‘Whoever does not write is written’: the role of ‘nature’ in post‐post approaches to environmental education research

While McKenzie mentions in passing her concern about anthropocentrism and human oppression of the natural world, she is mostly silent about the role of ‘nature’ in post‐post approaches to environmental education research. If one takes feminist poststructuralist ideas about voice and representation seriously, surely the place of ‘nature’ in environmental education research must be interrogated? Is there space for ‘nature’ in multivocal representations of research? How might our own polyvocality include our experiences of our animality? How might we assess the legitimacy of such representations? What are the limits and possibilities of post‐post approaches to environmental education research when ‘nature’ is taken into account?     

CSE and the 16+: Teachers' Views

During the interview ‘Mary’ – who had last year been a school pupil and this year is a first‐year undergraduate on the new degree in Education (with Teaching Certificate) – talked at some length, and with considerable feeling, about how her main frustration as a female pupil had been what she saw as her systematic disenfranchisement from influence over the content and process of the schools' curricula which she had pursued over the previous thirteen years. Although she felt that all pupils suffered this lack of influence she was convinced that girls suffered disproportionately. [Some time later in the interview], when talking about the ‘teaching practice’ she had recently completed, ‘Mary’ described how her ‘music and movement’ work had met with ‘loud and disruptive’ reaction from some of the boys in the mixed class of 7–8 year‐olds, even though the majority of the children had clearly enjoyed and been engaged by the scheme she had designed. Faced with this rejection, and experiencing some anxiety about how the teachers and her tutor would assess her potential as a future teacher if she was not seen to be exercising what they would count as ‘good control’ of the class, ‘Mary’ resolved her ‘problem’ by designing an alternative scheme which the few boys would not (and did not) reject. Although the girls had ‘subsequently shown less interest’, their quiet acquiescence to what she offered them reduced her anxiety about her assessment as a teacher. When she related her pupil experience to her teaching practice experience ‘Mary’ was dismayed to realise that she had ‘reproduced for others precisely that frustration which [she herself] had experienced as a pupil’.

Extract from author's notes when evaluating a new pre‐service degree course, June 1983.     

为伊米莉亚的智商辩护(英文)

伊米莉亚虽然只是莎士比亚悲剧《奥赛罗》中的一名次要角色,但也颇为国内外的读者及评论家们关注。但无论在剧中,还是剧外,伊米莉亚饱受他人的指责,被认为是一个愚蠢不堪的笨女人,甚至该为最后的悲剧负责。然而,仔细考察整个剧本,这样的指责明显有失偏颇。伊米莉亚其实一点都不愚蠢。相反,她既机智又聪明。简而言之,伊米莉亚是又一位被大众偏见所冤枉的悲剧女性。     

Whose confession? Which tradition? (A preliminary critique of Penny Thompson, 2004)

What does Penny Thompson really want? Reading her article in BJRE 26 (1) proved a baffling experience: it clearly wanted to say something, and to say it passionately, yet signally failed to do so. It fails largely because it lacks an argument; there seems also to be conceptual muddle at its heart. A fuller critique will need to attend to Thompson’s reading of religious education’s history, particularly to her use of evidence—but that is a story for another night. Consequently, this brief critique has at its core four questions to elicit clarity where at present there is none: First, does Penny Thompson want so to revision religious education in community schools that she and other aspirants to ‘Christian confessional religious education’ may freely work to convert young people to ‘Christianity’ and to nurture them in a Christian tradition? Second, in what sense, or senses, does Thompson want readers to understand her phrase, ‘the truth of the Christian faith?’ Third, in whose confession and in which tradition does Thompson want this Christian confessional religious education to be rooted? Fourth, is Penny Thompson willing to allow Christian teachers to present alternative understandings of Christianity, critical of her (implied) view? These questions are preceded by reflection on the form of her article’s argument and on its use of ‘confess’ and its cognates.     

L'évolution technologique,la société et l'éducation

In the first part of this article the author recalls and emphasizes the way in which education and society are interrelated. It is considered impossible to pose a problem of education without referring to the social framework in which its solution is to be found. Education involves preparing the child for tomorrow's world — knowledge of this world being the point of departure of all pedagogic reflection — and at the same time not cutting it off from its roots. Presenting personal experience rather than launching into technical demonstrations the author recalls some of the changes over the past fifty years. The different educational milieus which the child and adolescent encounter, such as family, school and professional life, are affected by such technical changes. As far as the school environment is concerned, technological revolutions modify the relationships between pupil and knowledge, and create new relationships between teachers and pupils as also among pupils themselves. In addition, a new type of creativity has arisen as a result of the utilization of computers and databases. Schools have in fact experienced a series of revolutions which deeply transformed the access to knowledge: books, daily papers and the mass media, informatics. According to the author the book presents the ‘day before yesterday's knowledge’; the daily paper brings you up to ‘yesterday’; radio and television up to ‘today’. Informatics will make the pupil accustomed not only to seek knowledge but also to reconstruct or even construct it. Where does the school stand amidst this vast reconstruction? What is its present role? What will become of the teacher and his new roles? If the school wants to prepare itself for tomorrow's world it has to change radically today.     

The impossibility of ‘real-life’ word problems (according to Bakhtin,Lacan, Zizek and Baudrillard)

In recent years a great deal of work on mathematical word problems has focused on efforts to bring more of ‘real life’ into the problems themselves and students’ uptake of these problems. Following on from earlier studies of the word problem as a pedagogical and literary genre, the author argues that we cannot unproblematically assume an ability to know and to represent or match ‘real life’ in word problems. The author uses the work of contemporary theorists Bakhtin, Lacan, Zizek and Baudrillard, including concepts like the chronotope, the Lacanian Real, Imaginary and Symbolic, simulacra, and impossible exchange, to argue that conditions of our postmodern world render transparent matchings of word problems with ‘real life’ unsustainable.     

Theory and Passion in Action Research

The starting point for this article is Polanyi's insight that learning involves the personal participation of the knower in taking possession of knowledge, and that this process ‘takes place within a flow of passion’. Somekh pays tribute to Elliott's role in her own intellectual development, as her tutor while she was still a teacher, and later as her colleague. The article focuses on the contribution of the articles published in Educational Action Research, during its first 10 years, under the title of ‘Theoretical Resources’. The contested nature of this title is discussed and illuminated through an exploration of Elliott's writing about teachers' knowledge and the role of both theory and practice in theory generation. Somekh argues for the importance of intellectual engagement with ideas and theories through passionate participation within a ‘personalised and contextualised reality’ – she sees this process as akin to Elliott's notion of action research as a process which ‘problematises the ideas of theorists’.     

From divergent evolution to witting cross-fertilisation: the need for more awareness of potential inter-discursive communication regarding students' extended historical writing

History education stakeholders in England have consistently judged that some students find formal historical writing prohibitively difficult due to the demands of constructing an extended argument. While policy makers have agreed students need support in their historical writing, recurring themes in centralised resourcing have been wastage, incoordination and replication. Furthermore, two concurrent but largely disconnected discourses have developed and promulgated initiatives relevant to students’ extended historical writing: ‘genre theorists’ and the ‘history teachers’ extended writing movement’. Despite certain goals held in common participants in the two discourses have tended to talk past one another with concomitant issues in resourcing. Unsystematic, cross-fertilisation between the discourses has led to cycles of genre theory being collectively discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered by history teachers with knowledge not being built cumulatively. Furthermore both discourses have independently developed similar initiatives in a form of convergent evolution resulting in duplication of labour. Finally, divergent evolution has occurred where genre theorists have advocated approaches that are increasingly redundant for history teachers’ requirements. A more activist stance is therefore required to ensure meaningful inter-discursive communication between genre theorists and the history teachers’ ‘extended writing movement’ to ensure efficacy in developing approaches to improving students’ extended historical writing.     

Community and Learning: contradictions,dilemmas and prospects

In this article I reflect on learning and community and their joint deployment. ‘Community’ evokes images and feelings of security and comfort (‘us’ and ‘ours’), while ‘learning’ evokes a sense of progress and confidence in overcoming obstacles—a lifelong and somewhat breathless journey these days. We learn every day, but what is worthwhile learning? What types of communities are worth learning towards? Such crucial considerations can remain unexamined because these words are so beguiling—every one can agree that learning communities are worthwhile. Together these terms have provided a powerful contemporary discourse for different educational reform agendas. Recent proponents of ‘learning communi ties’ have drawn upon sociocultural theorising of learning initiated by Vygotsky and others in the early 20th century. I suggest that this recent deployment of sociocultural learning theory is opportunistic and reflects an effort to resolve certain endemic pedagogical dilemmas related to how inclusion/exclusion is negotiated, how diversity/uniformity is reconciled, and how membership of a learning community is managed over time. I suggest that our role as learning and/or community theorists is principally to critically reflect on what types of learning and communities are worth striving towards.     

Body‐Building: A Female Student's Use of the Transitional Spaces of a Painting Degree Course to Explore her Sexual Desirability and Aesthetics as a ‘Grotesque’ Female Body

Whilst a part of the fine art degree course is about teaching technical skills and learning from tutor/peer group crits, a larger part is about the facilitation of a ‘safe’ and structured space in which students gain the confidence to experiment with personal ideas, to hone a self‐critical reflection and understand who they are as individuals, before being cast out into the world as ‘artist’. In this article I examine the thought processes and decision‐making of one undergraduate female painting student. For this student, who struggled to find her own ‘grotesque’ female body image in the canon of art historical works or contemporary popular media, the spaces of the painting degree course created a frame for possible enactments of identity and desire, as well as for playing with roles and practices. Through a mix of interviews with the student, viewing her visual work and written narratives, I analyse how she was able to carve out a space for her visual representation within the institutional frame. My analysis reveals how this student uses the transitional spaces of the degree course to develop creative strategies through which to explore her sexual desirability and aesthetic self. As an individual who felt marginalised from the visual realm of the ‘body beautiful’, the degree course offered an important refuge where she could examine how she felt about her own body and develop a confidence and character to present her body to the world.     

Art and Creativity in the Global Economies of Education

Creativity: what might this mean for art and art educators in the creative economies of globalisation? The task of this discussion is to look at the state of creativity and its role in education, in particular art education, and to seek some understanding of the register of creativity, how it is shaped, and how legitimated in the globalised world dominated by input‐output, means‐end, economically driven thinking, expectations and demands. With the help of Heidegger some crucial questions are raised, such as: How can art maintain its creative ontological and epistemological potential in the creative economies of globalisation? Is it possible for art and the creative arts to act as a process of ‘revealing’ and ‘becoming’ and ‘throwing light’ on the world while working within the market economies of innovation and entrepreneurship where creativity has become a generalised discourse? What matters in this discussion is to find a way to argue for the sustainability of art education as a creative mode of enquiry through which self and the world may be better understood, identity might be realised as difference and being‐in‐time might be possible.     

Multicultural education as an emotional situation: practice encountering the unexpected in teacher education

Juxtaposing the concepts of screen memory, counter-transference and the holding environment within psychoanalytic theory, this essay explores the author’s emotional experience, who begins the exploration by asking several questions. What happens to a teacher’s emotional world and her consciousness in the process of trying to shift students’ consciousness in multicultural education? What is the psychical consequence for teachers of colour who must listen to racist discourse as a precondition to convincing those to do otherwise? How does a teacher’s emotional world influence student learning and development of critical consciousness? In working through her emotional response aroused by the students’ questions in her multicultural education classes, the author discusses the importance of a conversation between psychoanalysis and critical multicultural pedagogies and why the conversation matters.     

Navigating with inner knowing and awakened presence: an approach to leading in a complex world

What are our options if we have to let go of the idea of controllability in our ever more complex world? What tools do we have to navigate in a territory that we can’t ‘manage’ anymore, where the old instruments of command and control have lost their grip? What makes us ‘know’ when intellectual knowing capitulates in the face of complexity? This paper presents an action learning approach in four phases that explores how intuition or other forms of inner knowing can be used as a resource in leadership and organisational change. It looks at what helps us access ways of inner knowing in complex situations and how a learning process could take place in the corporate context. The endeavour aims at exploring and actualising dormant potential to navigate the volatility, uncertainty and complexity of our business environment whilst embodying and radiating our purpose and vision.     

Rewriting Race,Class, and the “culture of poverty:” Ethnographic Work by Eleanor Leacock, 1959–1980

ABSTRACT

Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987) was a cultural anthropologist and prominent critic of the “culture of poverty” framework. This paper analyzes Leacock’s writings on the culture of poverty with the following questions in mind: How did Leacock’s critique of the culture of poverty framework evolve over time? What was her dissatisfaction with the available conceptual vocabulary and how was she struggling to grow beyond it? We illustrate the shift in Leacock’s critique of culture of poverty discourses by juxtaposing key writings from 1960 and 1980. We then offer an interpretation of the shift by discussing four central themes across her work: the we–they dichotomy, definitions of culture, a critique of research methods, and the real-world effects of the culture-of-poverty thesis. We conclude by drawing insights from the evolution of Leacock’s thinking to advance a critique of contemporary culture of poverty discourses, and to help develop an alternative conceptual vocabulary.     

A rejoinder to Jrène Rahm’s “Stories of learning,identity, navigations and boundary crossings in STEM in non-dominant communities: new imaginaries for research and action”

This article presents my rejoinder to Jrène Rahm’s response to my article “STEM learning research through a funds of knowledge lens.” I focus on four themes that emerged from my reading of her commentary: the importance of the histories of youth of immigrant origin; her comments on globality; the theoretical lens that she brings to my research; and the methodological issues she discusses. I highlight Rahm’s humanizing component and the need to understand the complexity of immigration. What are we doing in our global settings to build on the diversity of experiences and backgrounds among the youth as a resource towards STEM learning?     

From myths to models: the (re)production of world culture in comparative education

This article traces the emergence of the world culture theory in comparative education using critical discourse analysis. By chronicling the emergence and expansion of world culture theory over the past four decades, we highlight the (unintended) limitations and exclusive regimes of thought that have resulted. We argue that the theory's telos of a ‘world culture’ neglects the notions of power and agency, and continues to use discourses of modernism and ‘scientific’ methodology to justify conformity as the reigning global ‘norm’. The world culture theory ultimately results in an unwitting legitimisation of neoliberal policies and its varied educational projects. Drawing on the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of discourse analysis, we examine how the semantics and content of the world culture theory have evolved as it embraced an increasingly large and diverse community of scholars aligned with it. By highlighting some significant semantic shifts during the last four decades, we explore how the world culture theorists forged a relatively new (privileged) space in comparative education – a space that has increasingly turned deterministic and normative. Through a careful deconstruction of some of the basic assumptions of world culture theory, we call for reopening of an intellectual space for new ways of thinking about educational phenomena in the context of globalisation.     

Talking Tolkien: The Elvish Craft of CGI

Voted the greatest book of all time in several polls, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has been made into three films between 2001–2003 by New Zealand director Peter Jackson with the complete trilogy out on DVD in 2004. Prompted by the question: “What would Tolkien have made of them?” Mark Sinker discusses the films and the books by way of Tolkien’s inspiration William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts Movement’s notion of ‘‘right-making’’. Sinker contrasts the techniques of computer generated imagery (CGI) with Tolkien’s own ethic of the art and craft of writing, looking at Tolkien’s radical contribution to Fantasy as a genre for adults and how ‘right’ story-telling emerges into 21st century culture.     

Creating Aesthetic Encounters of the World,or Teaching in the Presence of Climate Sorrow

This paper explores education as a context for facing what Susie Orbach has termed ‘climate sorrow’ and asks: what ‘relations to the world’ are we imagining might help youth stay with difficult feelings about the future by enabling them to develop a living relationship to the more-than-human world in the present? By way of response, the paper offers a conceptual shift from ‘relations to the world’ to ‘encounters of the world’. I draw on the work of David Abram to reframe our relations as sensory encounters and on the work of Bruno Latour to reframe the world as a living multiplicity. What both authors enable is a complex understanding of the temporality of our living in and with our environment. To explore this further, I offer a reading of Olafur Eliasson's climate artwork, Ice Watch. Consisting of 24 blocks of melting glacial ice outside the Tate Modern in London, the installation holds two temporal dimensions together through the kinds of encounters it makes possible: chronological time (chronos) and living time (kairos). In the final section , I locate the time of environmental teaching at the juncture of chronos and kairos as a way of creating encounters of the world that educate about the climate emergency while also giving time for climate sorrow.     

The complexities of participatory action research and the problems of power,identity and influence

This article highlights the complexity of participatory action research (PAR) in that the study outlined was carried out with and by, as opposed to on, participants. The project was contextualised in two prior-to-school settings in Australia, with the early childhood professionals and, to some extent, the preschoolers involved in this PAR project seen as co-researchers. This article explores the author’s journey to PAR, which she considered a socially just mode of inquiry. However, it is not without its complexities and challenges. This article makes transparent these complexities and explores issues of ‘power’, identity and influence in collaborative research. Questions often reflected upon by researchers are re-visited in this article: What theoretical underpinnings align with the investigation? Why undertake such a demanding research design as PAR? What does this research design involve? Where does the university researcher fit? How does a PAR team ‘work’ when there are so many different personalities involved? What are the challenges that are faced by participatory action researchers and how might these be overcome? While these challenges are not new to PAR researchers, the solutions and discussion put forward in this article may generate further reflection and debate.     

Doctorate as genre: supporting thesis writing across campus

Increasingly learning advisors provide generic support for doctoral students. The terms ‘genre’ (a category, type or family) and ‘generic’ (ambiguously both ‘of a category’ and ‘non-specific’) are interrogated here in relation to such support. Literary studies scholars divide texts by genre for the purpose of analysis. It is helpful to see the doctoral thesis as a literary genre and discuss generic writing support in this context. Taking a theoretical position, I suggest that doctoral writing support can be theorised and conceived differently to complement supervisory support within disciplines. Ideas about the social significance of genre translate well to doctoral writing, which is also socially situated, speaking back to the discourse by which it is produced. Generic learning support is a contested phrase in higher education, a non-specific bolt-on process suspected of being never pertinent because it is not embedded in a discipline. Yet it is highly useful for doctoral students, a fact recognised in burgeoning practice. Around the world, generic support for doctoral study is increasingly provided as universities strive to sustain a healthy completion rate and ensure that discipline-specific, mainly supervisory, support is firmly complemented. Arguing for the thesis as genre enables the term ‘generic’ to have traction for those providing doctoral support across campus and opens up a theoretical way of discussing practice.