Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice
The Initiative on Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice (IPEPP)
The IPEPP initiative has funded twelve grants to date which are described below. Collectively, these grants are an initial step towards achieving our goal - to strengthen work that brings the tools and perspectives of contemporary moral and political philosophy to bear on concrete problems that arise in addressing problems of education practice and policy.
Please click on a grantee and scroll down to view details of the grant.
Heather Battaly | Acquiring Intellectual Virtue | California State University, Fullerton
Lawrence Blum | Racial Integration, Equality of Opportunity, and the Ethics of Teaching about Racism in the Context of a High School Class on Racism | University of Boston, Massachusetts
Eamonn Callan | Integration, Democratic Community, and Education, | Stanford University
Derrick Darby | Philosophy and the Racial Achievement Gap | University of Kansas
Kyla Ebels-Duggan | Creating Character: Autonomy and Moral Education | Northwestern University
Catherine Elgin | Ethics Across the Curriculum | Harvard University
Diana Hess | Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education | University of Wisconsin-Madison
Anthony Laden | Beyond the Civic Classroom: Re-framing Civic Education | University of Illinois at Chicago
Jennifer Morton | The Value of Non-Cognitive Dispositions: A Challenge for Educational Equality | City College City University of New York
Blain Neufeld | Civic Respect, Political Legitimacy, and Citizenship Education | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Bryan Warnick | Student Rights and the Special Characteristics of Schools | Ohio State University
Kyle Powys Whyte and Matthew Ferkany | Toward a Normative Framework for Environmental Education | Michigan State University
Heather Battaly
Acquiring Intellectual Virtue
California State University, Fullerton
Stemming from Aristotelian virtue ethics, Battaly seeks to demonstrate that acquiring intellectual virtues are not simply a matter of acquiring knowledge, but rather developing firmly grounded character traits. Battaly draws upon empirical work to explain why knowledge is not sufficient for acquiring intellectual virtue, suggesting that research done on the role of emotions in explaining behavior reveals the non-cognitive dimension of character traits such as open-mindedness. Furthermore, Battaly argues that intellectual virtue (like Aristotle’s belief about virtue and excellence) requires training and habituation and that only minor environmental changes may affect the development of non-cognitive intellectual virtues.
Lawrence Blum
Racial Integration, Equality of Opportunity, and the Ethics of Teaching about Racism in the Context of a High School Class on Racism
University of Boston, Massachusetts
Blum will study the educating of high school students about races as part of a project on civic education in a multiracial and multiethnic democracy. The focus will be on pedagogical, ethical, and personal challenges of this teaching, especially in the context of a racially mixed class. He will draw on first-hand experience from a course of Race and Racism that he taught at a local high school. Blum intends to show that, and how, numerous important educational values can be realized in an integrated classroom that is generally very difficult to achieve outside of it. Some of those educational values include but are not limited to: an understanding of the role race has played in the U.S. and world history, and how understandings of race differ in national and regional contexts; learning how race continues to be relevant to opportunities available to different groups; and gaining a sense of civic-oriented attachment to those of groups other than one’s own.
Eamonn Callan
Integration, Democratic Community, and Education
Stanford University
Callan intends to work out an ethical conception of equal membership in a democratic community at the level of the state (e.g., the American state), given the challenge of large-scale immigration integration, and to figure out implications for educational policy. He will explore the idea that an anti-caste principle can capture a broadly acceptable ethico-political norm to which many citizens of contemporary liberal democracies in the West would likely subscribe, despite other deep disagreements about social justice and the best form of democratic government.
Derrick Darby
Philosophy and the Racial Achievement Gap
University of Kansas
The persistence of racial inequalities in education has heightened the urgency to find ways to diminish and hopefully eradicate the K-12 achievement gap in the U.S. But how exactly should we understand the basis of our moral obligation to diminish racial educational inequalities in a liberal democratic society? Who is responsible for discharging this obligation? What steps in education policy and practice need to be taken to discharge it? These central questions will guide Darby in his research.
Darby is planning a series of three closely related papers to demonstrate how political philosophy can contribute to our understanding of why a liberal democracy must strive to diminish the racial achievement gap regardless of its causes and how it can contribute to our search for educational policy and practice to address this social problem. He will illustrate this by way of exploring the concrete case of whether we should adopt educational policies that offer black students cash incentives to improve their academic performance.
Kyla Ebels-Duggan
Creating Character: Autonomy and Moral Education
Northwestern University
Ebels-Duggan wishes to develop an understanding of moral education and its difficult relationship to autonomy through a dialog with the work of Immanuel Kant and John Rawls. She will specifically explore three issues concerning autonomy and moral education: the possibility and permissibility of moral education, the norms that should guide it, and some practical implications of our dependence on moral education. As the work progresses, she will produce three papers, one on the possibility and appropriate norms of moral education, grounded in the idea that the influence of proper moral education is rational rather than causal; a second paper considering the necessity of a worldview underlying moral education; and a third paper that deals with issues of moral responsibility.
Catherine Elgin
Ethics Across the Curriculum
Harvard University
Elgin’s project will address the core question: how does education in factual disciplines transmit moral values? The study will be a philosophical analysis that focuses the epistemology of science and mathematics and related work in the philosophy of education. It will identify the moral values embedded in science and mathematics; show how values figure in the disciplines and what values contribute to the understanding those principles yield, and thereby; suggest a reorientation in thinking about scientific and mathematical education, by making salient their role in developing and justifying such values.
Diana Hess
Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Hess plans to address the disconnect between empirical research in democratic education and the philosophical reasoning that is necessary if research is to inform practice and policy making. She plans to take findings from her recent study about deliberation and democratic outcomes and identify three dilemmas that will be developed into case studies. She will then invite cross-disciplinary teams of discussants with expertise in ethics and democratic theory to tackle normative questions in social studies education such as should civics courses teach students to adopt a strong partisan identity, or try to keep students in a “perplexed middle” -- to become thinkers that appreciate all sides?; what ethical principles ought to guide the selection of topics for discussion?; and what is the teacher’s proper role during a class discussion?. The teams will look at evidence and how it might affect practice, and inform the development of publications about the study.
Anthony Laden
Beyond the Civic Classroom: Re-framing Civic Education
University of Illinois at Chicago
Laden hopes to better understand the value of civic education that both respects diversity and yet does not reduce it to education in civics. He plans to develop a theory of reasons and reasoning and apply it to questions of civic education. His approach to reasons and reasoning defines reasons as offers to speak for another, and thus make reasons inherently social rather than private, and the activity of reasoning as something that we engage in together. He will assemble a study group of philosophers, education theorists and practitioners to study a set of questions about the place and purpose of civic education and the ways in which schools might provide such education.
Jennifer Morton
The Value of Non-Cognitive Dispositions: A Challenge for Educational Equality
City College City University of New York
Morton will investigate how emerging research on non-cognitive skills (such as emotional, social, and practical skills) complicates two central commitments of a liberal education: to neutrality and to equal opportunity. Liberal neutrality requires that the state’s institutions, including its educational institutions, remain neutral with respect to reasonable conceptions of the good. Equal opportunity requires that the state’s institutions give citizens an equal opportunity at pursuing their own conception of the good. Morton intends to show that recent empirical research on the role that non-cognitive skills play in enabling students to have access to two central primary goods—opportunities for higher education and well-paying jobs—creates a challenge for the possibility that a liberal education could satisfy both of these aims. She will then consider the impact of this challenge on educational policy.
Blain Neufeld
Civic Respect, Political Legitimacy, and Citizenship Education
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Neufeld plans to explore the education policy implications of political liberalism. His project will involve defending the claim that political liberalism should be understood as based upon a foundational principle of equal ‘civic respect’ for citizens, and exploring the implications of this account of political liberalism for education policy in pluralistic democratic societies. Neufeld will focus on the capacity of political liberalism and the principle of civic respect to reconcile the demand of accommodating social and religious pluralism with the goal of providing education sufficient for the free and equal citizenship of all persons. Articles written for the project will culminate in a book.
Bryan Warnick
Student Rights and the Special Characteristics of Schools
Ohio State University
Warnick’s project is to explore the “special characteristics of school environments” to better understand how schools can transform students’ moral and legal rights. What makes schools special from an ethical perspective? How should these characteristics modify students’ rights? What differentiates schools from shopping malls, airports, or public parks when it comes to individual rights and liberties?
Warnick intends to offer a philosophical defense of the notion of context-dependent rights that appears to underlie the “special characteristics” language of the Tinker vs. Des Moines decision. He also plans to analyze contemporary schools to identify the special characteristics of schools that appear to be relevant in transforming student rights. The anticipated outcome of this project will be to produce a book that addresses how the special characteristics of schools should transform our thinking about various types of individual rights and provide ethical guidance to educators making decisions in school contexts. A clearer understanding of moral dimensions of schools as they relate to students rights will bring order to a difficult and contested ethical and legal landscape.
Kyle Powys Whyte and Matthew Ferkany
Toward a Normative Framework for Environmental Education
Michigan State University
In a culturally and morally pluralistic society, the normative basis for environmental education in the public schools is a vexed but underexplored issue. Whyte and Ferkany propose that such a basis can be found in a combination of liberal principles, virtues, and skills that can be shown to improve deliberation on environmental issues. They seek to determine these principles, virtues, and skills through research in the relevant literatures in philosophy and environmental education, with particular attention in philosophy to the literatures on deliberative democracy, science, and environmental issues; on the legitimate aims of moral and civic education; and on environmental virtue ethics.