Don't Fence Me In: the Liberation of Undomesticated Critique

In response to Helmut Heid's critique of domesticated philosophical critique, I focus on the metaphor of domestication, which is central to his article. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, I offer a deconstructive critique of the opposition between domesticated and undomesticated critique, arguing that a clear conceptual demarcation between the two is impossible, and that ‘domesticated’ and ‘undomesticated’ critique always carry each other's traces. I explore connections between the undomesticated and das Unheimliche (Freud's ‘Uncanny’), as well as differences between Helmut Heid's and Paulo Freire's interpretation and use of the concepts of ‘domestication’ and ‘liberation’. Lastly, I examine how educators might go about a pedagogy of critique. I argue that critique can and should be understood and taught as a tradition, but one that is heterogeneous rather than monolithic. A careful reception of this translated and metonymic tradition of critique will enable students to see the spaces in which new critique—and critique of critique— is possible.     

A Model of Classroom Coping Strategies

This paper represents an attempt to construct a theoretical model with which to analyse the social context and genesis of classroom coping strategies, thereby linking macro‐ and micro‐factors. I approach this firstly through a critique of A. Hargreaves’ analysis which tends to emphasise macro‐factors and constraints on teacher action. I suggest that this analysis should be balanced and augmented by recognition of more independent and creative action in micro contexts. In the second part of the paper I develop Woods’ work on teacher survival by considering the use of the interactionist concept of ‘self and the phenomenological concept of ‘interests‐at‐hand’ as a means of defining the subjective meaning of ‘coping’, and its implication for classroom processes. I emphasise the importance of teacher biography. Finally a conceptual model which seeks to integrate many macro‐ and micro‐factors which bear on classroom coping strategies is presented.     

‘Ballet it’s too whitey’: discursive hierarchies of high school dance spaces and the constitution of embodied feminine subjectivities

This article investigates (i) how the structuring practices and meanings associated with dance classes at an inner‐city American high school operated as institutional spaces (re)producing ‘dividing practices’ that supported racial and classed hierarchies; (ii) how these racist structures were created and maintained relative to dominant notions of embodiment, ‘race’, social class, femininity, and dance; and (iii) the way these dominant practices and hierarchies were managed by two ‘black’ young women at the high school in order to construct particular modes of self‐governance. The analysis suggests that educators be attuned to the role that spaces play in creating particular types of ‘docile’ bodies and the strategies enacted by young people to create alternative embodied practices and subjectivities.     

The struggle to technicise in education policy

In contemporary education policy, simplified technical accounts of policy problems and solutions are being produced with the use of numeric calculations. These calculations are seen as clear and unbiased, capable of revealing “what works” and identifying “best practices.” In this piece, the authors use resources from the material-semiotic approach of actor-network theory to discuss how calculations have begun to serve as a subtle infrastructure underpinning the way we understand and organise our world. They demonstrate the usefulness of the approach in tracing the technicisation of policy by deploying it to qualitative studies of like-school comparisons in the two unexpectedly linked locations—New York City and Australia. The authors reveal how technical accounts are precarious and need constant maintenance to endure, even as they increasingly becoming routine, curtailing the policy imagination and limiting the spaces of contestation. It is for this reason, they argue, that a deeper understanding and sustained critique of such accounts is of pressing importance.     

Discourses at the boundary spaces: developing a fluent transition from preschool to school

This article examines the preschool–school transition in the Finnish school system from institutional and professional perspectives. It takes place in a context in which the fluent transition from preschool to primary school is supported by developing joint lessons for preschool and primary school children. Transition is seen as a process in which culturally and historically constructed institutional boundaries form an arena for professional learning. The study focuses on boundary work and boundary spaces. Boundaries are seen as spaces where resources from different practices are brought together to expand interpretations of multifaceted tasks. The data are analyzed from a discursive perspective. The study investigates how professionals create new forms of activity when collaborating in boundary spaces. Three discursive frames were identified. The first is called the ‘initiative frame’, the second the ‘consensus frame’ and the third the ‘collaboration frame’. These frames are considered in relation to creating new, shared practices and a common object of activity.     

The Spread of the Learning Outcomes Approaches across Countries,Sub‐systems and Levels: A special focus on teacher education

This article is based on the outcomes of the study entitled “The application of learning outcomes approaches across Europe”, which was funded by Cedefop and completed in 2015 (Wi?niewski et al, 2015 ). The study, aiming at exploring the implementation of the learning outcomes approach in European countries, addressed two major questions: (1) to what extent and how the shift to learning outcomes has been influencing education and training policies and strategies at macro (national) level and teaching practices at micro (institutional) level in EU and EFTA member countries, and (2) to what extent and how political priority given to learning outcomes has influenced institutional practices in the training of education and training professionals. The study, covering 33 EU and EFTA member countries and all sub‐systems of education, used empirical evidence from country case studies and also from a limited number of institutional case studies focusing on initial teacher education. The study demonstrated a significant progress in the use of the learning outcomes approach in most countries and in all sub‐systems, but also major implementation challenges. This article presents the outcomes of the study using an analytical framework combining three analytical perspectives: (1) curriculum development and delivery (2) European integration, and (3) governance and policy implementation.     

Blogging as public pedagogy: creating alternative educational futures

In this study, I explore ‘blogging’, the use of a regularly updated website or web page, authored and curated by an individual or small group, written in a conversational style, as a form of public pedagogy. I analyse blogs as pre-figurative spaces where people go to learn with/in a public sphere, through collaboration with interested others. However, my intention is not to conceptualize blogging spaces as such, but rather—having framed them in a particular way—to explore the extent to which they globalise dissent. My argument is that the blogs I explore, understood as public pedagogic spaces, cultivate voices of educational dissent. Positioning itself within the global research imagination, the study draws extensively on data generated by two blogging communities with a combined international readership in excess of 40,000 people; one of the blogs is based in the UK, written by a group of adult educators. The other is based in Canada written by a group of adult literacy practitioners. Whilst both blogs are authored, curated and carried by a named individual, as public pedagogic spaces, they are implicated in the creation of a dialogic self: a self which is developed collaboratively with/in the interests of and through a public that coalesces around them. The pedagogies associated with these spaces are argued as explicit and intentioned. The public that coalesces around them learns how to survive a global neoliberal policy nexus that is unsympathetic towards the ideals they pre-figuratively embody. In so doing, they call into being the creation of alternative educational understandings of themselves and each other in relation to policy, pedagogy and the purposes of education.     

Body‐Building: A Female Student's Use of the Transitional Spaces of a Painting Degree Course to Explore her Sexual Desirability and Aesthetics as a ‘Grotesque’ Female Body

Whilst a part of the fine art degree course is about teaching technical skills and learning from tutor/peer group crits, a larger part is about the facilitation of a ‘safe’ and structured space in which students gain the confidence to experiment with personal ideas, to hone a self‐critical reflection and understand who they are as individuals, before being cast out into the world as ‘artist’. In this article I examine the thought processes and decision‐making of one undergraduate female painting student. For this student, who struggled to find her own ‘grotesque’ female body image in the canon of art historical works or contemporary popular media, the spaces of the painting degree course created a frame for possible enactments of identity and desire, as well as for playing with roles and practices. Through a mix of interviews with the student, viewing her visual work and written narratives, I analyse how she was able to carve out a space for her visual representation within the institutional frame. My analysis reveals how this student uses the transitional spaces of the degree course to develop creative strategies through which to explore her sexual desirability and aesthetic self. As an individual who felt marginalised from the visual realm of the ‘body beautiful’, the degree course offered an important refuge where she could examine how she felt about her own body and develop a confidence and character to present her body to the world.     

Digital Art Making as a Representational Process

In this article I bring artistic production into the learning sciences conversation by using the production of representations as a bridging concept between art making and the new literacies. Through case studies with 4 youth media arts organizations across the United States I ask how organizations structure the process of producing autobiographical digital art through a focus on representational tasks and how learning can be traced by examining youth artists' representations over time. Using a distributed cognition framework I analyze data on the process of making digital art in terms of the macro and micro tasks performed in order to identify occasions for external representation construction and use across organizations. I then examine how individual youth engage in these macro and micro tasks by producing representations that demonstrate their understanding. These analyses show that youth media arts organization production processes engage young artists in a representational trajectory that begins with developing a story about the self, moves toward a focus on how the tools of the medium afford representation of that story, and culminates in digital representations that reflect an understanding of the relationship between story and tools.     

Centering Nepantla Literacies from the Borderlands: Leveraging “In-Betweenness” Toward Learning in the Everyday

This article argues that building powerful literacies involves the centering of dispositions and practices that thrive on the boundary—spaces that are not always sanctioned as educational. Leveraging youths’ repertoires is particularly important for educators of nondominant learners who are committed to challenging characterizations of their students as being inept or deficient. To this end, we address how the design of learning opportunities that attend to polylingual repertoires (Gutiérrez, Bien, Selland, & Pierce, 2011)—the use of multiple languages and forms of expression-—can open up opportunities, pathways, for youth to leverage new identities as resources for consequential learning. We advance the idea of organizing learning environments where youth playfully negotiate their nepantla identities that are often in a “state of perpetual transition” (Anzaldúa, 1999, p. 100). We argue that nepantla literacies, or literacies that thrive in the boundary, emerge through negotiations with syncretic (Gutiérrez, 2014) literacies—those that are valued in the academy and across spaces and communities.     

Black male teachers,white education spaces: Troubling school practices of othering and surveillance

The absence of male teachers in primary schools has been an ongoing concern for policymakers and schools in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia, and as schools have become more ethnically diverse so have concerns that the teacher workforce should reflect the communities it serves. Pre-service teacher training plays a critical role in this aim, by identifying, recruiting, retaining and training those who demonstrate potential to become teachers in English primary schools. As one of a few studies to explore the racialised and gendered experiences of black male teachers in England, I adopt the use of critical race theory (CRT) to examine how black male teachers are characterised and constructed in white education spaces. Drawing on a larger study, this paper utilises counternarrative, a key precept of CRT, to draw attention to processes of exclusion, othering and surveillance through the experience of David (the main character). Interview and documentary data illuminate institutional processes of overt and covert racism, as well as racialised and gendered stereotyping. David’s story reveals how his voice is muted as it is woven into processes of othering, hyper-surveillance and disciplinary power.     

Wittgenstein and Stage-Setting: Being brought into the space of reasons

Abstract

Wittgenstein constantly invokes teaching, training and learning in his later work. It is therefore interesting to consider what role these notions play for him there. I argue that their use is central to Wittgenstein’s attempt to refute cognitivist assumptions, and to show how normative practices can be understood without the threat of circularity, grounded not in a kind of seeing, but in doing, and the natural reactions of an organism. This can generate a worry that Wittgenstein’s position is quietist and anti-critical: critique, as a challenge to the taken-for-granted grammar of our language game, is technically meaningless. I argue that Wittgenstein does not rule out critique. His own practice demonstrates that critique is possible, but takes place within a language game, and its status as critique is always subject to challenge in the agora of a discourse.     

Assessment and student participation: ‘choice and voice’ in school principal accounts of schooling territories

Schooling territories are bounded spaces where policies, bodies, practices, and discourses meet and collide. It is well documented in assessment literature that students who are active decision-makers understand their learning processes and have the necessary wherewithal to access support across schooling spaces. These spaces are co-produced through interrelationships, where youth participation is associated with power, voice, democratic citizenship, legal entitlement, empowerment, motivation and self-confidence. Recognising the growing pedagogical emphasis on locating students as responsible for their own learning, we consider how assessment practices constitute enabling and constraining schooling territories. Assessment for learning (AfL) can be linked with emancipatory practices in schooling territories where learner agency is co-produced through socio-material classroom relations. We use principal comments to map a range of interrelated schooling territories as a relational cartography of spatialised practices and student participation in AfL. Mostly, these territories are teacher imagined and defined, constructed through schooling and policy frameworks, and determined through the use of student achievement and student voice data. These conceptualised schooling spaces are interrogated to consider the positionality of students within AfL-related territories. While choice and participation may seem emancipatory, we reveal that AfL practices can serve a rarely acknowledged process of affirming territorial power.     

Restorying as political action: authoring resistance through youth media arts

ABSTRACT

This article explores the lived realities for young people growing up and learning in a climate of racial discrimination, religious intolerance, misogyny, and xenophobia, and how school-sponsored and school-supported uses of digital media can afford young people opportunities to navigate their experiences of social injustice and resist exclusionary discourses and practices. In a collaborative inquiry into the practices of two youth media producers, we explore how these counternarrative efforts are forms of restorying, in which young people write themselves into existence in ways that can reconfigure school spaces. Framed in Black feminist and critical cosmopolitan perspectives, this article considers how young people use new media tools in school to engage the narrative imagination and build the worlds they want to live in, simultaneously representing the political histories and realities of their everyday worlds and imagining alternative futures. We explore the ways schools can create opportunities for youth to engage in these new media practices that re-author themselves and the institutional spaces they encounter – and how these opportunities are situated within broader intersectional forms of systemic inequity and oppression.     

Observant participant: carnal sociology and researcher identity in religious educational spaces

The ethnographer’s embodied action during research is a complex of habit, belief, social and institutional positioning, and intention. This article examines what urban anthropologist Wacqaunt calls ‘carnal sociology’ and considers its implications for ethnographers of religious educational spaces. Contemporary ethnographers of education have renewed their interest in religious educational spaces—religious schools, houses of worship, public festivals. In conducting research in the field of religious education, ethnographers often cross familiar and unfamiliar boundaries, engaging in forms of participant observation and practice beyond their own religious categories: we research in religious spaces and with religious communities different from our own commitments. Drawing on interactional data from a multi-year ethnography of an urban Catholic school and parish in Philadelphia (USA), I consider how my own embodied participation in the religious rituals of the school and parish led to a reflexivity on practice, and initiated institutional and youth-driven social positioning in response.     

Discursive constructions of equity in Australian higher education: Imagined worlds and the case of people seeking asylum

There is a strong rationale for people seeking asylum and refugees given temporary protection to be key beneficiaries of Australian higher education equity practices. However, despite the extreme precarity they face, this group remains among the most educationally disadvantaged populations in Australia. Here, we use critical discourse analysis to examine the publicly available statements of 38 Australian universities to identify discursive representations of equity practices and connections, with our analytic gaze focused through the lens of people seeking asylum. Using a three-part analytic heuristic examining ‘statements’, ‘practices’ and ‘connections’, we offer a critical discourse analysis of how each public university expresses its commitment to the equity agenda in powerful stakeholder-facing documents—such as annual reports, strategic plans and media releases—and we compare this analysis against institutional stated practices with regard to people seeking asylum. In identifying misalignments between equity statements and stated practices, we suggest that institutional equity narratives articulate ‘imagined worlds’, in which all marginalised groups can access higher education. We argue that now is the time to move beyond these ‘imagined worlds’, to enact stated commitments to universal education, by instituting real and effective practices to facilitate equitable access to Australian higher education for people seeking asylum.     

Producing knowledge for sustainable development in Africa: Implications for higher education

This article complements the critique of thedevelopment policies and practices implementedin Africa's local communities by Africangovernments and international developmentagencies by linking them to a specifichegemonic form of knowledge and knowledgeproduction which largely structures the way inwhich Africans, including African scholars,know development, Africa and the world. Theyoften exclude, marginalize and inferiorizeAfrican traditions, knowledges and ways ofknowing. With food policy making in Africa as acase, I examine how higher education isimplicated in the process by which developmentknowledges are generated and become dominant inAfrica as well as its consequences. Borrowingfrom critical theory I raise questions aboutwhich knowledges are promoted, privileged andbecome dominant and how. I argue that highereducation in Africa should be rethought andrestructured to better reflect the actual livedexperiences of the vast majority of Africans.This requires that local communities, includingtheir various segments, participatemeaningfully in the generation of knowledgeabout their development to ensure the relevanceand acceptance by the people of the policiesand programs that these knowledges engender.Institutions of higher learning and researchcan do this by becoming true centres ofcritical inquiry into knowledges and ways ofknowing, including non-hegemonic knowledges andways of knowing in the West. They canfacilitate this by creating spaces for theexpropriation of what is suitable in modernscience and technology and theirre-articulation with elements of Africa'straditions, values, practices and relationshipwith nature in order to pursue developmentpolicies that are African-centred andsustainable.     

Preserving respectability or blatant disrespect? A critical discourse analysis of the Morehouse Appropriate Attire Policy and implications for intersectional approaches to examining campus policies

In this paper, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the Morehouse College Appropriate Attire Policy and discuss how issues of race, gender, and sexuality converge to reveal both overt and hidden meanings embedded in the policy. I also consider how power is used towards “other” black college men who neither fit neatly into prescribed gender norms, nor foster representations of “good” black men. I situate this critical policy analysis in the context of two ideas: bipolar masculinity and the politics of respectability, and offer implications for the use of intersectional frames in scholarship and research on men and institutional policies.     

Global/Cultural Teachers Creating Possibilities: Reading Worlds,Reading Selves,and Learning to Teach

In this article I explore the notion of a global/cultural educator, especially how we as teacher educators prepare future educators for the global communities that they might serve. I argue that our challenge is to prepare educators to work on behalf of, from, alongside, and within communities. To work globally requires educators to bridge the gap between the privileged and the marginalised, between uniformity and diversity, between local and global, across gender and races, and between indigenous and immigrant. To achieve these goals, I posit that we need to go beyond an infusion of the knowledge of various cultures in our curriculum. I suggest that we need to find spaces where the global/cultural educator can have an identity that emerges not from theory alone but from a mix of scholarship, practice, global development, and cultural critique and proceeds in a manner that is responsive, supportive, diverse, and nonoppressive. It is a journey for which we lack a map and indeed may be blinded by our own vision.