Doret de Ruyter

When I received the invitation of Mitja Sardoč to contribute to a special issue in commemoration of Terry McLaughlin twenty years after his untimely death in 2006, I did not have to think twice. Th...

1. In this paper, we defend virtuous gratitude as an aim of primary and secondary education. This defence is built on the idea that schools should not only provide students with knowledge about the...

In het Nederlandse debat rond vorming en onderwijs bestaat onduidelijkheid over de betekenis van het woord persoonsvorming. Dit belemmert de discussie over normatieve en empirische vraagstukken rond persoonsvorming.Een conceptuele analyse is uitgevoerd om de regels voor het gebruik van het woord persoonsvorming te verhelderen. Zowel het concept ‘vorming’ als het concept ‘persoon’ is generiek en differentiërend geanalyseerd. Dit heeft geleid tot een generieke beschrijving van persoonsvorming als ‘blijvende invloed op kenmerkende eigenschappen van een menselijk subject’. Binnen deze beschrijving hebben we drie manieren onderscheiden waarop de betekenis van ‘persoonsvorming’ kan verschillen, en die bepalen wanneer er sprake is van persoonsvorming. Zo kan persoonsvorming als beschrijvende of voorschrijvende term worden gebruikt, als intentiewoord of als resultaatwoord, en voor vorming tot persoon of vorming van personen. Op basis van onze analyse stellen wij voor om de term ‘persoonsvorming’ te gebruiken voor de generieke beschrijving en niet voor meer specifieke betekenissen. Dit generieke concept vormt de basis voor verschillende betekenissen en voor verschillende concepties. Dit zijn normatieve interpretaties van persoonsvorming. Scherp gebruik van het verschil tussen concept en concepties en de verschillende betekenissen, zou voor meer helderheid in de discussie kunnen zorgen.

This article offers a theoretical investigation of the educational value of gratitude. We make the case that it is possible to learn from and through gratitude experiences. More specifically, gratitude experiences include understandings regarding and a reflective awareness of the value, contingency and vulnerability of certain goods as well as one's dependency in relation to these goods. We argue that such experiences can transform one's outlook on life in a sense that is educationally relevant and valuable in relation to one's flourishing. Building on this, we claim that gratitude can contribute to the development of wisdom. However, since the interpretations of the world inherent in gratitude can be epistemically inaccurate and/or morally inappropriate, gratitude experiences must also be guided by wisdom. Instead of blindly accepting the perceptions implicit in gratitude experiences, people must reflect on these with genuine care for the truth and for justice. We suggest that educators can bring their wisdom and concern for justice to bear in stimulating and guiding others' gratitude experiences in a desirable manner, especially in the case of young people, whose reflective capacities are still developing. We conclude that gratitude experiences should be recognized as a potential source of educationally valuable forms of awareness and insights.

Since the 1990s, there has been a spate of influential research defending flourishing as the aim of education. Promoting student flourishing is a key goal of education that extends beyond academic achievement. This approach recognizes the holistic development of students, nurturing their intellectual, emotional, social, and physical well-being. Over the past two decades, we have also witnessed increased practical uptake of this theoretical stance. Educators, schools, and head teachers from all over the world have drawn inspiration from this movement explicitly to prioritize virtue language and student flourishing in their classrooms or adopt a whole-school approach that aims to cultivate students’ virtuous characters with the goal of student flourishing and well-being. This is clearly a wide educational remit and one that has been championed and criticized. In response to objections, some of which were recently made, defenders of flourishing as an educational aim ought to revisit their premises and further explicate and defend their claim that education should aim at flourishing. This is precisely what the five contributions to this suite of articles do, making a timely contribution to furthering the debate over how and why education can and should aim at flourishing.

Dit hoofdstuk presenteert een alternatief voor de dominante meritocratische en neoliberale opvatting over wat we van mensen zouden moeten waarderen in onze samenleving en daarmee op scholen. Volgens deze opvatting zouden we het menselijk kapitaal van leerlingen moeten vergroten door hun cognitieve vermogens te vergroten en leerlingen te stimuleren om hoge prestaties op toetsen te leveren. Daarmee kunnen leerlingen een goede bijdrage leveren aan economische groei en bloei. Verdedigd wordt dat niet het floreren van de economie het ultieme doel of de bedoeling is van onderwijs, maar het floreren van mensen. Mensen floreren als ze hun potenties kunnen ontwikkelen en hun capaciteiten kunnen inzetten om activiteiten te ondernemen en relaties aan te gaan die zinvol en waardevol zijn. Het hoofdstuk licht toe waarin dat doel zich onderscheidt van meritocratie en wat als verdienste (‘merit’) geldt. Dit wordt verbonden aan de nieuwe onderwijsvisie van de Organisatie voor Economische Samenwerking en Ontwikkeling (OESO), waarin ook floreren als doel van onderwijs wordt voorgesteld.

In the University of Humanistic Studies (UvH) research and education are inspired by an inclusive humanistic worldview. As a worldview-based university, the UvH has both an entitlement to promote humanism as the prime source of inspiration and a responsibility to live up to its worldview-based mission. It strives not only for the academic formation of students, but also promotes humanistic moral and ethical values and assists students in developing skills and dispositions that enable them to live a good life, more specifically a good working, civic, and personal life. In my own words, it aims for students' flourishing. This aim leads to various challenges in a university, and I discuss two of them. First, the university has to combine the promotion of humanistic values and the cultivation of students' disposition to put these into practice with respect for the autonomy of students. Second, it has to combine aiming for students' flourishing with looking after the mental well-being of students while ensuring that caring for, and preventing, students' psychological problems does not overrule, or even jeopardize, education for flourishing.

In this empirical study, we investigate what and how teachers in Dutch universities of applied sciences (UAS) think they contribute to the development of students’ ethical compasses. Six focus groups were conducted with teachers across three programmes: Initial Teaching Education, Business Services, and Information and Communication Technology. This study revealed that teachers across the three different professional disciplines shared similar ideas about what should be addressed in the development of students’ ethical compasses. Their contributions were grouped into three core themes: creating students’ moral awareness, developing students’ moral skills and promoting students’ moral professional behaviour. The majority of the teachers used a wide range of planned and unplanned pedagogic–didactic actions (reflecting individual learning and cooperative and group learning) to enhance the development of students’ ethical compasses. However, teachers’ strategies were mostly unstructured and unreflective and depended on the individual teacher’s ability and knowledge to address moral themes. Furthermore, the study revealed two incompatible ideals: as role models, the teachers aimed to exemplify explicitly how to be a professional with an ethical compass. However, they also wanted to adopt a neutral stance because they were afraid to manipulate the students’ ethical compasses. Therefore, they avoided promoting the ethical compass that they believed to be the best.