Women Curriculum Theorists (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series) [1 ed.] 1032258977, 9781032258973

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Studies in Curriculum Theory Series

WOMEN CURRICULUM THEORISTS POWER, KNOWLEDGE AND SUBJECTIVITY Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott

Women Curriculum Theorists

Most published bodies of work relating to curriculum theory focus exclusively, or almost exclusively, on the contributions of men. This is not representative of influences on educational practices as a whole, and it is certainly not representative of educational theory generally, as women have played a significant role in framing the theory and practice of education in the past. Their contribution is at least equal to that of men, even though it may not immediately appear as visible on library shelves or lecture lists. This book addresses this egregious deficit by asking readers to engage in an intellectual conversation about the nature of women’s curriculum theory, as well as its impact on society and thought in general. It does this by examining the work of twelve women curriculum theorists: Maxine Greene, Susan Haack, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum, Nel Noddings, Jane Roland Martin, Marie Battiste, Dorothea Beale, Susan Isaacs, Maria Montessori, Mary Warnock and Lucy Diggs Slowe. The book is not an encyclopaedia, nor is it a history book. It aims to bring to the reader’s attention, through a semantic rendition of the world, those seminal relationships that exist between the three meta-concepts that are addressed in the work, feminism, learning and curriculum. It will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in curriculum, and the philosophy and sociology of education. Sandra Leaton Gray is an Associate Professor of Education at the UCL Institute of Education, UK, and Senior Member, Wolfson College, Cambridge University. David Scott is an Emeritus Professor of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment at the UCL Institute of Education, UK.

Studies in Curriculum Theory Series Series Editor: William F. Pinar University of British Columbia, Canada

In this age of multimedia information overload, scholars and students may not be able to keep up with the proliferation of different topical, trendy book series in the field of curriculum theory. It will be a relief to know that one publisher offers a balanced, solid, forward-looking series devoted to significant and enduring scholarship, as opposed to a narrow range of topics or a single approach or point of view. This series is conceived as the series busy scholars and students can trust and depend on to deliver important scholarship in the various ‘discourses’ that comprise the increasingly complex field of curriculum theory. The range of the series is both broad (all of curriculum theory) and limited (only important, lasting scholarship) – including but not confined to historical, philosophical, critical, multicultural, feminist, comparative, international, aesthetic, and spiritual topics and approaches. Books in this series are intended for scholars and for students at the doctoral and, in some cases, master’s levels. In Search of Responsibility as Education Traversing Banal and Radical Terrains Hannah Spector Currere and Legacy in the Context of Family Business Towards a New Theory of Intergenerational Learning Samuel Chen Curriculum Histories in Place, in Person, in Practice The Louisiana State University Curriculum Theory Project Edited by Petra Hendry, Molly Quinn, Roland Mitchell, and Jacqueline Bach Women Curriculum Theorists Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Studies-in-Curriculum-Theory-Series/book-series/LEASCTS

Women Curriculum Theorists Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott The right of Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-25897-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-26808-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28931-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319 Typeset in Goudy by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

Acknowledgements and Dedicationsvii Foreword by Janet L. Millerviii Prefacexiii 1 Introduction1 PART I

Conceptual Framings

21

2 Maxine Greene and Imaginative Possibilities23 3 Susan Haack and Foundherentism37 4 Julia Kristeva and Edusemiotics51 5 Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice64 6 Nel Noddings and the Disposition of Care80 7 Jane Roland Martin and a Gender-Sensitive Curriculum91 8 Marie Battiste and Indigenous Knowledge104 PART II

Feminist Praxes

119

9 Dorothea Beale and the Education of Girls122 10 Susan Isaacs, Phantasy and Play135 11 Maria Montessori and the Autonomous Development of Children148

vi  Contents

12 Mary Warnock and Special Educational Needs161 13 Lucy Diggs Slowe and Human Potential177 14 Decolonising the Curriculum189 References Index

214 228

Acknowledgements and Dedications

I would like to thank IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, for the term’s sabbatical leave I was given to write this book. I would also like to thank colleagues at the IOE, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Passau for their stimulating conversations that provided inspiration and direction, especially Professor Judith Suissa, Professor Ines Langemeyer and Professor Jutta Mägdefrau. I would like to thank my friends and neighbours in Germany who provided endless support and encouragement during the writing process, especially my young friends, Thea and Juno Carreiro, who visited regularly while I was working on the early childhood aspects of the book, allowing me to see curriculum theory and child development playing out in real life and real time. Finally, I would like to thank my children Sophie, Conrad, Angus and Felix, and most importantly my husband James, for their tireless encouragement. Sandra Leaton Gray Tuesday 8th March 2022 This book is for Moira, Sarah and Gail. Henryk Górecki’s third symphony is called the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. In the symphony Górecki uses the words of Helena Wanda Blażusiakówna, a Polish woman imprisoned by the gestapo in 1944, who scratched on her prison wall the following: ‘O Mamo, nie płacz, nie. Niebios Przeczysta Królowo, Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie’ (Oh Mamma do not cry, no. Immaculate Queen of Heaven, you support me always). David Scott Tuesday 8th March 2022

Foreword

My eager readings of Women Curriculum Theorists: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity have prompted my appreciation, not only for this striking book and its multiple conceptual layerings but also for what I imagine must have been difficult choices that co-authors Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott faced throughout this text’s composing. My assumption is that primary among those difficult decisions was their final selection of twelve truly exceptional women whose differing educative works have been and remain influential in the history of ideas. I also would guess that many readers, in simply scanning this book’s Table of Contents, will be highly supportive of the twelve women whom these co-authors did chose as exemplars of the complexities that mark any deeply significant work. Leaton Gray and Scott do further specify that they chose women whose scholarship, pedagogies and activisms have involved and shaped, albeit in often quite varied ways, the overarching concept and practice of learning. In so doing, the co-authors also situate their philosophical discussions and explorations of what they name as the hinged relationships among learning, feminism(s), knowledge and curriculum. As well, these relational hinges appear throughout this book as means to link to a particular concept within each woman’s work. However, Leaton Gray and Scott also quickly acknowledge that these twelve women are those who would not be regarded by most as ‘curriculum theorists’. Nor, from my curriculum studies perspectives, would any of these women likely claim such affiliation. The co-authors do effectively make the case that these women – albeit separated by chronologies of time as well as by scholarly affinities, geographic contexts, situated concerns and differing commitments – collectively have played key roles in framing the theories and practices of learning that are an integral part of curriculum studies and its theorisings. Further, the co-authors demonstrate for readers ways that each of these twelve women has theorised as well as acted upon an issue, a passion, an abiding connection and a concept that has enabled and strengthened her deep commitments to the betterment of differently positioned, differently situated, differently embodied and enacted women’s lives. Leaton Gray and Scott rightly

Foreword ix argue that, collectively, these women’s diverse works comprise counteractivities, including categorical reframings and knowledge-decolonisings, for brief examples, to the continuations of patriarchy’s varied manifestations. Overarchingly, however, it is “learning” that functions as the key concept with which the co-authors grapple throughout this book, a concept that Leaton Gray and Scott argue must be the focus of what they conceptualise as any act of curricularising. The co-authors thus invite readers into their examinations of what they posit as “three nexuses of thought” in relation to learning. These include learning’s antecedents; its relations to other relevant concepts and ways that each related concept is used in the lifeworld. These concepts and praxes, they argue, enable their continuing explanatory as well as philosophical discussions of ideas undergirding the overarching concept and practice of learning. Although I might posit, as particular nexuses of thought, those that inform and shape understandings of curriculum as concept, as subject matter content and as lived, I view Leaton Gray and Scott’s interrogations of their particular nexuses as intertwined connectors. These provide crucial openings into what the co-authors attribute as notable in each of their chosen woman curriculum theorist’s work. For, in my view, it is each of the selected women theorists upon whom the spine of this book turns. And certainly, Leaton Gray and Scott do acknowledge that these twelve women’s accomplishments as well as their lived experiences as educators mesh in varied ways with the co-authors’ choices of their key and hinge concepts, even those the co-writers have chosen not to offer summaries of each woman’s work, nor to provide biographical details for all. Rather, Leaton Gray and Scott address a particular concept or, in the case of certain of these selected women, what the co-authors term an historical praxis within each woman’s work. Such a praxis, the co-authors explain, could include a particular biographical event or an episodic chain of events, for example. These concepts and praxes in turn enable the authors’ continuing explanatory as well as entwined philosophical discussions of ideas undergirding the overarching concept and practice of learning. It is to that concept and practice, Leaton Gray and Scott maintain, to which these twelve notable women have contributed, both in their writings and via their lived experiences as educators, broadly construed. Simultaneously and of equal importance, in my view, the co-authors’ engagements with these women’s scholarship function as invitations to readers to engage in our own interrogations of all forms and practices of gendered inequality. Notably, Leaton Gray and Scott specifically argue that feminism’s bottom line must mean that it is against, or at least offers alternative perspectives to, patriarchal forms of governance over women’s lives. And certainly, these twelve women represent varied generational, experiential and ideological iterations of refusals of inequalities of all sorts, including those deemed as inequalities based on one’s gender, however, declared and/or lived. Reading Women Curriculum Theorists: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity

x  Foreword thus has prompted, in part, my re-interrogatings of ways that then-dominant gendered assumptions about being and becoming the elementary school “good girl”, for example, also ultimately propelled my strong alignments with the varieties of feminisms. Of course, my readings of and responses to this book are framed by my US-situated perspectives and adherences, not only as a young girl educated in US public schools, but also as a woman curriculum theorist who entered into academic life in the United States during the early 1970s, and who fairly quickly embraced feminisms in all their multiplicities, myriad challenges and commitments. The 1970s, that decade in the United States that continued to manifest myriad 1960s unleashings – the Women’s, Black Panthers, and Civil Rights movements; Vietnam war protests; flower children and consciousness-raising groups. Simultaneously, in the mid-1970s, even as many continued the fight for full acceptance of women as active and equal participants in all forms of private, social and political life, a large number still considered the category of “woman”, per se, as a unitary and even a “naturally less-than” part of that essentialised male-female binary. Categorical dualities also continued throughout the 1970s and beyond to permeate a good portion of Western, white-male-solidified assumptions about those they deemed worthy – or not – of representation and participation within varied academic disciplines, including education in general, and curriculum studies, in particular. Such assumptions, for example, undergirded the primary determiners of what and who could constitute “curriculum”, determiners who most often continued to be white males, most of whom continued to conceptualise curriculum as it had been in the early years of the twentieth century; that is, as primarily predetermined, decontextualised subject matter content that also required these men’s design, development and evaluation processes. These were some of the currents of thought that pulsed throughout the United States during the early years of the 1970s, the moments in which I both entered into my graduate studies and first met the already highly regarded, internationally known, US philosopher of education, Maxine Greene. Greene, the woman whose concept of “imagination/imagining” opens Leaton Gray and Scott’s discussions of concepts and their hinged relations to that key concept and practice of learning. Greene’s philosophising, directly inspired by Sartre’s work, compelled her to constantly argue that educators must enact what she called “social imagination” in order to daily fight the plagues of indifference, of bias, of exclusion, of cruelty, in the schools in which we teach and on the streets where we live. Greene, a woman philosopher enamoured with existential phenomenological rather than analytic thinkers; a voracious reader and teacher of literary fiction and an ardent advocate for the arts as openings to all means of being and always becoming. All these commitments, she noted, often also positioned her as too literary, too emotional and too “feminine”, to be a “real” philosopher of education. But long before many of us currently appropriated the phrase,

Foreword xi indeed “she persisted”. So too did those US curriculum studies scholars with whom I studied and worked during the 1970s and beyond. Rebelling against the predominant technical-rational conception of curriculum understood only as subject matter “content” to be conveyed by teachers who often had no say in what might constitute their contingent, daily created and enacted curriculum, the US curriculum movement known as the reconceptualisation theorised curriculum as lived, both subjectively and socially. Curriculum reconceptualised primarily employed humanities-oriented perspectives that support literary, philosophical and historical modes of inquiry; these, in turn, enable interrogations of curriculum as “raced, classed, gendered” texts, for example. Such modes, especially blossoming throughout the 1970s and beyond, also include the autobiographical as saturated with psychosocial-cultural-political-historical-discursive and material influences, flows and fantasies – all informing and constituting curriculum as lived, and curriculum studies as thus both theorised and enacted as complicated conversation (Pinar, 2019). Early in my academic studies and then-beginning career, I especially was influenced by one of Greene’s primary interests, what in her book, Landscapes of Learning (1978), she identified as “predicaments of women”. Such predicaments in the United States included numerous reportings of subordination of women teachers to those men in administrative positions who dictated the foremost imperative they had set for women: that is, of “keeping the lamp of morality alight” (ibid.: 227). Throughout her long life, then, Greene in fact embraced feminisms as capable of being studied and debated on myriad academic levels while simultaneously functioning as living, constantly morphing efforts focused on equality for all – a concept in fact imbued with intents and effects of “social imagination”. Greene’s work, and especially her tireless advocacy for educators to engage in all that “social imagination” might entail, continues to influence and inspire countless educators’ work, including my own. In addition to as well as in both direct and indirect ways, Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott position all twelve women represented in this book as engaged with and in what we can identify as ground-breaking and inspiring feminist-oriented theorising, teaching, researching and organising efforts. In drawing attention to these aspects, Leaton Gray and Scott point to multiplicities that for decades now have undergirded and continue to proliferate in all manner of far-reaching forms of feminisms. These, in turn and as part of major continuing work of curriculum theorists, comprise a major portion of that which Leaton Gray and Scott have constructed as the multilayered hinged concepts that bolster “learning”. Indeed, Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott have composed a complicated and complicating book, one filled with intensely argued considerations of all that constitutes learning. In assembling and minutely examining not only the multiple concepts that inform the overall intent of this book but also the related conceptual work of the twelve women theorists, activists and teachers

xii  Foreword whose works continue to inform and inspire, Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott have made a notable contribution to the complicated conversation that is the curriculum. Janet L. Miller Professor Emerita Teachers College, Columbia University New York, NY, U.S.A. Autumn 2022

References Greene, M. (1978) Landscapes of Learning, New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Pinar, W. F. (2019) What Is Curriculum Theory? New York, NY: Routledge.

Preface

The origins of any book are obscure, but one of our initial thoughts was that most published bodies of work relating to curriculum theory focus exclusively, or almost exclusively, on the contributions of men. This is not representative of influences on educational practices as a whole, and it is certainly not representative of educational theory generally, as women have played a significant role in framing the theory and practice of education in the past. Their contribution is at least equal to that of men, even though it may not immediately appear as visible on library shelves or lecture lists. This book addresses what is to us an egregious deficit by asking readers to engage in an intellectual conversation about the nature of women’s curriculum theory, as well as its impact on society and thought in general. It is not an encyclopaedia, nor is it a history book. Its aim is to bring to the reader’s attention, through a semantic rendition of the world, those seminal relationships that exist between the three meta-concepts that we address in the work, feminism, learning and curriculum. There are bound to be omissions – the selection of women is necessarily imperfect. However, it is presented as a form of counter-argument to the canon, which we hope represents the beginning of a wider de-gendering and decolonisation of the field in general. Our primary inspiration for this book has been the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797). Wollstonecraft was a passionate advocate of educational and social rights for women. She outlined her beliefs in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), considered, by some, to be the ground-breaking feminist work. Wollstonecraft initially worked as a schoolteacher and then as a governess, experiences that inspired her views in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). In 1788, she started work as a translator for the London publisher, Joseph Johnson, who published several of her books, including the novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788). Her mature work on woman’s place in society, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), calls for women and men to be educated equally and given equal respect. In 1792, Wollstonecraft left England to observe the French Revolution in Paris. In the spring of 1794, she gave birth to a daughter, Frances (Fanny) Imlay. In 1795, Wollstonecraft returned to London to work again for Joseph Johnson and joined an influential radical group, which gathered at his home, and included,

xiv  Preface William Godwin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Holcroft, William Blake and, after 1793, William Wordsworth. In 1796, she began a relationship with Godwin, and on 29 March 1797, they were married. The marriage was brief. Mary died eleven days after the birth of her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Among Wollstonecraft’s later works are Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), a travelogue with sociological and philosophical leanings, and Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1797), a posthumously published unfinished work that is a sequel to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a feminist work. In it, Wollstonecraft argues that the education system of her time deliberately educated women to be subservient and frivolous. She was a deeply serious person and argued for a proper education for girls and women. Other early feminists had made similar pleas for improved education for women. Such invocations had existed prior to the Reformation but had atrophied with the dissolution of women’s religious orders, when their extensive assets were given to men, either to set up monastic communities or for personal use. Wollstonecraft’s work started from a point where the education of women and girls had deteriorated, and its unique quality was the suggestion that improving and changing the status of women could be achieved by radically reforming the education system. Such a change, she concluded, would benefit everyone in society. The publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Women created considerable controversy but failed to bring about any immediate reforms to the education system or to the political system. However, her ideas, expressed in the book, had a particular influence on the burgeoning American and European women’s movements, and in particular on American women’s rights pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a ground-breaking work of literature that even to this day has credibility in feminist and human rights movements. Wollstonecraft wrote the book in part as a reaction to Edmund Burke’s (1965) Reflections on the French Revolution, published in 1790. Burke saw the French Revolution as a movement that would inevitably fail, as society required traditional structures such as inherited positions and property rights in order for it to survive and prosper. Wollstonecraft’s immediate response was to write, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a rebuttal of Burke that argued in favour of parliamentary reform and for certain inalienable religious and civil liberties, that were open to both men and women. This argument wasn’t unique – Thomas Paine published his Rights of Man (1995) in 1791, also arguing against Burke. Wollstonecraft went one step further, and, for the first time, a book was published that argued for an equality of human rights for both men and women. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written in 1791 and published in 1792, with a second edition appearing the same year. It was sold as the first volume of the work, but Wollstonecraft never wrote any subsequent volumes. There had already been a small number of books published that argued for the reform of women’s and girls’ education, but none that set out, in an uncompromising manner, a rights-based view of equal esteem and treatment for both sexes. In the

Preface xv Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft (1792: 3) criticised the then current state of women’s and girls’ education: I attribute [these problems] to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers … the civilised women of this present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect. She went to say that, I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties. (Wollstonecraft, 1792: 3) Wollstonecraft’s arguments were far ahead of their time. For example, in Chapter 12, she recommended the establishment of a national education system, in which there would be mixed-sex schools. She also argued that it is essential for women’s dignity that they be given the right and the ability to earn their own living and support themselves. The book covers a wide range of topics and the many digressions in the text support William Godwin’s view that Wollstonecraft wrote the book quickly over the course of only six weeks. Wollstonecraft’s (1792: 5) tone conveys both her own sense of humour and also her anger at the enfeebled situation that the majority of women found themselves in: My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. A sculpture of Mary Wollstonecraft by Maggie Hambling was unveiled on 10th November 2020 in Newington Green, near where she lived and worked. It shows a silvery naked everywoman figure emerging defiantly from a swirling mass of female forms. Opinions are divided on its artistic and social merits. However, one aspect of Wollstonecraft’s legacy is clear, which is that she set in train a series of intellectual events that (among many other things) led to a man and women sitting in a co-educational university two hundred and thirty years later, a twenty-minute stroll from her burial place, working on an academic book together as intellectual equals. David Scott Sandra Leaton Gray Tuesday 8th March 2022

1

Introduction

This book, as you can see from its title, is about the curriculum, or at least about the concept of curriculum and the practice of curriculum-making. And yet, many of the women theorists that we highlight here have never used the notion of the curriculum in their writings and would deny that they are writing or have ever written about the curriculum. What they have done is developed an understanding of an issue or a set of issues that have a connection with or relation to the lives of women, in both a denotative and performative sense. They want something better than we have now. This inclination can be manifested in a particular rendition of curriculum knowledge. A curriculum is usually conceptualised as a body of knowledge and a programme of learning, and we can use the term to refer to a formal document, such as a school or training syllabus. However, it doesn’t just have to refer to these formal inscribed procedures and processes, but can also be given an epistemic sense, so that, for example, lifelong learning processes can be thought of as being curricularised. What we are focusing on here are two meta-concepts, knowledge and learning, the relationship between the two and the way these can be framed in curricular terms. Knowledge and learning, as meta-concepts, are positioned in various networks or constellations of meaning, principally, the antecedents of the concepts, their relations to other relevant concepts and the way the concepts are used in the lifeworld. This means that concepts, such as imagination (imagining), gender (gendering), care (caring), justification (justifying) and indigeneity (indigenising), and historical events, such as the introduction of play pedagogies in schools, the transformation of special educational needs at the policy and practice levels and episodes in the struggle to decolonise the curriculum round the world, are central to how we understand the concept and practice of learning. All of them have a direct relationship with learning and can be positioned in the field of learning or education. However, these positionings need to be made explicit or at least good reasons need to be provided for their inclusion in this field. There is a need to distinguish between different types of concepts because if their functionality is different then we can only use them in different ways. For example, meta-concepts can be distinguished from peripheral concepts, DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-1

2  Introduction in relation to how important they are in the argument that is being made or the discursive configuration of which they are a part. Gendering is a metaconcept in most feminist discourses. Some concepts are dispositional and some have denotative contents. All concepts are normatively and ethically framed, and what this means is that every time we use a concept, discursively or as a praxis, we are giving a value to something in the world. However, some concepts are strongly framed as value carriers and others are only weakly framed. Some concepts have a supersessional form and consequently are hierarchically arranged, while others do not. Our focus in this history of ideas is on concepts and conceptual development. We address in each chapter a concept or an historical praxis (event or episodic series of events), and we do this by exploring a part or aspect of the work of an important woman theorist with a record of feminist commitments. These are not summaries of their work as a whole. They are philosophical discussions of some key concepts and praxes within the overarching concept and practice of learning that these women have contributed to in their writings and in their lives. This means that our feminist concept-framings and praxes, which we can loosely associate with the work of Maxine Greene (imagination), Susan Haack (justification), Nel Noddings (care), Julia Kristeva (edusemiotics), Jane Roland Martin (curriculum), Dorothea Beale (girls’ education), Susan Isaacs (play), Maria Montessori (autonomy), Mary Warnock (inclusion), Marie Battiste (indigeneity), Martha Nussbaum (social justice) and Lucy Diggs Slowe (black women’s higher education), are not biographies or even intellectual biographies of these theorists. And, in addition, we are only interested in an idea or a set of ideas or a practical application of an idea (inclusion in the case of Mary Warnock, for example) in each of these cases. We also discuss in the last chapter (Chapter 14) women’s counter-activities to the different types of patriarchy that exist and that they are subject to, such as absenting thoughts, reframing categories, counter-conducting, immanent critiquing, emancipating the self, decolonising knowledge, reading the world as a feminist text, praxis(ing), trans-framing, reflecting and textualising. A note is in order here about the languaged concept of feminism. As with all concepts, to understand and use a concept in a book about women’s experiences in the lifeworld is also to position it within antecedent, contemporaneous and applied networks of meaning. This means that we are not using the concept in essentialist, detheorised or positivistic ways. We are acknowledging that language and language systems are value-impregnated to their core, and we are using the term to suggest that there are several different interpretations of the male/female dyad. We are also restricting ourselves in the main to the terms, woman and women, and this does not signify an attempt to use a concept in a nonnormative or positivistic way – a concept without any sense of value attached to it – since a woman is not linguistically a man and is not linguistically an intersex person1. We are using these terms, and the term, girl-child, because they more closely approximate to objects in the world, and because they are

Introduction 3 more obviously monosemic words. The issue about language that this raises will come up time and time again in this book and is of some significance. In the first instance, we want to focus on feminism, as a concept and as a practice, and its historical, archaeological and genealogical connections and relations and this includes past and present-past2 occurrences. We need to consider how these three types of event methodologies, which refer to events in the past and in the present-past, can be distinguished from each other. Historical, archaeological and genealogical methodologies are framed by time, although this core category is construed differently in each of them. A further shared element is that they produce configurations of discursive objects, such as liberal feminism, critical and intersectional feminism, normative feminism, feminist naturalism, radical feminism, epistemic feminism, political feminism, decategorising feminism and libertarian feminism. These discursive object configurations are conceptualised in different ways, historically, archaeologically and genealogically. The key then to understanding what they are lies with the types of relations that exist between objects, object-relations, objectconfigurations and persons in their formation and reformation. Archaeology is the term used by Michel Foucault (Les Mots et Les Choses, Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines (1966), translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences) in his earlier writings to describe his approach to history and writing history3. This approach focuses on the discursive trace-objects and object-arrangements (the order of things) left from the past, which enable us to write a history in the present-past. He contrasted this with a genealogical approach. The genealogical approach is designed to critically interrogate belief-formations by attempting to explain the scope, extent, breadth and totality of discourses that are in existence4. Both of these approaches are historical in a conventional sense, in that an event, a discursive or material happening, or a configuration relating to either of these, has occurred prior to other objectevents, objects and configurations of objects. There is a temporal order between these objects. Throughout this book, we will point to historical, archaeological and genealogical ways of thinking, which operate at particular moments in history. Having said that, it is important not to overvalue and thus exaggerate the efficacy of the properties of these discursive configurations, especially the property of absolute reach or ambit. An important binary that has had real effects in the space of learning – the area of life that is fully focused on learning – is the male/female binary, an oppositional coupling of two word-objects, and this implies a relationship between these two descriptive terms, both of which can be problematised. In addition, the strength, type and probative force of this relationship are central to the prevailing discourse. We therefore need to examine in the first instance its characteristics. Although women have been actively involved throughout the centuries in making societies, they have been marginalised when it comes to the production of knowledge about societies and social activity. This has implications for how epistemic differences are constructed to conceptualise

4  Introduction masculinity and femininity, how these key categories function to define the nature of people (women, men and intersex persons), and how they work to attach different valuations to women’s, intersex persons’ and men’s dispositions and capacities. The feminist configurations that we discuss below are not histories, archaeologies or genealogies. They are models of what feminism might be, and they consist of discursive objects, sets of discursive objects, configurations of discursive objects, and discursive and material arrangements of people, predominantly connected by logical relations. The first model that we need to consider is liberal feminism5. The emphasis here is on removing barriers to women’s participation in public life and arguing for a more equal share for women in the rights, privileges and opportunities enjoyed by men. This rendition of feminism is founded on the emancipatory impulse of liberalism. Its key elements are a belief in an essential human nature, a commitment to progress and a trust in an abstracted form of rationality (see Chapter 14). There are three possible iterations of liberal feminism. The first is what some people have called egalitarian-liberal feminism. These feminists understand feminism as a set of inalienable rights, freedom as the ability and capability to live a life of their own choosing and a sense of political autonomy, where women are the co-authors of the structural conditions of their lives. Women’s needs and interests currently are insufficiently reflected in the arrangements of material and discursive resources in society and consequently these arrangements lack credibility. Egalitarian-liberal feminists believe that the state, or the government which represents the state, should be reformed to allow these personal and structural freedoms to be realised. They follow classical liberal notions of freedom, exemplified in the writings of John Stuart Mill (2001). The second form of liberal feminism is called equity feminism, which understands the state as the prime source of their oppression. They therefore seek to abolish or limit government, and this includes those laws in which governments have granted special privileges to women. A third form that liberal feminism can take is cultural and sometimes libertarian. Feminists of this persuasion are concerned about constraints on their freedoms from the government, and in addition from familial, religious and community institutions. They recognise that the sources of women’s oppression lie outside the remit of the state. An alternative feminist perspective is an attempt by feminists to integrate their approaches into mainstream critical theories, such as Marxism6, structuralism and post-structuralism. Feminists of this persuasion argue that gender inequality derives from capitalist economic and social relations and that men’s domination over women is a by-product of capital’s domination of labour. The focus of women’s exploitation is ideological, and this can result in episodes of false consciousness among women. This form of patriarchy is structural and resistance to it has taken an intersectional form. The purpose of intersectionality is to develop a single framework for analysing power that encompasses sexism, colonisation, racism, class oppression, heterosexism and other axes of oppression, as they play out in history and society.

Introduction 5 A different feminist perspective is that traditional feminine values should be valorised over traditional male values. Feminists of this persuasion accept the view that women’s nature is different from men’s and that women excel in relational and nurturing practices. They go on to argue that the characteristics associated with femaleness such as caring, relatedness and attentiveness should be privileged over male characteristics, such as rationality, objectivity and disinterestedness. Feminists of this persuasion, irrespective of emphasis, accept the rational-irrational binary and its association with a masculinefeminine difference, arguing simply that it should be reversed with a consequent privileging of all aspects of the feminine over the masculine. Radical feminists7 shift the focus from equal opportunities to the phallocentric nature of all systems of representation8, and argue that, whenever the two sexes are represented in a single model, the feminine is always collapsed into a universal model represented in masculine terms. Feminists of this type have shown how the general concepts, assumptions and categories of thought have been organised around hierarchies, which by association privilege masculinity and devalue femininity. Regardless of which academic discipline or framework radical feminists are working within, there is a widespread recognition that ethical and epistemological issues do not exist in a vacuum but rather exert a significant influence on concepts, ideals and values. The way we make sense of the world is through broad categories and answers to questions to do with the nature of reality, the mind, subjectivity, knowledge and knowledgeconstruction, objectivity, morality and ethics. There are other directions that feminism has taken. The first of these is political in a proactive sense9, so that feminism is understood, first, as a means by which women are given equal status in important and powerful positions in society, in the boardroom, in the legislature, in the judiciary, in the armed forces, as top earners and in the media. The argument that this will change politics, business, the enforcement of the law, media opinion and the like to a more consensual, democratic and softer form of governing relations in society has been abandoned, with the impulse now towards a general balance of men and women. The result is that existing structures and institutions in society are left relatively unscathed. The second strand is to embrace and participate in libertarian practices, much favoured by the right-wing patriarchy in the political process10. The intent is an equalising of pleasure and liberty between the different sexes. This amounts to limited forms of change in society that can be easily accommodated by capitalist or neoliberal structures and arrangements. Another direction that feminism has been exploring is category subversion. This has taken two forms. The first is through recognising and institutionalising different forms of sexuality11, for example, lesbian, asexual, transgendered, queer/questioning, autosexual, intersexual, gay, bisexual and other types of sexual identity. What is distinctive about this is the fluid nature of sexuality, with people moving between different sexual identities over time. Newer forms of sexual identity are being created, and for some, these are becoming

6  Introduction well-defined markers of identity and lifestyle. This has consequences and implications for public policy because many of these new forms of sexual identity are deliberately crafted as oppositional and transgressive. The second and more powerful response that feminists are increasingly taking is to challenge in a fundamental sense the male/female binary category and the positioning of women within it. This involves a direct challenge to the idea of natural differences between men and women and, in a more fundamental sense, to the whole idea of difference12. Crude versions of these different relations are hegemonic in modern societies. Difference can be understood in several ways. There is a common use given to the term, where difference is understood as not being or as being opposite to something else. Then there is the meaning given to the term by Jacques Derrida (1982). Words, concepts and signs only have meaning within other arrangements of words, signs and concepts, so what should concern us is the process that distinguishes social elements from other social elements, and consequently engenders binary oppositions and endlessly narrativised hierarchies of meaning. Arguments are then made that physical differences between men, women and intersex persons are not as significant as they seem to be. For example, Wilchins (2004) suggests that most infants diagnosed as intersex are children who happen to have clitorises larger than two standard deviations from the mean and that this measure of the category is essentially arbitrary, as are most of the classifications we live with and use in life. Caster Semenya, a South African athlete, has been prevented from taking part in Olympic and other athletic championships because she is said to have a condition that produces high levels of testosterone, and thus cannot be categorised as a woman. What these two examples show is that categories, such as the male/female dyad, are not natural or definitive divisions but constructed categorisations (formed and reformed by human beings in society) that enable certain types of political and social arrangements13. An extreme version of this argument is that there are no meaningful natural divisions or differences between social objects – similarities and differences between objects can only be attributed to the functioning of the relevant concepts and not to any natural processes. Any activity in and about the world is dependent on a human being or human beings acting in the world, and this applies as much to concept-development as it does to other worldly practices. All these varieties of feminism show how gender relations operate in favour of male domination and their fundamental purpose is to help effect a redistribution of power towards women. However, the category of woman is not understood in the same way by everyone, nor is the category of female as opposed to male – women’s experience is differentiated in the life-course. This means that we need to be sensitive to this diversity of women’s experiences and to the power relations that are present among women, and, this hardly needs saying, to those that are present between and among men, women and intersex persons.

Introduction 7

The concept of learning The framing function, an account of the background to the methodology being used in the construction of knowledge in this book, comprises a reasoned argument to support a claim about some aspect of the world, whether universal, meta-epistemic, meso-epistemic or empirical. This argument consists of a series of knowledge claims, valorisations, reconceptualisations and inferential relations. Any claim to knowledge made by a person is framed or enframed14, and consequently, there is a need to articulate and give expression to this enframing as it relates to ontological, epistemological and methodological interests. This requires a theory of mind, and therefore a theory of the relationship between mind or minds and the world. In addition, concepts, such as feminism, can be polysemic and used in a number of different ways and are enframed in a form of life15, where this is understood discursively, materially, socially, politically or epistemically. This framework is a form of dispositional realism. All this and more needs to be established before the central argument of this or any other book can be attended to. There are five object-types in the world: discursive objects (for example, gender), material objects (for example, a women’s only recreational space), relational objects (for example, female subjugation), structural-institutionalsystemic objects (this includes discursive configurations, such as liberal feminism, and material configurations, such as a sex-divided ward in a public hospital) and people16. Each of them has different characteristics and because objects have a morphogenetic structure in rare circumstances may change their status as objects; indeed, what constitutes an object-type is also morphogenetic. In an object-ontology, human beings can be said to have (acquired) dispositions. These are conceptual relations, which cannot be fully determined as to their meaning in definitional and essentialising ways, but only in terms of how they are used and applied. What we are suggesting is that when we make a truth-bearing statement (and feminists make many of these), we are not providing a description of an experience but making a claim about it in what Wilfred Sellars (1997) described as ‘a space of reasons’17, and what follows from this is that we can and should understand and use concepts specifically in relation to past, current and future-oriented networks of meanings18. Reasoning within this space involves giving and asking for reasons, where this activity is understood as making a commitment to the world (see Chapter 14). The activity we are concerned about in this book is the concept and practice of learning, and those objects (such as feminism) and object-relations (such as inference) that characterise them. A theory of learning pivots on the idea that there is an entity, which we can call a person, and this entity has a relationship (both inward and outward) with an environment. As a concept, learning is fundamentally related to knowledge, and therefore if we are concerned with learning and the practices

8  Introduction of learning, we also need to make reference to what is to be learnt, and typically what we are aiming at in such considerations is some form of knowledge. In society, these different forms of knowledge are given different statuses or have different attachments of importance, so, for example, indigenous knowledge is considered to be less important, and therefore less apt or correct than eurocentric scientific knowledge (see Chapter 8). These ascriptions of importance do not only lie in the intrinsic nature of each knowledge form but also in the way these knowledge forms are realised in societies. Knowledge then is fundamental to the four types of learning that can be identified: cognitive (relating to propositions), skill-based (relating to processes), embodied (relating to bodily accomplishments) and dispositional (relating to the characteristics of a person). Knowledge and learning are homologous concepts, and what we mean by this is that both operate in the same way and that they share properties and meanings. Prior to cognitive, skillbased and embodied forms of learning are a set of dispositions, without which they would be unsustainable. Cognition comprises the manipulation of those symbolic resources (words, numbers, pictures, images, modalities, etc.), which points to something outside itself. Skill-based knowledge is different from cognition because it is procedural and not propositional. Embodied knowledge is knowledge that has a direct relation or connection with the body (in our case here, the female body) both in its formation and in its expression. Examples of embodied knowledge are sexuality or sexual preference, physicality and motility. Distinguishing between knowledge of how to do something (process forms of knowledge), knowledge of something (judging that claim in terms of its relations within and to a network of concepts, and making the subsequent commitments that this entails), conceptual knowledge (interacting with the world in a specific way) and embodied forms of knowledge (assimilating an action and being able to perform in the spaces associated with that action) is important; however, they are in essence all knowledge-making activities and consequently can be formulated generically as acts or activities of learning. We also need to address the relationship between knowledge and the world. This comprises a rejection of crude versions of representationalism that have dominated previous and current theories of learning, curriculum and women, such as behaviourism and cognitivism. Representationalist theories of mind identify an inner realm of representations and an outer realm of objects in the world, which are placed in some form of identity relation. If we reject this approach, the focus of our work in the world should be, not so much the existence of these two realms and the possibility of describing what they are, but the relationship between them, between mind and world. This means that we should prioritise expression or inference before representation in the semantic process, that is, in the determination of meaning. An activity of the mind is not a representation of an action in the world. Ethical and epistemic judgements bring about something – they do not act exclusively as reflectors of some preformulated reality.

Introduction 9 We also make the case (provide sufficient reasons for making a claim of knowledge) for values and valorisations as being centrally implicated in both our descriptions of the world and in our life choices19. There are two dimensions to this claim. The first is ontological and this is a claim that objects in the world and human beings are valued in relation to each other and to other object-types. A second dimension is that values are epistemological. If we accept that valuefree knowledge is an impossibility, and that we inevitably make prejudgements about the world in our investigations and in our life-choices, then being in the world is understood as a practice, primed for investigation but resistant to algorithmic and value-free methods for describing it.

Concepts In the first part of this book, we provide critical accounts of concepts and concepts-in-use, such as imagination, play, pedagogy, judgement, the girl-child, meaning, disposition, care, holism, indigeneity and decolonisation, understanding them as being only a sample, and a small sample at that, of all the concepts in the networks of meaning associated with learning. In Chapter 2, we examine the relationship between imagination, play and pedagogy, through the work of Maxine Greene20. A key aspect of her work is seeking to understand the way the child learns through their imagination, and this is best realised through play. The reason for this is to develop and extend the child’s ability to determine the possible uses of discursive and material objects. A play-pedagogy in its use allows us to say something about two human activities or practices – playing and learning – and is better understood as an active, engaged and committed activity in the world, rather than as a proposition, skill or embodiment. As a concept, it has a binding relationship to knowledge, and this can be expressed as a means for learning about particular objects that are in the world, but that can only be learnt in a particular way. Furthermore, knowledge of the concept and how it is used in the world is transformed at the pedagogic site, and it is possible to suggest that properties such as the simulation of the learning object, the representational mode of the object, the degree and type of amplification, control in the pedagogic relationship, progression or its relations with other learning objects, its textual form, relations with other people in the learning process, temporal relations and types of feedback mechanism are fundamental components of this pedagogic transformation (see Chapter 7). What this means is that in the learning process, the learning object, in this case, play-pedagogy, takes a new form because of changes to its properties, and therefore the concept of play-pedagogy has attached to its properties that relate to the grammar21 of the pedagogic process that it might go through. In Chapter 3, we critically examine the work of Susan Haack or at least that part of her work which concerns itself with the concept of judgement. Judgemental rationality requires a unitary theory of knowledge and is a

10  Introduction corrective to the many disciplinary or domain-specific forms of knowledge in existence. What this suggests is that at the extra-disciplinary level, knowledge can be produced which allows us to make a judgement between different theories about the world – to allow us to say that this knowledge of objects in the world is superior to that knowledge of the same objects. Susan Haack has attempted a reconciliation between different criteria of judgement; in her case, the criteria were foundationalism and coherentism. She understood foundationalist criteria as having experiential, rational and logical elements, and she called her reconciliation, foundherentism22. Making a judgement between different conceptions of and theories about the world is central to any notion of curriculum that we might hold. In Chapter 4, we look at how the work of Julia Kristeva paved the way for the development of a field of edusemiotics. She identified three generations of feminist thinking. The first of these argued for equality between men and women, which involves a restructuring of the belief sets of both sexes and a restructuring of the relationships between them in both material and discursive ways. The second generation of feminist thought and praxis is where the woman and the girl-child are understood not as a universal set of categories but as having their own embodied definition and structure. This is a commitment to difference in an essentialised form. The third generation of feminist thinking is not concerned with a universal equality between the sexes, nor a fixed and gendered sense of identity, but instead argues for an approach that respects ambiguity and nonidentity, and thus embraces bodily difference and a sense of being in history. Kristeva’s feminism, while still reflecting a particular psychoanalytical viewpoint about women and men, and a separation between the two, also encompasses notions of multiple sexual identities and is opposed to a singular feminine language and valuation. All of this and more have implications for an edusemiotic theory of learning and curriculum. In Chapter 5, we examine the work of Martha Nussbaum and in particular the relations between feminism, universals and learning. Nussbaum comes from a liberal feminist tradition, and for her, this means endorsing a realist ontology, the possibility of social, political, ethical and epistemological universals and a social justice framework. Martha Nussbaum’s liberal theory of justice rests on the possibility of there being such things as universals. In her book, Sex and Social Justice (Nussbaum, 2000a), she sets out her sense of universal capacities and she calls them central human functional capabilities. She rejects utterly the collective work of many writers who would understand themselves and have been understood as postmodernist, such as Jacques Derrida, JeanFrançois Lyotard and Friedrich Nietzsche. For her relativism is a blind alley that does not allow us any purchase on feminism, learning and the curriculum, in an epistemological and ethical sense. In Chapter 6, we discuss the work of Nel Noddings and the idea of an essentially feminist ethic of care. Nel Noddings has developed an ethic of caring or, to put it in another way, a learnt disposition of care, which is central to

Introduction 11 everything we do as persons. Her designation of an ethic of care is relational and thus is more to do with how we understand and relate to objects, objectrelations, object-configurations and people in our worlds. Natural caring, for her, is a moral attitude, a longing for goodness that comes out of our own experience of being cared for. And in addition, she develops a notion of ethical caring, which she describes as: ‘a state of being in relation, characterised by receptivity, relatedness and engrossment’ (Noddings, 1984: 34). Acting ethically comprises a dispositional state, which is already there (in some form or another), having been learnt, seeking to express itself in the world in relation to a problem in the world that requires some action. Dispositions then have this persistent quality, although they can in time be modified. They have a strong affinity with a person’s chosen identity. A notion of identity is a key curriculum concept. For Jane Roland Martin (Chapter 7), life is a series of metamorphoses or whole-person transformations, embedded in a curricular form. These personal transformations are also culture-crossings, that is, passages from one culture to another. In these transformations, some underlying traits endure. By whole person, she means a holistic way of being. In asserting the power of education and indeed in endorsing a view of a gender-responsive curriculum, this acts as a repudiation of a romantic or naturalised conception of education – the idea that everyone is born with ‘a fundamental self that presses for exteriorisation regardless of circumstances’ (Martin, 1994: 32). Her transformational curriculum is gender-sensitive. In Chapter 8, we focus on the idea of indigenous knowledge and how this relates to the curriculum. We do this by examining the work of Marie Battiste, who has written extensively on these concepts and concept relations. The chapter will clarify the theoretical framework that has been developed by her to understand what indigenous knowledge is, provide some insight into the reasons for the tensions between indigenous and eurocentric ways of knowing, and then show how these forms of knowledge can be applied to the curriculum. This will involve an examination of two key conceptual areas: indigeneity and decolonisation (see Chapter 14).

Praxes Praxis is not just action for this would render the concept as meaningless insofar as everything we do in the world would be a praxis. It involves some form of conversion of thought into action, or at least the construction of a particular thought or set of thoughts in such a way that certain actions inevitably flow from it and other actions are set aside. As with all thoughts or thinking, this praxis is embedded in histories, archaeologies and genealogies of that thought or concept and what that thought or set of thoughts allows or disallows. This last point can be best illustrated by a close reading of some examples of educational praxes, with regards to the conceptual and practical field of learning.

12  Introduction Praxis in a feminist sense, or as a feminist might want to understand it, has four elements: practice on practice, practice on thought, practice on ourselves and practice unfolding from thought. The first of these refers fundamentally to doing something in the world, such as the various forms of suffragette direct action for equal voting rights in the United Kingdom a hundred years ago; those activities evolved in scope and form over the period of the activity. The second refers to thought working on the practice of thought over a period of time and in response to a particular conceptual issue, such as feminism. For example, there are temporal, spatial, inferential and logical connections between the eight different forms of feminism and their evolutionary trajectories that we identified at the beginning of the chapter: liberal feminism, structural feminism, normative feminism, feminist naturalism, radical feminism, epistemic feminism, political feminism, decategorising feminism and libertarian feminism. The third possibility is practice on ourselves, and this locates the source of practice in individual reflection. A particular notion of a mind has as its centrepiece a model of individual reflexivity that includes a notion of inner speech, where parts of the mind communicate with other parts of the mind. This internal conversation has three conditioning structures. The first is that it is a genuinely interior phenomenon. The second conditioning structure is that this sense of subjectivity relates directly to a particular person. The third conditioning structure is that it possesses causal powers, in that material and discursive consequences could follow directly from an internal conversation. There is then a fourth sense that can be given to the notion of praxis, and this is where work on thought drives practice in a particular way – thought and practice are so intertwined that in criticising or subverting the one, we are also criticising and subverting the other. There are several versions of this, principally, categoricity, technical rationality, contextuality and specifying source. An example of an object-relation or object-connection operating at the discursive level over time is the relation between a theory or set of propositions about objects, relations and arrangements of objects – how they might work in the world – and a set of future arrangements of objects and relations in the practice setting. For those concerned to provide accounts of learning and women, conceptualising the relationship between the theory they produce and the practice they are describing, and subsequently transferring to the practice setting, is central to their activities. The first of these understands science as the final arbiter of truthful accounts – the relation is therefore categorical. There is a correct method for collecting data about learning activities, with this method leading to the creation of objective, value-free and authoritative knowledge about how practitioners should behave. Practitioners therefore need to bracket out their own values, experiences and preconceptions because these are partial, incomplete and subjective and follow the precepts of theorists whose sole purpose is to develop knowledge that transcends the local and the contextual.

Introduction 13 The second praxical viewpoint has some similarities to the first viewpoint but understands the creation of objectified and authoritative knowledge in a different way. The educational script that is produced is still treated in the same way as with the first perspective, but the relationship between theory and practice is understood as being in accord with a technical-rationality framework. This involves the solving of technical problems through rational decision-making. It is the means to achieve ends where the assumption is that the ends to which practice is directed can always be predefined and are always knowable. The condition of practice is the learning of a body of theoretical knowledge, and practice therefore becomes the application of this body of knowledge to achieve preset ends. The third type of theory-practice relationship is multi-perspectival and multi-methodological. If there is no correct method, but only a set of methods that produce texts of various kinds and these can be read in different ways, then the practitioner is required to make a series of decisions about whether a text is appropriate or not. Theory and practice are here being uncoupled. Whether or not the practitioner works to the prescriptive framework of the theorist will depend on several factors, such as the fit between the values of the theorist and the practitioner, whether they share a common epistemic framework and, fundamentally, whether solutions are being provided by the theorist to practical problems encountered during the practitioner’s everyday activity. A fourth position that can be taken is an extension of the position expressed above. This is an interpretation of the theory-practice relation in which deliberated thoughtful practice is not just the target but is the major source (perhaps the specifying source) of social theory and explanation. This is in effect a rejection of a role in practice for the theorist because they operate outside the practice. Practice is understood as deliberative action concerned with the making of appropriate decisions about practical problems in the practicum or practical setting. These four discursive formations offer alternative perspectives on an important aspect of social life. What has become a commonplace in the development of public policy over the last twenty years is the sense in which there has to be a binding relationship between theory and practice; but in reality, practice in the educational and social spheres is the outcome of political deliberations, detheorisations, knowledge-distortions and unforeseen events and occurrences23. The first of these praxes refers to the development of girls’ education, which was an aspect of the work of Dorothea Beale (Chapter 9). In the late nineteenth century in Britain, various key societal changes were starting to take place, increasing the spread of knowledge and political enfranchisement and, in doing so, transforming democracy. In 1871, for example, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were opened to all, irrespective of creed, whereas previously they had been reserved for Anglicans. Science and history were increasingly regarded as equal to the study of the Classics and Mathematics.

14  Introduction Competitive examinations were introduced for the Civil Service. The First and Second Reform Bills were passed extending the right to vote (albeit still confined to men). Forster’s Education Act of 1870 established universal elementary education, and the Trade Unions Act of 1871 liberalised employment rights. The most significant nineteenth-century development in curriculum terms, however, was the development of secondary education for girls on the same basis as that offered to boys, in turn contributing to codifying the ideological basis for a liberal education. In Beale’s works, we see movement from the intellectually undemanding curriculum of what were known as ‘Dame Schools’, with their focus on basic literacy, numeracy and accomplishments, such as needlework, to institutions modelled on the major boys’ ‘public’ schools (public in the sense that they were run by boards of governors rather than by private proprietors for profit). The new girls’ schools offered a broad, subject-based curriculum that was intellectually rigorous. This was something that had been previously considered too demanding for girls, so the idea that girls were not only capable of studying in the same way and to the same level as boys, but that this should be expected of them, and indeed that this should be their duty, was highly controversial. This combination of intellect and a sense of duty provides an example of what we might describe as late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Christian feminism, mirroring the post-Arnold conceptualisation of boys’ schools as promoters of muscular Christianity during the same period. Such an emancipatory approach to education may have been revolutionary for girls, but it also provided the basis for further educational reform throughout the twentieth century. It links eighteenth-century ideas of the Enlightenment with the ‘psychoanalytical turn’ taken in progressive education at the beginning of the twentieth century, from received to organic knowledge. This brings us to the second praxis, the practice of play as it was developed in the work of Susan Isaacs (Chapter 10)24. Pivotal to an understanding of early childhood education (otherwise known as early year’s education) is a reconciliation of the biological and social aspects of child development. Central to the Isaacs model of child development is a rejection of much of what might be termed free or instinctive, purely genetically driven, behaviour on the part of children, apart from among the very youngest (an example being the early ‘grasp’ reflex). Instead, Isaacs promoted an acceptance of the idea of children’s behaviour mirroring, emulating and anticipating that of adults. This way of conceiving child development as a function of the social world was significantly influenced by her observational experiences and concrete actions as Head of The Malting House, a progressive school in Cambridge that was open between 1924 and 1929. Isaacs described two types of relations involving what she termed ‘phantasy’, or imagination, as children navigate the space between their physical environment and the relationships around them through free play. She called the first a ‘circumstantial relation’ (Isaacs, 1951: 34), as children copy aspects of the adult world in their play in a derivative manner

Introduction 15 that involves dramatic representation. (She gave the example of children playing at telephones.) She called the second a ‘conative nexus of thought and phantasy’ (Isaacs, 1951: 34) in which children develop symbol formations, an example of which is the symbolic value of fire, motors, mud and so on. This offers a means for the child to play out and resolve inner conflicts and tensions. In this way, imaginative free play allows children to move between conceptualisation and activity using an iterative process that encourages the development of independent thought. Play within the curriculum therefore becomes a vital tool necessary for the intellectual growth of the child. A third praxis focuses on the practice of becoming autonomous (Chapter 11). Maria Montessori is the originator of an educational system recognised globally that bears her name25. The Montessori system is a pedagogy based on a belief in the innate desire of children to learn, and the right of each individual to an education on the grounds that he or she is part of a larger society. After graduating in medicine from the University of Rome in 1896, Montessori was appointed an assistant doctor at the psychiatric clinic of the University. In 1907, she opened the first Casa dei Bambini, a preschool for children aged three to six in one of the poorest parts of Rome. Her success here led to the opening of other Montessori schools, and for the next forty years, she travelled throughout Europe, India and the United States, lecturing, writing and establishing teacher training programmes. She disliked conventional classrooms, where ‘children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his (sic) place’ (Montessori, 2014: 1). She attempted, instead, to teach children by engaging them in activities involving the use and manipulation of materials conducive to learning and through creative pedagogies. Through this, she argued, it was possible to allow children the freedom to develop, and the logical consequence of allowing this freedom to develop to its fullest extent is the absence of conflict, in an individual and institutional sense. Although Montessori used the word, freedom (libertà (da), in Italian), extensively in her writings, we should understand this notion as more to do with autonomous self-development. This takes us back to the original Greek meaning of the term: auto (αὐτός) plus nomous (νόμος) is equivalent to the self and laws, which in turn can be construed as having its own laws, and thus to the sense of children deciding for themselves what they should learn. The meaning that we are giving to the notion of autonomy is, we feel, better aligned with Montessori’s intentions. A fourth praxis is a policy determination (Chapter 12). In England, the first significant educational changes with regards to pupils with special educational needs in mainstream education were recommended in the Warnock Report of 1978. The Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People, chaired by Mary (later Baroness) Warnock, was appointed in November 1973 by the then Secretary of State, Margaret Thatcher. Its remit was ‘to review educational provision in England, Scotland and Wales for children and young people handicapped by disabilities of body and mind, taking account of their needs, together with arrangements to prepare them for entry

16  Introduction into employment; to consider the most effective use of resources for these purposes; and to make recommendations’ (Warnock, 1978: 1). Its most important contribution was the recommendation that the term ‘learning difficulties’, described as ‘mild’, ‘moderate’ and ‘severe’, be used, allowing these pupils to be included in mainstream educational schools and minimising their social stigmatisation. In the same report, the term ‘specific learning difficulties’ was coined for the first time for those pupils who experience major difficulties in particular areas of learning, namely reading. The focus in this chapter is on the antecedents, networks and uses of the concept of inclusion26. This chapter examines the Warnock Report in relation to its perspective on deontological and universal forms of ethics, identifying fault lines, which may have resulted in curriculum distortions. We also examine Lucy Diggs Slowe’s work at Howard University in philosophical terms, particularly in relation to the American pragmatists, and the work of John Dewey. Slowe’s work focused on the idea and realisation of higher education for black women, and ineluctably on black ontoepistemologies (Chapter 13). What we have here is a sophisticated symbiosis between a philosophy of education for black women, which also asks questions about their role in the wider society, and the practical working out of that philosophy organically within an educational setting. This is a form of activism and praxis. This chapter focuses on three elements that are central to the work of this book and to the counter-empiricist philosophy that we are expounding: an understanding of black women’s onto-epistemologies, the practical application of these in real-world settings and how these impact the history and use of important conceptual framings, with reference to inclusion as a concept and as a practice. In the final chapter (Chapter 14), we map the quasi-genealogical threads of our feminist theorists’ work in knowledge development, curriculum and learning. We are committed then to ‘paying attention’, as Simone Weil (1952) suggested, to the diversities of curriculum thought in the world. We have explored these diversities of thought through a thematic semantics rather than a specific type of disciplinary enquiry. This is the key to understanding why we have structured the book in the way that we have. Rather than proactively mapping a comprehensive dramatis personae of the field, which would be impossible in a single book given the size and scope of what would be required, we have allowed these diversities of thought to come to us (‘to resist averting our gaze and slowly begin to imagine a response’, as Weil (1952: 13) suggested), and we have then reflected on them in the light of our knowledge of curriculum philosophy and praxis. This also explains our choice of women in this book – we expect disagreement, but our selection was never meant to be encyclopaedic. These women were not chosen because they were the best writers or the best theorists or the best philosophers (even if we could find good grounds for making these evaluations), but because they had chosen to write about a concept or a praxis that best fits the overarching social theory that is being argued for

Introduction 17 in this book, and they had done so in a way which added to our understanding of these important concepts and praxes. In this chapter, we discuss women’s involvement in curriculum theory, knowledge development and learning and what form these might take. Debates surrounding the curriculum are central to processes of modern schooling and related policy formations, which makes this an important area of inquiry. Yet all too often, the field of curriculum theory has been dominated by male voices. There doesn’t seem to be a convincing reason for this dominance other than intellectual habit and convention, especially considering the obvious range and depth of women’s wider contributions to the field. Indeed, the writing of any history of education requires us to embrace women’s constant involvement with and within it: from the earliest days of religious communities providing education to girls, from the development of their early literacy to what we might see as higher education today and women as mothers seeking the best education for the children and young people in their care, through to eighteenthand nineteenth-century initiatives that sought to create similar educational opportunities for both boys and girls, and more recently, contributions to the global development of social justice. This includes the de-gendering of education that is proving so important for accommodating intersectional identities in the modern age. To deny women curriculum theorists, their place in history is to silence the voices of half the population of the world. We also discuss in the last chapter (Chapter 14) possible forms of women’s counteractivities to the different types of patriarchy that exist, such as absenting thoughts and ideas, reframing categories, counter-conducting, emancipating, immanent critiquing, decolonising knowledge, reading the world as a feminist text, praxis(ing), trans-framing, reflecting and textualising. In addition, connections will be made between the work of these women curriculum theorists and the feminist theories of knowledge and identity set out in this introduction. The central issue that we will be discussing here is the relationship between feminism, in its many shapes and guises, and the concepts and practices of learning and curriculum. This is a more complicated set of issues than is generally acknowledged, and we do not come to any definitive and binding conclusions, as an empiricist is inclined to do27. What we do, however, is open up and illuminate the possible meanings that inhere in the three concepts and the relations between them.

Notes 1 The sex of a person is more complicated than it at first seems. According to the conventional scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But some people straddle the boundary – their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another – these may be thought of as intersex conditions. But even then, these categorisations are ideological, that is, they are framed or enframed. This is not an example of gender category subversion.

18  Introduction 2 We are using the term present-past to affirm the Heideggerian idea that the present is always the past even if for a brief millisecond it didn’t refer to what has already happened. 3 cf. Foucault (1966; 1969; 1976; 1978; 1979; 1982; 1986; 1989; 1990; 1997; 2010). 4 A discourse is a set of propositions about the world joined together by a series of connectives and relations that offer an account of an object or objects in the world, and it may even act to create objects in the world. 5 Liberal feminists include Mary Astell (1666–1731), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1799), Harriet Taylor (1807–1858), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). 6 Neo-Marxist feminists include Angela Davis, Raya Dunayevskaya and Claudia Jones. 7 cf. Daly (1992), Flax (1990), Griffin (2000). 8 Leading figures in what has been called second-wave feminism are Shulamith Firestone, Kathie Sarachild, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Carol Hanisch, Roxane Dunbar, Naomi Weisstein and Judith Brown. 9 All actions and thoughts can be construed as political or value-embedded. Here, we are referring to institutional reform in the first place and discursive reform in the second. 10 Michel Foucault (1976) in his later work positioned the notion of desire as operating in particular arrangements in society. 11 These different forms of sexuality are embodied of course, but they also have a direct relationship with feminism and the various forms that feminism can take. Allosexual, androsexual, asexual, aromatic, autosexual, autoromantic, bicurious, bisexual, biromantic, closeted, coming out, cupiosexual, demisexual, demiromantic, fluid, gay, graysexual, grayromantic, gynesexual, heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, LGBTQIA, libidoist asexual, monosexual, non-libidoist asexual, omnisexual, pansexual, panromantic, polysexual, pomosexual, queer, questioning, romantic attraction, romantic orientation, sapiosexual, sex-repulsed, skoliosexual, spectrasexual and straight are names for different types of sexuality. A different list would include paraphilic desires such as towards nonhuman objects, the suffering or humiliation of oneself or one’s partner, children and non-consenting persons. Indeed, one source has listed as many as 549 different paraphilic behaviours (cf. Aggrawal, 2008). 12 Difference as a concept then is both multi-perspectival and contested. 13 For example, a trans-woman is a person who was given a male identity at birth and a trans-man is a person who was given a female identity at birth. Trans-women in most cases have taken on a female-gendered identity, may experience gender dysphoria and may choose to transition. Trans-men in most cases have taken on a male-gendered identity, experience gender dysphoria and are choosing to transition. This process commonly includes hormone replacement therapy and/or sex reassignment surgery. Their sexuality is not directly related to their gender and may be heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, asexual, pansexual, omnisexual and so on. 14 This is a word used by Martin Heidegger (1962), translated from the original German word, Gestell, to denote those social, geohistorical, temporal, epistemological, political and discursive frames within which our utterances are ineluctably embedded. 15 Wittgenstein (1953) made this point time and time again, although this attracted a huge amount of criticism. 16 People, we would argue, have to be treated differently from other types of objects not least because they operate through dispositional concepts and volitions, and all this implies. 17 Reasons are different from, and operate in different ways to, physical causes. There are also good and less good reasons for doing something.

Introduction 19 18 In his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars suggested that ‘in characterising an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says’ (Sellars, 1997: §36). 19 The language we use is implicated in valued or valorised conceptualisations of the world. In this book, we are dealing with feminist, gendered and sexuate views of the world and ways that we can counter these. Gribble et al. (2022) suggest that: ‘Avoidance of sexed terms most commonly results in the words “woman” and “women” being replaced with “person”, “people” or “families” and the words “mother” and “mothers” being replaced with “parent”, “parents”, “family” or “families”. Sometimes body parts (e.g. “vagina owners”) or processes (e.g. “birthers”) are also used. Terms such as “non-males” or “non-men” may be used to denote women. “Maternity”, “maternal”, “midwife” and “breastfeeding” have also become contentious terms’. Yes, non-sexist replacements can be found – the problem is that these words or phrases rapidly take on a valued meaning. A language is a carrier of values and we cannot avoid this. 20 cf. Greene (1965a; 1965b; 1973; 1978; 1988; 2001; 2004; 2007). 21 Grammar is being understood here as a semantic process and not as a linguistic form, in line with how Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) used it in his Philosophical Investigations. 22 Her work is fundamentally about making judgements and justifying what those judgements are about. 23 Consequently, educational reform is difficult and slow-moving. 24 cf. Isaacs (1930a; 1930b; 1933; 1948a; 1948b). 25 cf. Montessori (1912; 1918; 1936; 1946; 1948a; 1948b; 1964; 1917/1965; 1973; 2009; 2014; 2019). 26 Although Mary Warnock did indeed pioneer a new approach to special needs, focusing on integration, she dramatically changed her mind and published a reversal in a pamphlet (Warnock, 2005, Special Educational Needs: a new look, Impact No 11. London: The Philosophy Society of Great Britain). 27 This book is a response to empiricist and positivist conceptions of knowledge; detheorised and reductionist ideas of learning that have filtered through to the management of our schools; regressive and degenerative notions of curriculum as in social realist approaches; simple messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum and assessment that abound in disciplines and sub-disciplines such as the sociology of education and leadership and management; the employment of punitive forms of power in our universities, colleges and schools; the use of bureaucratic power mechanisms in new public management strategies; and the denial that values are central to understanding how we live and how we should live – the normative dimension to social policy and social theorising.

Part I

Conceptual Framings

In this part of the book, we will be examining a number of key concepts as they relate to the hinge concept and practice of learning. We will be doing this by focusing on the work of Maxine Greene (imagination), Susan Haack (justification), Julia Kristeva (edusemiotics and psychoanalytics), Martha Nussbaum (social justice), Nel Noddings (care), Jane Roland Martin (curriculum) and Marie Battiste (indigeneity). We will make the argument that to understand the idea and practice of learning we need to look at three networks or constellations of thought: the antecedents of the concept; its relations to other relevant concepts and the way the concept is used in the lifeworld. In Chapter 2, we examine the relationship between imagination, play and pedagogy, through the work of Maxine Greene. In Chapter 3, we critically address the work of Susan Haack, or at least that part of her work that concerns itself with the concept of judgement. In Chapter 4, we look at how the work of Julia Kristeva paved the way for the development of the field of edusemiotics. In Chapter 5, we examine the work of Martha Nussbaum and in particular relations between feminism, universals and learning. In Chapter 6, we discuss the work of Nel Noddings and the idea of a feminist ethic of care. For Jane Roland Martin (Chapter 7), life is a series of metamorphoses or whole-person transformations. This comprises a transformational curriculum that is gender sensitive. Finally, in Chapter 8, we focus on the idea of indigenous knowledge and how this relates to the curriculum. We do this through a reading of the work of Marie Battiste, who has written extensively on these concepts and concept relations. This will involve an examination of two key conceptual areas: indigeneity and decolonisation. Part I is a reminder that the meaning of a book is manifested through each of its chapters and parts, yet each chapter’s and each part’s meaning depends on the meaning of the whole book.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-2

2

Maxine Greene and Imaginative Possibilities

As we read Maxine Greene’s various books1 we are seduced by the beauty of her prose, her command of the meaning-making dimension of the English language. We are caught up in, we are committed to, her search for meaning and how we can learn best. In this chapter, we focus on the concept and practice of pedagogy and this is a pedagogy of imagining ‘… this is where our imagination enters in, as the felt possibility of looking beyond the boundary where the backyard ends or the road narrows, diminishing out of sight’ (Greene, 1978: 27). The ground for the argument she is making is a view of what imagination is and what role it plays in how we learn. We are interested in the pedagogic imagination. A concept, such as pedagogy, is both a material and discursive object and consequently has all the characteristics that we have come to associate with these types of objects. In the real world, boundaries are drawn between objects. As a discursive object, the concept of pedagogy has several properties, such as being polysemic, semantically contested, networked, interactive, powerful and dynamic. In addition, as an object it has causal powers, both as a conceptual object and also because it is in the world, or at least in a world2. Maxine Greene (2001: 7) talked about education, pedagogy and learning as being understood: … in openings, in unexplored possibilities, not in the predictable or quantifiable, not in what is thought of as social control. For us, education signifies an initiation into new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, moving. It signifies the nurture of a special kind of reflectiveness and expressiveness, a reaching out for meanings, a learning to learn. The concept of pedagogy then can in part be understood by and through the trace-objects that constitute its past; these are, however, only fragments of the meanings that people gave to the notion. We can examine the etymology of the word, or at least what other people have thought is its etymology, while also at the same time accepting that an etymology is not the same as how the concept was used in the past, both discursively and in a material sense. Its common late sixteenth-century meaning, DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-3

24  Conceptual Framings ‘the science of teaching’, was derived from the medieval French word, pédagogie, which in turn was derived from the Latin word, paedagogia and from the Greek word, paidagōgia, which roughly can be translated as ‘education, attendance on boys’ (giving us a marked gendered description of the word). The word, pedagoge, was first used in the fourteenth century to refer to ‘a schoolmaster, teacher of children’ and versions of it can be found in the old French, pedagoge, meaning, ‘teacher of children’, which in turn is derived from the Latin word, paedagogus and the Greek word, paidagōgos, meaning ‘slave who escorts boys to school and generally supervises them’ (see Online Etymology Dictionary). Later, a new meaning seems to have been attached to the word, ‘a teacher or trainer of boys’, from the word, pais, meaning child and agōgos, meaning leader and agein, meaning to lead – to drive, draw out or forth, move. In the seventeenth century, the word acquired a new meaning and a new evaluation, ‘a dogmatic and narrow teacher’. The word, pedagogy, then, has continued to change its meaning and consequently how it could be used, so that it now reflects a different set of commitments than before. These are etymological derivations and not exclusively conceptual derivations. There are many different views of what pedagogy might be and how broad it is as a concept, with three current theories in existence3. The first is a model of pedagogy that can be developed from the idea that knowledge is transposed from many different locations and time-points and that it emanates from outside the learner. It is the means by which knowledge evolves round the world. The second is a functional model of pedagogy that understands it as a carrier of something, such as identity, social positioning or concept-acquisition. Basil Bernstein (2002) suggested that pedagogy was the means by which the accumulated knowledge of a society could be produced, distributed and allocated, then transposed into an institutional form and finally changed into a set of criterial standards. In Bernstein’s terms, this pedagogisation comprised three fields of activity: an area of production and distribution, a field of recontextualisation and a field of reproduction4. The third approach, then, is the one argued for in this book, which is that pedagogy is a mechanism (using this word without its mechanical and deterministic elements) or apparatus and has properties including causal powers that operate in the churn of other objects (discursive, material, relational, configurational and, perhaps more importantly, human). A concept, such as pedagogy, has a history, an archaeology and a genealogy and can only be understood comprehensively as a trace-object. In ancient Greek society, a distinction was made between the activities of teachers or pedagogues (paidagögus) and subject teachers (didáskalos). A pedagogue, and consequently a pedagogic activity, became divorced from the idea of a subject teacher and from a notion of didactics or learning a subject or subjects. Immanuel Kant (1992a), for example, writing in the latter part of the eighteenth century, distinguished between the nurturing of the child and formal instruction; the point being that pedagogy was at this time understood as more than just instruction. Kant made a further distinction between the two insofar as he suggested that instruction is

Maxine Greene and Imaginative Possibilities 25 a training for school and guidance is a training for life. The distinction between education and training had not yet taken on its modern meaning. The instructional element in pedagogy had earlier been introduced at least in an informal way by John Comenius (2012) in his book, The Great Didactic (Didactica Magna)5. This new meaning of didactics suggested that the point of life was to develop as a rational, self-regulated and devout human being. One of Kant’s successors, Johan Friedrich Herbart, introduced into the concept of pedagogy a further distinction between education (educatio in the original Latin) and teaching (instructio in the original Latin)6. To some extent this mirrored or at least reinforced the distinction that we referred to earlier between pedagogic activity (paidagögus) and didactics (didáskalos) common in Ancient Greek society; however, the effect was to bring into the clustered concept of pedagogy the notion of didactics, to interiorise what for some was an external activity. For Herbart, education was about the shaping of character, teaching was about the acquiring of knowledge. In his Universal Pedagogy (1906) he argued for five formal steps in teaching: preparation where the teacher related the material to be taught to ideas (memories) held by the learner(s); presentation where the teacher presented the new material to the learner in a concrete form; association where the teacher compared these new ideas with those ideas already held by the learner; generalisation where the teacher took the learner beyond the experience of the particular into the realm of the abstract and application where the teacher facilitated a process of using these concepts in everyday life. Throughout most of medieval Europe, formal learning took place under the patronage of the Catholic Church. A variety of Catholic pedagogical styles and techniques can be identified. Each of them has different pedagogical properties, and each of them gives a different meaning to the concept of pedagogy. The styles flex and overlap with each other. An exegetical approach is fundamentally organised around a holy book or books and the associated commentary and interpretation. The curriculum is holy reading and prayer. More subtle and non-dogmatic processes of exegesis abound in the history of Catholic education7. For example, in Maximus, the Confessor’s Ambigua ad Joannem and in his Ad Thalassium, two traditions of monastic spiritual pedagogy are described: the exegetical aporiai tradition, a hermeneutic process that seeks to resolve difficulties posed by certain biblical passages and the quaestio-responsio. The Ad Thalassium and the responsio were in essence a form of spiritual catechism leading the learner to a mystical contemplation of the logoi and Logos of creation. These exegetical approaches were not gendered, except insofar as the doctrinal, ordinal and ethical contents of the curriculum were sexuate. Reflection on the world is a second type of pedagogical approach. An example of this is an Ignatian pedagogy (i.e. a pedagogy developed within the tradition of St Ignatius). The thrust of this pedagogy was that in doing the spiritual exercises (to know the will of God) this would transform the learner so that she would make appropriate decisions about how she should act in the world. Without this

26  Conceptual Framings sense of spirituality, the subsequent ethical precepts held by her that compel her to behave in this rather than that way are empty and moreover likely to be misguided and wrong. Reflection then in this sense also embraces action in the world. The person behaves in a reflective manner. Meanwhile, as an essential part of a Catholic liberal theory of education, a pedagogy of individual selfdiscovery was developed and used. The goal here is for the individual learner to achieve an independent point of view and a personal Catholic voice. This can perhaps be described as a form of spiritual apprenticeship. A more organised Catholic form of external engagement reached its height of popularity in the medieval enthusiasm for service, using the resources of the surrounding community for learning scenarios. This approach has connections and relations with a pedagogic approach developed by the philosopher, John Dewey (1928), learning by doing, which comprises a notion of phronesis or practical wisdom8. Dewey suggested a five-phase notion of pedagogy: an exploratory phase, in which the learner delimits and explicates the problem that they have encountered; an intellectualisation of that problem so that a practical solution is forthcoming; the development of a methodology to allow the collection of data to define the problem and the solution; the elaboration of the idea or supposition and testing this idea by working through a process of imaginative activity – a key theme in the educational philosophy of Maxine Greene. Another way of framing the concept is by determining what counts as a pedagogic activity. This sense of inclusion and exclusion is an ever-present concern, with the stress on instrumentality and examinability as criteria for certain types of knowledge being included in a curriculum and others being excluded. Indeed, the concept of pedagogy is now understood as exclusively didactic, with this borrowed idea more in line with how pedagogy is used as a concept in Europe. Didactics has acquired a more instrumental function. An alternative notion of pedagogy is what has become known as social pedagogy9 and this has its roots in Continental Europe and Scandinavia; and it also takes us back to Ancient Greek notions of pedagogy, expressed through the figure of the pedagogue. The principle behind this new or revived form of pedagogy is the flourishing child, or at least a focus not on the narrow instrumentalism of learning but learning as an integral part of being and becoming a human being. The scope of pedagogic activity has been widened to include notions of reflection, meta-cognition and self-awareness (see Chapter 4). Critical pedagogy is designed to produce habits of thought that underpin and go deeper than our everyday thinking. Paulo Freire (1970) argued for an educational approach that encouraged learners to think critically about their education by making connections between their own individual problems in life and the social context or indexicality of their lives. This emancipatory pedagogy comprises a praxis whereby the learner engages in a cycle of developing theory, applying that theory, evaluating the results, reflecting on them

Maxine Greene and Imaginative Possibilities 27 and then theorising anew. Social transformation is the purpose and intention of this praxis at the collective level (see Chapter 14).

Pedagogy Pedagogy, then, as a concept can be understood in several different ways (as elements of contemporaneous networks or constellations of meaning). We can understand it as the means by which we develop as human beings (a Bildung). Maxine Greene (2007: 102), for example, talked about its meaning-making qualities: Each one’s life-history, in fact, is a history of emergencies and transformations. Consciousness arises, writes Merleau-Ponty, in the realisation that “I am able”, meaning the realisation that one can reach beyond what is immediate, make horizons explicit and transcend what is a field of presences towards other future fields. What were once perplexing shapes and fragments on the fringes of the perceptual field are thematized, transmuted into symbolic forms. Naming occurs; interpretations occur; meanings are built up; intersubjective relations entered into; gradually, the embodied consciousness constitutes a world. The concept of pedagogy can be construed as movement, progression or enhancement. It can take several forms: negating, absenting, progressing, futuring (a notion that Maxine Greene used extensively in her writings), intensifying, extending, unfolding, articulating and realising. Negating is a process of semantic realignment. As such it connects an expression of an object, object-relation, object-configuration or person to another expression of these objects with a meaning that is opposed to the meaning of the original expression. Absenting is both something that is not there and an active process of making something absent with the intention of bringing it back into the fold. This is a pedagogy of absenting and returning those absented objects to the world10. Progression in one of its many pedagogic forms can be construed as intensification. Whereas extension refers to the amount or range of progression, intensification or complexity refers to the extent to which a sophisticated understanding of a concept has replaced a superficial account. There is also a type of progression, abstracting, which involves moving from a concrete understanding of a phenomenon to a more abstract one. A pedagogic response to this type of progression is to revisit and reconstruct a set of ideas or operations at different levels of complexity at different stages in the learning programme (cf. Bruner, 1966)11. The idea of progression can be construed as a process where the result is already present at the first moment and is openly revealed at the second moment. This model of the unfolding of the enfolded understands learning not so much as learning something that is external to the learner, but as the realisation of an implicit potential that human beings have. This is a pedagogy

28  Conceptual Framings of completion or realisation12. Maxine Greene (2007: 1) also suggested that pedagogy might be understood as a futuring: Young children, as you know better than I, keep looking, touching, smelling, reaching, finding out what the world is like – unless adults close them in, try to channel curiosity and wonder, try to “school” instead of educating, to impose basics and discrete bits of knowledge, instead of creating situations in which children, using their own initiatives, learn how to learn. They do that by futuring, moving beyond where they are. This is the power of imagination to break through the crusts of the conventional and the routine, to light the slow fuse of possibility. A notion of progression is implicit in an increased capacity to articulate, explain or amplify an idea or construct. The learner retains the ability to deploy the skill, and in addition, she can now articulate, explain or amplify what she is able to do and what she has done. If we want to articulate an experience, there are several conditions: knowledge of the object, knowledge of the process and knowledge of how the object and the process can work. These iterations of progression are all pedagogic forms or discursive objects. They all suggest or imply a notion of reflection or an eliciting of meaning, a phrase that Maxine Greene used many times in her writings.

Imaginative possibilities Some examples of learning objects are: learning how to care for someone, learning that two plus two equals four, learning how to read, learning about the spatiality and temporality of objects in the world, learning what a verb is, learning how to take part in a conversation, learning how to catch a ball, learning to be kind, learning how to trap a football, learning what trapping a football might mean, learning how to build a house, learning how to express a wish, learning what a mother is and what love is, learning what being a part of a way of life might be like and much more. These learning objects have dispositional elements, so, for example, you do not just learn how to count up to six, you understand the activity of counting upwards as enframed in a complicated network of concepts and what things are. In effect, this commits us to understanding concepts as being embedded in our three networks or constellations of meaning: the antecedents of the concept; its relations to other relevant concepts and the way the concept is used in the lifeworld. Grammar then is a semantic idea13; in trying to understand the grammar of a collection of pedagogic processes and learning objects, we are always looking at what is meant by them and their arrangements. Grammar is not understood in terms of its linguistic reference, but rather in terms of how it can show meaning14. A child learns by using their imagination and being allowed to use their imagination. The reason for this is to develop and extend their ability to

Maxine Greene and Imaginative Possibilities 29 determine the possibilities of objects. In this book, we have been constructing an argument that concept learning is about developing the imaginative possibilities of how a concept can be used in a way of life15. This supports the notion of learning as being about dispositional concepts and acquiring these dispositional concepts as they are used in the world and as they fit within a framework or network of other dispositional concepts. This is achieved by determining the possibilities of use and being that inhere in these objects (conceptual or otherwise), even if only transiently.

A play-pedagogy The principles that undergird a notion of play-pedagogy are complex and interrelated. A play-pedagogy is a word-object that acquires its semantic content from meanings that are given to both words and then used in combination. These word-objects can only be understood in relation to how they are used in the world or a world. Indeed, using criteria or acknowledging that there are always criteria being used in judgements that are made points to the purpose or function of these criteria – the use of any criteria signifies a set of enablements and constraints as to how a word-object or concept can be used. Using the term, play-pedagogy, allows us to say something about two human activities or practices, playing and learning; and consequently a concept, such as this, is better understood as an active, engaged and committed activity in the world. A play-pedagogy has a particular relationship to knowledge and this can be expressed as a means by which we learn about particular objects that are in the world, but that can only be learned in a particular way – the activity or learning task has a logical relationship with the learning model being employed. In addition, ethical and taxonomic valuations that inhere in the concept and in the practice of play-pedagogy are central to the meanings we give to it. It is also worth noting that the concept of play-pedagogy has attached to it properties that relate to the grammar of the pedagogic process. In Chapter 10, we show how this concept of play-pedagogy was manifested in real-life settings through the work of Susan Isaacs16. The concept and practice of play is determined by the principle that looking at things as if they could be otherwise is a worthwhile activity. Play is about transformational possibilities; that is, it both creates the conditions for being imaginative, and it allows the practice of imagination to function. This transformational process refers to ideas, materials, media and actions, creating in the process novel ways of thinking about these activities. Maxine Greene (2007: 5) suggested that play allows the shifting of perspectives and different ways of seeing: Social imagination is the capacity to invent visions of what should be in our deficit society, in the streets where we live and in our schools. Social imagination not only suggests but also requires that one take action to repair or renew.

30  Conceptual Framings There are three possibilities here: introducing into the learning setting alternative ways of seeing and thinking that the learner was not aware of; reworking the meanings that the learner has given to objects, object-relations and object configurations in their mind; and making something more coherent and adequate than it is at present. Play is the transformation of acts of imagination into actions in the world. There is also the sense that can be given to the concept of understanding and connecting with other people’s minds and circumstances. This argument was made by Maxine Greene (2007: 5) in its strongest form, and this is that in order to behave well towards other people and to empathise with them and their circumstances, we must have a strong sense of imagination, because in imagining we step outside our own beliefs, understandings, reflections and memories in a transgressive sense, and thus implicitly accept that there is another person or persons who is or are not like us17. This both affirms to us the existence of other people and other minds and allows us to behave in ways which are not purely solipsistic, as Maxine Greene (2007: 63) suggested: One of the reasons I have come to concentrate on imagination as a means through which we can assemble a coherent world is that imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible. It is what enables us to cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those we teachers have called “other” over the years. If these others are willing to give us clues, we can look in some manner through strangers’ eyes and hear through their ears. This is because, of all one’s cognitive capacities, imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities. It allows us to break with the taken for granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions. Another sense that can be given to the term, imagination, is that it allows us to develop alternative meanings of a concept or word-complex. This is after all what we have been doing and will be doing throughout this book, following the injunction that in trying to understand a phenomenon, we have to work out its possibilities of use. We of course have to do more than this, such as also try to understand how it fits into a network (or networks) of other concepts, propositions, embodiments and processes. The key for us here is to work out what the connection might be between an act of imagination and a specific act of learning. In learning, we are engaging in several processes, such as responding to a learning stimulus, internalising an object from an environment, reflecting in different types of ways on a learning object, assimilating that learning object into the array of other objects in our minds, and then externalising and establishing a new relationship with the environment, even though this might have changed as a result of the actions of other human beings. Following the principle that a pedagogy or learning process is logically dependent on the meanings that inhere in the learning object, play as a practice would seem to fit this best; and this is because play has characteristics that better align with the exercise and development of an

Maxine Greene and Imaginative Possibilities 31 imaginative capacity in the learner. Playing then is not a rest from learning – a way of renewing the energies and capacities of the learner before they embark on harder and more demanding tasks – but an essential pedagogic process for the learning of certain types of objects in the world, and perhaps more significantly, for laying the foundations for learning other types of objects as well. Another pedagogy of the imagination is learning through the Arts. Maxine Greene (2007: 69) throughout her writing career focused her theory of education and learning on the experience of artistic envelopment, creation and recreation: Local knowledge and local coming together ought to counter the tendency towards abstraction, as should a conscious concern for the particular, the everyday, the concrete. (Introducing works of literature and art into teacher education can help teachers develop this conscious concern. Literature deals with particularities, seduces persons to see and to feel, to imagine, to lend their lives to another’s perspective.) To move, then, from the particularities to wider and wider graspings is, in part, a matter of looking through more and more particularities, to discover on others’ questions and visions more and more ways of transcending one-dimensional grasping. It is the power of the Arts that allows the imagination to be realised, and this implies a different mechanism or apparatus from that of play. The Arts do not just affirm what is but reject utterly the idea of a thin conception or onedimensional expression of the world. It is impossible to understand Maxine Greene’s regard for the Arts without first understanding what drove her in her quest to understand the pedagogic imagination. The quest, which she sets out in Releasing the Imagination (Greene, 1978: 1), was deeply personal: ‘reaching, always reaching, beyond the limits imposed by a woman’s life’, and in addition, fundamentally public: ‘that of a person struggling to connect the undertaking of education … to the remaking of a public space’ (Greene, 1988: xi). Her life and thus her biography was and is always praxical, always open and always in the making, a consistent longing for ‘something better’ than there is, ‘that which might be better in an always open world’ (Greene, 1988: xi), and this longing was sensitive to the gendered place and role of women in the world. Feminism as a concept and as a practice works in the same way, and it is important that in a chapter about imaginative possibilities, we make some connections, discursive and material, between this idea and the forms that feminism can take in the lifeworld. Greene after all called herself a feminist18.

Feminism Roy Bhaskar (2011) distinguished between three types of power. The first type refers to the capacities of women19 to act in the world, that is, speak a language, enter into a relationship, reason or communicate. These power(s) exist even if they are not theorised, perceived or actualised in events. Power can

32  Conceptual Framings also have negative characteristics, referring as it does to relations of control, oppression, domination and exploitation, such as in women’s subjugation in history. He identified a third type of power and developed this idea through his philosophy of metaReality20. This mode of power is intertwined with a notion of in-the-world spirituality. Power is enframed in all human beings as a capacity or potential that can be transformed in action. Consequently, and from a feminist perspective, it is perhaps possible to conceptualise power as having three dimensions: as a resource for redistributing goods of both a material and discursive kind, as domination and as empowerment. Another way of thinking about power is to distinguish between action-theoretical conceptions of power (here the focus is on the dispositional capabilities of individuals and more importantly for our purposes here, the dispositional capacities of groups of people, such as women) and broader constitutive conceptions of power (here the focus is on institutional and systemic structuring possibilities for action and of course for resistance – see Chapter 14). This is directly relevant to decolonising processes21, which involve acts of resistance to other, subjugating and epistemic, colonising processes. Just as radical feminists tried to broaden the theoretical framework for analysing power so that it might encompass both class division and women’s subordination, intersectional theorists have tried to broaden the framework even further so that it embraces all forms of human subjugation and exploitation. The purpose of developing a theory of intersectionality is to frame holistically a notion of power that encompasses sexism, colonisation, racism, class oppression, heterosexism and other axes of oppression. The process of intersectionality is part of the genealogy of the concept and praxis of gendering: There is another argument for the need to look critically at what is understood to be theory in education and the need to encourage interpretation of structures and texts from the perspective of individual vantage points, individual backgrounds, and individual locations in the world. Nothing else, I am convinced, will effectively counter the fearful separation of facts from values that allows persons to claim that the knowledge they depend on is wholly neutral, even when used to dominate and impose controls. (Greene, 2007: 61) In this book, we have identified eight different meanings that we can give to the concept of feminism: liberal feminism, critical or intersectional feminism, feminist valuing, naturalism, radical feminism, epistemic feminism, decategorising feminism and libertarian feminism. The next task is to try to understand the connections and relations between them. Here are some specific frames or framings that might enable us to do this: the frame of molecules and atoms, for example, neurophysiological explanations, which have some lackings or lacks as Greene put it; the frame of associations between variables; the function

Maxine Greene and Imaginative Possibilities 33 or use-in-the-world frame; the frame of causal relations; the frame of events and event(ing); the linguistic frame; the universal hermeneutic frame; the frame of structuring; the semantic frame and the universal or transcendental frame. This places these frames in some form of hierarchy. However, this is not a straightforward hierarchy where the atomic frame is the lowest point (has the least purchase on the problem that we are seeking a solution for) and the transcendental frame is the highest point (has the most purchase on the problem as it is defined) with other levels equally distanced between the meanings given to the first and last frames. In this case, different criteria are being applied to these different frames and this complicates the description of the relations between them. These frames then are manifestations of difference and in particular the determining difference between the different levels or frames. If we focus on and commit ourselves to the subatomic level, where the medium is the atomic particle, we are necessarily adopting a physicalist view of consciousness, a belief that consciousness and individual thought is an illusion or at least that this illusion is composed of these atomic particles, an accidental view of change, a reductionist methodology that is bereft of meaning and a causal relationship to other levels of explanation or other frames – it is more basic. At the level of association, then, we are committing ourselves to a reductionist methodology or way of seeing the world. Scientific realists and statistical positivists generally subscribe, knowingly or unknowingly, to a Humean theory of causality22 as spatiotemporal contiguity, succession and constant conjunction and this is founded on the idea that although it is not possible to observe a relation between cause and effect, it is possible to identify an association between two or more events and then infer a causal relation. Objections to Hume’s theory of causality have been made. It cannot account for spurious associations or order cause and effect relations and there is no guarantee that all the possible interacting variables have been identified. It is also reductive because it treats these variables as real, and therefore elides epistemology with ontology. The meaning of a concept is always embedded in a framework of other concept-meanings. The detheorisation of much contemporary research involves a separating out of the concept from the framework in order for it to have the properties of a variable. Having detheorised the concept, relations are then identified between these different variables, even if the variable itself does not have a meaningful relationship with the world. If we work to the frame of interpretation, then we understand human action as inseparable from meaning-making, with our experiences organised through preformulated interpretive framings. Interpretivists believe that we belong to traditions of thought, and the task of the theorist is to make sense of these interpretations, even though such interpretive activity is mediated through the theorist’s own frame of reference. The field of study is therefore the meaningful

34  Conceptual Framings actions of social actors and social institutions. Phenomenologically, Greene (1973: 7) argued that: To do philosophy, then, is to become highly conscious of the phenomena and events in the world as it presents itself to consciousness. To do philosophy … is to develop a fundamental project, to go beyond the situations one confronts, and refuse reality as given in the name of a reality to be produced. This phenomenological and semantic stance was fundamental to her work. The language frame is more difficult to comprehend. The issue is that our attempts at describing the world are always and inevitably circumscribed by the state (and contents) of our language, and what this means is that this language set – its structures, its structured meanings (the semantic dimension), its ways of asserting what is true knowledge and what is false knowledge, its designation of the types of relationships between mind and the world that can exist, in short, its determination of what reality is like – is the prime determinant of our way of life. Epistemology, semantics, pragmatics, ethics, metaphysics, science and technology are all determined by the implicit and overt structures of the language that we are using to express ourselves. Some have argued that we can get round this problem, if we see it as a problem, by referring to other languages, but here we encounter a further problem, which is that of translation. An assumption is being made here that this is a conscious process of inscription or an internal operation in the mind where the person making the translation speaks both languages, and can quite easily translate one to the other. This is a false assumption and is more obviously realised in genres that are difficult to translate, such as in poetry (where there are few satisfactory translations and even then it is tempting to say that a new poem has been created, which we like). This argument that we cannot operate in any sense outside of a language or a set of languages is contingent on the idea that there are no universals, such as thought universals, behavioural universals, existential universals, metaphysical universals; or to put it in a different way, we cannot think, operate, exist or speculate outside (without using) a language. And further to this, since language is our world, we cannot know if there is another world outside of the language or languages we are using. However, there are clear differences between the first and last framings. There are also different time-relations at the different levels, for example, the level of events refers to distinctive points in time, whereas the level of causation refers to whole systemic events that last over time. These ten levels or frames then are: atomic, associational, functional, causal, actual, linguistic, hermeneutic, structural, semantic and universal. They enframe the concepts and praxes that we are concerned about in this book: feminism, learning and curriculum. Our ten different feminist valuations: liberal feminism, critical or intersectional feminism, feminist valuing, feminist naturalism, radical feminism,

Maxine Greene and Imaginative Possibilities 35 epistemic feminism, decategorising feminism and libertarian feminism have relations between them and these are not just a result of the contingency of history. They are also structured in relation to a particular form of hierarchical valorisation. We address the issue of valuing the various feminist perspectives at a later point in the book (see Chapter 14). In the next chapter, we examine the work of Susan Haack, or at least that part of her work that concerns itself with the concept of judgement.

Notes 1 Maxine Greene was a professor of philosophy and education and the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education at Teachers’ College, Columbia University. She taught there for many years, while also directing the Centre for Social Imagination, the Arts and Education. She also served as ‘philosopher-inresidence’ at the Lincoln Centre Institute for the Arts in Education; and she was a past president of the American Educational Research Association, and the Philosophy of Education Society. She was born in December 1917 and died in May 2014. 2 Pedagogy then can be understood as a concept in the traditional propositional sense, and in addition as a practice. 3 Alternative views of the concept of pedagogy inevitably technicise the notion. 4 Without a full understanding of what knowledge is, Bernstein trivialises the conception of the transformative process. In addition, he treats culture and cultural formations as rationally coherent and logically consistent. 5 The Great Didactic (Didactica Magna) was first published in Czech in 1648, Latin in 1657 and English in 1896. 6 cf. Blyth (1981). 7 cf. Louth (1996). 8 In Aristotelian ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics for example, phronesis is distinguished from wisdom or intellectual virtues, such as episteme and techne. The reason for this is because it has an essentially practical character. 9 Some of the features of a social pedagogy can be found in Smith (2016). 10 cf. Bhaskar (2002). 11 A spiral curriculum, a concept widely attributed to Jerome Bruner (1966) refers to a type of curriculum in which key concepts are taught throughout the curriculum, but with deepening layers of complexity, or in different applications. 12 cf. Bhaskar (2002). The concept of unfolding may have serious and harmful implications, such as in eugenicist beliefs. 13 cf. Wittgenstein (1953). 14 Stanley Cavell (1979: 177) described this enframing in the following way: ‘In learning language, you do not merely learn the pronunciation of sounds, and their grammatical orders, but the “forms of life” which make those sounds the words they are, do what they do – e.g. name, call, point, express a wish or affection, indicate a choice or an aversion, etc.’ 15 ‘We feel as if we had to see right into phenomena: yet our investigation is directed not towards phenomena, but rather as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. What this means is that we call to mind the kinds of statement that we make about phenomena’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953: 90, his italics). 16 Susan Isaacs (1930a,b) argued that children learn empirically from contact with the physical world; children’s knowledge grows as a consequence of this engagement, through experimentation, observation and discovery; children have a

36  Conceptual Framings

17 1 8 19 20 21 22

natural curiosity about the natural world; children are capable of reason when interested in the subject matter; children will engage in their interests given the right environment; children move between phantasy and reason with no set structure and children can hypothesise and make inferences. Pretending and imagining are sometimes thought of as homologous concepts. An obvious distinction between the two is that one is a state of the mind and the other is a behaviour in the world. cf. Greene and Griffiths (2003). Bhaskar’s philosophy is not gender-specific. Bhaskar’s philosophy of metaReality is a philosophy that transcends critical realism in its realist state and insists on the existence and necessity of non-dual states and phases of being and a critique of a disenchanted reality. We address the concept and practice of decolonisation or decolonising in the last chapter of this book. This is one interpretation of David Hume’s notion or idea of causality and the most common one, and he makes this point repeatedly in his writings. Here are two instances of it (Hume, 2000: 161): ‘All ideas are deriv’d from and represent impressions. We never have any impression, that contains any power or efficacy. We never therefore have any idea of power’ and ‘I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation (cause and effect) is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other’ (Hume, 2000: 167). There are many other instances in his A Treatise of Human Nature.

3

Susan Haack and Foundherentism

The principal focus of this chapter is knowledge and whether it is possible for us to know anything. If we want to argue that it is possible to know something, then we have to provide good reasons as to why a sceptical position is untenable. A sceptical view about knowledge can be understood as a knower having a fundamental doubt about a particular instance of knowledge or a general doubting or questioning attitude towards knowledge in general. An extreme version of this scepticism is that there are no reasonable grounds for holding any knowledge beliefs (empirical or a priori truths), and consequently we are not able to decide between competing ethical or epistemological accounts of state of affairs in the world. An epistemic sceptic and, in particular, an ethical relativist is unable to give their assent to the proposition that men and women should be equally treated and equally respected. Richard Rorty (1998) adopted a position, such as this, with the consequence that all matters of justification, for him, were simpliciter cultural and political. This means that processes of knowledge (knowing) and justification (justifying) play out in environments and settings that have acquiring and maintaining power as their central functionings. A true-knowledge approach implies that there is an important connection or relation between knowing and justifying, in that we cannot subsequently know something without it also being true in some sense or another. We are concerned in this chapter then with justified or true knowledge and with Susan Haack’s account of this, which she called foundherentism. Before we describe what this is, we need to provide a set of reasons as to why, in a book about women’s experiences, learning and the relations between the two, this is an important or salient issue and why we need to discuss it at all. In the opening chapter of this book, we suggested that the languaged concept of feminism has, as a discursive object, certain properties, such as being polysemic, semantically contested, networked, interactive, powerful and dynamic. In addition, we suggested that as an object it has causal powers, both as a conceptual object and because it is in the world, or at least in a world. And thus, as with all concepts, to understand and use it in a book about women’s experiences in the lifeworld is also to position it within antecedent, contemporaneous and applied networks of meaning that relate to these experiences. DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-4

38  Conceptual Framings This means that we are acknowledging that language and language systems are valorised1 and we are using the term, feminism, in its many guises, to suggest that there are several different interpretations of the male/female dyad. In this sense and consequently, we are committed to providing a justification for the way we use the concept in the world, while also attempting to show that alternative versions are less apt or less able to be used in this way. The other reason for doing this is to determine, in an ethical and epistemological sense, reason-giving differences between our different manifestations of feminism (see Chapter 1). Learning as a concept and a practice is of the same order. Susan Haack’s justificatory schema is a useful account of how we can do this.

Epistemology Epistemology has traditionally allowed us to distinguish between different types of knowledge claims, specifically between legitimate and illegitimate ones2. The development of the social sciences in the nineteenth century took place under the long shadow of the physical sciences, and consequently, these disciplines or proto-disciplines sought to mirror the procedures and approaches adopted by the natural sciences. Such approaches can be characterised in the following way. There is a real-world out there and a correct way of describing it. Theorising3 about that world is simpliciter a matter of following the right methods or procedures. What these are is clearly disputed and a matter of some concern, as we have seen in the response to the Covid pandemic by various scientists of different persuasions around the world. However, the principal characteristic of scientific knowledge is that it aspires to the production of true knowledge because it works to criteria, such as systematicity, objectivity and rigour. In addition, science accumulates knowledge, that is, it builds incrementally on previous knowledge. However, it is hard to argue that the social sciences or the humanities have developed a body of knowledge, which presents unequivocal truths about its subject matter, which is in some sense equivalent to a scientific body of knowledge. (There are many reasons for this; not least that social objects, relations and object-configurations are discursively and institutionally dynamic and morphogenetic4.) Furthermore, twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy has generally accepted that any observations that we make about the world, including those that are integral to the knowledge-production process and can be construed as ‘facts’, are always conditioned by prior understandings we have of the world5. Some word-objects and some conceptions, such as a fact, data, a statistic, information and evidence, are understood as basic and foundational, and thus as having a positive truth-value – a fact cannot be disputed, data is unchallengeable, a statistic is a truthful representation of something in the world, gathering information allows us to go on in life with some certainty, and evidence is required for us to assert that something is true. However, fact-based epistemic or semantic theories, including Wittgenstein’s

Susan Haack and Foundherentism 39 early representationalist theory of the Tractatus (1961) and Searle’s (1995) status object theory, are unable to determine how the real relations in social life, those between knowledge of the world and the world itself, operate. Data, for example, is one of these foundational constructs. There is a need here to answer questions about the provenance of data, the relationship of data to truth, the placing of data at the centre of our inquiries, the way data seems to have an objective value-free dimension to it, the sense in which data cannot be questioned, the cohabitation of data and fact, the exclusion of interpretation at this basic level, indeed the ascription of this level as basic6. The real question then is to ask if anything can really be given, beyond reproach or criticism or questioning. We can test out this proposition in relation to a data collection exercise of counting the number of women in a delimited space, at a particular timepoint. This would seem to be a fairly straightforward activity. However, it is not as simple as it seems. The first problem is working out what a person is and in particular what a woman is as opposed to a man or an intersex person. According to current theory7, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is the most important criterion: if you have a Y chromosome you are male, and if you don’t have it, you are female. But some people straddle the boundary – their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their sexual anatomy says another – and these may be thought of as intersex persons. Then, in the absence of being able to test these persons in a laboratory and only being able to observe these persons from a distance, can we identify which of those persons in the delimited space at a set moment of time is male or female or intersex? These debates focus on gendered indicators and the third problem concerns the notion of personhood. Can we always say that girl-children should be thought of as persons in a full sense, despite an acknowledgement that they share certain physical characteristics with a woman and that the girl-child will in most circumstances grow up to be a woman. There are genuine disagreements about whether a girl-child shares all the characteristics that we associate with an adult female, such as responsibility for their own actions. Virtually all societies deny rights and privileges to children and there is the issue of when (i.e. at what age) a child ceases to become a child and becomes an adult. It is possible that we can solve this problem by restricting our definition of a person to certain physical characteristics, notwithstanding that these physical characteristics change in relation to age. The fourth problem is that some of the women in this delimited space may be pregnant. Not all of the pregnant women will show external signs of being pregnant and once again a test in a controlled setting would be required to determine whether the women we are wanting to include in our population are pregnant or not. There is a much more serious issue, however, and this is whether we count an embryo/foetus from the moment of conception to birth as a person, as a Roman Catholic would, or whether we only count that person as a person after birth, or whether we identify a point between conception and

40  Conceptual Framings birth at which we decide that they have attained a sense of personhood. For example, some people distinguish between an embryo and a foetus and set a date as the tenth week of development in the womb. These are difficulties we are likely to have with counting women in a space at a set time-point, seemingly a straightforward task, but in reality hardly that, and even then, there are issues with time-points, physical boundaries, observer positional biases, appearances of women and more. In order to count the number of women in a delimited area, we have to make a series of assumptions about what we are looking for, and we have to come to an agreement about some key conceptual issues. Data talk has a certain rhetorical force and a performative function. How are some discursive objects constructed as data in the first place? Facts are given, they are out there and they cannot be disputed. But in reality, facts or fact(ing)s are simpliciter propositions, knowledge fragments, processes, embodiments and dispositions, that have attached to them a truth component. They are a means by which we can understand what is true or authentic. They trail an argument about the veracity of things we might want to say about the world. And, in addition, truth is frame-specific and valued in relation to the way we can see the world, whether in atomic, associational, functional, causal, actual, linguistic, hermeneutic, structural, semantic or holistic framings (see back to Chapter 2). The truth of something, because it is frame-specific, has ideological leanings. However, we must be careful here for two reasons: first, ideology is a meta-concept, and it, therefore, has certain properties, such as being semantically contested, networked, interactive, powerful and dynamic, and second, the polysemic nature of the concept means that we can use it in a variety of ways. The first set of meanings that can be given to the notion is that ideology is an action-focused set of beliefs and consists of a reason or reasons for doing something in the world. It is local and specific, in that it doesn’t refer to any type of world-view or Weltanschauung, except insofar as all ascribed meanings have a relation to meta-concepts, such as truth, objectivity and reality. The second set of meanings that we can attach to the concept understands it as an obfuscation of reality. A person is deceived about what reality is like because they are surrounded by a fog of misinformation that doesn’t allow them to apprehend its true nature. Under this conception, ideology is understood as contra-positioned to both a real-world (Kant’s8 noumena – das Ding an sich) and a truthful account of it (Kant’s phenomena – Phänomen). Ideology operates by camouflaging those social conditions and relations which are flawed in some sense or another, giving an illusory account of their function and rationale. Women are deceived about their actual conditions of subservience. What this means is that given the right conditions and circumstances, ideology could be stripped away and we would see the world as it really is and we could live our lives with and through a noumenal rendering of this world. The third and perhaps more significant set of meanings that we can give to the notion of ideology is that all our dealings with and in the world are in some

Susan Haack and Foundherentism 41 sense or another ideological. All our actions in the world, our beliefs about this world and about ourselves, the way we conduct ourselves and can conduct ourselves in the world, the use of our sensory apparatus, our deployment of meta-concepts and conceptual frames, come from a particular and specific set of ideas or from an ideology. There is nothing else – there is no sense of an ultimate reality that we can access. What matters is our Weltanschauung9 or world-view, and this is clearly in conflict with another, or even several other, Weltanschauungen or world-views. It also supports the distinction that Kant made between noumena and phenomena. What it doesn’t mean, however, is that we always act, see the world and believe things, which are necessarily in accord with our world-view or a world-view. Human beings are sometimes mistaken or confused. This interpretation of the notion of ideology is different from our second version because it makes a strong case for there not being a correct account of reality, only that reality is always ideologically mediated. If law and ethics and epistemology are reduced to ideology, then they cannot be thought of as categorical in any real sense. The positivist/empiricist method (cf. Durkheim, 1995 or Ayer, 1936) incorporates an idealised view of scientific activity and can be characterised as a set of general methodological rules, with the claim being made that it is categorical. A clear distinction is made between knowers and objects in the world. Facts can be identified, free of the values and personal concerns of the observer. Any assertions or statements we might want to make about this world are about observable measurable phenomena, and this implies that two theorists if they apply the correct method would come to the same conclusions. It is the correct application of the method that guarantees certainty and trust in the theories that are produced10. This view of theory-development is and has been disputed by interpretivists, phenomenologists, semioticians, critical theorists and postmodernists, who, in their turn, have been criticised for not providing a way of developing their theories that fulfils the Enlightenment desire for universal knowledge – knowledge which is shorn of superstition, personal preference and special pleading. All these different types of theoretician seek to provide an alternative to a view of theory-building that prioritises reduction to a set of variables, a separation between the knower and what they sought to know, a means for predicting and controlling the future and a set of perfectly integrated descriptions of the world with a view of the social actor as mechanistic and determined. Semioticians provide one possible alternative. They generally focus on the meanings that social actors construct about their lives and in relation to the world and argue that human beings negotiate these meanings in their social practices. Human action then cannot be separated from meaning-making, with our experiences organised through preformulated interpretive frames. Semioticians believe that we belong to traditions of thought, and the task of the theorist is to make sense of these interpretations, even though such interpretive activity is mediated through the theorist’s own frame of reference. This is a practical matter for each person, although of course they cannot develop meanings on

42  Conceptual Framings their own, since all meaning-making is located within cultural, linguistic and historical communities of practice. The field of study is therefore the meaningful actions of social actors and social institutions. These frameworks comprise accounts of, or reasoned arguments to support, a claim about some aspect of the world. Consequently, it is possible to determine that any claim to knowledge we might want to make is credible: that there are four ways of establishing the truth or otherwise of any propositional claim we might want to make about knowledge, i.e., epistemic, coherentist, rational and logical and that some form of combination of these is possible and necessary. Susan Haack (1993) argues for a reconciliation between foundationalism and coherentism, with the understanding that foundationalism can be understood as having logical, rational and epistemic dimensions. Haack called her reconciliation of foundationalist and coherentist elements, foundherentism.

Foundherentism The argument that Haack makes in her book: Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (1993) is set out in the introduction and first chapter. Haack has written about other matters than epistemology, such as legal knowledge and philosophical pragmatism, but we are concerned in this chapter with only one part of her work, her attempt to reinstate epistemology (against moves by such people as Richard Rorty (1979) and Michel Foucault (1969) to relativise the notion) and consequently her attempt to develop an objective way of deciding between or making a judgement about different versions of the world – a theory of epistemic justification11. What she is essentially doing is producing a new account of epistemology, which avoids the difficulties that both foundationalism and coherentism have and replaces it with a theory that combines the various forms of foundationalism that have been identified (logical foundationalism, epistemic foundationalism, atomic foundationalism, non-inferential foundationalism and the like) with coherentist theories, such as the conceptual theory that we are advocating in this book. She wants to include in her theory of foundherentism an argument that knowledge both allows for mutual support among beliefs and takes account of individual and collective experience and is thus neither purely a priori nor purely empirical in character. It is a fusing of these two concepts. Haack (1993: 14) defines foundationalism in relation to two essential precepts: 1 Some justified beliefs are basic; a basic belief is justified independently of the support of any other belief. 2 All other justified beliefs are derived; a derived belief is justified via the support, direct or indirect, of a basic belief or beliefs.

Susan Haack and Foundherentism 43 For her, this is a minimal claim and is intended to distinguish it from the claims made by other foundationalists, such that knowledge is certainly true (cf. Descartes, 1988), incorrigible (cf. Russell with Whitehead, 1909) or infallible in the sense that they cannot be falsely held (papal infallibility is an example). In addition, Haack (1993) wants to include as possibilities for foundational knowledge three variants, where a basic belief is justified but not because it is supported by any other belief. These are: an experientialist version in that a basic belief is justified by the support of a person’s sensory or introspective experience12, an extrinsic version where basic beliefs are justified because of a relation or connection between what that person believes and its truth-value13 and an intrinsicality theory where basic beliefs are justified in themselves14. Haack also proposes that there can be different degrees of foundationalism in any set of beliefs, resulting in a range of variants: strong pure foundationalism, weak pure foundationalism, strong impure foundationalism and weak impure foundationalism. Advocates for classical conceptions of foundationalism argue that if we want to establish the truth of a proposition, we have to identify those basic principles that underpin the way we describe and use them and the relevant inferences that allow the researcher to move from a set of premises to a conclusion. These basic principles or beliefs are not in need of any further forms of justification if we want to use them as foundational principles. This strong foundationalist view therefore comprises a process of identifying self-evident truths, and consequently, if a foundational belief is to be thought of as credible, it requires no further justification and no further evidence to support it. Haack (1993: 17) compares this and its variants to a coherentist theory of justification, where ‘(a) belief is justified iff it belongs to a coherent set of beliefs’. She suggests that this set of beliefs is also thought of or can be thought of as requiring the element of consistency or being comprehensive or having an explanatory coherence. Each of these additions is crucial to how we might understand the concept of coherentism. Haack (1993: 18) further distinguishes between what she calls uncompromising coherentism15 and moderated coherentism, which accepts the first part of this but not the second16. A further version, which Haack calls moderated, degree-of embedding coherentism, accepts the second part but denies the necessity of the first part17. These two forms of justification are placed in some form of opposition to each other, although Haack is at pains to point out that this doesn’t exhaust all the possibilities of this relation. In short, Haack (1993: 19) wants to suggest that foundationalism and coherentism can be distinguished because foundationalism requires ‘one-directionality, coherentism does not; coherentism requires justification to be exclusively a matter of relations among beliefs, foundationalism does not’. Haack’s concern then is for a reconciliation between foundationalism and coherentism, and the argument is difficult and detailed, with much of this detail being lost in the abbreviated account that we give here. However, this reconciliation results in what Haack refers to as foundherentism, a rather ugly neologism, but a stunningly appropriate one, especially when the theory being

44  Conceptual Framings proposed is unitary and is attempting some sort of mediation between different and rival theories. Haack (1993: 19) characterises foundherentism as: A subject’s experience is relevant to the justification of his (sic.) empirical beliefs, but there need be no privileged class of empirical beliefs justified exclusively by the support of experience, independently of the support of other beliefs; and Justification is not exclusively one-directional, but involves pervasive relations of mutual support. An example of Haack’s ‘pervasive relations of mutual support’ is the belief system that we are using throughout this book, which focuses on concepts and concept development. A concept, such as judgemental rationality, is both a material and discursive object and consequently has all the characteristics that we associate with these types of objects. In the real world, boundaries are drawn between objects. As a discursive object, the concept of justifying has certain properties, such as being polysemic, semantically contested, networked, interactive, powerful and dynamic. The consequences of adopting a foundherentist set of beliefs are profound. However, we need to compare it with another set of justificatory relations. Roy Bhaskar (2011) developed a particular notion of judgemental rationality. This requires a unitary theory of knowledge and is a corrective to the many domain-specific forms of knowledge in existence18. And this suggests that at the extra-disciplinary level, knowledge is capable of being produced that allows us to make a judgement between different theories about the world; in other words, to allow us to say that this knowledge of objects in the world is superior to that knowledge of the same objects. Judgemental rationality consists of four elements or processes. The first of these is epistemic, where one theory is better than another theory because the relationship between knowledge of the world and how the world is structured is better aligned19. The second element or process is where a theory or description of the world is superior to another because within it there are fewer contradictions and logical anomalies. The third approach focuses on the capacity of the theory or model to be more rational than its rivals (see Chapter 14 for a discussion of the concept and praxis of rationality); and the fourth approach suggests that a theory is to be preferred to another because it is more practically apt or has stronger links to existing frameworks of meaning, i.e. coherentism. These four processes, once they have been reconciled, allow us to make judgements about theories, models and descriptions of the world. In addition, this configurational process can act as criteria of judgement about the object of the investigation, such as concepts related to learning, feminism, judgement and the like.

Susan Haack and Foundherentism 45 There are three problems with this conceptualisation of true knowledge. Since we are dealing here with four processes, we have to address the issue of how they can be subsumed into one set of criteria which would allow us to determine that it is superior to any other statement or claim, such as that women are oppressed in the world and have been throughout history. The second is that these criteria are of a different logical order, and this creates difficulties if we want to use them as justificatory principles, even if this construes the notion of logic in a particular way. The third problem is that each of the processes is valorised, with these valuations and sense-making processes being differently formed in different social, geo-historical and discursive environments. Any theory of epistemic justification has to accommodate the valorisations and revalorisations that are a part of the world we live in. Susan Haack’s notion of foundherentism is a serious attempt at reconciling the different criteria of knowledge, although it is only partially successful in addressing the semantic dimension of women’s (and men’s and intersex person’s) experiences in the world.

A semantic theory A semantic theory is one in which the specifications of meanings are determined in a symbolic system. Some philosophers deny that in the domain of language distinct and definite meanings can be given to linguistic expressions. This comprises a scepticism about meaning and a scepticism about semantic theories of meaning. Semantic theories are language-specific and this might create a problem since we are then dealing with a plethora of languages and a plethora of semantic systems, which cannot amount to a general theory of semantics. There is a further problem and this is that we have to identify what parts of a language text convey meaning. Are we referring here to words, spaces between words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, whole books, illustrations, diagrams, multimodal forms of expression and so on? Do each of these elicit meaning in different ways? If we extend the notion of text(ing)20 to include observations, evaluations, reflections, discursive and material object-identifications (including persons), are we then required to abandon all attempts at understanding semantics in general terms and only understand it as relating to particular and specific instances of meaning-making? In framing the concept of meaning and its semantic dimension, a variety of approaches have been developed. The most prominent has been to understand a semantic theory as an explanation of the truth property of a sentence or linguistic unit in relation to what it shows, encodes or expresses in the particular context within which it is being used. This type of semantic theory can embrace a notion of reference or correspondence or likeness, but not inference or networking. The principal problem that it has is that meaning, whether expressed linguistically (in relation to a unit of language) or objectively (in relation to an object in the world), cannot account for the way the world for us is conceptually framed. The meaning of a concept, object, proposition or

46  Conceptual Framings meta-theory therefore lies in the mediations and negotiations we undertake in the world. This formulation does not deny the existence of a referent, as some semantic theorists are inclined to do (for example, Derrida, 1978); however, what it does do in a Kantian sense21 is distinguish between an unknowable world and the way we can perceive or come to know that world. This positions the truth-value of a linguistic utterance or proposition about a concept, object, object-configuration, object-relation or person in the relationship between mind and world. A theory of propositions, in which the utterance represents something that is external to it, is unsatisfactory22; however, semioticians, as a response to this, have modified their original theories to include a notion of reference. Expressions and indeed propositions, in addition to a reference, also have a content, and it is this that allows them to be thought of as having a meaning. The issue still remains as to what type of content-meaning we can give to linguistic expressions; since all we have established here is the possibility of these linguistic expressions having a meaning. We have suggested that reference cannot explain content in any complete sense, although we have also suggested that content cannot be satisfactorily explained without pointing to a referent and this means that a semantic theory always assigns a value and a substance to an expression, which we can call its contents. We now need to determine the place of context or indexicality that enframes those contents (value and substance) in our picture of the world. Expressions consequently are context-dependent and these contexts can be understood as aspects of different registers, constructs, modalities, modes, disciplines, texts and the like, with each of them having their own way of working. Every reference then of a linguistic expression must seek to show the context of utterance, and in addition, its circumstance of valuation – how it is received in the world. There is also the circumstance in which the utterance does not just have a context but works – in a performative sense – to create one, and this means that the meaning of an utterance depends on the state the world is in. The meaning of an utterance such as that women are badly and unfairly treated in the world as it is currently organised is a function of a world that is related to a function of an object or objects in that world, which in turn is related to a function of the context or indexicality of that object or those objects, which in its turn is related to a function of its truth-value. There is a view of semantics that is directly opposed to representionalist semantic theories and this is a notion of inferentialist semantics (that we can find in the work of Robert Brandom). Brandom (2000: 12) suggests that: The standard way is to assume that one has a prior grip on the notion of truth, and use it to explain what good inference consists in …. Inferentialist pragmatism reverses this order of explanation … It starts with a practical distinction between good and bad inferences, understood as a distinction between appropriate and inappropriate doings, and goes on to understand talk about truth as talk about what is preserved by the good moves.

Susan Haack and Foundherentism 47 The inferentialist starts off with distinguishing between good and bad inferences and then tries to explain these in terms of a contextual framework, which includes notions of truth and objectivity (this is a second-order operation). Priority is given here in meaning to the three semantic networks that we introduced in the first chapter of this book: the antecedents of the concept, the contemporary meanings that this concept has and how that concept is used in the world; and this allows judgements to be made about good or bad inferences and this in turn gives priority to concepts as the basics of thinking about the world. Brandom’s (1994; 2000; 2004) support for a notion of inferential semantics is designed to identify the semantic contents of the concepts we use. In rejecting a representationalist viewpoint, where the contents of the concepts that we use are determined by states of affairs in the world, he wants to substitute a notion of inference from concept to concept, from discursive object to discursive object, from concept to what is in the world and from discursive object to material object. This viewpoint then focuses on the relations between different types of objects and is predicated on the superiority (for describing what is in the world) of inferentialism over representationalism in every case. However, this position threatens the idea that some concepts, some discursive objects and some relations between objects have some epistemic content, which is derived from the state the world is in. This inferentialist perspective cannot describe in a full sense the types of relations that there are between the different elements of language and the world because the word-object of inferentialism is not sufficiently explicated (see Chapter 14). It does, however, point to the need to enframe our understanding of concepts and discursive objects/configurations in the world (with the implications that this has for our understandings of learning and feminism). The problem still remains that if we reject in its entirety representationalism, then it is difficult to work out what the semantic contents of concepts, such as learning or feminism might be (cf. Haack, 1993). Some elements of knowledge, which can be described as transcendental, could be an exception to this. Richard Rorty (1998: 57) wanted to deny even this and settle for a version of knowledge that employs a strategy: for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which “the relativist” keeps getting himself [and this] is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try. This move doesn’t allow a real escape from relativism or from the possibility of some form of transcendental knowledge; indeed, it is a thoroughgoing sceptical argument, a position that Haack rejects. The issue then of what knowledge is, its justification, constitution and rationale, is of some importance in determining the meaning of our three meta-concepts: women, learning and curriculum. If knowledge is understood

48  Conceptual Framings as disciplinary-based or domain-specific, then the mode of production and justification is located within a discipline (such as physics, sociology or linguistics) or domain of knowledge (i.e. region, language, register, index, realm or field of knowledge, such as in advertising, teaching, engineering, talking, writing, cooking and many more). If knowledge is understood as interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, then its mode of production and justifying rationale is located in the spaces between different academic disciplines or knowledge domains or outside those different academic disciplines or domains altogether. What this also means is that disciplinary knowledge, discipline-derived rationales for knowledge and discipline-based epistemic practices are in some important ways insufficient and inadequate. If all sense-seeking and sense-making is through culturally and historically located interpretive frames, then knowledge of objects is perspective-bound and partial – it is relative to these frameworks23. Underlying this argument is a notion of a universal hermeneutics where understanding always involves interpretation and where this interpretative activity is understood as universal. Interpretation is not, however, arbitrary but, as we have just noted, takes place through interpretive frames, which are themselves located in the background of all our beliefs and practices. Even apparently simple actions, such as arm-raising, can only be understood in terms of an immersion in and inseparability from a background and are therefore never fully specifiable. They are enframed. Justifying then is a concept, and more than this, it is a hinge concept, in that it has a particular significance in the scheme of things or objects. It is also key to any utterances we make about the world; since without the capacity to justify any claims we might want to make (true-knowledge) we are left in a state of either confusion or silence24. Judgemental rationality is therefore a key concept, a hinge mechanism. Susan Haack’s work in this regard allows us to say things about the world in general and in particular to distinguish between different manifestations of the concept of feminism, so that we can talk about liberal feminism, critical or intersectional feminism, normative feminism, feminist naturalism, radical feminism, epistemic feminism, political feminism, decategorising feminism and libertarian feminism25 and valorise them. In the next chapter, we examine the contribution of Julia Kristeva to the theory of edusemiotics and to semantic and semiotic theories in general.

Notes 1 The issue of normativity and value-impregnation is complicated and this chapter, and indeed this book, does not do full justice to it. However, it remains an essential element in the metatheory that underpins our work here. 2 Haack (2007: 20) suggests that one of these legitimate forms might be science or the scientific method, in one of its guises or forms, despite numerous ‘obstacles: Humean scepticism about induction; the paradoxes of confirmation; the “new riddle of induction” posed by Goodman’s “grue”; Russell Hanson’s and others’ thesis

Susan Haack and Foundherentism 49 of the theory-dependence of observation; Quine’s thesis of the underdetermination of theories even by all possible evidence’. The point is that Haack assumes that these obstacles can be overcome. 3 Theorising as a concept can be understood in many different ways: hypothesising, temporal hypothesising, meta-theoretical hypothesising, truth-bearing, judgemental propositionalising, networking, as a world-view and there are many more – see Scott (chapter 9, 2021). 4 cf. Taylor (1985; 1998; 2007; 2011). 5 For example, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Wilfred Sellars, W.V.O.Quine and Jacques Derrida. 6 cf. Standish (2016) for a fuller and philosophical expression of these matters. 7 What we mean by current theory is reference to the conceptual framing used by the disciplines and practices of medicine and biology in the world. 8 cf. Kant (2007). 9 There is no equivalent word in the English language. 10 In effect, this reproduces the notion of a sharp distinction between scheme and content that Donald Davidson (1974) criticised. 11 Haack writes as follows: ‘The problems of the epistemological tradition, I shall be arguing, are legitimate; formidably difficult, but not in principle insoluble. So, the problems I shall be tackling are familiar enough; most centrally: what counts as good strong supportive evidence for a belief? (the “project of explication” of criteria of evidence or justification, as I shall call it); and: what is the connection between a belief’s being well-supported by good evidence, and the likelihood that it is true? (the “project of ratification”)’ (Haack, 1993: 1). 12 ‘Some justified beliefs are basic; a basic belief is justified not by the support of any other belief, but by the subject’s experience’ (Haack, 1993: 15). 13 ‘Some justified beliefs are basic; a basic belief is justified, not by the support of any other belief, but because of a causal or law-like connection between the subject’s belief and the state of affairs that makes it true’ (Haack, 1993: 15). 14 ‘Some justified beliefs are basic; a basic belief is justified not by the support of any other belief, but in virtue of its content, its intrinsically self-justifying character’ (Haack, 1993: 15). 15 ‘A belief is justified iff it belongs to a coherent set of beliefs, no belief having a distinguished epistemic status and no belief having a distinguished place within a coherent set’ (Haack, 1993: 19). 16 ‘A belief is justified iff it belongs to a coherent set of beliefs, some beliefs having a distinguished initial status, and justification depending on weighted mutual support’ (Haack, 1993: 19). 17 ‘A belief is justified iff it belongs to a coherent set of beliefs, some beliefs being distinguished by being more deeply embedded in a coherent set than others’ (Haack, 1993: 19). 18 In addition, Bhaskar developed a notion of immanent critique (Isaksen, 2017), although this creates some difficulties for his theory of judgemental rationality. 19 Bhaskar identified four possible reasons for the two elements being misaligned: there are social objects in the world and these exist regardless of whether they are known or not; knowledge is fallible because any epistemic claim can be refuted; there are trans-phenomenalist truths which refer to the empirical world and discount deeper levels of social reality, i.e. the work of social mechanisms; and more importantly, there are counter-phenomenalist truths in which those deep structures may actually be in conflict with their appearances (cf. Scott, 2021). 20 We are not using the notion of text(ing) here to refer to a process of electronic communication. 21 cf. Kant (2007).

50  Conceptual Framings 22 There are many such theories, for example, correspondence theories where an identity is postulated between a world and our minded representations of that world. 23 Gadamer argued that it is impossible to separate oneself as a researcher or person from the historical and cultural context that defines one’s interpretive frame since both the subject and the object of research are located in pre-understood worlds. Frames (or pre-understandings) constitute ‘the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience ... the conditions whereby we experience something – whereby what we encounter says something to us’ (Gadamer, 1989: 173). 24 Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1961: i) that: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent’, although here he was referring to a certain type of knowledge (metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, etc.) and not to knowledge in general. 25 Susan Haack (born 1945) is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of Miami. She has written on logic, the philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. She has been heavily influenced by the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce.

4

Julia Kristeva and Edusemiotics

Julia Kristeva’s theory of edusemiotics and psychoanalytics is derived from and is oppositional to that of Sigmund Freud’s. If we are to understand and give expression to Kristeva’s theory, we also have to understand its antecedents, its relations to other relevant conceptual framings and the way it is used in the lifeworld. Sigmund Freud’s1 theory of mind in which the relationship between mind and world is understood as a symbolic exchange has been influential in the history of psychoanalysis. He believed that some painful events in childhood unless properly dealt with can traumatise the adult person and are manifested in the form of neurotic behaviour. He also believed that we avoid painful thoughts and feelings by employing defence mechanisms, which protect the structure of the psyche: repression, denial, projection, displacement, regression and sublimation. In his book, Studies in Hysteria, Freud told the story of Bertha Pappenheim (under the pseudonym of Anna O) and described her as an example of a person exhibiting physical symptoms of distress, hallucinations and speech disorders, which were, for him, surface manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts, originating in childhood2. We are not concerned here with the means for treating this patient nor with the theory of the psyche that he developed later. What does concern us is his theory of psychosexual stages of development. These stages (oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital) signify movements that children normally go through over time and as they are growing up. They also signify the development of psychic elements in the formation of the mind of a person and its relationship to the world (principally through id, ego and superego developments). The oral stage comprises the child getting satisfaction from putting things in its mouth to meet the demands of its id and satisfy its libido. During the anal stage of psychosexual development, the libido of the child is focused on the anus and the child derives pleasure from defecating. Freud understood this as a sign of independence and ego development. The third stage of psychosexual development is the phallic stage, where the child’s libido (desire) centres on their genitalia as the erogenous zone. The most significant aspect of this stage is the Oedipus complex. For Freud, the young boy develops sexual desires for his mother. He wants to possess his mother exclusively and DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-5

52  Conceptual Framings reject his father. During this stage, his focus is on his penis and the pleasure it can give him. However, he also develops a castration anxiety, because he fears that it may be taken from him. As a consequence and as a defence, he starts to imitate and copy male attitudes and behaviours and identify with the male or masculine. For a girl, the Oedipus or Electra complex took a different and far from satisfactory trajectory. She desires her father and this leads to penis envy and the wish to be a boy. She then blames her mother for her castrated state, and in her anxiety, she represses her feelings and identifies with her mother and takes on a female-gendered role. What is noticeable about this story is the gendered deficit role that women are given – they are deficient because they do not have a penis. At the latent stage, which precedes puberty there is little activity of a psychosexual nature. The final stage of childhood, for Freud, was the genital stage. The sexual instinct, and this operates only if the child has gone through in a proper manner the various stages of psychosexual development, is now directed towards heterosexual pleasure3. Processes of fixation and conflict may impede the fulfilment of this stage of development and a person can become stuck at this stage or any of the others, with the consequence, according to Freud, that perverted forms of sexuality4 may develop. Consequently, Freud identified an oral personality, an anal personality, a phallic personality, a latent personality and a genital personality. The point is that separate and naturalised pathways for men and women were being mapped out by Freud, and these were not equal in esteem, significance, power or definition. To be psychologically healthy, a person, man or woman, had to go through a gendered pathway, and if each stage was not successfully negotiated then the child could become fixated at that stage, and this inevitably led to neurosis. All of this is very familiar. And there is a sense in which this psychosexual development pathway is not just only a description of what happens but also has a performative function, in that it has contributed to human beings conforming to what is expected from the theory. It has semiotic elements and a semantic dimension to it. Meanings can be intentional or unintentional, as in Freud’s theory of dream symbolism, or in symptoms of a particular medical condition that we may or may not have manifested in or on our bodies. Signs can be associated with feelings and emotions and can be sensory. In order to work out the meaning of a sign, we engage in processes of analogising, allegorising, signifying, symbolising and communicating. Jacques Derrida (1978) argued that the relationship between a signifier and something that it refers to cannot be fixed and permanent, in contrast to Freud who was inclined to give a universal meaning (spatial and temporal) to his dream symbolisations. C. S. Peirce (1982) categorised signs into three principal types: an icon, which resembles its referent, for example, the clothed female body shape on the door of a public convenience; an indexical object, which is so designed that it can be associated with its referent, such as the need to equalise male and female representation in cabinet government; and

Julia Kristeva and Edusemiotics 53 a symbol, which can only be related to its referent because it is conventional, for example, the three standard sex symbols: a male person represented by a circle with an attached arrow pointing outwards at 45 degrees, a female person represented by a circle with a cross attached at 180 degrees, and a hermaphroditic or bisexual person represented by a circle with both an attached arrow pointing outwards at 45 degrees and a cross attached at 180 degrees. Peirce, anticipating Derrida, in addition suggested that a sign rarely has a permanent meaning, although he never went so far as to suggest that it could be endlessly deferred. Peircean semiotics is triadic with three referential points: the sign, the object and the interpretant. Peirce distinguished between the interpretant and the interpreter; the former being understood as an internal (to the mind) representation that mediates between the object and the sign, whereas the latter is the interpretant who affects the interpretation. This brief digression into Peircean and Derridean semiotics reminds us that in order to understand the meaning of a concept there is always a need to frame the concept, semiosis in this case, as being embedded within three networks of meaning: its antecedents, its relations to other relevant concepts and the way it is used in the lifeworld. Semiotics then can be understood as having three dimensions: syntactical, where the emphasis is on the mutual relations between different symbols; semantic, where the emphasis is on the relations between the symbol and what it stands for, and pragmatic, where the relationship that we are concerned with is between symbols, their meanings and the uses of those symbols5. Semioticians classify signs or systems of signs into the way they are transmitted and their modality. The signs carry a meaning from one setting to another through codes. (In the field of education, Basil Bernstein (2002) developed a code theory in his explication of the concept and practice of pedagogy, which was understood by him as the means through which the accumulated knowledge of a society is produced, distributed and allocated.) The code can be carried in words, such as personal pronouns – he, she, they – having gendered meanings, or in clothes that men and women wear, such as in the gendered use of trousers and skirts. Codes can also have a wider meaning, in that they represent the values that a society thinks it stands for, for example, the recent use of the union jack by politicians in the United Kingdom when being interviewed, to show their patriotism for their country and culture, or what they think is their country or culture. Semiosis is a word-object that focuses on the process of meaning-making implicit in a human being’s apprehension of a sign, or signs, or sign system. Code transmissions can have a cartographic form, in that in the first instance meanings are constructed through the encoding of signs, in the second instance, new meanings are constructed from the possibilities that those signs have, and in the third instance maps are created as interpretative cyphers that have implications for the way we should behave (see the postscript to this book at the end of Chapter 14). This cartographic and

54  Conceptual Framings triadic system of code communication has, as its central focus, a relationship between our minds and the world and the injunction that this relationship is not a passive one but a mediation. The process of code transmission can occur between settings that are not alike, for example, between dream states and waking states. Freud (2006) was concerned with signification in dreams6. He conceived of dreams as a way of getting in touch with the unconscious, indeed, this is the only way this could be done, because the ego’s defences are weakened during the dreaming process. He distinguished between the manifest content of the dream (what the dreamer remembers happened in the dream) and the symbolic meaning that could be attached to the dream (the real psychic expressions). Dreams for Freud acted as displacement devices. He provided the example of one of his patients who dreamed about strangling a small white dog. This was interpreted by Freud as a desire by his patient to kill his sisterin-law, and at the same time avoid direct blame by displacing his desire onto a dog. The dog stood in for his sister-in-law. In Freud’s later work on dreams, he explored the possibility of universal dream symbols, so that if a person experienced a dream with those symbols in it, they were in fact dreaming about a fixed and permanent notion of human experience. For example, poles, guns and swords represented a penis. Horse-riding and dancing represented sexual intercourse. The person as a whole is often shown as a house. Parents appear as kings or queens; children and siblings are symbolised as animals or vermin. An erection is symbolised as a balloon, airplane, missile or rocket. Female genitalia are symbolically represented by objects, such as pits, caves, bottles, trunks, jars, ships, mouths, churches and shoes. Wooden and paper objects are the provinces of women, while breasts are represented as apples, peaches and fruits in general7. We substitute symbolic objects in dreams and in life for the latent and disturbing contents of those dreams, or so Freud claimed.

Psychoanalytic feminism Psychoanalysis8, certainly in its beginnings, understood a person’s sense of self as influenced by unconscious drives, meaning-making stories and symbolic and agential structures that go beyond the consciousness of that person. It also adopted in its earliest manifestations a view of difference that divides and separates the male from the female. From a Freudian perspective, these are learned behaviours, although not necessarily from direct choices made by men, women and intersex persons. These unconscious drives and symbolic structures privilege the male over the female. We have here an example of how the theory or description of an activity has both a denotative and a performative function9. Categories, such as man, woman and intersex, male and female, masculine and feminine, are being constructed through conceptual theorising and committed praxis.

Julia Kristeva and Edusemiotics 55 Simone de Beauvoir10 was determined to address these Freudian perspectives from a different perspective. The first move in her feminist narrative was to assert the existence of a feminine as well as a masculine libido. Freud’s sense of feminine sexuality entailed a deficit and was determined by a notion of dependence on another, a male form of sexuality. It failed to account for women’s otherness. This otherness cannot be adequately described by the biological sciences with their inbuilt gender biases that treat human beings, of all three sexes, as determinate objects in the natural world and not as free self-determining agents. Here we see the importance of separating out discursive and material objects from human beings in the philosophical framework or enframing that we are working within. De Beauvoir’s existentialism is also a rejection of the economic monism of historical materialism and of the sexual monism of Freudian psychoanalysis. For de Beauvoir, this form of psychoanalysis inserts women into a narrative of self-division and conflict. It is the sense in which this narrative holds women to a fixed future and to a past that is beyond their control. Women come to see themselves through the eyes of men. De Beauvoir rejected this psychoanalytical story, begun by Freud, because it denies women ‘the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value’ (de Beauvoir, 1989: 45). She further took issue with Freud’s notion of the unconscious, insisting that it is not just unconscious forces that form and shape a woman’s identity, but also those discursive and material structures and configurations within which she is positioned. Finally, we need to refer to and make explicit her psychoanalytical stance, that is, in many ways very different from Freud’s. This psychoanalytical stance is transgressive in that the woman learns how to be a woman through her appropriation of bodily differences and through her deconstructing and rejecting of sexist and gender-specific narratives.

Semiosis The third psychoanalytical story is provided for us by Julia Kristeva11. In response to Freud’s Oedipal and Electra complexes, Kristeva does not believe that they can be overcome or set aside, and in addition, she denies the possibility of a sexuate culture, as Luce Irigaray (1985) envisioned. This sexuate culture would overcome the demands made on women through the need for a castration myth and reinstate a feminist story as an essential part of women’s lives. Kristeva’s story12 is feminist and has a direct relationship with our feminist theories, especially those that emphasise the existence of and role for learned feminist symbolic narratives in the world, as opposed to universal, masculinist and deficit ones. Initially, she sought to offer a direct route into the idea of a feminist praxis and a set of feminist praxes. In her book, Women’s Time (1986), she identified three different generations of feminist thinking. The first generation is universal and rationalist and seeks equality between men and women, which

56  Conceptual Framings would involve a restructuring of the belief sets of both men and women and a restructuring of the relationships between them at both material and discursive levels. This is what we called in the introduction to this book, liberal feminism. The emphasis is on removing barriers and impediments to women’s participation in public life and demanding a greater share for women in the rights, privileges and opportunities enjoyed by men. What prevents this is female subordination and oppression. Her conception of the second generation of feminist thought and action is where the woman is understood not as a universal category but as having her own definition and structure, both of which are understood as embodied. This is a commitment to difference or at least an understanding of difference in an essentialised way. Her third generation is neither concerned with a universal equality between the sexes nor a fixed and gendered sense of identity, but instead argues for a path that respects ambiguity and non-identity and thus embraces bodily difference and a sense of being in history. Kristeva believes that any sense of subjectivity that a woman might have is in fact divided, a splitting in two. On the one hand is the body, which, for the woman, includes desires, sexualities and erogenous experiences, motilities, reproductive capacities and birth-experiences, menstrual and menopausal experiences and corporeality. On the other hand, there is the law, by which she means those material and discursive formations within which she as a woman is imprisoned and from which she cannot effectively escape. These symbolic formations ineluctably impose a violence on women, which Kristeva does not want to deny, and only allows a fractured form of identity. The split cannot be healed. Identity for women is fragile and precarious. Signification for Julia Kristeva has two elements, the symbolic and the semiotic. Her view is psychoanalytic and refers to a particular picture of the female condition, although the use of the phrase ‘female condition’ needs to be used with care. This is a symbolic field of instincts, which can be located in the structures of language rather than in the meanings of words. This field is a space of the musical, the poetic and the unstructured. It is closely tied to the feminine in one of its epistemic forms. The symbolic is the space of growth and learning for the female child and consists of an abjection from the mother for that child to enter the world of culture and meaning. This space of language can be compared to the semiotic, which is associated with the masculine, order and structure. The child will for a time oscillate between the symbolic and the semiotic. What can be inferred from this is that the female child is differentiated from the male child with regards to their relationship with their mothers, and in relation to the chora or nourishing maternal space. Kristeva’s feminism, while still reflecting a particular epistemic viewpoint about the female, also encompasses notions of multiple sexual identities and is opposed to a singular feminine language or viewpoint. Kristeva accepts the notion of ego formation originally developed by Freud but ascribes this to an imaginary symbolic father, with whom the girl-child identifies. This period of identification with the father figure is pre-Oedipal –

Julia Kristeva and Edusemiotics 57 the imaginary father makes possible the initial separation between ego and object for the child. The symbolic father is not the first experiential object for the girl-child, but it is the first identification, allowing for the possibility of languaging and loving and for the real existence of other people. This symbolic rupture intrudes on the maternal relationship or maternal space, as Kristeva calls it. This shows or suggests that there is an infantile symbolisation or meaning-making process at work from an early stage, and it is the imaginary father who facilitates it. Kristeva accepts that a painful break between the girl-child and the imaginary father takes place at a later stage, and the father or paternal figure is then associated with the law or with those real discursive and material configurations that constitute the world. Kristeva (1984: 75) calls this break: ‘the structural violence of language’s irruption as the murder of soma, the transformation of the body, the captation of drives’. The point is that this can only occur through the mediations of a loving father, and this allows the separation of the child from the mother. Again, what this shows is that all experiences for the child and the adult are mediated by significatory practices, even if they are organised through the formation of the ego. The question that immediately comes to mind is whether these signifying practices are monosemic and given, or whether there are many opportunities for meaning-making in these significatory practices. Although this rent in experience is suffered by the signifying child and is understood as a loss to be mourned, it is also for Kristeva a gift that allows the child to become a languaged being. She calls this a matricide, and she means by it a repression of the maternal body as a necessary event in the development process. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abnegation (1982), Kristeva describes it as neither inside nor outside, neither self nor other, but as an indicator of boundaries, borders and limitations. She is implicitly referring here to a decategorisation narrative, and the idea that processes of classifying and reclassifying change the nature of objects, object-relations and object-configurations13. Kristeva offers an example of this delimiting and debordering process by pointing to bodily fluids, sweat, blood, pus, milk, the mother’s body as non-objects and sites of abjection. Her point is that this is an inevitable process, but it brings with it exclusions, separations and melancholia. The idea of the maternal figure and the relationship between the mother and her child, symbolic or real, has to be excised, cut out of the picture: ‘matricide is our vital necessity’ (Kristeva, 1989: 27), because it allows the development of the ego and the development of the child. The organisation and reorganisation of the female psyche are premised on loss.

Development or progression These stories or narratives have as their central signifier the idea of development or progression between different states of being or having. This is a hinge object-relation, that is enacted over time, and is multidirectional. Examples

58  Conceptual Framings of object-relations expressed dualistically are one-to-one or one-to-many relations, strong or weak relations, vertical or horizontal relations, endogenous or exogenous relations and dialectical or absenting relations and connections. Each of these examples of object-relations is expressed in terms of its potential to influence object-arrangements at a particular point in time14. Consequently, an object-relation, such as progression, can be understood as pluralising, forcing, vertical, exogeneous, enabling, convergent and contiguous. This is an expression of an object relation, such as progression, and it can also be understood as historical and specific to moments and locations that do not have a universal significance. The concepts that we have been dealing with in this chapter – the girl-child, progression and development – are understood as discursively constructed and produced within specific social conditions, temporal, spatial and epistemic. In such work, an understanding of discursive configurations and semiotic systems is taken to be central15. An example of a dehistoricised and gendered iteration of the notion of development or progression can be found in the work of Lawrence Kohlberg (1976). His theory of moral development was based on thinking processes inferred from observed behaviours. Kohlberg argued that human beings, regardless of their sex, developed during childhood in and through a series of levels. He called the first of these the preconventional level. Initially, individuals follow rules that are defined for them by others. The individual subsequently focuses on receiving rewards or satisfying personal needs. Level two is the conventional level. Following social rules is still considered to be important, but the concerns of the individual are now focused on relationships with other people and with social relations in general. For Kohlberg, there is a third level, the postconventional or principled level. At this level, the individual starts to act from a set of principles that they have developed on their own. There are two stages here. The first is a contractual orientation, where laws and rules are not considered to be absolutely right but the best there is and are sanctioned by contracts freely entered into by individuals. The second stage is for Kohlberg the highest state of being (and this is a requirement of any stratified system). Here the individual operates through freely chosen ethical principles of conscience, which may override principles relating to laws or socially defined rules. Children move from lower levels to higher levels in accordance with this theoretical schema of progression. Some understanding of and practice at the lower levels is a prerequisite of moving satisfactorily to the higher levels. However, these are not just logical or empirical accounts of what happens; they are also preferential accounts by Kohlberg, writing as he did over fifty years ago, although they may have become actual normative progressions since16. Kohlberg’s developmental schema rejects the notion of a gendered psychic route for girls and boys, men and women and suggests that all three sexes (men, women and intersex persons) develop through the same set of progressions, from childhood to adulthood. Human beings move from lower levels to higher

Julia Kristeva and Edusemiotics 59 levels in accord with a gender-neutral theoretical schema of progression, or so he suggested. Carol Gilligan17, in contrast, argued that there is an implicit gender bias in this suggestion and indeed in the whole Kohlbergian enterprise, because its placement of value at the different stages, its valorisation, always favours the concerns, preoccupations and beliefs of men rather than women. Moral development for women focuses on relationships and she suggested an alternative developmental framework, in which children, boys and girls, go through three stages: the preconventional morality stage, in which there is a strong focus on survival and self-interest; the conventional stage, at which a separation occurs, with girls prioritising selflessness and caring; and the postconventional stage at which girls take on a responsibility for their commitments and actions. Caring for others becomes the highest stage of moral development, and women, it is suggested, are more likely to reach this hierarchy than men. It is also a learned belief and set of behaviours. Georg Hegel (1977, originally 1807) writing from a universalist perspective articulated a notion of progression or development. In an idealist sense, history is said to encompass a view that one set of arrangements in the history of a people is an improvement on a previous set of arrangements. The objects and relations between objects in the world are now so conceived and actualised that any different set of arrangements would constitute a diminished (in terms of some notion of ideational perfection) set of arrangements. What this amounts to is the identification of a hierarchy of goods or a stratified arrangement of human affairs, which can be shown to be better at higher levels than at lower ones. This is making a claim that there is a large organising theme (for example, Hegel’s theory of events as the unfolding of human history), meaning (for example, monosemic inevitability) or direction (for example, teleological endpoint) in history; and that this is not just a retrospective judgement but one that has implications for the future or will determine what happens in the future. This is different from a goal that a human being or set of human beings has, which may or may not be fulfilled depending on circumstances that prevail at the time and the work that is put in. It thus treats history as non-arbitrary but as having some underlying purpose.

Symbolism and mimesis As we have seen, there are many different semiotic systems, and this variety indicates that there are different ideas of development and learning. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the normal child goes through a series of psychosexual stages as it grows and develops. These stages (oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital) signify movements that children normally go through over time and they constitute a part of the learning process. If the child does not go through these stages in an appropriate manner, then there is some form of psychic disorder taking place, which will cause unhappiness, neurosis and psychopathy. There is no sense here of these developmental processes and these notions of

60  Conceptual Framings normality and consequently abnormality being socially constructed and relative to time and place. In addition, as an adult condition of human beings, Freud suggested that consciousness operates at three levels of awareness (they are sometimes in conflict with each other): the preconscious (a part of the mind below the level of immediate conscious awareness, from which memories and emotions that have not been repressed can be recalled), the conscious and the unconscious. At the unconscious level, we tell stories about ourselves that do not have literal and denotative meanings; many of these stories, usually expressed in dreams, employ a series of symbolic markers. These have to be translated into or reassigned to our language and semantic structures (consciously held), and especially those discursive and material structures in which we are gendered. This process of translation is sometimes difficult and has direct implications for processes of learning. De Beauvoir on the other hand understood these gendered processes in a different way. Instead of understanding our sense of self as influenced by gender-neutral notions of unconscious drives, meaning-making stories and symbolic and agential structures that supersede the consciousness of the individual man and woman, she suggests that these unconscious drives, stories and symbolic structures always favour the male over the female. Categories, such as men and women, male and female, masculine and feminine, boy-child and girl-child, are valorised through these structures and stories. Kristeva’s story is much more complicated. A woman’s subjectivity involves a splitting in two between a body with distinctive female attributes, for example, reproductive capacities, and those material, discursive and symbolic structures that she is a part of. The split cannot be healed and results in an identity for women that is fragile and precarious. This is a story of differentiation in psychic terms and the inevitability of a developmental process in which there are different paths for men and women. This is not a story about misogyny and domination built into the material structures in society, but a story of the psychic differentiation and valorisation of men and women in a developmental process that is gendered in nature. We also suggested that progression or development can have other types of meaning – dialectical, historical, super-agential, hierarchical, gendered, absented and materialistic. All of this implies that we are dealing with several different objects (material and discursive, configurational and agential) and several relations between them or several relational objects that connect them. The objects are the different stages of progression or being and the relations are the connecting links between them. They are also learned gender(ing) processes. Theoretical and contextual considerations impact, then, on how elements of teaching and learning are realised. Acknowledging this allows the realisation of several learning models: mimesis, dialogism, mutuality, falsification, semiosis, reflection, metacognition and repetition. Each of these in turn is underpinned by a particular theory of learning, and thus any model of learning that is employed is constructed in relation to how we can know the world

Julia Kristeva and Edusemiotics 61 and what it is. These models or learning sets and their properties give different emphases to the various elements of a learning process. Mimesis for some semioticians is the primary form of learning18. It applies to processes of social and cultural learning and is, as is all learning, objectspecific. The types of learning that it most successfully could be applied to are emotional learning, values learning, motility especially with young children and the intentions19 and existence of other people. The spectrum of mimetic learning is therefore wide. In this form of learning, the body, its senses, imagination, language, gender and desire play an important role. It is not the same as imitation or simulation, because it points to the idea of something outside the mind to which the learner aspires to be similar. This external object may be another person, an environment or an invented imaginary world. Dialogism refers to the use of a conversation or shared dialogue to explore or criticise an idea. Participants in the dialogue do not have to be dispositional equals, indeed in most cases one of them is more experienced than the other. The Elenctic method or Socratic debate is a form of cooperative learning based around an argumentative dialogue between individuals and is designed to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out underlying presuppositions. This pedagogy involves a process of questioning and answering to enable the learner to develop apt evaluations of objects and explore how they can be used. It has a coaching and an observational form. Mutual forms of learning assume that the learning relationship is between equals. Examples of this type of learning include: being offered emotional support if learning proves to be difficult; exchanges between learners so that each individual can test their theories, ideas and constructs against those held by other learners engaging in the same type of learning; cooperation between two learners of equal standing, so that in a problem-solving exercise, better solutions are forthcoming because there are two problem-solvers rather than one; and the joint production of a script, artefact, performance or text so that alternative and new interpretations or readings can be made. Using a falsification or trial-and-error approach, the learner makes repeated attempts to solve particular problems, with these solutions being tested in reallife situations. If these solutions prove to be deficient, then the learner tries out different solutions until they are satisfied that they have found the correct one. In adopting a falsification approach the learner is required to engage in a series of interrogative processes with regards to texts, people and objects in the environment, and come up with solutions to problems. Semiotic and semantic approaches focus on meaning-making and meaningremaking by the learner that is implicit in any conceptual realist account of learning. There are a number of steps or action-sets that the learner goes through: contextualising, framing, theorising, retroducing, delimiting, explaining and reconceptualising. These semiotic processes mirror the approaches that empirical researchers should adopt but rarely do. Reconceptualising is an essential element in all types of learning; here, it constitutes the principal focus.

62  Conceptual Framings Another model of learning is reflection. There are three types of reflective practice: intensive action reflection which is understood as tacit, implicit and occurring on a daily basis; reactive or reflective learning involving immediate reflections on events that have already taken place; and deliberative reflection involving the conscious management of thoughts and activity and the deliberate setting aside of time to ensure that judgements are based on a deep understanding of a particular issue. Metacognitive and self-regulated learning refers to learners’ awareness of their own knowledge and their ability to understand, control and manipulate their own cognitive, skill-oriented, embodied and dispositional processes. They work by persuading learners to think about these auto-learning processes in more explicit ways. Self-regulated learning has three components or elements: cognitive processes of knowing, understanding and evaluating; metacognitive processes involving strategies and skills for learning how to learn; and motivational elements, which allow the learner to engage with cognitive and metacognitive processes. There is also practice and repetition. Practice is the act of rehearsing a behaviour over and over again or engaging in an activity again and again. This reinforces, enhances and deepens the learning associated with the behaviour or activity. Choosing between these models depends on the content and constitution of the learning object – the former is logically dependent on the latter. It also depends on the choice of learning theory that is made. These learning models have an important role to play (whichever one is chosen) in the processes of learning and constitute elements of a pedagogic process. We have been concerned here with notions of development, edusemiotics, psychoanalytics, progression and hierarchy. In the next chapter, we concentrate on a feminist theory of justice as it is understood by Martha Nussbaum.

Notes 1 cf. Freud (1962; 2001; 2002; 2004; 2006; 2011). 2 Anna O. was the pseudonym given to one of the patients of physician Josef Breuer. Her case was described in the book that Breuer wrote with Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria. She had originally sought Breuer’s help because she was experiencing a series of disorders, such as visual disturbances, hallucinations, partial paralysis and speech problems. Breuer diagnosed the young woman as a hysteric and later discussed her case with Freud, who developed from this case his notions of talking therapy and psychoanalysis. 3 The bias we can see here is homophobic. 4 A sexual perversion is a normative concept. What is a perversion for one person may be a celebration of their sexuality for another. 5 The concept of city(ing) in the United Kingdom is an example of a symbolic statusinferring. Previously, there was a set of criteria for its endowment, such as that the place had to have a cathedral and a university. Now it is simply in the gift of the monarch, although the prime minister of the time actually makes the decision. 6 The concept of a dream also has epistemic dimensions, cf. Descartes (1988). 7 The interpretation of these dream symbols has a certain comic feel about it.

Julia Kristeva and Edusemiotics 63 8 We are referring here to the concept and practice. 9 cf. Austin (1962) – he further distinguished between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary utterances. 10 Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, political activist, feminist and social theorist. Her principal work was in feminist existentialism. 11 Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist and novelist. She is Professor Emerita at the University Paris Diderot. 12 This story is told in Kristeva (1982; 1984; 1986; 1987; 1989; 1991; 1998; 2002). 13 The scientific method, with its claims for the possibility of positional objectivity, that concepts can be reduced to measurable constructs, and that we should adopt a representational ontology, is negligent of this. 14 This is the crucial point. It is not just that objects have tendencies to influence other objects; it is that they have tendencies to influence them in particular and specific ways. These tendencies are relational. 15 cf. Walkerdine (1993, abstract): ‘Developmental psychology is understood in this paper as one of the “grand metanarratives of science” through which modernity has been characterised. The objects “the child” and “development” are held up for question, examining the way in which these are discursively constructed and produced within specific conditions of possibility which locate them in the government of the social and the production of the historically specific form of the subject, the individual. In such work, an understanding of discourse, practice, semiotic systems and fantasy is taken to be central.’ 16 cf. McLeod (2018) – it is the linear nature of the progression mode that has bothered a great many people. 17 cf. Gilligan (1982; 1989; 1990); Brown (1992); and McLean, Taylor and Sullivan (1997). 18 For example, Kress and Bezemer (2015). 19 cf. Nagel (1974; 2012).

5

Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is the practice of cutting or removing the external female genitalia without medical justification or the consent of the woman or girl-child1. It has been illegal in the United Kingdom since the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act, passed in 1985. It was replaced by the Female Genital Mutilation Act of 2003 and was further amended by the Serious Crime Act of 2015. Most girls, who are mutilated, are cut before they reach the age of five. It can include the ritual nicking, cutting and removal of the clitoral hood and clitoral glans, the removal of the inner labia, the removal of both labia and the closure of the vulva (though usually not all of these). The World Health Organization (2021) suggests that there are four types of processes: (i) the partial or total removal of the clitoral glans and/or the prepuce/clitoral hood; (ii) the partial or total removal of the clitoral glans and the labia minora (the inner folds of the vulva), with or without removal of the labia majora (the outer folds of skin of the vulva); (iii) the narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal, which involves the cutting and repositioning of the labia minora or labia majora, with or without the removal of the clitoral prepuce/clitoral hood and glans and (iv) the pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterising of the female genital area, in addition to (i), (ii) and (iii). All of these involve pain as they are surgical operations. They are literally reconstructions of the female body. The practice is rooted in a notion of constructed male/female difference, a going-beyond what is biologically female, an attempt to control or diminish woman’s sexuality, including a sense of female pleasure and desire and is interpolated in a sexist discourse about purity, modesty and beauty. It has some harmful side effects, including recurrent infections, difficulties with urinating, chronic pain, cyst developments, infertility, complications during childbirth and in some cases fatal bleeding. Some reasons for the practice of FGM being preserved are social acceptance and to avoid social exclusion, the need to conform to a religious authority, hygienic practices, the preservation of virginity, marriageability and the enhancement of a certain type of male sexual pleasure. Some of these reasons are less convincing than others. Some of them are socially conformist, others are brutally misogynistic. Some of them point to DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-6

Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice 65 hidden reasons; others are more open and legitimate. All of them incorporate a sense of value; that is, the reason itself is underpinned by a set of normative commitments. Such practices are easy to condemn and they cannot be defended within any of the feminist perspectives that we identified in Chapter 1 of this book. Liberal feminists, such as Martha Nussbaum2, focus on the perceived inequalities that such practices imply and indeed promote, in that they are practices which reduce equal esteem, equal capability and equal functionality of men and women and because they are physical and symbolic expressions of relations of subjugation, control, oppression, domination and exploitation and specific forms of master-slave relations. Nussbaum (2000a) further argues that a key concern with FGM is that in most circumstances it is forcefully applied to children, who cannot give their consent. Coming from a universalist tradition (ethically normative), she argues that there is a significant, moral and material distinction between social pressure and physical force, comparable to the distinction between seduction and rape. Liberal feminists want to promote an egalitarian politics in which women’s views and activities are given the same status and degree of significance as they are for men. What prevents this is female subordination and oppression, an example of which is FGM. Structural feminists also suggest that the seeds of this oppressive practice – FGM – lie with the ideological and material relations of capitalism. Women are understood as victims of false consciousness participating in their own oppression. Feminists who accept the view that women’s nature is different from men’s, and consequently argue that the valorisation implicit in the male/ female binary should be reversed, are appalled by these practices of FGM and the consequences of implementing them, because, rather than reversing the binary, such practices reinforce it. For radical feminists, the desexing of women and girls in this case is an example both of oppression and of a particular form of patriarchy in which women are denied sexual pleasure and the fulfilment of their sexual desires. Political forms of feminism argue for women having equal status with men in positions of power within society. FGM is an example and celebration of difference between men and women, especially because it involves an embodied transformation and has considerable consequences for conduct in public life. It is also an example of regressive category subversion with regards to sexuality and gender identity. The problem with the eradication of FGM practices in the United Kingdom and round the world is that it seems to transgress the anti-colonial argument that we should not interfere in local cultural practices but respect them. Implicit within this argument is an overextended idea of universal human rights, a characterisation of a natural human body, a failure to take account of cultural context and an imposition of eurocentric values on other people. This last criticism goes much deeper. Some feminists argue that the eradication and elimination of these practices, even though they are forms of bodily violence against women, dehumanises and infantilises women. The principal argument

66  Conceptual Framings that indirectly allows the practice of FGM is that there are no universals, in the form of human rights, philosophical expressions, moral stipulations or deontological ethical theories that can be imagined or developed to justify decolonising3 forms of action against these practices.

Universals In order then to counter this, we have to develop some form of theory or principle or provide good arguments for a particular universal or set of universals whether moral, ethical, social, political or epistemological, that is antithetical to the context and circumstances of the practice of FGM. And a prior question that needs to be answered is whether it is indeed possible to develop such a theory or principle in a general sense. This view of the world is opposed to the view that all forms of truth-justification at the meta-level for determining the adequacy of any claims we might want to make are unsatisfactory and limited. In Chapter 3, we discussed Susan Haack’s notion of foundherentism, which in its conception and practice is a universal. It can also be thought of in universalistic terms because it is able to transcend, go beyond, disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity, ethical relativism or theories that hold that morality is relative to the norms of a person’s culture, social norms that only have significance in local situations and settings, Hobbesian imperatives4 that understand the law as only a command apparatus, and Rortyan5 epistemological theories that argue that all matters of justification are simpliciter cultural and political issues. These theories seem to rule out the possibility of any form of universal or foundational knowledge. However, denying the possibility of universals seems to be a contradiction in itself, since the denial acts in this and other cases as a universal6. This is also a denial of true knowledge being located in the disciplines or domains alone and is a reassertion that there are some trans-epistemic elements (understood in a transcendental sense) to knowledge development. Universals can be distinguished from and contrasted with particulars or individual objects. Under this conception, similarity and identity are explained by appealing to general concepts existing only in the mind, although they clearly have some connection or relation with particular objects that are mindindependent, both our minds and other people’s. In broad terms, universals can be divided into two types. The first comprises meta-statements about matters to do with the relationship between mind and world, for example, our gendered frameworks, sexuate perspectives on the world and sexist descriptive languages interpenetrate what is being called reality to such an extent that it is impossible to conceive of a pre-sexuate, gendered and sexist world (cf. Putnam, 1990, with regards to the general principle). The second type comprises statements about worldly issues, for example, whether FGM practices hurt women and girl-children. They clearly do. Martha Nussbaum’s liberal theory of justice rests on the possibility of there being such objects as universals. Here in the first edition of her book, Sex and

Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice 67 Social Justice (2000a), she sets out her sense of universal capacities, calling them central human functional capabilities: 1 Life: Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length, not dying prematurely or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living. 2 Bodily health and integrity: Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; being adequately nourished, being to have adequate shelter. 3 Bodily integrity: Being able to move freely from place to place; being able to secure against violent assault, including sexual assault, marital rape and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction. 4 Senses, imagination, thought: Being able to use the imagination, to think and to reason – and do these things in a ‘truly human’ way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training; being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice (religious, literary, musical, etc.); being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech and freedom of religious exercise; being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-beneficial pain. 5 Emotions: Being able to have attachments to things and persons outside ourselves; being able to love those who love and care for us; being able to grieve at their absence; in general, being able to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude and justified anger; not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear or anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.) 6 Practical reason: Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s own life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience.) 7 Affiliation: (a) Being able to live for and in relation to others, to recognise and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; being able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation; having the capability for both justice and friendship. (Protecting this capability means, once again, protecting institutions that constitute such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedoms of assembly and political speech.) (b) Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. (This entails provisions of nondiscrimination.) 8 Other species: Being able to live with, concern for and in relation to animals, plants and the world of nature.

68  Conceptual Framings 9 Play: Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activity. 10 Control over one’s environment: (a) Political: being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, free speech and freedom of association. (b) Material: being able to hold property (both land and moveable goods); having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having then freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers (Nussbaum, 2000a: 40–2). Nussbaum’s liberal principle is that everyone should be treated equally (men, women and intersex persons) unless those characteristics that constitute their difference are such that this becomes impossible or unfeasible. The default position is always one of equality of esteem and treatment.

Equality Equality as a concept is polysemic. It can be understood as a process of equalising, in an active and praxical sense, and can be thought of as a disposition. It can signify correspondence between different material and discursive objects, material and discursive configurations and persons, in relation to particular features of these objects. In this sense, it acts as a counter to difference or differentiating. To say that women and men are equal is not to say that they are identical, that is, no object or person can ever be completely equal to another because if this were so they would be identical. Equality as a concept is closely linked to concepts, such as justice and morality. If men and women are not being treated equally with regards to practices of FGM (deprivations of sexual pleasure with regards to women; the infliction of pain on the one, as a child usually, and not on the other, and the forced imposition of gendered roles for women and not for men) then we can say that these practices and the practices that are attached to them are immoral or unfair. Four types of equality and therefore of justice (this is a claim that Martha Nussbaum wants to make) have been suggested: formal equality, proportional equality, moral equality and distributive justice. Formal equality is underpinned by two principles. The first of these is that unless we can determine that there are significant differences between two people, then we should respond to both of them in the same way. The second principle of a formal discourse of equality is that we should only respond to people differently if we can find good reasons as to why they should be treated differently, and as to why they are different. It is therefore irrational to treat equal cases in unequal ways without sufficient reasons. John Rawls (1971)7 articulated two principles of justice: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others,

Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice 69 and social and economic arrangements are to be made so that they operate to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. Two issues immediately arise: why should we abide by a principle of rationality? and what constitutes a significant difference? Proportional equality is different because it adds another condition to the way we should treat other people, which is that we should treat all relevant persons in the same way unless a case can be made that they in some way deserve a different treatment. Under this conceptualisation, if a human good or disposition, such as diligence or goodness, is unequally distributed in a group of human beings then members of this group should be treated in relation to certain dispositions that they have or that they have acquired or do not have or have not acquired. The principle of proportional equality underpins a notion of social mobility. The most obvious problem with it is how do we determine in a fair way that some people have a greater capacity or have used that capacity to achieve good ends. It is a theory of justice because it sets out a series of steps by which goods of all types can be distributed amongst a population. Moral equality is a rights-based notion of justice and consists of treating everyone, especially men and women, equally. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity because they are human. This is a conception of justice which is substantive, universal and morally equivalent. In Kant’s (2007)8 moral philosophy, the categorical imperative is underpinned by an equality notion of universal human worth. Martha Nussbaum’s central human functional capabilities is another example (see above). However, recognising that all human beings are equal does not logically and categorically lead us to the view that we should treat all persons equally, as John Rawls (1971) was so concerned to argue. Theories that limit themselves to the equal distribution of basic means, in the hope of doing justice to the different goals of all human beings, focus on means as opposed to what individuals gain with these means (Sen, 1985). The value that goods have for someone depends on the natural environment and individual capacities. Hence, Amartya Sen proposes that we should distribute goods in relation to ‘capabilities to achieve functionings’, that is, the various things that a person can do or be (Sen, 1985). Evaluating individual well-being has to be tied to a capability for achieving and maintaining various functionings constitutive of a person, such as adequate nourishment, good health, the ability to move about freely or to appear in public without shame. Martha Nussbaum has linked the capability approach to an Aristotelian, essentialist, theory of the good – a theory meant to be, as she puts it, ‘vague, incomplete, and open-ended enough to leave place for individual and cultural variation’ (Nussbaum, 2000a: 35). On the basis of such a thick conception of necessary and universal elements of the good life, certain capabilities and functionings can be designated as foundational or universal. For example, Martha Nussbaum, as a woman, applied this idea of universal capabilities and functionings to the difficult and troubling issue of abortion or

70  Conceptual Framings termination of a foetus. It has been argued that a concern for human dignity is a good reason for legitimising an abortion if certain conditions are met: where the pregnancy is the result of rape, where the foetus is considered to be nonviable and where it threatens the women’s life or health. Nussbaum would go further than this and invoke a future condition, that giving birth or allowing the foetus to come to full-term would threaten the principle of equal dignity for all human beings in their lifetimes. This immediately raises the issue of the status of the unborn child, and here we have a profound clash between two principles: the one concerns the starting point for treating all human beings as deserving of equal dignity and the other is that the woman who is pregnant may also now, and in the future, after giving birth, lose some protection from a loss of dignity as a human being if a termination is not carried out. The question arises as to which of these reasons has a greater force, ethically and epistemologically. Martha Nussbaum wants to connect the idea of human dignity and the principle that all human beings are entitled to a level of respect qua their designation as human beings (woman, man or intersex person) to claims by individuals to a certain threshold level of well-being, whether material, physical or psychological – a capabilities approach to social justice. If this is accepted, then the argument she is propounding has wider concerns and consequences for the distribution of goods in society. However, we are considering here how the principle might work in the case of abortion and this is complicated by the fact that allowing the pregnancy to come to full term can only have real consequences for some members of the human race, women. Men will not lose any essential dignities granted to them if a termination of the foetus is allowed, even if they have contributed to the formation and development of the foetus. The capabilities approach treats each person as an end in itself and not a means to an end; and consequently, affirms the principle of equal determination of treatment and consideration regardless of biological differences. It is focused on choice or freedom now and in the future life of the person concerned and one of its consequences is that it commits the society to promote for all its people a set of opportunities or substantive freedoms which are inalienable. This enjoins that society to redistribute goods, unequally to disadvantaged groups, such as women so that they, women, can benefit from these freedoms and opportunities. It is a compelling argument for retaining the right to terminations for women at the point at which life is deemed to begin. This is the essence of Martha Nussbaum theory of social justice, which has significant implications and consequences for the lives of women: The idea is that a minimally just society is one that secures to all citizens a threshold level of a list of key entitlements, on the grounds that such entitlements are requisite of a life worthy of human dignity. (Dixon and Nussbaum, 2011: 4) This is an ethical emancipatory theory that has some universal elements.

Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice 71

Equality and learning We are dealing here with the relationship between two concepts or conceptual frames, those of women and learning, conscious all the time that in focusing on learning we are also focusing on curriculum as a concept and as a practice. Equality of opportunity is the idea that people should be allowed to compete on equal terms for available goods, such as food, shelter, transport, positions at a university, employment of different types, social orderings and the like. This is the idea of open competition, and it is opposed to the distribution of scarce resources and assets on the grounds of economic class, family circumstance or cultural positioning. The principal difficulty with this notion in the educational context is that these different economic, familial and cultural influences cannot be easily eradicated from the process of competing with and against others for all these available goods, because these dispositional traits are essential to the development of the child, almost from birth. Parents bring up their children in different ways, which affects the life-chances of those children. Providing equal opportunities for everyone doesn’t necessarily lead to an equality of outcome; indeed, under some perspectives, it is not designed to do so. Conservative and neoliberal political philosophers dislike intensely the idea that there should be an equality of outcome, since they believe that this socialist idea is in opposition to the idea of a just reward for effort and enterprise and a cultural diversity that they enjoy. From this standpoint, the ideal of equal opportunity is to counteract the effects of people’s natural and social circumstances while at the same time permitting inequalities of goods that happen because of the choices those people make. The principal justification for this approach and set of beliefs is that justice or the adoption of a just stance requires the neutralisation of the effects and consequences of differences in people’s circumstances, material, psychological, discursive and so forth, and secondly that it is just and fair that people should both bear the costs and enjoy the benefits of their voluntary choices. This scenario or argument is problematic in that it would seem to suggest that a heavy smoker, who subsequently is diagnosed with lung cancer, should not receive treatment from the National Health Service, on the grounds that they knew that smoking might cause cancer and thus they have only themselves to blame, especially in a climate of scarce health resources. A further complication of the argument is that volitional processes might not be as developed for some people as they are for others. For example, if a person has a propensity to addiction, should they be required to exercise more restraint than someone who finds it easier to avoid smoking simply because they have a different bodily profile? For some, this is an argument that equality of opportunity should be supplemented by a further moral imperative that the needy are entitled to certain forms of support regardless of how their needs arose. As with all these arguments, there is still a need to provide a universal justification, in some form or another, for the distribution of goods.

72  Conceptual Framings We are concerned in this book, above all else, with forms of gendered inequality, since feminism has to mean that it is against, or offers an alternative perspective to, patriarchal forms of governance over women’s lives. This means that the divide between essentialists (ranging from biological reductionists, through evolutionary psychologists, to physiological, psychological and cultural determinists) and volitional constructionists is at its starkest. Within each of the social categories of gender, sexuality and sex, there is the potential for differences between members (for example, respectively, masculinefeminine, heterosexual-homosexual-unisexual and male-female); indeed, these differences are part of the various discourses emanating from the social categories. Social equalities are manifestations of weak boundaries between and within these social categories; social inequalities denote strong boundaries between and within them. In other words, notions of difference and different practices vary between different social, geographical and historical environments. There are broadly three types of equality as the concept plays out in the field of learning: equality of goods, equality of opportunity and basic capability equality. Equality of goods (that has a relationship to learning) suggests that a pedagogic process is fair when all the members of a society have equal access to what that educative process can offer, i.e. the best curriculum, the best teaching, the best resources for learning and so forth. Inequality of goods suggests that some members of that society are denied access to these goods and resources in the system. The background assumption to a notion of equality of opportunity is that a society contains a hierarchy of more and less desirable, superior and inferior positions, or there may be several such hierarchies. In a classed-based society, the assignment of individuals to places in the social hierarchy is fixed by birth. The child acquires the social status of his or her parents and the rewards that are associated with it. In contrast, if there is an equality of opportunity, assigning individuals to places in the social hierarchy is determined by some form of competitive process, and all members of society are eligible to compete on equal terms. The third form then that equality can take is basic capability equality (cf. Sen, 1985), that is, capability for life functions. Elementary functions include being in good health, nourished, sheltered and the like. Social functions comprise having self-respect, taking part in the life of the community and so forth. Capability refers to the real options that someone has to pursue the ends they desire. Furthermore, inequalities, such as classed, gendered or disabled kinds prevent the realisation of human freedom and thus limit a person’s ability to function in society, as Martha Nussbaum makes clear.

Values We are puzzled about what the world is like and as to how we can know what it is. A possible solution to this is to accept that values are central to understanding how we live and how we should live and this valorisation goes all the way

Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice 73 down, into our descriptions of the world, into those attempts we make at creating better futures and into our relations with other people9. We therefore need to work at how we do and can understand the world as it is and as we would want it to be. There are two dimensions to this claim. The first is ontological and this amounts to an assertion that objects in the world and human beings are valorised in relation to each other and to other object-types. Objects are arranged in the world and there could be other arrangements of these objects in other possible worlds. Indeed, objects (material and discursive), objectrelations, object-formations and human beings could be differently formed. A second dimension to the claim that we are making that those values go all the way down is epistemological and this invariably elicits a complaint from those who assert that we can develop value-free knowledge of the world. If we accept that value-free knowledge is an impossibility and that we inevitably make pre-judgements about the world in our activities in the world, then being in the world is understood as a practice, primed for investigation, but resistant to algorithmic and value-free methods for describing it used in the natural sciences. Again, if we accept that values are ontologically and epistemologically present in the world and in our endeavours to understand the world in its many iterations and in its many possible iterations, then we have to consider what these values might be and what their provenance is. Again, in conformity to the approach we adopt throughout this book, we need to explore what these valorisations are and what they are not, or at least what other people have construed them as being and not being. Virtue ethics is one of the three approaches to ethics that have a normative dimension. It foregrounds the virtues or moral character of the individual and can be contrasted with approaches that focus on duties or rules, as in deontological ethics, or on the consequences of actions, as in consequentialism. The virtues operate at the cultural or discursive level. In this form, they are dependent on membership of a practice, and this includes how they are instantiated in that practice. They are practice-based insofar as excellence in the practice requires a judgement to be made as to what is considered to have value in the practice. This therefore implies a relation (a type of progression) between a novice and an expert within the practice. The crucial issue is that any designation of an ethical virtue is always, and can only be, understood in terms of some conception of how the society is organised. Ethical judgements always supervene on epistemological judgements. The identification of the virtues is the hardest part of the argument to sustain because it opens up a series of unresolved issues, expressed perhaps as a series of questions. Examples of such questions are: what is its provenance (for example, a principle of equality)? and why is one set of virtues (for example, human dignity) to be preferred over another (for example, meritocratic treatment ethics)? Feminist ethics has at its principal raison d'être a desire to understand, criticise and subvert how gender relations operate in societies (material and

74  Conceptual Framings discursive configurations) and in frameworks (the antecedents of the ethical concept, its relations to other relevant ethical concepts, and the way the ethical concept is used in the lifeworld). Specifically, feminist ethicists, such as Martha Nussbaum, want to understand, criticise and subvert binary views of gender, how the male is privileged over the female, and the way gendered relations in society are oppressive, especially with regards to women and girls. Judith Butler (1990), for example, directly criticises the gender binary because it supports a fixed conception of the world as this is constituted by biology, and this contributes to the maintenance of oppressive and gendered social orders. Feminist ethics focuses on the subversive or praxical part of the equation, although this is not enough to determine that it is a distinct type of ethical framing. However, for feminists, such as Butler, this reaffirms the idea that all ethical theories are political and thus a part of a valorised and normative conception of reality. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792: 51), argued for a virtue ethics that did not distinguish between men and women with regards to how they should conduct themselves: I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues … Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them …. must be the same. The term feminisme was first used in the nineteenth century (Offen, 1988) and embraced a plurality of approaches to feminist ethics. These included universal virtue ethical ideas as well as an emphasis on difference between men and women, both as they now behaved and as they should behave. These feminine virtues have been conceived of in different ways, so for example, John Stuart Mill (2002), suggested that women’s virtues, such as gentleness, love, spirituality and sentimentality, were superior to male virtues and that these virtues were innate to women and men. Some modern-day feminist ethicists argue that an ethic of care is a particular characteristic of a woman (see Chapter 6). Although twentieth-century feminists approached these ethical issues in different ways, they generally shared a belief in progressivist notions of moral and social improvement. Existentialist ethicists, such as Simone de Beauvoir (1989), argued the case from a different perspective, so that women are not just active choosers of their lifestyle and set of ethical precepts, but are also shaped by oppressive forces, including female subordination. De Beauvoir believed that women are defined and understood as not men, that ethical theories, whether deontological, consequentialist or virtue-based, should take account of women’s social situation in the present and their capacity to make appropriate decisions about their lifestyle, and that women’s oppression is an impediment to women fully coming to know themselves.

Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice 75 Alison Jaggar, a modern feminist ethicist, argued against a form of discursive separateness for women and men. She maintained that: What we must do instead is to create a new androgynous culture which incorporates the best elements of both … which values a new androgynous culture which incorporates the best elements of both … which values both personal relationships and efficiency, both emotion and rationality. This result cannot be achieved through sexual separation. (Jagger, 1983: 288) Similar arguments for androgenous ethical approaches, gender bending and gender blending (Butler, 1990; 1993) and gender-eliminativism are prevalent among gender ethicists to this day. Intersectionalist ethicists argue that the constant tension in feminist theory and praxis between conceptions of femininity and feminism can be resolved by adopting intersectional approaches to the various ethical issues that feminists have an interest in. Attitudes, dispositions, characteristics and identities of men and women are shaped by other forces than gendered ones. Some feminist ethicists have argued for the adoption of deontological moral theories with their trailing substrata of rights and entitlements – we should acknowledge women’s equal capacity for moral agency, while also at the same time accepting that processes connected with oppressive practices have deemed women as a special case for unequal and privileged (to their benefit) treatment being afforded to them. Feminist ethicists have consequently argued for human rights with regards to reproduction, abortion, bodily characteristics, sexuality, sexual harassment, pornography, violence against women, rape and safety.

Rights and entitlements Martha Nussbaum’s rationale for her liberal view of equality, an equal esteem being given to men and women, is universal or transcendental. One form that this sense of universality can take in this context is rights-based and in particular the ascription of human rights. Rights-based ethical theories prescribe certain treatments for human beings and proscribe others. They are deontological and mandatory. Particular manifestations, such as the prohibition of FGM practices, are justified on the grounds of universal notions of how we should behave and conduct ourselves in life. The moral doctrine of human rights, as we have already seen in Nussbaum’s central human functional capabilities, refers to the fundamental prerequisites for leading the good life, which in like fashion requires a universal justification for what this might be. The doctrine of rights is underpinned by a fundamental claim that there is a rationally-derived moral order that applies to all human beings in different places and times, and in the context of this book, this means that moral,

76  Conceptual Framings ethical and epistemological classifications and constructs, such as fundamental differences between men and women and intersex persons, should not in any way restrict or delimit the idea of equal esteem and treatment for all human beings. It is here that rights doctrines are at their most vulnerable. We should also be careful to delimit the scope of rights-based ethical theories, insofar as they are generally seen as dealing with the shape, content and scope of public normative commitments. There are many other areas of life, mostly private and relational, that are considered not to be the province of rights-based ethical theories. These theories and their justifications aim to give legitimacy to attempts to regulate the contemporary political order. Such justifications include a view of morality and justice that comes from a pre-social domain and that allows us to distinguish between conventional and universal beliefs, and beliefs which understand human beings as carriers of certain natural rights10. The idea of natural law is that there is a natural moral code in existence, which is based around the identification of certain universal human goods. Immanuel Kant’s rights-based doctrine (endorsed by Martha Nussbaum) is centred on the principles of equality and moral autonomy. If we can identify a precept of reasoning that can be applied to all rational persons, which supersedes individual desires or interests, then we can attach a condition of universality to the identification of moral principles or ways of conducting ourselves in our lives. This, for Kant (1992b: 48), is the moral imperative, which has a binding quality to it: ‘act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it can become a universal law’. We are human beings, the defining characteristic of human beings is that they are rational, rationality comprises the making of universal judgements and acting in universal moral ways, and thus there is a possibility of determining deontological ethical precepts (see Chapter 14). This can be exemplified by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (see back to Authors’ Preface). The success of human rights campaigns doesn’t excuse us from providing a justification for these rights, even if we were able to say unequivocally what these rights are. Such justifications principally focus on two reason-giving arguments: interest theories and volitional theories. For some there cannot be a sufficient reason for adopting a rights-based theory, rights are simply there as are the sun and the moon and the earth. Rights do not require a justification; they are natural givens. This viewpoint is not helpful insofar as in this book we are adopting an ethical position of equalities of respect and treatment for men, women and intersex persons, and that this means that we have to provide sufficient reasons for taking this stance. Furthermore, we are explicitly rejecting the idea of rights and ethical precepts as simply being facts in the world and accepting some form of normative, denaturalised and valorised ethics. Martha Nussbaum in effect is advocating an interest theory, as she has been concerned to identify those social and biological requirements for being able to lead the good life at a minimal level, adopting as she has a capabilities approach within a notion of equality. John Finnis (1980), for example, identified a set of

Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice 77 fundamental human interests: life and its capacity for development; the acquisition of knowledge, as an end in itself; play, as the capacity for recreation; aesthetic expression; sociability and friendship; practical reasonableness and the capacity for intelligent and reasonable thought processes; and finally religion, or the capacity for religious experience. These are disputable, and fundamentally, the good life as a concept and as a practice is polysemic. A version of this interest-based argument is that rights are manifestations of individual selfinterest. Greed is a prerequisite of economic growth, which benefits everyone. The best means of protecting and furthering our own individual self-interest is to respect other peoples’ activities of protecting and furthering their interests, and in the end this leads to the furtherance of the common good, to the benefit of everyone. However, the minimal conditions for flourishing are socially and culturally relative, as Amartya Sen (1985) claims, so interests cannot be thought of as natural or universal. In contrast to the interest approach, a volitional theory is justified in terms of the utilisation of one and only one human disposition: the capacity for freedom. All the other capacities that we have talked about can be reduced to this one fundamental capacity. Even if this was feasible, there is still the problem of how the concept of volition or willingness can be justified. And further to this how do we understand the concept of volition? The possession of rights can be justified on the grounds that we are rationally purposive agents and having rights is a precondition for being rationally purposive. This argument is usually supplemented with the generic liberal argument that we cannot simply will our own rationally purposive activity, without logically also willing that of others. The problem with this is that being rationally purposive is understood differently, for example, by different people at the different extremes of the political spectrum (see Chapter 8). And further to this, willing or exercising one’s volition is circumscribed by context, which means that it is harder for some rather than others to exercise this fundamental human attribute. Rights-based theories can be and have been subjected to some fundamental criticisms: the first challenges the idea of universal claims expressed as human rights, and the second challenges the objective character of rights-based principles. In the first case, there is a general problem with universals of any kind, whether ethical, epistemological or praxical. Morality, knowledge and action are socially and historically contingent. We have to muddle along in life without recourse to principles that tell us how to behave, what to think and how to act. These forms of relativism are prominent in the debates around indigeneity, colonisation and decolonisation (see Chapter 8). At its worst, the principle of moral relativism may be deployed to justify practices that all of us find abhorrent, such as FGM, as we have seen above. The second criticism of rights-based theories is epistemological. Ethics is not and cannot be a subset of epistemology, but merely a subjective wish of an individual or a collective body of some type or another. What this means

78  Conceptual Framings is that although we may not be epistemological sceptics, we are ethical relativists, with the link between knowledge and ethics broken. The decisions we might want to make about our conduct in life and other people’s conduct are simpliciter powerful volitions. For example, Richard Rorty (1993) has argued that human rights are not based on any principle of rationality, but on a sentimental view of human beings, plunging us into an ethical abyss.

Feminist virtue ethics Feminist virtue ethics are different from deontological and consequentialist feminist ethics. They are related to dispositions, and what this means is that the ethical act comprises an inner state, which seeks to express itself in the world in relation to a problem that requires some action, such as the unequal treatment of women. This is a notion of non-determinacy. The reason why this notion is important is that the identification of the virtues requires a theory of knowledge (i.e. epistemology) and of being (i.e. ontology) and the identification of a relationship between the two, and any ethical theory (deontological, consequentialist or virtue-based) requires a theory of intentionality and universality. Martha Nussbaum (2000a: 42) argues for capability development as a goal, indeed as the purpose of learning: The basic claim I wish to make – concurring with Amartya Sen – is that the central goal of public planning should be the capabilities of citizens to perform various important functions. The question that should be asked when assessing quality of life in a country – and of course this is a central part of assessing the quality of its political arrangements – is, How well have the people of the country been enabled to perform the central human functions? And have they been put in a position of mere human subsistence with respect to the functions, or have they been enabled to live well? Politics, we argue (here concurring with Rawls), should focus on getting as many people as possible into a state of capability to function, with respect to the interlocking set of capabilities by that list. For Nussbaum this is a moral claim. In the next chapter, we discuss the work of Nel Noddings and the idea of a feminist ethic of care. Nel Noddings has developed an ethic of caring or, to put it in another way, a learnt disposition of care, that is, central to everything we do as persons. Her designation of an ethic of care is relational and thus is more to do with how we understand and relate to objects, objectrelations, object-configurations and people in our worlds. Natural caring, for her, is a moral attitude, a longing for goodness that comes out of our own experience of being cared for. And in addition, she develops a notion of ethical caring, which she describes as: ‘a state of being in relation, characterised by

Martha Nussbaum and Sex and Social Justice 79 receptivity, relatedness and engrossment’ (Noddings, 1984: 22). The ethical act is this sense of engrossment. This places her theory of caring firmly within a feminist perspective which accepts the idea that there are dispositions that are quintessentially female in form and use. This is fundamental to whether we accept Noddings’ feminist position – the privileging of traditional feminine values over masculine values.

Notes 1 This graphic account of Female Genital Mutilation is given here because we are dealing with issues of torture and reformulations and reformations of the female body. 2 cf. Nussbaum (1990; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2000a; 2000b; 2001; 2011) and with Sen (1993). 3 Decolonising and transgressive practices are discussed in the last chapter of this book. 4 In his book, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (2010, originally 1651) characterised the state of nature as a war of every man (sic) against every man, a constant and violent competition. 5 Richard Rorty (1998) rejected a notion of epistemology, although he later argued that it was important to keep the conversation going. 6 If this argument is correct, then we are beginning the process of establishing the existence of what P. F. Strawson (1959) called universals of coherent thought, and even some universals relating to key ontological relationships such as a mind-world distinction and consequently a connection between them. 7 Rawls’ (1971) theory of justice as fairness recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of a society in any case where inequalities may occur. 8 A moral imperative is a principle that compels that person to act. It is a kind of categorical imperative, as defined by Immanuel Kant (2007). Kant understood the imperative as an obligation of pure reason, in its practical aspect. Not following the moral law was seen to be self-defeating and thus contrary to reason. 9 We are using the term value to indicate that an object, whether discursive or material, configurational, relational or person-centred, has attached to it, in its functionality, a marker of worth, in relation to other objects or persons. 10 In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (2018: 189) suggested that ‘the natural is that which has the same validity everywhere and does not depend upon acceptance’.

6

Nel Noddings and the Disposition of Care

Our focus in this book is on concepts and conceptual development. Each chapter addresses a concept or an historical praxis (discursive or material) by exploring a part or aspect of the work of an important woman writer in the history of ideas. This involves a selection from all the people that we could have chosen. It also involves the development and use of criteria for our choice of women writers. As we suggested in Chapter 1, these women were not chosen because they were necessarily the best writers or the best theorists or the best philosophers, but because they had chosen to write about a concept or a praxis that best fits the overarching social theory that is being argued for in this book and have contributed to our understanding of these issues. Nel Noddings1, for example, has focused throughout her career on explicating a disposition of care, which is an important element in, and example of, a philosophy of dispositional realism. These chapters are philosophical discussions of some key concepts and praxes within the overarching concept and practice of learning that these women have contributed to in their writings and in their lives. The argument we are making throughout is that to understand the idea and practice of a concept, caring for example, we need to look at three nexuses or constellations of thought: the antecedents of the concept, its relations to other relevant concepts and the way the concept is used in the lifeworld. This means that we are not using the concept of caring in essentialist, detheorised or positivistic ways. We are acknowledging that language and language systems are valorised to their core, and we are using the term to suggest that there are several different interpretations of the disposition of caring. We therefore need to examine this disposition and a general notion of dispositions within our three networks of meaning, which we have called nexuses of thought. The first of these nexuses comprises the activity of genealogising. This means that caring as a disposition cannot be fully understood without due attention being paid to its genealogy, manifested in the traces of the disposition in the past and in the present-past. To care as in the Old English, carion or cearian, can be understood as being anxious or solicitous, grieving or feeling concern or interest. Its derivation also extends to the Proto-Germanic, DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-7

Nel Noddings and the Disposition of Care 81 karo, meaning to lament, from which we can derive a notion of grief-care from the Old Saxon, karon, which broadly means, to lament, to care, to sorrow, to complain and from the High German, charon, meaning to complain or lament. It also has connections and associations with the Gothic, karon, which can be translated as being anxious, and this in turn is said to have a Proto-Indo-European root in the word, gar, meaning to cry out, call or scream. The developmental sense is from cry to lamentation to grief. A different sense of evolution comes from the Dutch word, karig, which means scanty or frugal, and from the German, karg, meaning stingy or scanty. Positive senses, such as having an inclination or having a fondness for something, seem to have developed later as mirrors to some of these early negative ones. As a noun, it has similar antecedents. From the Old English, caru or cearu, we can discern a sense of sorrow, anxiety, grief, burdens of mind and serious mental attention. In late Old English, it also refers to a concern or anxiety caused by the apprehension of evil or the weight of many burdens; and from the ProtoGermanic comes the word, karō, meaning lament, grief, care (this can also be sourced from the Old Saxon, kara, translated as sorrow; the Old High German, chara, translated as wail or lament; from the Gothic, kara, meaning, sorrow, trouble, care; and from the German, Karfreitag, meaning Good Friday). These are traces of the meanings we gave to this concept in the past (see Online Etymology Dictionary). The second network of meanings that a word-object such as care might be a part of is a set of contemporary conceptual frameworks, composed of several discursive objects, object-relations and object configurations, such as attentiveness, beneficence, benevolence, compassion, concern, tender-heartedness, thoughtfulness, altruism, charity, generosity, help, selflessness, understanding, adoration, affection, devotion, love, and meta-concepts, such as education, learning, feminism, ethics, morality, imagination, justification, edusemiotics, holism, the girl-child, play, pedagogy, creativity, inclusion, indigeneity and many more. Each of these concepts and meta-concepts is positioned in its own networks of meaning. (We do not have the space here to give a full account of each of them.) The third network that care as a concept and as a disposition (caring) is positioned within refers to how it is used and how it can be used as a concept and as a practice in the world or in a world. Nel Noddings has written extensively about this, and though there are several rival theories, her work in this field will serve as a compelling example. Furthermore, she has placed herself within and acted as a propagator for one of our feminist discourses – the category of normative feminism. This advocates the privileging of traditional feminine values. Advocates for this position accept the view that women’s nature is different from men’s and that women excel in relational and nurturing practices. They go on to argue that the characteristics associated with femininity, such as caring, relatedness and community, should therefore be valorised over male characteristics. In other words, they all,

82  Conceptual Framings irrespective of emphasis, accept the male-female binary and its association with masculine-feminine difference, arguing simply that the hierarchy should be reversed with a consequent privileging of all aspects of the feminine over the masculine.

Notions of care and caring The ethics of care is a moral theory. It seeks to privilege in the scheme of things caregivers and care receivers: The ethic of care rejects the notion of a truly autonomous moral agent and accepts the reality of moral interdependence. Our goodness and our growth are inextricably bound to that of others we encounter. As teachers we are as dependent on our students as they are on us. (Noddings, 2016: 237) Noddings suggests that care is a quintessentially feminine ethic in that women prefer face-to-face interactions and thus prefer singular caring relationships: I shall strike many contrasts between masculine and feminine approaches to ethics and education and indeed, to living. These are not intended to divide men and women into opposing camps. They are meant, rather, to show how great the chasm is that already divides the masculine and feminine in each of us and to suggest that we enter a dialogue of genuine dialectical nature to achieve an ultimate transcendence of the masculine and feminine in moral matters. The reader must keep in mind, then, that I shall use the language of both father and mother; I shall have to argue for the positions I set out expressively. (Noddings, 1984: 13) General and abstract relationships are the province of men. From a maternal perspective, denied to men, she argues that this is basic to the human being, not necessarily as a result of any genetic determination, but because of bodily and consequently experiential relations that women enter into in the world. This is their corporeality in the form of reproductive, menstrual, menopausal, sexual, motile and erogenous experiences. The self is corporeal and necessarily shapes our being in the world. These dispositions are bodily and can thus be separated from dispositions that are in some sense experiential, such as the disposition of caring and entering into face-to-face relations or preferring the particular to the general or adopting a feminist ethic in the world, although bodily and experiential dispositions are related. From these bodily states of being, it is possible to identify certain dispositions: mothering, having maternal instincts, intuitionism, caring feelings and dispositions, mental health, cognitive abilities, emotion, sexuality, passivity, etc.

Nel Noddings and the Disposition of Care 83 Noddings distinguished between the two partners in the caring act – the one-caring and the cared-for – and argued that each has some form of moral obligation to care reciprocally. She called this an act of engrossment, defined as the one-caring receiving the cared-for, on her own terms, resisting projection of the self onto the cared-for, and trying to act non-selfishly to meet the needs of the person who is being cared for: Dialogue is implied by the phenomenology of caring. When we care, we receive the other in an open and genuine way. I’ve called this receptivity “engrossment”, but that term is not meant to suggest infatuation, obsession, or single mindedness. It suggests, rather, a non-selective form of attention that allows the other to establish a frame of reference and invite us to enter it. As dialogue unfolds, we participate in a mutual construction of the frame of reference, but this is always a sensitive task that involves total receptivity, reflection, invitation, assessment, revision and further exploration. (Noddings, 2016: 231) This is an ethical action that for Noddings has two sources: a natural state of being, that is, natural by virtue of being human, and a memory from when that person was cared-for, most commonly by parents of one sex or another. An ethic built on caring is, I think, characteristically and essentially feminine – which is not to say, of course, that it cannot be shared by men, any more than we should care to say that traditional moral systems cannot be embraced by women. But an ethic of caring arises, I believe, out of our experience as women, just as the traditional logical approach to ethical problems arises more obviously from masculine experience. (Noddings, 1984: 190) The first of these would seem to be an embodied characteristic and the second a socially learned characteristic or disposition. Noddings distinguished between caring-for someone and caring-about someone. The first refers to the hands-on business of caring and the second to a general disposition of caring, although she argued that we cannot care for everyone. There are three primary meanings-in-use that we can give to the activity of caring: hierarchical, dispositional and projective or self-reflective. The first of these is an ideal state that guides judgement and action. We should subscribe to a hierarchy of caring because human beings are so constituted that they seek perfection in being carers. We are compelled to behave in this way, although clearly it can be resisted or only partially fulfilled. The second set of primary meanings that we can give to the notion of care is a disposition that in its fulfilment allows us to live the good life. It acts as a means for maintaining and repairing our world and the world. This is care as a staged

84  Conceptual Framings practice, in which we can develop the notion of a temporal hierarchy, such as attentiveness to the need for exercising a caring disposition, a willingness to respond and do something in the world to ameliorate that lack, the exercise of skill in providing care, and responsiveness to this particular exercise of care so that there are no harmful side effects. The third then is the sense of being able to apprehend another’s world as a possibility: When I look at and think about how I am when I care, I realise that there is invariably this displacement of interest from my own reality to the reality of the other ….. Kierkegaard has said that we apprehend another’s reality as possibility. To be touched, to have aroused in me something that will disturb my own ethical reality, I must see the other’s reality as a possibility for my own. This is not to say that I cannot try to see the other’s reality differently. (Noddings, 1984: 277) Carol Gilligan (1990) argued that a care perspective is equivalent to a masculine justice tradition but has some significant differences – women are associated with relational ethics. Gilligan suggested that in adulthood women are encouraged to resolve the crises of adolescence that they inevitably go through by excluding themselves or others, that is, by being good and responsive, or by being selfish and independent. As a result, women’s adolescent voices of resistance are silenced, and they experience a dislocation of self, mind and body, which may be reflected in eating disorders, low leadership aspirations and self-effacing sexual choices. Several criticisms have been made of Noddings’ notion of care ethics. Victoria Davion (1993) described it as a kind of slave morality, valorising the oppression of women, in that it seems to equate empowerment and authenticity as a woman with self-sacrifice and self-effacement. It has also been suggested that an ethic of care is an essentially female disposition. However, even if some women identify with this ethic of caring, it doesn’t mean that all women do or should. Other critics suggest that there is nothing distinctive about care ethics as a moral theory, since it is only an exemplification of liberal concepts such as autonomy, equality and justice. This is fundamental to whether we accept Noddings’ feminist position – the privileging of traditional feminine values over masculine values. Another set of criticisms centres round a concern that care ethics obscures the bigger picture and is essentially parochial. Noddings herself has recently and explicitly positioned her theory of care ethics within a framework of justice, although this is not an explicitly feminist theory of justice. The principal objection to Nodding’s view of care ethics is that she paints a picture of the woman in essentialist terms and thus of the man as the opposite though still essentialist. Decategorising feminist perspectives are attempts to counter these essentialist perspectives. Many feminist care ethicists have attempted to avoid these essentialist strategies by situating caring practices in

Nel Noddings and the Disposition of Care 85 time and place, by understanding the notion of care as being symbolic rather than a representation of women’s voices, by explicating the disposition of care as a gender-neutral activity, and by being careful about perspective and privilege when asserting frameworks of ethics and morality.

Dispositions We therefore need to argue (provide compelling reasons) for accepting and endorsing a notion of dispositional realism2, in that care and caring are best understood as dispositions. Things or objects in the world, whether, material, dispositional, configurational, relational or human have causal properties and thus causal powers. These are intrinsic to the nature of the object or objects. This means that these objects, networks and relations are structured and because of this they possess powers. This refers to an important element of the claim or series of claims that we are making about caring and learning in this book, which is that any coherent theory of learning or indeed of caring needs to embrace a dispositional essentialism3 (but not an identity essentialism4), and consequently an object, whether discursive, material, relational, configurational or person-oriented, has causal properties and thus dispositional powers. In accepting this, we are committing ourselves to an approach that suggests that objects have real powers by virtue of what they are, although those powers are not always realised5. Dispositions are the building blocks of a person, and indeed of any object in the world. For example, caring is a property of a person6; fragility and number are properties of respectively an artefact, such as a glass vase and an abstraction, such as a mathematical set. Dispositions, as inner states of objects, precede, condition and have some influence over actions, activities and events. Dispositions of a person, artefact or abstraction then have a persistent quality; however, because they are time-limited, they can be modified, that is, a person at the age of five may not have acquired the disposition of caring but develops it at some point during their life, and material and discursive objects, relations and configurations are subject to natural change7. There are two types of conditions for the application of a disposition. The first of these is conditions that enable or prevent the realisation of the intended disposition. An example is the human or at least male disposition of breeding. If there are no female human beings to breed with then his breeding disposition cannot be realised, although he still retains his disposition of fertility. The second type of condition for the application of a disposition comprises those enablements or constraints that respectively allow an object to be dispositionally active or prevent an object from exercising a dispositional capacity. If a man has a zero sperm count this stops that man from being fertile. In the absence of the cared-for, there can be no one-caring (Noddings, 2016). This distinction is of fundamental importance in that any theory of change, whether institutional, systemic or personal, needs to take account

86  Conceptual Framings of the nature of the relationship between an object and its properties, and whether these properties are intrinsic or attached. If an object changes its properties and consequently its powers to affect change in other objects and in the arrangement of objects in the world, it becomes a new object. However, if one or more but not all of its properties change, then we can say that we do not have a new object but only a modified one8. A disposition, we are suggesting, is a functional property of a person. A property of a person is that they are, for example, caring; if they are, then that person can perform certain caring acts, although first, those actions may not be as they were intended by the person, and second, may not result in what the intention suggested would happen. Dispositions have functional essences, and these are at the core of any social, discursive and physical object-ontology; indeed, the only way that dispositions can be construed is in their functional form. Being a carer then involves the acquisition and expression of a complicated set of abilities understood as functions of a person. Furthermore, these abilities may be fully realised, partly realised, or not realised at all.

Concepts In this chapter, we are dealing with an important concept, the concept of caring (a dispositional concept), and how it can relate to other concepts, such as feminism, learning and curriculum. We therefore have to address what it is and how it relates to conceptual frames that seem to structure the way we see the world. Our concerns then will focus on whether concepts and conceptual framings are universals (see Chapter 5), how we can identify what they are, how we can distinguish between different concepts, whether we can in fact judge between different conceptual frames and, given our interest in semantics and semiosis, how do concepts and conceptual frames carry and transmit meanings, their modality. We also need to distinguish between the concept or conceptual frame itself and instances of it. Women’s emancipation as a concept has both an abstract form and can also be understood as a praxis, a concrete action in the world, such as the establishment of a college for black women, at the time of fierce discrimination for both black persons and especially women in the United States of America (see Chapter 13). If we want to make a knowledge claim, this knowledge claim is dependent on the concepts and the conceptual framings that we possess. As we have seen (in Chapter 3), a claim that there are a certain number of women in a delimited space at a particular time-point is dependent on several conceptual frames that we have already acquired, such as what a person is, what a woman is, what a foetus is, what a girl-child is and so forth. Finding out about something in the world can only be accomplished through our personal framings, and this is what we call concepts. And what this also means is that our dealings with the world always invoke issues such as knowledge, belief and justification (see back to Chapter 3).

Nel Noddings and the Disposition of Care 87 Conceptual learning or, as we have transposed it, dispositional learning, then, has a place in the language of learning. What this means is that concepts, such as caring, are understood as the properties of a person, as elements of knowledge and as having dispositional powers. Knowledge is transformed at the pedagogic site, through processes such as: simulation, representation, amplification, pedagogic control, progression, textual construction, temporality and feedback (see Chapter 7 for a full account of these various properties). In the learning process, the learning object takes a new form because of changes in its properties. We become or do not become caring people. In this chapter, we have examined two important educational dispositions: learning and caring. As dispositions, they have causal powers, even if these powers are not always realised. They are also concepts. This means that concepts are not representations or images in the mind, but rather abilities or capabilities9. Concepts such as caring or being a feminist or being a woman or being careful in the world about our five types of objects (discursive objects, material objects, relational objects, configurational objects and human beings) are abilities or dispositions of particular human beings. (Women are not being objectified here, but only thought of as being different from other entities, such as men. This assertion of course may have essentialising elements.) We are suggesting that it is possible to identify different types of concepts if we understand a concept-type in relation to how it can be used in a way of life. Some of these types are generalisations, abstractions, symbols in the mind, acquired dispositions, object categorisations, valued configurations, algorithmic formations and semantic conditionals.10 This class of objects can be understood as having family resemblances and not just logical or rationally formed relations or connections11. There are three principal uses of the term: concepts as representations in the mind, concepts as abstract objects and concepts as abilities. The first of these maintains that concepts are psychological entities, and this view is underpinned by a representationalist theory of mind, with this view of the mind-world relationship able to accommodate a notion of correspondence, reflection, sameness or manifestation (see Chapter 8 on the mindbody distinction). There is something in the world, outside the structures of a mind, which can lead to an equivalent operation in that mind, and these operations can be thought of as beliefs, desires, concepts and the like. These are psychological states and they are sometimes divided into primitive or basic concepts and concepts that are dependent on them. Under this conceptualisation, concepts are taken to be foundational or basic, and thought – now understood as irremediably conceptual – is grounded in these images in the mind.12 This representational view of concepts is the default position in cognitive science. The second view of concepts, such as caring, is that they are abstract objects. Concepts, in this view, are the meanings of words and word-complexes as opposed to objects and states of mind. Concepts as meanings mediate between

88  Conceptual Framings thought and language and their referents13 – thoughts are not psychological states but rather they are the meanings of states of mind. However, there cannot logically be a private language of thought, only that for a statement to be meaningful (that is, for it to make sense and thus have a use-value), it must in principle and in reality be subjected to public criteria of justification to allow a judgement to be made about its truth-value. The signs in language can only work where there is the possibility of public (comprising other people in specific time and place locales) affirmation or disaffirmation. A difficulty with the idea of concepts as abstract objects is that they stand or seem to stand outside the causal process; that is, they cannot be accessed in the normal way that we access objects in the world. We grasp the sense of an expression of care, for example, but this metaphor remains at the level of expression and has little ontological substance. And furthermore, it is unclear here how concepts can be learned. The third principal view of concepts is that they are abilities, and this is the predominant way that they have been understood here. This does not mean that some concepts cannot be understood and conceptualised as abstract objects; however, what this suggests is that primitive or basic concepts, such as learning, are neither representative images in the mind nor words and word-complexes in a language of thought. And this in effect renders representational views of concepts as inadequately conceptualised on two counts: first, that concepts are understood in too narrow a way so that learning inevitably becomes a peripheral activity, and second, that there is a variety of learning types that allow learning of concepts as abilities, a position that is denied to those who adopt an exclusively representational viewpoint.

Personal transformations For Jane Roland Martin (the thinker that we discuss in the next chapter), life is a series of metamorphoses or whole-person transformations, another set of concepts. Education is essentially implicated in these transformations. These personal transformations are also culture-crossings, that is, passages from one culture to another. In these transformations, some underlying traits might endure. By whole person, she means a whole way of being. In asserting the power of education and indeed in endorsing a view of education, this can act as a denial of a romantic or naturalised conception of education – the idea that everyone is born with a true inner self that presses for completion regardless of circumstances. There was a eurocentric family of views in the late eighteenth century that understood the natural as an inner source of motivation and action. It is possible to place these under the collective term of expressive romanticism; although, we should be careful about placing all its many iterations under one single banner or label. In contrast to the classical emphasis on form, tradition and harmony, some romanticists argued for the expression of feeling and imagination in the construction of knowledge. There are two consequences of this.

Nel Noddings and the Disposition of Care 89 The first is expressive in a fundamental sense so that we can talk about the nurturing of an inner voice. The second is entering into a particular relation to nature, one of conservation, respect and care for it. In this sense, nature means more than just the environment but also extends its meaning into what is considered natural. Thus, some sexual practices were considered to be abhorrent because they did not conform to what is natural or given. We can then talk about a naturalistic ethic14 in which our behaviours, intentions and thoughts are aligned with a natural norm. This is also a form of legitimation in that human beings now had a clear way of distinguishing between those activities which are natural and those which are abnormal, and consequently those activities which they should own and those activities which they should disown. A naturalist, above all else, rejects utterly any metaphysical or even universal sense, although universals may be understood as natural objects, as being justified by their natural status. On this account, there are no Platonic forms, Cartesian mental substances, Kantian noumena, divine objects that do not in a broad sense belong to nature. There is only the natural order of things. Although many scientists embrace naturalism, this doesn’t mean that naturalists necessarily endorse notions of determinism, physicalism and reductionism. Indeed, we have been careful in this book to separate out those belief-sets which embrace these notions and a theory of mind that is in some sense volitional. These are not just epistemological issues, but also ethical ones, even if we choose to align the one with the other. What this means is that we allow ourselves the possibility of not reducing every normative concern to something that we might want to call non-normative, such as in some versions of logical positivism (for example, Ayer, 1936). And what follows from this is that there is an irreducible normativity and hence ethical prescriptiveness involved in the use of concepts and conceptual terms, such as caring and learning. There is nothing peculiar about this, just that there is a normative, ethical and natural activity of doing, behaving, understanding and making judgements. This sense of going on in life, of whole-person curricular transformations, is the focus of the next chapter.

Notes 1 Nel Noddings is Lee L. Jacks Emeritus Professor of Education, Emerita, at Stanford University since she retired in 1998. 2 In A Realist Theory of Science (2011: 212) Roy Bhaskar endorsed the anti-Humean argument that things have causal properties and thus causal powers: ‘(a) thing acts, or at least tends to act, in the way it is. It should be stressed that the difference between a thing which has the power or tends to behave in a certain way and the one which does not is not a difference between what they will do, since it is contingent upon the flux of conditions whether the power is ever manifested or tendency exercised. Rather, it is a difference in what they themselves are, i.e., in their intrinsic natures’. 3 In using the term dispositional essentialism we are referring to the capacity of objects to have properties, including causal powers. We are using this textual device to provide evidence to support an argument that we are making in this

90  Conceptual Framings

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 1 12 13 14

chapter; however, we are framing the notion of evidence in its widest sense to mean, in addition to its conventional sense, reasons for making judgements about matters to do with learning. We are not transposing the idea of dispositional essentialism to any form or type of human identity. We are drawing a distinction here between the potential powers of objects and their actual realisations, in that they have causal effects. The issue of what a person might be is complicated, but it must include some notion of acquired properties that persist over time. Natural change is perhaps best expressed, in the fragments of writing that Heraclitus left us, as universal flux (cf. Bollack and Wismann, 1972). The distinction between a modified and new object is not definitive. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) would have approved of this, given his aversion to the idea of concepts as being representational images in the mind. These different views about what a concept is can be encapsulated in the three principal views of concepts and conceptual developments discussed here. cf. Wittgenstein (1953). Fodor (1975; 1998) called this the language of thought hypothesis. Frege (1980) argued for a sense-reference distinction, although he did not use the term concept, but rather referred to the referents of a predicate. Naturalism comes in many guises and forms.

7

Jane Roland Martin and a Gender-Sensitive Curriculum

By the 1980s, many feminists had become disillusioned with the political project of making women equal to men as they found ordinary and everyday discourses excluding of women’s experiences. This led to a growing awareness of the deep-rooted patriarchal nature of such thoughts. Even if sexism was eliminated with both sexes participating fully, the patriarchal nature of structural forms, such as in the language we use and those specific valorisations that are made, would still ensure that men and women were positioned unequally in terms of power. The development of a more radical feminism therefore was a response to the limitations of these approaches. Radical feminists, such as Jane Roland Martin, argued that when notions, such as rationality, knowledge and subjectivity, are examined, their gendered nature is revealed, so that concepts, which have been taken to be neutral and universal, are shown in effect to be masculine. The claim made by empiricist/ analytic epistemologists that rationality, objectivity and abstraction are the only guarantee of truth is a specifically masculine claim. Furthermore, each of the oppositions that structures this type of thinking are derivative of the most fundamental opposition of all, that of masculine-feminine, male-female and boy-girl. In all these binaries, the male element is privileged over the female and maintains its position by its capacity to define itself as a universal norm against which the feminine, and we have to be careful about how we use this word, is judged and found wanting. Jane Roland Martin1 understands herself as a radical feminist, being in opposition to this particular form of valorisation. Discursive structures that are relevant to the issues we are discussing in this book use several devices to exclude or marginalise women. Martin2 makes this point forcefully: In sum, the intellectual disciplines into which a person must be initiated to become an educated person exclude women and their works, construct the female to the male image of her, and deny the truly feminine qualities she does possess. (Martin, 1994: 74) DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-8

92  Conceptual Framings These devices include processes of absenting, excluding, disregarding, deleveling, reducing, distorting, conflating, falsely ascribing, deliberately falsifying, decategorising and the like. Each of these devices operates specifically in particular discourses or discursive structures. They act as relational objects.

The curriculum The concepts that we are addressing in this book (imagination, justification, care, edusemiotics, holism, girls’ education, play, creativity, inclusion, indigeneity, the girl-child and black women’s higher education) are also related to the experiences women have in the world and consequently are given meaning in relation to the set of feminist perspectives that we have referred to in earlier chapters (liberal feminism, critical and intersectional feminism, normative feminism, feminist naturalism, radical feminism, epistemic feminism, political feminism, decategorising feminism and libertarian feminism). In this chapter, we examine the idea of a curriculum through our three lenses or nexuses of thought: the antecedents of the concept; its relations to other relevant concepts and the way the concept is used in the lifeworld. What this also means is that the curriculum and curriculum processes are shaped certainly by value perspectives and usually by masculinist perspectives, not just because they are predominantly male writers but also because the discourse within which the construction of the curriculum takes place is predominantly male or masculine. In the first instance, we need to understand the possibilities of and problems with different versions of the curriculum as they were originally conceived. That is, we need to understand what these curriculum notions are, what disciplinary limits and enablements they have and how they connect to other concepts and conceptual frameworks. The concept of curriculum is characterised by its polysemic, ideological (see Chapter 3) and contested nature. We can identify ten important curriculum discursive constructions at both the theoretical and praxis levels: systemic-technological, critical-reconceptualist, sociocultural or cognitive constructionist, phenomenological, epistemic foundationalist, conservative restorationist, autonomous instrumentalist, economist, postmodernist and neoliberal curriculum frameworks, focusing on competences, and extra-national single surface comparative and assessment-driven implementation mechanisms. What is noteworthy about systemic-technological versions of the curriculum is the underpinning belief in science as the model for the essentially practical activity of determining what should be included in a curriculum and how it should be delivered. In this version of the curriculum, atomism, pre-specification and control are prioritised, with the curriculum conceptualised in terms of behavioural objectives and an input-output model of schooling. Behavioural objectives are derived from the philosophical theory of behaviorism and have been used specifically within the discipline of education to provide an explanation for the play of social and educational objects. Behaviourism makes three

Jane Roland Martin and a Gender-Sensitive Curriculum 93 interrelated claims. The first of these is that if we are trying to develop a coherent social theory, we shouldn’t be concerned with what is in people’s minds but with how they behave. The second claim is that behaviours can be explained without any reference being made to internal events in the mind. The source of these behaviours is the environment and not people’s minds. The third claim that behaviourists make is that if psychological terms are used as descriptors or evaluative markers then they should be replaced by behavioural terms or, at least, those psychological constructs should be translated into behavioural descriptors. Examples of this are the use of behavioural modification drugs, such as antipsychotics, to override volitional and intentional cognitive processes of the individual, behavioural techniques to predict the behaviour of populations during the recent Covid pandemic, and training processes to replace educative processes for becoming a teacher in the UK schools3. Another example is how populations are categorised in gendered ways, and usually to the detriment of women. Mariana Mazzucato in The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (2018) has argued that both the economic structures that we have set in place, and the means by which we give value to objects within those structures, are valorised in themselves. For her, these valorisations are skewed in our current social, political and discursive arrangements. For example, she suggests that over the last one hundred and fifty years we have adopted categorisations and valuations of economic affairs that exclude any economic activity that does not have value in a market-based economy. An example of this is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), seemingly an objective indicator, but in reality, an ad hoc assemblage of valuations and dis-valuations of economic goods with no compelling rational basis to them, except perhaps a bias towards male forms of work. These forms of social control are directed specifically at women, as most of their work (housework, domestic work, caring work and the like) is not officially recognised in the seemingly objective statistical world (see back to Chapter 3). There is a set of curriculum perspectives that offers a more critical approach to knowledge and therefore to the curriculum, what should constitute a curriculum and how it should be constructed. Critical pedagogy, an example of this, is underpinned by a belief that schooling and the curriculum always represents a preparation for, and legitimation of, a specific form of life. It therefore seeks, through pedagogic means, to surface, and in the process subvert, existing arrangements, both material and discursive, which have had the effect of reproducing racist, sexist, homophobic, disablist and unequal social relations. Unlike some postmodern viewpoints, critical pedagogy is predicated on a clear ethical position with regards to society and to the way society reproduces itself (this usually takes the form of socialist, communitarian, anti-capitalist, feminist and other frameworks and beliefs), though some versions of critical pedagogy emphasise the need to disrupt conventional school knowledge structures and the reproductive processes that accompany them, without specifying alternatives for learners.

94  Conceptual Framings A third curricular movement can be described as sociocultural or social constructionist. A particular iteration is cultural-historical activity theory. It was inspired by Lev Vygotsky, and as its centrepiece had the triangular model of subject, object and mediating artefact. When people engage in a learning activity (and in a sense this constitutes the principal activity of consciousness – see Chapter 8), they do so by interacting with the material world around them (though here the material world is embodied, structured and discursive). What they are doing is entering into a social practice and taking part in social activities. For Vygotsky (1978), our contacts with people and their environments are mediated by artefacts, such as physical tools, discursive practices, arrangements of people, technologies and social norms. This in turn led Vygotsky to a preoccupation with the notion of meaning and thus to the development of a notion of semiotic mediation, which constituted a rejection of the behaviourist paradigm4. A fourth curriculum tendency is interpretivism. Those studies that broadly fit into this framework understand the curriculum from a phenomenological, ethnographic, cultural-anthropological, interpretive, ethnological or ethnomethodological position. All these broadly phenomenological positions seek to emphasise the role of meaning-making and human volition in both understanding and implementing the curriculum. Phenomenology is a meta-philosophy that focuses on the three key aspects of learning, the relationship of the individual to and with the world, the subsequent conception and activation of being in the world, and how our descriptions, words, schema and theories can provide us with some purchase on that world. The focus is on the givens of immediate experience and this is an attempt to capture that experience as it is lived, both by the individual and the external observer5. Whereas behaviourists are concerned with the behaviour of individuals and side-step the inner workings of the mind, phenomenologists argue that a notion of consciousness is essential to any theory of learning. Curriculum theorists have also sought to develop universal and objective forms of knowledge, which provides a rationale or justification for a school, college or university curriculum. Before we discuss these types of theories, we should note that a descriptor, such as objectivity, a key term in post-truth discursive politics, contains multiple rather than singular meanings, as it is used in the world. It is possible to give six different meanings to the concept (of objectivising), namely, that something can exist objectively without it being perceived by human beings, that if something meets a set of truth conditions it is objective, that something is objective when the relevant knowers’ traces such as values and interests are bracketed out, that something is objective if it can be directly accessed through observation, that something is objective if its mode of application to the world is correct, and that something is objective when more than one knower can agree on its truthfulness6. Bearing this in mind, we can say that epistemic foundationalism has three principal forms: cognitive-impressionism, cognitive-universality and metaphysical essentialism.

Jane Roland Martin and a Gender-Sensitive Curriculum 95 The first of these, cognitive-impressionism, suggests that an idea is correct or apt insofar as it impresses itself on a person’s consciousness with such force and conviction that she cannot doubt it. Cognitive-universality suggests that reality is unknowable but the mind operating in an essentialist way supplies the structuring mechanism for the apprehension of the object. A third type is metaphysical and this refers to transcendental and ontological essentialisms, both of which have epistemic consequences. These three foundationalist positions are inappropriate or incomplete as theories because the essentialisms they propose are synchronically rather than diachronically realised. In contrast, conservative-restorationists suggest that the curriculum should be anchored in the past and they argue for canons of influential texts, the inculcation of values rooted in stability and hierarchy, formal and didactic modes of pedagogy, strong insulations between theoretical and everyday knowledge, strong forms of classification between different aspects of knowledge, and indeed in some cases a belief that curriculum knowledge is either intrinsically justified or even universal. Michael Young’s and Johan Muller’s (2007; 2010; 2015) curriculum specification, which is an example of this, is underpinned by two knowledge-claims. The first of these is that a curriculum should comprise objective knowledge and that a notion of objectivity is a precondition for any inquiry or practical application of knowledge in a curriculum. The second knowledge-claim is that this knowledge emerges from and cannot be reduced to the contexts of its production and acquisition – it thus has some universal and transcendental characteristics. This means that real knowledge and consequently powerful knowledge is emergent, nonreducible and socially differentiated. These stipulations are derived from a fallacious Durkheimian epistemological perspective7 (see back to Chapter 3). There are also various types of curriculum instrumentalism. Autonomous instrumentalists argue that it is possible to provide a justification for the contents of a curriculum by focusing on the acquisition of certain virtues or dispositions. There are two problems with this approach: there is a difficulty with establishing what the good life is or what an appropriate virtue might be, and there is an equal difficulty with identifying experiences for children in school which will lead to the development of dispositions to allow the individual to lead the good or virtuous life when they leave school. This perspective therefore incorporates an idea of the good or virtuous life as the endpoint and indeed determinant of what should and should not be included in a curriculum. The point is that, even if this cannot be precisely articulated, it can still act as a means for determining a way forward, an ethical desiderata (see back to Chapter 2 and the account we provide of Maxine Greene’s attempt at futuring). Economism understands the aims and purposes of formal education as directly to produce trained workers for an efficient and effective economy, whether market-based or state-controlled. It is the reduction of all social facts and processes to economic phenomena. This has implications for the

96  Conceptual Framings curriculum, such as the exclusion of other curricular purposes than purely economic ones. In broad terms, instrumentalism has several different forms, and even critical pedagogy, underpinned as it is by a normative model of society, can be thought of as instrumentalist. Instrumentalism has come to be associated with any normative view of life as the endpoint and purpose of formal schooling. A postmodern ontology suggests that fixed and stable values are no longer influential, that identities are decentred, that relations between individuals are unstable, that structures are emergent rather than permanent and that progress in society is an illusion. A postmodern approach to the curriculum refers to how that reality can be known and therefore how this form of knowledge is reflected in the construction of a curriculum. Though postmodernist thinkers differ in their approaches, it is still possible to identify a range of views held by theorists who have described themselves as postmodernist or have been described as postmodernist by others. The first of these is a rejection of correspondence views of reality. Indeed, many leading postmodernist thinkers, such as Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida, would subscribe to a form of epistemological and epistemic relativism. Here, the only meaningful phenomenon is the text, which does not refer to an extra-discursive reality. The second of these principles is a distaste for universalising modes of thought and global narratives. Knowledge is local and specific, has no trans-social dimension to it, and is constructed within communities that develop their own criteria for determining what is true and what is false. Judgements made about other social settings and systems across place and time can only be made from the viewpoint of the social setting to which the observer belongs. Knowledge is therefore relative to particular time/space loci. The third principle involves a rejection of ethical and teleological ideas. Frequently, postmodern ideas are criticised for claiming legitimacy and authority, as any set of ideas must do, and at the same time undermining that claim by denying credibility to these notions. Adopting a postmodern perspective has certain implications; principally, that knowledge of the world cannot lead to the production of propositional, objective and verifiable knowledge that results in a science of pedagogy and curriculum, crossing physical, geographical and temporal boundaries. All these curriculum viewpoints have been replaced by neoliberal curriculum perspectives. Neoliberalism is a concept that embraces the idea of free-market capitalism. It is generally associated with policies of economic liberalisation, privatisation of public corporations, deregulation, globalisation with the development of cross-border economic organisations, austerity, reductions in government spending and a substantial increase in the size and extent of the private sector. It is an attempt to shift control of goods and services to profit-making organisations. It also has significant implications for how we can understand the world, issues of truth, objectivity and realism, and how we organise that world socially. In its economic form, neoliberalism emerged from the great depression of the 1930s and was designed to counter the urge

Jane Roland Martin and a Gender-Sensitive Curriculum 97 to control markets, provide a welfare support for those who were market causalities, offer rational or non-market solutions to social arrangements and strip markets as effective regulators of what we think and believe. Neoliberal ideas are now the prime organisers of education systems round the world and can be expressed in terms of a number of propositions: traditional (and inevitably neoliberal) knowledge forms and strong insulations between them need to be preserved; each of these knowledge forms can be expressed in terms of lower and higher level constructs and the latter have to be taught before the former and sequenced correctly; knowledge can be constructed in behaviourist terms; certain groups of children are better able to access the curriculum than other children, and, as a result, a differentiated curriculum is necessary to meet the needs of learners. The teacher’s role is to impart this body of knowledge in the most effective way.

A gender-sensitive curriculum Knowledge is transformed at the pedagogic site, so it is possible to suggest that properties such as: the simulation of the learning object, the representational mode of the object, the degree and type of amplification, control in the pedagogic relationship, the type of pedagogic text, relations with other people in the learning process, the organisation of time (temporal relations), the types of feedback mechanism and the relations with other learning objects are fundamental components of this pedagogic transformation. What this means is that in the learning process the learning object takes a new form because of changes to its properties8. The first of these is the degree and type of simulation. In a simulation, a new medium is chosen that gives the learning object a new form, these media being virtual, graphic, enumerative, enactive, symbolic and oral. Indeed, depending on the new form, there is a gap between the formation of the original object and the mediated object. The implication of this is that the pedagogical relation between the learner and the world is never direct but is realised through the mediated object, with the process of knowing the unmediated object having a retroductive orientation, although this may be understood in a different way by the learner. The second property is the type of truth criterion that the knowledgeconstructor adopts. There are five conceptions of truth: truth as correspondence, truth as coherence, truth as what works, truth as consensus and truth as warranted belief. This property refers to a determination of the relationship between knowledge and the world, although it should never be assumed that this relationship is straightforward, linear or easily determined (see Chapter 3). The third property is amplification. Amplification is a central term in the field of rhetoric and stands for all the ways that an argument, explanation or description can be expanded and enriched. In addition, amplification refers to the capacity of the pedagogic object to increase in size, in extent, or in effect,

98  Conceptual Framings as by the addition of extra material. The use of a microscope in a science laboratory, or the use of the Internet to extend the reach of the learning object, or the taking of a deliberate and alternative position from the accepted norm for the sake of debate or to further the argument but always to deepen the learning process, are typical examples of amplification. The fourth property is control in the pedagogic relationship. Framing refers to the message system of pedagogy. A syllabus with set topics, to be completed in a predetermined order, within a specified time, is strongly framed. Weak framing occurs when the teacher is able to select topics by themselves and organise the sequence and pacing of material according to a different set of criteria than the official specification. Two control pathways can be identified. The first refers to the relationship between the teacher and the learner and the curriculum developers, so a teacher or facilitator of the message system has either a restricted or extended control over the way it is received in the pedagogic setting. The second refers to the relationship between the teacher and learner, and again this refers to the amount of control either one or the other has over the constitution of the message that is central to the pedagogic or learning process9. The fifth property is the constitution of the task given to the learner in the pedagogic setting. Learning tasks have a number of constituent elements and how they differ in kind allows us to determine and identify these different elements: media of expression, the logic of this mediated expression, its fit with a learning model, its assessment mode and its relation to real-life settings. Media of expression include oral, graphic, pictorial and enumerative modes. Each of these media has an encompassing logic to them, so that a task which requires a written response to a request is of a different order as a learning experience to one which requires an oral response. A further component of a pedagogic task or activity is the mode of assessment that inheres in it, with these modes of assessment being broadly understood as formative or summative. There is also the authenticity of the task and this refers to whether and how the task relates to real-life settings. The activity or learning task has a logical relationship with the learning model being employed. Frequently, there is a mismatch between them so that the task or activity (i.e. an oral response to a question, a written analysis of a text, a feedback exercise and so forth) and the type of learning model that is being adopted are incompatible. The sixth property is the relationship between the learner and other people in the pedagogic setting. One way of characterising the relationship between the text or object and the learner is by determining its strength along a continuum ranging from a diffuse mode to a concentrated mode. What this means is that the message being conveyed is embedded in a relationship between a stimulus and a recipient, which is either diffuse or concentrated, or could be placed on a continuum between them. An example of a diffuse strategy is an instructional mode of learning where the stimulus is being shared by a number of people. An example of a concentrated strategy is a one-to-one coaching

Jane Roland Martin and a Gender-Sensitive Curriculum 99 relationship. Since the relationship is both from the catalyst to the learner or learners and also from the learner or learners to the catalyst then this is going to influence the type of message received by the learner. We model the world as a sequence of messages passing from one to the other. The stimulus is clearly of a certain type. These are message-conveyance systems or processes of semiotic transmission that operate with and through a particular stimulus. Learning is always embedded in temporal arrangements of one type or another – a seventh property. A curriculum is an arrangement of time given to different items of knowledge, so any learning episode is going to be embedded in these arrangements. For example, pace of learning is important, that is, the pace at which a student completes a learning activity or the pace at which they are expected to work against a norm. Pace can be understood as a performative construct so that it is not meant to provide an empirical description of how a person has performed but is designed to act as a stimulus to increase the pace of learning for the general population – it thus has an explicit normative function. The most important of these properties is those relations that the learning object (and this comprises an act of choice by the curriculum developer) has with other learning objects. One way of understanding this key curriculum relation is by invoking the Discipline Principle. Jane Roland Martin is resolutely opposed to this construct, and her opposition is the first step in her development of a feminist curriculum10: When curriculum theorists say ‘Teach the disciplines’, they seem to have in mind what has been called the theoretical disciplines rather than the practical disciplines, that is to say, disciplines like physics and economics and geology rather than disciplines like sculpture, the dance and teaching. Thus they speak of the disciplines of knowledge, they want the modes of inquiry of various disciplines to be taught, they conceive of disciplines as having basic concepts, as making discoveries, as formulating laws and theories. This sort of talk is quite out of place where the practical disciplines are concerned but very much to the point in connection with the theoretical disciplines. (Martin, 1994: 135) Curriculum arrangements for any school system need to apply to all aspects of their teaching and learning environments: subjects to be taught, relations between subjects, core and optional curriculum elements, different types of teaching groups, summative forms of assessment, etc., and they cannot be treated as separate items. They can be placed on a linear scale with traditional/ fragmented approaches at one end, and networked approaches at the other. In between these two points, traditional and networked, there are eight notional points on the continuum: connected, nested, sequenced, shared, webbed, threaded, integrated and immersed11.

100  Conceptual Framings A fragmented curriculum has clear boundaries between the different subjects. A variation of this, a connected curriculum, is where connections are made as to how knowledge in another domain can supplement and contribute to knowledge in the specified domain. A nested curriculum has some similarities with this; however, a clear distinction is made here between generic skills and specific content. This model is only partially integrated as the content of the subject area is still treated as belonging to a curriculum area; however, some common skills are identified that cross the boundaries between different content areas and these are taught across the curriculum. In a sequenced curriculum learners moving between different subject areas are taught the same concepts, although reference is made to different applications and different disciplines in different contexts. In this model, we start to see more complex interconnections among subjects and subject boundaries start to weaken. The next point on the continuum is where the curriculum can be thought of as shared. Here, a particular topic is chosen that has several disciplinary strands. A webbed curriculum has some similarities with a shared curriculum; the difference being that there is a greater degree of integration. The curriculum is divided into themes, and each theme is treated in a different way by the subject teachers. The integrity of each discipline is retained, and the methods and approaches that are distinctive to these disciplines are taught even if the generic subject matter is the same. A threaded curriculum is where the emphasis is on the process of learning, or on metatheoretical processes. The content is subordinated to the teaching of these skills and a curriculum is devised that cuts across the traditional disciplines and focuses on common skills. A threaded curriculum in turn gives way to an integrated curriculum. Here disciplinary boundaries begin to dissolve, as teachers work in interdisciplinary teams to plan units round overlapping concepts and themes. Immersion is where integration becomes the responsibility of the learner as they focus on a particular topic or theme, and they borrow ideas, theories and the like from different disciplines. There is little evidence here of any adherence to the methods and protocols embedded within particular disciplines. Immersion is often used as a therapeutic approach to education or at the extreme end of progressive schooling methods. This gives way to a networked curriculum. Such an approach requires learners to reorganise relationships of ideas within and between the separate disciplines as well as ideas and learning strategies within and between learners. Martin (1994: 192) has argued that subject construction, thematic or otherwise, is a creative activity: In choosing a subject-entity – the science of physics, women, the environment – one’s work has just begun. There are parts to be chosen and relationships among them traced. There is also the question of how the subject-entity is going to be viewed. The New Curricula for the most part took intellectual disciplines as their subject-entities. What distinguished

Jane Roland Martin and a Gender-Sensitive Curriculum 101 them from earlier efforts at subject construction was that they viewed the disciplines as fields of enquiry rather than as accumulations of knowledge. This was no slight change. Although the aspects under which a subject is viewed does not dictate its parts and the degree to which they are integrated, it surely influences these decisions. One who views history as a field of enquiry will normally be led to a very different version of the subject than one who views history as an account of the past. And this leads us inexorably to affirm the different types of knowledge that should be a part of a curriculum but rarely are. As we suggested in the first chapter of this book, knowledge has four principal forms: how to do something (process forms of knowledge), of something (judging that claim in terms of its relations within and to a network of concepts, and making the subsequent commitments that this entails), through something (interacting with the world) and embodied as something (assimilating an action and being able to perform in the spaces associated with that action). The discipline principle, which Martin rejects in a fundamental sense12, is that the best way we divide up the world is through naturally occurring disciplines or knowledge constructs, that this provides us with a means for structuring the school curriculum, and that interdisciplinary and transcendental forms of knowledge are of little relevance in this structuring. For Martin, this is not and cannot be a real feminist and inclusive curriculum: There is more to education than advocates of the Discipline Principle seem ever to have dreamed of. Thus far we have simply questioned the adequacy of the Principle in relation to one educational objective, namely that our students learn about those things we consider important enough to be learned about. But education is not and ought not to be limited to learning about: there are skills to be acquired, techniques to be mastered, activities to be learned, works of art to be appreciated; there are emotions to be fostered, attitudes to be developed, convictions to be encouraged, ways of acting to be promoted. The Discipline Principle and, indeed, the curriculum theory to which it belongs, must be condemned for ignoring all these things – that is to say, ignoring them except as they enter into one particular context. (Martin, 1994: 143) There are alternatives and these alternatives sit more easily at the networked end of the curriculum spectrum. A curriculum in essence is a planned programme of learning, and therefore if we are to understand it, we also have to develop a theory of learning. As a concept, learning is fundamentally related to knowledge, and therefore if we are thinking about learning and the practices of learning, we also need to make reference to what is to be and how it is learned, and typically what we are aiming at is some form of knowledge. This has implications for a theory

102  Conceptual Framings of learning and knowledge-development and therefore for the curriculum theory that follows from it. What also follows from this is that in most societies these different forms of knowledge are given different statuses or have different attachments of importance, so, for example, male or masculine or productive knowledge (as Martin (1994) understands it) is considered to be more important than female or feminist or reproductive knowledge (as Martin (1994) sees it), but these ascriptions of importance do not lie in the intrinsic nature of each knowledge form but in the way these knowledge forms are realised in particular societies, and especially those societies that are organised along patriarchal lines. From this curriculum perspective (and we have to say only from this curriculum perspective) a feminist curriculum can be constructed, and this comprises, for Martin, what she calls a gender-sensitive ideal: For some time I assumed that the sole alternative to a sex-based conception of the educated person …. was a gender-free ideal, that is an ideal which did not take sex or gender into account. I now realise that sex or gender has to be taken into account if an ideal of the educated person is not to be biased. To opt at this time for a gender-free ideal is to beg the question. What is needed is a gender-sensitive ideal, one which takes sex or gender into account when it makes a difference and ignores it when it does not. Such an ideal would be truly gender-just. The second moral is that everyone suffers when an ideal of an educated person fails to give the reproductive processes of society their due. Ideals which govern education solely in relation to the productive processes of society will necessarily be narrow. In their failure to acknowledge the valuable traits, dispositions, skills, traditionally associated with the reproductive processes, they will harm both (sic.) sexes, although not always in the same ways. (Martin, 1994: 83) This draws Martin (1994: 208) inexorably towards a repudiation of the theories, interpretations and narratives constituting the disciplines of knowledge, towards an integrated and liberal curriculum (though not one constructed round the disciplines or subjects of knowledge) and towards a curriculum that is gender-sensitive: Since the subject matter of the liberal curriculum is drawn from these disciplines, that curriculum gives pride of place to male experience and achievements and to the societal processes associated with men. In so doing it is the bearer of bad news about women and the reproductive processes of society. Can it be doubted that when the works of women are excluded from the subject matter of the fields into which they have been initiated, students of both sexes will come to believe, or else will some to have their existing belief reinforced, that males are superior and females

Jane Roland Martin and a Gender-Sensitive Curriculum 103 are inferior human beings? Can be it be doubted that when the course of this initiation the lives and experiences of women are scarcely mentioned, males and females will come to believe, or else believe more strongly than ever, that the ways in which women have lived and the things women have done throughout history have no value? All the elements of a curriculum (simulation, representation, amplification, control, progression, learner relations, textual-modality, temporal relations and feedback mechanisms of the learning object) would also have to conform to Martin’s gender-sensitive principle. In the next chapter, we examine the concept and practice of indigeneity through the eyes of Marie Battiste.

Notes 1 Jane Roland Martin is an American philosopher known for her work on education. She is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. 2 cf. Martin, J. H. (1992; 1994; 2000; 2002; 2007; 2011). 3 They were remarkably unsuccessful. 4 Learning can be seen as adaptive rather than transformative, and Vygotsky’s work (1978) has always been associated with the latter rather the former (cf. Scott, 2021). 5 This knowledge-making activity is directed in the first instance to the things in themselves that are the objects of consciousness, and that try to find ‘a first opening’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945) on the world, free of those presuppositions brought to any learning setting. This points to the break with behaviourism that phenomenologists generated. 6 cf. Scott and Scott (2018). 7 Durkheim’s (1939) epistemological perspective is positivist and empiricist. 8 For a fuller account of these properties than the one in this book see Scott (2021). 9 This property has some relation to Basil Bernstein’s (2002) notion of framing and classification, though, in our view, it is superior to it. 10 Martin’s opposition to disciplinary knowledge is only one part of her extensive writing portfolio. 11 cf. Fogarty (1993). 12 What we mean by this in a fundamental sense is that Martin believes that a feminist curriculum has to embrace some integrationist elements.

8

Marie Battiste and Indigenous Knowledge

This chapter is about the concept and practice of indigeneity or indigenising. In a book about women’s experiences in the lifeworld, we are committed to positioning them within antecedent, contemporaneous and applied networks of meaning, and as they relate to feminist theory and praxis. This means that we are not using the concept in essentialist, detheorised or positivistic ways1. We are acknowledging that language and language systems are valorised, and multi-perspectival at the levels of word, word-complex, word-concept and praxis, and we are using the notion to suggest that there are several different interpretations of indigeneity, the concept we are examining in this chapter through the work of Marie Battiste2. Indigeneity or indigenising as a concept and as a practice has a relation or set of relations with and can only be understood in relation to the concepts of feminism and learning, genealogically, coevally and in its application. In Elizabethan times in England at the end of the Tudor dynasty, a discursive and material configuration, or, as Michel Foucault called it, a dispositif3, was hegemonic. This comprised a belief in four types of humours: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic, and those individual people were inclined towards one or the other. This was their predominant characteristic as persons. Sanguinicity resides in the blood system, is produced by the liver, its element is air, it is hot and moist, its complexion and body type are red-cheeked and corpulent, and the dominant personality of the sanguineous person is that she is amorous, happy, generous, optimistic and irresponsible. A choleric person’s body substance is yellow bile, and this resides in the spleen, its element is fire, it is hot and dry, its complexion and body-type are red-haired and thin, and the dominant personality of the choleric is that she is violent, vengeful, short-tempered and ambitious. The phlegmatic’s body substance is phlegm and this resides in the lungs, its element is water, it is cold and moist, its complexion and body-type are corpulent, and the dominant personality type is sluggishness, pallidity and being cowardly. The fourth humour is melancholia, which has a body substance of black bile produced by the gall bladder, its element is earth, its qualities are cold and dry, its complexion and body type are sallowness and being thin, and the dominant personality traits are DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-9

Marie Battiste and Indigenous Knowledge 105 introspection, sentimentality and gluttony. These sentiments were shared by other communities in Europe. The humours were said to give off vapors which travelled to the brain; a person’s personal characteristics (physical, psychological and moral) were determined by her ‘temperament’ or the balance of her humours. By 1600, this typology was commonly used, and if we want to understand Elizabethan life or how it was lived, then knowledge of the humours is essential (cf. Porter, 1999). The dispositif or categorisation of human types survived for long periods of time because it worked or at least because it was made to work, and not because it was correct or incorrect4.

Discursive configurations A discourse, or discursive configuration, such as indigeneity, is a set of propositions about the world joined together by a set of connectives and relations that offers an account of an object or objects in the world and may even act to create objects in the world. A discourse can never be a singular determinant of identity, behaviour or action. Discourses (for example, indigenous discourses) are structured in a variety of ways, and both this meta-structuring and the forms it has are relative to time and place. These meta-forms refer to constructs such as object-designation, performativity, reference, value, binary opposition, representation and legitimacy5. The first of these meta-forms refers to the designation of objects as objects and how they are different or separate from other objects in the world; in part, this constitutes a naming process and it refers to the relations between singulars and generalities, such as indigenous/extraneous in a colonising discourse or male/female in a gendered discourse. The second meta-form refers to the balance between denotative and performative utterances, or between offering an account of something with no intention of changing objects in the world and offering an account that is intended to change an object or create a new one. Utterances about indigeneity, decolonisation and the like may be characterised by the balance of performativity and denotation within them. The third meta-epistemic form concerns the relative value given to an object in comparison with another object, an example of which is an indigenous philosophy being understood as inferior to Eurocentric notions of science6. The fourth meta-structuring device is when an object, description or disposition is defined in terms of another object, description or disposition of which it is the opposite. If the indigenous/extraneous7 binary is used as an example, it is possible to see that the positioning of the two terms as oppositional in meaning, and the subsequent valuing of one (extraneity) and the devaluing of the other (indigeneity) because of their oppositionality, has significant implications for how we can use these concepts in the world. The fifth meta-principle refers to the referential value of a statement. Making an educational or social utterance about indigeneity, for example, implies a particular type of truth-value. A correspondence theory represents the truth

106  Conceptual Framings of whether the utterance mirrors the reality that it seeks to describe. A number of such theories are in existence, some fairly primitive such as naïve appeals to facts or fact(ing)s, others are more sophisticated so that they avoid mirror imagery and at least take account of sceptical arguments (see back to Chapter 3). On the other hand, coherence theories suggest that the truth-value of a statement does not lie in its reference to an external world but in whether it fits coherently in a web of knowledge. A statement about, for example, indigeneity, therefore, implicitly or explicitly is underpinned by a theory of reference embedded within a theory of truth, and this marks it out as a knowledge form. The sixth meta-principle refers to the way the particular ideas, concepts, phrases and descriptors are embedded in networks of ideas, concepts, phrases and descriptors, and have a history. So, for example, indigeneity as a concept is always positioned in a complicated network of other terms, such as innateness, colonisation, decolonisation, race, ethnicity, trait theory, genetics, phenotypicality, biology, historical origin, evolutionary theory and many more8. Indigeneity as a concept and as a practice therefore has antecedents, is related to other concepts and praxes and is used in the lifeworld in particular ways. We have been referring here to the relations in the discourse between different ideas and notions, and how these can vary depending on the discourse. A key networking concept with which indigeneity has past, contemporaneous and applied relations, is race.

Race categories The concept of race has been used to signify a division of people into different groups. (This is only one way it can be used.) Under this conception, racial divisions are said to have some type of biological foundation, and this generates discrete racial groupings, so that members of each group share a set of biological characteristics that are not shared by members of other groups. These characteristics are inherited from other members of the same racial grouping, and it therefore becomes possible to identify the geographical origin of each race. These inherited characteristics are usually thought of as physical phenotypes, such as color of hair, skin color, eye shape and bone structure; however, this is where it becomes much more complicated and divisive, sometimes these characteristics are used to refer to behavioural phenotypes such as intelligence or criminality. For example, in 1735, Carl Linnaeus divided human beings, Homo Sapiens, into four distinct groupings, Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus and Afer, and associated each of them with a different humour or personality type, sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic, respectively (cf. Anderson, 2009). Indeed, he described the first of these groupings as ‘active, acute and adventurous’, and the last of these as ‘crafty, lazy and careless’. A belief in the concept of race as it is understood and defined here leads to certain social and political practices that discriminate against particular people, and in addition, to the formation and reformation of categories such as indigeneity, and

Marie Battiste and Indigenous Knowledge 107 subsequently to the development of social, cultural and pedagogical practices associated with them. They are not natural kinds9. Determining the boundaries between different racial or indigenous groupings has proved to be somewhat controversial. One form that these racial groupings took was that there are only four distinct races and they were both geographically based and allied with the phenotype of skin color: white or Caucasian, black or African, yellow or Asian and red or North American (cf. Anemone, 2011). This downplayed other biological or phenotypical distinctions, reduced all human beings to four basic categories and identified skin color as the determining factor in race and racial categorisations. Within this system, no distinction was made between Scandinavians and Italians, both categories being subsumed into a white or Caucasian category. Other taxonomists tried to distinguish between Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean races, but with little success. This reduction in relation to geographical area did not apply to the concept and practice of indigeneity, since indigenous groups are said to exist in many different parts of the world and are reproductively isolated from each other. The difficulties that these taxonomists encountered led to a belief that race as a category was socially constructed, and not just through the nominalisation process itself or through biology. However, some biologists persisted in their belief in racial categories, arguing that reproductive isolation during human evolution or through social practices such as miscegenation had led to the existence of different groups of human beings sharing physical phenotypes and even to clusters of genetic material. In addition, some argued for the formation of socially constructed and differentiated racial categories. Indigeneity as a concept and as a praxis over time developed the same or similar semantic relations to the concept and praxis of race, for example, its separateness from colonising or discriminatory discourses10. There are then conceptual, ontological, epistemological and normative conceptions of race and indeed of indigeneity. For example, in the Moorish conquest of Andalusia in the eighth century, the idea of blood heritage (‘limpieza de sangre’)11 became an important concept as a category of religious membership. Cultural identification markers had some importance; for example, monogenicists asserted that all human beings had a common ancestry, as in the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament; whereas polygenecists asserted that different races descended from different ancestral roots. Sexual selection became a central focus for the conceptual development of the field of race through the work of eugenicists, such as Francis Galton, who advocated selective breeding to improve the qualities of the human race. This is a manifestation of the category of difference, in both its evaluative and praxical knowledge senses12. Racial naturalism signifies and is an example of old biological and essentialist views of race, in which races or divisions of people have heritable, biological features; these are shared only by members of the group and are used to explain behavioural, characterological and cultural predispositions of

108  Conceptual Framings people who belong to that group. Very few people and then only those who place themselves at the extreme end of the political spectrum believe in these biological and essentialist race theories. They are imagined forms of social identity13. Racial constructivism then is an argument for suggesting that even if biological race theory is false, races and racial divisions exist because they have some form of credibility in particular societies, and that credibility is supported by the racial categorisations used by governments in censuses and the like. A genealogy of indigeneity points to similar mechanisms and characteristics. Anglo-American discourses on race are linked to discourses on eugenics, the family, sexual predation, normality and population management, which function within the networks of power that Foucault (2010) referred to as biopower14. Indigeneity as a concept and as a praxis also functions within biopower networks.

Indigeneity Marie Battiste and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood (2000, location 309–317, Kindle Edition) have suggested that indigenous ways of knowing can be expressed in the following way: From the beginning, the forces of the ecologies in which we live have taught Indigenous peoples a proper kinship order and have taught us how to have nourishing relationships with our ecosystems. The ecologies in which we live are more to us than settings or places; they are more than homelands or promised homelands. These homelands do not surround Indigenous peoples; we are an integral part of them, and we inherently belong to them. The ecologies are alive with the enduring processes of creation itself. As Indigenous peoples, we invest the ecologies with deep respect, and from them we unfold our structure of Indigenous life and thought. And further to this, Battiste and Youngblood (2002, location 309–317, Kindle Edition) suggest that ecological insight creates a vision of the animate “natural” world. It informs our communion with the land, our wisdom, and the various dimensions of our faith and our hopes. Indigenous order, consciousness, and heritage are shaped and sustained by ecological forces and by the relationship of their changing forms. Ecologies are not static or general; they are places of eternal and often violent change. Indigenous orders are not singular modes of existence but are manifested in different ways. We carry the mysteries of our ecologies and their diversity in our oral traditions, in our ceremonies, and in our art; we unite these mysteries in the structure of our languages and our ways of knowing. The forces and

Marie Battiste and Indigenous Knowledge 109 aspects of our ecologies are manifest in our stories, which are to us what water is to plants. Marie Battiste (adapted from Battiste, 2013) identifies a set of criteria for determining what indigenous knowledge is, with this indigenous knowledge designed to apply to all indigenous knowers in the world, even if they are separated in time and place. 1 Knowledge of unseen powers in the ecosystem 2 Knowledge that all things in the ecosystem are interdependent 3 Knowledge that reality is conceptualised by concepts that are well-known to participants in the indigenous practice 4 Knowledge that personal interrelationships are central to personal, community and ecosystem practices 5 Knowledge that sacred traditions and persons should have as their primary function initiation to the next generation, i.e., the preservation of specialised forms of knowledge 6 Knowledge that the infrastructure of families passes on this specialised knowledge. Battiste (2011: xvii) also makes explicit connections between indigeneity and colonisation: Through our sharing, listening, feeling, and analysing, we engaged in a critique of the trauma of colonization. We examined the frameworks of meaning behind it, we acknowledged the destructiveness that it authorized, and we imagined a postcolonial society that embraced and honoured our diversity. We shared many sides of a box that we came to know more fully. We came to see colonization as a system of oppression rather than as personal or local prejudice. We came to understand that it is the systematic nature of colonization that creates cognitive imperialism, our cognitive prisons. We are focusing here on the concept of indigeneity and because it is a concept it has all the characteristics that we associate with a concept or conceptual frame. Dispositional concepts precede other forms of knowledge and what this means is that human beings cannot possess propositional, process or embodied forms of knowledge without some form of conceptual knowledge, and that this conceptual knowledge influences and conditions the shape, form, function and reach of these other forms of knowledge. This conceptual framing process is unique to people, and it therefore acts as a marker of difference between people and material objects, discursive objects, object-relations and material and discursive object-configurations. Conceptual framings include objects that have an active quality, for example, being indigenous.

110  Conceptual Framings A variety of criteria have been suggested as to what is or is not an indigenous people and this difficulty is further compounded by how it is used now. What this suggests is that a concept, a conceptual frame and a conceptual discursive configuration changes its meaning between different time points, and this requires us to adopt a genealogical approach to understand the meaning of a concept such as indigeneity and how it is currently used to identify a discursive or material object in the world, in this case, an indigenous people. Several discursive configurations focusing on the concept of indigeneity can be identified. (These also act as arguments for decolonising processes.) The first of these is that a distinct group of people maintained a lifestyle that was different from other peoples’ with respect to the occupation and use of specific territories or land areas. In part then this is a geohistorical marker, in that a geographical area is set aside for the exclusive use of a group of people, even if in some cases that geographical area is no longer occupied by the original set of people. For example, many aboriginal areas in Australia, such as the Torres Strait, are now occupied in part by people that would not self-identify as aboriginal peoples15. The distinction then rests on geographical and historical occupancy and on the symbolic importance that some groups of people attach to these areas of land. This is an argument that ownership of land, past or present, is an inalienable marker of a social arrangement. The second discursive configuration focuses on, and prioritises, this last criterion as being of particular importance, though not necessarily based on the value and meaning attached to it. To distinguish an indigenous people from a nonindigenous people might involve the deliberate perpetuation of cultural distinctiveness by particular indigenous people and this refers to language, social organisation, religion and belief systems, various powerful hierarchies, modes of production, laws, institutions, ways of life, healing processes and learning modes. The point is that these are deemed by indigenous people to be different and as having more value than other processes, symbolic formations, nonindigenous objects, object-relations and discursive and material object-configurations. In addition, there is always a desire to preserve their ancestral environments and systems. Distinctiveness rests on different values being attached to different objects. The third discursive configuration focuses on the idea of self-identification and the subsequent endorsement of that status by governments and authorities. The idea of difference – being different and attaching different values to material and symbolic formations and institutions – is built into, is a part of, that way of life and how that way of life is valued. In Canadian aboriginal terms16, this refers to those beliefs that endorse the idea of knowledge of unseen powers in the ecosystem, that all things in this ecosystem are interdependent, that reality is structured by conceptual frames that inhere in the life of the indigenous people, that personal interrelationships are central to these ecosystem practices, that sacred traditions demand that certain people within the indigenous practice should preserve these specialised forms of knowledge

Marie Battiste and Indigenous Knowledge 111 and that the network of family life is entrusted with the passing on of this specialised knowledge (cf. Battiste, 2013). This is difference writ large as is the notion of espacement or spacing, so that what should concern us here is the process that differentiates social elements from other social elements, and in most cases engenders binary oppositions and endlessly renarrativised hierarchies of meaning (cf. Derrida, 1982). The key to understanding this reason for conceptualising indigeneity in this way is that this is how those indigenous people see themselves, and this allows us to distinguish indigenous people from other peoples. The fourth way of constructing the discursive configuration is by focusing on the idea of indigenous peoples, also referred to as first peoples, aboriginal peoples, native peoples or autochthonous peoples, as a culturally distinct ethnic group. There is an immediate problem with this in that the term is now being applied to a wide variety of people in different geohistorical locations. Amnesty International (2010), for example, claim that there are 370 million indigenous people in the world, spread across 90 countries. There are 5,000 different indigenous peoples and more than 4,000 indigenous languages. Each of these indigenous peoples are likely to have constructed different narratives as to why they are different from nonindigenous groups and from other indigenous groups that self-identify as indigenous. Finally, there is the most interesting of the discursive arguments, which centres on the experience of subjugation or colonisation, and downplays the idea of different symbolic and material institutions. This experience then – the concept is immersed in history – of subjugation, marginalisation, dispossession, exclusion and discrimination, even if these conditions no longer exist, is central to how we might understand the concept and praxis of indigeneity, and in addition, help to construct an opposition to these hegemonic forms of oppression. Sir Thomas Browne in 1642 first used (indeed, invented) the term of indigeneity to distinguish between different types of what he called negroes17, which in turn meant that he was not just describing a people but creating a way of differentiating between peoples. This is what Browne (1642: 132) had to say: ‘and although in many parts thereof there be at present swarms of Negroes serving under the Spaniard, yet were they all transported from Africa, since the discovery of Columbus; and are not indigenous or proper natives of America’. Divisions between peoples are being created in slow and incremental ways that have real effects on object-arrangements and normative networks in society. Indigenous people usually though not always have been affected by colonising and decolonising narratives or discursive configurations. One of these decolonising onto-epistemologies is a rights-based argument (see back to Chapter 5). Indigenous rights have been declared as powerful forces and as having efficacy in international law by the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank, and this includes issues to do with culture, identity, language, access to employment and health, education and natural resources.

112  Conceptual Framings Indigenous is derived from the Latin word, indigena, meaning ‘sprung from the land, native’ (see Online Etymological Dictionary). The Latin word-object, indigena is based on the old Latin word-object, indu, meaning ‘in, within’ and gignere, which can mean ‘to beget, produce’. Indu is an extended form of the Proto-Indo-European en or in. The origins of the term indigenous are not related in any way to the origins of the term, Indian, which, until recently, was commonly applied to indigenous peoples of the Americas. Autochthonous originates from the Greek αὐτός, autós, meaning self/own and χθών chthon meaning Earth. The term is based on the Indo-European root, dhghem(earth). In the 1970s, the term and the concept began to be used as a way of linking the common experiences of colonised people across international borders. They are culturally distinct groups that have some common characteristics. However, these forms of genealogising only have a limited capacity to explain the concept we are dealing with here18. Legislating is another form of genealogising. The Doctrine of Discovery is a legal and religious concept tied to the Roman Catholic Church that rationalised and legalised colonisation and the conquering of Indigenous peoples throughout the last millennium. Pope Innocent 1V’s writings from 1240 were particularly influential. He argued that Christians were justified in invading and acquiring infidel’s lands because it was the church’s duty to control the spiritual health of all human beings on Earth. The English developed the legal concept of terra nullius (land that is null or void) or vacuum domicilium (empty or vacant house) to validate their land-claims over Indigenous peoples’ homelands. This praxial concept formalised the idea that lands which were not being used in a manner that European legal systems approved of were open for European colonisation.

Identity Indigeneity can be an important dimension of personal identity, and this refers to the way a person identifies with a particular social object, such as a nation, a collection of nations, an ethnic trait, a racial classification, a geographical entity, a personal history, a sense of heritage, a social unit, such as the family, a religion or a sexual orientation. Whatever the social object, this identification comprises a preference for that object over other objects of the same type, for example, identifying with a people, such as Canadian First People or the Kaupapa Maori people, over and above a nation, such as Canada or New Zealand, or identifying with a particular racial grouping (imagined or otherwise) and not with human beings in general. These social objects can be nested in some type of identity grouping, so, one can identify with an area within a country, a country, a nation, a union of countries or even the world. (All of these categorisations are constructed by people and have geographical and historical inflections.) What is pivotal here is how a person constructs their personal identity – how they give more importance to one particular social object or even to

Marie Battiste and Indigenous Knowledge 113 several objects and consequently less importance to others. A person’s identity refers to certain properties of the social world to which a person feels a special sense of attachment or ownership, that is, in all their deliberations about the world and with regards to their activities in this world, they prioritise some reasons for action over and against others. As a result, they see the world in a particular way, although they may share that world with other people who subscribe to the same or similar markers of identity. These identity markers are imagined conceptualisations of the social object, so indigenous, racial, spatial, historical, ethnic, religious, sexualised, embodied or familiar attachments comprise imagined and constructed narratives about indigeneity, race, geographies, histories, ethnicities, religions, sexualities, bodies or social groupings. Frequently, human beings reify the properties of the social object to which they are attached, treating them as natural or as common sense and thus seemingly outside of processes of review and reconceptualisation. A person’s sense of identity then consists of those features of the imagined object that define them as a person or even make them the person that they are. They give that person a sense of belonging, and they focus on that person in a particular way. Fundamentally, personal identities are a matter of what human beings care about in the world and have a curricular inflection. They are also markers of difference; that is, they refer to the type and extent of dissimilarity between different manifestations of a social object, for example, indigenous and extraneous, abled and disabled, male and female, black and white, heterosexual and homosexual and intelligent and unintelligent, persons. Crude versions of these relations are ever-present in societies round the world. However, difference can become pathological if different sets of values, usually in opposition to each other, are attached to different manifestations of the social object. Being a woman, or being a woman in a nomadic society, may be a characteristic of a particular person, but it cannot count as an identity marker for that person, if that person has not invested enough feeling and commitment in it to trigger actions. In addition, it may be possible for a property to belong to a person’s identity, in that it is a central defining belief that they have (ethnic purity for example), with at the same time that belief being false. A person’s sense of identity may be changeable, fragile, focused on different social objects at different times and contingent. However, for most people, social attachments that are acquired at an early age persist over time and are extremely difficult to reverse, although they may take a different curricular form at different moments in that person’s life and indeed involve denials and repudiations, such as in ethnic or racial identities. What sort of things are women as persons? What are their fundamental properties? What, for instance, are they made of? Are they substances wholly or partly formed and reformed by material, embodied and discursive features of society or is each woman able to shape her own life-course? And fundamentally, how do women construct their sense of self? These are difficult questions

114  Conceptual Framings to answer, but the answers that are given and the subsequent identities that are assumed have consequences, some trivial, some serious. Identity is being used here to indicate a sense of wholeness and thus persistence across time. All discussions of a person over time require some understanding of change; that is, a notion of change is built into the conception of the human being. However, if there was no cohering element between time moments, so that every moment entailed a change of person, we would not have a sense of personhood, which therefore has to include a notion of persistence over time. There are three possible senses that we can give to this idea of persistence in identity and identity formation: psychological-continuity views, physicalist perspectives and narrative explanations. In the first case, persistence between different states of the human being across time is explained by some form of psychological relation. The present or future person inherits certain features, we can call them psychological, from the past, such as beliefs, memories, preferences, dispositions and capacities, and these constitute a notion of identity over time. In the second case, a physicalist perspective, the identity relation is not conceived as psychological but as physical, with the understanding that identity is now understood as ineluctable and inevitable, and that volition, in any meaningful sense, is illusionary. A different identity perspective, which helps explain this notion of persistence over time is a part of the stories we tell ourselves and the narratives that structure our lives. These narratives are identity-constituting and are fundamental to a notion of who we are and who we think we are. A person’s past, present-past and future self involves a narrative continuity of a phenomenological kind. These three views of identity over time, in a diachronic sense then, are suggesting that there are substantive, nontrivial, necessary and sufficient conditions for a person persisting from one time-moment to another, even if those conditions are understood in different ways in our three perspectives. Identity and consciousness are homologous concepts. In saying this, we still need to understand what consciousness is, as it is a polysemic concept. There are a number of theories of consciousness in circulation19 – what it is, how it operates and why we need a theory of consciousness at all. General theories of consciousness largely divide between standard mind-body separations, separate functionings systems and physicalist theories. Those who believe in dualist theories argue that some operations of the mind fall outside the realm of the physical and cause-effect-cause relations, as they are generally understood. Substance theorists, taking their inspiration from René Descartes (1988), suggest that there are both physical and nonphysical substances, and minds are examples of the latter, with these minds embracing a notion of consciousness. Property dualists suggest that minds cannot be reduced to physical properties, but nonetheless causal relations can be instantiated by the same things that trigger the operation of physical processes. Emergent property dualists introduce into the equation a notion of emergence so that even though they accept that consciousness and conscious processes come about through the operation of physical processes, the result cannot be understood

Marie Battiste and Indigenous Knowledge 115 or expressed in physicalist terms (or, it needs to be said, in how language and semantic structures currently operate). These dualist theories mark out a clear distinction between the properties of the mind and the properties of a physical reality, and it is hard to see how any theory of consciousness could be anything other than vacuous if a purely physicalist theory was endorsed. Separate functioning systems theories are dualist in essence because they argue that there are two different systems in operation, one of them being more powerful than the other (although the use of the word, powerful, gives a greater authority to a physicalist view of the mind, the world and the relations between them, than to a form of consciousness that prioritises intention and reason-giving over a brute physical reality). The first system then is irreducibly physicalist, an example of which might be taking a narcotic substance, leaving a person less aware, less alert and feeling carefree, and, this is the important point, overriding the normal processes of consciousness, those of reasongiving, curricular formation, and intentional activity. The second system is concerned with volitional behaviours, meaning-making processes and semantic evaluations. Both operate in conjunction with each other; however, both of them do not operate in the same way. Physicalist theories of consciousness do not subscribe to a notion of free will, which means that in every aspect of our lives we cannot be sure that we are not being radically deceived. Physicalist theories vary enormously in their scope and direction20. For example, some type-type identity theories deny the notion of consciousness altogether, whereas others argue that since the conscious property and the neural property are of the same type, then there is no need to explain how the one can cause the other or give rise to it. Most physicalist theories of consciousness are not of this type but aim to understand the world in terms of some form of psycho-physicalist relation, in which the two are not identical. All of these theories come up against the existence of free will, and all of them are essentially deterministic. Thomas Nagel (2012), coming from a dualist position, suggested that substances in the mind and processes cannot be directly subsumed into physical substances and processes, that is, there are significant differences between the two; however, we do not have at present and possibly ever a language for describing states of the mind, even if we can provide good grounds for suggesting that they are different; and what this means is that we cannot provide a convincing account of what these states are and what the relation between states of the mind and physical states might be, although we can infer that differences exist between them. The problem with a physicalist notion of consciousness is that not everything can be explained by this view of the mind-body relationship – every action of the mind cannot be explained fully by an identical movement in the brain. It is this missing knowledge that constitutes the core of consciousness. Consciousness under this conceptualisation is more than what we already know about the mind and the brain, and more than we can literally ever know21. Concepts such as indigeneity, feminism and learning are functions of consciousness.

116  Conceptual Framings

Indigeneity and feminism Marie Battiste’s compelling defence of epistemic indigeneity includes and indeed is underpinned by a feminist notion of power, although many indigenous discourses either ignore the question of women’s subordination or reject the possibility of analysing the intersectional moments between sexism and other forms of subordination, such as racism, heterosexism, class-based oppressions and, in particular, the various forms of colonisation and deindigenisation that we have been concerned about in this chapter. Rights-based indigenous discourses do exactly that since they are empty of content. There are several models of feminist power, such as redistribution, domination and empowerment, and these take on a particular form in indigenous discourses. Power is enframed in all individuals as a capacity or potential that can be transformed in action. From this standpoint, any form of action, including empowerment, liberation and emancipation, pivots on a woman’s dispositional qualities. From a feminist perspective, it is perhaps appropriate to conceptualise power as a capacity to distinguish between action-theoretical conceptions of power (here the focus is on the dispositional capabilities of individual people and more importantly for our purposes here, the dispositional capacities of groups of people, such as women) and broader constitutive conceptions of power (here the focus is on institutional and systemic structuring possibilities for action and of course for resistance – see Chapter 14). This is directly relevant to decolonising processes, which involve resistance to other, subjugating and epistemic, colonising processes. Just as radical feminists tried to broaden the theoretical framework for analysing power so that it might encompass both class exploitation and women’s subordination, intersectional theories have been designed to broaden the framework even further. The goal of theories of intersectionality is to develop a single framework for analysing power that encompasses sexism, decurricularisation, colonisation, racism, class oppression, heterosexism and other axes of oppression in their complex interconnections. The process of intersectionality has a long history and a complex genealogy. It is however a part of the genealogy of the concept and praxis of indigeneity. In Part I of this book, we have provided critical accounts of concepts, such as imagination, play, pedagogy, judgement, the girl-child, meaning, disposition, care, holism, indigeneity and decolonisation, understanding these as only being a sample, and a small sample at that, of all the concepts in the networks of meaning within which learning is embedded. We now move on to the second theme of the book, that of praxis. Praxis involves some form of conversion of thought into action, or at least the construction of a particular thought or set of thoughts in such a way that certain actions inevitably flow from it and other actions are set aside. This last point can be best illustrated by a close reading of some examples of curricular praxes, with regards to the conceptual and practical fields of learning and gender.

Marie Battiste and Indigenous Knowledge 117

Notes 1 As educational theorists our work is framed, and therefore requires us to operate with and through a general theory of objects and object-relations. This enframing comprises a semantic understanding of the possibilities of the concepts we use, and these possibilities have political, social, epistemological, functional, ethical and relational meanings. As we suggest in the opening chapter of this book, there are five object-types in the world: discursive objects, material objects, relational objects, structural-institutional-systemic objects (this type includes discursive and material configurations) and people, including the self, which is always experienced differently from the way other people are experienced. Each of them has different characteristics and, because objects have a dynamic structure, in rare circumstances they may change their status as objects; indeed, what constitutes an object-type is also dynamic. In an object-ontology, objects, including human beings, have acquired dispositions. This leads us to a form of conceptual or dispositional realism, and a deep antagonism towards empiricism in all its forms and guises. 2 Marie Battiste is an author and educator working as a professor in Canada at the University of Saskatchewan in the Department of Educational Foundations. Her roots are in the Potlotek First Nation in Nova Scotia, Canada. 3 The term dispositif or dispositive was first coined by Michel Foucault and it refers to the various institutional, physical and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures that create and maintain the exercise of power within the social body. Foucault used the term in his ‘Confessions of the Flesh’ (1977) interview, where he explains what a dispositif is: ‘What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, first, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements’. 4 Notions of correctness and incorrectness are of course concepts or discursive configurations in their own right, and thus have all the characteristics that we have come to associate with concepts. 5 cf. Scott (2008; 2011; 2017; 2018; 2019a; 2019b); Scott and Scott (2018); Scott and Usher (2011); Scott with Bhaskar (2015). 6 Eurocentric science can only be categorised as multidimensional. This does not just refer to enlightenment views of the scientific method. 7 Extraneous may also be thought of as having universal dimensions. 8 This list of possible connections and relations only covers a small part of the range of networked meanings. 9 The argument about natural kinds is complicated and has been partly addressed in the opening chapter of this book. 10 These colonising and decolonising discourses or discursive configurations are discussed in the last chapter of this book. 11 cf. Sicroff (2010). 12 Eugenics was a perfectly respectable doctrine in late Victorian and early Edwardian society with Francis Galton from the university, University College London, that we work in, one of its most prominent advocates. James Watson, one of the discoverers of the DNA sequence, more recently argued along eugenicist and racist lines (Guardian Newspaper, 2014). Another eugenicist working from University College London was Karl Pearson, whose claim to fame was the development of a number of statistical methods, such as the chi-squared test. There are some important and complicated connections and relations between the development of eugenicist beliefs and these analytical methods.

118  Conceptual Framings 13 Folk racial labels have three forms: ascription, identification and treatment, and for a folk racial identity to have purchase in a society all three of these have to be operationalised (cf. Appiah, 1996). 14 Biopower, for Foucault, is a practice of the modern state and its regulation of its subjects through ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.’ (Foucault, 1969: 32). 15 The term aboriginal has to be used with great care, but it can mean a member of a people who were the first people to live in a country before any colonists arrived. Marie Battiste (2011) uses it in this sense. 16 Marie Battiste’s origins are in the Potlotek First Nation in Nova Scotia, Canada. 17 We are repeating this term here with disgust. It is of course not our term. 18 Online Etymological Dictionary (accessed January 2019) https://www.etymonline. com. 19 cf. Van Gulick, R. (Spring, 2018). 20 Such as: higher-order theories, reflexive theories, representationalist theories, narrative interpretative theories, cognitive theories, information integration theories, neural theories and quantum theories. 21 A friend recently remarked that neurophysiological approaches and methods held out the possibility of fully understanding how the brain works and thus for him how the mind works. Our argument here, and it is long and complicated (it has taken up most of the book so far), would suggest that he may have a long time to wait, and even then, any answers that are given to this philosophical problem may prove to be unsatisfactory.

Part II

Feminist Praxes

Praxis is not just action for this would render the concept as meaningless insofar as everything we do in the world would be a praxis. It comprises a thought becoming in some way an action. As with all thoughts or thinking a praxis is embedded in histories, archaeologies and genealogies of that thought or concept and what that thought or set of thoughts allows or disallows. Praxis in a feminist sense, or as a feminist might understand it, has four elements: practice on practice, practice on thought, practice on ourselves and practice unfolding from thought. In Part II of this book, we examine the development of girls’ education, which was an important part of the work of Dorothea Beale in her life (see Chapter 9). The second of these five feminist praxes is the practice of play, as it was developed in the work of Susan Isaacs (see Chapter 10). The third praxis revolves round the practice of autonomous creativity (see Chapter 11). Maria Montessori is the originator of an education system recognised globally that bears her name. The Montessori system is a pedagogy based on a belief in the creative potential of children, their natural desire to learn and the right of every child to be treated as an individual. The fourth praxis is a policy determination (see Chapter 12) and this refers to pupils with special educational needs in mainstream education. The focus of this chapter is on the antecedents and uses of the concept of inclusion in the work of Mary Warnock. The last feminist praxis we look at is Lucy Diggs Slowe’s work at Howard University focusing on the idea and realisation of higher education for black women, and ineluctably on black onto-epistemologies (see Chapter 13). In the final chapter, we map the quasi-genealogical threads of our feminist theorists’ collective work and relate these to learning and curricularising. We also identify and critically examine several feminist praxes which are refusals, resistances and struggles against the conditions that women find themselves in: counter-conducts, emancipations, immanent critiques, processes of decolonising knowledge, readings of the world as a feminist text, decategorisings, absentings, praxes of various types, trans-framings and reflexive and textualising strategies. DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-10

120  Feminist Praxes An explanatory note is appropriate here at this point in the book. Interwoven into each of the next five chapters are a series of biographical narratives. These biographical fragments1 are an integral part of the five praxical accounts that we provide in Part II of this book, and this therefore requires us to explain how these biographical accounts can add to our understanding of these praxes. Central to a feminist biographical method is a notion of narrative, and it is important to affirm here that our five biographical accounts are feminist in orientation and design, even if, as we suggested in Chapter 5, there are several different ways that we can understand what feminism is. This idea of narrative refers to underlying discourses, usually in story form, that permeate individual experiences. There is consequently a hermeneutic process at work in these accounts. The biographical method is an attempt to overcome the divide between what Julia Kristeva in Chapter 4 called the law and women’s agency in the world and in the process to mediate between the structural and the phenomenological. It does this by focusing on the individual life, lived in relation to social narratives, institutional mores and those relatively enduring institutional, structural and discursive structures that constitute the social. The central building block of the biographical method is the text, whether spoken or written, by the person concerned. Texts are situated in history, and this historical dimension has implications for how they are constructed and understood. The life history focuses on the individual woman, in the cases we are considering here, and is particularistic. It does this through narrative analysis, but always with the understanding that these narratives are public, even if formed and reformed at different points of time by the actions of individuals and groups of individuals. Central to narrative analysis is the notion of time. Time is understood as experienced through social narratives and provides a cohering character to that life. The individual life in its biographical form is continuously made and remade by the person concerned in the present and by the biographer to achieve narrative coherence. Since narratives are embedded in history, life is always being transformed. It is never enough to understand the process as one of remembering, or of course not remembering the past and then representing that account as truthful. Indeed, that understanding is a reconceptualisation of previous reconceptualisations. The nearer in time the event or activity being recalled, the fewer representations there are. Indeed, the process is wave-like, as successive accounts are re-formed in relation to present understandings. It is further complicated by memories of overlapping reconstructions and how the event or activity was understood in the past. This meta-process of reflection has a focus and a frame. It refers to the past, but it also refers to the way in which the past was, but is no longer, framed in the same way. The second element of the life is that it is fragmentary, never more so than in these abbreviated accounts of the life histories of Dorothea Beale, Susan Isaacs, Marie Montessori, Mary Warnock and Lucy Diggs Slowe. This is not just because memory is fragile, but also because the original and subsequent

Feminist Praxes 121 reconstructions of events, sources of ideas and the formation and interpretation of those ideas are complex and elaborated. The person whose life it is does not, and cannot, have full knowledge of the events and activities to which we refer in these five chapters. They cannot know the consequences of projects that they initiated. These are unforeseen. Furthermore, they may have a limited view of why they actually did what they did, and of how they subsequently understood these events. Tacitly, they may be proficient knowers and may have a store of knowledge from which they draw in their everyday lives but are unable to articulate it to themselves. Indeed, these relatively enduring structures are understood by them, whether tacitly or otherwise, idiomatically. They interpret them in ways that others would not. There is also, and this is important, the feminist biographer’s interpretations of these interpretations. These praxical accounts focus on the five praxes that we are considering (a praxis of play, a praxis of creativity, a praxis of learning, an inclusionary praxis and a decategorising praxis); however, it is impossible to separate out a praxis from a person’s intentional activity. The biographical fragment that we provide in each case is framed by the argument that we are making, as well as being framed ideologically, and, this hardly needs saying, from a feminist perspective as well. It is a selection and a point of view. The interpreted account (of both biography and praxis) is therefore only one of many interpretations that could have been made, and furthermore it involves at some point a closure of this series of interpretations during the course of the process. A praxis is in essence a biographical account. The past is organised in terms of the present, that is, contemporary discourses, narratives and texts constitute the background to any exploration of the past. It is not that an account refers to actual events which are then imperfectly recollected, but rather that past events are interpretations undertaken by the person whose life it is, and these interpretations always have a pre-text. Furthermore, this pre-text, comprising as it does the means by which meanings are organised in the present, refers to other pre-texts in the past and supersedes them. The public and private dimensions of the account are intertwined. Private acts are located in history and carried out in society. The biographical element is always fragmentary, comprising parts as opposed to wholes, narratives that never quite come to fruition, disconnected traces, sudden endings and new beginnings. The praxes that we are dealing with here are best expressed through their biographical manifestations.

9

Dorothea Beale and the Education of Girls

Until the 1918 Fisher Education Act, most women in Britain had a very limited range of education opportunities open to them, certainly at secondary level and beyond. This also meant that employment opportunities were often similarly constrained. One of the leading nineteenth-century figures to challenge this was Dorothea Beale, educationalist, suffragist, social reformer and founder of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Beale encouraged girls to develop an intellectual life that was on an equal footing with boys, bringing significant pressure to bear on Parliament to provide resources for it. This educational equality was to be achieved through study of the same academic subjects, as well as through academic assessment processes designed to facilitate and promote access to higher education for women at a time when it was being expanded generally. She also encouraged her pupils to develop habits of mind orientated towards lifelong learning. Beale formalised this by allowing alumnae to become affiliates of the College, attending lectures on a continuing basis. In doing so, she contributed to a significant shift in power structures within British education that promoted new forms of knowledge and engagement with learning. There was an element of compromise in Beale’s model for women’s education as she sought to reconcile girls’ future private and public roles as part of a redistribution of power and influence. This meant achieving an equilibrium between nineteenth-century home life, in which a woman was frequently seen as resembling, ‘The Angel in the House’2, and women’s future contribution to society generally at a time of rapid scientific and economic expansion. This was particularly important with respect to women’s involvement in suffrage and social reform. Beale frequently argued that an academic education allowed girls to fulfill any future domestic duties to maximum effect, whilst also preparing them for engagement in public life where appropriate. This engagement might be as private citizens acting in the public interest because of a sense of duty. Alternatively, it might mean developing a public-facing life through engagement in new professional domains such as teaching, where women could find paid employment and achieve financial independence. Beale also framed this as a form of duty or vocationalism. DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-11

Dorothea Beale and the Education of Girls 123 This chapter begins by presenting a biographical account of Beale’s educational life, which encompassed many of the educational experiences and roles typical of women’s education at the time, providing a useful reference point for mapping the trajectory of her educational consciousness. It describes the growth of girls’ education in England, within the context of progressive social reform as well as the extension of the suffrage that took place between 1832 and 1919. The chapter then discusses Beale’s professional praxis as manifested in the curriculum she promoted for girls, before exploring how her professional activities can be understood as an intellectually spiritual endeavour. In this way, her philosophical positioning can be seen as providing a conceptual bridge in our understanding of schooling between the Enlightenment and the twentiethcentury psychoanalytical turn of educationalists, such as Susan Isaacs.

Biographical notes Dorothea Beale (1831–1906) was born in Bishopsgate, the fourth of eleven children, and came from a well-connected and scholarly family with an interest in social issues. Her father, Miles Beale, was a surgeon, and she was the first cousin to the English feminist writer, Caroline Frances Cornwallis. She was initially home-educated until the age of 13. She later said of that period: ‘I can only remember one really clever and competent teacher; she had been educated in a good French school and grounded us well in the language’ (Raikes, 1908: 9). She then attended a school for girls in Essex until the age of 13, where she described the teaching as ‘miserable’ (ibid). This was supplemented by attending lectures at institutions, such as the London Institution, Gresham College and Crosby Hall. She was subsequently sent to Paris in 1847 to study at a school for English girls, returning in 1848 when the school closed on account of the February Revolution. She was one of the first pupils at Queen’s College, London, which had grown out of an initiative by the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution to raise the standard of education among governesses in the London area by providing evening lectures, before starting to take day students to improve its financial standing. At Queen’s College, she studied alongside Frances Buss (1827–1894), her senior by four years and another pioneer in women’s education, as well as headmistress of the North London Collegiate School (a later incarnation of Queen’s College). Other contemporaries at Queen’s College included Adelaide Procter, founding member of the Langham Place circle, Sophia Jex-Blake, the medical pioneer and Julia Wedgwood who became a lecturer at Girton College, Cambridge. Beale demonstrated an early aptitude for Mathematics, studying Trigonometry, Conics and Differential Calculus under Astley Cock. She was later appointed as Mathematics Tutor at Queen’s College in 1849 herself, while still attending any classes she pleased. She also accumulated college certificates, which although they weren’t particularly standardised, provided a claim to be able to teach certain subjects (they did involve external examiners). By 1854,

124  Feminist Praxes she had become headmistress of the school attached to the college. Around this time, she started publishing works on education, and in 1857 she left Queen’s College to become Head Teacher of the Clergy Daughters’ School, Casterton, Westmorland. This had been known as Cowan Bridge when it was founded in 1832, and attended fairly disastrously by the Bronte sisters, during which time two of them died (it features under the pseudonym of Lowood in the novel, Jane Eyre). It seems to have improved in the interim, however, as Beale received a letter from a Mrs. Wedgwood in February 1857 expressing relief, ‘I am truly glad that you find your new home more agreeable than you had been led to expect, and that you think the children are happy, and times are unlike Jane Eyre’ (Raikes, 1908: 43). Beale was given a heavy teaching load spread across a large number of subjects. The school itself was rigidly governed with school uniforms and strict rules featuring prominently. Expressing dissatisfaction with the slow rate of education reform at Casterton, Beale made up her mind to resign but was dismissed by the school’s committee in advance of her communicating it to them (Shillito, 1920). There was a short interlude in her teaching career when she authored some religious pamphlets as well as The Textbook of History (1858), a work that ran to seven editions, and was inspired as a reaction to another textbook that had proved controversial because it was regarded as overly Roman Catholic in its sentiments (Cummin, 1857). Also that year, Beale was selected from among fifty candidates for the Women’s College at Cheltenham, the first private girls’ school of its type in England. It had originally opened in 1854 with 82 female students (a boys’ school had opened in 1843). Cheltenham was one of the first ‘public’ schools for girls, public in the sense that it was run by a board rather than being owned by proprietors with the aim of generating a financial profit. Beale spent the next 48 years developing the school, including opening a nursery class in 1876 and setting up teacher training as an integral part of the College. By the time of her death in 1906, the school had grown into a world-famous community of about 1,000 students, most of its teachers were alumnae, and it had trained many other women to set up and lead private girls’ secondary schools as they proliferated across the country at the end of the nineteenth century. Girls had also started to take academic qualifications for the first time, an initiative in which Beale played a leading role as she was a significant figure in the campaign for girls’ matriculation examinations for university entrance (Burstyn, 1980). In 1893, this progress towards tertiary education had led to the foundation of a women’s teacher training college for secondary school teachers3, St Hilda’s College in Oxford, which became St Hilda’s Hall in 1896, recognised as Oxford University’s second college for women by the Association of Promoting the Higher Education of Women, and officially recognised by Oxford University itself in 1910, although they were not permitted to be full members of the University until 1919. Beale had personally purchased and donated Cowley House in 1892, the building in which St Hilda’s was established. At the time, this represented a typical blurring of public and private

Dorothea Beale and the Education of Girls 125 finance in the quest for educational reform. Such an approach presented advantages in the form of philanthropic entrepreneurship, but also disadvantages, as institutional development could be constrained by a lack of personal resources or support at a key stage when they were needed. This also became a problem when Cheltenham alumnae pursued charitable objectives in East London aimed at alleviating poverty, as Beale had a general distrust of charitable support given to individuals, on the grounds that it would weaken them, and therefore refused to become involved (Campbell-Day, 2021; Shillito, 1920). In addition to her philanthropic leanings, Beale was a devout Anglican who had introduced ‘Quiet Days’ or days of religious observance for teaching staff at Cheltenham, so she saw the establishment of St. Hilda’s as a step towards something resembling a holy teaching order, or what Shillito describes as a ‘Sisterhood of Teachers’, living in something akin to a monastic community. She eventually accepted that a secular model would be more appropriate (Dyhouse, 1981; Shillito, 1920). In a more worldly initiative, Beale also founded the Cheltenham school magazine in 1880, and the Cheltenham Women’s College Guild, an alumnae association, in 1884, which had 2,500 members by 1912. As in the case of Lucy Diggs Slowe at Howard University in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century (see Chapter 13), corralling the alumnae of a women’s organisation was seen very much as securing its future. The success of the College attracted significant attention, and in 1866 Beale testified before the Schools of Inquiry Commission (Taunton Commission) as a prominent educator, having been mobilised by suffragist Emily Davies, founder of Girton College, Cambridge (Bennett, 1990; Bryant, 1979; Fletcher, 1984). The minutes of the Commission were published a year later in 1867 and this did a great deal to promote the cause of girls’ education in England, including via the Endowed Schools Act of 1869, whereby some of the substantial financial assets of boys’ schools were distributed to those of girls. She gave further evidence to the Bryce Royal Commission in 1894, this time on secondary education. In response to questions regarding whether study was injurious to girls’ health, she replied: For one girl in the higher middle classes who suffers from overwork, there are, I believe, hundreds whose health suffers from the feverish love of excitement, from the irritability produced by idleness and frivolity and discontent. I am persuaded, and my opinion has been confirmed by experienced doctors, that the want of wholesome occupation lies at the root of much of the languid debility of which we hear so much after girls have left school. (Shillito, 1920: 41) In addition to her contributions to public commissions, Beale was a prolific educational author. In her published works, she frequently uses rhetorical styles and techniques that according to Currer (2020) were likely to have

126  Feminist Praxes been developed and refined during her earlier participation in debates at the Kensington Society4. Beale was also heavily involved with educational committee work throughout her career, including being President of the Association for Headmistresses of Endowed and Proprietary Schools (founded by her with Frances Buss in 1874) from 1895 to 1897. She was given an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh in 1902, only the second woman to receive this honour. Beale died in post in Cheltenham in 1906, having given her final religious studies lesson just days before.

Girls and secondary education in England The education of girls had not been a particular priority for most families or indeed government until the mid-nineteenth century. At the time Beale became most professionally active, girls received elementary education up to the age of 10, with some exceptions, after the introduction of universal elementary schooling via the 1870 Education Act (otherwise known as the Forster Act). Their elementary education was then made compulsory by the 1880 Elementary Education Act (as was that of boys). This led to general improvements in literacy levels across the population, albeit from a very low base. General literacy rates had been depressed as a consequence of the industrial revolution, as children were increasingly employed in factories with little opportunity for education. This was something that the newspaper publisher and Anglican evangelist Robert Raikes (1725–1811) had attempted to ameliorate through the introduction of Sunday Schools in 1780 but which still left half the female population unable to sign their names in the marriage register by the mid-nineteenth century (Reay, 1991). Even after the introduction of universal elementary education, secondary education opportunities for girls at this time were considerably more limited, and despite the efforts of reformers such as Beale and Buss, generally centred upon London (Fletcher, 1984). Even after the 1918 Education Act (otherwise known as the Fisher Act), free-state secondary education in the sense that we might understand it today was generally confined to a limited number of boys, and very occasionally girls, who competed for grammar school scholarships. Otherwise, children attended elementary schools up until the age of 14, or fee-paying secondary schools, depending on the financial assets of their parents (many institutions were set up by the Girls’ Public Day Schools Company between 1870 and 1900 for that purpose). Those attended by boys might be local grammar schools or independent boarding schools. Those with large endowments were sometimes referred to as the ‘Great’ schools, as they prepared boys for nationally significant leadership positions later in life, across different sectors including Government, the clergy, medicine, law and the civil service. The educational approach taken by these schools had been heavily influenced by Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, in the decades immediately leading up to Beale’s appointment as headmistress of Cheltenham. Arnold had

Dorothea Beale and the Education of Girls 127 a considerable impact in redefining educational standards for boys around the ideals of Christian moral philosophy. Opportunities for girls were much more limited until the growth of the new women’s movement, eventually embracing the Married Women’s Property Act (1882), the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (1859 onwards) and the Suffragist Movement (1866 onwards). Prior to about 1870, education for older girls tended to be provided by proprietorial dame schools (run by individual women for profit in private homes, and generally involving between 8 and 30 children) or by governesses (hired to live in family homes and provide instruction to any children). University education for women was also extremely limited at this time. Until 1868, when nine women were allowed to register at the University of London for a ‘special examination’, this had been all but prohibited. Women had also been prevented from attending Oxford and Cambridge Universities on the grounds of a numerus clausus (‘closed number’ or rationing of places) that was also used to block the attendance of Jews, on the basis that the colleges were established for Anglican men, and that attendance by others would go against the wishes of the original founders (a condition dropped for men of other faiths in 1871). Women eventually gained access to lectures and some teaching, and some women’s colleges were founded, but they could not graduate until 1919 (Oxford) and 1948 (Cambridge). Rapid social changes in the second half of the Victorian era from 1865 to 1901 eventually combined with a general frustration at a lack of provision for the education of girls and women generally. This meant that from the middle of the nineteenth century, there was rapidly increasing demand for new schools aimed at teaching girls beyond elementary levels, including preparing them for university, and it was in response to this demand that Beale was able to carry out her reforms.

Beale and a curriculum for girls Beale saw herself as participating with missionary zeal in a re-establishment of a women’s education system that had found a home in medieval religious institutions, but which had been destroyed by the Reformation, with the assets of women’s religious orders being appropriated by their male equivalents. As she wrote, There are a few endowed schools where girls are fed and clothed, and taught to read and write indifferently, and a few schools have been lately established and maintained by public subscription where orphan girls can obtain superior instruction; but the numerous foundations of ancient endowment for the religious and intellectual education of young females, scattered over the country in the middle ages, were all swept away at the dissolution of religious houses in the sixteenth century. The great ecclesiastical foundations for men were reformed and re-established on an

128  Feminist Praxes improved system, but the rich endowments for the benefit of women were either seized by court favourites or transferred to schools and colleges for men, and our sex to this day have not recovered from the fatal blow (Beale, 1866: 15) Her existence as a headmistress during historic events during the midnineteenth century meant that she needed to balance two different aspects of girls’ education for her educational reforms to be successful. Publishing her 1866 paper, On the Education of Girls, she stated: ‘I think that the education of girls has too often been made showy, rather than real and useful’ (Beale, 1866: 1). In statements such as these, she promoted the idea of women having a wider social purpose, via a public role beyond the family home. At the same time, given that secondary schooling would be non-compulsory until 1918, she needed to ensure that any educational programme was inviting enough to attract fee-paying parents; otherwise, girls’ schools were likely to fail financially. Therefore, in her curricular model, she sought a pragmatic balance between subjects, such as music and dance on the one hand, and grammar, languages and mathematics on the other. This meant that potential parents were not intimidated by an overly intellectual offer, but at the same time the foundation was laid for further study if necessary. This was largely provided by women teachers, within a framework of what Gorman (1982: 24) has described as an ‘organised, standardised competitive school experience for girls’ involving uniform standards and defined goals, and increasingly aimed at a growing middle class. As Beale explained, In a large institution girls are enabled to measure their own powers in a way impossible in home tuition, and thus much conceit is rooted out, and when the moral tone in a school is high, an influence for good is exercised, and the character is strengthened. (Beale, 1866: 6) At Cheltenham, Beale ran a system where pupils were put into three agerelated groups on entrance (roughly ages 6–12, 11–16 and 15–19 respectively), and differential fees were charged accordingly. The school day ran from 9.10 to 12.55 for all pupils (changing from its original all-day school model on grounds of practicality), but girls could stay from 2.45 to 4.15 to complete homework. Beale considered that there were eleven underlying principles to effective teaching, which she had derived from the early psychological literature: 1 2 3 4 5

Awaken interest. Avoid distractions. Proceed from the known to the unknown. Proceed in classifying by noticing likenesses first, then differences. Make lessons pleasant.

Dorothea Beale and the Education of Girls 129 6 Adapt teaching to the intellectual level of the pupil, pitching it just above ‘unassisted intelligence’. 7 Form right habits. 8 Encourage a spirit of enquiry. 9 Foster intellectual ambition. 10 Present pupils with the highest ideals which they can appropriate. 11 The ultimate ideal or final cause of instruction should be implicit within it. (Beale, Soulsby and Dove, 1898: 37–41) In terms of subject content, alongside drawing, music and dancing, as well as Calisthenics5 and perhaps some needlework for younger children, pupils were instructed in English (Language and Literature), French and German, scripture, science (Physics, Chemistry and Biology), astronomy, history and physical geography, with some flexibility in subject choice. Latin and Greek were optional extras (early in a school career, German was said to take the place Latin might have in a boy’s education). Girls were not allowed to attend higher level classes until sufficient groundwork had been completed, and understanding of subject matter took precedence over recall. The educational programme involved regular tests and assessments of various types6, and preparation for examinations that would allow for university entry, known as ‘Local’ examinations and run by Oxford, Cambridge and Durham universities. There were also competitive prizes given by the school, although no prize-giving or speech day. There was a hierarchical structure within the school, and strict timetabling. In many ways, Cheltenham was an example of how girls’ schools in the late nineteenth century increasingly resembled their male counterparts. However, these schools were not simply copies of what had been provided previously for boys. Embedded within Beale’s model curriculum was a commitment to a different kind of teacher professionalism than had been the case earlier in the nineteenth century. Previously educational practice had been centred on memorisation, often via what was known as ‘catechism’, in which question-and-answer forms were memorised and recalled on demand. The new approach typified by Beale allowed for reflective practice through experimentation with new teaching methods, with instruction often provided by specialist teachers. This reflected an increasingly widespread search for new forms of pedagogy. A good example is the way she framed the function of her 1858 history textbook, … I hope my readers will remember that this little work can be used only as a text-book in conjunction with an extended course of instruction; nothing but industrious and thoughtful study can make one an historian … it is well from time to time to traverse the world in a sort of intellectual railway, and I should like my little book to take the place of ‘Murray’7 on such an excursion; but I hope my readers will frequently descend at the different stations to take a nearer view of the country, and enjoy the

130  Feminist Praxes pleasures of exploring unfrequented paths; a carriage would take you to places out of the direct line, and introduce you to scenes, which you would scarcely have reached along … (Beale, 1858: iv–v) In addition, the impact of these methods went beyond ensuring classroom attainment. It was linked to new developments in higher education for women, for example, the opportunity to study for degrees via the University of London or being able to participate in teacher training at places such as St Hilda’s in Oxford. In turn, these new forms of professional training and engagement allowed increasing numbers of women to become financially independent and offer support to other women also engaging in learning, reflecting the drive towards female emancipation and suffrage taking place generally at the time (Jordan, 2017; Kamm, 1958). This allowed women to occupy what could be regarded as socially ‘safe’ spaces within the male public domain, which Tamboukou describes in Foucauldian terms as … sites within (Patriarchal) society, but at a distance from it – both real and metaphorical – wherein space, identity and politics come forcefully together (Tamboukou, 2004: 400) We must remember that women’s access to these safe spaces was still an elite privilege, however. Five years before Beale’s death, only the tiniest proportions of women were engaged in higher education or vocational training, with Sutherland (2015) calculating the overall number as 3,500 out of a total male and female population of 38,000,000 in England, Wales and Scotland. Until the First World War, the small number of women who had studied at university overwhelmingly became teachers and academics, and only very occasionally became writers, artists, doctors or civil servants. One or two joined religious orders (Sutherland, 2015). The groundwork had nevertheless been set for women’s increasing involvement in education, and by the 1944 Education Act, state provision had become universal.

Women’s education reform as intellectual spiritual practice In spite of Beale’s pedagogical innovations, she is frequently seen as a relatively conservative figure within the women’s education movement generally. This may be because, despite her membership of the Kensington Society, Beale was not explicitly agitating for women’s suffrage through her educational provision for girls, although she was certainly equipping her pupils with the tools to engage fully within society. This potentially included the idea of enfranchisement at some later stage, but it was not designed to promote it in an active

Dorothea Beale and the Education of Girls 131 sense. Instead, Beale seemed more concerned with the idea of duty in relation to everyday living, being ‘real’ and ‘useful’, as she described it, which aligned with her religious beliefs as a high Anglican (although Currer (2020) notes that she took exception to some aspects of High Church Anglicanism). This has been categorised as a kind of Christian feminism (although Beale would not have been familiar with the term, feminism, as it was only adopted from the French language in about 1890). It is particularly the case in the light of Beale’s desire to establish a ‘Church League’ in 1886 (Inkpin, 1996; Nelson, 1992). This Christian Feminist approach can be seen as typical of what Delamont has described as a ‘double conformity’ in the education of girls and women, in which they attempted to reconcile the curriculum of their brothers with their societal role as future wives and mothers (Delamont, 1978). It can also be seen as a female counterpoint to ‘Muscular Christianity’ (a term popularised in 1857 by the novelist Tom Hughes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays) that had been promoted by Arnold within the boys’ school movement as part of his reforms. Alternatively, Jordan (2017) sees Beale’s motives as corresponding to broader ideals of self-actualisation, moral autonomy, public service and vocational preparation very much in the same vein as other leading women thinkers at the time, as they sought a way to accommodate change within existing societal structures. This change was achieved via what Jordan describes as a Foucauldian ‘discursive constellation’, in which women activists did not challenge the domestic ideal of womanhood of the time, but instead presented education as a progressive means to complement and facilitate such ideals. This certainly seems the case in Beale’s description of the apotheosis of women’s education as being ‘the perfection of the individual and the good of the community’ (Beale, Soulsby and Dove, 1898: 2), which would ideally be supported by quasi-monastic communities providing vocational teaching expertise. While it is therefore possible to see both sacred and secular aspects to Beale’s professional practice, it is clear that engagement in women’s education represented for her something approaching a distinctively spiritual act. As she argued in 1898, … it seems to me that the intellectual relation to God has been too much ignored; we should love with the mind as well as with the heart; with the developing of the physical and psychical life, the soul craves to root itself more firmly on the consciousness of the universal, it desires to be at one with the All-Wise and the All-Good Father of spirits to work out the purpose of its own existence. (Beale, Soulsby and Dove, 1898: 215) Beale’s intellectual spirituality is also evident in her meticulous dealings with Pandita Sarasvati Ramabai (1858–1922), a visiting student and Sanskrit scholar at Cheltenham Ladies’ College from 1884 to 1886. Ramabai was later

132  Feminist Praxes to become a pioneer in the Indian women’s feminist movement, making her mark on the field by publishing a key work, The High-Caste Hindu Woman, in 1887 (Bernardi, 2000). Ramabai had been sent to the College by the Anglican Community of St Mary the Virgin from India and adopted by Beale and Sister Geraldine of the order as a protégé. She later converted to Christianity. In her dealings with Ramabai, Beale was careful to try to understand her on her own terms rather than solely seeing their relationship through the prism of Christianity. In a letter to Sister Geraldine in 1885, Beale writes that Ramabai must ‘study Christianity as a philosophy. She cannot receive it merely as an historical revelation’ (Ramabai, 1977: 32 cited in Kirloskar-Steinbach, 2018: 166). In this example, we see a particularly explicit account of how Beale expected the intellectual life of a young woman to develop through teaching and study, directed towards independent thought. In terms of significance, this goes beyond an educational recommendation for the acquisition of knowledge. Beale’s intellectual position here is typical of a particular type of late nineteenth-century Victorian progressive thought, as it gradually developed from a self-reflexive (and indeed sometimes even self-punitive) form of religious morality towards a more subjective understanding of the world, albeit systematically and rigorously acquired.

The Beale curriculum and forms of knowledge The history of education for girls is significantly more complex than simply documenting what kind of provision was made alongside its chronological order. Dorothea Beale’s contribution to education as a curriculum thinker is an example of this complexity, as it has two key aspects. The first aspect is a technical one. Her work built substantially on earlier educational reforms in that it established and consolidated a distinctively academic form of curriculum aimed mainly at middle- class girls. This was in turn delivered by middle-class female teachers who had been specifically trained as subject specialists. They frequently went to work in other girls’ schools, and later co-educational ones, spreading this idea of the curriculum even more widely. These teachers were encouraged to develop their didactical knowledge further through early forms of reflective practice. As part of this approach, Beale encouraged them to engage in the development of creative educational materials and processes which took account of psychological science as it was understood at the time. This meant that by the time the British Government provided universal secondary education in 1918 (or at least in an extended elementary form); there was a ready-made cadre of women teachers trained in the forms of teacher professionalism aimed at increasingly heterogeneous pupil populations. In relation to the education of girls specifically, Beale ensured the enduring success of this curriculum by achieving a careful equilibrium between the future private and public roles of girls within society. This allowed it to gain wider acceptance, while also providing for various forms of female emancipation at a later stage.

Dorothea Beale and the Education of Girls 133 Ultimately, it enabled women to have increased access to higher education and work alongside men. In this way, it contributed to the development of new forms of female identity, as general educational provision for girls both broadened and deepened. The second aspect is a spiritual one. Beale saw educational praxis as a form of religious observance and duty, something we have described here as intellectual spirituality. She perceived engagement in learning among women as involving something akin to building an intellectual and spiritual sisterhood. She would have liked to have seen this manifested in a tangible sense by founding a vocational community, but it eventually took form at St. Hilda’s College in Oxford, which was originally established to train women teachers, and continues today (albeit slightly differently, and now co-educational). As we can see from her relationship with the Indian social reformer Ramabai, Beale’s work had a missionary component, in the sense that she encouraged the promotion of Christianity through what has been described as Christian feminism. However, she saw this as only having value if religion was studied by individuals from a philosophical point of view, with them coming to intellectual conclusions of their own. In this way, the Beale curriculum requires a subjective formulation of knowledge, in contrast to the memorisation of prior knowledge developed by others, which had been popular in earlier educational settings. This shift towards organic understanding took place just prior to the growth of the psychoanalytic framing of the self in education that was promulgated by Susan Issacs in the 1920s, and which we write about in Chapter 10. The role of knowledge in Beale’s conceptualisation of education can in many ways be seen as acting as a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It lays the groundwork for a shift away from received models of knowledge towards those that are generated by, and reflect, the self. In this sense, it can also be seen as a continuation of the Enlightenment with an impact beyond simply the education of women. In the next chapter, we develop further understandings of the concept of curriculum knowledge through a feminist lens or frame. Susan Isaacs operating in both philosophical and praxical ways developed an innovative notion of pedagogy and an early childhood education curriculum based round the idea of play, which she gave a material form to in the opening of a progressive school.

Notes 1 William Pinar (2004: 1) gives a biographical inflection to the concept and practice of curriculum: ‘I would say, for me, curriculum is the bridge. Through the curriculum I learn to do my personal and social and I understand how my personal is constituted by the social’. 2 Coventry Patmore’s popular poem of 1854 celebrating his dead wife, describing the women’s role as primarily passive and domestic. Virginia Woolf memorably commented, ‘Killing the Angel in the House is part of the occupation of a woman writer’ (Woolf, 1931).

134  Feminist Praxes 3 Training had previously been available for elementary school teaching via the monitorial system founded by the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in 1811, and the British and Foreign Schools Society in 1814. Standards were not particularly high, and eventually they were supplemented by institutions such as St John’s College, Battersea, (1838–1926) founded as Battersea College by James Kay-Shuttleworth as the first of a network of twenty residential teacher training colleges for men and women. 4 A women’s discussion group founded in 1865 and the precursor to the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage. 5 A form of strength training. In a history of the school it was described as follows, ‘… a kind of musical drill with plenty of marching, combined with a series of rhythmic ball exercises to a musical accompaniment’ (Steadman, 1931: 48). 6 Mr Dodgson, otherwise known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll, was the first examiner of arithmetic and mathematics at Cheltenham. 7 Guidebooks for Travellers was first published by John Murray in 1836.

10 Susan Isaacs, Phantasy and Play

Pivotal to the understanding of early childhood education (otherwise known as early years education) is a reconciliation of the intellectual and social aspects of child development. Key to this has been the work of educational psychologist and psychotherapist, Susan Isaacs (1885–1948). Isaacs developed a way of understanding early childhood development that drew on what was then a two-century-old philosophical tradition in education, including the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), John Dewey (1902–1971), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and Melanie Klein (1886–1960) (Hood, 2019). She mapped what can be seen as a facilitative model of education. In this model, the child stands at the centre with adults in attendance, and the emphasis is on the child’s navigation of a complex world, particularly in terms of the development of social relations. Adopting this philosophical position meant that Isaacs saw the curriculum as something to be developed in response to the child’s natural stages of development, rather than something to be imposed on them as a way of explicitly accelerating skills and abilities. Isaacs’ framing of the curriculum in this way therefore represents a mirroring or reflection of the child, focused around his or her engagement in imaginative play, in a manner typical of the progressive schooling movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. This approach continues to influence professional practice significantly to the present day. The chapter begins by providing a very brief synopsis of Isaacs’ early life and career, and the educational environment in which it took place. It then considers the influence of her observational practice at The Malting House School in Cambridge (1924–1927). It discusses how this was used in her writing to bring together the intellectual and the social aspects of child development in the early years. It also explores how she used psychoanalytical tools as a mechanism for understanding the broader context of children’s behaviours, linking this to her conceptualisation of curriculum for the early years. The chapter then locates the further development of this work philosophically, exploring its influence on the training and professional development of teachers. Finally, the chapter examines the implications for contemporary and future professional practice. DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-12

136  Feminist Praxes

Biographical notes Isaacs experienced a challenging start to life, and it is useful to link this with her later interest in the psychoanalytical aspects of childhood, and its reconsideration. Her experiences can also be located within the growth of Liberalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and in the context of late Victorian and Early Edwardian patterns of middle-class education, as well as to some extent through the lens of gender, as outlined by Martin (2011) and Hood (2019). Shapira (2017) also considers her as exemplifying the early twentiethcentury ‘female expert’ within the history of science, as women started to occupy domains considered socially acceptable, in this case relating to children. She came from a large family, the child of a Methodist lay-preacher and his wife from an industrial area in the north of England. Isaacs’ mother died when she was six and her father was later to marry his deceased wife’s former nurse; it may be that the young Isaacs was aware of the father/nurse relationship and this may have been the last thing she mentioned to her mother before she died (Gardner, 1969). Gardner also reports that, at some stage in her mid-teens, Isaacs was removed by her father from Bolton Secondary School on account of her growing agnosticism. After several years, during which she remained at home with her stepmother, joined the Fabian Society and supported the Women’s Suffrage movement, her father finally gave permission for her to work as a governess, and then to train as a teacher of very young children at Victoria University in Manchester. After encouragement and patronage from Grace Owen (1973–1965), a leading figure in the development of early years education and nursery teaching training at the time, and Professor J. J. Findlay (1860–1940), one of the first British university professors of education, she changed course from teacher training. She eventually graduated with a first-class degree in Philosophy, and then was awarded a postgraduate scholarship to study Psychology at Newnham College, Cambridge. She subsequently took up various teaching and lecturing posts in a range of institutions. During this earlier period of her life, Isaacs underwent psychoanalysis with John Carl Flugel (1884–1955) and later Joan Riviere (1883–1962) and subsequently trained and practised psychoanalysis herself. She became an Associate Member of the newly founded British Psychoanalytical Society in 1921, and a full member in 1923. She has been described as the first practising British child analyst (Graham, 2009). It was during this period that she encountered theories of infancy developed by Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein (whose circle she would later join), as well as Jean Piaget’s (for example, 1962) work regarding the intellectual development of young children. The seeds had been sown for her engagement with educational ideas on the periphery of the Bloomsbury Group, in a ‘liberal laboratory’ (Bar-Haim, 2017). The ‘liberal laboratory’ that Isaacs moved on to establish and run was The Malting House School in Cambridge from 1924 to 1927, a progressive

Susan Isaacs, Phantasy and Play 137 experimental school aimed at bringing children up in ‘freedom’. Whether it was framed psychoanalytically is open to question. Isaacs denied this and attributed the school’s inspiration to John Dewey (Isaacs, 1933: 19). Additionally, the idea of unfettered freedom was later to be seen by her as somewhat problematic, with some negative aspects of children’s behaviour overshadowing the whole project (Bar-Haim, 2017; Lawrence, 1949; Meisel and Kendrick, 1986). On the other hand, Geoffrey Pyke (1894–1948), the founder of the school, certainly saw psychoanalysis as being inherent within his own educational model, which had influenced the school significantly (Cameron, 2006). The school was one of only a small number of schools in the 1920s that attempted to operationalise psychoanalytical theories; the others included the Children’s Home, established by the Moscow Institute of Psychoneurology in 1921, with Trotsky as patron, and attended by Stalin’s son, Anna Freud’s ‘Matchbox School’ at Hietzing, near Vienna, which ran between 1927 and 1932 (Midgley, 1965), Dora and Bertrand Russell’s Beacon Hill School (1927–1943) and A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School, established in 1921 in Dresden, before moving to Sonntagsberg in Austria and then in 1923 to Lyme Regis, before settling at its current site at Leiston in Suffolk in 1927. These schools combined psychological theories and anti-authoritarianism, and it can be seen very much in the same vein.1 The Malting House School was visited by Melanie Klein in 1925, resulting in a high degree of mutual respect between herself and Isaacs, although Klein expressed reservations regarding issues, such as aggression among the children (Grosskurth, 1995: 138). It was also visited by Jean Piaget in 1927; although Isaacs was initially more critical of his theories (Isaacs, 1930a: 44), she would later popularise them along with those of Donald Winnicott (1896–1971) (Burman, 2011). At the school, Isaacs observed and recorded the day-to-day activities of young children and adults in the most minute detail. This ‘evidence’ provided the material for the theoretical positioning that would later allow her to formulate a suitable framework for curriculum in the early years, although in time she would temper her attitude towards some of the findings, for example, the earlier absence of most forms of discipline by adults of children. Although they would go on to provide inspiration for generations of early childhood educators, these day-to-day inductive accounts were not always received positively by psychologists initially; for example, in a review of The Social Development of Young Children, Fordham University child development expert Dorothea McCarthy wrote: The reader … is sure to be disappointed by the author’s narrow conception of the young child’s social development which is made to hinge entirely around problems of infant sexuality … The interpretation of these “records” is decidedly Freudian … (McCarthy, 1933: 234)

138  Feminist Praxes Between 1933 and 1939, Isaacs was Head of the Child Development Department of the Institute of Education in London, leading it to achieve an international reputation. When the Department closed temporarily at the beginning of the Second World War, she led the Cambridge Evacuation Survey, which reviewed the experiences of 850 children evacuated from London to Cambridge2. She was also an agony aunt from 1929 to 1936, using the pen name, ‘Ursula Wise’, in popular journals to answer questions regarding the parenting of young children (Isaacs, 1948b). Isaacs eventually died of cancer in 1948. Despite the fact, she had been regarded as the country’s leading child psychologist, it had not been possible for the Institute of Education to find her a Chair or even a Readership before her death (Martin, 2011), but she was awarded the CBE, a prestigious national honour.

The Malting House School The Malting House School worked from the principle that learning by experience was preferable to authoritarian approaches. If we examine Isaacs’ thinking at this time, there are similarities with theories developed by the infant experimentalist, Myrtle McGraw, in the sense that the child’s development is seen as a symbiotic rather than a purely genetic process. Here, it is argued that experience triggers behaviour that assists development, and development allows for further or more advanced experiential behaviour. Thus, McGraw developed a neuro-behavioural theory of development that allowed children to devise their own movements in laboratory situations, demonstrating that experience such as gravity, inhibition and judgement play an important role in child development, which therefore cannot be attributed solely to genetics (Dalton, 1998)3. The Malting House School worked on similar principles, also as an experimental facility, albeit with older children than those worked with by McGraw. It was attended by up to 20 children at any time, mostly boys, and included some children with what might be described as behavioural difficulties today. Isaacs described herself as a ‘lover of children’ and explained that she felt her responsibility lay in ‘the great, the desperate need of children themselves to be understood’ (Isaacs, 1933: 13, our italics). In this respect, she left minutely documented accounts of the children’s behaviour, which had been collected by stenographers, with associated interpretations through the lens of psychoanalysis. In addition to this acute level of observation and reflection by adults (as opposed to the testing of children4), the Malting House School approach differed most markedly from other child-centred educational environments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the very wide extent of the freedom available to its pupils. At times, this could be uncomfortable for the children (and indeed the staff). Isaacs provides an example of a boy struggling to come to terms with

Susan Isaacs, Phantasy and Play 139 complex feelings involving hate, violence and in-group power structures (the reference to ‘his room’ is because about a third of the children at the school were school boarders, despite the fact they were all very young, aged between two and eight). 2.2.27 Conrad went to his room alone. When Miss C. went in, her had a khaki hat and sword on, plunging up and downplaying at ‘soldiers’. He was talking quietly to himself and was for several seconds quite unaware of Miss C.’s presence. He seemed to be acting out some phantasy of bravery. When he saw Miss C. he stopped and said, “I hate the others, they’re beastly.” In the evening, the others were chasing each other about and romping, and Conrad joined in with them. He ran at Jane quite valiantly. She was surprised and taken at a disadvantage and called out that he had kicked her. This rallied Dan and Norman to her side, and Conrad was frightened and ran away to his room, calling out “I hate you all.” (Isaacs, 1933: 70) Isaacs later describes this kind of behaviour as corresponding to the process of the social contacts of young children changing, as their loves and hates become increasingly stabilised. Behaviour becomes less spontaneous and impulsive, and the child moves from an egocentric position to something which is more socialised (Isaacs, 1933: 254). The child is given the space in which to make this transition by his educators. The role of the school staff members during such accounts is usually unrecorded, unless there was an unusual interaction or intervention. In this case of an incident of exhibitionism, an adult is recorded as present, but her reaction is not (although in later accounts, an adult presence does appear, in assisting with toileting). 7.10.24 Robert and George were in the garden together. Robert pulled down his trousers and exposed his penis, saying, “Look at my wee-wee thing! Where’s your wee-wee thing?” George did the same. Whenever these two were together in the garden, and thought themselves free from observation, they were liable to do this. Robert always initiating it, but George following readily. On one occasion, later than this, Mrs I went to join them in the sand-pit, after there had been a sing-song about “wee-wee things”, when George suddenly said to her, “Do you know where the weewee thing is? Here it is,” exposing his penis. (Isaacs, 1933: 135)

140  Feminist Praxes The boys seem to be aware of some kind of taboo, which we can see from the fact that they investigate their genitals only when unobserved5. A proposed explanation for their behaviour lies in the fact that central to the Isaacs model of child development is a rejection of much of what might be termed any ‘free’ or ‘instinctive’ purely genetically driven behaviour on the part of children, apart from among the very youngest (an example being the early ‘grasp’ reflex). Instead, Isaacs promoted an acceptance of the idea of children’s behaviour both mirroring/emulating and anticipating that of adults, as a form of mimesis (see back to Chapter 4). Through a parallel process of diegesis, Isaacs then records the children’s engagement in mimesis and interprets it as narrator, focusing on psychoanalytical aspects of which the child is unaware (although she would claim neutrality). In this way, the adult is both central to the generation of the act as well as the interpretation of the act. Consequently, human relationships are accorded a greater significance and centrality in Isaacs’ work than in the McGraw model, which focused more on children’s physical interactions with their environment. As Isaacs said, … with young children, no adult can under ordinary circumstances be a minimal stimulus … The children are psychologically orientated towards him as an adult. Their world hangs upon him, and his slightest sign is full of meaning (Isaacs, 1930b: 9). Isaacs sees this process of imitation as having multiple aspects. Drawing on the research of Melanie Klein, Isaacs describes two types of relations involving what she termed ‘phantasy’6, or a particular type of imaginative practice grounded in the self, as children navigate the space between their physical environment and the relationships around them through free play (Isaacs, 1948a). She calls the first a ‘circumstantial relation’ (Isaacs, 1948b: 34), as children copy aspects of the adult world in their play in a derivative manner that involves dramatic representation. (She gives the example of children playing at telephones.) She calls the second a ‘conative nexus of thought and phantasy’ in which they develop ‘symbol formations’. (She gives the example of the symbolic value of fire, motors, mud and so on.) This offers a means for the child to play out and resolve inner conflicts and tensions, something Ogden (2011: 940) describes in the psychoanalytical literature as ‘fulfilling the human need to understand the truth of one’s experience’ (ibid.: 34). In this way, imaginative free play allows children to move between conceptualisation and activity using an iterative process that encourages the development of independent thought. Play within the curriculum therefore becomes a vital tool necessary for the intellectual growth of the child. The next part of the chapter describes how Isaacs operationalised this.

Susan Isaacs, Phantasy and Play 141

The Isaacs curriculum In seeking to create an optimised educational environment to frame a pedagogical approach with play at its centre, Isaacs’ underlying principles linked pedagogy, philosophy and psychology to provide what Murray describes as an ‘enduring consilience’ allowing for the production of rigorous and reliable knowledge relating to early childhood. This continues to have relevance for early childcare professionals today (Murray, 2021). This approach was derived from her theory of intellectual growth founded in children’s contact with the natural world, and can be paraphrased as follows: 1 Children learn empirically from contact with the physical world. 2 Children’s knowledge grows as a consequence of this engagement, through experimentation, observation and discovery. 3 Children have a natural curiosity about the natural world. 4 Children are capable of reason when interested in the subject matter. 5 Children will engage in their interests given the right environment. 6 Children move between phantasy and reason with no set structure. 7 Children can hypothesise and make inferences. (Isaacs, 1930a) In The Intellectual Growth in Young Children, Isaacs (1930b: 258) describes how this might be implemented within the context of a school, through the representation of a ‘Summary of Activities’ (which in the book is expanded in detail): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Physical exercise and practice of bodily skills. Rhythmic movement, music and song. Dramatic expression, stories and verse. Spontaneous make-believe. Handwork. Drawing and painting. Reading and writing. Number, and geometrical and other formal material. Practical responsibilities. Gardening, and care of animals. Interest in everyday facts, and scientific experiment. Excursions.

Thus, Isaacs regarded the starting point for education as being the children’s environment, as derived from the work of Dewey, which provided the basis for all other activities. We see the subsequent formulation of knowledge in her work as the effective synthesis of all four types of learning outlined in the first

142  Feminist Praxes chapter of this book. Cognitive learning takes place through the use of the symbolic resources available to children, underpinned by the role of phantasy within independent play to explore the hypothetical world outside the child. Skills-based learning takes place through the association of adults in their role as ‘companions’ to learning, with them providing the procedural framework for activity. Embodied learning takes place through the relatively free exploration of physical capacity and proclivity within the educational setting. Dispositional learning involves, for Isaacs, being curious, reasoning, engaging, hypothesising, inferencing and many other capacities. Taken together they allow for the optimal development of the child, in direct contrast to, say, behaviourist models of knowledge dependent on operant conditioning systems for implementation (such as corporal punishment). As such, her position is comparatively near to that of Maxine Greene and the concept of ‘play-pedagogy’ in the sense that it is transformational (see back to Chapter 2). This is because the resultant knowledge will lead to the development of a theory of mind that is external to the child, while being unique to each child, rather than something formulated and implemented consistently according to a set protocol. It is referenced against the child’s private or internal life, which is in turn subject to ongoing reflexive processes as it effectively learns how to be itself in the company of others. Isaacs’ curricular approach was subsequently invoked directly and indirectly by educators when debating early childhood curricula, particularly in relation to primary school education reform (Central Advisory Council for Education, 1967; Hall, 2010). It was seen as superior as a sequential approach that might lend itself to reproduction in a textbook. Within this, the role of the teacher, better expressed perhaps as ‘educator’, is to set up the conditions for learning for growth during the learning journey, providing materials, reflection and insight as appropriate (Willan, 2011). We see this framing of the role of educator as fellow traveller in the way Isaacs dedicated Intellectual Growth in Young Children (1930: iv) to ‘my child companions’. In describing the environment that was made available for children to undertake this level of spontaneous and multi-faceted engagement with the natural world, Graham (2009) writes in detail about the richness of the educational resources made available to the children at the Malting House School. These ranged from climbing frames to hand tools, maps, Bunsen burners, typewriters, a gramophone and a library of books. This level of practical resourcing was necessary because the underlying philosophy of the Issacs curriculum was to ‘reverse the usual assumption that says either openly or implicitly to the child: ‘first learn what we have to teach you, then you will be able to do things for yourself’’ (Eyken and Turner, 1969: 39). The way the school was equipped also gives an indication of the priorities given to three main areas: academic, handiwork and social, and correspondingly this resembles the early approach of other progressive schools, such as Bedales, founded by John Haden Badley in 1893, with its motto, ‘Head, Hands and Heart’. However, Isaacs generally divided her

Susan Isaacs, Phantasy and Play 143 analysis into two categories: intellectual and social, sometimes to the point of including them in separate books, or at least in different sections within the same book. Similarly, they are somewhat artificially divided for the purposes of analysis here, but as Isaacs frequently points out in her own writing, in reality they would have been entirely symbiotic and they would have occurred as a consequence of free play. In terms of the intellectual aspects of the curriculum, we can see from Isaacs’ writings in Intellectual Growth in Young Children (1930) that numeracy and literacy came about through their relationship with practical tasks and interests. For example, children were required to place orders for food or materials and therefore needed to articulate this in writing. Activities, such as cookery, involved calculating quantities as well as weighing and measuring. Flashcards for whole-word recognition and whole-sentence recognition were used to teach reading when the children expressed an interest in it. Scientific education was predominantly biological in nature. It focused on aspects of the environment immediately available to children, for example, their own bodies and the animals they encountered daily (such as the death of a rabbit on the school site). These activities and the related underlying philosophy are likely to be familiar to many contemporary early childhood educators, as they resemble a play-based curriculum that has become almost universal in many contexts. The social aspects of the curriculum were the focus of her 1933 book, Social Development in Young Children, and relate to the cited examples given earlier in this chapter. Children’s increasing maturity was said to have an impact on their academic engagement and attainment, as their emotions became stabilised. Through centralising the medium of play, she enabled children to explore issues including egocentrism during their improvised exchanges. For example, Isaacs gives examples of children instructing each other very precisely in what they are and aren’t allowed to do, making up their own rules, and the way this can have little bearing on what the participant actually wants to do or thinks is right. There are opportunities to work through issues relating to hostility and aggression, and she gives examples of kicking over each other’s bricks or threatening each other with brooms. Children are also able to explore friendliness and cooperation, such as inviting others to play with them, and asking after their welfare if they have been hurt. Isaacs also includes reports of issues relating to what she describes as, ‘The Deeper Sources of Love and Hate’ (Isaacs, 1933: vii), including sexuality, guilt and shame. This can be scatological, curious, or it can be represented through the imitation of adult life, for example, playing at marriage and parenthood. Throughout these two key works, as well as the rest of Isaacs’ writing, she challenges the notion of the social contract in a manner entirely congruent with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Liberalism by which her work was ultimately influenced. Through the medium of psychoanalytic

144  Feminist Praxes analysis, she presents a theory of human nature that is markedly different from that of Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau, although we see elements of each of these in Isaacs’ writing at times, in spite of her attempts to frame incidents as neutrally as possible. In her books, children are not entirely selfish and vicious in the manner of Hobbes; where they cause harm it is shown to have a developmental function. They are not blank slates in the manner of Locke, as it is shown they can have an inherent understanding of the situations and motivations of other people. Neither are they noble savages in the manner of Rousseau (1979), as they are shown to be able to negotiate reasonably among themselves at times. Isaacs sees children as evolutionary creatures demonstrating a range of distinct and relatively complex capabilities from an incredibly early age, and that this is manifested through forms of expression. Hence, the children at The Malting House can be seen as practising what Wynn et al. (2018) might term, ‘selective altruism’, as they interact in a relatively sophisticated manner with their surroundings, fellow pupils and adults. Isaacs’ distinctive contribution has been to investigate empirically the ebb and flow of children’s natural developmental processes in the light of these interactions, bridging a number of theories of human nature in doing so.

Implications for contemporary practice Drummond summarises the benefits of Isaacs’ observational approach to early childhood education very succinctly: Isaacs was simply not interested in the extent to which children’s thought mirrored her own or the extent to which they made their faces fit the conventions of an arbitrary adult society. To see children as Isaacs saw them is to see them whole, vividly and dramatically, with all their strengths and weaknesses intact. The Malting House School teaches us the lesson of looking, with attention, at everything that children do (and think and feel) as they live and learn in our benevolent provisions for them. (Drummond, 2000: n. pag.) A century after Isaacs began to link her theories of child development with professional practice, through observation and reflection, the idea of play in early childhood education has now become so universal that it is quite difficult to imagine many very young children experiencing school otherwise. However, it can take quite a different form to that of The Malting House. Governments can require young children’s play to be assessed for educational content, formally monitored and recorded for quality assurance purposes, for example. Leaton Gray (2007) has written about how this is rooted in the new Managerialism. It represents a shift towards teacher technicisation and performativity in early childhood education within the British system, where early childhood educators have been obliged to observe children playing and

Susan Isaacs, Phantasy and Play 145 subsequently complete achievement grids linked to age-related targets. This is not an approach that Isaacs would have seen as sufficiently reflective and insightful, because it is not a dyadic mimesis/diegesis model with symbiotic human relationships at the centre. Instead, it is a form of developmental audit, grounded in accountability measures, located within a chronological framework for children’s development that sits outside the individual child, rather than originating from within. Modern-day observation practice differs in other regards as well. Safeguarding and privacy concerns, as well as issues to do with consent, mean that educators are likely to be more guarded in what they write down in relation to children, and how any information is likely to be shared. Children’s developing sexuality is generally not seen as appropriate to record, for example, unless there is a particular pathology. Additionally, a sole account of a 2–3 period of observation in a single school is unlikely to form the basis of definitive findings for changing professional early years practice. As is the case of many seminal thinkers at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, Isaacs’ findings can be seen as essentially unfalsifiable and unverifiable, located as they are within the social and cultural context of the time. Yet, they have proved durable and seem to display an inherent truth about the discovery learning of young children that is evident to all who spend time with them. There are other possible grounds for the durability of her approach. The main period of her work took place just before the vast expansion of professional teacher training and associated publications from the 1940s onwards, and this allowed the concept of play to be embedded consistently within early childhood practice, amplifying her ideas. Also important was the similarity of her conceptualisation of early childhood learning to that of Vygotsky, who had not been translated into English at the time. Both see learning as existing first and primarily in a social context with others, and the fact that both strands of thought were developing in parallel has no doubt assisted with the consolidation of the position. Isaacs’ work should not be seen as historic or static, however. Educators have attempted to develop the democratic aspects of free play in later experiments. Possibly the least known but most notable of these was work in the 1970s–1980s using the early computer language, Turtle LOGO. This allowed very young children to programme a small, mobile robot to perform tasks ranging from moving around the classroom, to play melodies and to flashlights. The aim was for children to develop confidence in disrupting the classroom and the curriculum in general, allowing them to follow their own experimental learning inclinations (see Agalianos, Whitty and Noss, 2006). As such, it is securely rooted in the radical democratic classroom of Dewey and the childinitiated cooperative learning model envisaged by Isaacs, underpinned by mimesis and diegesis. Yet, as in the case of play in the early childhood curriculum, Turtle LOGO eventually became appropriated by the mainstream

146  Feminist Praxes and mostly subsumed within Computer Science, with its own curriculum and assessment metrics attached. Where her influence is currently most useful, however, is not in philosophically resisting things such as performativity in early childhood education. Isaacs’ work provides a robust explanation for why expert tutoring systems or social robotics underpinned by artificial intelligence would be at best fairly useless, and at worst actively harmful, when used with this age group for anything but the most benign activities. The rich and highly nuanced world of phantasy, referenced against companionship, underpins an iterative and sophisticated development process among young children. This is not purely about them gaining knowledge, but instead it concerns the maturation of both brain and psyche, with a need for human contact at its very core. If Isaacs’ theories tell us anything at all, it is what it means to be a young human in the modern age, and why naturalistic free play still matters. The third praxis revolves round the practice of creativity. Maria Montessori is the originator of an educational system and pedagogy based on a belief in the creative potential of children, their natural desire to learn and the right of every child to be treated as an individual. Montessori (2014) disliked conventional classrooms, where children were assigned in a rigid fashion a position and a place, an example of which in a recent film, ‘Belfast’, is the way a young child was given a desk with a number attached and depending on his performance during the week, moved between the desks, up or down (Belfast, directed by Kenneth Branagh, in 2021). She attempted, instead, to teach children by engaging them in activities involving the use and manipulation of materials conducive to learning and through creative pedagogies.

Notes 1 A direct descendant of The Malting House School can be found in the Chelsea Open Air Nursery School, which Issacs established in 1928 with Natalie Davies, now part of the Local Authority provision in Kensington and Chelsea, London, and available to local children aged under 5. 2 John Bowlby was part of her research team for the Cambridge Evacuation Survey, being a PhD student of Cyril Burt at the time and possibly also of Isaacs herself. It is likely that this survey went on to inform his thinking surrounding attachment theory (Van Dijken et al., 1998). 3 The child development work of both McGraw and Isaacs was largely overshadowed by the work of Gessell and his ‘maturation theory’ (Gessell and Ilg, 1949; Gessell, Thompson and Amatruda, 1938). This is discussed in more detail in Leaton Gray, S. (2023) ‘Phantasy and Play: Susan Isaacs and Child Development’ London Review of Education. 4 Isaacs argues very clearly against testing in Social Development of Young Children: ‘In general, one can say with regard to personal development under five years, that what a child does for one person under certain conditions is no reliable index of what he may do for another person in a similar situation.’ (Isaacs, 1933: 9, her italics).

Susan Isaacs, Phantasy and Play 147 5 Their behaviour in Isaacs’ records takes a different form to, for example, the kind of sexually-related play described five decades later by Walkerdine, where small boys attempt to disempower a female teacher via vulgar use of her name – ‘Miss Baxter the paxter knickers taxter’ (Walkerdine, 1993: 14–15). Here the incident is recorded as being less gendered and threatening than Walkerdine’s example, and is described more as the child gradually reaching a state of awareness. Such framing is typical of Isaacs’ work. 6 The concept of ‘phantasy’ was developed by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and was deliberately spelled this way as a contrast to ‘fantasy’, or daydreaming. It was developed by her into the term ‘unconscious phantasy’, which Isaacs was to draw upon heavily as a construct (see Likierman, 2011).

11 Maria Montessori and the Autonomous Development of Children

The Italian educator Maria Montessori is known for numerous books that develop a distinctive philosophy of education, with the most notable being The Montessori Method (1912). This has been implemented at scale across the world, although its popularity has waxed and waned at different points in history. We argue here that she can legitimately be seen as one of the main historical innovators in Western educational theory and pedagogy. This chapter begins by providing a brief biographical context to her work and the development of what was known as the Montessori Method, as well as a short discussion of how it was framed in political terms at various stages throughout its existence. The chapter then discusses the medical background to its development, before analysing the subtle interaction between philosophy and pedagogy that underpinned her approach to education. This embraced a range of what Frierson (2014) has described as ‘epistemic virtues’, including physical dexterity, sensory acuity, love of knowledge, intellectual love and humility. This complex and nuanced interplay of ideals was sometimes difficult for contemporaries and governments to appreciate fully, and it was also difficult to operationalise with an appropriate degree of fidelity, given the scale of provision globally. The chapter locates this problem culturally, before concluding that the enduring quality of the Montessori Method means that her work has had a wider influence on education generally than is usually recognised, going well beyond nursery school provision for young children. As such, the legacy of her work may ultimately be more significant than is the case for any other curriculum theorist in this book.

Biographical notes The background of Maria Montessori is unusual for an educationalist and has become canonical. Edited highlights of her life are usually reported in relation to every related educational setting and product that bears her name. This can even include supposed quotations and aphorisms being attributed to her that do not exist in her writings, the most common being the saying, ‘Play DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-13

Maria Montessori and the Autonomous Development of Children 149 is children’s work’, part of a complex problem of attribution that repeatedly plays out in the education literature in different ways1. In this way, her biography frequently includes hagiographic elements (a phenomenon repeatedly described by Kramer as a ‘plaster saint’ aspect of her work, see Kramer, 1988). This tendency has to some extent been incorporated into what is now a global Montessori brand. As we have taken a conscious decision to include biographical notes in the praxis section of this book (Part II) as a way of evaluating curriculum thought in practical and historical terms as well as philosophically, we rehearse her biography in this chapter. However, in the interests of balance, we include some details that do not normally feature in advertising materials and background articles aimed at teaching professionals. In her own biography of Montessori, Kramer (1988) draws on primary source materials to describe and locate Montessori’s work with more precision than can be found in many other accounts, and consequently we draw heavily on this work here. Kramer describes how Maria Tecla Artemesia Montessori (1870–1952) was born in Chiaravalle, Italy, into a middle-class family. Montessori was the only child of Alessandro Montessori and Rainier de Stoppani. Her father was a government official from a military background working as an accountant for the local state tobacco industry. Her mother came from an affluent background, and was relatively well-educated for the time, encouraging her daughter along similar lines. Although her parents were keen for her to become a teacher, Montessori wanted to study to become a doctor, something which was more or less unknown for women in Italy in the nineteenth century. However, it had become possible for the first time in Italy due to various social and political reforms that had been playing out during the final quarter of the nineteenth century, including the formalisation of girls’ schooling in Italy, and its foundation within the public domain. Nevertheless, Montessori’s medical ambitions were to cause tensions at home and were also seen as controversial within society. Montessori’s application to study medicine was initially rejected by the Board of Education but later accepted. In 1896, despite initial squeamishness at some of the practical aspects of the discipline, she graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Rome, becoming one of the first female doctors in Italy (although in other accounts, this is often wrongly reported as her being the first woman doctor ever to graduate in the country). Montessori was then given an appointment as a volunteer at the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, where she first became interested in the educational problems of children with intellectual disabilities. During this period, in 1898, Montessori also had a son with a fellow doctor and colleague. They did not marry for a number of reasons, including the fact that Montessori would have been obliged to give up her career, so she arranged to have her son fostered, and for some years kept his identity secret. They were reunited later and he worked as her assistant for some

150  Feminist Praxes years and subsequently became a renowned psychotherapist in his own right. It was at this stage that Montessori started to take early steps towards her career in education. In 1899, Montessori was appointed as a consultant for the newly established National Union for the Protection of Children with Disabilities and was invited to lecture on special teaching methods for mentally disabled children at the Normal School of the Academy of Rome. She eventually became a lecturer in hygiene (public health) and pedagogy, and later anthropology, at one of the two women’s teacher training colleges in Italy. In 1900, she became co-director of the National Union’s Sculoa Magistrale Ortofrenica2, a school for mentally disabled children, which she left in 1901 to continue her studies and research. In 1906, Montessori was put in charge of a state educational facility in the San Lorenzo district of Rome, with 60 children aged between three and six, from deprived families. In 1907, she opened ‘The Children’s Home’ (Casa di Bambini in the original Italian), a term that was later to be adopted by the Montessori system as a way of describing their educational settings (and often mistranslated as ‘The Children’s House’; we reluctantly use the mistranslation throughout this chapter as it is likely to be more familiar to readers, and it also avoids any linguistic overtones of orphanages). Reactions to her involvement were mixed; on the one hand, the authorities felt that there was little scope for Montessori to do any damage given the age and deprived social backgrounds of her students, on the other hand, her friends and associates largely saw this as insignificant work which detracted from her medical career (Thayer-Bacon, 2012). At local government level, it is hard to see it as anything other than a worthy policy project of educating ‘other people’s children’ and keeping them gainfully occupied and out of trouble during the day in the absence of their working parents. Luckily for Montessori, the opportunity also provided a tabula rasa for experimentation with new educational methods on intellectually normal children (albeit in this case suffering from social deprivation). This started to lead to international acclaim. By 1909, Montessori was achieving significant international success and launched a course for 100 children, also publishing her first book, The Montessori Method, which was translated into English and published in the United States three years later. Ultimately, it would be translated into twenty languages and would become an international bestseller. The idea of the Montessori ‘Method’ spread extremely rapidly, and by 1910, there was a network of Montessori schools spread out across Europe, with the first US Montessori School opening in New York in 1911. This success led to the establishment of the Montessori Education Association with celebrity patrons including Alexander and Mabel Graham Bell. In 1913, she also set up her first international training programme, and graduates of the programme returned to their home countries to establish their own Montessori schools. The huge popularisation of her Method was such that it rapidly became impossible to check whether her Method was being followed faithfully,

Maria Montessori and the Autonomous Development of Children 151 which contributed to its periodic demise and represents a problem that still characterises its use today (Marshall, 2017). This is that anyone can describe their school as ‘A Montessori School’ or describe educational equipment as ‘Montessori equipment’, due to there being no formal accreditation or patent protection system. This extreme popularity also meant that she was frequently approached by those seeking to exploit her work for personal gain, in particular, the publisher Samuel Sidney McClure, who brought her to the United States in 1913 for a joint lecture tour that he had promoted heavily3, in the hope of recouping some of the major losses he had made on the magazine he published, McClure’s Magazine (Thayer-Bacon, 2012). However, despite the sell-out tour, the Montessori Method soon attracted critics. William Heard Kilpatrick, author of The Montessori System Examined (1914), and an acolyte of John Dewey, launched a blistering attack on what he called Montessori ‘doctrines’, that has been described as highly gendered and largely inaccurate (Kilpatrick, 1914; Thayer-Bacon, 2012). Kilpatrick also described Montessori’s work as derivative of Rousseau, Froebel and Dewey, not fully understanding its medical origins, grounded as it was in biological evolutionary concepts. This hostility could also be attributed to the fact that the Montessori Method was seen as out of step with the US social reform movement promoted by Dewey and others, a fact that contributed to its decline in popularity until the 1950s. Montessori’s non-conformist tendency was a continuing theme in her work throughout her career. As a consequence of this nonconformity, Montessori continued to travel internationally and give lecture tours, but to less acclaim. She lived in Barcelona from 1915, where her work was supported by the Catalan Government, until she refused to take a public position in relation to the Catalan independence movement in 1920. Her model Montessori school was subsequently closed by the Spanish military dictatorship in 1924. She continued living in Barcelona until the outbreak of civil war in 1936, when she moved her family initially to the United Kingdom and then to the Netherlands. Her political resistance pattern also played out in Italy. By 1923, the Italian Minister for Education, Giovanni Gentile, had expressed his support for Montessori schools and teacher training. Consequently, Benito Mussolini made Montessori education nationally available. In 1936, two years after Montessori’s refusal to cooperate with the country’s fascist youth movement, all Montessori schools in Italy were closed. During this unsettled period, Montessori founded the International Montessori Association in Amsterdam (1929). In 1938, this was followed by the Montessori Training Centre in Laren, also in the Netherlands, and during the Second World War, she worked with her son to establish what she described as ‘cosmic education’ in India, in an advanced Montessori course aimed at children between the ages of 6–12. The final phase of her life’s work, carried out in the aftermath of the Second World War, involved public recognition and honours in various countries, as

152  Feminist Praxes well as forming the basis for what would become the movement for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Montessori died in the Netherlands in 1952, at the age of 81.

Background to the Montessori Method The roots of the Montessori Method or system can be found in early work surrounding the medical care of disabled children. Three years after graduation, in 1899, Montessori visited the Bicêtre Hospital in Paris to observe the legacy of work that had been started some years previously by Edward Séguin (1812–1880), a French-born American psychiatrist. Séguin was the author of Traitement moral, hygiène et éducation des idiots (1846)4, later regarded as a classic psychological text, and a founding work in the area that was to become special education. Shortly after the book’s publication, Séguin emigrated to the United States due to the turbulent economic and political climate in France at the time, as it became the Second Republic (incidentally this was also the reason that Dorothea Beale, another one of the female curriculum theorists discussed in this book, returned from her studies in France). In his work, Séguin theorised that much intellectual disability was the consequence of arrested development rather than a fundamental inability to learn. He developed a set of sensory learning materials, known as the physiological method, which had in turn been influenced by the work of Jean-MarcGaspard Itard (1774–1838), a French doctor and the author of Rapports sur le sauvage de l’Aveyron5 (1807). Itard was famous for having worked with deafmute patients, as well as a feral child found in a forest in Aveyron, South of Paris (hence the title of the book). Séguin had studied under Itard as a medical student and was mentored by him. These influences represented a pivotal moment for Montessori in terms of moving away from medicine and towards education. During this period, and later in the educational setting she established herself in 1907, she developed a systemised version of the teaching techniques and materials originally developed by Itard and Séguin, which were termed ‘Orthophrenic’ and designed for use with disabled children. Montessori’s materials were based on progressivist learner-centred approaches to education. This approach encouraged free play in a ‘prepared’ environment, using sensory tools aimed at teaching abstract concepts to children through the physical practice of tasks, in turn, linked to language development. These learning techniques were linked so that knowledge became interconnected and more readily accessed. Montessori’s rationale for this was that, it is well-known that … [one must link] all new knowledge to the old, ‘going from the known to the unknown,’ because what is absolutely new can awake no interest. (Montessori, 1917: 45)

Maria Montessori and the Autonomous Development of Children 153

The interaction of Montessori philosophy and pedagogy As we have indicated in the introduction to the chapter, the Montessori Method was underpinned not only by specific learning techniques and materials but also by a distinctive educational philosophy. As she explained, Intellectual education and moral and social education are the two sides of development. The first is concerned with intellectual development and the second with the individual’s active life in society. (Montessori, 1946: 90) This section of the chapter will outline some of the approaches used in the Montessori classroom and explain how they both reflected and reinforced the philosophical framing of her approach. Key to understanding this educational approach is appreciating the relevance of the classroom learning environment to the pedagogical processes taking place. One example of the prepared environment within the Montessori classroom is the provision of child-sized household equipment to enable embodied learning, so children could practice adult tasks such as laundry, chopping fruit and vegetables, polishing and sweeping. In minutely detailed analyses of the philosophical aspects of the Montessori Method, Frierson (2014; 2016; 2021) describes this as a form of embodied cognition involving the development of physical dexterity and sensory acuity. These skills in turn form part of what he described as the promotion of intellectual virtues (two of several; others we discuss later). These represent aspects of what Frierson described as a ‘virtue epistemology’. The specific educational techniques developed by Montessori that involved embodied cognition also made significant use of technical classification and ordering skills, for example, stacking especially designed blocks into towers or laying out rods in order. Integral to this was what was called the ‘internal work cycle’, which involved the child choosing the equipment, setting it up, and clearing up afterwards, taking as long as he or she wanted, and repeating it as often as he or she liked. Frierson argues that this development of child agency through autonomous self-direction of activity forms a core value of Montessori’s moral theory, in which childhood can be seen as a ‘conquest of independence’, as described in The Absorbent Mind (Montessori, 1964). Montessori explained that: The child’s conquest of independence begins with his first introduction to life.  While he is developing, he perfects himself and overcomes every obstacle that he finds in his path.  A vital force is active within him, and this guides his efforts towards their goal. (Montessori, 1964: 83) Within the Montessori Method, this embodiment was framed ethically in a number of ways that we describe throughout the chapter, but here it can be

154  Feminist Praxes seen in terms of the skills of navigating the use of fragile or sensitive items through a responsive physicality, that was also mindful of others in the room or educational setting. Montessori described this as involving physical ‘grace’ as a form of intellectual accomplishment, and to an extent also a social one. Speaking about children in a Montessori classroom, she said, The grace and dignity of their behaviour and the ease of their movements are the corollaries to what they have gained through their own patient and laborious efforts. In a word they are ‘self-controlled’ and to the extent that they are thus controlled they are free from the control of others. (Montessori, 1948a: 94) Developing concentrated attention was key to the development of this sense of grace and dignity. To promote attention, activities would be placed around the room on low shelves at child height, so they could easily take things out and clear them away independently, working on them without interruption between these phases of activity. Frierson describes how interruption (generally by adults, but equally by other children) was seen by Montessori as an anathema to learning. She felt that adults should be positioned as people who could potentially help children do things by themselves, rather than doing things for them. Therefore, within the Montessori Method, children were not seen as mini-adults requiring instruction, but rather as individual learners with different needs, directing their own activity, through learning materials that allowed self-correction. An example of this is a pedagogical technique Montessori explained in her London lectures, It is therefore best to start by giving him the set where the difference is in two dimensions. As all the cylinders in the set have the same height, the little knob is always easy to hold even if the cylinders were to be misplaced. This will enable the child to correct himself. (Montessori, 2019: 82) It should be noted that this push towards independence and self-correction does not only have a philosophical function, it also has a solid empirical basis and is recognised in the psychological literature as essential to cognitive development in children until the age of around nine years old (Denervaud et al., 2020). Nevertheless, within the Montessori Method, self-correction took on additional philosophical aspects. For example, the pursuit of perfection, and the delayed gratification involved, was seen as representing part of a moral life in which the development of good character was an essential part of children’s development. This idea of task perfection and completion as a moral act applied to practical and everyday activities as well. Hooks and cubbies for children’s possessions would be fixed in ways so that children could hang up their coats and put away shoes themselves.

Maria Montessori and the Autonomous Development of Children 155 To facilitate the transmission of culture and philosophy, Montessori classrooms would be mixed-age, with children staying in the same classroom for about three years. This allowed for different types of peer-to-peer instruction, as well as the ability to rehearse classroom activities and routines at a relatively deep conceptual level, rather than requiring children to be moved into a different situation each academic year, with a corresponding curricular shift rooted in chronology. Development was expected to run at the pace of the individual, require rehearsal and take time. These arrangements are linked to the idea of intellectual love and humility, as further epistemic virtues. Here, we mean the idea of mutual respect within a learning community, for example, promoting the best values of humanity through doing things like clearing up and turn-taking in the classroom (facilitated by the fact that there was only ever one piece of each equipment so that children would have to learn patience and sharing as part of their everyday activities). This was further reinforced through techniques, such as the introduction of something called the ‘Silence Game’. This was a game whereby the whole classroom would seek to maintain silence actively for as long as they could so that they developed the ability to engage in nonverbal cooperation. The idea behind this was to promote solidarity and cohesion that would build on the other areas of mutual cooperation occurring in different areas of their work, such as sharing equipment. Montessori saw this quest for cohesion as essential to the pursuit of social participation. The way she positioned this is different to Nietzsche’s Übermensch ideal of the achievement of human potential as an aim. Montessori felt such framing did not make a sufficient contribution to humanity as a whole and saw it in a broader context. In addition to the promotion of socialisation as an epistemic virtue, the trend towards classification and ordering in the Montessori classroom resembled certain aspects of the scientific method common at the turn of the last century, with its aim being both self-correction and the pursuit of perfection, but also the virtue of love of knowledge. For example, we might think of the Edwardian gentleman etymologist collecting different types of insects to pin on a board for ordering and labelling, or botanists going on voyages to collect different ‘new’ specimens for cataloguing and storing back at Kew Gardens, in pursuit of the discipline described as systematics (Bather, 1927; Hull, 1998). The difference here with the science education approach common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that children were able to choose which of the structured activities they wished to engage in, and when they might like to do it, and that the activities associated with each stage were designed to be absorbing and developmentally sensitive. This approach meant that children could spend as long as they felt they needed to on any activity, in pursuit of what we might call mastery learning today. While engaged in this model of learning, individuals could also work together with other children or alone, as they saw fit, thereby combining love of knowledge with cooperation and community building. The aim was once again the fulfilment of humanity,

156  Feminist Praxes rather than a focus on the path of individuals. It particularly rejected satisfying individual assessment goals linked to chronology. However, issues of temporality and development could not be ignored within educational structures altogether, and the next section of the chapter discusses how this was developed in Montessori’s later work.

Cosmic education Montessori’s original intention was to develop an holistic form of education that covered different stages of child development up to adulthood. She considered these stages to be 0–6 years (early childhood, seeking physical and biological independence), 6–12 years (childhood, seeking mental independence), 12–18 years (adolescence, seeking social independence) and 18–24 years (maturity, seeking spiritual and moral independence). Montessori termed these four stages, ‘planes of development’. The focus of most of her activities centred on the first of these planes and mainly involved children between the ages of three and six. This is also where most provision exists in terms of educational settings, and it is the phase discussed most frequently in her writing. In her later work, Montessori started to develop her thinking about the second plane of development, and what an associated education system might look like in order to achieve this. In doing so, she codified the idea of ‘cosmic education’. Montessori argued that this began with the child constructing him or herself as a human being, and its goal was to construct itself as an adult living in sympathy with the rest of the world, as well as the planet itself. In this way, the cosmos (including the whole of nature and humanity) could be seen as an integrated structure (Grazzini, 2013; Montessori, 1948a,b). This aspect of her work has not received a great deal of attention in the literature but tells us something about the late Romanticism inherent within her understanding of education. Montessori’s model of cosmic education seems to correspond to the idea of what idealists and romantics earlier described as a ‘productive imagination’ (a term borrowed from Kant), a way of linking nature with the imagination, emotion and authenticity in the pursuit of Bildung or education in its broadest possible sense. Within this, it can be argued, individuals who are free and self-aware do not need to seek immortality through any form of transcendent reality, as their morality provides a justification for existence in itself. The development of morality in this regard, as well as its relationship with an idea of autonomy, can certainly be seen throughout Montessori’s writing. In this context, nature can be seen as making a moral world possible and provides the rationale for, and framing of, community. Here, we see echoes of Schelling’s 1807 Treatise on Human Freedom. This is in the sense of a model that, as Sturma (2006) puts it, demands the individual repeatedly takes a step outside him or herself in order to achieve freedom and autonomy. This seems to reflect Montessori’s understanding of the relationship between the

Maria Montessori and the Autonomous Development of Children 157 individual and the community within her model, as well as the relationship of education to the wider cosmos. The philosophical and practical interplay of all these aspects of pedagogy was incredibly subtle, sophisticated and interdependent and significantly less explicit than in the case of many other educational approaches, for example, the American pragmatist and democratic education philosophies of Dewey. This may account for the fact that the Montessori Method was so badly misunderstood by Kilpatrick and others, and periodically rejected as an elite form of education by state systems. The next section of the chapter explores how this links to related progressive systems in education as well as to contemporary education policy and practice.

The cultural location of the Montessori Method A useful way of locating the Montessori Method culturally is to begin by considering what it was not. Despite its apparent focus on learner agency, and the journey from the concrete to the abstract (common to many progressive schooling movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), a Montessori school was not a place where very young children might be able to fulfil a spontaneous desire to dissect a rabbit to see if it was really dead, as in Susan Isaacs’ Malting House School in the 1920s. It was not a place where they might decide to spend a week or two outdoors, using different types of the blocks provided from different sets in order to stage informal performances or mock battles, as they might have done in A. S. Neill’s Summerhill. Similarly, it was not a place where children might choose to engage in fantasy dressing up and playing with conventional toys. These kinds of activities were not exactly discouraged within the setting, but Montessori reported that when presented with toys for such purposes, children did not use them but instead gravitated towards versions of adult activity. She wrote that, ‘It was the children themselves who showed that they preferred … the small “real life” utensils to toys’ (Montessori, 1964: 169). Montessori’s justification here was that in countries where the toy making industry is less advanced, you will find children … calmer, more sensible and happier. Their one idea is to take part in the activities going on about them. They are more like ordinary folk using and handling the same things as the grownups. (Montessori, 1964: 168) In the light of this finding, Lillard and Taggart (2019) ask us to consider the question of whether the model of pretend, play and fantasy we are used to in European and American educational contexts is in fact more to do with habitual social expectations, rather than any biological aspect of child development. Was Montessori correct in identifying this possibility? This chapter

158  Feminist Praxes is not the place for a definitive verdict either way, but it is useful to reflect on the various points of difference with other educational models, in the way we have done here, if we are seeking to understand what makes the Method philosophically consistent. Considering the role of the teacher within Montessori schools is also important in terms of establishing how it related to comparable systems. Vital to the successful use of the Method was the close observation of children by individuals. There were similarities here with the progressive approach of Susan Isaacs (although Isaacs used professional stenographers to record the data, with educators only keeping diaries retrospectively). In the Montessori Method, the teacher primarily observes the children at work before gently and occasionally steering them towards different educational activities, each designed with a specific purpose. The teacher might demonstrate techniques, ensure children experience no interruption to their learning or run small learning groups, but generally the focus is on the child rather than the teacher as instructor. This focus on the role of the teacher as facilitator, rather than information distributor, meant that Montessori mirrored the work of educators, such as Beale and Isaacs in that regard, even if the approach was not identical (in the case of Beale, in particular, there is a combination of a perennialist philosophy that values knowledge for its own sake, including knowledge that stands outside time, with an essentialist philosophy, concerned with training the mind in the pursuit of knowledge acquisition – see Chapter 9). It is significant that in Montessori’s first ‘Children’s House’ she deliberately chose an unqualified teacher to take charge. She felt that this was necessary to ensure that the teacher came with no preconceptions. Montessori needed teachers without preconceptions, because her schools were also not places where children would be asked to engage in systematic memorisation, as was the case in many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mainstream elementary schooling systems. In contrast, Montessori set up an effective learning environment that allowed children to teach themselves through modelling real-world problems at a small scale, with a view to becoming critical thinkers and, as we have discussed, gaining an appropriate degree of independence. Motivation to learn was seen as intrinsic rather than extrinsic, and a form of intellectual virtue, with grades and prizes common to other schools rejected from the Method. The relationship of learning with critical thinking and child development was also grounded in the idea of early education being a human right, accessible to all. The irony here is that the lack of formal Montessori accreditation or quality assurance processes for schools and specialist teacher training has led to a lack of state funding for such schools, and in many cases they have become the province of a small social elite6. Lillard and others have argued that this is because the Montessori system aligns poorly to contemporary education systems, as outcomes are not sufficiently measurable within certain time frames and testing structures (Lillard, 2019). It is also out of alignment with the evidence-based

Maria Montessori and the Autonomous Development of Children 159 approach of other curriculum theorists such as Isaacs, in its apparent rejection of fantasy/phantasy as part of the development trajectory of young children, which may potentially impact negatively on the development of children’s creativity (Kirkham and Kidd, 2015; Lillard, 2019; Soundy, 2009). The general lack of fidelity to the original system in many settings has also made it very hard to judge in terms of medium to long-term academic outcomes (Marshall, 2017). However, to assess the Montessori Method in terms of educational reform frameworks like these is to perceive it in a relatively limited sense. What we have here is a philosophical project that is seeking a certain kind of equilibrium between constraint and freedom, and that also seeks to be socially and politically neutral. The next section of the chapter explains how this is located within a broader context.

Determining Montessori’s legacy Underpinning the development of the Montessori Method lie a number of philosophical propositions relating to the nature of work, the development of character, the meaning of community, the meaning of vocation and the nature of childhood. An important clue to what this meant for children can be found in Montessori’s description of the future of schooling: My vision of the future is no longer of people taking exams and proceeding from [one level of school to the next], but of individuals passing from one stage of independence to a higher [one], by means of their own activity [and…] will, which constitutes the inner evolution of the individual. (Montessori, 1948a: xv) In comments, such as these, Montessori rejects essentialism. She is instead concerned with bringing together the intellectual, emotional and social development of children, while also contributing to various higher-order functions. These functions involved the relationship of the individual to a philosophical notion of an ideal self (not, however, the Übermensch ideal of Nietzsche, but something invariably more closely interconnected with others, nature and the universe) and the relationship of the individual to a thriving community. In turn, she argued, this could potentially have global ramifications in terms of the effective functioning of whole societies and ultimately globally. Although the Montessori Method sits uncomfortably with many school reform movements in which formal accountability is central to conceptions of efficacy, it seems to sit rather better than we might at first think with ideas of social reform that came out of democratic change at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century across Europe and the United States in particular. The Method incorporates what were then relatively new understandings of child psychology that have gradually become incorporated into mainstream pedagogical thinking. These include ideas like inquiry-based learning, small

160  Feminist Praxes group cooperation, subject mastery, special education for disabled children and certain aspects of classroom design. Montessori was not exclusively responsible for developing these ideas and similar concepts can be found in the work of a number of educators from this period. However, where she had most influence is in bringing them together coherently, and in a manner that could achieve global impact, at scale, in a manner that endures today. This is her legacy. Montessori valued girls’ and boys’ learning equally. The fourth praxis is an inclusive policy determination. In England, the first significant educational changes with regards to pupils with special educational needs in mainstream education were recommended in the Warnock Report of 1978. The Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People, chaired by Mary (later Baroness) Warnock, was appointed in November 1973 by the then Secretary of State, Margaret Thatcher. Its most important contribution was the recommendation that the term ‘learning difficulties’, described as ‘mild’, ‘moderate’ and ‘severe’, be used, allowing these pupils to be included in mainstream educational schools and minimising their social stigmatisation. The focus in the next chapter is on the antecedents and current uses of the concept of inclusion.

Notes 1 Supposed attribution frequently ranges across Piaget, Steiner, Froebel, Pestalozzi, Rousseau and Locke, an issue discussed at length by Armitage, who argues that it is actually rooted in a form of Calvinist philosophy (Armitage, 2016). 2 Orthophrenic School. 3 In a rather similar manner to the mid-nineteenth-century business relationship between the showman P.T. Barnum and the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, where she was branded as ‘The Swedish Nightingale’, but significantly less profitable for either side in the medium term. 4 ‘Mental Treatment, Hygiene, and Education of Idiots’. A more contemporary and politically correct translation might be the ‘Care, Public Health and Education of Patients with Global Developmental Delay’. 5 ‘Reports on the Savage of Aveyron’. 6 At the time of writing, there are only four state-funded Montessori schools in the United Kingdom.

12 Mary Warnock and Special Educational Needs

Mary Warnock (1924–2019) was a philosopher in the area of morality and metaphysical ethics, and a writer on existentialism. She was also an educator, having been both a school and university teacher. In 1973, Warnock was invited by the then Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher, to chair the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped and Young People (1974–1978), which was given a deliberately wide remit: To review educational provision in England, Scotland and Wales for children and young people handicapped by disabilities of body or mind, taking account of the medical aspects of their needs, together with arrangements to prepare them for entry into employment; to consider the most effective use of resources for these purposes; and to make recommendations. (DES, 1978: 1)1 The Committee was relatively large, with 27 members and a further 15 co-opted members, and during its duration would see three different Governments. There were four subcommittees, respectively, dealing with 1 2 3 4

The needs of handicapped children under five, The education of handicapped children in ordinary schools, Day and boarding special school provision and The educational and other needs of handicapped school leavers.

The inquiry covered three nations of the United Kingdom: England, Wales and Scotland, which was unusual for the time, as Scotland was usually dealt with separately. The subsequent Report, Special Educational Needs (1978, later called ‘The Warnock Report’) was highly vocal in its criticism of policy failings in the field. It resulted in significant changes, leading to children with disabilities being included in mainstream schools and allocated special Government support via a system of ‘statementing’ as a means of entitlement, and to act as an accountability measure. The Report rejected terminology, such as ‘retarded’ and ‘educationally subnormal’, instead introducing the DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-14

162  Feminist Praxes phrases, ‘Special Educational Needs’ and ‘learning difficulties’. The Report also argued that around one child in six would have such needs at some point in their educational careers (para 3.17), which was a relatively broad definition of the term. These recommendations were seen as radical and formed the basis for the 1981 Education Act, influencing policy and practice both across the United Kingdom as well as internationally, paving the way for the contemporary understanding of diversity. However, there were also many highly contentious elements, principally surrounding the organisation of provision. Warnock subsequently criticised the Government on the basis that the system had become too bureaucratically complex and because it denied help to low-income children (Warnock, 2005). She argued that an ‘ideology of inclusion’ had grown up (Warnock and Norwich, 2010: 13), which had the effect of denying children appropriate differentiation and provision. Warnock criticised the Government again after a 2010 OFSTED Report, arguing that disabled children had been ‘betrayed’ by changes to education policy (Warnock, 2010). Inherent within this was a tension between treating children the same or different, which she felt led to inconsistent provision, as a consequence of difficulty in categorising need. She was also concerned that the Report resulted in an overreliance on children attending mainstream provision with the possible side-lining of their emotional needs, for example, in the case of autistic children (Warnock and Norwich, 2010). She blamed these issues on what she described as ‘seeds of confusion’ planted in the original Report and made the case for a wholescale review, as well as improved funding (Warnock, 2005; 2010). At the core of these complaints lay something larger than a criticism of Government policy and its implementation. The complaints related to a fundamental concern regarding what it meant to be a full human being, and how this should be respected and accommodated by others. In this way, it addressed existential concerns from a philosophical point of view. In this chapter, we focus on the ways in which this seminal Report both reflected and built upon Warnock’s unique philosophical framework, in which a whole systems approach was central, typical of her work on education generally (Warnock, 1988; Warnock and Norwich, 2010). In this way, we examine the intersection of her praxis as a public servant and praxis as an educator. We then explain its far-reaching impact not only on the education of children with Special Educational Needs, but also more widely on education generally, through an apparently paradoxical framing of what it means to have an accessible curriculum within an inclusive schooling system. This in turn contributed to the development of the 1988 Education Reform Act, in which children were expected to be educated in age cohorts regardless of where they might be schooled and to be presented with a broad range of subject options. Inherent within this Act were further philosophical tensions relating to education, with respect to balancing the need for a child to be educated by right on the one hand,

Mary Warnock and Special Educational Needs 163 with a conceptualisation of education as primarily serving the economy on the other.

Biographical notes Mary Warnock (née Wilson) was born in Winchester, the youngest of seven children and born seven months after her father had died of diphtheria. She did not know her elder brother, Malcolm (1907–1969), who had autism and was cared for in an institution. She studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, and subsequently volunteered as a teacher at Sherborne School for Girls during the Second World War. She taught philosophy from 1949 to 1966 at St Hughes College, Oxford, and was launched into public life as a philosophy commentator on Radio 3, after writing two books on existentialism in the 1960s (The Philosophy of Sartre in 1965 and Existential Ethics in 1967). She subsequently became Head of Oxford High School for Girls from 1966 to 1972. Warnock later became Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, and was made a cross-bench life peer in 1985 as Baroness Warnock of Weeke. She was the wife of philosopher, Geoffrey Warnock, whom she had married in 1948, and with whom she had two sons and three daughters. Their family home was in Oxford, which in the 1950s and 1960s was something of a world centre of philosophy; indeed, the couple were friends of Philip Strawson and Isiah Berlin. She chaired two key public inquiries, the second of which was into the ethics of human fertilisation and embryo use. The subsequent Report, A Question of Life: The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology (1984), was arguably even more significant than the inquiry she led into Special Educational Needs, but both had a durable impact on society at a time when new frameworks for ethical practice were badly needed. In addition to chairing these public inquiries, and popularising French existentialism and the work of Sartre, her other philosophical works included publications such as Imagination (1976) and Memory (1980), Imagination and Time (1994), Easeful Death (2008) and Critical Reflections on Ownership (2015). She died in 2019, having ‘liberated’ herself from a nursing home after a week of residence.

Framings2 Warnock was a moral philosopher but could also be described as a ‘metaphysical ethicist’ in the sense that her position is derived from two branches of philosophy. On the one hand, her framings of problems are invariably derived from first principles, or what could be described as fundamental categories of reality. On the other hand, her focus was also on the idea of rightness of action or best value to solve a particular problem, giving us the ethical aspect. She was also a pragmatist (in a non-philosophical sense) and this allowed her to apply both aspects to particular social problems, and most specifically as Chair

164  Feminist Praxes of the two public inquiries as described above. She uses this framework to define her views on curriculum. On the surface, this appears a reasonable approach to take. This is because it can be argued that every field of investigation and inquiry has its own enframings (see back to Chapter 1), and as Walsh (1936) usefully reminds us, making explicit these framings allows for ‘arbitration of ethical diversity’. In the case of Warnock’s Special Educational Needs inquiry, such arbitration was certainly of significant concern, if not central to the enterprise, given the sensitivity of the problem. In addition, without proper attention being paid to those epistemological, social and categorical framings, either implicitly or explicitly, it is hard to see how an ethical framework could ever be usefully generated. This is because we need to identify and bring to the surface any preconceptions or assumptions we have if we are to achieve the maximum possible good, as well as meeting our obligation to provide it. In understanding our rationale for thinking in a certain way, it is also possible to achieve insights into how we perceive the nature and function of human beings and humanity. The other advantage to adopting this approach to ethics is that we can engage with ideas; phenomena do not have to be tangible in order to exist or be given form (Moore, 1903). Additionally, although we might deploy some common-sense observations about the world in order to avoid absurd extremes, we do not assume that there is a superior ‘natural’ or default position somewhere else. Instead, we build our own framework based on our understanding of the current reality. Warnock subsequently described this approach and its outcomes in relation to ethics as ‘the moral idea of society’ and saw it as a form of societal progressivism (McKie, 2019). This section of the chapter will consider different elements of her work in turn, therefore, and relate them systematically to the 1978 Warnock Report. These elements are: substance, properties, change, cause, possibilities, time, personal identity and nothingness/absence. Each is used as an intellectual framework to understand particular and specific ideas in the Report. What soon becomes apparent is that while this can be seen as a useful analytical device for highlighting the assumptions and intentions of the original Committee, led by Warnock, it also reveals areas of tension and conflict that ultimately led to the policy structure all but failing in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This then led to Warnock’s own interventions and admissions of fault.

Substance Substance here can be taken to mean something existing in its own right. The most obvious example in the Report is the reification of the concept of Special Educational Needs as it struggles to reject a medical model of disability, focused on clinical diagnosis and categorisation, replacing it with

Mary Warnock and Special Educational Needs 165 what has come to be called a social model of disability. This terminology and way of framing disability conceptually were developed in the 1970s by activists in the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and given academic validity by Oliver (1990; 1996), Finkelstein (1980; 1981) and others. The new framing manifests itself early in the Report, where the Committee rejects quasi-scientific classification terminology of the past, for example, words such as ‘retarded’ and ‘ineducable’. Warnock was concerned (not unreasonably) that labelling children in particular ways led to a deficit model of the child in which shortcomings took precedence over possibilities (Warnock and Norwich, 2010: 65). The aim of the Committee was to emphasise the pedagogical interaction between children and their educational settings or teachers as a cause of any difficulties or struggles. In this way, Special Educational Needs are effectively institutionalised, with a claim that typically between twelve and twenty per cent of children are likely to experience this at some point in their school careers (Paras 2.48, 3.13, 3.15). Within such a definition, all Special Educational Needs become qualitatively the same, despite the fact that different categories might be applied to different children in clinical practice (hearing impaired, visually impaired, mobility impaired, autistic, developmentally delayed and so on). The term ‘Special Educational Needs’ effectively represents the ‘substance’ of disability here, allowing it helpfully to vary over time, reduce with age and maturity, and so on. It also allows it to have indeterminant components that have not been precisely categorised or defined. Learners’ needs are benchmarked against a ‘norm’, without us ever really knowing what makes someone normal. What happens instead is that the ground is constantly shifting. Special Educational Needs become a reflection of the learning environment, having a dynamic form. A disability in one context may not present as such in another. Framing it this way conveniently allows for a philosophical argument regarding inclusion. If Special Educational Needs are reasonably common among the wider population, the argument goes, then difficulties in learning can be seen as something to be accommodated within mainstream schools, rather than being exclusively the domain of special schools. Warnock describes this as participating in a ‘common enterprise of learning’ (Warnock, 2005: 32). As we know, however, this became one of the most significant areas of contention later on, as parents of profoundly disabled children struggled to find school environments where their children’s needs could be properly accommodated. If we look closely at what has been omitted as substance from this way of understanding the problem, we see obvious categories such as dyslexia left out. Dyslexia was felt by the Government at the time of commissioning to be a middle-class problem that did not require children to have special attention in school (Kirby, 2019). The proposed model of provision also does not cope very well with issues of comorbidity, where children have more than one difficulty

166  Feminist Praxes at once, and it certainly does not accommodate issues to do with English as a second language or social deprivation and poverty as interacting with schooling (Allan, 2014). This political, rather than philosophical, decoupling of some aspects of learning difficulty from others meant that the project could not realistically succeed in any durable form. This is because it was patently unrealistic to expect schools to cope with the degree of complexity of need that was required, particularly given the limited resources available to them and the overall vagueness of definition. Therefore, we see the privileged selection of some particulars over others, largely as a result of political expediency, resulting in a model that does not hold up in a particularly robust way in philosophical terms. The next section discusses how this problem can also be attributed to the concept of ‘properties’.

Properties The Report is based on the idea of children with Special Educational Needs having certain properties that lead them to experience difficulties in classrooms, something metaphysicians might see as a ‘bundle’ of properties. From this perspective, children with Special Educational Needs resemble each other as non-standard learners (in the way, disability and learning difficulties are framed in the Report), despite potentially being very different from one another in reality, rather like patients in a hospital might vary significantly from one another while all still being regarded as ‘patients’ or ‘ill’. A logical consequence of this bundling is the policy of not only placing disabled children in mainstream schools but also putting them into chronological age cohorts regardless of their situation, as they have effectively become interchangeable. However, the very act of doing this risks immediately exposing points of difference that might not otherwise matter in the longer term. Let us give an example of how this might play out in practice. There is a sizeable literature on the difficulties of summer-born children, and most particularly boys, in reaching a standard of education expected by the UK Government at age seven, because they will effectively have been in school almost a year less than those born early in the autumn, with biological sex also playing a role in differential development here (Sykes et al., 2009/2016). Yet the older they grow, the less significant this chronological difference matters. The problem of gender in primary school learning was recognised in relation to smaller numbers of boys than girls passing the 11+ examination for entrance to grammar school from the 1940s to 1970s (Abbott, 2006), and gender, birth month and development phase in relation to testing at age seven, via the imposition of Key Stage 1 Standard Attainment Tests by the Government from the early 1990s (Sammons, West and Hind, 1997). During this testing, points of difference were exposed that would not normally be significant and which were likely to be resolved later on in many cases. In terms of the Report, it could be argued that these summer-born boys represent an

Mary Warnock and Special Educational Needs 167 example of some of the twelve to twenty per cent of children experiencing difficulties during their schooling career, and that reinforces the case for having a broad and largely undefined definition that moves away from a medical classification model. The inadvertent effect of rigid age cohorts, however, is that the early signs of more serious learning difficulties can become trivialised, and in turn, what are really only typical examples of developmental trajectories can be pathologised within school, labelling children as non-standard learners early on, when the real problem may be the politicisation of educational standards. Somewhere in the middle of this are children and teachers trying to navigate their way through the system. In the Report, such confusion forms part of a struggle to identify what should be central to any understanding of Special Educational Needs. There are two competing ideas here. In the first, the concept of a child acts as the fundamental basis for understanding, with all children being equivalent and their situations being largely interchangeable over time. Here we see the concept of the child as fixed, acting as a type of philosophical ‘substratum’ (Leibniz, 1998; Maturana, 1998). In the second idea, it is Special Educational Needs, or even disability, that is effectively fixed, and used as the ‘substratum’, or fundamental basis for understanding, with a child’s identity of different types overlaid onto it. In this idea, Special Educational Needs take a specific form, here acting as a mechanism for a form of social classification and reproduction (Lukacs, 1968). This mechanism exists as a categorisation concept independently of the needs of particular children. The Report tries to deploy both positions at once, and in doing so, it becomes vague. Such vagueness was combined with abandoning medical terminology, which meant that it demonstrated a reluctance to discriminate between the impact of permanent and/or profound versus transient and/or trivial learning problems. As it says in the Report, We have found ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand we are aware that any kind of special resource or service for such children runs the risk of emphasising the idea of their separateness, an idea which we are anxious to dispel, and of limiting the notion of special education to the provision made for such children. On the other hand, unless an obligation is clearly placed on local education authorities to provide for the special needs of such children, there is a danger that their requirement for specialist resources will be inadequately met. (Para 3.30) Consequently, the Report is more concerned with promoting a kind of collectivism of difficulty, rather than individual learner rights. It never quite resolves what it wants to see as ‘properties’ of the object, which means that the Committee left it to others to interpret what was really meant (Lindsay, Wedell and Dockrell, 2020). This was supposed to be achieved through the

168  Feminist Praxes system of statements of Special Educational Needs, where an idealised balance between need and provision was sought, as well as between the child and the need. As the Report continues, Our proposed system of recording children as in need of special educational provision will differ from the present system of categorisation in several important ways. First, it will lay an obligation on a local education authority to make special educational provision for any child judged to be in need of such provision on the basis of a profile of his needs prepared by a multi-professional team, whatever his particular disability. Secondly, it will not impose a single label of handicap on any child. Thirdly, it will embody a positive statement of the type of special provision required. (Para 3.23) As a result, statements of Special Educational Needs became a kind of proxy arena for this particular struggle over properties, to play out more or less endlessly. The next section examines how this struggle can be located within a social theory of change.

Change Change in social theory can relate to the intrinsic properties of something, or how something changes in relation to the impact of external objects, as well as how objects might change around it. Various types of changes are represented in the Warnock Report, at a child level, at a system level and at a societal level. Each of these forms of change interacts with the others and tells us something about the purpose and function of the Report. Defining the key types of change within it is important, therefore. Is change here a number of small-scale processes building up to a larger one? Were disabled children positioned differently after the Report, effectively becoming a different kind of being or person? To decide this, it is helpful to focus on two types of changes in particular, as these predominate. The first is the idea that change can be spatial, as children grow. The second is that change can be temporal, with children becoming older. Both combine to form what we think of as maturity. To some extent, the concept of maturity is represented in the Report, with the idea that twelve to twenty per cent of children will experience learning difficulties, and that these may be transient in their nature as children mature as learners (Para 3.13). The Report also discusses growth in relation to parental involvement (Para 5.3). Where the Report becomes rather stuck, however, is that each stage of development is more or less self-contained. In its understanding of development, childhood is seen as a time when problems are first identified, and adolescence as a time when children may develop new medical, psychiatric or behavioural problems. Little attention is paid to adult trajectories

Mary Warnock and Special Educational Needs 169 within the proposed model. This is despite a post-16 section (Chapter 10), where there is a great deal of discussion around the practical aspects of physically mapping provision, and where and how young people might be placed, including how potential teachers and employers might be persuaded to tolerate them (Para. 10.83). There is no real sense of curriculum trajectory, however, or how young people might respond and change in relation to it. This is because the processes proposed do not include clear lines of accountability beyond the school leaving age at the time, which in this case was sixteen. Therefore, the small-scale interventions proposed do not represent a larger process of societal change, with disabled children more likely to be included in learning later in life as a consequence, despite this being a stated desire of the Committee. Of course, this may have taken place as a result of the actions of individual teachers or other professionals, but it does not feature prominently within the Report. Therefore, what has been set up here is a circular process of self-referencing performative tasks, with little external oversight or context in the medium to long term.

Causation The issue of causation is central to understanding a culture of circularity, or introspection, as described above. Some allowance must be made for the fact that it can be difficult to identify the exact reasons as to why certain things happen in education, as there are so many factors that could or should be considered. However, in the case of the Report, it might have made sense for the Committee to set up what John Stuart Mill described as a ‘method of difference’ (Mill, 2002). This would have allowed them to test the causation of certain situations via trialling or modelling different approaches, either theoretically or empirically. The most obvious way of doing this in practical terms would have been to pilot the idea of statements of Special Educational Needs in a number of specific regions or situations, before rolling them out nationally. Warnock’s later criticisms of her own Report suggest a serious lacuna here (Warnock, 2005; 2010; Warnock and Norwich, 2010). The system was not properly piloted and refined, which meant that this had to take place later through the legal system as parents challenged local authority interpretations and decisions. In turn, this meant children’s needs were not always properly met, with practices varying from Local Authority to Local Authority (Dorling, 2019; Rustemier and Vaughan, 2005).

Time Another feature of the framing that is being used here is the relationship of time to policy. Time in the Report is seen in the context of children working towards a notional future, or horizon, that arrives at the point the child leaves the education system. In that sense, therefore, the Report is temporally

170  Feminist Praxes framed. Children are also measured against others temporally, in terms of age cohorts, as we saw in the ‘properties’ section above. Despite many attempts to abandon the concept of retardation, or children being ‘behind time’, the term is used nine times in the Report, and the term ‘remedial’ (also rather backward-looking in its framing) forty-one times, for example. In this sense, time provides another example of something that is reified within the Report, contributing to the social reproduction of certain perceptions. This means that some education pathways are automatically seen as non-standard and less desirable. This can also be seen as children having what Basil Bernstein might have understood as ‘retrospective identities’ within the policy framework being deployed as part of the Report’s terms of reference (Bernstein, 2000). To do this, time takes two forms. First, time exists in its own right (this resembles Platonic (Plato, 1997)) time with what we might see as standardised education provision running alongside it. Events then happen within time (this resembles Aristotelian time), for example, a placement in a particular education setting, or some sort of provision occurring. This creates a temporal clash in the Report and its stated desire to provide a durable model for the future, because it assumes that constant time means the same as the events within it, assuring us that effective educational inclusion embraces both. An example of this is the way the Report acknowledges history, giving a fairly detailed account of the past (in Chapter 2 of the Report). Throughout later sections of the Report, it also talks about needs in the future in terms of growth or provision. However, this is presented as a kind of progressive, idealised future that remains elusive, and somewhat vague. Time as a gradually progressive concept is one rhetorical technique the Report uses to avoid challenging the social constructions of why some key problems occurred in the first place, for example, because of poverty and deprivation, or geography. The Report identifies the reasons behind this omission as: … we have not felt it part of our business to go deeply into the factors which may lead to educational handicap. We are fully aware that many children with educational difficulties may suffer from familial or wider social deficiencies. While for most children their family life enhances their development, others show educational difficulties because they do not obtain from their families or their social circumstances the quality of stimulation or the sense of stability which is necessary for proper educational progress. But regardless of the cause of such children’s problems, familial or social, unless part of their educational provision is designed to compensate for the deprivation they have suffered, they will be unable to benefit from education in the ordinary sense. One cannot always keep these different strands apart. (Para 1.2)

Mary Warnock and Special Educational Needs 171 Shortly afterwards, there is a different justification for children taking different amounts of time to do the same things: … for some the road they have to travel towards the goals is smooth and easy, for others it is fraught with obstacles. For some the obstacles are so daunting that, even with the greatest possible help, they will not get very far. Nevertheless, for them too, progress will be possible, and their educational needs will be fulfilled, as they gradually overcome one obstacle after another on the way. (Para 1.4) Consequently, the Report is somewhat confused in its framing of time, because of its terms of reference. This means it is impossible to hold it to account for very much. Time becomes another aspect of the vagueness that permeates definitions.

Personal identity Definitions of the individual are undoubtedly very important to an endeavour such as educational inclusion. Within the Report, disabled children are identified as children in a holistic sense, by removing the use of terms such as ‘ineducable’, taking them a step further away from being seen as non-people or on the periphery of society, certainly in educational terms. As the Report argues, … education, as we conceive it, is a good, and a specifically human good, to which all human beings are entitled. There exists, therefore, a clear obligation to educate the most severely disabled for no other reason than that they are human. No civilised society can be content just to look after these children; it must all the time seek ways of helping them, however slowly, towards the educational goals we have identified. (Para 1.7) This is a helpful framing for the purposes of inclusion, seemingly derived from John Locke (1693) and the concept of education as a virtue. However, in some of the descriptions of their issues at school, their embodiment as learners remains. For example, throughout the Report we see the term ‘disability of mind or body’ repeated frequently in different forms. This is more troublesome, not least because the whole mind/body debate is understandably beyond the scope of education policy to resolve. This is because it is difficult to pin down precisely how the two interact, and what therefore needs to be done about adapting learning in order to accommodate both. The Report has gone some way to solving the problem of the personal identity of learners, but it has not resolved it completely.

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Possibilities Here, we see the Report trying to represent the idea of future possibilities and hope, in the sense that a future-orientated perspective is essential to any educational process. This is similar to the idea of Armstrong’s combinatorial theory of possibility (1989), allowing for an almost infinite range of opportunities and possibilities. The Report does this by combining non-actual possibilities (for example, notional forms of provision that might never exist, or which could only exist within a very limited set of circumstances) with a range of possible worlds (for example, educational landscapes in which children’s needs are routinely accommodated in particular ways), to form a largely fictionalised future. ‘Possibilities’ here include matters such as new forms of interdisciplinary teacher training (Para 16.21), enhanced educational opportunities for children (Para 4.51), achieving independence for children (Para 1.6), the possibility of dual registration in two educational settings at the same time (Para 5.41), the possibility of extending the school day (Para 8.36), the possibility of providing routine employment for the severely mentally handicapped in the food processing industry (Para 10.76) and pupils transferring to ordinary schools (Para 11.12). The Committee frequently asserts its hope that such things will be provided. However, there is no mechanism for ensuring access to these matters or ensuring any form of entitlement across the whole of the United Kingdom. Once again, we see philosophy interacting unhelpfully with policy, and being diminished as a consequence. Possibilities remain just that, rather than being converted into tangible actions. The next section explains how this links to the concept of nothingness or absence.

Nothingness In the Report, the very absence of something provides the reason for something else to be created, so in this sense, it represents what we might call a negative property. This might be the absence of progress or the absence of involvement. It might also mean the absence of some kind of provision in a particular area on historic or practical grounds. In this way, absence becomes a negative truth. For example, the Report states, in relation to what it calls ‘educationally sub-normal children’, … in the absence of well-tried methods there would be need for experimentation to discover the most effective ways of helping them. (Para 2.48) It also discusses the idea of the ‘absence of segregation’ in relation to disabled children (Para 7.1), and the ‘absence of a national plan for the visually

Mary Warnock and Special Educational Needs 173 handicapped’ (Para 11.29) in a similar sense. In each case, the Report does not propose an effective empirical structure for remediating any absence or monitoring the development of provision moving forward. Once again, it is vague. And once again, the task of scrutinising provision and perceiving what is absent in a detailed sense is ultimately left to parents, fighting for their children’s educational entitlements via the political and legal systems.

Ethics There were clearly some advantages to the Committee using an ethical theory to provide an intellectual framework for the Report, even if the rationale and structure weren’t made explicit at the time. Doing so allowed for a series of generalisations to be made, consisting of apparently self-evident truths. This gave the problem of educating disabled children societal context and function, as well as a sense of purpose and momentum. Their lives were deemed to have universal meaning, and consequently they were seen as having the universal right to be educated. This was seen as being the mark of a decent and civilised society. In turn, considering the role of this ethical theory again helps us to structure our own thinking about the work, and to find out the different motives behind various aspects of it. We can gain insight into the general and abstract situation of children and young people in a particular set of circumstances, in this case children experiencing difficulties at school in the 1970s in the United Kingdom. It also tells us something about how Warnock as a philosopher brought her educational theories to bear on the problem of what and how these children and young people should learn. It tells a story of a struggle between lofty deontological aims – those of rights, justice and duty, for example – and the social imperatives of utilitarianism, ensuring the greatest happiness of the greatest number, mediated by resourcing and political priorities. It is important to understand this struggle philosophically, as the approach taken in this Report was to become something of a modus operandi for Warnock. Indeed, Wilson (2011) argues that Warnock’s later work on the ethics of embryology was built on its foundations. There are certainly similarities. For example, the 1978 Special Educational Needs Report imposed regulatory structures via statements, notionally as a form of accountability within an audit culture. It also led to a proliferation of outside consultants and agencies providing services, often as a form of shadow or mirror economy, related or complementary to mainstream state provision, but not under its ultimate control. This was very much seen as a typical solution to a social problem at the time, with a marketised framework for many aspects of provision being seen as politically expedient. Finally, it was left to embattled parents to monitor an increasingly complex and fragmented system, often via the courts or via their members of parliament and local councillors.

174  Feminist Praxes This seems rather distant from Warnock’s general ideas about the aims of education. These aims appear in the Report, and she also cited them in interviews later on. Warnock saw the aims of education as being the development of the imagination (in the sense provided by Jean-Paul Sartre (2004) whose work she had popularised), preparation for a career, and the inculcation of a proper sense of morality. In addition, she argued that the content of the curriculum was more important than issues surrounding the opportunity to study it, and she saw equality as more of a political issue (Pyle, 1999). In terms of putting philosophy to work, her position was … you can’t do philosophy at all unless you concern yourself with the relation between the language you are using and the things you are talking about. (Pyle, 1999: 10) The language issue was dealt with in the Warnock Report in a relatively straightforward manner, mainly by trying to change the lexicon from a stigmatising language to a more neutral language (although as we suggested above, more stigmatising terms still crept into the Report). She also saw inclusivity as democratising the experience of having difficulties with learning at school at certain times. Everything else was left relatively vague and expected to be the concern of the delivery process. This approach was never going to be enough. One way of viewing the Report’s philosophical shortcomings is that Special Educational Needs provision was never really a problem of resourcing, because alternative funding sources (charitable and parental) frequently stepped in when Government spending fell short, often without benefiting from the economies of scale achievable by Governments. It was instead a problem of definition in the face of a particular kind of political intervention and framing that went well beyond changing words that had become offensive to modern sensibilities. The philosophical approach in the Report can be characterised by what Teidman (1999: 39) calls ‘a relatively light-hearted pragmatism’, as a means of skirting the most obvious political debates when seeking to define the problem, and presumably reducing the risk of it being rejected by the Government that commissioned it. As we have discussed throughout this chapter, the Report was to lead to a chaotic system of perverse incentives, misunderstandings and patchy provisions (Barton, 2005; Daniels, Thompson and Tawell, 2019). Warnock later recanted on the way inclusion had been framed in the Report, arguing rather paternalistically that ‘her’ Special Educational Needs children had been ‘cynically betrayed’ (Warnock, 2010). This externalises the problem beyond the Enquiry and its Report. Another way of considering the issue is that the ‘light-hearted philosophical pragmatism’ Warnock engaged in set the scene for

Mary Warnock and Special Educational Needs 175 no particular organisation or body to be ultimately responsible for outcomes. This lack of leadership and accountability restricted opportunities for pupils and meant that the continuum of provision sought by the Committee was simply not available to many of them in the way that it should have been. We should not be surprised. As a curriculum theorist, Warnock’s clearly stated position was that the content of the curriculum is more important that any means of access. This purist position, combined with a surfeit of political compromises, led to many of the Sisyphean struggles that parents, children and teachers continue to experience in relation to navigating Special Educational Needs today.

Policy texts Policy texts, such as the Warnock Report, condition the types of readings that can be made of them. Policy texts are constructed in different ways and therefore can be understood in terms of several continua: as being prescriptive or non-prescriptive, as having a wide or narrow focus, as being open or concealed, as authoritarian or non-authoritarian, as generic or directed, as denotative or performative, as single-authored or pluri-authored, as monomodal or multimodal, as referenced to antecedent, contemporaneous or applied networks of meaning; and as coherent or fragmented. Since the form that the policy text takes conditions the type of reading that can be made, then it is possible to point to a notion of reading impediments. These constraints or impediments can be understood as referring to the contents of the policy text (the claim made about what has happened and what this implies for what will happen), about relations within the policy text (the way social relations are inscribed in it and the way the reader is encouraged to understand these as normal), and the positioning of the various players in the policy game and how much power they have. Policy texts work as mechanisms of hierarchical normalisation and thus have the potential to become the hegemonic way of arranging objects in society. Policy texts, such as the Warnock Report, although understood by many people as neutral and non-ideological, operate in effect as discourses of normality, so that for readers to understand themselves in any other way is to understand themselves as abnormal and even as unnatural. The reader is not just presented with an argument and then asked to make up their minds about its merits or demerits, they are being positioned within a discourse – a way of understanding what is happening in the world, feminist or otherwise – which, if it is successful, restricts and constrains the reader from understanding the world, its totality, in any other way. The discursive configuration is characterised as common sense, whereas in fact it is merely one way of viewing the world and is therefore ideological. In Chapter 14, we examine the possibility of reading texts about the world in transgressive ways, as an emancipatory strategy for women. Before we do that, we explore a different type of praxis in the work of Lucy Diggs Slowe.

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Notes 1 It should be noted that the word ‘handicapped’ was used at the time to signify children with disabilities. As Lindsay, Wedell and Dockrell (2020) point out, this meant that, unusually, the very pretext of the enquiry was to render its own conceptualisation redundant. 2 cf. Chapter 2 for an account of the different framings that our accounts are embedded in: atomic, associational, functional, causal, actual, linguistic, hermeneutic, structural, semantic and universal.

13 Lucy Diggs Slowe and Human Potential

As an influential advocate for change, the university administrator, Lucy Diggs Slowe (1885–1937), made an extraordinary contribution to North American higher education at a time when it was reforming itself in the aftermath of the Civil War. Central to her efforts was a deeply held philosophy of curriculum that drew upon the American Pragmatist philosophy of Dewey and others, which in turn directly addressed issues to do with intersectional discrimination1 in terms of race/ethnicity and gender as well as how they related to democracy. In this way, her conceptualisation of the value of knowledge and its relationship with the development of social identity transcended notions of progressivism common at the time, as well as reflecting the general expansion of suffrage taking place in the early twentieth century. This chapter briefly describes Slowe’s biographical background, before examining the main aspects of the educational philosophy that she developed to underpin her work, demonstrating how she operationalised them, and finally linking them to more recent developments in sociology and black feminist theory. In the first place, given that a significant aspect of her work addressed the role and function of black women within society, it is necessary to define exactly what we mean by race, as well as our own positioning within this construct. Race is a difficult term to use in writing of this kind, not least because it is frequently confused or used interchangeably with the term ethnicity, something that is problematic on many levels. We developed a genealogy of racial classification and terminology earlier in the book in relation to the work of Marie Battiste (see Chapter 8), but we acknowledge the difficulties of attempting to come to a subject such as this as authors. We also acknowledge the inherent imperfections of any approach as this debate continues to unfold socially, culturally and discursively. In the light of such difficulties, the chapter therefore chooses as its point of reference the social construction of race prevalent among Slowe and her professional contemporaries at the time. We use the term as she did. This was a period of American history where racial segregation and discrimination took on different guises within modern society (for example not allowing black student organisations to belong to the same parent bodies as those for white students). It resulted in racial striations throughout American society, which DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-15

178  Feminist Praxes effectively functioned as a form of the caste system. It was also exaggerated by gender, in the case of women, and further embedded in institutions that continued to reproduce disadvantage, codified through the very idea of a ‘black university’. Here, we acknowledge these discriminatory patterns of human behaviour and experience. We conceptualise race as a politically charged construct commonly used at this time, with ethnicity being a twenty-first-century classification that indicates a common national or cultural grouping, something that did not always usefully apply as the US higher education sector grew and became more diverse in the twentieth century. For example, the almost Promethean struggle of Slowe against the destructive policies of the first black President of Howard University, Mordechai Johnson (which we address later in the chapter in more detail), is not usefully served by formulating both players as being part of the same national or cultural group. It was not an internecine battle. This is more a story of gendered power and resistance, and its place within a racialised democracy, rather than a story of ethnicity. It took place in an institution that was originally founded in the 1860s for the training of former slaves as African-American preachers (although it soon took another form as a Liberal Arts college, and from its inception accepted both men and women, as well as those from different races and backgrounds). We do not take fully the position on race that, say, a critical race theorist might take, in terms of resisting (but not necessarily eliminating) the very existence of race as a valid construct within societies. We cannot do that here because we are drawing on the writings and reflections of Lucy Diggs Slowe, who did not classify or conceptualise race in that way, because for her it was evident and was a meaningful classification. Similarly, we use a contemporary lexicon, but we acknowledge terms such as ‘Negro’ and ‘coloured/colored’ where appropriate, as they were used by her contemporaries, something that is also clearly reflected in the literature. Similarly, we use ‘black’ as a shorthand for African-American in the context of US education during the period 1860–1937, because that is what Slowe would have assumed. Having defined what we mean by race, and other aspects of our terminology, we now explain how we address her educational philosophy. Drawing on the work of Beaubeouf-Lafontant (2009) and others, we see this as having three aspects. The first aspect was that black people should not be educated in a manner that suggests a deficit, requiring remediation. Second, education is essentially about human flourishing, and great pains should be taken to ensure a rounded intellectual and social experience to allow individuals to flourish. Third, leadership training and high levels of community engagement are absolutely essential to the education of black people, if they are to promote engagement on equal terms with others in society, contributing to the greater good. This found form in the programmes and frameworks that Slowe developed as a mechanism for ensuring the optimal education of women students, linked to the establishment of self-governance and ambitious programmes of self-development. In this way, she actively rejected the notion of racial inferiority. It was also part of a wider movement in many countries that had started in the late nineteenth century, with the aim

Lucy Diggs Slowe and Human Potential 179 of providing secondary and higher education for women and allowing them to fulfil their educational and human potential in new ways, beyond simply the domestic domain. We now provide a brief account of Slowe’s early background that serves to illuminate her path to holding this set of beliefs.

Biographical notes Lucy Diggs Slowe (1885–1937) was born as one of seven children in Berryville, Virginia, twenty years after the end of slavery. She was orphaned at the age of five and raised by her aunt in Lexington, Virginia. In 1904, she graduated from Baltimore Colored High and Training School, part of a segregated public school system, and won a scholarship to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., the top black college in the country. This was an unusual achievement by any standards, considering that at the time less than one per cent of young black people and only five per cent of young white people in the United States were eligible to attend university. During her time at Howard University, Slowe was president of the women’s tennis team and, in 1917, she was the first black woman to win a major sporting title, at the American Tennis Association’s first tournament. (It had been set up because the United States Tennis Association prohibited black players from taking part in tournaments.) Slowe was also a founding member of the first Greek alphabet organisation, or sorority, for black women, Alpha Kappa Alpha (a Greek alphabet organisation is a form of student society) and served as president of its local chapter. Slowe graduated as a class teacher in 1908 and began her career teaching English at Douglass High School in Baltimore, Maryland. School teaching represented a typical career path for a college-educated black woman during the early part of the twentieth century, as professional trajectories were relatively limited. She also studied for a Master’s degree at Columbia University in New York during her summers, from where she graduated in 1915. She was subsequently asked to create the first Junior High School for blacks in the District of Columbia, the Shaw High School, and served as its principal, creating in post the district’s first in-service training programme for junior high school teachers. In 1922, she was appointed as the first Dean of Women at Howard University, creating the basis for a women’s campus. She established three new women’s residences and contributed in a highly influential manner to the professionalisation of the role of the Dean in US universities generally. Nidiffer (1999) sees this professionalisation in general terms as having four stages: establishing educational principles for institutions, engaging in collective activity, developing distinct areas of expertise and creating a professional literature and association. Each of these stages is reflected in Slowe’s work. She founded the National Association of College Women, the Association of Deans of Women and Girls in Negro Schools and the National Council of Negro Women, as organisations within which these stages could take place. However, despite

180  Feminist Praxes considerable and enduring success in university administration and the education of women, this period of her career was characterised by frequent battles with the university authorities, and most specifically, University President, Mordechai Johnson. Nevertheless, Slowe served as College Dean for fifteen years until her premature death in 1937, arguably from exhaustion. During her final twenty-five years, she lived with her life partner, the playwright and fellow educator, Mary P. Burrill, in what is now known as the Slowe-Burrill house in Washington. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in light of its historic connection with the two women.

The ‘New Howard woman’ It is possible to see from the sheer breadth of Slowe’s associations that her model of education had the potential to expand beyond the realms of Howard University and indeed beyond the situation of women and race, influencing society as a whole. This was a time of significant change. Slowe saw her role as pertaining to the development of black women who belonged to the first generation who had escaped slavery, and therefore were living a different life from their mothers and grandmothers. In the light of this, she saw negro college women as being needed for future leadership roles within public life (Anderson and Slowe, 1994). The early origins of Slowe’s educational philosophy were therefore derived from a fundamental concern that black women students were not benefiting from the post-Civil War expansion in higher education in the United States to the same degree as men and white women, with their experiences framed by the patriarchal power structures adopted by black men at the time, in the aftermath of their 1870 enfranchisement (Chatelain, 2005; Patterson, 2008; Perkins, 1983). The expectations of black college-educated women then, a new middle-class grouping2, were confined to particular occupational categories, usually related to the provinces of care, home and children, as these were thought to be suitable domains for women. Even in new occupational categories for women administrators, work was combined with ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983). By this we mean that women administrators at university were expected to be heavily involved in the personal lives of their women students, acting as moral guardians or custodians, with the emphasis largely on encouraging compliance with rules and social norms, through systems of surveillance. They were then required to discipline the women accordingly, regardless of their personal views on any particular behaviour, or its relationship with the university system. This was in contrast to allowing women to develop broader social, intellectual and cultural perspectives, which might be significantly more individualised, and based on alternative moral positions or codes. As such, the role of Deans of Women differed from those of Deans of Men in that while there was a pastoral role for both types, it was not combined with a domestic supervisory or surveillance function in the same way, and emotion management on behalf of the institution was not as prominent as an

Lucy Diggs Slowe and Human Potential 181 occupational requirement for men. In response to this, Slowe felt very strongly that the Dean of Women should therefore be perceived as an educator rather than as a student ‘watch dog’ (Slowe, 1930: 2) and receive an academic rank and salary within the university that was commensurate with this. The difficult relationship between Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mordecai Wyatt Johnson provides a vivid example of how this played out at the university. While Slowe’s initial years as Dean had passed relatively smoothly, the arrival of Johnson (a Baptist minister) as President in 1926 meant that changes were continually made that were unfavourable to women at the university. Johnson refused Slowe’s requests for a pay increase (when it was given, Slowe reported he raised her salary $200, but, at the same time, male deans were awarded between $850–1,150), cut budgets for the women’s programme, removed her from his conferences of the academic deans, refused to attend events organised by the Department of the Dean of Women, and tried to reduce her role to that of a resident matron living on campus (Bell-Scott, 1997; Carroll, Miller and Pruitt-Logan, 2012). The most egregious example of his discriminatory approach took place in 1927, when students made a serious complaint regarding sexual harassment in class carried out by Professor Clarence Mills, a male Mathematics teacher. On behalf of the women students concerned, Slowe raised the matter with the University authorities and brought it to the attention of the President. However, the outcome of the complaint was that her authority was attacked and her relationships with the male deans deteriorated. Clarence Mills was allowed to finish the academic year and then given a lengthy paid leave of absence, during which time he completed his doctorate, before finally leaving the university (Bell-Scott, 1997). In addition to the problems under Johnson’s presidency as outlined above, Slowe argued that accommodation, health services, sports and cultural activities were not always sufficiently well provided for black women. Slowe felt this to be necessary in order to achieve a degree of human flourishing that she felt to be essential. It was also difficult for students who needed to work their way through university to find suitable paid work, and careers education and guidance could be relatively limited for them. The general expectation seemed to be that they would become schoolteachers, or take on similar occupations, whereas Slowe felt considerably more was possible in terms of their achievements as human beings. Slowe challenged this conceptualisation of the black woman’s role and purpose by positioning them as part of a broader movement that built on the universal suffrage movement, grounded in the democratic promise of equal education for black students. She termed this, ‘The New Howard Woman’, which was reified as an ideal for educated black women, forging a new racial respectability. In her womanist review of Slowe, Beauboeuf-Lafontaine links this to an early twentieth-century discourse of the ‘New Negro’, a term first used by Alain Locke in 1925 to resist the phenomenon of what he described as ‘protective social mimicry’ that had characterised race relations at the time of what he called the ‘Old Negro’ (Locke, 1997). Beauboeuf-Lafontaine argued

182  Feminist Praxes that Locke’s gendered distinction here leaves black women in the position of being subject to male frameworks for advocacy and action, through a different form of social mimicry rooted in conservative values. Within this model, black women are required to reflect, rather than initiate, action (BeauboeufLafontaine, 2009). Slowe’s viewpoint on womanhood contested this position, finding its origins in the works of Dewey and others, and its emphasis on individual self-determination in the face of such conservatism (which, in Slowe’s experience, was frequently disguised racism and misogyny).

Slowe and American pragmatism Within Slowe’s conceptualisation of a curriculum for the ‘New Howard Woman’, it is helpful to return to the three aspects of her educational philosophy that are potential of interest to us here: 1 Black people should be educated on equal terms, rather than in a manner that suggests inherent deficiency. The recognition that race does not require remediation needs to be a characteristic of modern society. 2 The ultimate purpose of education is human flourishing and this requires an holistic approach that embraces academic and intellectual pursuits, as well as cultural and sporting ones. To Slowe this meant that music, art and literature should be seen as essential components of a rounded education (Turner, 1955). 3 Leadership training and substantial community engagement are integral to the effective education of black people. This serves two functions within modern society, namely self-governance and the greater good. The rationale behind these three aspects was that Slowe was highly critical of what she saw as an existing negative model of black women’s education within the home, which she characterised as encouraging passivity and inaction, via an a priori assumed model of feminine purity, and in doing so, suppressing natural tendencies of women towards activism and change (Hevel, 2016; Ihle, 1994). Slowe felt this to be overly conservative, resulting in women being seen as adjuncts to men rather than individuals in their own right (Slowe, 1937). Where she did encourage women students to engage in community activities, the pattern of activities centred on organisations, such as the Juvenile Protection Association, the Young Women’s Christian Association, Juvenile Courts and similar, reflecting once again the traditional women’s role, but refracted through the lens of community service (Anderson and Slowe, 1994). An important question to consider, if we are to understand what Slowe was trying to achieve through this refracted individualism, is how the relationship between the individual and the collective can be balanced. Here, Slowe’s work appears to be a manifestation of what John Dewey (1859–1952) described in a 1925 paper as American Pragmatism (Dewey, 1925). In this paper, Dewey

Lucy Diggs Slowe and Human Potential 183 identified two key philosophical influences in developing a framework for reconciling human reason with action, termed ‘pragmatism’. The influences were Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and William James (1842–1910). Dewey described pragmatism here as having been initiated (albeit imperfectly) by Peirce (1878), who developed a way of thinking about the meaning of human action as being grounded in the pragmatic aspects of Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals. In describing pragmatism in this way, Dewey argued, Peirce is concerned with the art of making concepts clear, and how things are relevant when they become universally applicable to the human condition. So, was Slowe’s idea of the ‘New Howard Woman’ universally applicable3 in this pragmatic sense? It depends to a large extent on the purpose of her related actions. Peirce argued that action can never be seen as an end in itself and that we need to consider two sides of it when thinking about pragmatism. We need to consider aspects of life that are incorporated within any particular system, and we also need to consider aspects of life against which the system itself represents a protest. If we apply this method to considering Slowe’s curriculum (using this as a proxy for her actions), we start to understand the relationship between individualism and collective action rather better, whether it can be seen as applying to the human condition generally, and what the purpose of the refraction might have been. Here, women were defined by Slowe as being part of a social movement whereby the concept of ‘negro’ was in flux, and their intellectual, social and cultural development represented part of this change. At the same time, the fact that they were women meant intersectional discrimination, in addition to that of race alone. In Slowe’s work, we see an alternative system being established that represented a challenge or protest to that discrimination. Hence, the actions Slowe put into place were not an end in themselves to use Peirce’s terminology, but had a larger purpose. In philosophical terms, they also fulfilled a further function. They can be seen as bridging the conceptual divide between Peirce, James and Dewey, who were concerned with the relationship between empiricism and thought, and that of black philosophers such as W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)4 and Alain Locke (1885–1954), who were exploring progressive formulations of the negro identity. In this way, the Slowe model seems universally applicable to the human condition, and in that sense passes Peirce’s test for pragmatism. In considering the philosophical underpinnings of the Slowe model fully, however, we must also address the issue of refracted female individualism within it. In his 1925 paper, Dewey described how William James (1907) developed this view of pragmatism in relation to what James called ‘habits of action’, with the role of experience being particularly significant here. (The consequences of experience, on the other hand, were seen as theoretical in his argument, as they could not definitively be known.) That is to say, pragmatism allows for a particular concern with certain patterns of behaviour. In particular, it shows us how the idea of monism (the one) can be reconciled with the idea of pluralism (the many). James understood monism as representing the idea of

184  Feminist Praxes fixed and immutable conditions and attributes. An example of this immutability might be the idea that graduate women were expected to occupy careers centred around the needs of children and the home, as this is where they were considered to be best suited (as described earlier in this chapter). In contrast to monism with its attendant immutability, James understood pluralism as allowing for liberty, novelty and contingence. This brings with it what he called the ‘right to believe’ in alternative futures, in which a general idea might be able to act as a mode for signifying particular things. An example of this might be the belief that women were able to occupy leadership positions within wider society, rather than just confine themselves to issues relating to children and the home. This ‘right to believe’ in different possibilities is very interesting to us if we are trying to understand how Slowe reconciled the personal and the collective because it stresses the importance of the individual within any reconciliation. Dewey called this engagement with the process of alternative futures, ‘active individualism’, and saw it taking place within a society of individuals who can be educated (and thereby able to participate in democracy). He characterised American society as a place of particular possibility for this type of individualism, describing it as ‘American Pragmatism’ (as in the title of his paper). Here, we see an almost perfect fit of place, time, process and outcome, in terms of the underlying philosophy of the Slowe higher education curriculum. As such, the identity formation of women within the ‘New Howard’ model becomes intrinsically social. The next section of the chapter discusses how this was achieved in practical terms.

The development of identity In seeking to pursue a philosophy related to American Pragmatism within the ‘New Howard Woman’ curriculum, Slowe modelled appropriate behaviours, through engagement with a large number of black organisations that she either belonged to (for example, the DuBois Society that met to discuss current affairs) or founded, most notably, organisations such as the Alpha Kappa Alpha black women’s sorority group, of which she was one of the original nine members. In this way, she allowed for the shifting of the social from intersectional disadvantage to the agency of the individual. As Slowe said, It appears … that if the college is going to do for the girl what the community and the girl herself has a right to expect, it must provide opportunities not only for her intellectual development, but for the development of her powers of initiative and self-direction. (Slowe, cited in Bell-Scott, 1997: 70) Alpha Kappa Alpha had been founded at Howard University on 15 January 1908 and is the oldest of what is known as ‘Greek Letter’ organisations in the United States, which are a form of membership society for students that

Lucy Diggs Slowe and Human Potential 185 provide for extra-curricular activities as well as community service5. Its stated purpose is to cultivate and encourage high scholastic and ethical standards, to promote unity and friendship among college women, to study and help alleviate problems concerning girls and women in order to improve their social stature, to maintain a progressive interest in college life, and to be of service to all mankind. For Slowe’s students, this latter activity would in turn introduce them to volunteering work, embedding students within their local communities. It would also prepare them to adopt leadership positions and prepare for office in other regards later in life. It was through activities, such as this, combined with self-governance activities within the university itself, that Slowe was able to promote the idea of grassroots level democratic engagement, as well as allow women to prepare themselves for future leadership roles. This framing of Slowe’s work is linked by Herdlein, Frezza Cali and Dina (2008) to local and national political engagement, as well as internationalism. As part of this endeavour, Slowe was responsible for the 1922 foundation of the annual Howard Women’s Dinner, a significant act of performative resistance from which men were excluded (unless they were waiting staff). As the organisers wrote in a letter to the men of the university: We are indeed sorry you must miss so much fun, but you may retaliate on us whenever you desire by having a men’s dinner. If you had thought of this first, you could have had the laugh on us, but your thoughts are evidently concerned with more weighty matter than eating … we are going to invite you to stand in the balcony of the dining hall to look down on us. From this, your point on vantage, you can force us women to do the usual thing; look up to you. (Cited in Carroll, Miller and Pruitt-Logan, 2012: 103) The dinner continued annually for fifteen years until Slowe’s early death in post in 1937. It provided a basis for interaction and networking between students and alumnae, allowing for the kind of organic community growth Slowe saw as so essential for consolidating the educational offer for women students at Howard. It is also a very good example of what we have discussed earlier in Chapter 8 in relation to Bhaskar’s (2011) notion of power. It can be framed here in feminist terms, with the Howard Women’s Dinner seen as a resource for redistributing goods of both a material and discursive kind, such as domination and empowerment. In this way, as in the foundation and evolution of extra-curricular organisations, such as Alpha Kappa Alpha, Slowe further developed Dewey’s idea of American Pragmatism through creating the conditions for experiential

186  Feminist Praxes learning that reached beyond the traditional classroom. In doing so, Slowe anticipated Dewey’s essay of 1928, ‘A Critique of American Civilisation’, which argued for promoting the talents of all its citizens, but within the framework of working towards individualism, rather than this being automatically bestowed. Slowe established a system in which relationships could be forged naturalistically based on individuals’ interests, rather than being subjected to a received patriarchal model from outside, that overly formalised their structure and interactions, subjugating women in the process. Different aspects of learning were integrated as a means of achieving this, from the purely intellectual to the practical. In this way, Slowe was able to improve the human experience through her support of the ideal ‘New Howard Woman’. She presented learning as being underpinned by natural processes, rooted in human relationships, just as Dewey did, with the role of the Dean facilitating its development. There was also a dynamic, rather than static, quality to her system. Women were required to adapt to university life during their time as students, readapting as alumnae later in life through the Howard Women’s Dinner and through their ongoing sorority activities. In doing so, identity itself became a progressive, iterative act, framed within a larger cultural context. In this way, we can see Slowe’s work as an educator as representing a form of democratic praxis.

Contemporary relevance In considering the legacy of Lucy Diggs Slowe, we have so far used conceptualisations of race from 1920’s America, as well as contemporaneous philosophies of pragmatism from Dewey and others. In this final part of the chapter, we consider her work in a more modern context, to see what it can bring to an understanding of education a century later. The last century has seen a significant massification of higher education in the United States (and indeed in many other countries). This is something Schofer and Meyer (2005) have described as representing a movement from a relatively closed, elitist system, aimed at training students for the professions, to a human capital model with the expression of unlimited potential at its core. The Slowe curriculum certainly aligns well with the latter, and this is what gives it an enduring quality. However, the question that needs to be asked is how well it fits within an increasingly commercialised model of higher education characteristic of America a hundred years later. If it was invented now, it is possible to imagine a situation in which the ‘New Howard Woman’ could be taken on by a university marketing department as a way of encouraging enrolments, which would never have been Slowe’s intention (if nothing else, it is unlikely that she would have considered pride in the University as something that should be financially commoditised). Instead, it is likely Slowe envisaged her curriculum as allowing students to develop a form of what Bourdieu called habitus, or a total personality type (Bourdieu, 1990). Within this habitus, students are able to reflect and engage

Lucy Diggs Slowe and Human Potential 187 with social learning in a way that promotes personal transformation. The way a New Howard Woman holds her body, the way she perceives and classifies the world, her appreciation of what is around her, and her actions all represent the transformation that has taken place. Where this goes beyond the notion of habitus, however, is that it goes beyond simply reproducing existing social structures, in a manner that Bourdieu might have expected. It reaches beyond the individual, and in doing so, actively contributes to a widening enfranchisement. Bearing this in mind, it is possible for us to map the Slowe curriculum for women against what the black feminist theorist, Patricia Hill Collins, describes as four key strands of black feminist thought (Collins, 1990). These are: 1 Black women’s self-definition. An example is how Slowe applied this in relation to the membership organisations she both joined and founded, as well as the clear gender demarcation lines that she drew in relation to the Howard Women’s Dinner. Extra-curricular enrichment opportunities were frequently the arena for much of this self-definition. 2 Different types of oppression, such as race, class, gender, age and so on (which Collins termed the ‘matrix of domination’). Here, Slowe challenged discriminatory practices on behalf of herself (as in the case of refusing to live on campus and act as a matron to women students) as well as for others (as in the case of taking a formal complaint to the College President regarding sexual harassment of women students by a member of staff). 3 Intellectual activism, which Slowe achieved through articles and lectures promoting women’s involvement in education and democracy at a key turning point in history, educating the first generation of women born after slavery. 4 Challenging the imagery of discrimination. Here, Slowe offered a holistic model of an educated woman where she would be active rather than passive, as a challenge to the conservative male hegemony of the time. In this way, Slowe’s philosophy of curriculum manages to highlight the consequences of what Battiste (2013) describes as ‘the trauma of colonisation’, in this case slavery, but through a uniquely intersectional perspective. It can be seen as a praxis of participatory democracy. Where it has particular relevance today is teaching us about the extraordinary power of persistence in seeking to achieve the social good.

A postscript During the writing of this chapter, Howard University honoured Lucy Diggs Slowe by naming a street after her at 2455 4th St NW, Washington DC. The designation ceremony was held on 22nd October 2021, led by Mayor Muriel

188  Feminist Praxes Bowser, a Howard Alumna herself as well as an Alpha Kappa Alpha member. Many of the University’s senior leaders spoke at the event. Phylicia Rashad, Dean of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, and another Alpha Kappa Alpha member asked the question: What was that impetus, what was that spirit inside that young woman? This faith and confidence and belief in herself? … What I am really excited about is discovering that same spirit within our young women on this campus today. And bringing them to that realisation within themselves of who they are in spirit. Confident. Aware. Capable. Strong. Intelligent. Prepared to inspire the next generation, the next generation, the next generation. Because this is what we do, this is how we are, and this is how we stay’6. In this way, it would seem that the ‘New Howard Woman’ lives on. In the last chapter of this book, we examine the various strategies and counter-conducts open to women, having already suggested that all the feminist perspectives that we have discussed in this book are oppositional to patriarchal states of affairs, although each of them conceptualises these forms of oppression in different ways. All of them have a learning dimension. These important discursive and material object-relations, which are relevant to issues of feminism and learning, are: dialectical relations, absenting thoughts, reframing categories, counter-conducting, immanent critiquing, emancipating, decolonising knowledge, reading the world as a text, praxis(ing), transframing, reflecting and textualising. They are also curriculum relations.

Notes 1 The term ‘intersectional’ did of course not exist in the time of Lucy Diggs Slowe. 2 This differed from poorer Black families where there was a long history of women’s paid work being primarily domestic in character rather than taking place outside the home, leading to a different way of conceptualising the public/private divide. As Collins argues, ‘because in the US and elsewhere Black women’s paid labour has historically often been domestic labour, poor Black families often do not equate the private with the home and the public with work’ (Collins, 1990). 3 The idea of a ‘universal’ here being Peirce’s rather than Dewey’s. 4 Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). 5 It currently has 300,000 student and alumni members across around 1,000 branches, known as chapters (including US Vice-President Kamala Harris as a member, with Michelle Obama as an honorary member). 6 The full ceremony can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIDj_ YhB31o.

14 Decolonising the Curriculum

We have suggested in the preceding chapters that the meta-concept of learning has to be the focus of any act of curricularising, and that if we are to understand what the concept and practice of learning might be then we have to look at a vast array of concepts and conceptual practices that are relevant to it1. Acts of deconstructing and reconstructing2 concepts and conceptual frames, such as imagination or imagining (see Chapter 2), gender or gendering (see Chapter 1), care or caring (see Chapter 6), justification or justifying (see Chapter 3), meaning or semiosis (see Chapter 4), indigeneity or indigenising (see Chapter 8), curriculum or curricularising (see Chapter 7), equality or equalising (see Chapter 5), play or playing (see Chapter 10), autonomy or being autonomous (see Chapter 11), inclusion or including (see Chapter 12), social justice or fairly treating (see Chapter 5) and education or educating (see Chapter 1), have therefore been central to our work in this book. All of them have a direct relationship with learning and can be positioned in curriculum and gender fields. However, these positionings need to be made explicit or at least good reasons need to be provided for their inclusion in these fields. We hope that we have done this in the pages of the book that you have read so far. Our focus has been on concepts and conceptual developments. In each of the chapters, we have addressed a concept or an historical praxis (biographical event or episodic series of events) through the work of a woman writer who has made an impact on the history of ideas. These were not summaries of their work. They were philosophical and exegetical discussions of key concepts and praxes within the overarching concept and practice of learning that these women contributed to in their writings and in their lives. The argument has been made throughout that to understand the idea and practice of learning we need to look at three nexuses or constellations of thought: the antecedents of the concept; its relations to other relevant concepts and the way the concept is used in the lifeworld. Each of the concepts that we have chosen to look at has been framed in this way. Throughout the book we have focused on feminism, as a concept and as a practice, and its historical, archeological and genealogical connections and relations. We have considered how these three types of event-methodologies, DOI: 10.4324/9781003289319-16

190  Feminist Praxes which refer to events in the past and in the present-past, can be distinguished from each other. Historical, archeological and genealogical methodologies are framed by time, although this core category is construed differently in each of them. A further shared element is that they produce configurations of discursive objects, such as liberal feminism, critical or structural feminism, normative feminism, feminist naturalism, radical feminism, epistemic feminism, political feminism, decategorising feminism and libertarian feminism. These discursive object-configurations can be understood in different ways, historically, archeologically and genealogically. In Chapter 1, we provided accounts of these object-configurations, where the relations between objects are understood as logical and not historical, archeological or genealogical. In subsequent chapters of this book, we have traced some of the antecedent, contemporaneous and applied meanings attached to these concepts and conceptual framings. The key then, to understanding what these are lies with the types of relations that exist between objects, object-relations, object-configurations and persons in their formation and reformation. We have suggested throughout that an important binary that has had real effects in the space of learning (and we mean in the socio-philosophical sense rather than the psychological or cognitive sense) is the idea of the male/female binary. Although women have been actively involved throughout the centuries in making societies, they have been marginalised when it comes to the production of knowledge about societies and social activities, such as curriculummaking. Feminists of all types of persuasion have tried to show how epistemological categories work to define and explain masculinity and femininity, how they function to define male, female and intersex persons, how they work to attach different valuations to these denotations, and how gender difference is a category of analysis around which the concept and practice of curriculum are structured.

Frames The framing or enframing process comprises an account of the background to the methodology that we have used in the construction of knowledge in this book, and it consists of a series of reasoned arguments to support a claim about some aspect of the world, whether meta-epistemic, epistemic or experiential. Such knowledge in this case can be expressed as a series of propositions. Any claim to knowledge made by a person is enframed, and consequently there is a need to articulate and give expression to this enframing as it relates to ontological, epistemological and methodological concerns. A relationship exists between a claim to knowledge and its truth-value, and this allows us to talk about true-knowledge as a useful idea, and, following on from this, any divisions or categories that we care to use could be other than they are, and this includes ontological and epistemological divisions. Truth as a hinge concept is therefore frame-specific. These framing-types can be understood as atomic,

Decolonising the Curriculum 191 associational, functional, causal, actual, linguistic, hermeneutic, structural, semantic and universal (see back to Chapter 2). This argument requires a theory of mind and therefore a theory of the relations between mind or minds and the world. In addition, knowledge and learning are homologous concepts, and concepts, such as feminism, can be polysemic and used in several different ways and they are enframed in a form of life. Any claim to knowledge we might want to make has to be justified, and this implies that there is a way of establishing the truth or otherwise of any such claim; for example, there are four justificatory mechanisms or apparatuses: epistemic, coherentist, rational and logical, and some form of combination of these is possible and necessary (see back to Chapter 3 and Susan Haack’s notion of foundherentism). This ontology is a form of dispositional realism. There are five object-types in the world: discursive objects (for example, indigeneity, which we discussed in Chapter 9), material objects (for example, a woman’s refuge), relational objects (for example, a feminist dialectic), structuralinstitutional-systemic objects (for example, discursive configurations such as radical feminism, and material configurations, such as a sex-divided school system) and people (women, men and intersex persons)3. Each of them has different characteristics and because objects and people have a dynamic structure in rare circumstances may change their status as objects; indeed, what constitutes an object-type is also dynamic. In an object-ontology, objects, including human beings, have acquired dispositions. These are conceptual relations, which cannot be fully explained in definitional and essentialising ways, but only in terms of how they are used in a way of life, or particular discursive formation. What we are suggesting is that in order to make a truth-bearing statement (and feminists make many of these), we are not providing a description of an experience but making a claim about it in a space of reasons4 and from and within a specific frame or set of frames. What follows from this is that we can and should understand and use concepts specifically in relation to current and future-oriented networks of meanings. Reasoning within this space comprises the giving and asking for reasons, where this activity is understood as making a commitment to the world, with that commitment referring to the circumstances surrounding its content and its consequences. Feminist knowledge in whatever guise comprises a series of emancipatory commitments that are inviolable (see back to Chapter 4). We have already suggested that the concept of learning is framed or enframed. Learning as a process has a set of pedagogic relations, that is, it incorporates a relationship between a learner and a learning object, which could be another woman, a feminist narrative, the female body, a particular array of feminist resources, a feminist artefact, an allocation of a role or function to a woman, or a feminist sensory object. A change process is required for this, and it is either internal to the idea of a woman or external to the community of which this woman is a member. Learning then is conditioned by an arrangement of resources, including spatial and temporal elements. Each

192  Feminist Praxes learning episode has socio-historical roots. What is learned in the first place is formed in society and outside the individual person. (This is a reaffirmation that learning as a concept and as a practice has referential but not exclusively representationalist elements.) It is shaped by the life that this woman is leading. It is therefore both externally and internally mediated. Under this conception, learning has an internalisation element where what is external to the woman is interiorised by her, and a performative element where what is internal to her is exteriorised in the world5. As we suggested in Chapter 1, the concept of learning has epistemic relations. There are four types of learning-objects: cognition (relating to propositions, for example, that feminism as a concept is always opposed to something or other), skill (relating to processes, such as reframing categories or counterconductings), embodiment (relating to bodily accomplishments, such as being a woman, women’s sexual preferences or women’s sexuality) and disposition. Prior to each of the first three types of knowledge then is a set of dispositions, without which cognitive, skill-oriented and embodied learning would be unsustainable. Distinguishing between knowledge of how to do something (process forms of knowledge), knowledge of something (judging that claim in terms of its relations within and to a network of concepts, and making the subsequent commitments that this entails), embodied forms of knowledge (assimilating an action and being able to perform in the spaces associated with that action) and dispositional knowledge (having certain characteristics and being able to use them in the world as a woman) is important; however, they are all knowledge-making activities and furthermore can be formulated generically as acts of learning. This is the essence of the knowledge claim we have made and are making in this book. That claim also has rational and practical elements that can be inferred from it.

Practical reasoning Practical reasoning is a subset of a more general concept of reasoning, and in turn reasoning can only be understood as part of a material and discursive configuration, which we can describe as rationality, or in dispositional terms, being rational. Rationality as a concept is plurisemic, multi-faceted and discursively formed. We can give a number of meanings to it. Rationality1 is a word whose only semantic content is that it is good. Rationality2 is a word that connects thinking and action. If the two are properly aligned then the relationship between thought and act is logically, semantically and comprehensively apt. Rationality3 is a word-object that denotes a truthful state of affairs. Rationality4 is a word that points to behaviours that society considers to be acceptable, whereas irrationality points to behaviours that society considers to be unacceptable. This set of meanings is socially, temporally and spatially relative. Rationality5 refers to a social practice, such as exchanging goods,

Decolonising the Curriculum 193 with a distinction being made between what modellers have called a perfect choice, which indicates a form that rationality might take (… a person is being rational if they make the perfect choice), and an imperfect choice, which indicates a form that irrationality might take (… a person has not acted in accordance with the criteria of rationality that they are committed to, so that the exchange of goods is not in their best interests or those of other people in society). Rationality6 is a word that denotes an ethical act or an act by a person that can be considered simpliciter to be ethical. A rational(ity7) number in mathematics represents a ratio of two integers. Rationality8 is a word-object that points to certain rational characteristics of a person, for example, we can represent a person as rational insofar as they have acquired certain dispositions, such as being autonomous or being self-determined (see Chapter 11). Rationality9 is a word-object that suggests that a person acts from sufficient and not from insufficient reasons. In the latter case, they are acting irrationally; in the former case, they are acting rationally. Rationality10 is an ideal state which is understood as the pinnacle of a thinking process. We are committed then, and have been throughout this book, to the sentient disposition of reason-giving and justifying beliefs and actions through the giving of reasons. This comprises both the contents of our judgements about, and perceptions of, the world, as well as the methodological contents of the way we can and do access the world, both a priori and empirically. There are three sites of knowledge: the world and its contents (Kant’s noumena), the mediating arena between the contents of the world and objects in the mind (this is what we might want to call learning sites), and the contents of the mind that allow us to make judgements, perceive the world and reflect on what we have perceived (Kant’s phenomena). To separate out these three sites is itself to make a judgement about the contents of the world and how we can access them. It is also to make a claim that there are always non-conceptual external constraints on what we perceive to be the contents of the world – we cannot make limitless claims about its contents because the world does not allow us to do this. What this argument cannot do is identify what those contents might be or determine what is or what is not in the world. In order to do this, we need to identify the means by which we access the world and show how these means mediate the world for us. We also need to determine the normative dimension of these processes, and this inevitably commits us to an explication of the idea of rationality and consequently of practical rationality. This comprises in the first instance examining an important element of the argument that we have been making throughout this book, that human beings have the capacity to be rational and this involves being able to align their intentions to a set of normative commitments. We might want to call this capacity or disposition ‘reason-giving’. There are several ways we can understand the idea of reason-giving. The first of these is that human mindedness is the ability to commune with reasons. Another view is that reason-giving can be understood as the way discursive

194  Feminist Praxes activities work by searching for the best reasons for action, unconsciously or consciously. The third set of meanings that we can give to the idea of reasongiving is that it refers to the structures of thinking and acting, i.e. material and discursive objects, relational objects, configurational objects and those embodied features of the human being, such as the capacity to speak, think, believe, move, and the like. (This is endorsed by Sellars’ (1997) spatial or geographical metaphor – the space of reasons.) The fourth set of meanings that we can attach to it is that reason-giving is one and only one disposition of human beings that some people have acquired and retained, and it has universal qualities only insofar as human beings have dispositions, besides other things. In addition, it has been suggested that describing human life as reason-giving or in the space of reasons is to distinguish it from deterministic, scientistic and atomistic views of the world – experience should therefore be understood as rational (the pursuit of reasons for action) rather than physicalist. There is a difference between acting rationally and acting from the best possible set of reasons. If we act rationally, the end that we desire may not be reached, with the understanding that whether it is reached or not is irrelevant to whether we have or have not acted rationally. This is because rationality can be construed and is best construed dispositionally. It has a set of qualities that allow any reasonable observer to say that this person is acting rationally. This set of qualities might include: not acting from reasons that as far as the person can see would only benefit that person and not other people; acting from reasons that are wholly benevolent; having clarity about whether the reasons the person thinks are driving their actions are indeed the prime motivators of those actions; being comprehensive about (having full knowledge of) all the possible reasons there might be for acting in a particular manner with regards to a particular issue, and so on. However, in order to determine whether a person has acted in a rationally dispositional manner, we have to in the first instance determine a best possible set of reasons for acting in the world in a particular set of circumstances. Since the concept of a reason is central to our concerns in this chapter, we need to understand the different ways that a reason has been understood and used. A reason is an argumentative statement that attempts to explain a belief or an action, where an explanation also includes a surfacing of those pretexts, subtexts and inter-texts that are there but which are only occasionally revealed. A reason has an evaluative sense in that it provides a justification for an action or a sequence of actions, insofar as this justification has a coherentist, logical, rational or epistemic form, or a combination of these. The third possible meaning that we can give to the term is that we have identified a state of affairs in the world, and we wish to understand what caused it. This refers to the reasons for an event or happening in the world. A reason might be used in the world to denote a capacity or attribute of a human being, as in human beings having a reason-giving capacity or dispositional concept of reason-giving, either in a communal or individual sense. A reason might also

Decolonising the Curriculum 195 be used to indicate a sufficient ground of explanation or of logical defence, as in a court of law. A reason might have been given the sense of making some event or activity in the world intelligible. A minimum set of conditions for a belief to be thought of as intelligible is as follows (this set is not necessarily correct): there are reasons that potentially can be made available for supporting a belief and these reasons can be construed in evidential form; these reasons are relevant to this belief insofar as they are necessary and sufficient for holding it and using it in the world; there are no contrary reasons publicly available or imagined for not holding that belief; this set of reasons is internally coherent and this means that the four conditions for intelligibility are met (the rule of non-contradiction, the rule of conformity to a truth criterion, the need for logical connectives and the need for conditionals/inferential methods)6. A reason can also be used to mean a power of comprehending, inferring or thinking, especially in a logical and rational way, and a form of practical reasoning is that it is a general human capacity for determining what we should do. Finally, we can understand a reason as a part of the concept of rationality – a rational human belief or action is one in which a sufficient reason is provided, and this reason is relevant to the belief or action. The argument that in every episode of knowing we are not just describing the world, but also placing that event in ‘the logical space of reasons’ (Sellars, 1997), and justifying this knowledge-claim, only makes sense within a particular enframing of the object-world. For example, if we adopt a physicalist view of the world, with no distinction being made between mind and matter, then reasons and separately rationalisations for those reasons are literally irrelevant to true or apt explanations of these phenomena. They cannot play a part in the causal sequence that we might want to explain, and this includes learning, gendering, epistemic and ethical activities. This would suggest that if a non-physicalist approach to volition and constraint is adopted then a notion of giving and asking for reasons as the essential characteristic of the human being is needed. Although this is an argument that on the surface seems to suggest that human beings can will certain things, this would be to claim too much7. The first obstacle to us believing this is that we have to provide an argument or set of arguments for the giving of reasons in the first place and any subsequent rationalisations of those reasons (all of this may be below the level of consciousness), and this reason-giving activity has to be different from the way a physicalist causal sequence might operate. Otherwise, reasons are simply epiphenomenal and are irrelevant to how we explain this or that, especially when we are dealing with learning as a concept or even an episode of learning8. And secondly, we still have to provide an argument within a space of reasons for a non-physicalist approach. We think that we have done this in Chapter 8. These reasons (which by necessity have a directive quality about them) are embedded in networks of reasons for doing things, which exist independently from the consciousness of the particular woman, although clearly this particular

196  Feminist Praxes woman and women, men and intersex persons in general have the capacity to access them. A woman can have a reason for her action, is convinced that the reason that she gives for her action is the actual reason as to why the action took place and believes that the action would not have taken place without the reason being developed prior to the action. And yet, the reason that is given may not be the real reason for that action. Furthermore, the rationalisation of the original reason is not necessarily a distortion of that original reason, it may comprise a re-forming of that reason that now entails the placing of the action in wider social, political, economic and discursive contexts, and in particular those contexts which we might want to describe as sexuate and discriminatory. The purpose is to grasp the reasoning action in its setting of rules, practices, conventions and fundamentally women’s intentions. What this implies is that there is always a volitional relationship in any particular action or event, and this in turn implies that in most circumstances the woman is a skilled knower, especially with regards to her own reasons for her actions, even if the original and motivating reason is subsequently rationalised over time. Reasons can have a supersessional form. There are three types: simple supersessions, sequencing supersessions and hierarchical supersessions. In the first case, an event gives way to another event, where this is demonstrably or reasonably superior to the original event in some or every way – it has superior qualities. These states of affairs may be material or discursive and can refer to different types of objects in the world (discursive objects, material objects, relational objects, discursive and material structural-institutional-systemic objects and people). With sequencing supersessions, an event is part of a sequence of other events, so that each part of this sequence demonstrably or reasonably is superior to the one directly below it in the sequence because it has superior qualities. There is no requirement for it to be of a particular length as a sequence. With hierarchical supersessions, an event is part of a sequence of events that culminates in an end-state that is perfect, insofar as it cannot lead to a higher state of being because it is complete. This form therefore suggests that all the other events are inferior or incomplete for a variety of reasons. The qualities or characteristics of the object determine the type of supersession that can be or is made, and consequently, we need to come to some determination about the concept of rationality. Each and every concept has different possibilities, and therefore, and as a result, different supersessional trajectories, not least in relation to the three supersessional forms we identified above: simple, sequencing or perfectional. When we say that an event is superior to another event, we are invoking a criterion or set of criteria, and this is unavoidable. We are using the concept of supersession, so that the meaning we attach to it is embedded in a way of life and does not wholly reside in a person or persons. It has an objective content. It also has normative qualities attached to it. A supersession does not just refer to something or some object replacing another object, but it also has some quality which legitimises that replacement. Some possible examples of supersessions are: something is more rational

Decolonising the Curriculum 197 than something else; something is more intelligible than something else; a reason is a better reason than another; a thought is a better or more complete thought than another; a life is more pleasurable than another; an action is more ethical than another; a good is perfect or imperfect, when being compared with another; a statement connecting two propositions is more logical than another and a statement connecting two propositions is more comprehensive than another. The most important of these supersessions is practical reasoning, which is the focus of this chapter.

Resistance The recognition of a conceptual domain of time-oriented change in social phenomena means that generative mechanisms exist that underlie the occurrence of social events, such as suffragettism in 1920’s Britain. These generative mechanisms may be resistive, oppositional, adversarial, etc., and in the case of our eight feminist perspectives, they are constituted by a state of affairs that is in opposition to another state of affairs. There is a variety of such mechanisms (the idea of a mechanism is not understood here as mechanistic and determined, but as a set or configuration of objects and object-relations, including those that relate to persons): counter-conductings, emancipations, decolonisations, immanent critiques, reading the world as a feminist text, decategorisations, absentings, praxis(ings), trans-framings, reflections and textualisations. These are examples of practical reasoning where the intention is to change a state of affairs in the world.

Counter-conductings Michel Foucault (1982: 263)9 argued for a mode of counter-conducting for all human beings, but that can also be appropriated by women. It is an ethic and praxis of relationships, and, for Foucault, it comprises ‘the kind of relationship you should have with yourself’ and with objects, relations, configurations and persons in the outside world. It acts as a counter and an opposition to prevailing discursive and material object-configurations. Women are encouraged to look at their own conduct, not in a condemnatory way, but as a seedbed for personal and political action. In the first instance, this is a process of refusal: ‘maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are’ (Foucault, 1982: 336) – there is a refusal being proposed here to accept the grounds on which women’s subjectivity is being constructed and a desire to subvert those grounds. At learning sites and in everyday life this would involve a plurality of refusals, resistances and struggles against power. These counter-conducts are ethical interventions, political refusals, voluntary insubordinations and practices of ‘reflective intractability’ (Foucault, 1997: 32). They operate through a pedagogy of imagination as we saw in Maxine Greene’s account of learning (see Chapter 2).

198  Feminist Praxes They involve a denaturalisation of the categories and fit with a notion of feminist thought that prioritises as a praxis, as a way of opposing, the meanings that inhere in categories as they are currently operating and in the pedagogic practices that institutionalise and reproduce them. For Foucault (1977: 154), this comprises the challenge of ‘creatively and courageously authoring one’s ethical self’. A more direct form of resistance is a notion of conscientização or critical consciousness, and this is a central element in Paulo Freire’s (1970) theory of emancipation.

Emancipation or conscientização A conscientização is a response to the oppressive conditions of women in society, as well as other persons, and in addition is a response to the oppressive elements that we have identified in the various feminist narratives set out in Chapter 1. Implicit within each of these discursive formations is: an account of a woman, including her morphogenetic capacities and affordances, and the environments within which she is situated; an account of the relationship between a woman and her environments; knowledge about understanding, learning and change, with regards to this woman and the environments in which she is located; inferences from these accounts, and conclusions about appropriate representations and media for representations. In addition, and particularly in relation to these feminist discourses, there is a discursive or material configurational object to which the new discourse is opposed and seeks to replace. For example, radical feminists argue that when notions, such as rationality, knowledge and the self, are deconstructed, their gendered nature is revealed, so that concepts, which have been taken as neutral and universal, are shown to be masculine. The condition of life and society is oppressive and radical feminists seek to reverse it, by replacing one set of conditions (material or discursive) with another that is less oppressive. This requires a praxis of liberation, although we should understand such a praxis in a variety of ways, depending on the type of oppression that is encountered. For Paulo Freire10, this praxis comprised a process of becoming aware of those social conditions in which women live their lives and in particular of the oppressive elements that constitute them. This entails the adoption of a critical attitude towards those human relationships that women discover themselves in. Conscientização involves the woman in understanding and fully appreciating her own social, political, economic, gendered, classed and racialised enframings and how these play an important part in the shaping of her reality. It also involves an attempt by the woman to reappropriate her sense of agency. This is an act of learning and as with all acts of learning there is a pedagogy involved and a particular arrangement of learning resources to facilitate it. This pedagogy, as Freire understood it, comprises the creation of a set of conditions for the woman to realise her own agency and to understand herself as a person rather than an object (discursive, material, relational or configurational).

Decolonising the Curriculum 199 There are essentialist (as a woman) and realist elements here, as well as an acknowledgement that the struggle is not just only personal but also political and social. It happens through work and in particular women working in the world. The pedagogy involved is dialogic and eschews environments in which there are unequal relations between teachers and students. Freire also argued that the status quo, which he called a banking model of education11, was counterproductive and regressive. His concern was with intentionality and agency in the process of learning. Another form of resistance works through decolonisations of knowledge.

Decolonising knowledge Self-evidently, decolonising as a concept and as a practice is in opposition to the concept and practice of colonising. It is an undoing, a cancelling, a transformation and a going beyond. In short, control over the lives of a people is shifted from one national body, the coloniser, to what we might want to call the indigenous12 people of that nation, the colonised. These colonising and decolonising processes operate within political, social, cultural, epistemological, temporal, geographical, categorising and semantic framings and settings. The process of moving from one to the other is not straightforward and is usually fragmentary and gradual, and generally does not involve a going back to an imagined utopic view of the past. A new sense of nationhood and nationality is being developed. It might also involve an ongoing critique of eurocentric worldviews and the prioritising of First People’s or indigenous knowledge. Decolonisations of knowledge or epistemic decolonisations (i.e. a discursive configuration comprising discursive objects and discursive relations, that has the potential to persist over time) takes as its central opposition (it is not this or that ….) the perceived universality of eurocentric knowledge systems. It seeks to construct and legitimise alternative epistemologies and epistemological framings. The presumption is that knowledge systems, curricula, categories, etc. are colonised and need to be decolonised. The universality that it is opposed to is replaced by a more apt and convincing sense of universality. Colonial forms of universality determine what can count as legitimate knowledge, and in effect exclude, marginalise and dehumanise those with different forms of knowledge, expertise and justification. The colonisation process, long or short, extensive or restricted, resulted in a repression of indigenous forms of knowledge production, of meaning systems, of different symbolic universes and of notions of indigenous subjectivities and agencies. For example, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: 28) characterised this process in the following way: Imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized people, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their special relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world.

200  Feminist Praxes In Chapter 8, we gave a linguistic form to this process through the words of Marie Battiste. Here is Battiste (2011: xvi) writing about the activity of epistemic decolonisation: As the twentieth century unfolds to a new millennium, many voices and forums are converging to form a new perspective on knowledge. Many of these voices belong to the Indigenous peoples who have survived European colonization and cognitive imperialism. They represent the thoughts and experiences of the people of the Earth whom Europeans have characterized as primitive, backward, and inferior – the colonized and dominated people of the last five centuries. The voices of these victims of empire, once predominantly silenced in the social sciences, have been not only resisting colonization in thought and actions but also attempting to restore Indigenous knowledge and heritage. By harmonising indigenous knowledge with eurocentric knowledge, they are attempting to heal their people, restore their inherent dignity, and apply fundamental human rights to their communities. They are ready to imagine and unfold postcolonial orders and society. Colonialism is a form of exploitation and subjugation, and it exists and works in every crevice and fissure (material or discursive) of the woman, her life and her relations with other people and other things or objects. Political decolonisations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were only partially successful because they ignored the most powerful form of colonisation, epistemic colonisation. Several forms of epistemic decolonisation have been developed, some of which we have referred to above. The first form is that decolonial forms of knowledge are simpliciter oppositional constructs to that which they sought to replace. The process of the construction of knowledge and its justifications is essentially oppositional and reactive. The second form that epistemic decolonisation can take is to understand colonising epistemic practices as wholly misguided and false, and thus the solution is a cutting out, an erasure (in history and over time), of these malignant constructs. This has to comprise a reversion to what was there before colonisation, a nativist conception. The third form of epistemic decolonisation is not to reject in total those eurocentric stories, narratives, justificatory principles that are in the history of these colonised peoples but to build on them, to develop them in local contexts and environments; to create, in short, new epistemic models out of old ones, both indigenous and colonial. Another type of resistance is through a process of immanent critiquing.

Immanent critiques Immanent critiques of discursive objects and discursive configurations offer a further perspective on political and epistemic forms of resistance. An immanent critique positions the critique within the object or configuration under

Decolonising the Curriculum 201 consideration, for example, within a discursive configuration such as women’s rationality and essentialism. Implicit within every feminist discursive formation are: an account of a woman’s capacities and affordances, and the environments within which she is situated, inferences from these accounts and appropriate representations in a narrative form. These interstices and positionings constitute a particular rendition of an object or an objectconfiguration and those consequences of committing oneself to this discursive object-configuration. Adopting an immanent critical approach is to make a judgement, perhaps we can call it a critical judgement, not from any universal or external set of criteria, but from criteria generated within the discursive configuration itself13.

Reading the world as a feminist text The world, and this is shorthand for anything that might exist which is external to our minds, such as other people, mountains, rivers, human activities before we were born, books that were written by people who were not alive when we were born and thoughts that could not have entered our minds before they did, can be read, understood, appreciated, assimilated as texts and ideological and historical texts as well (see Chapter 3). Historical and ideological texts can be read in terms of their pretexts – each social and discursive formation in place and time has its own way of arranging language, discourses and writing. Furthermore, each text has a subtext, which operates beneath the text, but gives it its meaning – those epistemologies and traditions of knowledge that are historical and allow a particular reading. Texts refer to observations, evaluations and reflections of discursive and material objects, relational objects, configurational objects of various types and persons. Textual readings are always ideologically framed, with this referring in this book to women’s subjugation, control, oppression and exploitation. A feminist therefore sees the world, acts in the world, works with certain categories that structure that world and behaves in a particular way because they are a feminist. However, what this doesn’t mean is that everyone who calls themselves a feminist always thinks and behaves like a feminist. Reading a text in a feminist sense can be construed in a number of ways, principally either as a feminist action in the world or as a feminist conceptual activity in the mind. Several approaches to reading texts have been developed. The first of these is monosemic and this means that an authoritative reading can be made of a text. The second approach is also monosemic, but here the primary focus is the intentions of the author. The text allows an unequivocal reading because that reading is consistent with these intentions. The third approach focuses on reading the text and its enframings. The text and the way in which it is read (in this case, as it relates to feminism) are enframed14. There are several solutions to the problems created by the assertion that textual reading is immersed in history and society. The first of these is to accept that any

202  Feminist Praxes interpretation that is made is partial, and that is as far as anyone can go. The second possible solution is that we can in some way transcend the historicity of our own interpretative stance. Instead of proposing that an unequivocal reading of a text is possible, if we can understand the different contexts and pretexts of a text, then this in itself constitutes a better way of reading it15. A text under this conception can be a life, an episode in a life, an experience in that life, a feminist praxis, a book, a sign, a technology, a feeling or emotion, a framing and an enframing, and much more. Another form of resistance is an attempt to subvert the categories by which we live, and through which women are made women.

Decategorising In Chapter 1 we provided two examples of category subversion. The first was through recognising and institutionalising new and different forms of sexuality. We suggested that sexuality is different from other forms of difference because it is essentially and fundamentally embodied. The second and more powerful response that we suggested feminists were increasingly making is to challenge in a fundamental sense the male/female binary category and the positioning of women within it. This involves a direct challenge to the idea of natural differences between men and women and in a more fundamental sense to the whole idea of difference16. Difference as a concept can be understood in several ways. There is the common use given to the term, where difference is understood as not being or as being opposite to something else – words and signs only have meanings within other arrangements of words and signs, from which they differ. Another way we can understand the idea of difference is by conceptualising it as a particular arrangement or spacing so that what we should be concerned about is the process that differentiates social elements from other social elements17. We have seen this all too clearly in the accounts of women’s experience given by the twelve feminist thinkers that we have highlighted in this book: Maxine Greene (imagination) (see Chapter 2), Susan Haack (justification) (see Chapter 3), Nel Noddings (care) (see Chapter 6), Julia Kristeva (edusemiotics) (see Chapter 4), Jane Roland Martin (curriculum) (see Chapter 7), Dorothea Beale (gender) (see Chapter 9), Susan Isaacs (play) (see Chapter 10), Maria Montessori (autonomy) (see Chapter 11), Mary Warnock (inclusion) (see Chapter 12), Marie Battiste (indigeneity) (see Chapter 8), Martha Nussbaum (social justice) (see Chapter 5) and Lucy Diggs Slowe (decategorisations and recategorisations) (see Chapter 13). Processes of classifying and reclassifying change the nature of objects, object-relations object-configurations and, in particular, the male/female dyad. Indeed, all references to the world involve the identification, manipulation, transformation and reconstruction of the categories, and we cannot avoid this. Absenting is another mode of resistance.

Decolonising the Curriculum 203

Absenting Roy Bhaskar (2002) criticised the meta-notion of ontological monovalence, which suggests that reality is only positive and present. He suggested that the positive, in this tradition, undermines the negative or sense of non-being, so that change becomes impossible. By not including the negativity of reality and by emphasising positivity over negativity, reality can only be thought of as positive and this implies that unequal relations do not exist, and praxis and change are not necessary. To correct this error, Bhaskar (2008a) positioned as central to his work on dialectics, the concepts of absence, negativity and change, asserting that they have real ontological features such as having causal effects in the world. (Mary Warnock’s notion of the absenting of segregation that we documented in Chapter 12 is an example of this.) So, while the notion of negativity was used to indicate ‘nothingness’, that is, indeterminate absence, Bhaskar used instead the notion of determinate absence, in the sense that an entity can be absent in terms of not being there in a particular space or time-moment or because it has never existed or due to its dissolution. Examples of determinate absence include the absence of facilities for pregnant women or rights denied to women around the world. Absence can be positive or negative. While positive absence is a necessary condition of being, for example, silence before speech, negative absence is present in the form of a lack, an ill or a contradiction, such as illness as the absence of health. In general, when something significant is left out of a problem, contradictions and tensions emerge, and of course if nothing is done about them, they will proliferate, resulting in a gradual decline into disorder. By looking at what is absent in a specific situation, this will give us a clue as to how it can change; change is a process of movement in which an object becomes something else and in the process ceases to be what it was. In order to restore or resolve these contradictions, Bhaskar (2008b) suggested that absences should be absented, and this can be achieved through expanding the totality of objects by adopting a more inclusive arrangement. For example, excluding women from voting causes incompleteness and contradictions in society until these lacks are addressed (see back to Maxine Greene’s account of lacks or lackings in Chapter 2). Absences are ills and constraints on human freedom. Ills can range from being entrenched in the physical body as ill-health or in false beliefs or in structural ills, such as patriarchal relations. Emancipation, accordingly, is perceived as the removal of absences or constraints and their transformation to more wanted or empowering structures. Emancipation can be achieved either at the individual, the collective or even the universal level. The praxical value of absence for investigating women’s emancipation is prioritised. Absences are real because they have causal effects on women’s lives. Absenting them starts the process of change and emancipation, since unwanted structures are replaced by more wanted ones, and this alerts all of us, men, women and intersex persons, to uncover disempowering or unwanted structures. This is a form of praxis, an emancipatory form.

204  Feminist Praxes

Praxis A praxical feminist hermeneutics and critique is framed genealogically. This comprises, in general terms, an opening up, a looking at, the ways in which women and women’s concerns have been portrayed and represented in the past, and how we can develop new ways of thinking about women and about how those institutions and practices that are hostile to women can be reorganised and reconstructed. The focus is and has always been on the way male power emerges and is misused in the lives of women. The first wave of feminist praxis in the English-speaking world focused on improving the political, educational and economic system for women and girls, leading to the partial success of the UK suffragette movement in the 1920s. This first wave developed a philosophy of equal rights for women and the dissolution of some forms of difference, material and discursive, between men and women. The second wave of feminism had its roots in the United States and drew inspiration from the civil rights movements, where the concerns were primarily with racial differences. It developed by borrowing a language of liberation and resulted in a feminist consciousness based on solidarity and sisterhood. Discursively, it began the work of separating out biological conceptions of women’s identity from socially constructed ones, and in the process problematised notions of biological determinism and essentialism in women’s lives. Women were being positioned as subjects and agents of a feminist politics and praxis. Two distinct discursive formations were being deployed here. The first focuses on the category of women as distinct from the category of men, with its essentialising dimensions and revaluations between the sexes. In Chapter 6, we showed how this might work through the development of an ethic of care by Nel Noddings. The second discursive configuration embraces a diversity of women and a ‘difference’ feminism. The focus here is on how gendered difference is socially constructed and for some this can be represented in a symbolic and psychoanalytical form, as we have seen in Chapter 4 in our examination of the work of Julia Kristeva. Both of these forms of feminist praxis argued for a category of woman that has a determinate meaning. This notion of a universal womanhood was challenged by feminists, such as bell hooks (1981), who argued that women’s conditions of work and life were far more complicated than this; that any feminist theory and praxis needed to take account of women’s multiple and complex identities and experiences. (In Chapter 9, we suggested that in implementing a Beale curriculum, girls were simultaneously receiving what was considered to have been a boys’ curriculum and at the same time had to learn what it meant to be a wife and mother in a patriarchal society.) These notions of feminist praxis were also being challenged by non-eurocentric women who, as we saw in Chapter 8 through the eyes of Marie Battiste, were much more concerned with colonisations and oppressions of indigenous peoples. Post-colonial theory further exacerbated the division between a universal subject-feminism and a

Decolonising the Curriculum 205 feminism that recognised multiplicity, diversity and intersectionality (for example, Jagger, 1983). A further wave of feminist theory began the process of politicising and revaluing feminist thought and praxis. Alison Jagger (1983) divided up political feminism into four substrata: liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, socialist feminism and radical feminism. Liberal feminism, as we have seen, had its roots in liberal, enlightenment and emancipatory traditions of thought and in political terms followed the precepts of post-war eurocentric liberalism. Marxist feminism was rooted in cold war politics and Marxist-Leninist ideas of equality and liberation. Socialist feminism had its roots in European socialist movements and new forms of psychoanalysis, such as Lacanian analytics18. Radical feminists were more concerned with alternative epistemological and categorising processes and developing critiques of patriarchy in its many forms and guises. They continue to dispute many of the central tenets of liberal feminism, which emphasise the centrality of the individual woman and her capacity to live the life she wants to live. Recently, some feminists (for example, Mouffe, 2005) have begun to explore the idea of a feminist notion of democratic institutions that would render sexual, gendered, sex and sexuality differences as effectively irrelevant and ‘nonpertinent’. From this performative perspective, feminism is understood as a praxis of anticipating and working towards a better political future, even though that future can never be known with any degree of certainty. Praxis is not just action for this would render the concept as meaningless insofar as everything we do in the world would be a praxis. It involves some form of conversion of thought into action, or at least the construction of a particular thought or set of thoughts in such a way that certain actions inevitably flow from it and other actions are set aside. As with all thoughts or thinking, this praxis is embedded in histories, archaeologies and genealogies of that thought or concept and what that thought or set of thoughts allows or disallows. Praxis in a feminist sense, or as a feminist might understand it, has four elements: practice on practice, practice on thought, practice on ourselves and practice unfolding from thought. The first of these refers fundamentally to doing something in the world, such as the various campaigns for equal pay between men and women in the United Kingdom over the last twenty years – those activities evolved in scope and form over the period of the activity. The second refers to thought working on the practice of thought over a period of time and in response to a particular conceptual problem such as patriarchy. For example, there are temporal, spatial and logical connections between the different forms of feminism and their evolutionary trajectories that we identified in the first chapter of this book: liberal feminism, critical or structural feminism, normative feminism, feminist naturalism, radical feminism, epistemic feminism, political feminism, decategorising feminism and libertarian feminism. The third possibility is practice on ourselves, and this locates the source of practice in individual reflection. We have already suggested that an activity of the mind can be construed as a notion of inner speech, where parts of the mind

206  Feminist Praxes talk to or communicate with other parts of the mind. Reflexivity can then be thought of as emancipation. There is a fourth sense that can be given to the notion of praxis, and this is where work on thought drives practice in a particular way – thought and practice are so intertwined that in criticising or subverting the one, we are also criticising and subverting the other. An example of an object-relation or object-connection operating at the discursive level over time is the relation between a theory or set of propositions about objects, relations and arrangements of objects – how they might work in the world – and a set of future arrangements of objects and relations in the practice setting (from description to practice). For those of us concerned to provide accounts of curriculum, learning and women, conceptualising the relationship between the theory we produce and the practice we are describing is central to our activities. In short, how this relationship is understood is important both because it affects the type of account produced and because it impacts on the workings of practices per se. Another form of resistance might be called trans-framing.

Trans-framing Trans-framing as a form of resistance or counteractivity comprises a movement between, what we called in Chapter 2, onto-epistemological frames or framings, describing them as such because our knowledge of the world always has ontological dimensions. In that chapter, we identified a variety of frames or framings that in a transversal sense might enable women to resist or counteract those oppressive forces that are ineluctably a part of modern societies: the frame of molecules and atoms, for example, neurophysiological explanations; the frame of associations between variables; the function or use-in-the-world frame; the frame of causal relations; the frame of events; the linguistic frame; the universal hermeneutic frame; the frame of structure and structuring; the semantic frame and the universal or transcendental frame. This places these frames in some form of hierarchy. However, this is not a straightforward hierarchy with the atomic frame at the lowest point (having the least purchase on the problem that we are seeking to solve) and the transcendental frame at the highest point (having the most purchase on the problem as it is defined), with other levels at different points between the meanings given to the first and last frames. In this case, different criteria are being applied to these different frames and this complicates the description of the relations between them. These frames then are manifestations of difference and in particular the determining difference between the different levels or frames. Framings can be construed as onto-epistemologies. The truth of something or other, as a consequence, is frame-specific and this includes what many people construe as facts (see Chapter 3). In this book, we have identified eight different meaning-senses that we might be able to give to the concept of feminism: liberal, structural, evaluative, natural, radical, epistemic, decategorisational and libertarian (see Chapter 1). We also need to understand how each of them is framed

Decolonising the Curriculum 207 and the connections and relations between them. Deframing or trans-framing, as an act of resistance (and learning), is a movement upwards or downwards or sideways, but always a repositioning of the way women can see the world.

Reflexivity Another form of resistance is practice on ourselves, and this locates the source of practice in individual reflection. This internal conversation has three conditioning structures. The first is that it is a genuinely interior phenomenon, and this implies that a woman, a man or an intersex person has a private life. The second conditioning structure is that this sense of a person’s subjectivity has a first-person ontology – it relates directly to a particular woman, man or intersex person. The third conditioning structure is that it possesses causal powers, in that material and discursive consequences could follow directly from particular internal conversations. This is a notion of reflection, or even reflexivity, which is a way of saying that a woman can be disposed to reflect back on herself. We identified four types of reflexive action in Chapter 1, borrowing from the work of Margaret Archer (2002). The first of these is what she called communicative reflexivity. Here the life of the mind is characterised by an internal conversation that is a part of the whole process of learning. The second type of reflexive action is what she called autonomous reflexivity and here the processes of the internal conversation are foreshortened and may be automatic and involuntary, insofar as they lead to actions. Then there are meta-reflexive processes, in which the principal focus is the internal conversation; interiorisation and exteriorisation processes are marginalised. Archer also suggested that there may be fractured reflexive processes, in which the interrogation by one part of the mind of another part does not proceed smoothly and coherently, leading to woman being distressed and disorientated. We also need to address the issue of textuality, both as a form of resistance and as the way we have positioned ourselves in this book.

Textualising We have used in this book a variety of textual devices (multi-referentiality, linearity, fragility, corrigibility, enframing and coherentism), and we want to draw attention to some of them here. The first of these is the insertion of many references – an unusually large number – to other chapters in the book. This is designed to show that every concept being used here has a referential structure, in that every conceptual (and thus semantic) activity is framed and then reframed in relation to the possibilities that inhere in the concept and in a network of other concepts. The point of this is to suggest or show that meaning, or the semantic dimension, is both dynamic and embedded within a network of other concepts, with their own semantic possibilities.

208  Feminist Praxes The second device that we have used here is more traditional. This refers to the linear structure of the text, in which a series of premises are introduced and justified, inferential connections and relations are established between them and conclusions are then drawn. This can be contrasted with a hypertextual mode of writing that has a non-linear structure19. Our textuality in this book then is a more conventional type. We have set out an argument, and its parts, and done nothing else, that is, we have been making a case for a particular viewpoint about feminist knowledge and learning and what it refers to. The third device concerns the fragility of the writing, and what we mean by this is the sense in which we as the authors have had to struggle throughout with finding the right words, sets of words, sentence-constructions, paragrapharrangements, chapter divisions, book structures and so forth that can approximately bridge the gap between the text that we have produced and what it refers to outside of the confines of the text itself. If we abandon the idea of categorical and timeless definitions of words that can represent in some magical way women’s experiences in the world, then the attempt at writing the world into being is always a struggle and always insufficient. The point we are making is that this is not a confession of inadequacy but an acknowledgement that our words and word-sets are never adequate or sufficient and cannot be so given the task that is being attempted, although most writers addressing issues to do with women and learning are unaware of this. In addition, we are conscious of writing at a particular point in history – our work is time-framed – where redefinitions and conceptual reformations take place all the time. The fourth device that we have used here is to discuss at all times and in as many ways as we can the issue of correctness or aptness. Are we correct in what we say? Are we producing truthful knowledge? If we want to criticise a position taken by someone else, or if we want to make a claim that this other position is logically deficient, or conceptually inadequate, or superficially formulated, or insufficiently evidenced, then we can only do this by comparing it with a position which is logically sufficient, or conceptually adequate, or in-depth, or evidenced. In short, we need criteria about truthful knowledge in order to make a judgement about a position or approach. We were very aware of this when we were writing Chapter 12, as we chose to approach the work of Mary Warnock, and in particular the Warnock Report, from a self-referencing critical perspective (an immanent critical position), that is, we framed our account in relation to her own philosophical perspective. The fifth textual and methodological device is that in every word, wordcomplex, sentence, paragraph and chapter in this book, we have made a series of assumptions about the world and our knowledge of it, some of these are made explicit, some are not. These preconceptions can be broadly summarised as a conceptual theory of ontology and thus of epistemology, an ontic and epistemic theory of valuations, that we can know the world but only with the greatest of difficulty, and that these key framing-objects, knowledge and the

Decolonising the Curriculum 209 world, should be analysed as separate entities. This textual device is used by us throughout the book and is of some significance. Related to this is the fact that one of us is biologically female and the other biologically male. Maybe this doesn’t matter, but it raises the issue of whether and in what way a man can understand and write about the lifeexperiences of a woman; a woman can understand the life-experiences of, and write about, a man; a white person can understand the life-experiences of, and write about, a black person; a black person can understand the life-experiences of, and write about, a white person; an abled person can understand the life-experiences of, and write about, a disabled person; a person can understand and write about the life-experiences of another person and so on. Can we ever understand and write about issues that are outside our experience in a fundamental sense? What we have to do here, as a bare minimum, is acknowledge the gulf between ourselves and our understanding of the different experiences of other people, and accept that our words, use of concepts and texts are approximations and nothing more, while also accepting the philosophical point that this text, and the argument we make within it, is written from a particular point of view, which is that women are of equal worth to men20. We could go further here and suggest that the act of writing together about the social beyond our own experience or group allows for a deeper understanding of, and compassion towards, other people. For us this is an inclusive practice. A final textual and methodological device that we have used extensively in this book is to set a series of general arguments against other arguments developed by other people. The point is that this is what most philosophers and thinkers actually do even if they don’t always make it explicit. This leaves open the possibility that we could write a history, an archaeology and a genealogy of women and learning without such referencing, and indeed, there must have been a time in which every thought was new or at least not related to what other people said. What you have just been reading is a text and a particular type of text. As a text, we have argued throughout that it is a signifying practice, and as a signifying practice it has to question its own textuality and indeed the discursive contents that it is committing to.

A postscript What we have been doing throughout this book is mapping over time, in past, present-past and future episodes, the contents of some meta-concepts in social theory, feminism, learning and curriculum. Maps, we need to remind ourselves, are ways we make sense of the world and not just geographical path-finders. They refer to real places, real-time moments, real states of mind, objects and things, imaginary places and time moments, imaginary states of mind, objects and things and so on. At various points in this book, we have sign-posted what

210  Feminist Praxes comes next and then, as in this last chapter, we have flagged-up what we have written about. We have mapped our way through the treacherous waters of the history, archaeology and genealogy of these key meta-concepts. A genealogy of mapping shows us how this can both codify and challenge the assumptions we make about the world. In Brunetto Latini’s map of Paradise, Le Livre de Tresor (Book of Treasures), a fourteenth-century manuscript, a number of different types of objects are mapped together. The East (‘Orient’) is depicted as on top of the West (‘Occident’) and below them is Europe and Africa. In the map of Paradise is a placing of the earthly form (‘paradis terestre’) shown in the North (‘septemtrion’) with the Pillars of Hercules in the South. Many medieval Christian maps of the time were depictions of a Christian geography – an ideological and religio-notion of place21. Jorge-Luis Borges22 mapped the various animals that have an actual and imagined existence in the world. Animals were divided into several categories: belonging to the Emperor, embalmed, tame, suckling pigs, sirens, fabulous, stray dogs, included in the present classification, frenzied, unnumerable, drawn with a very fine camel hairbrush, et cetera, having just broken the water pitcher, and that from a long way off look like flies. In Renaissance Italy, Antonio Manetti mapped the shape and size of hell, as depicted in the poem, The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. It was published posthumously in 1506. Dante’s hell is conically shaped with a vano or void set at 3,245 miles deep. Hell lies beneath Jerusalem, with Mount Purgatory at the southern-most point. The hell that is shown is precisely mapped and thus is given a spurious certainty and sense of truth. Thomas More’s Utopia (1518) included a map of utopia drawn by Ambrosius Holbein. The map is full of jokes and puns (linguistic and pictorial), such as on close inspection the island resembles a grinning skull, the hull of the ship represents grinning teeth and a nose. Holbein’s interpretation of this land of utopia is one of death and decay and a warning that this is how utopian dreams always end. The artist, Grayson Perry, has always been interested in the imaginative possibilities of mapping. His map of nowhere is obviously a pun on and reference to More’s Utopia. He also references in his map of nowhere the medieval world depicted in Mappae Mundi, showing the world as embodied in the body and life of Jesus Christ. This is Perry’s playful reflection on our modern obsession with the self as the centre of everything and the way we can express that self in the world. Digital cartographies visualise maps as carriers of specific types of information that are other than geographical location. For example, Benjamin Henning has produced a Mapper Mundi style guided population cartography, where the size of the area represents population density (see ‘Fifty Maps and the Stories they tell’ by Jerry Brotton and Nick Millea, published in 2019). Layla Curtis’ NewcastleGateshead (2005) is on the surface a map of the Tyne and Wear area in the United Kingdom. However, on closer inspection,

Decolonising the Curriculum 211 we can see parts of Australia and the United States, added to British, Canadian, Irish, Jamaican and New Zealand cartography. The landscape from a superficial reading of the map is familiar; on close inspection, it is full of geographical references, place pluralities such as fifty-two Newcastles and ten North-Easts, and signs to Alan Shearer, Newcastle United Football Club’s record scorer. These references denote a cultural as well as a geographical mapping exercise. Ivan Sanderson’s (1967) Taxonomy of Knowledge Map has three interlinked rings. In the outer ring, there are the disciplines of knowledge: Mathematics, Mysticism, Mentology, Anthropology, Biology, Geology, Astrology, Chemistry, Physics and Ontology. In the middle ring, there are ten applied knowledge concepts: measurement, existence, performance, matter, gross bodies, the earth, life forms, manufacture, mentality and concept. In the centre, there are the words: applied knowledge and technology and the useful arts. The relations between these different objects are represented pictorially rather than linguistically. These maps present new and engaging ways of understanding the world around us. This book has attempted to do something similar, as it maps the past through the lens of the present and an associated imagined or hypothetical future as manifested through the act of learning. We conclude this postscript with an account of Abraham Maslow’s (1943) motivational mapping theory much used in psychology that provides us with a pictorial representation of human needs, expressed hierarchically or as a pyramid. The first and lowest level of the pyramid gives us a list of physiological needs, such as air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sex and sleep. At the second level, people want to experience order, predictability and control in their lives. These are depicted as emotional security, financial security, law and order, freedom from fear, social stability, property, health and well-being. At the third level, there are love and belongingness needs, such as friendship, intimacy, trust and acceptance, receiving and giving affection and love. At the fourth level, there are esteem needs, which Maslow classified into two categories: esteem for ourselves (dignity, achievement, mastery, independence) and second, the need for reputation and respect from others. The top of the pyramid depicts self-actualisation needs and this refers to the realisation of a person’s potential, their self-fulfilment. It is self-evidently the highest state that a person can reach. In using this pyramidal structure, Maslow is showing us and not telling us about relations between objects and object-configurations in our world. He is mapping our psychological needs within the society that we find ourselves a part of. All these examples, Brunetto Latini’s map of Paradise, Jorge-Luis Borges’ classifications of animals, Antonio Manetti’s mapping of the shape and size of hell, Ambrosius Holbein’s interpretation of the land of Utopia, Grayson Perry’s map of nowhere, Benjamin Hennig’s Mappae Mundi style grided population cartography, Layla Curtis’ NewcastleGateshead cultural map, Ivan

212  Feminist Praxes Sanderson’s Taxonomy of Knowledge Map and Abraham Maslow’s motivational map of human needs, are all maps drawn from ideological commitments of people living in the real world. The women curriculum theorists highlighted in this book brought to the task a degree of rich ideological commitment that allowed for a durable and significant legacy in terms of how people learn, both today and in the future, across cultures and settings. We consider this to be the ultimate accolade for any curriculum theorist.

Notes 1 Relevance is a concept and thus as a concept is polysemic and potentially powerful. 2 Jacques Derrida (1981) used the concept of deconstruction as a way of surfacing underlying framings of a concept or idea or object – essences are to be found in appearances and not as universals. It was an attempt to go beyond the universality implicit in ordinary explication and explanation, although Derrida denied that deconstruction was a method. However, the praxis and ethic of deconstruction cannot be sidestepped in this move. Deconstruction is an ethic with some universal qualities, as is the idea of deconstruing and reconstruing. 3 People, we would argue, have to be treated differently from other types of objects not least because they operate through dispositional concepts and volitions, and all this implies. 4 Reasons are different from, and operate in different ways to, physical causes. 5 Within this framework, behaviourists, complexity theorists, cognitivists, culturalhistorical activity theorists, social constructivists, symbol-processing theorists, sociocultural theorists of learning, actor network theorists and critical realists conceptualise the various elements of learning and the relations between them in different ways. 6 cf. O’Grady, P. (2002). 7 As we saw in Chapter 4 with Simone de Beauvoir’s psychoanalytical argument, it is not just unconscious forces and volitional choices that form and shape a woman’s identity, but also those discursive and material structures and configurations within which she is positioned as a woman. 8 We are suggesting here that a temporal distinction needs to be made between reasons and rationalisations of those reasons and this would be in accord with a view that sentient human beings have intentions and that these intentions are not irrelevant to any explanation we might want to make of an event or causal sequence. So, in the first instance, the rationalisation of the action might not be a part of the explanation of the original causal sequence at the first time point. However, this rationalisation might in turn be an important part of a new and different causal sequence, with a different object as its endpoint. A rationalisation of an explanation is a post-hoc explanatory mechanism and may have nothing to do with the original reason-causing activity, except insofar as it may constitute evidence for the identification of the original reason for the action (cf. Scott, 2021). 9 Michel Foucault refused to be categorised as a man: ‘my objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.’ (Foucault, 1982: 77). 10 Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher, who argued for a critical pedagogy. His most influential work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), is an emancipatory text that is concerned with different types of oppression, economic, work, wealth, social, gender and sex.

Decolonising the Curriculum 213 11 A banking model of education refers to the metaphor of students as containers or vessels into which educators must pour in or fill up with knowledge. 12 We have to be extremely careful about how we use the word indigenous, so that it is not understood in any derogatory way. 13 cf. Bhaskar (2011). 14 As we suggested in Chapter 1, this is a word used by Martin Heidegger (1962), translated from the original German word, Gestell, to denote those social, geohistorical, temporal, epistemological, political and discursive frames within which our thoughts and utterances are ineluctably embedded. 15 Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989) suggested this, although it is not a complete solution. 16 Difference as a concept then is both multi-perspectival and contested. 17 cf. Derrida (1978; 1981; 1982). 18 The core of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory is that the unconscious works like a language and that meaning is a network of differences. 19 For example, Ludwig Wittgenstein organised his material in units of remarks. In the first paragraph of the Preface to the Investigations, he suggested that: ‘I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, sometimes in longer chains about the same subject, sometimes jumping, in a sudden change, from one area to another’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, Preface), and he qualified this in the second paragraph, after first suggesting that he had tried to write philosophy in a conventional manner, in the following way: ‘… my thoughts soon grew feeble if I tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination. – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought. – The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes, which were made in the course of these long and meandering journeys’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, Preface). 20 This has consequences for authorship. This book, regardless of what it says on the front cover and title page, is jointly authored, with neither of us having precedence in the writing process. The fact that one author’s name is placed before the other has no significance for authorship and ownership of the writing process. 21 Brunetto Latini’s map of Paradise, Antonio Manetti’s mapping of the shape and size of hell, Ambrosius Holbein’s interpretation of the land of Utopia, Grayson Perry’s map of nowhere, Benjamin Hennig’s Mappae Mundi style grided population cartography and Layla Curtis’ NewcastleGateshead cultural map are taken from a book called ‘Fifty Maps and the Stories they tell’ by Jerry Brotton and Nick Millea, published in 2019. 22 Book of Imaginary Beings was written by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero and published in 1957 under the original Spanish title, Manual de zoología fantástica.

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Index

11+ Examination 166 A Question of Life: The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology 163 Abbott, P. 166 Ability 69, 193 Abjection 56–7 Aboriginal 110–1, 118 Abortion 69–70 Absenting 27, 58, 92, 119, 188, 203 Abstraction 31, 85, 87, 91 Acquired dispositions 7, 69, 85–7, 191 Actor network theory 212 Adoration 81 Afer 106 Affection 35, 81, 211 African women 178 Agalianos, A. 145 Agency 75, 120, 153, 157, 184, 198–9 Aggrawal, A. 18 Algorithmic formations 73, 87 Allan, J. 166 Alpha Kappa Alpha Black Women’s Sorority Group 179, 184, 185, 186 Altruism 81, 144 American pragmatism 182–4 Americanus 106 Amplification 97–8 Anderson, K. A. 180 Anderson, M. 106 Anemone, R. 107 Anna, O. 51 Appiah, A. 118 Archaeology 189–90 Archer, M. 207 Armitage, M. 160 Armstrong, D. 172

Arnold, T. 14, 126, 131 Articulating 27 Arts 10, 31 Asexual 5, 18 Ashley, J. 227 Asiaticus 106 Assessment 19, 83, 92, 98, 99, 122, 146, 156 Association of Deans of Women and Girls in Negro Schools 179 Astronomy 129 Attentiveness 5, 84 Austin, J. L. 63 Autosexual 18 Ayer, F. 41, 89 Bartick, M. 219 Barton, L. 174 Bather, F. 155 Battiste, M. 104–18 Beale, D. 122–34 Behavioural complexity 34, 168; objectives 92–3 Behaviourism 8, 92–3 Bell–Scott, P. 181 Beneficence 81 Benevolence 81 Bennett, D. 125 Bergman, N. 219 Bernardi, E. 132 Bernstein, B. 24, 35, 53, 103, 170 Bewley, S. 219 Bezemer, J. 63 Bhaskar, R. 31–2, 35, 36, 44, 49, 89, 117, 185, 203, 213 Binary 3, 5, 6, 10, 65, 74, 82, 105, 111, 190, 202; opposition 3, 6, 105, 111 Biography 119–22, 131 Biology 49, 74, 106, 107, 129, 211

Index 229 Bisexual 5, 18 Black university 16, 119 Black women 177–88 Blake, W. 14 Blood heritage 107 Bloom, P. 227 Bloomsbury Group 136 Blyth, A. 35 Board of Education 149 Bollack, J. 90 Bourdieu, P. 186–7 Brandom, R. 46–7 Brotton, J. 210, 213 Browne, Sir Thomas 111 Bruner, J. 27, 35 Bryant, M. 125 Burman, E. 137 Burstyn, J. 124 Butler, J. 74–5 Campbell-Day, M. 125 Capabilities approach 10, 67–9 Capitalism 65, 96 Care 80–90 Cared-for 11, 83–4 Caring 83–4; feelings and dispositions 87 Carroll, L. 134 Castration myth 52, 55 Categorical imperative 69, 79 Categoricity 12 Causation 34, 169 Cavell, S. 35 Central Advisory Council for Education 142 Change 85, 168–9 Charity 81 Chatelain, M. 180 Cheltenham Ladies College 122, 124 Chemistry 129, 211 Class oppression 4, 32, 116, 187 Clitoris 6 Cognitivism 8 Coherentism 37–50 Collins, P. H. 187 Colonisation 109, 199–200 Combinatorial theory of possibility 172 Comenius, J. 25 Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Handicapped and Young People 161–76 Community 4, 26, 72, 81, 155, 156, 157, 159, 182

Compassion 67, 81 Complexity theory 27, 35, 166, 212 Complex Electra 52; Oedipus 52 Concept 1–20, 189–213 Conceptual development 30–1 Concern 67 Conflating 92 Conscientização 198–9 Consciousness 60, 114–5 Consequentialist ethics 74, 78 Contextuality 12 Correspondence 45, 50, 96, 97, 105 Corrigibility 207 Cosmic education 156–7 Counter-conducts 197–8 Creativity 81, 92, 119, 121, 146 Criteria 10, 24, 26, 29, 33, 44–6 Critical feminism 5–6; pedagogy 26–7 Crosby Hall 123 Cultural-historical activity theory 94 Cummin, Dr. 124 Currer, R. 125 Curriculum 91–103; autonomousinstrumentalist 95; connected 99–100; conservative-restorationist 95; critical-reconceptualist 93; economist 95–6; epistemic-foundationalist 94–5; immersed 99–100; integrated 99–100; neoliberal 96–7; nested 99–100; networked 99–100; phenomenological 94; postmodernist 96; sequenced 99–100; shared 99–100; systemic– technological 92–3; threaded 99–100; traditional 99–100; webbed 99–100 Dahlen, H. 219 Dalton, T. C. 138 Daly, M. 18 Davidson, D. 49 Davis, A. 18 Decategorising feminism 6 Decolonisation 199–200 Decolonising knowledge 200 Delamont, S. 131 Deleveling 92 Deliberately falsifying 92 Denervaud, S. 154 Denial 19, 51, 66, 88, 113 Denotation 105, 190 Deontological ethics 15, 73 Derrida, J. 6, 10, 46, 49, 52, 53, 96, 111, 212, 213

230  Index Descartes, R. 43, 62, 114 Desire 15, 18, 41, 51, 52, 54, 56, 61, 64, 65, 72, 73, 76, 87, 110, 119, 131, 146, 157 Development 135–160 Devotion 81 Dewey, J. 16, 26, 135, 137, 141, 145, 151, 157, 177, 182–6, 188 Dialectic 58, 60, 82, 188, 191, 203 Didactics 24–6, Diegesis 140, 145 Difference 3, 5, 6, 10, 18, 33, 34, 38, 54, 55, 56, 64, 68–9, 72, 74, 76, 82, 84, 89, 107, 109–11, 115, 128, 155, 169, 194, 202, 204–6 Dina, J. 185 Disability 164–71 Discipline Principle 19, 48, 100–3 Discourse 18, 105–6 Discrimination 86, 111, 177–83 Discursive configuration 105–6 Displacement 51 Dispositif 104–5 Disposition 80–90 Dispositional knowledge 4; realism 7 Disregarding 92 Distorting 92 Distribution 24, 69–70 Distributive justice 68 Dixon, R. 70 Doctrine of Discovery 112 Dorling, K. 169 Dove, J. 129, 131 Dreams 54 Drummond, M. J. 144 Du Bois, W. E. B. 183 Dunayevskaya, R. 18 Durkheim, E. 41, 95, 103 Dyhouse, C. 125 Education 122–34 Edusemiotics 51–63 Ego 51–52 Elementary Education Act, 1970 14 Emancipation 86, 116, 198–9 Embodied knowledge 8 Emotion 52, 60, 67 Empirical 7, 19, 37, 42–5 Endogeny 58 Endowed Schools Act, 1869 125 Enframing 7, 35, 55, 117, 190–1 English (Language and Literature) 129 Environment 7, 14, 30, 37, 45, 61, 68, 89, 93, 94, 99

Epistemic feminism 3–6; virtues 64–79 Epistemology 34–42 Equality 68–72; formal 68–9; moral 68–9; proportional 68–9 Erogenous experiences 51–6 Espacement 111 Essentialism 85, 89, 90, 94–5 Ethics 34, 41, 72–5 Ethnicity 177–9 Eugenics 108, 117 Eurocentric scientific knowledge 8, 11, 88–9, 105, 119, 199 Europaeus 106 Evolutionary theory 12, 106 Excluding 92 Existentialism 55, 63 Exogeny 58 Exploitation 4, 32, 65 Expression 8, 27 Extending 27 Exteriorisation 11, 192 Eyken, van der W. 142 Facts 38–42 Falsely ascribing 92 Father 51–7 Female genital mutilation 64–6; Act, 2003 65 Feminine ethic 72–5 Feminism 3–6 Feminist naturalism 4 Finnis, J. 76–7 Flax, J. 18 Fletcher, S. 125 Fodor, J. 90 Foucault, M. 3, 18, 42, 104, 108, 117, 118, 197–8 Foundationalism 42–5 Foundherentism 42–5 Fragility 85, 207–8 Frames 32–4 Freire, P. 198–9 French 129 Freud, S. 51–4 Frezza Cali, C. 185 Frierson, P. 148, 153–4 Froebel, F. 135 Futuring 27, 28, 95 Gadamer, H.-G. 50, 213 Gamble, J. 219 Gardner, D. 136 Gay 5, 18

Index 231 Gender 3, 91–103 Grazzini, C. 156 Gender-sensitive curriculum 91–103 Gendering 3–4 Genealogy 24, 32, 80, 108, 116, 177, 209 Generalisation 25, 87, 173 Generosity 81 Genetics 106, 138 German 129 Gilligan, C. 59, 63, 84 Girl-child 2, 9, 10 God 25, 131 Godwin, W. 14–5 Gorman, D. 128 Graham, P. 136, 142 Greek 15, 24–6, 112, 129 Greene, M. 23–36 Gresham College 123 Gribble, K. 19 Griffin, S. 18 Grosskurt, P. 137 Guardian Newspaper 117 Gupta, A. 219 Haack, S. 37–50 Hall, J. 142 Heidegger, M. 18, 49, 213 Help 81 Herdlein, R. 185 Hermeneutics 25, 33, 40, 48, 120, 204 Heterosexism 4, 32, 116 Hevel, M. S. 182 Hierarchy 33, 59, 62, 72, 82–4, 95, 206 Higher education 177–88 Hind, A. 166 Hinge 45–50 Historical 13–6, 24, 32, 80, 108, 116, 177, 209; origin 106; texts 11, 45 History of science 3 Hobbes, T. 66, 79, 144 Hochschild, A. 180 Hocking, J. 219 Holcroft, T. 14 Hood, P. 135 hooks, bell 204 Howard University 119, 178–9 Hull, D. 155 Human functional capabilities 67–8; potential 177–88 Hume, D. 33, 36, 48, 89 Humours 104–5; choleric 104; melancholic 104–5; phlegmatic 104; sanguine 104

Hygiene 105 Hysteria 51, 62 Identity 112–5 Ideology of inclusion 162 Ihle, E. L. 182 Imagination 23–36 Imagining 23–36 Immanent critique 200–201 Immordino-Yang, M. 218 Inclusion 161–76 Indigeneity 104–18 Indigenising 104–18 Inkpin, I. 131 Inferential semantics 46–7 Innateness 106 Institute of Education 1 Intensifying 27 Interiorisation 207 Interpretivism 94 Intersectionality 4, 32, 75 Intersex 2, 4, 5, 6 Intuitionism 82 Irigaray, L. 55 Isaacs, S. 135–47 Isaksen, R. 49 Itard, J. 152 James, W. 183–4 Jones, C. 18 Jordan, E. 130 Judgemental rationality 9, 44, 48, 49 Justification 37–50 Justifying 37–50 Kamm, J. 130 Kant, I. 24, 40, 41, 46, 49, 69, 76, 79, 89, 158, 183 Kendrick, W. 137 Kensington Society 126 Kidd, E. 159 Kirby, P. 165 Kirloskar-Steinbach, M. 132 Klein, M. 135, 136, 137, 140, 147 Knebel, J-F. 216 Knowledge 1–20, 104–118, 189, 213 Kohlberg, L. 58–9 Kramer, R. 149 Kilpatrick, W. H. 151, 157 Kirkham, J. 159 Kress, G. 63 Kristova, J. 51–63

232  Index Language 2–3, 19, 34, 38, 45, 48, 56–7, 80, 88, 104, 108, 145, 174, 201 Latin 24, 25, 35, 112, 129, 211 Lawrence, E. 137 Learning approaches 61–2; coaching 61; hypothesis-testing 62; meta-cognition 62; mimesis 61; observation 61; peer-learning 61; practice 62; reflection 62; trial and error 62 Leaton Gray, S. 1, 144 Legitimacy 76, 96, 105 Leibniz, G. 167 Lesbian 5, 18 Level 32–4; actual 32; associational 32; atomic 33; causal 33; functional 34; hermeneutic 34; holism 34; linguistic 34; semantic 34; structural 34 Liberal Arts College 178; feminism 3–6; theory of justice 10 Liberality 4 Libertarian feminism 3–6 Lifelong learning 1, 122 Lifeworld 1, 2, 21, 28, 31, 37, 51, 53, 74, 80, 90, 102, 189 Lillard, A. 157, 158, 159 Linearity 207 Local authority 146, 168 Locke, A. 181, 182, 183 Locke, J. 144, 160, 171 London Institution 123 Love 15, 28, 67, 74, 81, 138, 148, 155, 211 Male hegemony 187; /female 2, 3, 6, 38, 64, 105, 190, 202; sexual pleasure 5, 52, 64 Malting House School 14, 135–45 Maps 209–12; Abraham Maslow’s motivational map of human needs 210; Ambrosius Holbein’s interpretation of the land of utopia 210; Antonio Manetti’s mapping of the shape and size of hell 211; Benjamin Hennig’s Mappae Mundi style grided population cartography 211; Brunetto Latini’s map of paradise 211; Grayson Perry’s map of nowhere 211; Ivan Sanderson’s taxonomy of knowledge map 211; Jorge-Luis Borges’ classifications of animals 211; Layla Curtis’ NewcastleGateshead cultural map 211–2 Marriageability 64 Marshall, J. 151, 159

Martin, J. 138 Martin, J. R. 91–103 Maslow, A. 210 Massification of higher education 186 Master–slave 65 Mastery 155, 160 Material Objects 1–20 Mathisen, R. 219 Maturana, H. 167 Maternal instincts 56, 82 Matricide 57 Maturity 143, 156, 165, 168 Mazzucato, M. 93 McCarthy, D. 137 McGraw, M. 138, 140 Meaning 1–20, 189–213 Media 5, 29, 97, 98 Mediation 44, 46, 54, 57, 94 Meisel, P. 137 Menopause 56 Menstruation 56 Mental Health 82 Merleau-Ponty, M. 27, 103 Meta-epistemic 7, 105, 190; -reality 32, 36 Metaphysical Ethics 34, 50, 89, 94 Methodology 7, 26, 33, 190 Meyer, J. W. 186 Mill, J-S. 4, 18, 74, 169 Millea, N. 210, 213 Miller, A. S. 181 Miller, J. viii–xii Mind 5, 7, 8, 12, 15, 19, 30, 34, 35, 36, 46, 51, 53, 54, 57, 60, 61, 67, 79, 81, 84, 87, 88, 93, 94, 97, 114–5, 171, 175 Miscegenation 107 Modal argument 175 Monism 55, 183 Montessori, M. 148–160; method 148 Moral guide 83 Morality 59, 66, 77, 81, 85, 156 Mother 51–7 Mothering 51–7 Motility 61 Muller, J. 95, 227 Murray, J. 134 Muscular christianity 14, 131 Nagel, T. 63, 115 Narrative 55, 57, 63, 96, 102, 111, 113, 114, 120, 121, 191, 198, 201 National Association of College Women 179; Council of Negro Women 179

Index 233 Natural world 36 Negating 27 Neo-marxism 18 Nelson, C. 131 Network 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 16, 21, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 37, 40, 45, 47, 49, 53, 80–2, 99–100, 106, 108, 111, 116, 175, 191, 207 Neurosis 52, 59 Nidiffer, J. 179 Nobility 15 Noddings, N. 80–90 Normative feminism 3–6 Normativity 48, 89 Noss, R. 145 Nothingness 164, 172–3 Object categorisation 6, 87, 93, 112, 167, 202; configurational 2, 3, 7; discursive 1–19; human 1–19; material 1–19; progression 51–63; relational 1–9 Objectivity 94 Offen, S. 74 Ogden, T. H. 140 O’Grady, P. 212 Oliver, M. 165 One-caring 83, 85 Online Etymological Dictionary 24, 81, 112, 118 Oral 51 Oxford High School for Girls 163 Paine, T. 14 Passivity 82, 182 Patience 155 Patriarchy 17 Patterson, M. 180 Paying attention 16 Pedagogy 23–36 Peirce, C. S. 50, 52, 53, 183, 188 Perceptual Complexity 27 Performativity 105, 108, 146 Perkins, L. M. 180 Personal identity 112–15 Personality 52 Pestalozzi, J. H. 135 Phenomenal possibilities 49 Phenomenology 94 Phenotypicality 107 Philanthropy 117 Philosophy 16, 32 Physicality 8, 154,

Physics 48 Piaget, J. 135 Pinar, W. 11 Plato 89, 170 Play 30–6, 135–46 Pleasure 5, 51, 52, 64, 65, 68 Pluralism 183–4 Political feminism 3–6 Porter, R. 105 Positivist/empiricist method 19 Power 19, 31–2 Pragmatism 34, 53 Praxis 11–13, 119–21 Preservation of Virginity 64 Pretending 36 Private language 88 Process knowledge 1–20 Production 24 Progression 27–8 Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act, 1985 64 Projection 51 Properties 166–8 Propositional knowledge 1–20 Pruitt-Logan, S. 181 Psychoanalysis 51–63 Putnam, H. 66 Queens College, London 123 Queer/questioning 5, 18 Quine, W. V. O. 49 Race 106–8 Racial discrimination 106–8; segregation 106–8 Racism 106–8 Raikes, R. 123, 124 Ramabai, P. S. 131–3 Radical feminism 1–20 Rational/irrational binary 5 Rawls, J. 68, 69, 78 Reading the world as a text 201–2 Realising 27 Reay, B. 126 Recontextualisation 24 Reducing 92 Referentiality 207 Reflection 207 Reflexivity 207 Regression 19 Remedial 170 Representation 5–8

234  Index Repression 51 Reproduction 24 Reproductive capacities 56 Resistance 197–8 Responsibilities 141 Rights 68–70, 75–8 Rorty, R. 37, 42, 47, 66, 78, 79, 96 Rousseau, J. J. 135, 144 Russell, B. 43, 147 Sammons, P. 166 Sartre, J-P. 10, 163, 174 Schofer, E. 186 Science 3, 12, 14, 24, 34, 38, 48, 50, 55, 58, 63, 73, 87, 89, 92, 96, 98, 100, 105, 118, 129, 132, 146, 155, 200 Scientific method 48–50 Scott, B. 103, 117 Scott, D. 49, 103, 117, 212 Searle, J. 39, 225 Self-awareness 26 Selflessness 59, 81 Sellars, W. 7, 19, 49, 194, 195 Semantic conditionals 87 Semantics 45–8 Semiotic 51–63 Sen, A. 69, 72 Serious Crime Act, 2015 215 Sex 64–79 Sexism 1–9 Sexual preference 8, 112 Sexuality 1–19 Shapira, M. 136 Sheskin, M. 227 Shillito, E. 124, 125 Sicroff, A. 117 Signs 52–4 Slowe, L. D. 177–88 Social constructivism 108; exclusion 10, 26, 64, 111; justice 64–79; pedagogy 26 Socio-cultural theory 92, 94 Solicitousness 80 Soulsby, L. 129, 131 Soundy, C. 159 Space of reasons 7, 19 Special educational needs 161–74 Specifying source 12 St Hilda’s College, Oxford 124–5 Stages 51–4; anal 52; genital 52; latent 52; phallic 52 Standish, P. 49 Steadman, C. 134 Strawson, P. 79, 163

Subjectivity 5, 12, 56, 60, 91, 197, 207 Subjects 24, 99–102 Sublimation 51 Suffrage 134, 204 Summerhill 137 Super-agent 60 Superego 51 Sutherland, G. 130 Symbol 51–4 Symbol-processing theory 212 Symbolic 51–4 Tamboukou, M. 130 Taggart, J. 157 Taxonomy 211–2 Taylor, C. 49 Technical rationality 12–13 Tender-heartedness 81 Textualising 207–9 Thayer-Bacon, B. 150–1 The Angel in the House 122 The Textbook of History 124 The Warnock Report 161–76 Thoughtfulness 81 Time 3 Training 15, 25, 67, 93, 124, 130, 134 Trait-theory 11 Transformation 1, 9, 11 Transgendered 5 True-knowledge 37, 41, 190 Truth as coherence 97; as consensus 97; as correspondence 97; as warranted belief 97; as what works 97 Turner, B. 142 Turner, G. C. 182 Turtle LOGO 145–6 Understanding 1–20, 104–118, 189, 213 Unfolding 12, 27 Universal 64–79 Universal hermeneutics 64–79 Universals of coherent thought 66 Usher, R. 117 Value 1–19 Valued configurations 1–19 Variable 32, 33, 41, 206 Virtue ethics 35, 73 Vocationalism 122 Vygotsky, L. 94, 103 Walker, S. 219 Walkerdine, V. 63, 147

Index 235 Warnock, M. 161–76 Watson, J. B. 117 Weil, S. 16 West, A. 166 Whitty, G. 145 Whole-person transformations 11 Wilchins, R. 6 Willan, J. 142 Winnicote, D. 137 Wismann, H. 90 Wittgenstein, L. 18, 19, 35, 38, 50, 90, 213

Woolf, V. 18 Wollstonecraft, M. xiii–xv Woman’s refuge 191 Wordsworth, W. 14 World Health Organization 64 Wynn, K. 144 Young, M. 95 Youngblood (Sa’ke’j) Henderson, J. 105–6 Youth 151