ACCESS Archive — Vol 44 2024
Workload and the crisis in Australian school teaching
16 Jul 2024
Doug Goldson High School Teacher, Queensland, Australia Abstract The teaching profession in Australia is in crisis. There is a dramatic shortage of teachers and little prospect of significant improvement in the years ahead. This commentary gives an insider view of what is wrong with the teach…
Events
Symposium: The Changing Landscape of Education and ITE in Aotearoa
24 Jun 2024
Friday 30 August, 9.30am–3.30pm — Community Engagement Hub Rehua 108, Ilam Campus
Co-hosted by Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) and Te Kaupeka Ako Faculty of Education, this symposium brings together teachers, principals, academics and educators to draw on educational philosophy and theory to address topics of interest for practitioners in schools and centres…
Agora Archive — Columns
Steve Bannon’s Ideological Juggernaut
20 Jun 2024
Zachary B. Wolf described a recent conservative gathering featuring Steve Bannon as speaker. ‘Are we at war?’ Bannon demanded of the crowd, his voice slicing through the air. ‘Is this a political war to the knife?’ The phrase, steeped in historical resonance, harks back to a pro-slavery newspaper fr…
Agora Archive — Columns
From West to East
14 Jun 2024
1. The Decline and Backsliding of Liberal Democracy The decline and backsliding of liberal democracy, often referred to as ‘democratic backsliding,’ is a phenomenon where countries experience a gradual decline in the quality of their democratic institutions and practices. This trend is characterised…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Emerging International Order: Debating Polarity in Global Politics
11 Jun 2024
1: How many superpowers are there in today’s global politics? In today’s global politics, the most common perception is that there are two primary superpowers: the United States and China. This dyad is often referred to as a ‘bipolar’ world order, where these two nations are considered to have the g…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Pentecostalisation of Donald Trump
3 Jun 2024
The former president, defiant and unyielding, his signature bronzed face turning red before the cameras at Trump Tower, dismissed the legal process that made him a felon with a wave of his tiny hand. ‘Rigged,’ he repeated, his voice echoing through the room, a declaration of his studied refusal to a…
Agora Archive — Columns
Nuclear Geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific
1 Jun 2024
Introduction The Pacific region has been a geopolitical theatre of complex and multifaceted nuclear politics, marked by key milestones that have shaped the trajectory of international relations. This represents a period of seventy-five years that has passed through a related series of events marked…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Hedge-Fund Driven Neoliberal University in a Time of Crisis
27 May 2024
There can be little doubt that neoliberalism has undermined, if not crippled, the notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere – a protective and courageous space where students can speak, write, and act from a position of agency and informed judgment. This should be a space where educat…
Agora Archive — Columns
Surviving the Age of Gloom
22 May 2024
The post-truth zeitgeist relentlessly haunts us as meaning becomes ever more detached from representation, as signs now refer not to conceptually settled ‘signified’ meanings but only to other signs, vanishing in an endless chain of time-worn signifiers devoid of inherent intelligibility. Such langu…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Dialectics of Revolution
17 May 2024
In the realm of philosophical discourse, dialectical philosophy stands apart from the individualistic rationality championed by the Enlightenment. Unlike the Enlightenment’s emphasis on solitary logical analysis, dialectics asserts that entities can only be comprehended in their relational context,…
Agora Archive — Columns
Educating for Aesthetic Experiences
10 May 2024
Laura D’Olimpio shares an excerpt from her new book The Necessity of Aesthetic Education: The Place of the Arts on the Curriculum (Bloomsbury, 2024). Educating for aesthetic experiences An aesthetic experience arises from engaging in a particular way – a way that is open and receptive to what is the…
Agora Archive — Columns
The Politic Rhetoric of Bloodbath Politics
10 May 2024
In 2020, during a remarkable display of spiritual hysteria, Paula White, the wackadoodle spiritual advisor to former President Trump, embarked on a proclamation that reverberated both with a maddening celestial invocation and unhinged theological assertion influenced by a ‘Moonies cult’ revelation o…
Books
The Necessity of Aesthetic Education: the place of the arts on the curriculum
7 May 2024 — Laura D’Olimpio
The Necessity of Aesthetic Education is a manifesto. That which is experienced through engagement with art, through the many various and diverse art forms and media, is uniquely and essentially valuable to the lives of human beings. In order to fully appreciate and gain the most out of the arts, which offer a variety of aesthetic experience, there are concepts, skills and techniques integral to such understanding. In this book, Laura D'Olimpio argues that aesthetic education ought to be a compulsory part of education for all school-aged students, from pre-primary to high school, on the basis of its distinctive value. Such an argument is timely, given the so-called crisis in the arts and humanities, with declining student numbers in subjects that do not have a direct vocational correlative, and increased focus on science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) subjects. As funding cuts increasingly slash the support for the arts, there is a need to argue for why the arts and arts education is valuable, for their own sake, as well as for the positive contributions they can and do make to society. Through critical engagement with a range of thinkers including Maxine Greene, John Dewey and Elliot Eisner, D'Olimpio offers a unique and important contribution to aesthetic education, and to research within philosophy of education. Table of Contents Series Editor's Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Arts Education in Policy and Practice 2. Why Value The Arts and Arts Education? 3. Defending Arts Education 4. On the Centrality of Aesthetic Experience 5. Objections and Replies 6. Instrumental Defences of Arts Education 7. Aesthetics and Ethics Conclusion: The Necessity of Arts Education References Index
Agora Archive — Columns
Trust and Initial Teacher Education
3 May 2024
Teachers as trusted professionals Popular writer Adam Grant has looked at what has made the Finnish school system among the most successful in the world: In the early 1990s, a new leader came in and called for another set of dramatic changes to create ‘a new culture of education.’ Policymakers start…
CFPs
EPAT Special Issue: Naturalness and Artificiality in Education: Lessons From Fictional Texts
30 Apr 2024
10 July 2024
The special issue will thus contribute to the vivid discussion of AI and, more broadly to efforts on thinking how education should respond to ongoing global crises, focusing on changes in long-standing educational tensions and contradictions considering the emergence of new information technologies.…
Agora Archive — Columns
Nuclear Daze
30 Apr 2024
J. Andrés Gannon has formulated a nuanced geopolitical model of the war in Ukraine regarding the spectre of nuclear conflagration. Within the tempestuous realm of Russo-Ukrainian relations, Gannon warns that the lurching discourse surrounding the potential deployment of nuclear armaments by Russia h…
CFPs
EPAT Special Issue on Canonical Pluralism: New Approaches to Teaching the History of Philosophy
22 Apr 2024
20 November 2024
In contrast to academic philosophy, teaching philosophy consists largely of reading philosophers from the past. This approach presupposes selecting works and authors that culminate in a ‘canon’: a set of works or authors from a specific period deemed outstanding by individuals at a later period. The…
General
PESA Pub Band Seeking Members!
22 Apr 2024
ASAP
The PESA Pub band needs you (to Shake Your Dewey)! Keen to be a member of the world famous PESA Pub band? Keen to play a selection of conference theme adjacent pub band numbers at a PESA Pub event in Christchurch, 2024? Then get in touch with the PESA Pub manager Andrew (agibbons@aut.ac.nz) soon as.
Agora Archive — Columns
Trump’s Torching of America
9 Apr 2024
In the looming spectre of a Trump triumph in November 2024, democracy finds itself ensnared in a dark and foreboding web. Much like Grendel, the malevolent creature of ancient myth whose lineage traces back to the Biblical figure Cain, Trump prowls the political landscape tormented by a relentless h…
Agora Archive — Columns
Thomas Mann and Niko’s Cassirer
8 Apr 2024
Stanley Corngold tells us a story about Thomas Mann’s dog named Niko. Not allowed to step foot into Mann’s library, Niko finally gains entry. Well, Niko ate a book by Ernst Cassirer. If it was the book on symbolic forms, well, then – as Captain Ryder might say in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited…
Events
PG/ECR Group Meeting
26 Mar 2024
March 26 @ 5-7pm AEST or 7-9pm NZT — Zoom
PESA has a special focus on supporting post-graduate students and early career researchers engaging with philosophy of education. The PG/ECR group welcomes members to participate in activities as decided by the members of the group, including philosophical discussions, reading groups, writing and ed…
Agora Archive — Columns
Heraclitus and Trust
21 Mar 2024
Heraclitus, or Herakleitos (c. 500BC), famously addressed the classic Greek philosophical problem of reality (in part), saying, ‘You cannot step twice into the same river.’ It is not only the river that is constantly changing, but you also. Heraclitus’s resolution of the problem of identity (same/di…
Agora Archive — Columns
Metaphoric Philosophy between Cultures
17 Mar 2024
Samuel Marsden [meets Ruatara outside his pā (village) at] Rangihoua, 1814 (Te Ara)* The translation of meanings between languages and cultures is an ancient point of contention. A defining feature of Aotearoa-New Zealand is the language binary of English and te reo Māori (the Māori language), which…
CFPs
South Korea as Method: Korean Education as Postcolonial/Post-Oriental Discourse
11 Mar 2024
Submit a Manuscript to the Journal Educational Philosophy and Theory For a Special Issue on South Korea as Method: Korean Education as Postcolonial/Post-Oriental Discourse Abstract deadline 15 April 2024 Manuscript deadline 01 November 2024 Special Issue Editor(s) Young Chun Kim, Chinju National Uni…