0000000000113803
AUTHOR
Luis S. Villacañas De Castro
El eterno retorno en Borges, Blanqui, Whitman: retornos de la filosofía a partir de Nietzsche
Como Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges intuyó que la doctrina del eterno retorno debía relacionarse, de alguna manera, con la eternidad. En su versión no es el sujeto como tal quien acababa siendo eterno, sino solamente el instante que vuelve. Por contraposición a aquello que tanto Borges como Nietzsche llamaron eterno retorno, este ensayo pretende demostrar que en la versión del mismo que durante el siglo xix ideó Auguste Blanqui encontramos una metafísica más rigurosa y completa, puesto que también justificaría el principio de eternidad, del que aquellos no pudieron dar cuenta. Finalmente, defenderemos que la obra del poeta Walt Whitman también debería entenderse desde el esquema de Blanqui, y…
Teaching English as a Non-Imperial Language in an Underprivileged Public School in Spain
This article summarizes the processes and findings of a 2-year collaborative action research (CAR) project that analyzed and aimed to counteract some of the most negative educational effects of English linguistic imperialism in the field of English language teaching (ELT) and, more concretely, in the context of English as a foreign language education in Spain. The CAR investigated the ramifications of this phenomenon in a primary school located in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city of València. The pedagogical alternative it embraced in order to reverse the underlying tenets of ELT under present-day neoliberal imperialism consisted in combining art and multimodality thr…
‘We are more than EFL teachers – we are educators’: emancipating EFL student-teachers through photovoice
AbstractThe prevailing pedagogical orientations of English as a foreign language (EFL) education in Spain oppress learners intellectually in ways that are counterproductive to their learning. As a reaction to this, 129 EFL student-teachers (STs) took part during the 2013/14, 2014/15, and 2015/16 academic years in a workshop which drew on the methodology of participatory action research and on photovoice as a data-creating strategy, in order to emancipate these STs intellectually, boost their EFL development, and offer an alternative critical model for their future EFL teaching. The research was assessed collectively through a variety of qualitative strategies. Results showed that the photov…
Museum education, cultural sustainability, and English language teaching in Spain
The collaborative action research project presented analysed the potential of museum education to radically transform the way in which English was taught and learnt in three diverse elementary, middle, and high-school contexts in the province of València (Spain). Insights from museum education and New Literacy Studies were used to expand upon the pedagogical affordances of the material and multimodal dimensions of English language teaching, in order to generate more opportunities for student motivation and engagement by connecting with the learners' home and community cultures, identities, languages, and literacies. To assess the impact of the project, a variety of qualitative strategies we…
Translating Teacher Funds of Identity into Curricular Proposals for the EFL Classroom: A Model for Student-Teacher Innovation and Professional Development
This article describes the progress and findings of a research project, organized in the context of a university Masters course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), which aimed at translating the student-teachers' (STs) funds of identity into worthwhile curricular proposals for the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) subject. The first part of the research involved 38 STs in three workshops through which they became aware of their own funds of identity, expanded their own teacher identity, and finally designed curricular proposals that incorporated their funds of identity as valuable pedagogical resources. The second part of the research took place during the two-month practicu…
Marx y el ejemplo (sobre los límites de la racionalidad científica capitalista)
The following article aims at explaining 1) which exactly is the model of scientific rationality involved in the capitalist comprehension of economy; 2) why is this model deficient in managing the economic reality Marx discovered —a discovery (Marx’s) that necessarily contributed new factors to the western model of scientific rationality; finally, 3) why may Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis hold, vis-à-vis capitalist scientific rationality, a similar place to the one enjoyed by Marx’s theory.<br><br>Este artículo pretende explicar: 1) qué modelo de racionalidad científica (con qué exigencias y qué postulados) subyace a la comprensión capitalista de la economía; 2) por qué ese mode…
The Role of Second-language Learning in diagnosing Students Gaps of Knowledge. Towards a symptomatic Use of Interdisciplinarity
Abstract This discussion-paper aims to present a concrete, albeit untested, hypothesis regarding how second-language learning lessons could prove useful in diagnosing essential signs of confusion, misunderstanding, or of any other kind of cognitive blunder which affects the scientific knowledge of late primary-education students (aged 10-12). In opposition to the somewhat rigid means of evaluation normally employed in content-oriented subjects, such as History, Biology, etc. —exams, tests and written assignments, carried out, as a rule, in the children‘s native language—, this discussion-paper defends that the accuracy of the student's knowledge may also, though not only, be evaluated by pa…
The Pedagogical Problem: Vygotsky’s Encounter with Marx’s Phenomenal Forms
As advanced at the end of the previous chapter, the present one underscores the need to reassess Karl Marx’s contribution from the standpoint of pedagogy, in order for this field to come to terms with his sophisticated theory of the Erscheinungsformen or phenomenal forms. This analysis seems particularly pertinent in relation to the work of the early-Soviet scholar Lev Vygotsky, who allegedly deployed this concept in his own account of cognitive development in human beings. Indeed, despite the many educational fields that Marx’s work has impacted on—most obviously sociology of education, but also educational psychology, particularly thanks to the theoretical developments made by the author …
Introduction: The Pedagogical Obstacle of the Phenomenal Forms
This book is a further development from a previous one, published only in Spanish, whose title can be translated as The Copernican turn and the social sciences (Villacanas de Castro, 2013). It was a philosophical work relating to a general epistemological problem lying at the heart of the social and natural sciences. On the other hand, the present volume is firmly rooted in pedagogy. This difference reflects the professional journey that I have made in the meantime, from being a Graduate Student at a Faculty of Philosophy to becoming a member of staff at a Faculty of Education, where I currently lecture and carry out research. Despite the various shifts brought about by this transition, an …
Beyond The Ignorant Schoolmaster : On Education, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis
This first chapter introduces the main concepts of Marxist sociology and Freudian psychoanalysis, two theories that have been intensely devoted to investigating and overcoming the epistemological effects caused by the phenomenal forms which inhered in the mode of production and the psychic apparatus, their respective subject matters. Their two prominent spearheads, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, soon understood that their scientific endeavors depended on deciphering the mechanisms which, in each case, generated these distorted reflections. These mechanisms were class division—the complex network that in any given social milieu consolidates around specific relations of production—and the split…
The Pedagogical Solution: Freire’s Critical Pedagogy and Social Democracy
‘A critical [educational] process is driven and justified by mutuality. This ethic of mutual development’, argued Ira Shor (2009) in the context of his analysis of Freire’s dialogic pedagogy, ‘can be thought as of a Freirean addition to the Vygotskyan one’ (p. 291). As this quote suggests, the aim of this chapter is to describe the essential feature of Paulo Freire’s solution to the conundrum that Lev Vygotsky’s framework stumbled upon. While Shor’s sentence hits the target, it relies on a widespread opinion among education scholars, who tend to emphasize the ethical component of critical pedagogy in general and Freire’s project in particular (Darder, 2009; Flores-Kastaris et al., 2009). In…
A Practical Case of Participatory Meta-Action Research
As already noted in the Introduction to this book, this chapter contains the only experimental contribution to this volume. Its basic purpose is to illustrate the degree of applicability of the most relevant concepts presented so far: namely, phenomenal forms, critical pedagogy, educational action research, and the pedagogical role of certain basic principles, and furthermore, to assess their potential to orient real situations of educational practice. Before the details of the specific research are presented, however, an introduction to the diverse forms of educational action research seems appropriate at this point, especially if this introduction is to help the reader to draw connections…
Formulating 'principles of procedure' for the foreign language classroom: A framework for process model language curricula
This article aims to apply Stenhouse's process model of curriculum to foreign language (FL) education, a model which is characterized by enacting principles of procedure which are specific to the discipline which the school subject belongs to. Rather than to replace or dissolve current approaches to FL teaching and curriculum development, this article seeks to improve and enrich communicative and task-based orientations with an additional criterion for assessing the educational worth of the tasks through which these orientations are developed. Unlike the objectives and competences models, principles of procedure provide an intrinsic justification of school curriculum by enacting the epistem…
La pedagogía y la epistemología sometidas a examen. El inesperado potencial de la pedagogía «liberal» de John Elliott para la enseñanza de contenidos en las ciencias sociales y humanas
In an attempt to provide an in-depth analysis of John Elliott’s prolonged contribution to the field of educational and curricular studies, the following paper starts by locating this pedagogue’s work in the context of key ideological debates of the 20th century, whose consequences shaped the realm of the social and the human sciences. Elliott’s stand at this ideological crossroads is defined as liberal, on account of the way he tied his own educational philosophy to the ethical sphere and to the means of education, in opposition to the learning of objective knowledge. The second part of the paper explores Elliott’s pedagogy from the point of view of the potential it may have to suggest a cu…
Philosophical tenets of action research in education
The juxtaposition of action and research conveys a sense of the richness and complexity of action research, yet it does not entirely translate its nuanced and sophisticated philosophy. In turn, an understanding of this philosophy is crucial for grasping action research’s radical originality. In this context at least, it may be more accurate to define action research by drawing on the term practice, even though it does not form part of the basic conceptual pair. Not only does practice make it easier for us to trace the constellation of philosophical influences behind the theory and practice of action research—from pragmatism to postmodernism, including Greek philosophy and Marxist and psycho…
The Critical Potential of John Elliott’s Liberal Pedagogy
This chapter will continue to explore the difficult balance that, as shown in the previous one, held together the content and process dimensions of social democracy’s and Freire’s pedagogical projects. The same balance will now be approached from the standpoint of the liberal tradition, which provides critical pedagogy with one of the poles of the relationship that this book identifies at the heart of its success. John Elliott’s work on pedagogy and educational action research has been chosen for this purpose. From the early 1970s, when he started writing, to the beginning of this new century, the world has undergone important material and ideological transformations that I believe can be p…
'Why Should I Study English If I'm Never Going To Leave This Town?' Developing Alternative Orientations To Culture in the EFL Classroom Through CAR
This article describes the progress and findings of a collaborative action research project on the cultural dimension in primary levels of EFL education in Valencia (Spain). Its aim was to explore whether the EFL subject tended to ignore the students¿ native cultural background, and if so, whether this omission brought negative pedagogical consequences. It involved ten student-teachers who were carrying out their practicum placements at schools in the region, ten EFL school teachers, and a university researcher. Collective meetings were held to critically analyze the school experiences, and design experimental interventions to give a different orientation to culture in the EFL class. By the…
Matter, Literacy, and English Language Teaching in an Underprivileged School in Spain
This article analyzes the processes and findings of a collaborative action research (CAR) project that aimed to analyze the potential of materiality to radically transform the way English was taught and learned in an underprivileged public school in Spain. The CAR drew on new materialisms and new literacy studies to explore the relationship between matter and English language teaching from socioeconomic, sociocultural, and technological perspectives. The main pedagogical strategy consisted of widening the quantity and quality of the material resources in the English classroom, precisely to draw a material link between the English classroom and the students' homes, communities, and the infor…
El derecho y la revolución copernicana de Marx (Notas para un derecho científico a partir de ·El orden de El capital", de Carlos Fernández Liria y Luis Alegre Zahonero)
Taking for granted that Marx’s economic theory enjoys a scientific status and, furthermore, that it installed a real Copernican revolution in sociology, the present paper explores the possibility of deriving a system of law deserving the name of “scientific” in so far as it would be in keeping with the theses of the latter scientific theory. In this context, the paper argues against a claim recently sustained by Fernandez Liria and Alegre Zahonero, for whom a system of right compatible with Marx’s theory would be compatible, too, with the classic juridical formulations conceived during the Enlightenment. The main reason why this paper testifies against such compatibility is that the enlight…
L'enseignement interdisciplinaire de la littérature pour enfants écrite en anglais
El objetivo de este estudio es el de elaborar una propuesta didáctica que maximice el tiempo y los recursos destinados a la enseñanza del inglés durante los tres ciclos que, en España, recibe la educación primaria, con alumnos con edades comprendidas entre los 6 y los 12 años. El método escogido para lograr dicho objetivo es la interdisciplinariedad, de tal modo que pueda lograrse la síntesis de contenidos pertenecientes a distintas disciplinas y áreas curriculares, en este caso a la “Enseñanza de una lengua extranjera” (inglés) y al “Conocimiento del medio natural, social y cultural”. El contexto práctico de esta propuesta, en cambio, es únicamente el conformado por las clases correspondie…