Why is a live chicken banned from the kindergarten? Two lessons learned from teaching posthuman pedagogy to university students

The hierarchical human-centric paradigm has been criticized by various movements of posthuman philosophy because this paradigm forgets and dismisses nonhuman beings and entities: animals, nature, objects, and technology. When I developed a course called ‘Education and Adaptations of Animal Studies’ for university students in 2015, I learned two lessons in practice. First, many humans, pedagogues, and academics want to hold on to their anthropocentric worldview that separates them from other species. Second, in pedagogical practices humans prefer to avoid confronting the violence they do toward animals. In this article, I reflect on these two lessons learned and consider what they tell us about the dichotomies, anthropocentrism, and speciesism visible in pedagogical practices. I also discuss how posthuman pedagogy and posthuman ethics can help us ask uneasy questions that fracture the uncertain conception of human superiority.     

The ‘good life’ and the ‘rich portfolio’: young women,schooling and neoliberal subjectification

This paper explores the ways two young women, living in Australia, make sense of themselves, their activities, and futures. The two young women come from two different schooling contexts—a prestigious private school and a government school. We analyse their self‐narratives in relation to neoliberal discourse, and consider how, and with what effects, their school contexts privilege and make available neoliberal discourses, and work to produce different subjectivities and notions of ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ lives. Conceptualising schools as sites of subjection, we analyse the discourses that their respective schools make available to the young women, and how they have appropriated them. We suggest that the different exposure and access to neoliberal discourses position the women very differently in terms of future possibilities and work‐life scenarios in the neoliberal economy. In that way, the article seeks to make a contribution towards understanding schools as implicated in social (re)production and in the (re)production of classed subjectivities.     

Children of the market: performativity,neoliberal responsibilisation and the construction of student identities

This paper draws on interview data gathered from a broader study concerned with examining issues of social justice, cultural diversity and schooling. The focus is on five students in Years 5 and 6 who attend a primary school located on the edge of a class-privileged area in outer London. The children are all high achievers who are very invested in doing well in school and in life within the parameters of neoliberalism. The paper examines the ways in which neoliberal discourses of performativity and individual responsibilisation permeate the children’s talk in relation to their understandings of education and their future, and their worth and value as students. Such examination enriches the findings of important research in this area that draws attention to the ways in which neoliberal discourses have become naturalised and taken-for-granted in what counts as being a good student and a good citizen. The paper problematises the individualism, competitiveness and anxiety produced by these discourses and provides further warrant for supporting students to identify, challenge and think beyond them.     

Introduction to Section III: Deweyan Growth in Practice

At present, the structures, practice, and discourse of schooling are anchored to a “commercial spirit” that understands students, educators, and parents as economic operators trading competitively in human capital and to a discourse of failure that is disabling those who seek to understand and enact John Dewey's notion of education as democratic practice. Here Barbara Stengel illustrates both the commercial spirit in public schools and the discourse of school failure across two geopolitical settings: Shanghai, China, and urban U.S. schools. She argues that framing the educational enterprise in terms of economic success and failure makes it difficult for educators to address Dewey's vision of democracy and education substantively. Stengel concludes with an acknowledgment that, regardless of putative political commitments, these two public school systems are schooling — though not often educating — the same neoliberal subject, but that Dewey's vision of democracy and education nonetheless remains critical and compelling.     

Challenging normative assumptions regarding disengaged youth: a phenomenological perspective

This paper explores the experiences of 12 young people, all teenagers, who have chosen to attend alternative schools known as flexible learning options within the Australian context. Using a phenomenological approach, the study seeks to understand their experiences outside the normalised public discourse that they had ‘disengaged’ from mainstream school. A phenomenological approach is employed because of its potential to draw attention to predetermined assumptions about, in this study’s case, student disengagement, a concept commonly framed within a pathologised and deficit perspective. The study gives evidence for the utility of a phenomenological approach in providing insight into how macrosystem policy, such as a nationalistic neoliberal agenda, influences ‘schooling’ and subsequently students’ experiences with schools. The implications of this study with attention to the nexus between methodology and policy are discussed, especially in drawing attention to how phenomenology as a qualitative methodology provides a means of agency for the disenfranchised to challenge existing policy and public assumptions.     

“If You Show Who You are,Then They are Going to Try to Fix You”: The Capitals and Costs of Schooling for High-Achieving Latina Students

Schools are supposed to be places where students learn academic and technical skills while also expanding their social networks. Although much research exists that examines academic achievement from a variety of lenses, schools and educators continue to lack insight into the various strengths—or capital—students bring with them to school alongside the barriers—or costs—they face once there. To help bridge the gap between the extant research and what is practiced in schools, we provide insight into what educators can do to capitalize on students' strengths and minimize the barriers to achievement. This article draws from two theoretical frameworks, Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) and Racial Opportunity Cost (ROC), and two qualitative research projects that examined Latina high school students' academic achievement from a capitals and costs perspective. Although significant research has identified assets-based approaches to schooling, our results indicate that the interplay between the norms of the school and the norms the students embraced played a critical role in terms of creating conditions for a positive school experience. Based on our findings, we offer recommendations for educators to address the costs that students experience.     

Corporate practices and ethical tensions: Researching social justice values and neoliberal paradoxes in a ‘no excuses’ charter school

In recent years, there has been growing debate over the corporatisation of schooling, specifically the managerial practices of expanding charter school networks in the USA, often referred to as charter management organisations (CMOs). By definition, CMOs are consistently high-performing, well-financed networks of small schools operating in urban spaces, which adhere to a very specific ‘no excuses’ (NE) model of education in serving primarily students of colour living in poverty. This article is an autoethnographic account of my work as a leader in a CMO, which I theorise as a neoliberal project. We know very little of how neoliberal policies and ideologies are enacted in daily school life. I consider how the ethical responsibility of an educator is positioned within the daily practices and lived experience of leaders and educators working in a CMO. In focusing on my own ethical tensions, the article captures how this corporatised model of schooling influenced my values as an educator, my conflicted sense of social justice and the emotional labour of enacting a model of schooling founded on surveillance and accountability.     

Desirable places: spatial representations and educational strategies in the inner city

This article examines how the outcome of neoliberal educational reforms has affected urban schooling in the inner city of Stockholm – making it into a centralized nexus or a ‘hot-spot’ for students and schools. The aim is to analyse how geographical place and space have become major distinctive criteria in inner-city students’ educational strategies, as well as a comparative advantage for upper-secondary schools in the fierce in-between school competition. The data consist of interviews with close to 120 participants, official statistics and marketing from 55 inner-city upper-secondary schools. Our findings suggest that the growing commodification and upward socio-spatial homogenization of the inner city both affect the way schools use spatial representations in their marketing and also the strategies deployed by students in their school choice.     

学校食堂管理工作策略探析

学校食堂不仅关系到学生的身体健康,而且影响着学生人格品德的养成,受到家长、社会的高度关注,也成为学校育人的宝贵阵地。多年来,湖南省桃源县第一中学基于"后勤即感情、食堂是课堂"的理念,注重食堂基础建设,加强制度管理,强化阳光操作,很好地保证了校园的食品安全。同时,学校坚持立德树人,创建食堂餐饮文化,使师生在就餐的同时享受精神食粮带来的愉悦。     

Now I am NObody,see me for who I am: the paradox of performativity

This paper draws on data collected from young white middle class women experiencing eating disorders to highlight what we refer to as the paradox of performativity in schools. In interviews with these young women on their schooling experiences, their narratives convey both a critique of the social conditions of their schooling and their subjugated subjectivities, yet claim they are unable to ‘voice’ that critique within schools, or to resist performativity. In this paper, we explore this ambiguity and the implications it has for the subjectivities of young women. Such stories vividly reveal the painful and complex processes they endure in an effort to conform to performative cultures. The limits and possibilities of their ‘voice’ within these contexts, we suggest, reveals how performative discourse intersects with and is mediated by the embodied knowledge that both teachers and students bring to these educational encounters.     

Double contradiction of schooling: class reproduction and working-class agency at vocational schools in China

Situating in the different social, political and cultural contexts of schooling in China, which is more embedded in mixed neoliberal value, authoritarian state control and collective morality, we use a somewhat different theoretical angle to understand the process of ‘learning to labour’ and the reproduction of working class at school and at work. Our study extends the horizon of Willis’ analysis of cultural reproduction at school by seriously analysing students’ work experiences through their internship at the site of production. Taking a sociological rather than cultural analysis approach, we re-conceptualize working-class agency embedded in a double contradiction of schooling as a site of contestation. This double contradiction is generated by conflicting experiences caused by inevitable conflicts among the three spheres of material production, social reproduction and cultural reproduction in educating ideal labour subjects to serve the state, market and family, providing fertile soil for re-negotiating working-class solidarity.     

Learning Phenomenology with Heidegger: experiencing the phenomenological ‘starting point’ as the beginning of phenomenological research

Phenomenology has been with us for many years, and yet grasping phenomenology remains a difficult task. Heidegger, too, experienced this difficulty and devoted much of his teaching to the challenge of working phenomenologically. This article draws on aspects of Heidegger’s commentary in progressing the teaching and learning of phenomenology, especially as this pertains to research in fields such as education. Central to this task is elucidation of what I believe to be the most important feature of phenomenology—what Heidegger referred to as the ‘starting point’ of phenomenology. I have written this article in the manner of a phenomenological workshop with the intention of inviting the reader to engage experientially with this starting point.     

The experience of school in Scotland, 1970s to 1990s

Reforms to secondary schooling in the 20th century are most commonly discussed in relation to structures—the extension of secondary education to all students in the first half of the century, and the ending of selection into different kinds of school after the 1960s. Yet reformers also sought to give students a more satisfactory experience of school. Understanding statistically the changing experience which students had of secondary school following the reforms of the 1960s requires a lengthy time series of survey data collected contemporaneously and the capacity to link that information to evidence on attainment and on demographic factors such as sex and socio-economic status. Data from a unique series of such surveys in Scotland is used to investigate whether secondary schools became more humane in this period, whether students were more engaged with their schooling, and whether they thought that schools prepared them for life after they left. The conclusions are that the long-term aspirations of reformers to make schooling more satisfactory for students were broadly achieved. There were indeed improvements of experience and sentiment of these kinds, and they extended to students at all levels of attainment, to both sexes, and to all levels of socio-economic status.     

论学校要教会学生"学会做人"

学校教育的本质是既教书又育人。教师不仅要传授知识,更重要的是要引领青年学生健康成长。目前学校在教书方面各具所长,其目的主要是应对升学考试。但不容忽视的问题是,学校教育在教会学生做人方面却出现了漏洞,问题迭出。针对现状,有必要做一些思考和探讨。作为教书育人的学校必须懂得,为什么要教会学生学会做人和如何教会学生做人,做怎样的人。     

OP-ED National testing in mathematics: One province's predicament

Ability grouping is a common practice in many mathematics classrooms. Its negative effects on students have been documented in research spanning two decades or more, and yet it is still widely implemented—in some countries even mandated. Using data from interviews with Australian students in the compulsory years of secondary schooling (14–16 year‐olds), and using the theoretical tools offered by Bourdieu, I argue that the objective practices of school mathematics create an environment through which students internalize the practices to develop a sense of self, a habitus. This habitus potentially is more or less empowering, depending on the experiences within these streamed settings.     

Schools,teachers and community: cultivating the conditions for engaged student learning

This paper reveals the nature of the actions, discussions and relationships which characterised teachers’ and associated school personnel’s efforts to engage poor and refugee students through a community garden located in a school in a low socio-economic urban area in south-east Queensland, Australia. These actions, discussions and relationships are described as both revealing and producing particular ‘practice architectures’ which help constitute conditions for practice—in this case, conditions for beneficial student learning. The paper draws upon interview data with teachers, other school staff and community members working in the school to reveal the interrelating actions, discussions and relationships involved in developing and using the garden for academic and non-academic purposes. By better understanding such interrelationships as practice architectures, the paper reveals how teachers and those in schooling settings learn to facilitate student learning practices that likely to assist some of the most marginalised students in schooling settings.     

Intra‐activity of humans and nonhumans in Writers' Studio: (re)imagining and (re)defining ‘social’

Posthumanism, or the material turn, refuses to take the distinction between human and nonhuman for granted. Currently discourses in literacy education focus on the ways of incorporating new tools and technologies (products) but within a design perspective, which does not get at the social and participatory ways (processes) of students creating new relationships and realities with materials. A posthuman stance focuses on the processes of literacy artefacts coming into being and what is being produced in the process(es). The social is (re)imagined and (re)defined in processes that encompass social entanglements of humans/nonhuman materials creating newness, new realities. We put to work posthumanist concepts with data that we call the ‘solar system mural assemblage’ from a 7‐ to 8‐year‐old Writers' Studio in order to (re)imagine and (re)define social. We question what counts as ‘social’ when working from a posthumanist stance. Why does a ‘posthumanist social’ matter for literacy educators? How does this perspective not only change our research practices but also pedagogies? We wonder how literacies are produced – how realities come into being – in assemblages of human and nonhuman materials in Writers' Studio. We discuss how and why it matters that we (re)conceptualise the notion of social in literacy education by drawing on posthumanist views.     

Using high-stakes grades to incentivize learning

I use a natural experiment in Norwegian high school to investigate how high-stakes grades affect students’ investment in schooling. By exploiting variation across space and time I compare the performance of students taking the same exit exam in compulsory school, but where the test is high-stakes for only a subset of students. Using a staggered triple-difference framework, I find that exam grades increase in the high-stakes setting if students have a sufficient number of prospective high schools within traveling distance. Results from low-stakes ability assessments suggest actual learning — and not test-taking strategy — could largely explain the effect.     

Racism,Masculine Peer‐group Relations and the Schooling of African/ Caribbean Infant Boys

The past decade has witnessed the publication of a growing number of important ethnographic studies investigating the schooling experiences of Black students. Their focus has largely been upon student‐teacher relations during the students’ last few years of compulsory education. What they have highlighted is the complexity of racism and the varied nature of Black students’ experiences of schooling. By drawing upon data from a year‐long ethnographic study of an inner‐city, multi‐ethnic primary school, this paper aims to compliment these studies in two ways. Firstly the paper will broaden the focus to examine how student peer‐group relations play an integral role, within the context of student—teacher relations, in shaping many Black students’ schooling experiences. By focussing on African/ Caribbean infant boys, it will be shown how student—teacher relations on the one hand, and peer‐group relations on the other, form a continuous feed‐back loop; the products of each tending to exacerbate and inflate the other. Secondly, by concentrating on infant children, the paper will assess the extent to which these resultant social processes and practices are also evident for Black pupils at the beginning of their school careers—at the ages of five and six.