Shameful interest in educational research

ABSTRACT

This article considers ontological conceptualizations of shame-interest as experienced in educational research. Shame has frequently been reported in research as a property of the autonomous individual: the shame of the participant to share with the researcher, and the shame of the researcher to reflexively eliminate. Shame-interest is re-theorized here as a generative research event, as intra-action, as one simultaneous movement in the ongoing present. We attempt an ethical shift from a reflexive stance to fluxing movements of response-ability and co-consequence in order to encourage socially responsive educational research, informed through the conceptual resources of psychologist Silvan Tomkins, and feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad. Theory is threaded through a series of personal research vignettes to illustrate our thinking through ways shame-interest materialized within research events. Shame is re/conceptualized as a contestable composite feeling entangled with interest that allows an alternate non-reductive and ethical approach to educational research. We amplify our researcher responsibility, and our shame, by placing ourselves as entangled with the research ‘problem’ under investigation.     

Rethinking inequalities between deindustrialisation,schools and educational research in Geelong

Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective histories and material geologies of the earth that entwine with societal inequalities, and political questions of the relation between particular human bodies and the earth. In this article, we question: What might it do to rethink the concept of educational inequalities beyond human relations, from within a specific geographical territory? We seek to rethink inequalities including but exceeding these human relations; we argue that inequalities between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human, are materially generated and perpetuated. We offer three theoretical trajectories that consider the affective, spatial and material dimensions of inequality to rethink the relations between inequality, deindustrialisation and schooling. Educational research is implicated in the (re)production of inequalities, as well as having the potential to be part of the production of more equitable relations.     

(Un)becoming dysfunctional: ADHD and how matter comes to matter

Various neuropsychiatric disorders are a common feature today, not least in educational contexts where Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common diagnosis. The dominant perspective regarding ADHD is biomedical. This perspective has been questioned and challenged in various ways. The aim of this article is to think ADHD through quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.] theory of agential realism. According to Barad, what we perceive as singular entities do not exist in advance. Barad pays attention to the world’s entanglements, and what we perceive as singular objects and subjects are effects of specific and various material-discursive practices acting as agential cuts. The theory of agential realism assigns performativity to matter, which highlights that ADHD is something that continuously comes into being together with human and non-human bodies. The material dimension has not previously been emphasised as a causal factor in studies on ADHD. In this article, the focus is on the agency of the book. As a conclusion, the importance of taking responsibility for every material-discursive practice with which we are always entangled is emphasised.     

Affect: a tool to support pedagogical change

In the early childhood education field, the way children are conceptualised has substantially shifted in recent times. Child development theory has been unsettled as the single canon of early childhood practice. This has in turn challenged constructions of educators as keepers of a universal knowledge base, and as apolitical, non-interventionist facilitators of the natural unfolding development of individuals. While reconceptualising the early childhood knowledge base has oriented theorists and activists towards equity, unsettling educator subjectivities requires careful consideration in a feminised profession such as early childhood education. There is a need for greater discussion about how educators experience the uncertainties that accompany profound changes in teaching practice and identities and how educators can harness these uncertainties in ways that strengthen the profession. In this paper, I offer excerpts from teacher research that show how theories of affect support practitioners to engage productively the reflexivity needed to reconceptualise their roles as educators. I use affect theory to consider how the intra- and inter-personal dimensions of critically reflective practice can bolster the democratic and collectivist orientations in the teaching profession.     

Global economies of fear: affect,politics and pedagogical implications

This article seeks to explore the importance of the affective politics of fear in education and to discuss the implications for educational policy, theory and practice. The aim is to explore how discourses of fear work in some educational contexts and draw significant boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ through the structuring of curriculum and pedagogy. This analysis is done through argumentation and research evidence from the author's ethnographic work in the United States and Cyprus. Based on this analysis, the author draws out pedagogical openings that emerge from such efforts, and extends the space in which pedagogues might move to induce a critical interrogation of the affective politics of fear. It is argued that if educators are committed to inspire individual and social change – a change that would eventually problematise the symbolic violence exerted by the affective politics of fear – then much work needs to be done at the affective level.     

Teaching and tolerance: aversive and divisive pedagogical encounters

This paper takes as its subject the circulation of tolerance discourse within two pedagogical encounters in two Australian educational settings, and draws from the work of Wendy Brown on tolerance as a regulatory force. Brown argues that discourses of tolerance are produced within historical and cultural milieu that enable tolerance and aversion to exist simultaneously. This has significant implications for how we might come to understand the project of working towards a socially just educational system and the various struggles encountered within pedagogical sites. I also examine the pedagogical affects that are produced within different educational moments as we work to teach in or around difference and when we embody the Other in the classroom. I engage with how these experiences speak to the way in which tolerance as national ideal acts to both alleviate and circulate discourses of inequality such as sexism and homophobia.     

Elaborating pedagogical content knowledge: what it means to know students and think about teaching

The purpose of this study was to examine how a teacher understood her students and then thought and made decisions about content, curriculum and pedagogy. Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and Deweyan philosophies of experience and education provided the theoretical frameworks. Data were collected through observations (N?=?38) and interviews (N?=?38) over four months and analysed using constant comparison. Findings indicated that this teacher possessed a broad repertoire of knowledge about students that she used to think and make decisions about content, curriculum and pedagogy. The connections between knowing students and thinking about teaching were more sophisticated and interconnected than is typically recognized or articulated in teacher knowledge literature. Three themes are used to explain how this teacher understood her students’ emotional and social lives in and out of her classroom, and ways it influenced her thinking and teaching. The discussion centers on the need for more comprehensive analyses of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge.