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.     

Body,Caring and Power in Teacher–Pupil Relationships: Encounters in former pupils' memories

This narrative inquiry aims to look at teacher–pupil relationships through teacher memories. When 49 university students of education were asked to write their memories of teachers, they told about their teachers in relation to pupils. The data were analysed thematically and, based on that, re‐read through the concepts of body, caring and power in order to answer the question of how these can be understood as elements of the teacher–pupil relationship. We will also discuss the potential for encounter in teacher–pupil relationships, since we noticed that students especially seemed to recall encounters and non‐encounters in the relationship. By listening to former pupils, it is possible to elicit significant memories of what, from their point of view, is in the core of being a teacher. The meaning of recalling one's own teachers in teacher education is also emphasised.     

Enfleshing Embodiment: ‘Falling into trust’ with the body's role in teaching and learning

Embodiment as a compelling way to rethink the nature of teaching and learning asks participants to see fundamentally what is at stake within teaching/learning situations, encountering ourselves and our relations to others/otherness. Drawing predominantly on the thinking of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty the body's role within teaching and learning is enfleshed through the concrete experiences of one middle‐school science teacher attempting to teach for greater student inquiry. Personal, embodied understandings of the lived terms of inquiry enable the science teacher to seek out the lived terms of inquiry in her classroom alongside students. Theories are taken up as working notions for the teacher to examine as philosophical/theoretical/pragmatic processes to be worked with, and concomitantly, working as dynamic practice at the core of the teacher's thinking and experiences. The theory/practice conjuncture of inquiry is thus enfleshed, gaining embodied understandings. Embodiment as the medium enhancing comprehension is evidenced as holding worthy implications for teacher education. Teacher education must fall into trust with the body's role in teaching and learning.     

Caring for “others”: Examining the interplay of mothering and deficit discourses in teaching

Data from a year-long narrative inquiry, involving six American women elementary school teachers, suggests that teachers’ conceptions of caring are primarily shaped by their biographies. Despite teachers’ claims that they knew their students well, their conceptions of caring were relatively fixed across contexts rather than malleable to differing students’ realities. Here, I raise questions about the interplay of mothering and deficit discourses as they serve to legitimize and perpetuate single-loop caring. Implications for teaching, teacher education and care theory are discussed.     

Growth and Resistance: How Deweyan Pragmatism Reconstructs Social Justice Education

While Democracy and Education is often cited within the scholarship on and teaching of social justice education, it and Dewey's work generally remain underutilized. Peter Nelsen argues in this essay that Deweyan pragmatism offers rich resources for social justice education by exploring how Dewey's three‐part conception of growth has both analytical and normative force. Nelsen makes this case by examining student resistance to engagement with social justice issues, and concludes from this analysis that resistance is an opportunity for growth. Furthermore, rather than being a precursor to critical engagement with ideas, Nelsen contends that creating collaborative environments that foster interdependence across group memberships might be as important as the critical engagement itself.     

The search for a new role of liberal education in an age of globalization: the challenge of transferable skills to liberal knowledge at Japanese colleges and universities

One of the tasks facing Japanese colleges and universities is to implement a continuum of effective educational programs in order to properly respond to the impact of globalization. Effective university educational programs are needed to construct a new higher education system for nurturing transferable learning skills and cultivating hope for the future among our youth. First, the present tasks of Japan’s just and caring society in an age of globalization are discussed in relation to the changing mission and role of our higher education. Second, the nature of liberal knowledge required in an age of uncertainty and polarization is examined with regard to the changing roles of undergraduate and graduate education and the drifting lifestyle of the Japanese. Third, the role of the generative and transferable type of knowledge and skills is explored with specific reference to John Dewey’s theory of reflective inquiry in precarious situations. The need for cultivating the mindset of “collaborative inquiry” is also emphasized for the education of hope among our youth. The purpose of this article is to propose that the search for the generative and transferable type of learning and inquiry in higher education will lay a foundation for preparing our youth for the challenges of the knowledge society and participating in the construction of a new type of just and caring community in our country.     

SERVING AND LEARNING ATA UNIVERSITY LABORATORY SCHOOL: STUDENTS FROM BIRTH THOUGH ADULTHOOD BENEFIT WHEN SERVICE LEARNING IS INTEGRATED INTO THE PRESERVICE CURRICULUM

Service‐Learning (S‐L) pedagogy is attracting increased attention in teacher education. This article describes the implementation of S‐L in the preservice early childhood curriculum, which placed students in a birth‐5 years setting. It identifies a continuum of learning to care, which begins in infancy, as caring capacities emerge, through to adulthood, when preservice teachers learn from experienced mentors how caring characterizes their interactions with learners of all ages. Students’ journals indicate they believe S‐L experiences contribute to their personal, academic and professional development. Carefully implemented S‐L experiences validate students’ caring interactions, give them first‐hand experiences with young children during which they can apply theoretical constructs, provide experiences which help them clarify their own career goals, and make them feel better prepared to manage instructional and classroom management dimensions of working with young children.     

Developing a Pedagogy of “Making” through Collaborative Self-Study

We believe that the ideas associated with the Maker Movement have profound implications for teacher education. We have isolated the pedagogical principles of hack, adapt, design, and create as central to exploring how they work with teacher candidate participants in a maker pedagogy lab. We frame these ideas as Maker Pedagogy, which is the enactment of the principles inspired by the maker movement in the classroom to foster learners who operate as innovators, creators, sharers and givers of knowledge, tools and technologies. The purpose of our self-study research is to describe, interpret and analyze how our pedagogies of teacher education and our critical friendship have changed and developed as a result of providing experiences for teacher candidates in our maker pedagogy lab. In this project we use self-study methodology to investigate our teaching and practices, and we dialogue about our tacit and personal knowledge as it contributes to the knowledge and understanding of our teaching through Maker Pedagogy. In particular, the emphasis is on critical collaborative inquiry through critical friends and on dialogue as a valued component of our research. Of particular interest were data in the video recordings of each lab that indicated that one or both of us had reframed our understanding of maker pedagogy. The findings are framed as three themes that document what we are learning about Maker Pedagogy through teaching teacher candidates. These are (1) the value of self-study methodology, (2) Maker Pedagogy as distinct and (3) deepening our pedagogies of teacher education.     

Tronto's notion of privileged irresponsibility and the reconceptualisation of care: implications for critical pedagogies of emotion in higher education

This article takes on some of care theorist Joan Tronto's ideas on care and responsibility and asks what implications they have for critical pedagogies in higher education. The authors argue that Tronto's political ethics of care framework enriches the transformative potential of critical pedagogies, because it helps expose how power and emotion operate through (ir)responsibility. In particular, Tronto's notion of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ is analysed in relation to the gendered and emotional ideologies and practices that are constructed discursively and materially. It is argued that critical pedagogies of emotion grounded in Tronto's political ethics of care provide the concepts and openings to critically explore the emotions arising from failing to recognise different teachers' and students' needs and from engaging in practices of privileged irresponsibility. Also, critical pedagogies of emotion encourage students and educators to be attentive to their own emotional positions and practices with regard to caring responsibilities and (gendered and other) privileged irresponsibilities.     

Vocational teachers' gendered reflections on education,teaching and care

In this article, we discuss teachers' reflections on the relation between teaching and care in the two most gender-segregated sectors of vocational upper secondary education in Finland, namely Health and Social services and Transport and Technology. We first discuss the concepts around education, teaching, taking care for and caring about students, using theoretisations of care and feminist pedagogies. Using teacher interviews and field notes, we then analyse teachers' ambivalence about care work in the context of teaching, placing special emphasis on care as a gendered task, and then discuss the ‘moral panic’ or ‘worry speech’ about young people in vocational education from the perspective of caring about. The findings are reflected through earlier studies in lower secondary schools. We argue that even if teachers in vocational education, especially male teachers, tend to feel awkward about caring work, they cannot avoid it, and they do care about their students and regard care as a general responsibility.     

Scaffolding Science Teachers in Open‐inquiry Teaching

The present study deals with a school‐based professional development trajectory for secondary science teachers, aiming at scaffolding teachers in open‐inquiry teaching for the topic of water quality. Its design was based on the leading principle of ‘guiding by scaffolding’. Seven experienced teachers participated in institutional meetings and teaching at school. The research focused on designing scaffolding tools, addressing these tools in the meetings, and implementing them in the classroom. The main research data were obtained from meetings, classroom discussions, and observations. The results indicated that the professional development trajectory has promoted teachers’ learning of scaffolding students in open inquiry, especially the ability to know when and how to give students a well‐balanced combination of ‘structure’ for open‐inquiry learning and sufficient ‘space’ for that. The implications for science teacher education are discussed.     

Reframing Westernized culture: insights from a Critical Friends Group on EcoJustice education

In this article I report the findings of an intrinsic case study involving seven ecologically minded teachers who participated in a Critical Friends Group (CFG) for five months. The topic of our discussions was EcoJustice education, which involves analyzing and reframing Westernized culture. Findings are focused on how the participants grappled with what EcoJustice education means and their affective responses to both the content and the professional development experience. Analysis of the data revealed that reframing Westernized culture takes time, that it is not merely an intellectual exercise but also an emotional and psychological one, and that personal internalization comes before practical application. The participants also indicated that they valued being in a CFG where they could be honest and vulnerable as well as supported, connected, inspired, and challenged. I conclude by recommending CFGs as a model for transformative professional development in environmental education.     

Adult learners’ emotions in online learning

The aim of the research study reported in this article was to investigate how adult learners talk about their emotions in the context of a year‐long online course, the first online course these adults take, as part of a distance education program. The theoretical and methodological approach focused on formulating an account of how emotion discourses are used by learners, what role they play in online learning, and how they change over a one‐year period (if they do so). The findings of this study provide three insights: (1) they show how adult learners (who also happen to be novice online learners) respond emotionally and talk about their emotions in relation to online learning; (2) they call attention to the ways in which emotion talk changes from the beginning of the course to the end, always in response to specific demands and dimensions of online learning; and (3) they reveal the differential emotional responses between men and women in relation to their social and gender roles and responsibilities. Empirical and policy implications of this study are discussed at the end.     

Transforming learning: teaching compassion and caring values in higher education

As a result of reported failings in the care of people in the health and social care sector in the UK, HE providers who produce professionals to work in these areas are being challenged to address caring values in the student body. As values are subjective and affective, this requires the learning environment to not only promote critical thinking and the development of professional competencies, but to facilitate personal growth and change within students at cognitive, emotional and spiritual levels. As the latter dimensions are frequently ignored in education, this is very challenging: it requires a curriculum that supports students to understand, reflect on and, if necessary, restructure their own caring values in order to develop a transcendent lens i.e. the ability to put others before their own self interests and that of the organisation in which they work. It also requires students to develop the skills to challenge others in situations where caring values are not achieved or sustained. This can only be accomplished as a co-produced phenomenon, as it requires students who are prepared to engage in the process and educators, in both HE and practice settings, who are able and willing to role model appropriate skills and facilitate a learning relationship in which students can grow. However, if the true wisdom of caring values is to be realised in everyday practice, then this kind of transformational learning has to be supported at wider structural levels, and this just may be its Achilles heel.     

Design and inquiry: Bases for an accommodation between science and technology education in the curriculum?

This article examines the merits of the proposition that design and inquiry are conceptual parallels. It does so by first looking closely at the inquiry‐related discourse within science education, then at aspects of the design discourse within engineering, and finally within technology education. Convergences and divergences of these two streams of curricular advocacy are then identified, and implications and conclusions with respect to curriculum and instruction in both subjects are suggested. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 255–281, 2006     

Critical Thinking,Caring and Professional Agency: An Emerging Framework for Productive Mentoring

In this paper, we report on a mentoring programme which provides an accreditation pathway to a master’s level qualification. The paper served three purposes. First, informed by selected literature on education we caution against expedient reductionist models that are based solely on novice–expert mentoring relationships with limited facility for critical inquiry. Second, we present an evolving theoretical framework for productive mentoring based on our critique of a preferred academic literature and interactions with mentor teachers, school principals and teacher educators. We proactively encouraged an awareness of societal norms and traditions that can appear as counterculture to critical thinking. Lastly, we consider some implications for productive mentoring as an academic, caring and professional practice within a continuum of teacher education.     

从心灵内部的和谐到外部世界的和谐——一把打开柏拉图《理想国》的钥匙

在柏拉图看来,个人心灵内部与外部世界(国家)是同构的。国家由治国者、护卫者和劳动者三部分构成,相应地,心灵由理智、激情和欲望组成。三种人在国家内各做各的事是国家的正义,心灵的三部分各安其份则是个人的正义。理想的国家秩序的实现有赖于个人心灵内部理想秩序的先在实现。个人心灵内部理想秩序的实现则有赖于教育,其中,美育的作用至关重要。     

The development of an instrument to measure teachers’ inquiry habit of mind

In the present study the construct inquiry of mind explored and an instrument to measure it is proposed. Using three different samples, explorative and confirmative factor analyses were performed, resulting in three empirical dimensions that correspond to the three theoretical dimensions: 1) ‘value deep understanding,’ 2) ‘reserve judgment and tolerate ambiguity,’ and 3) ‘taking a range of perspectives and posing increasingly focused questions.’ Our findings suggest the teachers’ inquiry habit of mind scale has good psychometric properties making it useful not only for research that investigates teachers’ research attitude and intention to do research but also as an evaluation tool for the development of an inquiry habit of mind in both student teachers and teacher educators (in teacher education) as well as in experienced teachers (participating in professional development).     

Dangerous Carers: Pastoral power and the caring teacher of contemporary Australian schooling

Whilst care imperatives have arisen across the breadth of Western societies, within the education sector they appear both prolific and urgent. This paper explores the deployment of care discourses within education generally and draws upon the case of Australian Health and Physical Education (HPE) more specifically, to undertake a Foucauldian interrogation of care. In so doing I demonstrate the usefulness of Foucault's pastoral power lens and its capacity to provide insight into the moral and ethical work conducted by caring teachers on behalf of the state (Acker, 1995). Following a brief overview of the advocacy, challenges and debates surrounding the issue of caring teaching within education, I draw on the work of Hunter (1994) and three case studies from a genealogical interrogation of HPE that employed Foucualt's ethical fourfold as a heuristic device to reveal the ethical practices and objectives of the good HPE teacher. Drawing on this genealogical work, I argue that HPE teachers and their colleagues have been purposefully incited to constitute themselves as agents of pastoral power. From this Foucauldian perspective, I conclude with an exploration of the unintended and possibly ‘dangerous’ practices of caring teaching that may emerge within the complex and messy nexus of contemporary self‐constitution.