Professor Arie Kizel, Ph.D., Vice-Dean for Teaching, Head, Pedagogical Development of Educational Systems MA Program
Dept. of Learning and Instructional Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel and
Co-founder and President, Mediterranean Association for Philosophy with Children; current Editor, Studies in Education: J. of Study and Research in Education [Hebrew] and he serves on the Board of Reviewers of International Journal of Fear Studies.
Dr. Kizel and I have been connecting for the last few years around the importance of teaching about the nature and role of fear in education generally, philosophy of education, and more recently in teacher education specifically.
He and I have both utilized the concept of "pedagogy of fear" in which we use the term as a negative form of pedagogy that is not liberational. I wanted to introduce him and his work to the FM ning community because it is rare in my experience to find any professional educator (especially, in a mainstream university) who has taught about the pedagogy of fear and the difficulties in changing it. Kizel, is rare in the field, in having written three+ articles on "fear" directly and being committed to advancing the profile of this problem and approach to education. I so appreciate that effort. Recently, we have decided to co-author a book on this topic (in progress).
I am also excited to work with him because of his past 15 years or so researching and publishing on important topics in the field of Education, as he has developed expertise in the history of Israeli education (e.g., textbook analysis and revision), and he studies problems of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, monologizm and how to bring about pluralistic humanizing narratives back into education; he has become a world-recognized leader in dialogical pedagogy and ethical issues regarding philosophy and children; he explores how to better respect children (e.g., critiquing adult fear-projection of shadow conflicts and overall pathologizing of children) and their rights--and, how to teach philosophy with children, alternative education and mainstream education borders of exchanges, philosophical inquiry generally, Jewish-Arab affairs from an educational (historical, political) perspective and how to make education more inclusive, including those with special needs. I am most interested in his work to build a healthy sense of meaning and concomitant responsibility in teachers and learners across the board.
I appreciate his engagement at times with "counter-education" philosophies as in with his colleague Ilan Gur-Ze'ev and others. These have been issues that have long interested me as a critical, creative and caring educator going back into the late 1970s onward. As being someone who teaches teachers how to think better, it is inspiring to know he is out there and influencing teachers who will go out into the school systems and beyond schools, influencing democratic and civic society. Kizel is an eclectic educator to watch in the future and learn from and I am curious how his views of "fear" (and fearlessness) will grow over the years.
For those interested go to his blog for a listing of all his publications: https://ariekizel.blogspot.com/
References re: explicit Pedagogy of Fear topic by Arie Kizel
__2015. Pedagogy of fear as paralyzing men's questions. In Yesiayahu Tadmor and Amir Frayman (eds.), Education--Men's Questions (pp. 214-23). Tel Aviv: Mofet [Hebrew]
__2016. Pedagogy out of fear of philosophy as a way of pathologizing children. J. of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, 10(20), 28-47.
__2021. Philosophy w/ children as a way of overcoming the 'shadow adults cast over childhood' and the 'pedagogy of fear.' International Journal of Fear Studies, 3(2), 13-24.
__(Ed.) 2023. Philosophy with children and teacher education: Global perspectives on critical, creative and caring thinking. Routledge. [see specifically his "Pedagogy of Fear" (pp. xii-xxv) and "The Fear at the Heart of the Pedagogy of Fear" (pp. xxvi-xxix) in Editor Introduction.]
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