In late October of 2019, we brought together scholars from very different traditions in order to explore the notion of exemplarity and the role of exemplars in education. Bringing together scholars working on ethics and moral exemplarism, Spinoza scholars and Arendt scholars, we attempted to bring these different perspectives to bear on the role of exemplarity in education. Not in order to create a synthesis of ideas or to find solutions for practical issues, but in order to explore collegially the important issue of exemplarity in education. On the one hand, it was an attempt to put something on the table, and on the other, it was an attempt to bring people together in order to share a couple of days away from everyday academic life so as to engage the object of study without distractions. Part of what it occasioned can be read in this special issue.

Current educative practices have given rise to the predominant pressure to increase production and speed in academic work and education in general. Educators need to ask whether conceiving of education in such terms is what we really want our children and youth to experience. In this paper, we aim to interrogate the question of how a deceleration of education is possible, and why this would be desirable for students and teachers. We do this in a circuitous way, by exploring four exercises in pedagogical deceleration. These exercises are inspired by philological, didactical, pedagogical, and phenomenological practices.

The discussion of the power of the teacher's voice is raging again in light of the standardisation of education and the emergence of testing as the new regime of truth in educational processes. In confrontation with this paradigm, Jasinki and Lewis have raised pertinent questions regarding the role of language and the voice of the teacher. By highlighting what they coin the time of ritualised learning they expose how even when the teacher becomes almost surplus in the face of standardised curriculum and adaptive testing, there is a reproductive power being ‘cursed’ at our children. By introducing the notion of communities of infancy, Jasinski and Lewis point to another way of conceptualising learning and education, where the teacher portrays love for the children and not the truth about the world. In this article, I will argue that even in their very enticing argumentation for speaking silence, something goes missing. What goes missing is the quintessential component of the school, namely the world as it is ‘handed over’ to the children. By turning to a perhaps unlikely couple in the form of Hannah Arendt and Martin Wagenschein I will attempt to complement the framework of Jasinski and Lewis with a world that can be spoken about by teachers and students. Through a re‐introduction of the notion of exemplarity I will present a didactic framework where the teacher's voice does not become a curse, but retains the possibility of representing a world to the children in the activity of schooling.

Bearing with Strangers looks at inclusion in education in a new way, regarding education as a discipline with practical and theoretical concepts and criteria which emanate from education and schooling itself. By introducing the notion of the instrumental fallacy, it shows how this is not only an inherent feature of inclusive education policies, but also omnipresent in modern educational policy. It engages schooling through an Arendtian framework, constituted by and in a specific practice with the aim of mediating between generations. It outlines a didactic and pedagogical theory that presents inclusion not as an aim for education, but as a constitutive feature of the activity of schooling. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the book offers a novel and critical perspective on inclusive education, as well as a contribution to a growing literature re-engaging didactic and pedagogical conceptions of teaching and the role of the teacher. Schooling is understood as a process of opening the world to the young and of opening the world to the renewal that the new generations offer. The activity of schooling offers the possibility of becoming attentive toward what is common while learning to bear with that which is strange and those who are strangers. The book points to valuable metaphors and ideas – referred to in the book as ‘pearls’ – that speak to the heart of what schooling and teaching concerns. Bearing with Strangers will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, inclusive education and educational policy.

In this paper, the notion of pearl diving as a metaphor for historical methodology is explored as a possible conceptual contribution to pedagogical thinking and practice. Pearl diving in the thinking of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin refers to a process of bringing to life and coming to terms with a fragmented past, and requires of the thinker a form of Homeric impartiality. This they contrast with the processual and functional modern understanding of historiography, where events and things are subsumed by a causal linearity. According to Arendt and Benjamin, our past cannot be understood as though in one piece, but should rather be engaged as fragmented and crystallised into events—or pearls—which can be retrieved and can help us to illuminate our past and to understand our present. This paper considers what such an approach would entail for pedagogical theory and practice, as well as for the work of the pedagogical thinker and the teacher.

This paper explores the concepts of commons and commoning from an educational vantage point. These concepts point to places and activities that are shared, communal and un-privatised, in other words they point to places and practices not yet enclosed or appropriated by capital and market logics. Education is certainly a place and an activity that is increasingly being enclosed and appropriated by these logics, but at the same time education seems to always find ways of escaping this enclosure, and teachers and students find ways of being that escapes appropriation. Exploring the concepts of commons and commoning from an educational vantage point is thus an attempt at describing schooling as an activity that takes place in common and makes something common. By sharing and introducing a subject matter to the students, the teacher offers a shared space of exploration and study that can escape the instrumental and proprietarian framework of the neoliberal education agenda.

This article explores the idea of exemplarity in relation to educational research and teacher education. Exemplarity is introduced as an alternative to the paradigm of evidence and 'what works', which seems to be omnipresent in educational research at present. The idea of exemplarity relates to the particularity of educational practice. The claim of this article is that we need to skew the dominance of functionalistic studies of education, which focus on skills and solutions to problems, or on providing quick fixes and methods to be applied in practice. I will argue that this tactic shuts down interpretive spaces and gives the teacher an illusion of simplicity and efficacy that connects poorly with the complexities of pedagogical practice. Exemplarity provides a different way of answering the question of 'what works', since it does not claim generalisability, but instead offers a path to reflective engagement with the complexities of educational processes. The idea of exemplarity highlights how educators can be invited to lend an ear to practical experience and pedagogical theorising, and through these develop their tact and reflective abilities through exemplars that display pedagogical principles. This, in turn, offers the possibility of retuning one's practice, and in the scope of this article, retuning educational research itself.

This paper explores the role of exemplarity in education through a conceptualisation of two different dimensions of exemplarity in educational practice. (1) Pedagogical exemplarity, which relates to the pedagogical and ethical dimension of educational practice. In other words, this dimension explores the educational moments when someone takes up an exemplary function in educational practice. (2) Didactical exemplarity, which relates to the exemplary function of subject matter or educational content. In other words, this dimension of the project explores the educational moments when something takes up an exemplary function in educational practice. Through an initial conceptual exploration of these two dimensions, via the works of Linda Zagzebski and Martin Wagenschein, the paper sets out to lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of the role of exemplarity in education.

This paper explores the role of exemplarity in education through a conceptualisation of two different dimensions of exemplarity in educational practice. (1) Pedagogical exemplarity, which relates to the pedagogical and ethical dimension of educational practice. In other words, this dimension explores the educational moments when someone takes up an exemplary function in educational practice. (2) Didactical exemplarity, which relates to the exemplary function of subject matter or educational content. In other words, this dimension of the project explores the educational moments when something takes up an exemplary function in educational practice. Through an initial conceptual exploration of these two dimensions, via the works of Linda Zagzebski and Martin Wagenschein, the paper sets out to lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of the role of exemplarity in education.

In this paper, I will explore the experience of noticing/becoming attentive to something in education. What does it mean to take notice of something in an educational way, and how does something become educationally noteworthy? In order to grasp in more detail the idea of something being noteworthy, I turn to the metaphor of pearl diving – as this appears in the works of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin - and to Martin Wagenschein’s theory of exemplarity. These perspectives helps us to grasp not only the centrality of exemplarism in education. It also helps us to grasp what makes something educationally noteworthy, and how this is connected to attention and formative experiences. From this, we can return to a formulation of what makes some forms of notetaking educational.

Denne artikel præsenterer pædagogisk takt som et overset og væsentligtbidrag til pædagogikken, og forsøger at beskrive dens rolle i pædagogiskpraksis. Dernæst forsøger artiklen den svære øvelse at sige nogetom hvordan denne takt kan udvikles. Dette gøres gennem en kobling tilHannah Arendts ideer om dømmekraft og eksemplaritet. Pædagogisk takthenviser til en særlig evne til at identificere og handle i forhold til pædagogiskesituationer. Til udvikling af denne evne kræves altså dømmekraftog eksemplaritet. Disse to begreber stiller ideen om pædagogisk takt imodsætning til de herskende ideer om evidens og ’hvad der virker’, hvorpædagogikken forstås ud fra et primært samfundsvidenskabeligt perspektiv.Med begrebet om pædagogisk takt går bevægelsen snarere mod ethumanistisk perspektiv på pædagogikken som en egen disciplin, hvor svarpå, hvad der virker, må gives i relation den konkrete kontekst og gennemtolkning og handling på samme. Artiklen tager udgangspunkt i en rækkeeksempler på pædagogisk takt for dermed at tilbyde en forståelse af dømmekraftenog det eksemplariskes betydning for pædagogisk handling.

This book responds to the need for new ways of defining the aims and forms of education, in an age that has seen the ideals of progress and growth lead the planet and its inhabitants to the brink of extinction.

Arguing that contemporary ideas of performance and accountability counter "the heart" of education, the book calls for a retuning of education that encourages the younger generation to study objects and ideas for their own sake, rather than to appease established and conventional notions in society – therefore stepping into a common space of reflection and study. The chapters examine why and how we educate, and offer the alternative of engaging with educational questions, not determined by the logic of progress and growth but with an objective of creating a relation to the world around us. Using the works of Hannah Arendt combined with the tradition of Allgemeine Pädagogik to argue for a new conception of Bildung, the book encourages a method that emphasises outrospection over introspection.

Ultimately questioning modern-day education, the book redirects and retunes education away from being wholly concerned with achievement and growth, and will therefore be of interest to students, researchers and academics in the fields of philosophy of education, education and curriculum studies, education policy and politics, and sociology of education.

Contribution: The discussion of the power of the teacher’s voice is raging again in light of the standardization of education and the emergence of testing as the new regime of truth and evaluation in educational processes. In confrontation with this paradigm, Jasinki and Lewis have recently raised pertinent questions about the role of language and the voice of the teacher. By highlighting what they coin the time of ritualized learning they expose how even when the teacher becomes almost surplus in the face of standardized curriculum and adaptive testing, there is a reproductive power being ‘cursed’ at our children. Through an invocation of Giorgio Agamben, they show how the teacher’s voice is central to the reproduction of the societal hegemony, and how the values of society are reproduced as ‘curses’ and ‘oaths’ in the teachers voice. 'Speak like the teacher and you will be saved' or 'do not and you will be cursed'. By introducing the notion of communities of infancy, Jasinski and Lewis point to another way of conceptualizing learning and education, where the teacher portrays love for the children and not the truth about the world. In this framework it becomes important not what is spoken, but that the teacher and the student CAN speak (Jasinski & Lewis, 2016, p. 5). The teacher then becomes the one who facilitates speaking not as incantations of truth, but as the ability to speak at all. This they coin 'speaking silence'. In this paper I will argue that even in their very enticing argumentation for speaking silence, something goes missing. What goes missing is the quintessential component of the school, namely the world as it is 'handed over' to our children in schools. By turning to a perhaps unlikely couple in the form of Hannah Arendt and Martin Wagenschein, I will attempt to complement the framework of Jasinski and Lewis, with a world that can be spoken about by teachers and students. The emphasis on not cursing the children by offering the truth, in Jasinski and Lewis’ framework overshadows the important element of having something to speak about in the classroom, and the fact that these things are part of a history and a texture of the subject matter (die Fach in Wagenscheins vocabulary). It overshadows the world as subject matter in schools and as the habitat, we are introducing our students to in schools. In an Arendtian framework what we are engaged with in schools is the human artifice and the subjects into which is has been divided or 'didactically reduced', in order to become subject matter. In Wagenschein’s framework, the subject matter is best presented to the children through the exemplary elements of a given subject, and through letting the students experience first-hand the objects and the discipline or 'the way of thinking' of the subject, be it physics, language or biology (Wagenschein, 1956, p. 6). This coupling of Arendt's focus on the commonality and worldliness of what is presented in schooling and Wagenschein’s exemplary didactics offers a perspective which can supplement the critical vantage point in Jasinski and Lewis' idea of speaking silence, where it become a matter of letting the subject matter speak and not of the teacher speaking curses and oaths. Method: By turning to Hannah Arendt's educational writings and Martin Wagenscheins didactics, I will try to elaborate on a perspective on schooling where teaching as the art of showing is allowed to re-enter the conversation without immediately being consigned to scrapheap of ‘traditional teaching’. The framework for education that Arendt presented in her seminal essay 'The Crisis in Education' points us in a direction where conservatism and authority can emerge as educational concepts which point to something significant about teaching and learning which we cannot simply write of in light of progressive, constructivist or 'what works' conclusions about traditional teaching. Instead, Arendt proposes that we engage them as educational concepts that would perhaps be wholly untenable 'outside' of schooling and that are not to be conflated with political understandings. Wagenschein's didactics of exemplary teaching and learning can be put to use in giving flesh to Arendt's conceptual framing of schooling. By highlighting how the systematic approach to learning is more logical than it is pedagogical and didactical, Wagenschein shows how an exemplary approach which focusses more on 'entry points' [Einstieg], than on systematic progression opens a perspective on teaching which is focused on opening the subject to the students and not with giving answers or with speaking truth. For Wagenschein it is a matter of enticing interest and letting the exemplary speak about the subject to the students (Wagenschein, 1956). In this way, the subject matter is given voice (and authority) by the teacher and through the exemplary, and the teacher in turn is given voice (and authority) by the exemplary elements of the subject matter. Expected Outcomes: I this paper I wish to supplement the framework of speaking silence, put forth by Jasinski and Lewis, with a pedagogical and didactical perspective on schooling with an emphasis on the subject matter as a ‘didactically reduced’ common world (the human artifice), and the notion of exemplary teaching. With this framework I attempt to take seriously the conservative element of schooling and a notion of educational authority which does not run from the authority of the teacher(‘s voice), but faces it as a foundational part of what schooling and teaching is. This does not mean that teaching becomes the reproduction of social order or capitalism, but rather that teaching and schooling must be conservative in order to protect the possibility of change inherent in a new generation of students. When Jasinski and Lewis present the teacher as someone who must act and speak silence as if they do not know what they are talking about, the world and the subject matter goes missing, or in the words of Masschelein and Simons, the object to be placed on the table loses its meaning and becomes unimportant. In order to exemplify what I mean by this, and to show how I think the critique can be helpful I will turn to the work of Hannah Arendt, in order to highlight the importance of the (common) world for teaching, and to the theory of exemplary learning and teaching as presented by Martin Wagenschein, in order to outline how I believe teachers might go about portraying and showing the (common) world without casting a curse upon their students. References: Arendt, H. (2006) ‘The Crisis in Education’ in Between Past and Future. 170-193. London: Penguin Books. (Originally published 1958) Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. (Originally published 1958) Jasinski, I. & Lewis, T. E. (2016) ‘’Trust me, I do not know what I am talking about!’ The voice of the teacher beyond the oath and blasphemy’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1172472 Masschelein, J. & Simons, M. (2010) ‘Schools as Architecture for Newcomers and Strangers: The Perfect School as Public School?’ Teachers College Record, 112(2): 533-555. Masschelein, J. & Simons, M. (2013) In Defence of the School: A Public Issue. E-ducation, Culture & Society Publishers, Leuven. Wagenschein, M. (1956) ‘Zum Begriff des exemplarischen Lehrens’ Internet resource (accessed 08.09.2016): http://www.martin-wagenschein.de/en/2/W-128.pdf Wagenschein, M. (1997) ‘Das Licht und die Dinge‘ in Buck, P. ed. Einwurzelung und Verdichtung: Tema con variazione über zwei Metaphern Wagenscheinscher Didaktik. 43-45. Dürnau: Verlag der Kooperative Dürnau. (Originally published 1952)

In this symposium, we don´t want to defend conventional pedagogies over and against theories of learning, and we don´t want to enter into the debate about which methods, old or new ones, are the most effective and efficient. Rather, we want to take a particular existing practice at face value, i.e. as a practice that has a meaning which can only be (re)discovered by a careful analysis of what it is we exactly do when making notes in a ´traditional´ pedagogical context such as the lecture. This is, the educational value of this ‘mundane’ practice is to be found by engaging in a close phenomenological examination of the concrete things we do and experience as students and teachers in a classroom

The role of exemplification and exemplars is receiving increasing attention in educational theory. Usually, this is connected to emulation models in character and moral education. Exemplars in this framework are those who show us how to act and what to do, and inspire us emotionally to improve. In Hannah Arendt’s unfinished work on judgement, the exemplar plays a different role. Instead of functioning as an inspiration for behavioural change, the exemplar inspires thinking. In Men in Dark Times and the lecture series ‘Some questions of moral philosophy’, we find a collection of texts describing in detail some of the intellectual inspirations for Arendt’s work on exemplarity and judgement. In this paper, I will use an exploration of these texts as a starting point for considering the role of exemplarity in the development of educational judgement.

In this article, Morten Korsgaard and Mathias Aldinger examine the educational thinking of Hannah Arendt and accompany their analysis with an educational reading of Soren Kierkegaard's "The Seducer's Diary." The authors argue that their readings of Arendt and Kierkegaard point us to a pitfall in how we often approach the educational process: expecting the generation that is coming of age to satisfy the desires of the older generation. This expectation, which pervades present educational reform efforts, undercuts the possibility of education for (existential) freedom and, indeed, serves to manipulate the young into adopting the ideals and desires of the older generation. Reading "The Seducer's Diary" educationally allows us to interpret Johannes as a (mis)educator of Cordelia in the mold of the progressive and instrumental educators that Arendt critiques in "The Crisis in Education." In this way, Arendt and Kierkegaard alert us to the perennial paradox of educating for freedom without attempting to determine how this freedom is to be lived out and thus undermining the endeavor in advance.

In this paper, we present exemplarity as an alternative to the dominant evidence framework, and as the proper foundation for pedagogical reflection and action. This paper focuses attention on how exemplarity can serve to elicit and develop educational judgement. In other words, rather than evidence, teachers need good and bad examples of ways of acting and being to shape and sharpen their educational judgement. By turning to the exemplary approach, the space of reflection is widened, and educational judgement is challenged and provoked. The paper highlights how teacher judgement is formed through the challenge of examples

This paper presents some initial findings of a double-sided study on collective research in inclusive education. The aim is to discuss how thinking on inclusive education can be produced and evolved in a community of inquiry consisting of practitioners and researchers. The paper presents both a research process and an explorative theoretical endeavour to rethink how we might conduct research in education and more specifically inclusive education. The theoretical point of departure is Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘thinking without a banister’ which, succinctly put, means to be able to think without a fixed methodology. We connect Arendt’s idea of ‘thinking without a banister’ with Johann Friedrich Herbart’s concept of pedagogical tact, which deals with the strong connection between theory and practice in educational processes. The paper ends with a reflection on the possible influence on inclusive education of the framework presented, and how it might lead to a more inclusive starting point for thinking about and researching the field of inclusive education.

This paper presents some initial findings of a double-sided study on collective research in inclusive education. The aim is to discuss how thinking on inclusive education can be produced and evolved in a community of inquiry consisting of practitioners and researchers. The paper presents both a research process and an explorative theoretical endeavour to rethink how we might conduct research in education and more specifically inclusive education. The theoretical point of departure is Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘thinking without a banister’ which, succinctly put, means to be able to think without a fixed methodology. We connect Arendt’s idea of ‘thinking without a banister’ with Johann Friedrich Herbart’s concept of pedagogical tact, which deals with the strong connection between theory and practice in educational processes. The paper ends with a reflection on the possible influence on inclusive education of the framework presented, and how it might lead to a more inclusive starting point for thinking about and researching the field of inclusive education.

With a starting point in the tradition of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, this article presents a challenge to inclusive education research to engage a Continental perspective on educational research. The motivation is to entice inclusive education researchers to begin to ask educational questions of inclusion, as opposed to inclusive questions of education. Recent years has seen a call to re-think inclusive education research and this paper attempts to answer this call by turning to a Continental perspective and the emphasis on an at least relative autonomy for the theory and practice of education. The article explores the relationship between Continental and Anglo-American educational theory, and why they seem to have developed in such distinct directions. Beginning with the Anglo-American perspective, it is outlined how pedagogy and the so-called educational interest became replaced by the scientific standards dominant in other academic disciplines. This is countered by a look at the continued endeavours in the Continental spheres to formulate specifically educational criteria for educational processes. This leads to a negative aim in the form of arguing against neo-liberal policy and the politicisation of inclusive education, and a positive aim in the form of an argument for a move towards constructing a pedagogical ideal of inclusion

This paper presents Gert Biesta’s ontological critique of ‘the global evidence movement’, and performs a critique of his use of systems theory as a foundation for his ontological counter-position. We attempt to show how systems theory, as well as the prevailing understanding of evidence based education, are inadequate for describing and conceptualizing educational processes. Through his use of systems theory as a starting point for an educational ontology, Biesta approaches an acceptance of a functionalistic and anti-humanistic position, which we show is incompatible with educational processes, and thus inappropriate as a foundation for an ontology of education. As an alternative, we offer a reading of Hannah Arendt, and present her concepts of natality and plurality as more suitable starting points for a formulation of an ontology of education.

In this paper, we will propose an idea of education as conversations between friends on matters of common concern. In a scholarly and pedagogical climate of competition, testing and accountability, there seems to be little room for true pedagogical and scholarly conversation. What we aim to develop here, is a vocabulary that is able to capture some educational experiences that are being repressed in the current educational and academic discourse and practice. Starting from our own experiences as higher education workers, we argue for a way of speaking about educational practices that focus on the matters of common concern that gather - and put into conversation - students and teachers. We call this conversation a studious discourse so as to distinguish it from other forms of conversation and outline a definition of the kinds of friendships that potentially revolve around this form of communication. We base our argument on a reading of Jurgen Oelkers and Martin Wagenschein's pedagogical and didactical reflections and propose ultimately that education is not about the inner development of measurable skills or competences, but rather about becoming part of particular forms of communication about matters of common concern.

In this article, we try to understand the phenomenon of pedagogical tact as a particular form of power to judge. For this, we rehearse Immanuel Kant's idea of Urteilskraft as it first appears in the Critique of Pure Reason, where it is also rendered in educational terms. However, the power to apply rules works without any rule governing its operations. Similarly, Hannah Arendt, in her work on judging, points to the groundlessness of judging - or to its self-grounding. We follow these insights when rehearsing Johann F. Herbart account of pedagogical tact, in order to arrive at the question of how to theorise education from within the phenomenon of pedagogical tact. We take a clue from Herbart's idea of range of thought (Gesichtkreis), a horizon within one can build one's own understanding of education, one's own sensibility towards each and every singular educational situation that imposes various demands on educators.

Calls for reframing the subject matter of Religious Education in schools include the tricky question of how to select from a world of potentially interesting and relevant material. Pedagogues have long questioned the educational logic that takes so-called substantive knowledge as its starting point and imagines education to follow a linear path from simple to complex. Scholars of Religious Studies have addressed similar questions of how to bring the subject matter to life through taking a more disciplinary orientation , though this approach is problematized by RE’s multi-disciplinary foundations This paper brings together pedagogical and disciplinary perspectives to the question of exemplification in the production of curricular subject matter. Taking as its context RE in schools, the paper assumes the didactic principle that there is considerable difference between putative disciplinary knowledge and school subject matter and that the production of school subject matter requires considered processes of pedagogical transformation and reduction. The paper explores the logic governing this transformation by drawing on the pedagogical analysis of exemplarity offered by Martin Wagenschein alongside the more disciplinary analyses of the place of examples from Jonathan Z. Smith.