Encounters – Intercultural Dialogues on Education
Words in Motion – Adapting, Translating and Transposing of Pedagogies
The increase in international pedagogical discussions in the last years has shown that dialogue is challenging because pedagogical notions do not easily translate from one language into another. Despite, for example, the widely available translations of Comenius, Herbart, Fröbel, Pestalozzi, Spencer, Dewey and others, Anglophone Education Studiesrepresent a very different approach to pedagogical theorising than, to name but one, the German Erziehungswissenschaft. Paths of reception are, of course, eternally muddled, and all sorts of influences weigh heavily on such processes, but it might also be the result of the ways in which central notions and concepts have been translated, adapted, transposed, or even completely ignored.
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East Asian pedagogies: an edited book (Springer 2020)
Conceptions of culture are bound to conceptions of human being and human becoming. Cultures endure through the processes of formation that they, consciously or unconsciously, initiate. But the ideas that underpin educational formation are diverse, complex, and often inexplicit. In general, a conception of human being is at stake, i.e. an anthropology which includes ideas of what a good life or educated person looks like. In particular, the relations between those educating, those undergoing education, and the subject matter of education, are thereby shaped by distinctive normative considerations reflecting the diverse cultural circumstances of their origin. This, of course, is also true for those who discuss educational concepts and practices originating in contexts other than the author’s contexts: those presentations are usually done for formative, i.e. educational reasons, and those educational aspirations also need to be reflected upon with regard to the normative anthropologies which underlie, enable and restrict the way those presentations are shaped.
A book such as this, which intends to raise questions of international and intercultural comparative education must, therefore, reflect on the ways it attempts to achieve its goal, which is to participate in the dialogue between different educational cultures, or, more specifically: between our (i.e. the editors’) own cultures and those we might in a preliminary (and maybe overly hasty) step call East-Asian cultures. This collection of essays seeks to explore the Anglo-American traditions of educational trans-/formation and Germanic constructions of Bildung, alongside East Asian traditions of trans-/formation and development. Whether such juxtapositions are legitimate or worthwhile must itself be explored
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Classic Japanese Education in a Comparative Perspective
Classic Japanese education as practised in traditional Japanese arts like tea ceremony, Noh theatre, calligraphy, martial arts, and flower arrangement, offer a vantage point for comparisons of culturally very different theories and practices of education. From this perspective, it becomes possible to question and criticise apparently normal and fundamental features of contemporary education. In a series of papers, Karsten Kenklies explores those cross-cultural encounters to shed a light on the horizon of what is thinkable with regard to pedagogy and its practices.
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PAEDAGOGICA – A Book Series
PAEDAGOGICA publishes original monographs, translations and collections reflecting thought and practice known as la pédagogie in French, la pedagogía in Spanish, and die Pädagogik in German.
All of these terms converge on the intended influence of one person or group on another—often of an older generation on a younger. Pedagogy thus interpenetrates many spheres of human activity, forming a domain of practice and study in its own right—one that is ethical in its implications and relational in its substance.
The book series is edited by Dr Karsten Kenklies (University of Strathclyde) and Dr Norm Friesen (Boise State University).