Book 2.0 - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2022

Reading Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu again, always a completely immersive experience for me, I was struck again by the way in which the smallest details of that life become resonant, and make the text so eloquent, utterly involving a reader willing to give themselves up to the work. I was inspired to recall distant details of my own childhood in the West Midlands, and then of a period in a place that appears ‘remote’ from the mainland United Kingdom. These are two extracts from what will become a longer memoir, though not stretching to Proust’s twelve luminous volumes.

This dialogue between Anishinaabe scholar and filmmaker, Kalvin Hartwig, and board member Mark Turin explores Indigenous identity, language revitalization, reclamation and resurgence and the pernicious legacy of settler colonialism.

This article arose as a critical response to the second edition of Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education (2012) edited by Steven M. Cahn (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lissa Paul, a professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University in the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada, assigned Cahn’s anthology as the core text in a postgraduate course she taught in the winter of 2021: ‘The right to education: Historical frameworks’. As the course was designed to interrogate the philosophical grounds of (primarily North American) pedagogical practices, the masculine, Eurocentric biases of Cahn’s anthology mirror those underlying our educational institutions. In response to those biases, the five students in the class addressed Cahn’s errors of both omission and commission by developing something like a prospectus or book proposal for what Lissa dubbed the Anti-Cahn Anthology of Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education. In this article each student contributes a rationale for the inclusion of someone ‘missing’ from Cahn’s book and suggestions for selections from key texts. Adriana Brook writes on the medieval African-Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, Jessi Skye on the eighteenth-century Indigenous philosopher Handsome Lake, Rebekah Carlsson on the famous advocate of early childhood education, Maria Montessori, Jessica Dieleman on the late African American scholar bell hooks and Breanne Wilde on Jules Gill-Peterson and histories of the transgender child.

Migration and storytelling are defining and entwined features of humanity. Throughout history, people have travelled, in body and mind, exploring new places and ideas either by choice or necessity. Migration establishes cultural connections and imaginative possibilities, like new neural pathways in the collective human brain. This article explores workshops, designed and run in Ireland by children’s author Debbie Thomas and children’s author and illustrator Tatyana Feeney, who have used creative writing and illustration to build bridges between immigrants and Irish nationals, mainly children. We will describe cross-cultural workshops we have facilitated with children around Ireland and then focus on three major projects: Once upon a Folktale and Nation Creation (with children in mainstream Irish primary schools) and Connections (with Syrian refugees). In each project, Debbie oversaw the writing and Tatyana, the illustrations. All three projects have bridged cultures and enriched young participants, teachers and facilitators both culturally and creatively.

Review of: On Seamus Heaney, R. F. Foster (2020)

Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 248pp.,

ISBN 978-0-69121-147-3 h/bk, £14.99