Towards the decolonisation of religion education in a pre-service education classroom

ABSTRACT

In this article, I reflect on my attempts to decolonise religious education at a historically white university in a post-apartheid South Africa. This pre-service education project conducted in 2017 happened against the backdrop of two events, namely, a renewed curriculum policy, Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) and the #RhodesMustFall (RMF) and #FeesMustFall (FMF) protests. These events encouraged me to reflect on my academic role as a teacher-educator preparing pre-service teachers to teach religion in schools. This led to me asking many questions such as, what is the effect of my teaching religious education?, How do teacher-educators prepare religious education pre-service teachers for a multicultural and multireligious society?, How does my teaching align itself with the decolonisation of education? and How do I redress the colonial past in my religious education classroom? The data which included reflective reports, student experiences and self-reflexivity acknowledged the findings that religion education served as a unifying factor in building social cohesion. The significance of this paper lies in the argument that decolonisation becomes an imperative if one is striving for social justice and intends to commit oneself to a more equitable society where crossing borders must be a seamless act.     

Writing the queer self: Using autobiography to mediate inclusive teacher education in Canada

Writing the queer self involves locating the self within a broad understanding of queer that recognises a spectrum of sex, sexual and gendered subjects. In this article, I discuss how I write the queer self to link the personal to my positional practice as a gay teacher educator. I overview my work with Agape, which is a focus group that I initiated in my university's teacher education programme to explore sex, sexual and gender differences in education and culture. I explore how I link my queer autobiography to the professional and the pedagogical, and how I use it to engender deliberations about queer presence, representation and place in education. I conclude by speaking on the importance of doing this work as an ethical project for social justice and educational transformation.     

MacIntyre,rival traditions and education

This paper critically discusses MacIntyre's thesis that education is essentially a contested concept. In order to contextualise my discussion, I discuss both whether rival educational traditions of education found in MacIntyre's work – which I refer to as instrumental and non-instrumental justifications of education – can be rationally resolved using MacIntyre's framework, and whether a shared meaning of education is possible as a result. I conclude that MacIntyre's synthesis account is problematic because the whole notion that there are rationally negotiable ways in which to compromise or harmonise opposing justifications of education found in instrumental and non-instrumental forms of education is troubling – the reason being that these are cultural disagreements about human flourishing that are not neutral-free, and due to a lack of care distinguishing between the common uses of the term ‘education’, and its looser usages to mean something like school learning that embraces a range of aims and goals that are often incompatible. In this light, it is argued that the contestability card has been unnecessarily overemphasised, and brings to our attention the complex ways in which we interpret education and what it means to be educated.     

Understanding Candidates’ Learning Relationships with their Cooperating Teachers: A call to Reframe my Pedagogy

Abstract

This self-study frames the influences of cooperating (or mentor) teachers on teacher candidates in my teacher education classroom as an action-at-a-distance on my pedagogy of teacher education; that is, a tacit set of influences and expectations that teacher candidates develop about my course before it even begins. Interviews with teacher candidates enabled me to develop two conceptual metaphors to think about the relationships candidates develop with cooperating teachers on practicum. The first, freedom with foundation, reflects the fact that teacher candidates hope to have considerable autonomy in their practicum placements while simultaneously having the support from their cooperating teacher to receive meaningful, regular, feedback. The second, power and performance, names the tensions teacher candidates feel in experiencing the practicum as a site of performance rather than as a site of learning. I offer some specific pedagogical ways in which I have responded to these issues before making a turn to self. I examined journal entries from my own experiences as a teacher candidate 20 years ago with a view to understanding the ways in which the two metaphors may have played a role in my own development as a teacher. This research compels me to attend explicitly to action-at-at-distance forces in my teacher education classroom, such as candidates’ relationship with cooperating teachers and my relationships with my former cooperating teachers.     

Secularisation and the Securitisation of the Sacred a Response to Lewin’s Framing of the Gearon–Jackson Debate

In this article, I make a response to Lewin’s insightful and judicious contribution to the Gearon–Jackson debate. I address the central and important arguments made by Lewin in relation to three aspects of my theoretical orientations on religion in education: (1) what Lewin rightly identifies as my ‘propositional’ interpretation of religion; (2) the politicisation of religion as secularisation; and (3) the securitisation of religion in education as a ‘securitisation of the sacred’. I argue some theoretical framing for this is necessary and that an engagement with the (propositional) realities more helpful than their denial, and that precisely because religion is propositional it can be so used or directed to political and security purposes. In sum, to ensure there is no sense of equivocation in my response I greatly welcome Levin’s intervention, but defend my propositional interpretation of religion and defend too my conceptualisation of the politicisation and securitisation of religion in education. Prompted by Jackson’s critique and Lewin’s subsequent intervention, this response is offered then as a bridge to facilitate further theorisation of the politicisation and securitisation of religion in education as an aspect of secularisation.     

Developing a Vision of Teacher Education: How my classroom teacher understandings evolved in the university environment

Drawing on my experiences as a former classroom teacher making the transition to teacher education, this study examines how my vision of teacher education developed over the course of my first three years as a graduate teaching assistant in a social studies education program in the United States. A qualitative self-study methodology was used to identify and describe sources of tension and growth that contributed to the evolution of my classroom teacher understandings as I forged a distinct vision for teacher education. My vision of teacher education was informed by completing graduate coursework, engaging in the work of teacher education, interacting and collaborating with peers, and studying my practice as it developed and unfolded. Throughout the article, I discuss the potential of self-study methodology to encourage new teacher educators to examine both the features and motivations behind their practice, as well as the effects of this examination on the development of a vision of teacher education.     

Taking a Return to School: Using Self-Study to Learn about Teacher Educator Practice

The work of teacher educators is complex and multifaceted and requires knowledge of pedagogy and practice in both schools and teacher education institutions. This complexity, combined with calls for teacher educators to work in close partnership with schools, sees some in teacher education working in hybrid roles and across the boundaries of schools and universities. Drawing on a self-study conducted over a one-year return to teaching, I explore my return home to teach in a secondary school and I examine the continuing impact of this experience on my practice as a teacher educator. Using the concept of tensions as a conceptual framework to analyse the data I explore three tensions in this article: (1) teacher as technician versus teacher as pedagogue; (2) challenging versus being responsive to other’s views of learning; and (3) teacher versus teacher educator identity. I explore how a return to teaching in school and the tensions I experienced enabled me to develop my practice and understandings as a teacher educator. I argue that rich professional learning can result from using self-study to examine teacher educator practice, particularly for teacher educators working in hybrid roles and partnership contexts.     

Exploring The Island: Mapping the Shifting Sands in the Landscape of English Classroom Culture and Pedagogy

I begin with an account of my own observation of an English lesson taught by one of my student teachers using a teaching resource, The Island, that I used myself as a new teacher more than 20 years ago and of my own responses on finding it transformed by two decades of change in educational policy and practice. It has become almost a given in academic articles on English teaching, to refer, in a sentence or two, to the reduction of the English curriculum, the narrowing of pedagogy and the loss of teacher agency due to the dominance of a high stakes assessment regime. The policy changes that have given rise to this change have been clearly analysed elsewhere, but part of my purpose here is just to look again at how it might be experienced by a particular pupil in a particular class. I am interested in analysing some of the features of The Island’s incarnation then and now, from three different angles: as it is inscribed in the project book, as I remember teaching it and as I observed it recently in a London classroom. I draw on theories of literacy and of the teaching of writing in particular in trying to account for some of the differences but beyond that, I argue that it is essential to link such theories to wider political debates about culture and to reflect back from this to the purposes of the English curriculum and culture of the English classroom.     

Political economy of investment in education in South Asia: A reply

This is a reply to the commentary made by James Urwick on my paper ‘The political economy of investment in education in South Asia’ (International Journal of Educational Development 4, 155–166). The original paper discussed the rationality of allocation of resources to and within education in South Asian countries. In this paper I attempt to reply to some of the important issues raised by Urwick regarding my analysis, including choice of indicators and method of analysis. While some of the points raised by Urwick are obvious and some constitute genuine criticism, a large part of the criticism is misleading.     

Backing the right horse: Teacher education,sociocultural analysis and literacy in rural education

This paper is a reflection on the way that a background in sociocultural theory and research actually saved my teaching career by allowing me to shift from being a dispenser of knowledge to a cultural neophyte attempting to understand where he is. Teaching then is understood as a reading exercise which is undertaken in a particular place which itself needs to be read by the effective teacher. This is a narrative inquiry into practice which represents an attempt to understand my own teaching career in the light of Frank Smith's (1984) provocative essay “How education backed the wrong horse” in which he argues that anthropology would have made a better choice for a foundational discipline for education than psychology. I conclude with some thoughts on what this perspective implies for literacy instruction.     

The Intertextual Method for Art Education Applied in Japanese Paper Theatre—a Study on Discovering Intercultural Differences

In art education we need methods for studying works of art and visual culture interculturally because there are many multicultural art classes and little consensus as to how to interpret art in different cultures. In this article my central aim was to apply the intertextual method that I developed in my doctoral thesis for Western art education to explore whether the method would also work from a non‐Western point of view. My hypothesis was that it is possible to find local and global differences that arise from selected texts and study them interculturally. As postmodernism calls attention to marginal areas, I applied my method to a form of visual culture that is not well known in the European art education context, the Japanese kamishibai which can be translated as Japanese paper theatre. Based on the results, my study will propose a method for understanding visual culture and the multiple relations ‐ local and global ‐ between different cultures. Japanese paper theatre also offers an interesting potential for using visual and verbal stories in the theory and practice of art education.     

Poland: The window to higher education in Eastern Europe?

Upheavals in Poland during 1980–1981 included proposals for some dramatic changes in its system of higher education. Taking advantage of the momentum for change created by Solidarity and using the strike weapon where necessary, academics and students produced temporary changes which in some cases represent a complete reversal of previous policies. By studying these changes one obtains a view of some of the directions socialist higher education in Eastern Europe might take if the opportunity permitted.Author's Note: The account that follows results from a sabbatical spent in Poland during the early months of 1981. It reflects the reading I did and the impressions I gained while there. Any conclusions reached are my own and should in no way reflect on the people of Poland who hosted my highly stimulating stay there.     

Horse Riding 101: The role of experience in reframing teacher education practices

For this self-study of my teacher education practice, I positioned myself as a novice in the unfamiliar context of learning to ride a horse. This gave me an opportunity to re-experience being an authentic learner and thereby to deepen my understanding of how an individual learns to teach. I recorded my experiences in an electronic journal and analysed what happened over many months of weekly horse-riding lessons. Central to my learning process was feeding key ideas, insights and tentative analyses into discussions with my students and critical friends. As I analysed their responses further, two themes emerged through pattern analysis. First, being a neophyte in horse riding allowed me to empathise strongly with my students' novice status. Second, permitting them to see the development of my expertise through horse riding was helpful to my students. Re-positioning myself as a learner challenged my view of myself as a teacher educator and transformed my teacher education practice.     

Rhizocurrere: a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to curriculum autobiography

This paper introduces rhizocurrere, a curriculum autobiographical concept I created to chart my efforts to develop place-responsive outdoor environmental education. Rhizocurrere brings together rhizome, a Deleuze and Guattari concept, with currere, Pinar’s autobiographical method for curriculum inquiry. Responding to invitations from Deleuze, Guattari and Pinar, to experiment, I have adapted their ideas to create a philosophical~methodological concept that draws attention to relationships between my pedagogical and curriculum research and the contexts that have shaped my life~work. This paper outlines rhizocurrere, its parent concepts and how I have enacted my attempts to think differently about curricula and pedagogy. The central question is not ‘what is rhizocurrere?’ but rather ‘how does/could rhizocurrere work?’ and ‘what does/might rhizocurrere allow me to do?’     

Participation in adult education for community development: a critical discourse analysis of Training for Transformation

Participation has become so central to adult education for community development that even the World Bank supports participatory programming. This article analyses how participation is conceptualised in Training for Transformation (TfT), a Freirean-inspired curriculum used in international community development settings. TfT seeks to equip learners ‘to understand and take action in their world’, partly by shaping the curriculum itself. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the TfT curriculum, three interviews, and published TfT case studies, the study explores what kinds of involvement and control educators and curriculum developers intend in TfT. CDA elucidates who is included in the training and how practitioners position themselves vis-a-vis learners and other audiences. TfT implementation highlights the dialectic between idealised community participation and decision making in educational programming, and educators’ need and desire to develop curricular content. Specifically, within Freire’s early philosophy and the TfT curriculum, there is a tension between exploratory, participatory learning pedagogy rooted in dialogue, and animators’ intention to teach certain content and relay particular ideologies. This study highlights potential contradictions and complications in adult education for community development participatory discourses, and underscores the need for practitioners to consider what genuine participation entails and how best to cultivate it.     

德国奥地利职业教育考察见闻及启示

发达国家职业教育的体系比较完整,人才培养方案的特点比较突出,积累了值得学习和借鉴的成功经验。通过对德国和奥地利两国几所职业技术学校的考察,结合对国务院关于职业教育决定的学习,阐述了高职教育在办学定位、学生实践能力和职业技能培养、弹性学制和学分制、职业技术培训、师资队伍建设、产学研结合与校企合作等方面的启示。     

American Philosophy,Translation and the Time of the Pandemic: A Rejoinder to Ruth Heilbronn and Adrian Skilbeck

In response to Ruth Heilbronn and Adrian Skilbeck's thoughtful review of my American Philosophy in Translation, I take up three aspects of the argument about which I want both to defend my position and to clarify it further. The first is the use of examples in philosophy and philosophy of education. The second raises the question of how far American philosophy, as a philosophy in response to crisis, can answer to the contemporary crisis of the pandemic. The third addresses some educational implications of American philosophy in translation by paying attention to the particularities of its language—especially in respect of such considerations as distance education, international exchange without travel and alternative routes of political education through withdrawal and through the creation in digital space of what Thoreau called ‘beautiful knowledge’.     

Learning to be a group facilitator in outdoor education: using self-awareness to overcome fears and be fully present

ABSTRACT

Facilitating groups in outdoor education can sometimes be very challenging, and self-doubt and the fear of facilitating inadequately add to difficulties that facilitators must sometimes manage. In this paper, I will explore some of the ways by which facilitators contribute to the difficulties they experience and, furthermore, to explore some solutions. Negative self-talk can sabotage our best intentions as facilitators, by reducing the levels of free attention that are needed to facilitate well. I draw on the findings of a naturalistic inquiry conducted with 7 facilitator educators and 104 graduates of facilitator education programmes. Data collected through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and qualitative surveys were analysed using the constant comparison method. . Based on my research findings, I contend that outdoor education programmes do not need perfect facilitators. Rather, facilitators who can be authentic, self-aware and fully present for their groups will improve outdoor education programs.