Winston C. Thompson

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at The Ohio State University

In the present unjust context of US schools, many educators face uncertainty about the legitimacy of their issuing punishments, especially when their identity meaningfully differs from that of their students. In this article, we address these doubts by acknowledging distinctive elements of schools to provide helpful distinctions and analyses of the...

Amid efforts to limit “divisive concepts” in educational settings, this article investigates the obstruction of a civic‐focused early childhood curriculum. Joy Dangora Erickson and Winston Thompson analyze the challenges faced by a resourceful kindergarten teacher striving to uphold curriculum goals despite constraints imposed by the state legislat...

The 2007 publication of Miranda Fricker’s celebrated book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing gave way to a burgeoning area of study in philosophy of education. The book’s arguments create a context for expanding the scope of work on epistemic issues in education by moving beyond direct explorations of the distribution of epistemic...

In her groundbreaking book, Epistemic Injustice, renowned moral philosopher and social epistemologist Miranda Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice to draw attention to the pervasive impact of epistemic oppression on marginalized social groups. Fricker’s account spurred a flurry of scholarship regarding the discriminatory impact of epistemic...

In more than half of its states, the US has recently passed or proposed legislation to limit or ban public educational curricular reference to race, gender, sexuality, or other identity topics. The stated justifications for these legislative moves are myriad, but they share a foundational claim; namely, these topics are asserted to be politically a...

Thompson and Tillson introduce their co-edited volume, Pedagogies of Punishment placing it in the wider context of the Pedagogies of Punishment project, summarising the contributions and suggesting directions for future research.

In this chapter Tillson and Thompson consider what behavioural requirements schools may establish for students and which (if any) they may enforce through punishment, during compulsory education. They argue that before children are autonomous, schools may establish both paternalistic, and other-regarding requirements, but not requirements imposed f...

Building on the careful racial analyses of Charles W. Mills, this article uses the example case of Black ethnics to illustrate the general plausibility of ethnic identity as a useful political analytic category, suggesting that the absence of ethnic identity in racial analyses mutes important aspects of the lived experiences of racialized persons a...

The authors describe a collaboration to create a series of social justice–oriented curriculum maps for a predominantly White preschool. The researchers explore their own identities and biases, how racism disadvantages individuals and groups, and the resulting curriculum design.

In this extended book review, Winston C. Thompson engages with Larry Nucci’s and Robyn Ilten-Gee’s Moral education for social justice. Following summary of a few conceptual foundations of the project, Thompson offers areas of attention for further explorations of moral education in a socially unjust world. This focus on elements of the project’s fo...

This article emerges from a stream of scholarship demonstrating the inadequacy of broad arguments favouring ‘neutrality’ as an alternative to ‘directive normative instruction’ in the early childhood classroom. We advance a moral educational framing of the tension between neutrality and normativity in education: specifically, we argue that irreplace...

Rule violations are expected in schools, and assessments of the severity of those violations and the appropriate disciplinary responses are a significant aspect of educators’ responsibilities. While most educators and policy makers reject rule violation as a permissible behavior in schools, is such a categorical rejection always a suitable response...

This article provides a definition of monuments and describes their potential for removalist and preservationist controversy. The authors focus on the example of Confederate monuments in the United States as, on the basis of racist impacts, these monuments are candidates for widespread removal. The authors review influential existing philosophical...

In this review of the Educational Goods, the author provides a set of comments that might extend the worthy framework provided by Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb and Swift. In particular, the author calls attention to the ways in which continued work within this project might broaden its conceptualisation of educational goods, increase the scope of potential...

In recent work, Joseph Fishkin has helpfully enriched understandings of equality of opportunity as a feature of distributive justice schemes. One branch of his argument focuses upon the degree to which ‘merit’, as a function of talent and effort, is conceptually and practically vexing for these goals. While Thompson is in general agreement with the...

Traits of reasonableness are necessary characteristics of successfully engaged citizens within pluralistic liberal democratic societies. Given the evident unlikelihood of the spontaneous development of these critical characteristics, pedagogical effort ought to be exerted towards ensuring that this goal is realized. In what follows, we argue that p...

In this paper, Thompson engages the fact that educators perceive themselves to be faced with an apparent dilemma regarding racial identity education. On one hand, their political obligations may incline them to teach racial identity so as to avoid reifying the reality of a racialized system of power. On the other hand, honoring their epistemic obli...

The concept of liberalism has a wide influence on contemporary work within the field of education. Given this breadth of effect, it is not surprising that liberalism can be invoked in the service of multiple ends—many of which appear to be at odds with one another. As such, this article will trace liberalism's fundamental commitments of " equality...

Evans, Caines and Thompson examine issues within current teacher evaluation reform using ethics as a disciplinary lens. The chapter begins with a call for educational decision-makers to attend to the moral dimensions of teacher evaluation, especially when considering the potential intended and unintended consequences of the use of student growth me...

Background/Context Educational research tends to borrow accounts of justice from scholarship embedded within the structures and commitments of other disciplines or fields of study. This has created a body of educational research that largely responds to the “justice” goals of those disciplines rather than education qua education. Purpose/Focus of...

This presentation questions the rigidity of the boundary between ideal and non-ideal theory in education. In the service of this goal, the author challenges and extends John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness, bringing it to bear upon education in our imperfect world. By showing that this representative work of ideal theory can be meaningfully su...

We think of our schools as lively, vibrant places where our students, our children, can thrive; a place where we help them to secure their futures. Sadly, sometimes our schools are places of refuge, places where a student seeks as much normalcy as they can have in their lives. While our schools are places of hope and the future, too often we are fa...

In this essay, Winston C. Thompson questions the rigidity of the boundary between ideal and nonideal theory, suggesting a porosity that allows elements of both to be brought to bear upon educational issues in singularly incisive ways. In the service of this goal, Thompson challenges and extends John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness, bringing i...

At the 2013 annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, the Philosophy of Education Society's standing committee on race and ethnicity (CORE) organized a symposium on Meira Levinson's important book, No Citizen Left Behind. Along with author Levinson, the critics who took part in the symposium, Sally Sayles-Hannon, Michelle Moses, Winston Thompson and Quen...