Public Pedagogy and Social Justice in Arts Education

In this article we explore examples of public pedagogical actions and interventions, reading them through a social justice education framework lens. In our discussion we start with definitions of social justice, public pedagogy and case study methodologies. Then, we look at a variety of international examples to highlight the pervasiveness of public pedagogical opportunities in visual culture that include a festival, an individual, a citywide symposium, an online community, a cultural group and a museum exhibition. They are divided into three categories based on social justice principles suggested by Ayers et al. and later interpreted by Dewhurst: (1) Public pedagogy and social justice is rooted in people's experiences: Fiesta del Señor de Choquekillka: Ollantaytambo, Peru and Janet Weight Reed – an artist's public pedagogy utilising social media; (2) Public pedagogy and social justice is a process of reflection and action together: Ideas City Festival and the Vlogbrothers; (3) Public pedagogy and social justice seeks to dismantle systems of inequality to create a more humane society: CULTURUNNERS and sh[OUT]: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex art and culture. It is our hope that in looking more closely at these international examples of public pedagogy and social justice education that the power of such alternative sites of learning is apparent and encourages further interventions and investigations in such spaces of inquiry.     

Education in the Realm of the Senses: Understanding Paulo Freire's Aesthetic Unconscious through Jacques Rancière

In this article I re‐examine the role that aesthetics play in Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. As opposed to the vast majority of scholarship in this area, I suggest that aesthetics play a more centralised role in pedagogy above and beyond arts‐based curricula. To help clarify Freire's position, I will argue that underlying the linguistic resolution of the student/teacher dialectic in the problem‐posing classroom is an accompanying shift in the very aesthetics of recognition. In order to demonstrate the always already aesthetic nature of all education, I will turn to the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière. Through Rancière we can begin to understand how the pedagogy of the oppressed is predicated on an aesthetic redistribution of the sensible, of what can be seen and what can be heard. As Rancière will confirm, if we truly want to understand the aesthetics of pedagogy, we cannot simply see aesthetics as external to teaching and learning. Rather, education as an aesthetic event has to be taken seriously, and aesthetics should regain primacy in discussions of critical pedagogy.     

Empowering discourse: discourse analysis as method and practice in the sociology classroom

Collaborative learning and critical pedagogy are widely recognized as ‘empowering’ pedagogies for higher education. Yet, the practical implementation of both has a mixed record. The question, then, is: How could collaborative and critical pedagogies be empowered themselves? This paper makes a primarily theoretical case for discourse analysis (DA) as a form of classroom practice that provides a structured framework for collaborative and critical pedagogies in higher education, with a special reference to sociology classroom practice. I develop a tripartite scheme for building a framework for sociological imagination that is, first, sensitive to the discursive aspects of social reality (learning about DA). Second, I illustrate the use of DA as pedagogical tool and classroom practice (learning with DA). Third, I discuss how discourse analytical ideas can be used in evaluating classroom interaction and how these reflexive insights can be used to enhance student empowerment (learning through DA).     

Undermining critical consciousness unconsciously: Restoring hope in the multicultural education idea

The main goal of multicultural education is to transform the structural factors in the educational system in order to redress inequalities and inequities for historically underprivileged populations (Banks 1997). This article addresses theories and practices that frame multicultural education in teaching and learning contexts. How do teachers interpret the purpose of multicultural education? I suggest that educators are more likely to interpret multicultural education using the functionalist meta-theoretical framework (Burell and Morgan 1979) and the positivistic epistemology (Turner 2006). Ironically this kind of interpretation subverts the original goals of multicultural education as a transformative movement. The process of transforming curriculum and instruction in learning contexts encounters what I would call a “double jeopardy.” On one hand, curriculum processes run into political impediments that are often pervasive, complex, and invisible, whereas on the other hand they encounter a positivistic epistemology that reduces complex phenomena to simplistic, neutral, objective, and universal standards. I make a case for a radical humanist paradigm that privileges the investigation of social and political relations of power and places critical consciousness at the center of educational structures and pedagogy. I attempt to make critical consciousness visible and to show how it can be employed to change schooling opportunities and the lives of those who fall in the “Other” category of social theory.     

‘World-travelling’: a framework for re-thinking teaching and learning in internationalised higher education

In an era of unprecedented student mobility, increasingly diverse student populations in many national contexts, and globally interconnected environmental and social concerns, there is an urgent need to find new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. Static assumptions about so-called ‘Western’ versus ‘non-Western’ teaching and learning approaches or ‘local’ versus ‘international’ students are inadequate for responding to the complex histories, geographies and identities that meet and mingle in our higher education (HE) institutions. In this paper, I use María Lugones’ ‘world-travelling’ as a framework for discussing international and New Zealand women students’ reflections on teaching, learning and transition in New Zealand HE. I conclude with some suggestions as to what effective pedagogy might look like in internationalised HE if we think beyond culturalist them-and-us assumptions and recognise students’ complexity.     

Reciprocal Learning,Pedagogy and High-Performing Education Systems: Learnings from and for Singapore

ABSTRACT

Employing Connelly and Xu’s (this issue) conceptualisation of reciprocal learning, the article explores the potential for reciprocal learning about pedagogy provided by a body of PISA-inspired literature on high-performing education systems. I argue that the opportunities for reciprocal learning provided by that body of literature is rather limited and problematic because of its uncritical acceptance of the OECD’s basic premises about PISA and because of its employment of the ‘best practices’ approach to policy borrowing. Using Singapore as a case, I contend that reciprocal learning needs to be informed by the cultural historical narratives behind the development of an education system and a theory of pedagogy that locates the practice of teaching within a broad social, institutional, and instructional context of schooling. I discuss lessons from and for Singapore concerning the purposes of schooling, institutional norms and arrangements, and pedagogical practice.     

Counteracting fabricated anti-gay public pedagogy in Uganda with strategic lifelong learning as critical action

Political, cultural and social fallout following the introduction of the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda in 2009 intensified fabrication of an anti-gay public pedagogy of negation and nemesis that fuelled the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2014. The Government of Uganda, conventional Anglicanism and US evangelical Christianity were all implicated in developing this homophobic public pedagogy. This article provides an extensive account of what transpired to result in prohibition of lifelong learning focused on Ugandan sexual minorities. In the face of this prohibition, the article calls for lifelong learning as critical action constructed as strategic public counter-pedagogy aimed at recognizing and accommodating sexual minorities in the face of homophobia. This critically progressive counter-pedagogy would include a pragmatic turn to comprehensive health education as a starting point for inclusive, holistic learning. The article also considers the important role that media could play in this work. It explores contemporary realities of advancing and deploying lifelong learning as critical action in Uganda, examining the current dire state of education in the nation. It concludes by considering the status of Uganda’s tenacious quest to entrench gay apartheid amid what is now a growing trend toward global gay inclusion.     

The Playing Learning Child: Towards a pedagogy of early childhood

From children's own perspective, play and learning are not always separate in practices during early years. The purpose of this article is, first, to scrutinise the background and character of early years education in terms of play and learning. Second, to elaborate the findings of several years of research about children's learning in preschool related to the curriculum of early years education and, finally, to propose a sustainable pedagogy for the future, which does not separate play from learning but draws upon the similarities in character in order to promote creativity in future generations. Introducing the notions of act and object of learning and play (by act we mean how children play and learn and with the object we mean what children play and learn) we will chisel out an alternative early childhood education approach, here called developmental pedagogy, based on recent research in the field of play and learning, but also related to earlier approaches to early education.     

BLACK POWER AND BLACK STUDENTS IN KANSAS CITY

In this research I examined the enactment of liberatory pedagogy, a teaching practice that promotes equity for all learners, from the uniquely informative perspective of young women majoring in mathematics and elementary education. It is grounded theory that seeks to understand the role of personal identity and social location in learning and teaching. I collected data over a two-year period, following two young women from the final semester of their teacher education program to their first teaching positions. Three distinct influences inform the conceptual framework of this study: (a) the underrepresentation of women in mathematics; (b) the devaluing of elementary teachers' content and pedagogical knowledge; and (c) the marginalization of the education major and pedagogical knowledge. I ask research questions regarding the type of preservice education these women experience and how it informs their enactment of liberatory pedagogy. Themes among the findings include coping with being a stranger in both lands, the desire to know oneself as a learner, and enacting liberatory pedagogy as beginning inservice teachers.     

Book reviews

Distributed Learning: social and cultural approaches to practiceEdited by Mary R. Lea and Kathy Nicoll, 2002 RoutledgeFalmer 214 pp., £19.99 ISBN 0 415 26809 5Distributed Learning: social and cultural approaches to practice, edited by Mary R. Lea and Kathy Nicoll, is published as part of the Open University UK course Understanding Distributed and Flexible Learning within the Postgraduate Programme in Open and Distance Education. The book comprises of 12 chapters written by authors from different academic backgrounds. They draw on their extensive practical experiences to present and reflect on a number of conceptual models and describe best practices in distributed learning. The volume is aimed at practitioners who intend to use technology in a higher education setting and also helps those who may have been using it for a few years to rethink their approaches to online learning and teaching. The reader is introduced to several theoretical concepts based on different disciplines and perspectives, e.g. anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, economics and pedagogy. The specific focus is on the social and cultural aspects of learning. What does the term distributed learning mean? It describes practices on the continuum between traditional distance education and campus-based face-to-face education (cf. flexible learning, blended learning). With the proliferation of information and communications technology (ICT) in campus-based educational settings the boundaries between distance education and face-to-face education are fading. More and more traditional campus-based universities are providing access to higher education in a distance learning format. In fact, ICTs facilitate contact over a distance. Some authors even speak of a convergence between the two forms of education (Mills &;Tait, 1999). Campus-based institutions cannot deny their tradition: they insist that contact sessions are essential for successful internet-based independent learning, although distance education with its high quality pre-prepared study materials and tutorial (online) support has proven otherwise. This is what models for blended learning try to illuminate: the appropriate mix of face-to-face and distance teaching approaches. A strength of the book is that the authors come from both distance teaching as well as campus-based institutions and thus different views on the continuum are presented.     

Transformative conversations about sexualities pedagogy and the experience of sexual knowing

One of the hallmarks of sex education traditionally has been its Cartesian endorsement of mind/body dualism; we have preferred to equate ‘self’ as synonymous with ‘mind’, and have invested heavily in believing in the valence of rationality‐based sexualities education. We generally do not consider the way ‘self’ negotiates, interprets and relates to sexual knowledge in all of our complexity, including our messy, embodied and emotional lives. In this paper I address what I think are several much‐needed conversations for a holistic pedagogy of sexualities to incorporate, including the falseness of the mind/body split, reconsidering what counts as sexual knowledge, the role of the performative in communicating our sexual knowing, and the importance of considering affect in learning about sexualities. The second part of the paper examines pedagogical considerations currently absent in dialogues of sexualities education, such as incorporating transformational learning strategies in teaching sexualities, and what it means to educate toward being a sexual citizen. Finally, I will outline how discussions of epistephenomenology (our relationship to and how we experience knowledge) can contribute to moving toward a vision of a critical, cultural sexualities education.     

Opportunities to analyse pupils’ learning within coursework on campus: a remaining challenge in teacher education

To support pupils’ learning, teachers must understand what and how their pupils have learned, and teacher education should teach candidates how to do this. This article reports on survey data (n = 270) from three programmes and observation data (N = 104 h) from six programmes, located in Norway, Finland and the US. It examines the candidates’ opportunities to analyse pupils’ learning within their coursework. The authors argue that such opportunities might constitute profound possibilities to examine the complexity of teaching and learning. However, the study finds that the candidates have few opportunities to analyse pupils learning and that the full potential of these opportunities is unrealized. The authors argue for increased, specific attention to pupils’ learning within teacher education coursework, through a pedagogy of teacher education informed by existing research on how to elicit pupils’ learning.     

Pedagogies of being with: Witnessing,testimonio, and critical love in everyday social movement

This conceptual article explores education and the relational in everyday social movement. I highlight a single, local community event—a Speak Out—and travel with scholarship on public pedagogy, witnessing, and Latina feminist theories of coalition to articulate pedagogies of ‘being with’ in community activism for racial justice. My interpretive vignettes of the Speak Out are part of a larger ethnographic study focusing on a segment of a rural/small city community that moved with intention to teach and learn racial justice. While larger concrete goals were crucial and at the center of the community’s curriculum for justice, the various sites and forms of race-conscious pedagogy in public life—community forums, vigils, celebrations, mural projects—were also enactments of a profound commitment to the relational, to finding common ground in difficult solidarities. With a focus on the testimonios of three women of Color participants in the Speak Out, I show how witnessing and testimonio were at the center of pedagogies of ‘being with.’ In this work of education, the women (1) redefined community, accountability, and ally work, (2) exposed the fissures in social justice organizing across difference, describing commitment to social action with rather than for those most affected by institutional violence, and (3) affirmed the knowledge, histories, and self-determination of people of Color while challenging self-defeating stereotypes. Critical love sustained an ethics of openness to difference and facilitated the intentional work of creating race-conscious learning communities.     

Critically Teaching Criticality?: Modeling Social and Pedagogical Inquiry with Literary Texts

Within US teacher preparation programs, critical pedagogy and a desire for social change can lead teacher educators to prioritize transformation of prospective teachers’ beliefs through self-reflection. In pursuit of effective critical pedagogies, teacher educators also need to examine their own practices and beliefs. This self-study, a manifestation of teaching as inquiry, reframes evaluations of teaching away from what students do toward what teachers do. Here I undertake a reflexive examination of my own recursive practice as a teacher educator in children’s literature. Drawing upon a complex notion of teaching and learning, I argue that student learning outcomes are unpredictable, and as a result, successful teacher education should model self-inquiry as a vital part of teaching. Findings show that teaching choices (and omissions) in response to students’ responses led to unintended outcomes that undermined my motivations. I conclude that teacher educators’ self-inquiry and reflection in broader social contexts offers access to critical ways of thinking that underlie their work toward developing similar capacities among their prospective teacher students.     

Envisioning a critical social pedagogy of learning and work in a contemporary culture of cyclical lifelong learning

In Canada, current federal learning-and-work policy is focused on individual learner-worker development using an iteration of lifelong learning as cyclical. This policy aims to enhance the social as an effect of enhancing the economic. In this neoliberal milieu, cyclical lifelong learning has become not only a norm but also a culture and an attitude. Still, a current Canadian phenomenon indicates that increasing numbers of young adults are disengaging from participation in such learning that the federal government considers being a preventive measure. In discussing their withdrawal from what might be perceived as cyclical lifelong learning for control, I consider a particularly challenging case: the predicament of young adults in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. To help us think about adequately addressing the dislocation they experience in life and work, I offer a Freire-informed vision of a critical social pedagogy of learning and work. This pedagogy calls for re-engendering the social in lifelong learning by revitalizing critical social concerns with historical awareness, hope, possibility, ethics, justice, democratic vision, learner freedom, critique, and intervention.     

Qualitative research as a method for making just comparisons of pedagogic quality in higher education: a pilot study

Systems designed to ensure that teaching and student learning are of a suitable quality are a feature of universities globally. Quality assurance systems are central to attempts to internationalise higher education, motivated in part by a concern for greater global equality. Yet, if such systems incorporate comparisons, the tendency is to reflect and reproduce inequalities in higher education. Highlighting the European context, we argue that, if higher education is to play a part in tackling social inequalities, we must seek alternative methods to explore pedagogic quality in institutional settings. The sociologist Basil Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing provide an illustration of the potential of sociologically informed, qualitative approaches for exploring and improving higher education pedagogy and also for addressing social justice issues: these two concepts are used to analyse documentation about undergraduate sociology in two universities that have quite different reputations within the English and Northern Irish higher education system.     

Why use information and communications technology? Some theoretical and practical issues

Abstract

This article is concerned with theoretical issues of pedagogy and how they relate to the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in teaching. The article reviews the context of recent developments in ICT pedagogy. It also draws upon thinking about pedagogy which derives from learning theories. These provide a theoretical framework for research by the authors into the Smart Schoolinitiative in Malaysian schools. This initiative is attempting to change the pedagogy of Malaysian schools in a radical way. This involves the use of ICT alongside other innovations and a refocusing of the learning agenda for school-aged pupils. Some early impressions of the initiative are presented     

State control,religious deference and cultural reproduction: some problems with theorising curriculum and pedagogy in the Cambridge Primary Review

This article offers a critique of the quality of theorising underlying proposals on curriculum and pedagogy in the Cambridge Primary Review. Despite its strengths, the review is seen as omitting consideration of three major areas in primary education: gifted pupils, teacher effectiveness research and the private sector. Questions are raised about the review's use of evidence about a broad and balanced curriculum and about ability grouping. The proposals for curriculum are seen as backward-looking and bureaucratic, while its treatment of religious education is judged to be overly deferential and inadvertently sustaining indoctrination. Its proposals for pedagogy give undue emphasis to a particular form of constructivism, dialogic teaching, whilst ignoring theories of social/cultural reproduction. It is concluded that the review missed an opportunity to propose three more radical and innovatory reforms: to increase school autonomy in curriculum matters; to theorise pedagogy so as to include learning beyond the school; and, to integrate recent findings from educational effectiveness research into theorising pedagogy.     

The Social Foundations Classroom

In this article, we promote the use of autobiography in the social foundations of education classroom as a means of connecting education to real life experiences, history, and fostering epistemological development of college students. Autobiography involves students' awareness of the relation between theory and lived experience. As a form of reflective knowing, autobiography may help students understand complex terms such as "learning," "knowledge," and "education" by exploring various contexts that influence such understandings. Reflective knowing explores some of the experiential and purposive contexts that influence knowledge creation. Intellectual maturity and self-awareness may arise from circumstances that can lead students to be more confident critical thinkers and problem solvers. We describe how we have used autobiography in our social foundations of education classrooms and explore how influencing the pedagogy of teacher education critiques traditional epistemologies toward a redefinition of education for a democratic society.

Now reflecting on my educational history, I realize that everything I have learned in the past has taught me something about myself. Whether I was aware of my development at the time [hinges] on individual circumstances. I have thrived on learning, brought about by major changes impacting my life. These variations and my necessary adaptations have taught me the most important skill I need to know. Because of changes in my life, I have succeeded in learning how to learn. (Rita, Bucknell University, learning autobiography, September 1999)1

If I can make present the shapes and structures of a perceived world, even though they have been layered over with many rational meanings over time, I believe my own past will appear in altered ways and that my presently lived life - and, I would like to say, teaching - will become more grounded, more pungent, and less susceptible to logical rationalization, not to speak of rational instrumentality. (Greene 1995, 77-78)