In order to address pressing educational issues and help move schooling towards a more democratic practice, I have focused my research on the question of power and its relationship to the educational lives of students and teachers. Drawing on a number of philosophical traditions and empirical data, I have attempted to define how power functions in education on several interlocking—though potentially contradictory—levels:
1)\sBetween students and teachers
2)\sBetween cognition and identity formation in students
3)\sBetween teachers and classrooms as collective spaces of group identity formation
4)\sBetween teachers and institutional bureaucracies
5)\sBetween bureaucracies and larger political, social, and economic forces
Moving back and forth between the micro and macro levels of social interaction and between internal and external forces has enabled me to pinpoint one of the serious limitations of contemporary schooling. Stated simply, schools—as with society on a larger scale—are predicated on a fundamental logic of exclusion. It is this logic of exclusion that has generated the two major poles of my research. First, I have investigated the logic of exclusion through an adaptation of Giorgio Agamben's theory of abandonment. This work has enabled me to reassess practices such as zero tolerance in schools and has enabled me to shed new light on forms of institutional racism and classism. Second, I have attempted to move beyond the logic of educational abandonment/de-investment by connecting theories of democratic schooling with aesthetic philosophy. In particular, this research has focused on investigating several interrelated questions such as: what are the aesthetics of learning, how are the artist and the teacher similar and dissimilar, what are the narrative structures underlying particular forms of educational philosophy (the fable, the gothic novel, ect.), and what is the connection between the aesthetics of educational practice and democracy. Overall, this work hopes to forge a new understanding of educational "logopoiesis" against the logic of abandonment that exists in schools today.