Projects

History of Educational Thought

Much of my scholarship focuses on influential and controversial ideas in the history of educational philosophy. The two areas on which I most often focus are:

• Educational Philosophy in Antiquity: I have published several articles and encyclopedia entries on ancient Greek educational thought and I have written an introduction to Plato’s educational thought, Plato: Images, Aims, and Practices of Education (2018), for Springer’s Key Thinkers in Education series. I am the editor A History of Western Philosophy of Education in Antiquity (2021) the first volume of Bloomsbury’s reference series, A History of Western Philosophy of Education.
• Progressive Educational Philosophy: I’ve published several articles on the (often distorted) legacy Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, the so-called “fathers of progressive education,” along with discussions of other aspects of progressive education like the gardening metaphor in education, which recently appeared in  the Oxford Review of Education.

Struggle and Learning: As a doctoral student, I wrote a dissertation, The Labor of Learning: A study of the role of pain in education, which explored the productive role of pain in learning. When I began writing that work in 2005, I sought to challenge an educational culture in which struggle was taken to be an obstacle to learning. I attempted to recast some kinds of educational pains as catalysts for learning. I was pleasantly surprised by how well-received that work was. My dissertation was passed with distinction, was awarded the 2009 American Association of Teaching and Curriculum’s Distinguished Dissertation in Teaching Award and was supported by doctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Spencer Foundation. It has been over a decade since I began working on the topic, and the educational ethos has changed somewhat; now one hears enthusiastic calls for the value of “grit” and a focus on “growth mindsets.” I am interested in the occasionally problematic embrace of this new call for students to struggle.

Parenting:  Parents are besieged with advice. To the mountains of parenting advice books, we have added parenting blogs, parenting television shows, and parenting apps. The result, unfortunately, hasn’t been better parenting or even more confident parents. Instead, parents are more insecure about their choices than ever. Can we turn to historical discussions about child-rearing for help? I think so. Their ideas are often untimely and unattractive. And often people with the strongest advice had little experience with real children. (Rousseau, author of one of the West’s most influential books on parenting and education, famously abandoned his own children to the foundling home.) But some of their ideas about parenting can help us rethink our current assumptions about what it means to parent wisely.

Faith-Based Schooling: I am interested in the role of religious schooling in democracies. With Graham McDonough and Nadeem Memon, I co-edited a book, Discipline, Devotion, and Dissent: Jewish, Catholic, and Islamic schooling in Canada (2013) that sought to overcome some caricatures of religious schools and the parents who opt for them. We asked, “what do some of Canada’s religious schools aim to accomplish?” and “how do they navigate the sometimes challenging task of educating both members of their faith and Canadian citizens?”