Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students' capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe's and Rawls's conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end I take Eamonn Callan's Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe's critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the ''left'' and ''right.'' I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries.
We contend that as learners participate in these discourses, they are also performatively produced by them. By making these discourses visible, we can consider how to minimise unintended effects such discourses may cause. Our findings, although limited, offer a glimpse of the effects that those assumptions may have as we look to align better the formation of professional medical identity with the ideals of patient-centred care and socially responsible health care systems.
In the literature on complexity theory it has been noted that the increasing interdependence, non-linearity, and adaptiveness of social and other systems require forms of representation that can accommodate such complexity. In this essay I argue for examining the possibilities of cartography (mapmaking) in and of educational theory and research. Cartography offers alternative forms of representation that are better suited to capturing complexity. The performativity of cartographic representations, moreover, produces different knowledge. I present four features of educational theory, research, and practice that suggest the relevance of cartography. The first is the widespread use of narrative models of representation and interpretation. Narrative discourse typically emphasizes temporality; maps are an alternative or complementary discourse that visualize and help to examine the spatial character of educational experience. The second feature is that spatial metaphors abound in educational discourse, including the recently ubiquitous metaphor of the web or network. Cartographic discourse is well suited for representing, interpreting, and critiquing these metaphors. The third feature is the increased use of hyperlinked information in educational theory and practice. Maps are better suited to capture and to enable the questioning of the rhizomatic interconnections of hypertextual reading and writing practices than more linearly organized discourse. The fourth feature of education is that it is a social institution that plays a central role in the social positioning of subjects. When the discursive and physical mechanisms through which students and teachers are separated, categorized, ranked, and assessed are cartographically represented and analyzed, new questions can emerge about these mechanisms of power.
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