Barbara S. Stengel

Barbara Stengel is professor emerita at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN where she served as professor of philosophy of education and director of teacher education. She is also a professor emerita at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Stengel holds several degrees from the University of Pittsburgh (Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education, 1984; MA in Philosophy, 1984; MEd in Sports Psychology, 1980), as well as an MA in Religious Studies from Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

Dr. Stengel's expertise can be located in the intersection between theory and practice at all levels of education, with particular attention to pragmatist thought, both classical and critical (especially feminist), and, relatedly, to the moral dimensions of educational practice and to the ways affect and emotion play out of and into the work of educators.

Stengel is the author of several books: Responsibility, Bloomsbury Press, 2023; Toward Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy with Liz Self, Harvard Education Press, 2020; Moral Matters with Alan Tom, Teachers College Press, 2006; and Just Education: The Right to Education in Context and Conversation, Loyola University Press, 1991. She is the co-author, with Gert Biesta, of "Thinking Philosophically about Teaching" in the American Educational Research Association's Handbook of Research on Teaching (2016) and "Sex/Gender and Affect/Emotion" in Oxford University Press's Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality in Education. Her published journal articles in recent years address ethical issues in both higher and basic education, seek to understand emotions like courage and fear in educational practice, take up intersections between classical pragmatism and post-modern, critical, feminist, and new materialist theorizing, and, of course, explore critical pragmatist optimism as a stance for (re)constructive educational action in a precarious world.

Stengel is the host of a podcast, Chasing Bailey, that began as an attempt to represent the life of a school in Nashville, TN that was transformed through a thick school-university partnership. That podcast continues today as an ongoing attempt to elevate the voices of educators as those who can tell us how to make education in this country exactly what it needs to be – and why! Notions of responsibility and critical pragmatist optimism figure prominently in the telling of the Bailey tale and in the wisdom of the educators with whom Stengel talks regularly.