Review of Clarence W. Joldersma, A Levinasian Ethics for Education’s Commonplaces: Between Calling and Inspiration

Abstract

It is both a pleasure and a privilege to have this opportunity to review Clarence Joldersma’s recent book, A Levinasian Ethics for Education’s Commonplaces: Between Calling and Inspiration (hereafter LEEC). Joldersma has participated in and contributed to the scholarship on Emmanuel Levinas and education for the past 15 years or so, and I see this book in part as a consolidation of that work. I must admit that, on first reading, I was puzzled that he had chosen not to engage more explicitly with the work of other philosophers of education whose work is also informed by Levinas. I am thinking, for example, of Sharon Todd, Gert Biesta, Paul Standish, Claudia Eppert, Denise Egea-Kuehne and others (although several are named in the acknowledgments). But when I read the book a second time, I noticed a brief comment in the preface where he says that in the process of working and reworking the manuscript over a period of many years, what emerged—to his surprise—was his own voice. And indeed, as I returned to the body of the text, I started to see the book as a sort of pedagogical creed—an unpacking of Joldersma’s own fundamental beliefs about teaching, learning, curriculum, and the larger projects of schooling and education, as inspired by Levinas’s ethics. We learn, for example, that, for Joldersma, education is not about competition or primarily about passing on disciplinary knowledge, but rather a response to the call to justice—a fundamentally other-centered vision of education oriented toward the poor and marginalized, and to a commitment to human flourishing in our local communities and around the globe. Joldersma’s Levinasian-inspired education is obviously a radical departure from other conceptions of what education ought to be about, such as the pursuit of ‘‘academic excellence, personal development, finding truth, or the American dream’’ (p. 107). When I approach LEEC as a pedagogical creed, it becomes less important whether or not I agree with Joldersma’s interpretations of Levinas on particular points, or whether his interpretations align with or depart from that of other philosophers of education. Rather, reading the book through that lens allows me to