Overview

Students, parents, teachers, leaders, and policy-makers generate and take responsibility for their efforts, often without understanding the nature of the responsibility they hold. Barbara S. Stengel argues that every educational interaction is a call to and opportunity for responsibility for all involved. In short, responsibility represents the goal for students, the guiding vision for educators’ practice, and a useful design principal for leaders and policy makers. Using a critical pragmatist framing of the concept of responsibility, Stengel shows how greater attention to responsibility allows for a deeper understanding of diversity and equity as well as individual and common goods. It enables a deeper understanding of the moral dimensions of teaching and learning prospectively in growth rather than retrospectively in blame. The philosophical discussion of responsibility is coupled with discussion of the lived experiences of students, teachers, aides, and administrators and draws evidence from a case study of a middle school turnaround in Nashville, USA. The Bailey Middle School community developed a reading of responsibility that matched educators’ intuitions and experiences of their work, while enhancing students’ understanding of their place in the world. The book represents a call for educators to be, and become, responsible for their and their students’ lives-in-common and the individual well-being of all in the community.

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9781350302600

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Reviews

Responsibility offers an accessible entry point for practitioners who are dissatisfied with the factory model of public schooling and want to create schools with heart, but don’t know where to start. Stengel’s philosophical discussion, together with narratives from Bailey Middle School staff, provide a compelling account of how response-ability can positively shape a whole school’s culture. -- Ann Chinnery, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Canada A leading authority on pragmatism and education, Barbara Stengel expertly theorizes from her real-life experience in a so called failing school to show the difference responsibility (rather than accountability) makes in education. Her account is convincing and illuminating, exemplifying the potential of pragmatic philosophy in reckoning with the educational challenges of our times. -- Liz Jackson, Professor of International Education, Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Author Information

Barbara S. Stengel is Professor Emerita in the Practice of Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University, USA. She is the author of three books including Just Education (1991), Moral Matters (2006) and Toward Anti-Oppressive Teaching (2020). Dr. Stengel is a former President of the Philosophy of Education Society and current President of the John Dewey Society.

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