Amy Shuffelton | Loyola University Chicago (original) (raw)

Papers by Amy Shuffelton

A teacher, a medical researcher, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau walked into a bar. “You folks look lik... more A teacher, a medical researcher, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau walked into a bar. “You folks look like you need a drink,” said the bartender, surveying their faces. “The Common Core, the PARCC,”1 said the teacher, dropping her heavy backpack on the floor, “and these new recruits who think I’m deadwood because I’m over forty. I’ll take whatever you’ve got on tap.” “That’s hard,” said the bartender, “here you go. That’ll be $3.50.” “What a week,” said the medical researcher, leaning both elbows comfortably on the counter and gesturing expressively. “Months of getting NIH2 funding and IRB3 approval for this work on prosthetics, and then some participant tells me it’s important for soldiers to hold their babies. Make me a martini.” “That sure is hard,” said the bartender, “Here you go. Ten dollars, or do you want me to start a tab? And you, monsieur,” asked the bartender, turning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “What can I get you?” “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of thin...

The phrase ‘trigger warnings’ has been used in university discourse to refer to prefatory comment... more The phrase ‘trigger warnings’ has been used in university discourse to refer to prefatory comments from instructors, warning students that texts and/or classroom discussions may be disturbing to some students. Ironically, trigger warnings are also offered to professors in classrooms where guns may be present. Both kinds of trigger have been viewed by some as at odds with free speech, and by others as necessary for genuinely free speech to prevail. In this chapter, we argue that the metaphor of ‘triggers’, like material guns, has no place in the classroom. Pedagogical prefaces are legitimate, we are, but calling them ‘trigger warnings’ is a mistake. This chapter draws on Richard Rorty, John Dewey, and George Lakoff to argue that because the language we use has material consequences, democracy demands that instructors adopt new metaphors to describe the kinds of arguments that make classrooms places in which education can happen.

Philosophy of Education Archive, Mar 13, 2014

“I JUST HAVE TO DO WHAT’S BEST FOR MY OWN CHILD” In countless conversations about schooling, I he... more “I JUST HAVE TO DO WHAT’S BEST FOR MY OWN CHILD” In countless conversations about schooling, I hear a refrain from the mothers I talk with: “I just have to do what’s best for my own child.” Most often the line is used to wrap up discussion of some choice — where to send a child to kindergarten, for instance, or whether to rally for some policy change, or how to expend personal and collective resources. Mothers generally offer it as a trump-card rationale, as a truth whose self-evident logic forecloses all other possibilities. After all, who could deny a parent’s responsibility to look out for her child? I have noticed, though, that the line is often uttered in defense of some action that, minus the motherhood justification, appears inequitable, unfair, unkind, selfish — in defense of some action that is, in some other ethical framework, not self-evidently right at all.

Educational Theory, 2015

In this article, Amy Shuffelton addresses school shootings through an investigation of honor and ... more In this article, Amy Shuffelton addresses school shootings through an investigation of honor and masculinity. Drawing on recent scholarship on honor, including Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity and Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Honor Code, Shuffelton points out that honor has been misconstrued as exclusively a matter of hierarchical, competitive relationships. A second kind of honor, which exists within relationships of mutual respect between equals, she suggests, merits theorists' further consideration. In its hierarchical mode, honor is often a source of violent action, but honor in its egalitarian mode can play an important role in peacemaking. Shuffelton turns to Homer's Iliad and Adrienne Rich's "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" to explore honor's potential. Linking both kinds of honor to masculinity and the issue of gun violence, this article contends that to address gun violence in and outside of schools, masculine honor needs to be "reissued" as a matter of egalitarian relationships based on honest communication.

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2014

This essay argues that philosophy can be combined with qualitative research without sacrificing t... more This essay argues that philosophy can be combined with qualitative research without sacrificing the aims of either approach. Philosophers and qualitative researchers have articulated and supported the idea that human meaning-constructions are appropriately grasped through close attention to “consequences incurred in action,” in Dewey’s words. Furthermore, scholarship in both domains explores alternative possibilities to familiar constructions of meaning. The essay explains by means of a concrete example the approach I took to hybridizing these approaches. It describes an ethnographic and philosophical study of how children made meaning of justice and solidarity through their practice of democratic citizenship in an extracurricular program called Village. At Village, children built and ran a miniature town. Their actions and conversations around the political challenges that inevitably arose exemplify meaning-making of ideals in response to actual problems. The meaning of solidarity and justice for these children emerged through the consequences of previous and present actions they took in communication with others. This essay details the methods I used for designing the study, collecting data, and analyzing my findings.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2014

Although ‘new fatherhood’ promises a reconstruction of the domesticity paradigm that positions fa... more Although ‘new fatherhood’ promises a reconstruction of the domesticity paradigm that positions fathers as breadwinners and mothers as caretakers, it maintains the notion that families are self-supporting entities and thereby neglects the extensive interdependence involved in raising children. As a result, it cannot successfully overturn this paradigm and hampers our ability to reimagine relationships along lines that would better serve parents' and children's wellbeing. This article raises these issues through an exploration of ‘daddy-daughter dances’, which manifest new fatherhood discourse as expressed in public schooling. Although the dances are in some ways peculiarly American, they exemplify tensions and inconsistencies around father's involvement in child-raising that nag most contemporary Western societies. These tensions, the article contends, concern the distribution of public resources among families as well as within them. Drawing on Kittay's theorization of dependence and interdependence, the article argues that contemporary social reconfigurations demand a new reimagination of relationships that starts with the recognition of interdependencies

Educational Theory, 2013

Contemporary educational reformers have claimed that research on social class differences in chil... more Contemporary educational reformers have claimed that research on social class differences in child raising justifies programs that aim to lift children out of poverty by means of cultural interventions. Focusing on the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), Ruby Payne's ''aha! Process,'' and the Harlem Children's Zone as examples, Amy Shuffelton argues that such programs, besides overstepping the social science research, are ethically illegitimate insofar as they undermine the equitable development of civic agency. Shuffelton invokes Aristotelian civic friendship, particularly as interpreted by Danielle Allen and Sibyl Schwarzenbach, as key to a politics that avoids relations of domination and subordination. She concludes that social justice requires that educators involved with culturally interventionist programs recognize the workings of power within schooling and society, that they accept the limits of their own perspectives, and that they remain open to what is of value in child-raising practices other than those associated with the contemporary middle class. Friendship seems also to hold cities together, and lawgivers to care more about it than about justice; for concord seems to be something like friendship, and this is what they aim at most of all, while taking special pains to eliminate civil conflict as something hostile. And when people are friends, they have no need of justice, while when they are just, they need friendship as well; and the highest form of justice seems to be a matter of friendship. 1

Critical Education, 2015

To speak of the “neoliberal privatization of education” is discursively to acknowledge a distinct... more To speak of the “neoliberal privatization of education” is discursively to acknowledge a distinction between “public” and “private,” which “privatization” seeks to override. To critics of school privatization, the erosion of the distinct sphere of the public is a regressive move. It is noteworthy, therefore, that progressive feminists, who are also concerned with the distinction between feminized “private” and masculinized “public” spheres, have historically supported the erosion of this distinction. There are, this paper contends, importantly gendered dimensions to neoliberal privatization that feminist analysis of the “private” brings into focus.

Philosophy of Education Archive, 2008

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is, at face value, a critique of parental neglect. After Victor Frank... more Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is, at face value, a critique of parental neglect. After Victor Frankenstein succeeds in “discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more ... [becomes] capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter,” he abandons his creation.1 In language evoking both sexual experience and childbirth, he initially describes how “the astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture. After so much time spent in painful labor, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires, was the most gratifying consummation of my toils.”2 Piecing together a “human frame” out of parts gleaned in “charnel houses,” “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house,” he creates a living being.3 The moment it breathes and moves, however, Victor views its creation as a “catastrophe.” “[B]reathless horror and disgust filled my heart,” he recounts.4 Victor abandons the monster and in doing so sets off a chain of events leading to the d...

Philosophy of Education Archive, 2017

International Handbook of Philosophy of Education, 2018

Philosophy of Education Archive, 2020

In the immediate aftermath of the November 2016 election, Mark Lilla argued in the New York Times... more In the immediate aftermath of the November 2016 election, Mark Lilla argued in the New York Times that to win, the Democratic party would need to replace identity politics with a unifying vision of citizenship. Becoming aware of and celebrating our differences was “a splendid principle of moral pedagogy,” Lilla claimed, “but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age.” We need, Lilla argued, “a post-identity liberalism.” Education plays a prominent role in Lilla’s challenge, as he calls on teachers to “refocus attention on their main political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in our history.” He calls on the press to “begin educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored” and “take seriously its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially their historical dimension.”1 Lilla’s article and the b...