Moving beyond “stupid”: Taking account of the impact of violence on women's learning

This article draws on three Canadian research studies to question conventional understandings that access to adult literacy education is a simple matter of providing programs. In the face of women's experiences of violence, commonly overlooked barriers limit “access.” Different forms of violence, their frequency, and the prevalence of medicalizing discourses about violence are examined. Effects of violence on women's attempts to get to programs, complete courses they begin, and learn successfully, are introduced. Educators are challenged to design literacy programs that will support learning and create conditions to counteract the early “training” which tells women they cannot learn.     

How do we know whether the glass is half full? Reflections on equity,hope, and cycles of violence

How should we define equity and justice when it comes to communities and countries with historical, political, and economic trajectories different than ours? In the article “Rethinking equity: standpoints emerging from a community project with victims of violence and abuse in Argentina,” Castaño Rodríguez, Barraza, and Martin argue that it is crucial to define and implement situated views of equity and justice, especially ones that build on Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope. Leveraging feminist standpoint theory, Castaño Rodríguez and her colleagues described how a sanctuary for non-human animals in rural Argentina tried to support the socioemotional growth of a group of youths who faced domestic violence. The analyses led the authors to propose a “glass half-full” definition of equity that recognizes and builds on the resources, resilience, and positive outlook on difficult situations of the oppressed. On first approach, I agreed with Castaño Rodríguez, Barraza, and Martin’s call for the need to remain vigilant about how we define equity and operationalize it when working with historically marginalized communities. However, as I detail in this forum piece, my endorsement of the authors’ “glass half-full” situated vision of equity was undermined by tensions I experienced related to: (1) the article’s theoretical underpinnings; (2) its methodological approaches, particularly inhabiting a kind of “view from nowhere”; and (3) (unintended) implications of their conclusions about hope in the face of cycles of violence. While the work calls our attention to key ideas and methods, such as situated definitions of equity and the role of feminist standpoint theory, I conclude the authors’ “glass half-full” definition of equity sidestepped the structures that undergirded the violence youths and their community experienced and, therefore, did not realize its full potential.

     

Nothing Human

In this essay C. C. Wharram argues that Terence's concept of translation as a form of “contamination” anticipates recent developments in philosophy, ecology, and translation studies. Placing these divergent fields of inquiry into dialogue enables us read Terence's well‐known statement “I am a human being — I deem nothing human alien to me” as a recognition of the significance of the “nothing human” for contemporary humanism. By recasting Terence's human/foreign pairing through Freud's concept of the uncanny, Wharram draws a parallel between a “nothing human” that is radically interior to the human subject and an exterior agency of “nothing human” described by actor‐network theory and object‐oriented ontology. Only through an “alien phenomenology” (a concept borrowed from Ian Bogost) dependent on metaphors and translations that are necessarily approximate (or “contaminated”) can we begin to approach this “nothing human.”     

When the Exception Is the Rule: School Shootings,Bare Life,and the Sovereign Self

Much discourse on school shootings tends to imply a binary separation between what is considered normal and exceptional, between an expected course of human events and sociohistorical aberrations. In this article Harvey Shapiro suggests the need for new directions in our responses: First, he shows how responses to school shootings tend to expropriate and (paradoxically) dismiss certain kinds of violence in order to articulate a vision of the self as sovereign, exerting power over bodily life, exercising a self‐removal from community conversations, and thus claiming what Giorgio Agamben and others call the “sovereign exception.” Second, he suggests how Agamben's development of Walter Benjamin's concept of “divine violence” can unmask prevailing states of exception and can inform education's efforts to challenge binaries of good and evil, urban and suburban, individual and community, justice and law, normal and exceptional, that confound our deliberations and long‐term responses to mass shootings.     

Consider Your Man Card Reissued: Masculine Honor and Gun Violence

In this article, Amy Shuffelton addresses school shootings through an investigation of honor and masculinity. Drawing on recent scholarship on honor, including Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity and Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Honor Code, Shuffelton points out that honor has been misconstrued as exclusively a matter of hierarchical, competitive relationships. A second kind of honor, which exists within relationships of mutual respect between equals, she suggests, merits theorists' further consideration. In its hierarchical mode, honor is often a source of violent action, but honor in its egalitarian mode can play an important role in peacemaking. Shuffelton turns to Homer's Iliad and Adrienne Rich's “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” to explore honor's potential. Linking both kinds of honor to masculinity and the issue of gun violence, this article contends that to address gun violence in and outside of schools, masculine honor needs to be “reissued” as a matter of egalitarian relationships based on honest communication.     

Rejoinder to Aaron Cooley's Review of Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy

Because of Professor Cooley's prosecutorial review, I want to make clear at the outset that my rejoinder is not a codefendant's answer to a plaintiff's replication. Instead, I first attempt to provide an “immanent” analysis of Cooley's indictment, in the sense of dealing with what dwells within his reasoning. A specific philosophical definition of “immanent” reads: taking place within the mind of the subject, but having no effect outside (this does not apply to me as an outsider). I intend to battle with Cooley up close—no “dancing”—my defense against his offense. In the second part, the focus will be on what I think is missing from Cooley's attempt to discredit McLaren and Farahmandpur's book. His decision or failure to deal with what Marx and the most effective Marxists have written, and how some of this provided analyses that could be and/or was acted upon, may be more serious than his beating up on the book's authors.     

Passing by Proxy: Collusive and Convulsive Silence in the Trial of Leopold and Loeb

Despite unfolding as it did during the sexual revolution of the 1920s, Leopold and Loeb's “trial of the century” elicited a deluge of constitutive discourse that struggled against overt articulation and circulation of the boys’ queerness. In this essay, I argue that those discourses—dominant reportage, in camera courtroom conferences, and Clarence Darrow's famous summation—manifested what I label “passing by proxy,” a collusive and convulsive act of straight closeting that speaks queer sexuality despite concerted effort to silence it.     

“We Are Not Free”: The Meaning of <Freedom> in American Indian Resistance to President Johnson's War on Poverty

This essay examines how the ideograph <freedom> was crafted through dialectical struggles between Euro-Americans and American Indians over federal Indian policy between 1964 and 1968. For policymakers, <freedom> was historically sutured to the belief that assimilation was the only pathway to American Indian liberation. I explore the American Indian youth movement's response to President Johnson's War on Poverty to demonstrate how activists rhetorically realigned <freedom> in Indian policy with the Great Society's rhetoric of “community empowerment.” I illustrate how American Indians orchestrated counterhegemonic resistance by reframing the “Great Society” as an argument for a “Greater Indian American.” This analysis evinces the rhetorical significance of ideographic transformation in affecting policy change.     

A research base for new objectives of science teaching

A bright year 7 student was going through the usual steps that lead to the concept of density and its values for wood and brass and aluminium. After mensurating the volumes of cuboids of these materials he was observing the volume of liquid they displaced in a measuring cylinder. As he carefully pushed the wooden cuboid below the surface, I asked him, “Why do you have to push the wood down?” “Because it floats otherwise”, he replied. “Why didn't you have to push the aluminium down?” “Because there was not enough water to make it float”. “Tell me more”, I said. “Well, sir, you must have seen metal ships floating on the sea. If there's enough water, metal will float, but not in a little bit like this”. Just after describing for me how liquid acetone evaporated if it is placed on your skin, a first year university chemistry student with good test results was unable to give me any examples of a liquified gas. When pressed he muttered “Solids, liquids, gases” (A strangely immutable sequence that has neither evolutionary nor biblical support.) and said he thought the cO in a cylinder was probably liquid. Gases could be liquified by lowering the temperature, he said. On being asked to describe what would happen if he steadily cooled down the air in a space, he began by quoting, “Air molecules, being particles moving very rapidly with energy proportional to temperature”. As he cooled them down in thought, he held out his hands and slowed down the vibration of his fingers about a point in space. Finally, his fingers stopped and he said, “It's nothing”. “What do you mean, has it disappeared?” I said. “No”, he replied, but it's no longer a gas, and it's not a liquid or a solid. They are all just there suspended in space. It's no-thing”.     

Training four minute men at Vassar

The rhetorical appeal of Styron's novel as a symbolic response to contemporary American racial tensions is explicated through an examination of its strategic ramifications as a “meditation on history” and its sociopsychological implications with respect to violence, self‐definition, and social reform.     

Measuring Distributive Justice Preferences of Finnish University Students via the State Budget

We measure the distributive justice preferences of students within eight departments in the faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Turku, Finland. We use the Finnish government's annual budget and its specific appropriations as a proxy to measure the students' underlying preferences. We test whether the type of studies of the respondents is associated with the preferences one has for increases or decreases on specific programmes financed via the budget. Students of economics preferred more money for technological investments and research, as well as for “law and order” programmes. They wanted much less spending for subsidies of any sort. On the other hand, those in social—type disciplines, preferred the opposite, that is, less funding for technology‐related programmes and more money for pensions and subsidies.     

Transnational Asia: Dis/orienting Identity in the Globalized World

This article provides a phenomenological analysis of the author's transnational migratory experience situated in historical and ideological contexts. Using vertigo as a metaphor, I theorize Althusser's ideological interpellation as a process and practice of dis/orientation. Focusing on several phenomenological moments, I politicize and historicize my sense of orientedness at the intersection of my “being Japanese” and “becoming Asian” within the dialectical tension between Asia and the West. I argue that the power of ideological interpellation lies not only in the discursive logic of identity politics but more importantly in the embodied, subjectively lived, and phenomenologically significant experiences in which an individual is hailed by multidirectional ideological forces.     

A study of the nature of students' understandings about the concept of burning

The purpose of this study was to identify and characterize students' understandings about the concept of burning. Naturalistic data-collecting strategies used in this study included participant observation and interviewing. Twenty eighth graders were interviewed using the “interview-about-events” technique, a variation of the Piagetian interview. The interviews were audiotape recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using the process of analytic induction. The analysis showed that students' understandings about burning were fragmented, inconsistent, and at variance with scientific knowledge. These understandings are analyzed using Olson's (1977) characterization of common sense and scientific knowledge.     

TO BECOME ONE'S OWN MEDIATOR

Promoted by the Free University of Brussels, supported by the EEC, the transnational action‐research “To become one's own mediator” is applying and evaluating a violence prevention programme in elementary schools. We are creating and introducing the programme to the children (ages 8 to 10) and training the educational personnel. Inquiries are being made: questionnaire on transgressions, semi‐directive conversation about definitions of “violence”, test of attitudes in front of situations including social interaction, etc… Through that action research, our goal is to encourage our decision makers to include socio‐emotional programme in the school basic cognitive training. (It should be noted by U.K. readers that ‘violence’ is used in European research to describe acts of incivility. The role of a primary school teacher is also less global For example children will usually be supervised outside the classroom by people employed for that task).     

Engaging difference: towards a pedagogy of interbeing

In this article, I discuss how by engaging difference teachers and students can go beyond the binary of “self” and “other” towards “interbeing”. I first discuss how postcolonial and feminist perspectives can inform multicultural discourse by rethinking self and other in terms of hybrid identities and cultures. Then, I draw on Thich Nhat Hanh's (1991) concepts of mindfulness, contemplation, and interbeing; bell hooks' (1994) concept of an engaged pedagogy; and my reflections on my own practice of teaching multicultural education courses. I argue that a self-reflexive pedagogy of interbeing is transformative, enabling both students and teachers to “see with the eyes of interbeing” (Hanh, 1991, p. 98) and heal from the wounds of oppression.     

ACT UP,Haitian Migrants,and Alternative Memories of HIV/AIDS

In 1786, backcountry Massachusetts farmers, fed up with government policies favoring aristocratic elites, marched on courts to bar the entry of judges and juries. Enacting a long-standing tradition known to colonists as a “Regulation,” the farmers’ movement became known as Shays's Rebellion. Erupting in the turbulent days following the War for Independence, yet predating the formation of the national Constitution, Shays's Rebellion was understood as a crucial post-war attempt to deploy state violence to manage popular dissent; thus, Shays's Rebellion produced deeply problematic yet lasting rhetorical conventions for justifying the compromised forms of republicanism that mark the early republic.     

COMMUNITY BUILDING: A NEW ROLE FOR THE JEWISH DAY SCHOOL

Wearing a swastika armband, I entered the classroom carrying a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Placing it on the music stand I employed as a makeshift lectern, I peered around the room until the students became silent. Then I began to read sections of Hitler's venomous tome, the hateful words cutting through me like a knife. As I read, I noticed that a few students stiffened. I had students analyze Hitler's quotes, addressing them as either “Herr” or “Fraulein.” After this lesson, I explained why I used such tactics. I told them death and destruction during World War II was only part of studying the Holocaust. Learning where the Jew-hatred came from and its context within Nazism was also important. And that meant comprehending Mein Kampf. Closing the book, I removed the twisted cross and slowly tore it into small pieces.     

ORDER AND CONTENT OF THE BIBLICAL COURSES IN A COLLEGE CURRICULUM∗

The man is a blue collar worker. He tells the story of his nine year old daughter. She said that the only thing she really wanted for Christmas was a pair of Vidal Sassoon Jeans. He explained to her that they really weren't wealthy enough to afford $40 jeans. Maybe Levis would do. “Forget it,” she said. “If I can't have what I want, I don't want anything.”

The man said that they saved up and got her the Sassoon jeans for Christmas. “But you know,” he mused, “she judges the others in her class on what kind of designer jeans they have. They form cliques based on their clothes. It's their way of being somebody, being acceptable, being ‘in’.”     

PROTECTing the figure of innocence: child pornography legislation and the queerness of childhood

In US v. Williams (2008), the Supreme Court upheld the PROTECT Act; this law's “pandering provision” prohibits the distribution and solicitation of child pornography, but does not distinguish between real child pornography and “virtual” child pornography (images that are digitally created or manipulated and do not depict a real child). Situating this case at the intersection of rhetorical studies of the law and queer studies, I read the Court's opinions as rhetorical and cultural texts that circulate a strategic figuration of the child that emphasizes its sexual purity, vulnerability, and whiteness, and disavows the queerness of childhood desires. I argue that the Court's decision virtualizes the figuration of the child through the performative “collateral speech” act, ultimately conflating virtual materials with real children. Furthermore, I contend that the language of the law, as it taxonomizes and disciplines illicit desires, also expresses desire through its passionate figurations of childhood innocence and adult sexual morality.     

Betwixt and Between: Working Through the Aesthetic in Philosophy of Education: George F. Kneller Lecture,Conference of the American Educational Studies Association Savannah,Georgia, October 30, 2008

At a time when both philosophy of education and the arts are under threat within education, this article inquires into interdisciplinarity as one way of approaching the disciplines of philosophy of education and aesthetics. The article offers a retrospective autobiographical intellectual history and phenomenology of the author's own learning and scholarship within Higher Education in three main areas—philosophy of literature education, women's studies, and philosophy of music education, areas paralleling the three periods of her academic career. One sub-theme of this narrative about the balancing act of working in literature and music through philosophy of education is the author's ongoing resistance to professionalization or disciplinary academic control—of literature, philosophy, and music—while being a critical student of educational theory and practice in these areas—philosophy, literature and music within philosophy of education—of thus being “betwixt and between.” Two other themes comprising the article's subtext are “praxis” and “embodiment.” The double entendre of the phrase “working through” entails, first, using the arts of literature and music to practise philosophy of education; and secondly, embracing the psychological, ethical, and spiritual introspection that comes with critical engagement of the arts and its discourses. In short, the article aims to reprise some burning philosophical educational questions that have preoccupied its author over the years, questions deemed especially pertinent to the current increasingly diverse membership in the discipline of educational studies.