Hermeneutics Social Criticism And Everyday Education Practice

The individual chapters written by scholars of the Department of Ge­ne­ral Pedagogy at the University of Wrocław included in the volume offered to the Readers, showcase selected variants and problems of the hermeneutical and critical approaches to educational practice and research. The general pedagogy we practice in this way reveals its interdisciplinary character, drawing on the resources and achievements of philosophy, sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, religious studies, and political sciences. By deliberately adopting such an approach, general pedagogy becomes the basic science of pedagogy; one of its major tasks is the integration and criticism of knowledge about education and the study of education and its broadly understood contexts, a knowledge which is produced not only in numerous disciplines of humanities and social sciences. This ambitious task undertaken by many theoreticians and researchers of education all over the world calls for a continuous effort to review the resources of dynamically changing and transforming scientific knowledge and to draw on contemporary and historically significant philosophy. Translating these experiences into the resources of general pedagogy requires from us the effort of understanding the languages of contemporary humanities, social sciences and multicultural societies, as well as the effort of critical thinking, which can recognize and take into account the entanglement of scientific knowledge in social ideas and practices, its conflicts, inequalities and asymmetric discourses. Hence the general pedagogy we practice, exploring the area of ideology (religion) and utopias present in everyday educational practice, implements the vision of bringing closer these two approaches (hermeneutical and critical). We believe that such a general pedagogy, engaged, practiced with passion, aware of its present social context and its past and of the urgent needs, theoretical and practical difficulties, a pedagogy that explores the possible shapes of the future, is both necessary and inspiring. It addresses new topics and offers novel approaches, revises well-established and newly proposed findings, is aware of opportunities and threats. Nevertheless, the chapters written by us are integral, self-contained wholes, just as their authors retain their intellectual and research autonomy, which can be seen in the issues we choose, the mode of their presentation and addressing.

Utopia and Education is an original contribution of the philosophy and theory of education, which also enters the fields of disciplines other than pedagogy and uses their approaches and achievements. The work is part of utopian studies and complements its discourse with a less marked path of philosophy and theory of education. Moreover, in the context of pedagogy and education, it takes up a number of issues whose significance goes beyond the conventional framework of a single discipline: utopia, ideology, social criticism, fundamentalism, democracy, populism, translation, transdisciplinarity and knowledge transfer, socialisation, school as one of the social institutions, etc. The work not only reconstructs knowledge about specific phenomena relevant to education and pedagogy but also proposes an original solution to educational problems in the form of the concept of asylum pedagogy. The approach to these phenomena is well reflected in the division of the book into two parts. The book, apart from references to researchers associated with utopian studies, addresses ideas of such figures of the humanities and social sciences as Emmanuel Levinas and Erich Fromm; their concepts were earlier used by the Author in two monographs. Besides, there are references to Bronisław Baczko, George Steiner, Jacques Derrida, Michael Walzer, Hannah Arendt, Janusz Korczak, and Ilan Gur- Ze'ev. Throughout the work, the Author attempts to combine the perspectives of critical pedagogy and dialogue, finds inspiration in the achievements of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas and draws on Jewish thought and tradition.

Hermeneutic phenomenology is a combination of theory, reflection and practice that interweaves vivid descriptions of lived experience (phenomenology) together with reflective interpretations of their meanings (hermeneutics). This method is popular among researchers in education, nursing and other caring and nurturing practices and professions.

The collection of texts by scholars of the Department of General Pedagogy at the University of Wrocław is, on the one hand, an expression of the contemporary approach to general pedagogy as a reflection on multidisciplinary upbringing – mainly of philosophical, sociological and psychological nature, and, on the other hand, a reference to the name of pedagogy and its Greek source of the concept of paidagogos, which describes a slave in ancient Greece who led the sons of free citizens to a place of physical exercise and games.

A hermeneutics of education pays special attention not to educational structures, but the central role of conversation in the educational process. The key issue is the formation of the person as a unique reality of being and acting while supporting intersubjective understanding. The polyphony of understanding places the human search for meaning within the horizon of incompleteness and allows for both, spontaneity and rigor, in order to reach an understanding of what is happening to us and in us when we understand. Reflection on education is always inseparable from educational practice.

The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education approaches theory as a method for doing research, rather than as a background framework. Educational research often reduces theory to a framework used only to analyze empirically collected data. In this view theories are not considered methods, and studies that apply them as such are not given credence. This misunderstanding is primarily due to an empiricist stance of educational research, one that lacks understanding of how theories operate methodologically and presumes positivism is the only valid form of research. This limited perspective has serious consequences on essential academic activities: publication, tenure and promotion, grants, and academic awards. Expanding what constitutes methods in critical theoretical educational research, this edited book details 21 educationally just theories and demonstrates how theories are applied as method to various subfields in education. From critical race hermeneutics to Bakhtin’s dialogism, each chapter explicates the ideological roots of said theory while teaching us how to apply the theory as method. This edited book is the first of its kind in educational research. To date, no other book details educationally just theories and clearly explicates how those theories can be applied as methods. With contributions from scholars in the fields of education and qualitative research worldwide, the book will appeal to researchers and graduate students.

This handbook focuses on the often neglected dimension of interpretation in educational research. It argues that all educational research is in some sense ‘interpretive’, and that understanding this issue belies some usual dualisms of thought and practice, such as the sharp dichotomy between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ research. Interpretation extends from the very framing of the research task, through the sources which constitute the data, the process of their recording, representation and analysis, to the way in which the research is finally or provisionally presented. The thesis of the handbook is that interpretation cuts across the fields (both philosophically, organizationally and methodologically). By covering a comprehensive range of research approaches and methodologies, the handbook gives (early career) researchers what they need to know in order to decide what particular methods can offer for various educational research contexts/fields. An extensive overview includes concrete examples of different kinds of research (not limited for example to ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ examples as present in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but including as well what in the German Continental tradition is labelled ‘pädagogisch’, examples from child rearing and other contexts of non-formal education) with full description and explanation of why these were chosen in particular circumstances and reflection on the wisdom or otherwise of the choice – combined in each case with consideration of the role of interpretation in the process. The handbook includes examples of a large number of methods traditionally classified as qualitative, interpretive and quantitative used across the area of the study of education. Examples are drawn from across the globe, thus exemplifying the different ‘opportunities and constraints’ that educational research has to confront in different societies.