This book traces the notion of care and civic values in education that are largely devalued today by neoliberal economic concerns. Through a discussion of educators and philosophers including Arendt, Foucault, Guattari, Patocka, Simondon, Stengers and Whitehead, Atkinson explores the 'gift of otherness' in relation to an ethico-politics of pedagogic practice and learning, including art education. He argues for pedagogical practices that facilitate and support each learner's pathways throug...

This book explores art practice and learning as processes that break new ground, through which new perceptions of self and world emerge. Examining art practice in educational settings where emphasis is placed upon a pragmatics of the ‘suddenly possible’, Atkinson looks at the issues of ethics, aesthetics, and politics of learning and teaching. These learning encounters drive students beyond the security of established patterns of learning into new and modified modes of thinking, feeling, s...

This study is about the principles for constructing polite speeches. The core of it first appeared in Questions and Politeness, edited by Esther N. Goody (now out of print). It is here reissued with a fresh introduction that surveys the considerable literature in linguistics, psychology and the social sciences that the original extended essay stimulated, and suggests distinct directions for research. The authors describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic constr...

This book provides students with a concise introduction to the philosophy of methodology. The book stands apart from existing methodology texts by clarifying in a student-friendly and engaging way distinctions between philosophical positions, paradigms of inquiry, methodology and methods. Building an understanding of the relationships and distinctions between philosophical positions and paradigms is an essential part of the research process and integral to deploying the methodology and met...

This book, the fifth in the series developing BernsteinOs code theory, presents a lucid account of the most recent developments of this code theory and, importantly, shows the close relation between this development and the empirical research to which the theory has given rise. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity addresses the central issue of BernsteinOs research project: are there any general principles underlying the transformation of knowledge into pedagogic communication? In Berns...

Our self-conception derives mostly from our own experience. We believe ourselves to be conscious, rational, social, ethical, language-using, political agents who possess free will. Yet we know we exist in a universe that consists of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles. How can we resolve the conflict between these two visions?In Freedom and Neurobiology, the philosopher John Searle discusses the possibility of free will within the context o...

In its second edition, Method in Social Science was widely praised for its penetrating analysis of central questions in social science discourse. This revised edition comes with a new preface and a full bibliography. The book is intended for students and researchers familiar with social science but having little or no previous experiences of philosophical and methodological discussion, and for those who are interested in realism and method.

Confronting Theory presents a methodological (philosophical) and educational evaluation and critique of what has come to be known as Theory (‘with a capital-T’) in cross-disciplinary humanities education. Rather than merely dismissing Theory writing as risibly pretentious and abstract, Confronting Theory examines its principal concepts from the perspective of academic psychology and shows that, although ‘Theory that only dogs can hear’ may sound like revolutionary psychol...

This book addresses fundamental questions in relation to education and its epistemology. The position taken by the author is critical realist; and thus throughout the relationship between education and critical realism is foregrounded. Themes and issues that surface at different times in the book are: a critical realist view of education research; a resolution of the quantitative/qualitative divide; criteria for judging the worth of educational texts and practices; differences between scie...

In contemporary educational contexts young children and learning are tamed, predicted, supervised, controlled and evaluated according to predetermined standards. Contesting such intense governing of the learning child, this book argues that the challenge to practice and research is to find ways of regaining movement and experimentation in subjectivity and learning.Vivid examples from Swedish preschools – involving children, teachers, teacher students and educators and researchers -...

Since the 1970s, critical realism has grown to address a range of subjects, including economics, philosophy, science, and religion. It has become a complex and mature philosophy.Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism looks back over this development in one concise and accessible volume. The late Roy Bhaskar was critical realism’s philosophical originator and chief exponent. He draws on a lifetime’s experience to give a definitive, systematic account of this in...

Following on from Roy Bhaskar’s first two books, A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, establishes the conception of social science as explanatory—and thence emancipatory—critique.Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation starts from an assessment of the impasse of contemporary accounts of science as stemming from an incomplete critique of positivism. It then proceeds to a systematic exposition of scientif...