Social Education implies a constant exposition to human experiences of vulnerability and suffering. In this paper, Levinas’s philosophy of alterity and, specifically, the notion of hospitality constitutes our ethical lens to explore educational encounters in non-formal contexts within the Spanish Social Sector. The study is developed from a hermeneutic phenomenological approach into the depth of lived experiences of eight social educators who currently work with different populations groups. The testimonies, explored through semi-structured interviews, are presented in a conversational, dialogic, poetic (...) format. First, Levinas’ philosophy is presented as our ethical position, focusing on subjectivity as hospitality. Secondly, methodological aspects regarding hermeneutics are addressed. Finally, the testimonies of social educators are presented in an evocative way, exploring uncertainty and three different tensions regarding human relations in their practices: physical spaces, affection, and embodiment. (shrink)

Intellectual character education has been primarily expressed in terms of educating for intellectual virtues (EFIV). This aim of teaching intellectual virtues has received some challenges, such as how it fails to articulate adequate action guidance through exemplarist pedagogy, and how it neglects the pervasiveness of intellectual vice among students. To respond to these challenges, this paper considers the aim of educating against intellectual vices (EAIV) – teaching students not to develop intellectual vices or weakening those that they have already developed (...) – which comes with the emergence of vice epistemology. More specifically, I look at how negative epistemic exemplars can be used as a classroom strategy for EAIV, and demonstrate how this could address the aforementioned weaknesses of EFIV. (shrink)

Critical studies in higher education often embrace the ideas of the slowness movement to address time pressure. However, this desirable horizon presents some limitations. On the one hand, by emphasizing solutions at the individual level, boosting slowness may promote tactics incapable of producing changes to the underlying structural dynamics of time pressure. On the other hand, approaches based on slowness may also inadvertently foster a form of ethical paternalism within the context of ethical pluralism by prescribing substantive models of practice (...) ultimately based on ‘do this quickly or do it slowly.’ This theoretical research moves away from the temporal paradigm to that of the way of relating. Building upon the ethical concept of resonance, the approach focuses on a formal critique of the current socioeconomic and ethical dynamics of social acceleration, growth, and innovation that can contribute to projecting non-alienated relationships in higher education. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the tension between professional and liberal education by revisiting The Idea of the University (1852), the seminal mid-nineteenth century treatise of John Henry Newman. In returning to Newman’s classic text, we are interested in the significance of his lectures for a contemporary Higher Education increasingly under pressure to be ‘useful:’ on this understanding, ‘useful’ denotes an arguably limited and utilitarian sense where the university guarantees its students a well-paying job on graduation. In pressing on this distinction between (...) ‘the useful’ and ‘the useless’ – a distinction that continues to plague discourse on the contemporary university – our paper focuses on the experiential and pedagogical aspects of education that find recurring emphasis in Newman’s classic work: aspects of place, of community, and of the teacher–student relationship. (shrink)

Contract cheating is a challenging problem facing higher and further education providers (HE and FE) worldwide. In the UK, contract cheating has been identified as a growing problem by the HEA and, more recently, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education and the Department for Education. The high rate of contact cheating among students suggests that 8–9% of degrees awarded in the UK are unsafe. To address this issue, the current study with a new approach seeks to investigate student’s motivations, (...) experiences, and rationale for using contract cheating from their point of view. Collected data has been subjected to content analysis and the findings show different phases and drivers in this process. This study will help increase awareness among UK academics and education providers about the processes involved in contract cheating and propose a set of recommendations for the future. (shrink)

In his ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of ‘educative violence’ as a contemporary manifestation of ‘divine violence’. In this paper, we aim to interpret ‘educative violence’ by examining other instances where the young Benjamin addresses pedagogical issues. By connecting the concept of divine violence to Benjamin’s ideas of education in tradition and of the schooling of Geist, our goal is twofold: firstly, to comprehend the productive role that violence may play in the pedagogical context, and (...) secondly, to apply it to the conception of schooling presented by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons to highlight its relevance to school education. By linking scholastic violence to divine violence, we argue that schools must be defended not despite but because of the violence they inhere. In doing so, we contribute another layer to the defense of the school and offer fresh insights into Benjamin’s notion of divine violence. (shrink)

Our survey of literature on moral dilemmas in teaching reveals that scholars declare the need to unequivocally resolve them yet refrain from doing so. This phenomenon is rooted in falure to distinguish between the different moral conflicts. The methods of resolving abstract hypothetical dilemmas, advocated but not implemented by the scholars, are poorly suited to deal with conflicts involving social pressure and high-stakes consequences for the parties involved, like most of the conflicts that teachers report. Thus, textbooks invite teachers to (...) resolve dilemmas on their own through reflection and dialogue, beyond the limits which Habermasian ethics of dialogue allows. The scholarship licenses lax attitudes towards commitment to professional and ethical standards by appealing to the ethics of care. It appeals to outdated versions of ethics of care that posit care in opposition to the ethics of duties, no longer employed in ethics of nursing and other caring professions. (shrink)