical representations of the two sexes and of their differential valence, bearer of inequalities. Gender stereotypes are a fictitious construction, developed from erroneous representations and beliefs, which then result in prejudices against individuals of both sexes accordingly. Girls and boys do not always activate the paths that their gender stereotypes assign them. Furthermore, this sociological definition does not seem unrelated to the concept of gender dependence/independence (DIG) developed by Cendrine Marro (2012). We analyse the activities from the perspective of the relationship that each student will develop vis-à-vis the learning offered, particularly with regard to their dependence or

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independence concerning gender. This relationship is influenced by various parameters, including the type of task proposed, the stereotypes associated with it, social situations and belonging to the group of girls or boys (Morin-­Messabel et al., 2017). We examine gender by considering that the interplay of positions (gender, school, social) is not fixed but is likely to evolve according to the didactic context. To identify these variations, we use the concepts of epistemic gender positioning and the differential didactic contract. Epistemic Gender Positioning Our research has shown that students activate a dynamic epistemic gender positioning, which varies according to the specificity of the knowledge content studied but always has as its background a degree of dependence on, or independence of, gender stereotypes. Over the course of the interactions in the learning sequences, identification of variations in the epistemic gender positioning makes it possible to analyse the evolution of topogenesis, that is to say, the responsibilities respectively assumed by the teacher and/or students in the advancement of knowledge. These singular contributions of the actors in the joint didactic process are at the origin of the differential trajectories of the students, girls and boys (Amade-Escot, 2019; Verscheure & Debars, 2019). The Differential Didactic Contract Research in didactics has shown the eminently differential character of the didactic process by basing itself on the didactic contract (all of the reciprocal obligations and expectations between students and teacher with regard to the knowledge under study), which turns out to be negotiated between the teacher and sub-groups of students corresponding to various academic positions within the class. These positions relate to the various hierarchies of excellence present and are partially dependent on the social origin of the students (Schubauer-Leoni, 1996). We have shown that the subjects receiving the teaching, girls or boys, are not positioned and are not solicited in the same way by the teacher, who interacts with one or the other depending on the function that each will have to fulfil at a certain point in the advancement of the didactic process (Verscheure & Amade-Escot, 2007). The extension of the concept of a differential didactic contract integrating the idea of epistemic gender positioning helps to explain the

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great variability in the ways in which girls and boys develop skills in the classroom, as well as the co-construction between teachers and students of these variations (Amade-Escot et al., 2015).

13.3  Research Rationale and Purposes: The Focus Point of Change to Study and Fight against Gender Inequalities in Learning There are gender inequalities in teaching-learning processes, which we seek to study in order to fight against them. As we are working on such a complex and sensitive object as change, we have chosen to develop Participatory Intervention Research with a teaching team. This allows the academic world and a professional world to become interconnected (it is a question of doing research “with” rather than “on” educational practitioners) and it pursues a dual aim of scientific production and professional research development, also distributed between teachers and researchers (Desgagné, 1997; Desgagné & Bednarz, 2005). The theorical background that drives our perspective is Participatory Intervention Research with the purpose of sustaining practitioners in their will to change their teaching practices related to gender. The core idea of our approach lies in French literature related to “Mentoring changes in educational practices”. The intervention is situated in a context where change is driven by a Participatory Intervention Research team that wishes to combat gender stereotypes and assumes a praxeological objective to do so. Change is seen as a modification of the relationships between an actor (individual or collective) and their environment, involving the modification of the elements of the context as a preliminary step towards the transformation of individuals. For us, leading another person in a situation of change is more a question of advising than directing. It is participatory intervention research conducted within an ‘activist approach’ with the purpose of changing pedagogical practices. That is why, in our research design, collaboration between the teachers and the researchers is at the core of the changes in educational practices. We have been carrying out this research with the teaching team of a preschool in the suburbs of Toulouse, France, since 2015. The teaching and research teams work together to co-construct learning sequences aimed at greater gender equality. The activities offered in these sequences differ according to the level of the class and the wishes of the teachers, from preschool (age 5) to the end of primary school (age 10).

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Through the sequences put in place, the Participatory Intervention Research team wished to carry out an in-depth examination of the conditions for transforming practices that are still too traditionally marked by gender assignments, namely the girl-boy binary. The problem of this longitudinal research was to characterize the conditions under which joint didactic action enables (or not) awareness of gender stereotypes and to consider ways of transforming the practices of teachers and students in more emancipatory directions. We consider that the fight against gender stereotypes is a matter of emancipatory knowledge and constitutes an element of a “new” or “different” power to act. The construction of this knowledge involves the recognition of gender stereotypes, the identification of which is a first step towards considering their deconstruction for greater equality in learning in the classroom. We thus consider that ‘recognition of sex-stereotyping’ is a knowledge (Verscheure, 2018; Verscheure & Aussel, 2019; Verscheure & Barale, 2017, 2021). Here, we are more particularly interested in the sequence of Philosophical Debates related to the ‘recognition of sex-stereotyping’ conducted at preschool, and in analysing a “summary session” that was introduced at the initiative of the teachers under this term. This session, which therefore had a certain exteriority in relation to the learning sequence co-constructed with the researchers, seemed to us to be a favourable moment for identifying the effects of Participatory Intervention Research in terms of: (1) recognition by the students of the gender stereotypes and (2) the modalities of its actualization in the joint didactic action. Three research questions are specifically addressed: • What was the contribution of each of the participants to the advancement of discussions around gender stereotypes? • How and by what means were the students put in a position to identify the related knowledge during this so-called “summary session”? • To what extent do professorial regulations favour the institutionalization of a less prescriptive look at such stereotypes

13.4  Context of the Study and Research Design Here, we present the context of the Participatory Intervention Research and the choice of the activity Philosophical Debates related to the “recognition of sex-stereotyping” before describing the learning sequence as it was implemented, followed by the collection and processing of data from the so-called summary session, which is the subject of this chapter.

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EÇACHANGE Participatory Intervention Research EÇACHANGE Research1 has been integrated into the school project. This makes it a central educational issue since it has thus become compulsory for all students. The school concerned has a real social mix due to “balanced” school mapping, with several teachers having been made aware of gender issues in education. This research has its origins in the heart of ministerial orientations (Ministry of Education, 2010, 2014) even if, despite appearances and obvious will to do well, these are not always homogeneous and produce effects that sometimes diverge from what was envisaged. The Philosophical Debates sequence was set up at preschool (age 5–6) at the initiative of two experienced teachers, who had experience in leading Philosophical Debates in their class and encouraged the choice of this school activity to deal with questions of gender stereotypes. Characteristics of the Learning Sequence Co-developed with the Teachers This section sets out the institutional framework in which the Philosophical Debates activity adopted by the teachers took place, before discussing what we actually mean by “Philosophical Debates”. “ Philosophical Debates” at Preschool The texts of the 2015 preschool curriculum specify, in the dimension “learning together and living together”, that “the class and the group constitute a learning community which establishes the bases for the construction of a citizenship respectful of the rules of secularism and open to the plurality of cultures in the world”. Preschool is the place where children: (1) “discover the foundations of collective debate” (2) experience “a first acquisition of the principles of life in society” and (3) build “the conditions for equality, especially between children—girls and boys” (Ministry of Education, 2015). In line with these aims, the “Philosophical Debates” instituted by the school project appeared to be timely activities, especially as they were proposed by the teachers. In addition, these are activities conducive to 1  EÇACHANGE [Preschool—Learning cycles—Mentoring CHANGEs in educational practices—epistemic Gender positioning]: research funded by University of Toulouse.

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discussions on inequalities between girls and boys in school. The questions surrounding the difference between the sexes are eminently philosophical insofar as reflection on the subject is built, not in and through opposition, but in a relationship that alters them by questioning them (Verscheure et al., 2019).  hat Do We Mean by “Philosophical Debates”? W The literature on philosophical practices at school indicates that these didactic devices do not escape some risks of instrumentalization or the implementation of “ambivalent practices”. Aware of these risks, the collaborative work consisted of building a learning sequence with the objective of making it possible for students to reflect critically on the problems of human action and knowledge in connection with girl-boy inequalities. Regarding this type of debate, the authors agreed on the need for the teacher to adopt a posture of mediation in guiding the debate in order to let the students express themselves spontaneously and to allow the construction of their reflexivity (Verscheure et al., 2019). The teacher does not possess the truth but revives reflection through requests for clarification; they arbitrate speaking time, try to involve all the students and guarantee freedom of expression, while paying attention that this does not prevent the arguments from staying on topic. The students are considered as full participants in the debates while respecting the rules imposed by the teacher. Learning Sequence By focusing on the Philosophical Debates about sex-stereotyping and gender equality, the knowledge at play in the learning sequence co-constructed with the teachers is aimed to allow students to: • understand that the difference between the sexes does not imply a hierarchy of one sex over another, nor does it justify unequal treatment • identify that this difference does not prejudge any barriers of interest with regard to practices that are nevertheless marked by social gender norms • express their feelings about any differentiated or unequal treatment of girls and boys by adults and give concrete examples • become aware, beyond anatomical or bodily distinctions, of the idea of the existence of differences between individuals rather than between the sexes.

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Each debate was initiated by a question chosen so as to start a discussion on what, according to the students, can differentiate the activities of girls and boys. This choice, which may seem dichotomous at first glance, was thought of as a way to bring out the stereotypes that persist in society, in order to then discuss them. To this aim of developing students’ critical thinking was added the idea that one of the potential effects of longitudinal Participatory Intervention Research would be to participate, in the longer term, in the deconstruction of these stereotypes. The subjects addressed in the debates thus concerned the cultural dimensions of gender norms traditionally associated with bodily appearance, domestic activities, occupations, sports practices, etc. Thus, each debate in the learning sequence, initially planned over five weeks, was structured as follows: • the class is divided into single-sex groups (N = 8): this choice was made by the teachers to: “free the girls’ voice” (interview); • the rules of the debate clearly indicate that the students must first think in silence, and then take a position; • at the end of the first three sessions, a thematic analysis of the exchanges is carried out by the Participatory Intervention Research team to identify themes and feed into the fourth and fifth debates, which will take place in small mixed groups. Data Collection and Analysis The collection and processing of data concerned the interactions between students and teachers (Natalia and Christiane) during the “summary session” that was added at the teachers’ initiative and conducted in whole-­ class groups (17 students per class). The teachers wanted to “go further in identifying the effects of the debates” (Natalia interview) on their students by proposing a debate six weeks after the end of the learning sequence. They wanted to “let a little time pass” to identify what the students “had learned about girls and boys” (debriefing interviews). We consider that this additional session was relevant for identifying the effects of the learning sequence, on the one hand, on the recognition of stereotypes by the students and, on the other hand, on the dynamics of didactic joint action between teachers and their students. The researchers

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did not intervene during this session, either in its planning or its implementation, but it was nevertheless recorded and constitutes the body of data. We consider that this “summary session” is a moment of institutionalization (Brousseau, 1997), which is fundamentally linked to the didactic process and results from a specific intervention (Ligozat, 2011). The interpretation of the interactions of each teacher with the chosen students is based on the fact that any institutionalization is characterized by the presence of marks of modalization, which situates the basic statement in relation to the truth or necessity, by expressing judgments of an appreciative nature or showing degrees of support (Schneuwly & Dolz, 2009). On the other hand, the interactions are based on the identification of the actors (teacher or students) who take topogenetic responsibility with regard to the didactic context set up by each teacher. All of these analysers refer to the “joint” nature of the didactic action and will be interpreted in relation to the epistemic gender positioning of the students and their teacher, and their degrees of dependence on, or independence of, gender stereotypes, as the social norms and roles traditionally assigned to women and men and the implicit prescriptions of behaviour conveyed by these stereotypes. The aim of the analysis is to understand the evolution of the responsibility respectively assumed by each teacher and/or by the students (topogenesis) in the advancement of knowledge and its contribution to the differential dynamics of the didactic contract with regard to the challenges of knowledge: recognize sex-stereotyping and suspend judgment in terms of absence (regarding the conduct of the debate by the teachers, or regarding the critical effects of verbal interactions between participants).

13.5   Findings: Constraints and Possibilities of “Philosophical Debates” at Preschool in Connection with a Differential Dynamic According to Gender In the following sections, we examine the effects of the epistemic gender positioning of teachers on the evolutionary dynamics of the differential didactic contract with respect to “recognize sex-stereotyping and gender equality”.

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Illustrations of Joint Didactic Action in Natalia’s Class: A Topogenesis from the Students’ Side During the moment of institutionalization in a class group (9 girls and 8 boys), we report on the interactions between Natalia and the four students designated by her as representative of the class (ante interviews with Natalia): • Loan and Max, who have a good command of language and speak easily; • Clémentine who, although having a good command of language, is rather shy; • Joyz, a shy student having difficulty in mastering language. The audio recording of the session shows that the course of the discussions is punctuated by the turns of the teacher who calls on the students in turn, to “distribute the floor for all” (debriefing interview with Natalia). To initiate the discussions, Natalia recalls the theme of the learning sequence: “we had debates on philosophy on the theme of girls and boys, we discussed this subject several times”. She goes on to explain that, in the context of this session, she wants to know “what you [the students] thought about these moments when we discussed girls and boys together and maybe what you learned about it”. These two statements from Natalia clearly define the moment of institutionalization that she wishes to engage in exchanges with her students. We find the criteria of recontextualization, generalization and the presence of modalization marks that characterize this type of moment. However, the teacher lets the students debate and produces a few statements of truth, necessity or judgment. After clarifying what is at issue in the exchanges, Natalia gives the floor to Joyz, who says: “In fact, well, girls and boys, they have the right to have the same games”. This idea is taken up by several students like Loan who adds: “boys, they have the right to do the same things as girls” and goes on to explain that “girls and boys have the right to play together”, summoning in this statement elements discussed during the learning sequence.2 The fact remains that the 2  This question of “law” was strongly discussed during the debate in session 5, especially by the girls, who often spoke in this mixed group: “Girls have the right to have fun with boys’ games” or again “I told him I’m playing with my dad… and it was good.” And that “I have the right to love football”.

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students evoke “games for girls” and “games for boys”, which underlines the strength of the gender assignments that are still present. But the identification of the possibilities offered by games open to all appears, regardless of the types of games mentioned. This question of “equal rights” expressed by Loan appears to be an effect of the choices made by the Participatory Intervention Research team in the co-construction of the learning sequence: namely to promote the identification of the fact that girl-boy inequalities are cultural constructs. Asked by the teacher, Max confirms what Joyz pointed out when she said that the difference “is actually … [that] girls have twinky… and boys have (…)willy”. These students, by recalling the bodily differences identified during debates of philosophical inspiration, advance the knowledge in play, pointing to elements allowing stereotypes to be distinguished (without, however, naming them as such) and anatomical differences between girls and boys, while returning to the idea, beyond these differences, of the same rights for all. What characterizes the teacher’s behaviour, in accordance with her idea of “letting the answers emerge” and “not guiding the debates” (intention expressed during the various debriefings over the entire sequence) is that she does not comment on or take up the different ideas put forward by the students. The discussion then turns, at the initiative of the students, around the different sports that girls and boys can practice (e.g. basketball, rugby or tennis). Clémentine intervenes by saying: “there are also boys who dance”. This theme is taken up a few turns later when Max explains, “in fact girls, they can (…) for example she can do hip hop like a boy. (…) And the boy can do classical dance”. Through these remarks, Max’s repositioning contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the ongoing debate. He points out the fact—discussed during the debates of the learning sequence—that the existence of anatomical differences does not lead to the assignment of practices that would be more suitable for one sex than the other, nor of barriers of interests, even less inequalities of judgments. We consider these statements as signs of institutionalization by the students of the non-hierarchy of practices (especially sports) and of a less stereotypical view of the gender norms traditionally attributed to girls and boys. However, although these students are able to consider during their exchanges that girls and boys can do all the activities, they continue, just as with games, to label them in terms of “girl’s” or “girls’ activities” or “of boys”. It seems that Natalia’s students grasped issues of gender equality,

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but only by identifying suitable activities for both sexes. It is at this level that the questioning of what should, can or cannot be debated in school is situated, especially since the conceptions of gender equality in the official texts of primary school remain ambiguous and are still far from being unified. Note that, at this stage of institutionalization, the teacher does not take up the ideas put forward by the students. She switches to a second discussion phase: “Did you like it or not (…) those moments when we were discussing girls and boys?” Loan, like Max, replies: “I really liked (…) the boys answered lots of questions and (…) I agreed with them”. Joyz intervenes: “I loved discussing [this subject] because sometimes I was a little shy and for example (…) it helped me to [no longer] be shy”. Without underestimating the fact that some of these statements relate to the ordinary functioning of the didactic contract (the responses produced are those that the students think are expected by the teacher), we point to forms of repositioning in these students marking an evolution in relation to the first discussions of the learning sequence. For example, over the course of the sequence, we observe greater confidence of Joyz (whose teacher hypothesized that her speaking skills would be almost non-existent in view of her shyness and her poor linguistic skills), resulting in her speaking out more in the debates, which Natalia confirms during the debriefing interview at the end of the sequence. Thus, the words of the four students point to a heightened awareness of the equal right of all children to engage in all kinds of activities if they wish, even if some people continue to consider them as gendered. The statements produced by these students seem to us to bear witness to an evolution in the identification of gender stereotypes, in particular by distinguishing, no doubt still weakly, what concerns the bodily differences between girls and boys and what is relevant; the right of everyone to pratice activities that they want, according to their interests or their motives, in all forms of practice (to cite various objects of crystallization of the gender stereotypes evoked during the learning sequence). These signs of development in the students allow us to consider their possible deconstruction in the pursuit of longitudinal Participatory Intervention Research. As far as the teacher is concerned, we point out, in line with her interest in Philosophical Debates, a position in the background during this moment of institutionalization, leaving the students the responsibility for producing the assertions that seem relevant to them.

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Illustrations of Didactic Joint Action in Christiane’s Class: A Strongly Supervising Teacher’s Line of Action As before, we report on the interactions between Christiane and some of her students: • Pol and Maÿlan are considered to have a good command of language, speaking easily; • Ana and Mattieu have a “very scholarly” attitude and do not hesitate to express their opinions when arguing; • Adja, a rather shy pupil, and Enzo are identified as not integrated into the class and participating little in school activities (ante interview with Christiane). As revealed by the exchanges, this teacher—who wanted her students to be able to state that bodily distinctions are not obstacles to equality (“I hope that the students will come back to the anatomical differences” at the moment of the choice to set up the session “balance”)—finds no other solution than to attempt a supervisory intervention to obtain the expected answers, without success, however. The session begins with a discussion about possible activities for girls and boys. Pol immediately talks about the fact that “girls and boys can play rugby. Girls can play rugby. Boys and girls need to play boys’ games”. This installs, under the guise of affirmed gender equality, an implicit hierarchy (“need to play boys’ games”). In Pol’s remarks, the question of the activities that girls can practice is always placed in a non-reciprocal relationship with those of boys, marking an epistemic gender positioning imbued with the male domination that characterizes the field of sports (Bourdieu, 2002). Ana recalls that, in a previous debate, “the boys said we were dolls, girls!”,3 which points to the controversies and resistance that arose during the learning sequence. Mattieu reacts to this assertion by saying, “Boys too, they have the right to play with dolls”; he goes on to explain, “We didn’t say that it was the girls who are dolls, we said…”. However, he could not finish his remarks, because the teacher cut this exchange short by asking another pupil who again broached the subject of sports activities. Maÿlan comes back to the fact that “girls can play boys’ sports and 3  Ana is referring to a discussion that took place in lesson 2, where a boy suggested that “girls were like dolls; it shouldn’t have moved” when another had contradicted him by saying ‘no!’ girls are very normal … it’s like boys”.

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boys have the right to do girls’ sports, or whatever they want”. Just as in Natalia’s class, the fact of having “the right” to practice such and such an activity is taken up here while maintaining the dichotomous character of so-called girls’ or boys’ activities. Paradoxically, this point seems to us to be an indication of the emergence of the institutionalization by the students of the cultural construction of the gendered division of activities in the sense that the affirmation of equal rights—discussed at length during the learning sequence—is likely to go beyond the gendered connotation of the activity. Thus, these students also identified that the differences between girls and boys do not imply barriers of interest or prohibitions. However, unlike the other class, the anatomical differences between girls and boys4 are never mentioned. The various gender positions of the students, while they allow them to state that sports activities are for everyone, although always labelled as the activity of “girls” or “boys”, do not allow them to state that the existence of differences between individuals is more important than those between the sexes. While the exchanges between the students continue by listing the activities that all the children can engage in, Christiane takes over again by questioning them: “Do you remember everything that we have learned?” But the students do not respond and continue to discuss the theme of games that could be suitable for both girls and boys. Adja intervenes “in fact, boys have the right to play with girls’ bikes too, and girls have the right to play with boys’ bikes too”. Likewise, Enzo talks about the fact that “boys can have girls’ caps and girls are allowed to have boys’ caps” (or T-shirts). In these remarks that particularize the accessories of girls or boys, while opening their uses to all, we find a resumption of the previous argumentation about sports activities, namely a first step beyond the social norms of assignment of sex. The teacher specifically questions them: “Didn’t we say other things about clothes, hair for example …”, trying unsuccessfully to come back to the variability of the cultural features of bodily appearance that had been distinguished from those relating to anatomical differences during the learning sequence. Pol replies: “We said 4  This question (“boys have willy and girls have twinky”) was, however, widely debated during the Philosophical debate in lesson 2: “we see that we are not the same when we take the shower with my little brother” and “The boys have a lot of hair” said a girl. The question of hair and nudity thus occupied a quarter of the debate time (15 min) which could have suggested a possible resumption of the theme of anatomical differences by the students during the moment of institutionalization, a hypothesis mentioned by Christiane during a debriefing interview.

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that girls and boys could have long hair”. In the rest of the discussions, the students take up the idea that girls and boys can have the same clothes, glasses, shoes. We interpret these statements as an effect of the lasting dimensions of the didactic contract in this class, namely repeated responses aimed at meeting what the students think are the teacher’s expectations. At the end of this moment of institutionalization, Christiane then asks the question: “What is the real difference between a boy and a girl? The most obvious? Don’t you remember? However, despite this statement comprising modalization marks, which situate it in the register of truth and which suggest an epistemic gender positioning reinforcing the dichotomous dimension of the difference between the sexes, a boy replies that “Girls and boys can have the same hair”. The teacher tries one last raise “You mean what?” But getting no further response, she closes the discussion, “You said it all”. To summarize, the words of the six students reflect an increased awareness of the issue of equal rights with regard to practices, with a marked emphasis on questions of bodily appearance and self-presentation. We emphasize, however, that the word “equality” was never mentioned and that one can question the appropriation of this concept by the students. More notably than in the other class, Christiane’s students continue to reason in dichotomous terms about the specific practices of girls or boys, even if the potentially common participation in these practices seems to be the first indication of a move away from gender stereotypes. Nevertheless, the gendered hierarchy of practices, perceptible in the words of certain students (in particular with regard to the comparison of girls to dolls which does not give rise to any repetition by the teacher in this “summary session”), raises the question of the consistency of this acquisition. The students do not seem to have perceived the fact that the existence of differences between individuals is more significant than that between the sexes. Christiane’s efforts to introduce the question of “the real difference between boy and girl” do not lead to any connection with this objective of the learning sequence. Discussion: What Are the Effects of Philosophical Debates on Students’ Identification of Gender Stereotypes? According to the classes and the students, the analysis of the joint didactic action between the two teachers and their students during the “summary sessions” points to heterogeneous dynamics, more or less conducive to the

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recognition of gender stereotypes, which was the objective of the debates of philosophical inspiration that preceded them. The results confirm the differential aspect of the process of co-­ construction of this knowledge during the learning sequence. It emerges from all the analyses carried out that six of the observed students (Ana, Joyz, Loan, Mattieu, Max and Maÿlan) develop more flexible epistemic gender positions, marking the emergence of independence of gender stereotypes, which allows them to contribute to the advancement of knowledge by emphasizing that, beyond the particularization of the modalities of self-presentation or the practical types according to sex, each and every person can be free to comply or not. On the other hand, four students (Adja, Clémentine, Enzo and Pol) who activate epistemic gender positions dependent on sex stereotypes (in particular the systematic use of a binary gender vocabulary) remain on the surface features of the contexts explored. These students certainly identify some elements of appearance as being able to suit everyone (the length of the hair, the practice of dance) but without decoding the specific expectations of the didactic contract which are at the basis of the co-constructed learning sequence in Participatory Intervention Research. The findings stress that the ways of updating gender, in the process of positioning and repositioning over the course of didactic interactions, place each student in a differential contractual dynamic that may be more or less favourable to the acquisitions envisaged. It should also be noted that this moment of institutionalization reveals all the difficulties of creating the conditions for a debate, which is intended to be on the theme of gender equality in connection with the recognition of stereotypes, in a preschool class of 5-year-olds. We have seen that Natalia intervenes little with the content in play, leaving space for the students to take hold of the discussion without the teacher passing a judgment of truthfulness, and that she emphasizes little on the question of equality. In contrast, the context of the debate as set up and conducted by Christiane, although it allows the students of this class to institutionalize possible similar uses of games, sports and mode of self-presentation, does not take account of the power relations likely to hinder identification of the underlying stereotypes. Thus, at both sites, the mediation provided by the teacher is decisive in creating the conditions for the emergence of a critical point of view on the impact of gender norms. Natalia offers support in building the reflexivity

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of her students, while Christiane favours a “question-answer” format during the “summary session”, which is one of the possible pitfalls in the conduct of Philosophical Debates (Richard-Bossez et  al., 2018). The teachers indicate that the students “especially the girls” dared to express their ideas during the debates, “which was not the case at the beginning [of the sequence]”, and that this was “beneficial” throughout the discussion activities of this school year (interviews).

13.6  Conclusion: Feedback on the Fruitfulness of the Research In terms of the fruitfulness of the research device, it emerges from the analysis that the students took advantage of this sequence in the sense that they dared to enter into communication and reflect with others, while being able to state the outcome of these debates: some possible ways of overcoming stereotypes linked to self-presentation as well as to cultural and social gender norms traditionally attributed to practices. On the other hand, the results highlight the unique contributions of each participant in the joint didactic process, not only in terms of the multiple forms of gender positioning of the students with regard to the stereotypes explored, but also at the level of the different postures adopted by the teachers during mediations introduced through classroom interactions. The activation of singular epistemic gender positions, more or less in resonance with the knowledge of the sex stereotypes under study, due to the methods of sharing responsibilities between teacher and students in relation to this knowledge, emerge during debates on differential didactic contracts which do not allow all students to take full advantage of the system. Although the establishment of debates on gender stereotypes indeed seems to have a certain fruitfulness, it remains clear that, without a teaching mediation strongly attentive to the power relations in the class, to the implicit hierarchy of activities and to the maintenance of a reflexivity during exchanges between children, this learning support can be reduced to a simple pretext for debate. In terms of perspectives, it emerges that the focus on educational content articulating knowledge on gender and emancipatory values must be pursued with a view to educating for gender equality, from the first moments of schooling. “Debate” activities, among others, can be a learning moment for children to think about equality between girls and boys.

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The next step is to name the concept of “stereotypes” in class, in order to help the students to appropriate the concept. Our contribution makes it possible to defend the idea of a teacher-­ student co-construction of knowledge and gender at the very heart of teaching-learning situations, while pointing out the didactic conditions under which children can initiate a critical questioning of the impact of gender norms in their own practices—the first step in education for gender equality.

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Verscheure, I, Amade-Escot, C., & Vinson, M. (2020). De la pertinence du concept de « positionnement de genre épistémique » pour l’analyse didactique de la fabrique des inégalités en classe. Education & didactique. 14/1, 81–100. Repéré à https://journals.openedition.org/educationdidactique/5408 Verscheure, I., & Aussel, L. (2019). Effects of ‘philosophical debates’ at preschool on the recognition of sex-stereotyping: Some findings from a participatory intervention research. In: Conference ECER. NW27 special call. 3–6 September 2019. Hamburg, Germany. Verscheure, I., & Barale, C. (2017). How collaborative research can enhance changes in teaching practices and gender equality in elementary school. A didactic analysis of a circus arts unit. In I.  Verscheure (Ed.), Symposium: Challenging gender order in PE classroom. AIESEP International conference, 7–10 November 2017. Pointe à Pitre. Verscheure, I., & Barale, C. (2021). Hybridization of practices due to the researcher-teacher collaboration: A case of a longitudinal participatory intervention research in ‘cours préparatoire’ in physical education. In: Conference ECER. NW27 special call, 3–6 September 2021. Verscheure, I., & Debars, C. (2019). Student gendered learning in physical education: A didactic study at a French multi-ethnic middle school in an underprivileged area. In C. A. Taylor, C. Amade-Escot, & A. Abbas (Eds.), Gender in learning and teaching: Feminist dialogues across international boundaries (pp. 142–156). Routledge, Francis and Taylor. Verscheure, I., Debars, C., Amade-Escot, C., & Vinson, M. (2019). Saisir les codéterminations du pédagogique et du didactique dans les pratiquesd’enseignement. Contribution des études Genre. In E.  Saillot, I. Verscheure (2019). En finir avec la controverse did actique(s)-pédagogie? Education et Formation, 312, 41–52. Repéré à http://revueeducationformation.be/index.php?revue=32&page=3

Correction to: Fostering Kindergarteners’ Scientific Reasoning in Vulnerable Settings Through Dialogic Inquiry-Based Learning Maite Novo and Zoel Salvadó

Correction to: Chapter 11 in: E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_11

The author names of this chapter have been changed from Maite Novo Molinero and Zoel Salvadó Belart to Maite Novo and Zoel Salvadó after the initial publication.

The updated original version for this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­07492-­9_11 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9_14

C1



Conclusion

Enrico Postiglione*, [email protected] Abstract An extremely brief and final remark reiterating the invitation to foster greater cross-fertilization among different pedagogies and cultures in order to meet the many challenges posited to education in the face of an increasingly uncertain future. Alternative and empirically validated approaches and pedagogies such as Philosophy with Children, Reggio Children, Philosophy for Children Hawaii, Dialogic Education and so on are proposed as a meaning to build shared knowledge, encourage the dialogical disposition and argumentative skills of participants as well as to stimulate their critical, inclusive and respectful attitude, individual expression and mutual co-operation. Indeed, going forward into a future in which today’s children enter a world in which they will be working with technologies and job sectors only now in their infancy, solving problems that can’t yet be predicted, these skills are of great importance. However, the impact of so refined educational approaches might still be diminished by interventions limited to the specific goals set within the compass of their individual approach. In order to meet the challenges of future education and facilitate the process of change towards inclusion, progressive educational perspectives and practices have to flow into an increasingly inter-disciplinary, inter-­ perspectival,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9

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inter-cultural and ultimately versatile unified effort. Besides fostering inclusion within education, education itself, its goals, values and relationship with society are to be constantly questioned to create more interactive, child-centred and engaging learning communities for all. The chapters composing this book focus, inter alia, on ideological and structural dynamics that can undermine/promote inclusion, while providing future directions that can foster emancipatory, democratic, socially just and evidence-based forms of teaching and professional practice (e.g., interactive and inter-relational forms of teaching and learning, collaborative practices). Much work is to be done, though: quickly, new issues will need to be addressed and old problems will pop again in education. However, improving comparisons between different theories and practices as well as bringing to the attention of an international audience experiences and problems of a specific context might be educationalists’ crucial opportunity to equip teachers with a wide range of theoretical possibilities and educational tools to face the challenges of future education.

Index1

A Ability, 4, 6, 7, 39, 40, 58, 80, 81, 84, 85, 94, 100, 124, 128, 129, 134, 147, 151, 158, 159, 162, 164, 169, 198, 201, 204, 209n22, 221, 222, 232, 233, 248, 249 Active learning, 60, 157 Actual inclusion, 9, 11, 19 Adorno, T., 106, 112 Aesthetic/aesthetics, 145–152, 202, 203, 222 education, 151 perspective, 149 Aggressive, 97 Aligned, 15, 36, 56, 69, 88, 100, 197, 234 Anonymous, 82, 100

Anxiety, 90, 96, 180 Apprenticeship, 98 Argumentative process, 259 Assessment criteria, 82, 100 Automaticity, 94 B Beeching, Thomas, 48 Better future society, 155–173 Biology, 198 Biopolitics, 16, 108 Black, Max, 198–201, 199n5, 204, 205, 205n15 Blair, Tony, 29, 34 Bolsonaro, Messias, 107 Brazil, 106, 107, 110 Bureaucracy, 30–32

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Postiglione (ed.), Fostering Inclusion in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07492-9

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288 

INDEX

C Cambridge Primary Review, 45, 46 Challenge, 2, 6, 15, 17, 81, 85, 91, 123–126, 128, 130, 134–138, 162, 163, 166, 171, 196, 230, 237–240, 245, 248, 273, 285, 286 Childhood, 13, 14, 25, 27, 145–152, 203, 232–240 Civilisation, 105–107, 112, 117 Classrooms, 4, 4n7, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 29, 40, 59, 64, 66, 69, 71, 81, 82, 97, 112, 123–138, 150, 158–161, 163–165, 169, 171, 180–182, 191, 198, 206n18, 209n23, 216n40, 231, 235, 239, 240, 246, 248–251, 261, 262, 265, 268, 269, 281 CMT, 204 Cognitive, 40, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 99, 100, 147, 149, 157, 198, 200–202, 204, 205, 207, 207n19, 208, 222, 231, 232, 234, 238, 246 innovation, 199 science, 201, 202 Collaboration, 14, 93, 130, 149, 149n9, 157, 203, 214, 268 Communication, 11, 40, 93, 96, 124, 129, 132, 146, 151, 157, 170, 180–183, 185, 188, 196n1, 201, 204, 204n13, 214, 219, 219n55, 235, 246, 253, 257, 261, 281 Community, 256–262, 270, 286 heterogeneity, 256 of inquiry, 127, 158, 161, 164, 168, 179–191, 245–262 Community Ball, 160, 164 Comparative analysis, 17

Competencies, 32, 39, 45, 54, 57, 61, 64, 68, 71, 94, 123–125, 127, 131, 132, 138, 208n21, 232, 249 Complex issues, 191 speech acts, 181, 182, 184, 188, 189, 191 verb forms, 189–191 Complexity, 123–127, 151, 168, 180, 183, 184, 197, 205n15, 214, 221 Compulsory, 82, 270 Concept formation, 247, 248, 258, 259 Conceptual change, 202, 203 Confidential, 86 Conflict, 91, 92, 106, 112, 117, 128, 131, 132, 205, 218n51 Conjunctions, 45, 190 Connectors, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191 Consultation, 69, 98 Cooperative sources of support, 64, 65, 67–69, 71 Cooperative thinking, 127 COVID-19, 111, 112, 117, 155, 162, 163, 166, 172, 196, 219n54 Creative and caring thinking, 126, 128, 248, 262 Creative metaphor, 201, 205 Creativity, 34, 43, 84, 89, 172, 196, 198, 199, 201, 202, 205, 222 Critical and reflective inquiry, 125 Critical thinking, 14, 127, 132, 159, 181, 231, 245, 262, 272 Cultural backgrounds, 13, 85 Culturally responsive teaching, 159 Curriculum, 5, 25, 27, 29, 33, 39, 40, 42, 47, 82, 96, 124, 125, 127, 128, 159, 164, 165, 170, 233, 270

 INDEX 

D Definitions of ‘education’ and ‘inclusion, 4 Democratic society, 129, 132, 156, 158, 166, 172 Dewey, John, 13, 28, 149, 156, 158, 160, 162–164, 166, 169, 171 Dialogic/dialogically, 14, 16–18, 79–100, 127, 138, 181–184, 234, 238, 246, 250, 257 approach to inquiry, 234 inquiry-based learning, 229–240 interactions, 18, 234 lockdowns, 246 talk, 95, 100 Dialogue, 14, 15, 17, 18, 85, 91, 115, 116, 129, 132, 135, 147, 160, 168, 169, 208n21, 234, 235, 246, 249, 251, 252, 253n5, 257–259 Diffusion of responsibility, 89 Diplomacy, 96 Disciplinary society, 109 Discussion-stage, 251–253 Distributed thinking, 248–252, 259, 261 Diversity, 2, 3, 19, 137, 149–151, 172, 253 E Early arithmetic, 232 Early childhood education, 145–152, 231, 232 Easily accessible sources of support, 64 Education, 1, 23–49, 55, 80, 105–117, 123–126, 145–152, 179, 195–222, 245, 285

289

community, 245 environment, 8, 138, 149, 246 exclusion, 6, 7, 9, 14, 246, 250, 256 leadership, 19n16, 58 Effect size, 89, 90, 183 Elaborated, 38, 79–100, 213n35, 214 Empathy, 37, 96, 157 Estrangement, 151 Evaluated, 88, 169, 179 Explanations, 2, 33, 91, 189, 200, 202, 203, 214, 219 Explicit reinforcement, 94 F Families with lower scientific capital, 230 Favela, 108 Feedback, 16, 61, 64, 69, 71, 79–100, 169, 170, 219–221, 281–282 Flexible, 15, 81, 98, 132, 158, 180, 280 Fluency, 94 Formative, 80, 81 Formative assessment, 221 Foucault, M., 16, 23, 30, 35–38, 42, 107–109 Free-rider effects, 89 Frontal teaching, 13, 14 G Gender, 13, 18, 63, 85, 97, 115, 231, 246, 250, 265–282 Generalization, 58, 94, 183, 274 Good Thinker’s Tool Kit, 160, 164 Grade, 63, 80, 81, 90, 97–99, 191

290 

INDEX

H Habermas, J., 32 Hanahau’oli School, 162, 163, 172 Head Start on Science and Communication Program (HSSC), 233 Horizon 2020, 196 Hypothesizing, 93 I Imaginative understanding, 203 Immediacy, 80, 91, 94 Immigrants, 109, 155, 255, 256 Imprisonment, 108, 109, 111 Inclusion, 2–9, 4n6, 11–19, 12n14, 71, 72, 96–98, 147, 149–151, 246–248, 251, 253, 253n5, 254, 258, 259, 261, 285, 286 Inclusive education, 2–8, 11, 12, 14–16, 53–72 Inclusive learning, 65, 71, 191, 198 Inclusiveness, 130, 197, 218 Individualization, 91 Infancy, 13, 14, 125, 133, 285 Information processing, 93 Inmate, 108, 110, 112 Inquiry, 9, 12, 14–18, 123–138, 158–160, 164–166, 168, 169, 180–182, 191, 232–235, 237, 238, 240, 245–259, 253n5, 262 Integration, 5, 10, 216n40, 254 Intellectual safety, 160, 164 Interaction, 11, 13, 18, 84, 89, 91, 94, 97, 127, 146, 151, 179, 180, 182, 185, 197–200, 198n4, 204, 205, 208, 209, 209n23, 209n24, 213n35, 219–222, 234, 235, 265–267, 272–274, 277, 280, 281

Interaction view, 198 Interactive argumentation, 95 Interdisciplinary, 125, 127, 169, 197, 201–203, 231 Intrinsic motivation, 157 Iron cage, 33, 35 J Justification, 33, 92, 100, 189 for opinions, 86 Justify, 86, 92, 96, 127, 187, 198, 201, 271 K Kindergarten/nursery, 80 Kindergarteners, 18, 229–240 Knowledge, 3, 5n8, 6, 8, 12, 14, 18, 30, 34, 38–43, 45, 47, 56, 60, 94, 106, 114, 124–127, 135, 146–148, 150, 159, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 181, 182, 188, 197, 198, 200, 202–204, 208–210, 209n22, 210n29, 210n31, 214, 216n40, 222, 231, 232, 234, 238, 240, 245, 250, 252, 267, 269, 271, 273, 275, 280–282, 285 L Language, 6, 7, 13, 14, 17, 26, 29, 45, 82, 93, 100, 146, 147, 149, 151, 157, 159, 160, 179–185, 188, 191, 197, 198, 199n5, 200, 208, 209, 209n22, 215, 217, 221, 233, 234, 246, 255, 274, 277

 INDEX 

Leadership, 19n16, 29, 33, 44, 58–60, 68, 69, 99, 167 and professionalization, 54, 57–61, 71 Learning activities, 18, 35, 36, 164, 235, 236 difficulties, 220 disability, 63, 96 Lèvinas, E., 115–117 Lipman, Matthew, 14, 126, 158, 159, 161, 164, 247–251, 248n1, 253, 253n5, 261, 262 Listening, 12, 93, 96, 136, 137, 168, 219, 222, 246 Love of wisdom, 114, 117 Low-income children, 253, 253n6 Lyotard, J-F, 12, 16, 23, 30, 38–43, 114 M MacIntyre, A., 16, 24, 43, 44 Malaguzzi, L., 148, 148n8, 149, 149n9, 151 Management, 29, 44, 68, 98, 107–109, 219n54 Mark, 80, 99, 273, 274, 279 Matching, 84, 85, 93, 97, 100 Meta-analysis, 90 Metacognitive, 79–100 Metaphors, 18, 35, 36, 147, 195–222 Misconceptions, 91, 93–95, 105, 211, 221 Model, 10, 11, 13, 36–38, 55, 56, 61, 68, 70–72, 89, 90, 93, 98, 108, 135, 148, 150–151, 158, 161, 165, 167, 168, 171, 181, 197, 199–201, 205–207, 213n35, 214, 217n46, 231, 233, 238, 246, 249 of competent performance, 93 of enthusiasm, 94

291

Moderated, 87, 99 Monitored, 86, 184, 251 Music, 80, 82, 88 N Narrative, 18, 24, 30, 108, 169, 171, 195–222 Necropolitics, 16, 107, 111 Negative, 54, 55, 61, 63, 64, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 90, 96, 98, 100, 114, 158 Negative feedback, 83, 96 Negotiation, 81, 92, 96, 99, 100, 146 Novel, 91, 199, 249 O Objectives, 26, 30, 33, 36, 86–88, 129, 196–198, 203, 218, 268, 271, 279, 280 OECD, 33, 124, 285 Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), 28, 29, 36, 43, 44 Openness, 116, 127, 130, 133, 134, 136, 137, 151, 181, 185–187, 259 Open questions, 126, 180, 182, 184, 185, 191, 209n22, 210, 213, 214, 247, 260 Oral presentations, 79 Organisation, 30, 31 Organization, 5, 5n8, 31, 39, 68, 69, 72, 98, 167, 210n29, 221, 255 Orientation and Conceptualization, 237 P Pandemic, 2, 105–117, 155, 162, 163, 166, 172, 180, 196, 209n27, 210n28, 245

292 

INDEX

Participant constellation, 84 Pedagogical documentation, 146 Pedagogies, 1, 3, 11n12, 13, 15, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 39, 40, 45, 47, 125, 132, 133, 138, 155–173, 203, 245, 246, 249, 251, 259, 262, 285 for the future, 17 Peer, 4, 55, 62, 66, 80, 82, 83, 88, 90, 91, 93–95, 97, 99, 100, 146, 164, 169, 214, 215, 233, 246, 252 Peer assessment, 16, 79–100 Peer-reviewing, 99 Philosopher’s pedagogy, 160, 161, 165 Philosophical education, 16, 105–117 Philosophical inquiry, 16, 123–138, 164, 180, 182, 191 with Children, 16, 123–138 Philosophical questions, 126, 127, 130, 134, 136, 180, 182, 185–187 Philosophising with children, 17, 125–128, 130, 132, 135–138, 179–191 Philosophy, 16, 45, 126, 145, 164, 201, 231, 274 Philosophy for Children (P4C), 158, 159, 170, 246, 249, 251 Philosophy for children Hawai‘i (p4cHI), 17, 155–166, 169–172, 285 Philosophy for children Hawai‘i (p4cHI) Endorsed Certificate, 168, 169 Philosophy of education, 1, 3, 13, 156, 164 Physical education, 80, 82, 88 PISA, 29, 33, 34 Plurality of languages, 146, 197, 198 Portfolios, 79, 80, 82, 92, 168–170

Positive, 37, 56, 59, 64, 65, 67, 69, 81, 83, 85–87, 89, 90, 92, 95–98, 100, 114, 133, 134, 150, 172, 182–184, 197, 218, 251 experiences, 56, 60, 61, 65–69, 71, 72, 134 Practice, 5, 9, 16–18, 23–25, 27, 34, 35, 43–48, 45n2, 54–57, 59–61, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 83, 89, 93, 94, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 125, 127, 131, 133, 137, 138, 146, 150, 156, 158–161, 163–167, 169, 171, 233, 245–248, 265, 268, 269, 271, 272, 275, 277–282, 285, 286 educational, 15, 46, 47, 131, 163, 164, 268, 270n1 Preschool children, 232 Primary/elementary schools, 45, 62, 80, 91, 95, 97, 112, 133, 134, 162, 164, 208, 268, 276 Prisons, 16, 107–114, 113n10, 113n11, 117 Problem solving and decision making, 231 Process, 1, 3, 9–15, 17, 19, 23, 24, 27, 30–32, 35–37, 43–45, 55, 56, 68, 70, 80, 81, 83, 86–90, 92–95, 98, 99, 108, 109, 124–127, 129, 132–138, 146–149, 147n4, 151, 156, 160, 162, 170, 172, 181, 182, 185, 187, 188, 197, 201, 203n12, 204, 207, 222, 233–235, 237–240, 245–247, 251, 256, 258, 259, 261, 267, 268, 273, 280, 281, 285 Process-centred and open-ended, 125 Professional development, 55, 56, 69, 72, 161, 165 Professional development initiatives (PDI), 56, 57, 60, 61, 68, 69, 72

 INDEX 

Professionalization, 55, 57, 60–61, 68 Progressive education, 14, 17, 18, 25–28, 156, 157, 161–173 Progressive education movement, 155–158, 161–163, 166–168, 171 Progressive pedagogy, 158–161, 245 Prompts, 84, 187–188 Q Qualitative, 7, 58, 81, 91, 92, 185, 205n15, 210, 265 Qualitative analysis, 185, 204, 205, 210 Quality, 4, 4n7, 6, 7, 16, 47, 60, 79, 82, 90–93, 95, 156, 167, 170, 183, 198n4, 211, 211n33, 213–215, 218, 219, 252, 259, 262 of feedback, 87, 90 Quantitative, 7, 62, 67, 81, 87, 99, 185, 188, 204, 205n15, 210, 211, 213 Quantity, 87, 94, 221 Questioning, 93, 113, 156, 246, 247, 250, 257, 261–262, 271, 276, 278, 282 Questions, 3, 30, 57, 80, 114, 146, 157, 179, 198, 245, 268 R Rationalisation, 30–35, 43 Reciprocal, 82, 84, 100, 150, 234, 267 Reflection, 4, 8, 12, 15, 41, 55, 65, 80, 92, 100, 113, 128, 130, 134, 136, 138, 147–149, 151, 160, 168, 170–173, 182, 213, 239, 250, 251, 257, 271

293

Reggio Emilia Approach, 17, 145–152 Regulate, 94 Reinforcing peer feedback, 91 Reliability, 16, 30, 32, 80, 86, 87, 89–90, 99, 240 Resistance, 36, 37, 54, 65, 66, 72, 83, 85, 108, 112, 114, 262, 277 Rewards, 87, 90, 94, 171 Rubrics, 83, 89, 95, 100, 210n29, 218n49 S Scaffolding, 84 Schools Council (UK), 27, 28 Science education, 18, 195–222, 230, 231 literacy, 196, 233 and technology, 230–231 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), 230 Scientific community, 231 Scientific language, 198, 221 Scientific learning, 232 Scientific reasoning, 18, 229–240 Script, 83 Secondary/high schools, 25, 26, 57, 62, 63, 66, 80, 95, 112, 164, 165, 208, 231, 232 Seed-model, 65, 70–72 Segregation, 5, 10 Self-confidence, 94, 96, 246 Self-disclosure of ignorance, 94 Self-efficacy, 56, 60–65, 67, 69, 91, 93, 95, 96, 100 beliefs, 54, 61–69, 71 theory, 60, 67 Sense making, 201 Session plan, 18, 137, 247–257, 260 Shared cognition, 248, 251, 252, 258, 262

294 

INDEX

Shklovsky, V., 151 Single-word Response method (SWRm), 18, 245–262, 256n12 Skill, 7, 14, 17, 30, 33, 37–43, 68, 80, 81, 88, 91–94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 123–125, 127, 129, 130, 156, 159, 164, 183, 184, 191, 204, 208, 209, 231–234, 245–248, 259, 261, 268, 276, 285 Social justice, 2, 3, 128, 157, 168, 169 Social loafing, 89 Special educational needs (SEN), 5, 14, 54–69, 71, 72, 149n11, 209n22, 218, 250, 253–256, 254n10, 259–261 Special needs, 4, 97, 100 Speculation, 182, 186, 189, 191 State corporate, 46–47 instrumental, 47–48 STEAM, 208, 209 STEM, see Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Storytelling, 237 Suggestive feedback, 91 Summarizing, 93 Summative assessment, 80, 81, 87 Support for teachers, 55, 61, 68–69 Sustainability, 98–99, 124, 125, 128–132, 157 Sustainable development, 123, 124, 127, 129, 131 Symbolic categorisation, 258 T Teachers, 5n8, 8, 12–16, 19, 25–29, 34–36, 39, 40, 43–47, 53–72, 80–83, 85–91, 93, 95–97, 99, 125–128, 133, 135–138,

146–148, 156, 158–165, 168, 169, 179–189, 206n18, 208, 209n23, 209n24, 214n38, 219, 219n54, 220, 233, 234, 237–239, 246, 248, 256, 266–281, 286 Teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, 54, 61–65, 67, 69, 71 Teaching and learning, 12, 88, 123–128, 133, 138, 160, 171, 181, 286 Test performance, 79 Thatcher, Margaret, 28, 29 Thought experiments, 182, 187 Time, 11n12, 13, 17, 24, 26–29, 32, 37, 39, 41, 42, 44, 48, 69, 80, 81, 83, 86–89, 91, 98–100, 107–117, 125, 128, 147, 155–158, 163, 166, 171, 172, 180–183, 190, 204, 216, 217n48, 220, 222, 230, 252, 253, 257, 259, 271, 274, 278n4 Time-consuming, 80 Top-down and bottom-up strategies, 65–66 Training, 15, 33, 34, 57, 63, 64, 83, 88–89, 100, 125, 132, 138, 196, 232, 253 Transactional knowledge, 30, 38–43, 45 Transferable skills, 88, 93, 96 U Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education, 165 Uncertainty, 16, 17, 123–138, 171, 179–191, 218 Uncertainty competencies, 124, 127, 133

 INDEX 

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM), 161, 163, 165–169, 173 University/college, 5, 35, 47, 80, 99, 105, 161, 232 Unlearning, 45, 91 Utterances, 183, 189, 248 V Validity, 80, 87, 89–90, 210 Visual art, 80, 149 Voluntary, 82 Vygotsky, L. S., 181, 247, 257, 258

295

W Wacquant, L., 108, 109 Weber, B., 129 Weber, H., 55, 56 Weber, M., 16, 23, 24, 30–35, 42 Whole child, 157 Willingness, 56–61, 67–69, 71, 72, 124, 134, 247 Wisdom of love, 112–117 Withdrawn, 97, 112 Workplace, 57, 80 Writing, 28n1, 36, 42, 79, 81–83, 87, 88, 91–93, 99, 169, 215, 217, 232, 235