Why do we think non-affirmative education theory (NAT) offer a fruitful alternative among the many options available on the educational market?
First, in addition to the previously mentioned character of general education as a foundational discipline theorizing institutional education in a more comprehensive way, there are also more pragmatic reasons to this research programme. One such motive is that more recently published research introducing and developing these ideas in German, English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and other languages (e.g. Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017; English, 2013; Benner, Meyer, Peng, & Li, 2018) have received an inspired response internationally. When these ideas were earlier opened up for e.g. no similar interest could be identified.
Second, from a European (Continental and Nordic) perspective, non-affirmative theory represents the backbone of the European way of theorizing education, since the birth of modern education as a discipline. Yet, this line of thought has, perhaps unexpected, not received the position as a frequently used theoretical framing for empirical research or for practical school development. Perhaps the dominance of the English speaking research tradition and publication fora has contributed to such a situation? Another reason may be that education has been a culturally sensitive discipline, to a large extent developed within a nation-state frame of reference. In times of increasing parallell epistemologies and changes in dominating cultural hegemonies, new openings appear. In any case, we see extensive opportunities for the theoretically strong German-Nordic tradition of Bildung. The aim of this program is not to rehabilitate any tradition or theoretical position as such, but making visible some features of it, in order to rethink them and critically ask about their relevance. This requires, first, more attention being payed to fundamental theoretical and philosophical conceptualizations of education, and second, to demonstrante how this theoretical position relate to the practice of teaching in classrooms and to school development.
Third, by notions like recognition (Hegel, Honneth) and an occupation with the idea of education as an intervention in the learners life-world (summoning to self-activity, Fichte, Herbart), this approach relates to cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Yet, an international dialogue between CHAT and NAT is still lacking on a broader scale, but has been initiated (https://earli.org/SIG25-ULJENS).
Fourth, education is not limited to reaching knowledge, readiness to act or developing moral reasoning. It is about supporting growth of personality and culture, citizenship education and education for humanity. For much of today’s education theory the globopolitan perspective is not recognized despite the challenges we face and share. The non-affirmative approach recognize all of these and accepts them as challenges.
Fifth, given that NAT emphasizes the relational and mediating or translational nature of education activity it clearly also gestures towards hermeneutics and phenomenology. On a broader scale, such a dialogue is, however, still missing.
Sixth, today, a large number of initiatives in multi-level modeling explore the networked character of education, from the transnational to the local e.g Europeanisation (Normand, 2016; Brögger, 2019), actor network theory or ANT (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005), discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008), refraction (Goodson and Rudd 2012), and curriculum theory and Didaktik (Klafki, 1995; Hopmann, 2007), and complexity theory (Akkerman). More seldom these approaches theorize the normativity question so crucial in education. According to NAT, a frequently occurring hierarchical or linear reasoning subordinating education to politics would reduce pedagogical reflection and practice to an instrumental efficiency problem: How efficiently are educational aims reached by educational efforts? Then again, superordinating education over politics would mean that the field of education alone would define the kind of future that the world should move towards. NAT would instead argue in favour of a third position. It reminds us that education and politics do not have to be either super- or subordinated to each other, but being non-hierarchically related (Benner 2015). Consequently, NAT identifies curricular ideals in a political democracy as something resulting from a public dialogue involving e.g. politics, culture related reflection and professionals’ analysis. NAT reminds us that the education system as a whole must recognize or pay attention to existing interests, policies, ideologies, utopias and cultural practices, but that education is not expected to affirm these interests. Not affirming various predefined interests that are external to educational practice means not passing on these interests, knowledge or practices to the next generation without making these phenomena objects of critical reflection in a pedagogical practice with students. According to NAT, citizenship education for democracy can therefore not only be about the socialization of youth into a given form of democracy, but it must instead include a critical reflection of historical, existing and possible future versions of democracy.
Seventh, a word on normativity. NAT sees that educational practice is mediational and thereby partly hermeneutic in character in terms of being aware and acknowledging the subject’s agency, experiences and life history. From a normative perspective, NAT therefore argues that in translating and enacting policy initiatives, administrators, leaders and teachers must recognize curricular aims and content, but educators are not, ideally, allowed to affirm these values, as affirming them would mean not to problematize such aims and content with students, thereby reducing education to transmitting given values and content. This is how NAT explains the creation of pedagogical spaces for the learner. These spaces feature a critical reflection of what is, what is not and what might be. These spaces represent invitations to discerning thought and experimental practice, i.e. the critical contemplation of content advocated by the curriculum as a policy. As an analytical concept, NAT offers us tools for studying to what extent and how educators are supposed to affirm ideals, or how they position themselves as affirming educators. Today we can see a strong movement towards traditional ideology critical approaches. NAT makes sense in such a landscape as it deals seriously with the normativity question.
NAT is considered fit for these purposes, as it includes conceptual tools for understanding both a) curriculum reform activities as multi-level networked processes that all include educational dimensions, and b) the content of the curriculum, also defining the relation between, for example, politics and pedagogy, as well as the teaching–studying-learning process. In short, the idea is to explore to what extent similar foundations theoretical constructs may be applied to analyse (a) the teaching–studying–learning process related to the aims and teaching content of the curriculum, and (b) educational leadership and (c) governance in curriculum reform activities.
Given the above points of departure this research programme aims to make a contribution to discuss non-affirmative education theory from the perspectives touched upon above.