The teachers' pedagogical fiduciary duty to their students.

In education, the teacher's fiduciary duty to their students has been usually considered within the context of legal or ethical studies. In this article, I consider the notion of the teacher's fiduciary duty from a pedagogical point of view as the obligatory relationship that shapes guidance, advisement, and organization of the educational processes. I discuss what the fiduciary duty in general and the pedagogical fiduciary duty in specific is. I examine the three major arguments against the teachers' pedagogical fiduciary duty to their students coming from educational paternalism, institutionalism, and self-directed education. Similar to the legal and medical field studies of the fiduciary duty, I bring and analyze several problematic cases of the teachers' pedagogical fiduciary duty to their students, involving a teacher's unsolicited guidance, non-fiduciary fiduciary, autopaternalist fiduciary, and legitimatizing the student's voice. Based on these cases, I abstract five types of self-education. Finally, I contemplate how much the teacher-student pedagogical fiduciary relationship is dialogic and democratic.

Progressive Education is the Opium of the Educators.

Progressive Education, with its pedagogical desire to engage students in a taught curriculum in a meaningful way, is often viewed in opposition to Conventional Education. In this conceptual paper, I argue that despite and even because of this opposition, Progressive Education contributes to the stability of Conventional Education by making Conventional Education bearable for its teachers. I claim that despite its institutional rarity, Progressive Education remains hegemonic among educators because of its promise of meaningful learning for all their students that can be achieved in and out of the conventional school settings. I provide a critique of Progressive Education from the Critical Dialogue Education and Democratic Education perspectives.

Pedagogical Violence.

In this paper, we consider the phenomenon of "pedagogical violence" - infliction of physical, social, emotional, or psychological pains, or threat of such pains that is either the means for or non-accidental by-products of education used on a systematic basis. Pedagogical violence is often used for promoting certain desired learning in students. Alternatively, it can emerge as a violent reaction in students and teachers to particular educational settings directed against other students or teachers. In this paper, we review some of the debates and controversial issues around pedagogical violence, and we use a variety of illustrative examples to explore in more detail what pedagogical violence means in particular contexts. We argue that pedagogical violence is a natural consequence of alienated instrumental education. We will look at teachers' desire to avoid physical and psychosocial pedagogical violence. We specifically consider diverse forms of psychosocial pedagogical violence and its issues such as: summative assessment, epistemological pedagogical violence, students' ambivalence around pedagogical violence, rehabilitating/avoiding pedagogical violence through a carnival. We finish with a reflection about what can be done to minimize pedagogical violence. Our analysis heavily relies on the Bakhtinian theoretical framework of critical ontological dialogism.

What Kills Science in School?: Lessons from Pre-Service Teachers' Responses to Urban children's Science Inquiries.

This opportunistic case-study highlights striking differences in 6 urban children's and 12 preservice suburban middle-class teachers' perception of science and discuss consequences of science education and beyond. I found that all of the interviewed urban children demonstrated scientific inquiries and interests outside of the school science education that can be characterized by diverse simultaneous discourses from diverse practices, i.e., "heterodiscoursia" (Matusov in Culture & Psychology, 17(1), 99-119, 2011b), despite their diverse, positive and negative, attitudes toward school science. In contrast to the urban children's mixed attitudes to science, the preservice teachers view science negatively. They could not see science inquiries in the videotaped interviews of the urban children. There seemed to be many reasons for that. One of the possible reasons for that was that the preservice teachers tried to purify the science practice. Another reason was that they did not see a necessity to be interested and engaged in the curriculum that they are going to teach in future. The pedagogical consequences and remedies are discussed.

Magic Learning Pill: Ontological and Instrumental Learning in Order to Speed Up Education.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the phenomenology of learning - people"s attitudes toward their learning experiences that have inherent worth in themselves (i.e., ontological learning) or have value outside of the learning itself (i.e., instrumental learning). In order to explore this topic, 58 participants from the U.S., Russia, and Brazil were interviewed with a central question derived from the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's short story "Profession": whether participants would take a "Magic Learning Pill" (MLP) to avoid the process of learning, and instead magically acquire the knowledge. The MLP would guarantee the immediate learning by skipping the process of learning while achieving the same effect of gaining skills and knowledge. Almost all participants could think of some learning experiences for which they would take MLP and others for which they would not. Many participants would not take MLP for ontological learning, which is learning experiences that have inherent value for the people, while they would take MLP for instrumental learning, which is learning that mainly serves some other non-educational purposes. The main finding suggests that both instrumental and ontological types of learning are recognized by a wide range of people from diverse cultures as present and valued in their lives. This is especially significant in light of the overwhelmingly instrumental tone of public discourse about education. In the context of formal education, ontological learning was mentioned 35 times (28.0%) while instrumental learning was mentioned 74 times (60.2%). Although ontological learning was often mentioned as taking place outside of school, incorporating pedagogy supporting ontological learning at school deserves consideration.

Examining how and why to Engage Practitioners from across the Learning Landscape in the Research Enterprise: Proposal for Phronêtic Research on Education.

Educational practitioners are often reluctant, if not actively resistant, to their participation in production and consumption of educational research. Based on my research experience with educational practitioners, I try to deconstruct this phenomenon using dialogic Bakhtinian and Aristotelian sociocultural frameworks. I consider two major related breakdowns in the educational practice: 1) a lack of self-correcting process in the educational practice, while reliance on accountability policy to achieve the practice quality, and 2) a breakdown between educational research and educational practice. I argue that the first breakdown is caused by viewing teaching as poiesis, aiming at preset curricular endpoints, and not as praxis, critically defining its own values, goals, and virtues. As to the second breakdown, I argue that current mainstream and even innovative research is defined through the technê and epistêmê ways of knowing, which correspond to a poiesic vision of educational practice. I suggest that educational practice primarily involves the phronêtic and sophic ways of knowing, which correspond to a praxis vision of educational practice. I describe phronêtic research of teaching through a case of my students, preservice teachers, working on revisions of their lessons that they conducted at an urban afterschool program. Finally, I consider recommendations for institutional support for phronêtic research on teaching.

Mapping Concepts of Agency in Educational Contexts.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore and map the "espoused theories" (Argyris and Schön 1978) of agency used in educational contexts. More precisely, we limit the focus on the normative view of student agency assumed within dominant school practices, desired by educational practitioners, leaving out non-normative emerging agencies such as student agency of resistance. Agency is a "tricky" concept, and often scholars who use the concept of agency do not define or operationalize it (e.g., Archer 2000). One reason is that there is no consensus among scholars about the notion of agency, especially when applied to educational contexts (Hitlin and Elder Sociological Theory, 25 (2), 170-191, 2007). Moreover, the recent neoliberal framing of individuals' agency as fully autonomous, flexible, and self-entrepreneur is adding the dilemma of agency manipulation in the sphere of education (Gershon 2011; Sidorkin 2004). To tackle this dilemma in educational contexts, we suggest to further interrogating the normative notion of agency in all its modes and develop a more nuanced conceptualization. We hope that such conceptualization would produce an understanding of the diverse manifestations and definitions of agency within a human ideal, educational content, behaviors, and social settings. We observed diverse uses of the normative term "agency" in educational discourse. We examined the term as used by researchers and practitioners. We also looked at the different ways it has been used in philosophical discussions of education, political framing of the civic role of schooling, disciplinary policy statements, school mission statements, and in everyday common use. It is worthy to note that our categorization of the use and meaning of the normative term "agency" depends on the scholars' epistemological paradigmatic assumptions, socio-political and historical situatedness, and ontological projects being translated into diverse scholarships of education. As a result of our research, we suggest four major normative conceptual frameworks related to agency mainly being adopted in educational contexts that we labeled as: 1) instrumental, 2) effortful, 3) dynamically emergent, and 4) authorial. In this paper, we discuss these normative approaches to agency as we compare and contrast the assumptions and their consequences for the current field of education, mostly from a point of view of authorial definition of agency (our bias).

The middle-class nature of identity and its implications for education: a genealogical analysis and reevaluation of a culturally and historically bounded concept.

We consider identity as a historically emerging discourse that requires genealogical analysis - not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit [ourselves] to its dissipation (Foucault 1977, p. 162). We suggest analyzing identity through the history of socio-economic classes, their life struggles, ambitions, development, and reproduction. We see learning not as a project of transformation of identity, but rather as developing access to socially valuable practices and developing one's own voice within these practices (through addressing and responding to other voices). The access and voice projects free agents from unnecessary finalization and objectivization by oneself and others (Bakhtin 1999; Bakhtin 1990). In education, we should develop indigenous discourses of learning and develop a conceptual framework that makes analysis of diverse discourses possible. We argue that learning, as transformation of participation in a sociocultural practice to gain more access, is a better conceptual framework than learning as transformation of identity.