Critical pedagogy and emotion: working through ‘troubled knowledge’ in posttraumatic contexts

This article critiques some of the existing literature in critical pedagogy and the way it tends to overlook or downplay the strong emotional investments of troubled knowledge in posttraumatic situations. Examining existing literature in critical pedagogy reiterates the argument that the discourse of critical pedagogy constructs and sustains its own disciplinary affects. This article builds further on this argument and highlights the importance of foregrounding rather than backgrounding the complexity of difficult emotional knowledge and its pedagogical implications. Working from the assumption that critical pedagogy, especially in the context of posttraumatic societies, must engage this terrain of difficult emotional knowledge in ways that have not been sufficiently addressed by the current rhetoric of critical pedagogy, I look to work that gestures toward a discourse of critical pedagogy which considers troubled knowledge as a source of fruitful and responsive learning. As it will be emphasized, this argument entails making pedagogical space for understanding troubled knowledge in more nuanced terms. This task requires a constant reconsideration of new pedagogical resources to enhance the potential of critical pedagogy; this article discusses three such resources: the significance of pedagogic discomfort, the pedagogical principle of mutual vulnerability, and the value of compassion and strategic empathy.     

Contracting race: writing,racism, and education

This article presents the main terms of the racial contract, as they appear in the subcontracts of Mills’ theory, such as the spatial, epistemological, cognitive subcontracts. It is important to keep in mind that these subcontracts are by no means separate and represent analytical moments of the main contract. Furthermore, other than its institutional form, education is not a separate sphere from the racial contract. Finally, I end with the racial contract’s gaps to determine the possibility of its own demise, which requires the active signing off from the terms of the contract. That is, I sketch ideas about ways to counteract (i.e., counter-write) the racial contract as part of a corrective to the history that interpellates people of color as its targets. Both Whites and people of color have a stake in the rewriting of the contract, where in the end they are imagined as neither Black nor White but free. In this last portion, I spend some text on what Whites’ role may look like in signing off the contract, such as the case of white ‘race traitors’ within the white abolitionist proposal, recast as the ‘epistemological traitor’ in education.     

Transformative learning approaches for public relations pedagogy

Public relations educators are frequently challenged by students' flawed perceptions of public relations. Two contrasting case studies are presented in this paper to illustrate how socially-oriented paradigms may be applied to a real-client project to deliver a transformative learning experience. A discourse-analytic approach is applied within the case studies as a technique for identifying changes in students' understandings of the ideological structures, power relations and knowledge systems that underpin public relations and for determining whether transformative learning has taken place. The discourse engagement and normative/critical/ethical paradigmatic orientations examined in this paper provide conceptual foundations for developing civic responsibility that needs to be underpinned by salient social theory.     

Problematizing public engagement within public pedagogy research and practice

In this article, we explore issues related to how scholars attempt to enact public pedagogy (i.e. doing ‘public engagement’ work) and how they research public pedagogy (i.e. framing and researching artistic and activist ‘public engagement’ as public pedagogy). We focus specifically on three interrelated issues we believe should be addressed by scholars as they continue to theorize, enact, and analyze public pedagogies in the broader public sphere: (a) power dynamics embedded in individualized versus more collective enactments of public intellectualism; (b) conflicting and complicated conceptualizations of the relationship between the public pedagogue and the public, and how that relationship should be enacted; and (c) ethical issues surrounding the framing of public engagement and activist work under the umbrella of ‘pedagogy’.     

Neoliberalism is not a theory of everything: a Bourdieuian analysis of illusio in educational research

Despite the frequency with which the concept of neoliberalism is employed within academic literature, its complex and multifaceted nature makes it difficult to define and describe. Indeed, data reported in this article suggest that there is a tendency in educational research to make extensive use of the word ‘neoliberalism’ (or its variants neoliberal, neo-liberal and neo-liberalism) as a catch-all for something negative but without offering a definition or explanation. The article highlights a number of key risks associated with this approach and draws on the Bourdieuian concept of illusio to suggest the possibility that when as educational researchers we use the word ‘neoliberalism’ in this way, rather than interrupting the implementation of neoliberal policies and practices, we may, in fact, be further entrenching the neoliberal doxa. That is to say, we are both playing the neoliberal game and inadvertently demonstrating our belief that it is a game worth being played. In so doing, this article seeks to extend understandings of what illusio means within the context of educational research.     

Wooden dolls and disarray: rethinking United States’ teacher education to the side of quantification

ABSTRACT

According to the 2013 report by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), most teacher education programs are failing in the United States. These programs, NCTQ insists, are not preparing new teachers with sufficiently ‘scientific’ methods and are, in the process, failing to properly train prospective teachers how to ‘lead the classroom’ (p. 2). In the deficit discourses employed by NCTQ, teacher education programs have become a cesspool of ‘mediocrity’ (p. 1) where the overall findings ‘paint a grim picture of teacher preparation in the United States’ (p. 17). We actually agree that things are grim, but for very different reasons and in very different spaces. Using NCTQ’s ‘Teacher Prep Review: A Review of the Nation’s Teacher Preparation Program’ as an entryway, the authors argue that the report typifies not only an alarmist approach usually found in conservative attempts at social policy and reform, but also further reifies quasi-empirically based research as the best (indeed the only) method by which to measure effective teacher education programs. The authors deconstruct the taken-for-granted assumptions within the NCTQ text, challenging quantification as a research/policy paradigm while arguing for the value of newly imagining educational possibility through risk and creation.     

Character education,new media,and political spectacle

Ontario’s new Character Development Initiative is analyzed to determine whether it can be characterized as political spectacle. Examination of official policy texts, media reports, speeches, web pages, webcasts, and events at the Character Development Symposium suggests that the Initiative contains many elements of political spectacle; however, the policy has received little coverage in traditional media. Media coverage is considered as an essential component of political spectacles. In this case, media coverage is limited to digital media produced by the Ontario government itself. This raises questions about the implications of new media forms for the theory of political spectacle. I demonstrate that digital media offer new means for bringing political spectacles to citizens and enable governments to have greater control over their content. Since political spectacles facilitated by traditional media promote the status quo and make critical analysis of public policy difficult, government‐produced digital media might put democracy at even greater risk. Alternatively, government websites post texts that can be analyzed by citizens and used to promote democracy in education. I conclude that the strategic use of language and illusions of democracy, whether brought to citizens through digital or traditional media, are essential components of political spectacle.     

‘Next thing you know,her hair turned green’: absurdity and uncertainty in high-stakes teacher test space

This article explores what happens behind the closed doors and in the ‘black box’ of high-stakes educational testing. Our specific concern is licensure exams that are often gatekeepers into teacher education programs and the profession. Leveraging the spatial turn across critical social theory and other disciplines, we conceptualize the test space of these exams in order to account for the powerful reach that test companies have into teacher education and the ‘ideal’ restrictive space that test takers navigate. Against this conceptual background, we share findings from a larger qualitative study to illustrate how test takers ‘practice’ test space into something more manageable and familiar by leveraging various affordances presented to them. Overall, our study accounts for the spatial dimension of high-stakes educational tests and initiates productive ways to begin thinking about the structure and agency of these spaces.     

Singing into Language: Sudanese Australian young women create public pedagogy

This article examines the ethnocinematic research project Cross-Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education, and its relationship to the evolving notion of public pedagogies. The project explores the potential of alternative pedagogies, which include popular culture, especially audiovisual forms, to engage teachers and learners with one another in collaborative pedagogical methods. The author's collaborative work with students from refugee backgrounds involves what Giroux calls a ‘spectrum of social practices’ utilising a variety of media platforms. This article draws from the lived experiences of one particular co-participant, Achol Baroch, and her 15 Sudanese Australian co-participants. Their experiences of secondary education are traced through this arts-based participatory project using the emerging practice of ethnocinema, a type of ethnographic documentary film which is generative, interculturally collaborative and aligned with the transformative goals of critical pedagogy.     

Dialectics and dilemmas: psychosocial dimensions of ability grouping policy

Ability grouping in schools and classrooms constitutes something of a policy hiatus in the Australian context, in contrast to the conspicuous visibility of equity and quality as explicit policy goals. This article examines what I am calling the dialectics – i.e. moments of negation that allow for creation – and dilemmas inhering in the complex and contradictory relationship between policy priorities of quality and equity, and practices of ability grouping, in Australian schooling. I explore these dialectics and dilemmas between these dimensions both at a macro, social level of policy and at a micro, psychological level of the teacher as a policy worker, exploring the latter through a vignette of one pre-service teacher grappling with issues of ability grouping in schools and classrooms. The article concludes with an argument for the value of generating continual dialectical exchange between the conscious and the unconscious, between the imaginary and symbolic registers, between psychotherapeutic and educational discourses and between policy and practice, as an essential element in ongoing formation of ethically and politically agentive teacher identities that are capable of holding policy to account in a climate that often positions teachers as educational technicians and curricular transmitters.     

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.     

Pedagogy of the anxious: rethinking critical pedagogy in the context of neoliberal autonomy and responsibilization

Critical pedagogy, and the work of Paulo Freire in particular, understands the struggle for emancipation as involving the emergence, as historical subjects, of those who have been marginalized. In this regard, this tradition could be said to foreground a politics of the subject as central to its philosophy. However, scholars of critical pedagogy have not adequately attended to the reorganization of subjectivity that neoliberalism itself proposes. In the context of a pervasive anxiety produced by contemporary processes of precarity and fragmentation, neoliberalism asks us to understand ourselves on the basis of principles of individual responsibility, autonomy, and competition. Starting from the Foucauldian notion of governmentality and the Lacanian notions of drive and desire, I describe how this neoliberal recomposition of the subject poses a challenge to key principles in critical pedagogy. Thus, Freire’s account of the paralysis that characterizes the oppressed stands in contrast to the particular autonomy and hypermobility that neoliberalism demands. Likewise, the privileging of the sphere of consciousness in Freire overlooks the structure of libidinal investments within neoliberal circuits of consumption and communication. This interrogation has implications for critical education in the present, which I argue should invite students to betray the compulsions of their anxious autonomy in favor of a collective commitment and enlivened agency.     

加强人文精神教育,培养学生健全人格

中学历史教学在注重知识传授的同时,要以人为本,改进教学内容,创设各种情境,活跃课堂氛围,对学生进行健全的人格教育。本文从背景分析、内涵指向、策略表达三个方面作了论述。     

基于新媒体的思想政治教学改革研究

新媒体时代的到来,使信息传播方式朝着移动化、碎片化、互动性强的方向发展,新媒体日益显著的影响力使其成为高校思想政治教育不可忽视的阵地。高校思想政治教学中,可以借助新媒体补充教学资源库、拓展教学平台、丰富教学形式以及完善考核方式,从而提高思想政治教学的实效性。     

新媒体视野下的大学生思想政治教育研究

针对大学生使用新媒体技术现状的调查研究,分析了新媒体对现今大学生生活、学习、心理等各方面的影响,以及新媒体技术给高校思想政治教育工作带来的机遇和挑战,从而提出在新媒体视野下有效开展高校思想政治教育工作的对策。     

手机新媒体在学生思想政治教育中的应用

手机功能的发展,尤其是移动互联技术的应用,改变了人们的生活方式和学习方式。手机新媒体以其便捷灵活的操作性能和丰富多样的展现形式得到了广泛的使用。本文从手机新媒体的特性入手,分析了手机新媒体的快速发展对学生的思想政治教育带来的机遇和挑战,并举例说明手机新媒体环境下如何开展学生思想教育。     

新媒体时代下大学生思想政治教育工作探析

近年来,新媒体成为高校思想政治教育的一个全新载体。新媒体的出现,契合了大学生的思想、行为特征,对大学生思想政治教育工作既提供了机遇,也带来了挑战。在思想政治教育工作上高校应充分利用新媒体,以开创思想政治教育工作的新格局。     

面向网络舆情的高校思想政治教育工作研究

互联网已成为当前思想政治教育的新阵地。高校思想政治教育工作者要高度重视网络舆情带来的影响与挑战,准确把握网络舆情的特点,采取切实有效的应对措施,探索面向网络舆情的高校思想政治教育工作的新途径、新方法。     

Representation and the Straightjacketing of Curriculum's Complicated Conversation: The pedagogy of Pontypool's minor language

Reconceptualist and post‐reconceptualist curriculum scholars have drawn upon the notion of a complicated curriculum conversation as a means to describe the imbricated, pluralist, and eclectic character of curriculum theorizing. Insofar as this curriculum conversation is accomplished via language however, it remains wed to a particular representational logic restricting what might be thought. This essay explores the question of what it means to theorize curriculum when the very idea of a complicated curriculum conversation begins to fall into cliché. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, this essay analyzes three representational commitments of contemporary curriculum theorizing, addressing how each are inadequate for the theorization of difference or the instantiation of the radically new. Against the implicit commitment to conformity alive in the curriculum field, this essay posits an ethics of disidentification exemplified via Bruce McDonald's horror film Pontypool. It is via such a tactic of productive disidentification, this essay claims, that thought might be unfettered from the orthodoxies of common sense, becoming in this way more adequate for opening spaces unanticipated by contemporary representational regimes.     

大学生舆情视角下的大学生思想政治教育

大学生舆情是大学生思想状况的概括反映,是高校思想政治教育必须高度重视的新课题。高校应深刻认识大学生舆情对思想政治工作的影响,顺应新形势,研究新情况,采取有效措施,在大学生舆情的视角下推进思想政治教育工作的深入开展,实现青年大学生健康成长的目标。