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Abstract
Our paper addresses the emergence and evolution of values in educational settings. It builds upon and extends earlier work on companion meanings to develop a theory of the creative use of companion values and meanings in education. The recognition of companion values in educational practices highlight epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic transactions that occur in ways we characterize as ‘other than modern.’ Introducing the idea of educative moments allows us to identify situations where value spheres interpenetrate and interrogate each other in the meaning-making of students and teachers. These moments occur when students suddenly experience companion meanings and values such that teacher and student must deliberate together rather than the teacher dictating some dominating epistemological, ethical, or aesthetic value. This way, it is possible to accommodate critical and creative reflection in education where new values can emerge or evolve. We illustrate the theory by empirical examples from classroom conversations.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the four anonymous reviewers of this paper for their very helpful suggestions.
Notes
1. We will not here go into the discussion of the difference between, for example, environmental education and education for sustainable development (see e.g. Kopnina (Citation2012), Eilam and Trop (Citation2010), Bonnett (Citation2007), Sauvé (Citation1996, Citation1999, Citation2005).
2. Scientistic discourses repeatedly present themselves as value neutral, which James (Citation[1902] 1985) shows is impossible.
3. Dewey considers these three domains incommensurable. We can only hope to balance them the best we can. Thus, ethical deliberation involves a potentially tragic dimension. Below, we will learn that all deliberation involves dealing creatively with incommensurable values.
4. Dewey declares:
The business of reflection in determining the true good cannot be done once for all, as, for instance, making out a table of values arranged in a hierarchical order of higher and lower. It needs to be done, and done over and over and over again, in terms of the conditions of concrete situations as they arise. In short, the need for reflection and insight is perpetually recurring. (CitationLW 7, 212).
5. Nowhere in our paper has emphasis been added to any quote.
6. ‘A strictly possible operation,’ Dewey indicates, ‘constitutes an idea or conception’ (CitationLW 12, 289). Elsewhere, he writes: ‘Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure “facts”’ (CitationMW 9, 244). Unfortunately, too often we mistakenly confuse imagination (that grasps the possible within the actual) with the merely imaginary (escapist fantasy totally detached from the actual).
7. It is worth adding that King had an intelligent means for securing his ideal. It was the method of civil disobedience he borrows from Mohandas Gandhi who in turn derived it from Henry David Thoreau’s 1848 essay, Civil Disobedience.
8. Dewey’s reconstruction of theoria and practical reasoning with the following quotation:
“To be a man [sic] is to be thinking desire; and the agreement of desires is not in oneness of intellectual conclusion, but in the sympathies of passion and the concords of action: and yet significant union in affection and behavior may depend upon a consensus in thought that is secured only by discrimination and comparison. ibid. (CitationMW 3, 100).”
This passage echoes Aristotle in the Nichomachian Ethics. Desire has been a constituent part of practical reasoning since antiquity. Consider the following diagram:
fx
The Schema of Practical Reasoning (Adapted from Ross Citation1971, 199).
Here, ‘I’ is a person, ‘V’ is a value, U through N is means involving action. Note the initiating role of desire along with the place of perception in the conclusion. Given this course of reasoning, one ought to choose the possibility N and act on it. The ‘ought’ here has moral force it serves as a norm for judging the value of the choice.
9. Also, many consider simplicity as an epistemic value, but it is also an aesthetic value.
10. For a more detailed Deweyan critique of utilitarian economic calculative rationality, which so dominates global affairs including common notions of ‘development’ in sustainable development, see Mousavi and Garrison (Citation2003).
11. We often forget Dr .King was a clergyman as well as a leader in the civil rights movement.
12. This empirical example is collected within the project ‘Nature encounters and environmental moral learning’ and used in Andersson, Rudsberg, and Öhman (Citationin press).