Seekers after truth? Images of postgraduate research and researchers in the twenty-first century

Western cultural practices contribute to our understanding of the purpose of higher education and how we are to conduct ourselves in educational contexts. In this article, entitled ‘Seekers after truth?’, I analyse recent works of popular fiction which draw on and contribute to the idea that postgraduate research is a process of locating and amassing clues leading to the revelation or discovery of a truth. These novels re-inscribe the metaphor of the postgraduate researcher as detective or ‘seeker after truth’. This article considers the contradictory and productive meanings that arise from the trope of the researcher-detective. In addition, I argue that, although there are challenges in bringing the work of one field to bear on another, analyses of discourses which are not produced within higher educational contexts can nonetheless promote reflection on educational concepts. In this case, fiction enables us to consider ideas about what it is to do postgraduate research and to be a postgraduate researcher.     

‘I think we are still very directive’: Teachers’ discourses on democratic student participation

The objective of this study [Susinos, T. (Dir.), ‘Schools moving towards inclusion: Learning from the local community, the student voice and educational support’ (I+D+I, EDU2011-29928-C03-03)] is to gain a deeper understanding of the analysis of the discourses that different education professionals in the Spanish education system have on student participation in schools, based on the premise that they tacitly reflect different models of democracy and advance very diverse school practices. The study is based on the Student Voice Movement, which is defined by its commitment to deliberative democratic education and its role in the development of inclusive schools. In this article, we have conducted a qualitative analysis of the data from 31 in-depth interviews carried out with teachers and other education professionals from nine schools. These teachers’ discourses are summarised in four dimensions, which we have named individual, pedagogical, organisational and socio-political. Some conclusions of this work demonstrate a predominance of discourses linked to an individual and pedagogical dimension of participation, based on the idea that this fundamentally depends on the personal dispositions that some students have. It is less common to appeal to the socio-political dimension, which refers to participation as a citizen's right to debate and make decisions regarding common and public affairs. This suggests that teachers still see their work from a technical point of view, rather than envisaging the school as a space for democratic participation and practice. In short, with this study we aim to contribute to normative theories on participation and democracy in order to expand their empirical and practical support in schools.     

Young people's uses of celebrity: class,gender and ‘improper’ celebrity

In this article, we explore the question of how celebrity operates in young people's everyday lives, thus contributing to the urgent need to address celebrity's social function. Drawing on data from three studies in England on young people's perspectives on their educational and work futures, we show how celebrity operates as a classed and gendered discursive device within young people's identity work. We illustrate how young people draw upon class and gender distinctions that circulate within celebrity discourses (proper/improper, deserving/undeserving, talented/talentless and respectable/tacky) as they construct their own identities in relation to notions of work, aspiration and achievement. We argue that these distinctions operate as part of neoliberal demands to produce oneself as a ‘subject of value’. However, some participants produced readings that show ambivalence and even resistance to these dominant discourses. Young people's responses to celebrity are shown to relate to their own class and gender position.     

Gendered pedagogic identities and academic professionalism in Greek medical schools

Feminist scholarship has considered how pedagogical identities and emotions are implicated in the gender politics of belonging and othering in higher education. This paper examines how gendered and embodied pedagogy is mobilised in Greek medical schools to construct notions of the ideal academic and assert women’s position women in Academic Medicine. I employ thematic analysis to illustrate that formations of pedagogy and academic professionalism are bound up with emotions and embodied practices of relating, connecting, creating learning communities and promoting virtuous academic citizenship. Women’s gendered accounts of pedagogy and their boundary practices of identification demonstrate agency, intentionality and operate as highly political actions of legitimacy and resistance within the patriarchal realm of Greek higher education. I argue that gendered discourses of pedagogy in Greek medical schools become resources for resisting neo-liberal notions of academic work, individualism and women’s exclusion in the highly prestigious discipline of academic medicine in Greece.     

Admitting Impediments: or things to do with bodies in the classroom

This paper indicates how new theorising of the body can be brought to bear on pedagogical work as an erotic field. I make a case that the body of the teacher needs to be remembered in writing about teaching and learning, because it produces desire in pedagogical events, for good as well as ill. I show the ways in which recent work on corporeality counters mainstream educational writing about students and teachers. I then comment on some brief accounts of the experience of learning, using some of these concepts as a framework for my analysis.     

Power and possibility: the construction of a pedagogical practice

This article examines the relations of power that shape an elementary preservice teacher's pedagogical discourse and practice. The study employs a post-structuralist, connectionist framework to map the multiple social and discursive relations that interconnect to produce what preservice teachers can pedagogically conceive. The analysis shows how relations such as the state, cooperating teachers, school structures, and the preservice teacher function concertedly, within particular temporal and spatial conditions, to create a psychological/individual discourse as the dominant pedagogical framework. At the same time, this study shows how preservice teachers may interpellate, or summon, discourses that allow them to enunciate, or rework into something different, what relations of power have produced.     

Education for Sustainable Development and retention: unravelling a research agenda

This paper considers the question of what education for sustainable development (ESD) research might signify when linked to the concept of “retention”, and how this relation (ESD and retention) might be researched. It considers two different perspectives on retention, as revealed through educational research trajectories, drawing on existing research and case studies. Firstly, it discusses an ESD research agenda that documents retention by focusing on the issue of keeping children in schools. This research agenda is typical of the existing discourses surrounding Education for All (EFA). It then discusses a related ESD research agenda that focuses more on the pedagogical and curricular aspects of retention, as this provides for a deeper understanding of how ESD can contribute to improving the quality of teaching and learning within a wider EFA retention agenda.     

School readiness and pedagogies of Competence and Performance: theorising the troubled relationship between early years and early years policy

School readiness is currently a strong focus for education policy in England. However, understanding what it means to be ready for school, and how this is reflected in policy and enacted in practice, are sites of contention. This paper explores the genesis of the current disparity in understandings in the context of the English education system. A comparison of discourses reveals how early years is informed by distinctly different discourses which, transformed into practice, require different pedagogical approaches. This disparity is theorised within Bernstein’s Pedagogic Device and Pedagogies of Competence and Performance (Bernstein, B. 2000. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. London: Rowman and Littlefield.). This provides a theoretical framework which enables articulation of how these discourses are transformed into practice and the resulting pedagogical practices which are shown to be distinctly different. The paper outlines how a politically driven change in discourse has resulted in enforced pedagogical change in early years, and considers whether this is likely to achieve the stated aim of enabling all children to be ready for school. The implications for policy and practice are discussed.     

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.     

Extending the constructs of active learning: implications for teachers' pedagogy and practice

Active learning is a pedagogical construct widely appealed to within the global discourse of lifelong learning. However, an examination of the literature reveals a lack of clarity and consensus as to its meaning. This article provides a critical analysis of a range of dimensions underpinning the concept of active learning including policy discourses, definitions, interpretation and enactments in educational settings, and resultant pedagogical implications. A more robust theoretical framework is presented to support educator understanding which synthesises and extends current constructs and which bridges the divide between active learning considered as either theory of learning or pedagogical strategy.     

Writing the queer self: Using autobiography to mediate inclusive teacher education in Canada

Writing the queer self involves locating the self within a broad understanding of queer that recognises a spectrum of sex, sexual and gendered subjects. In this article, I discuss how I write the queer self to link the personal to my positional practice as a gay teacher educator. I overview my work with Agape, which is a focus group that I initiated in my university's teacher education programme to explore sex, sexual and gender differences in education and culture. I explore how I link my queer autobiography to the professional and the pedagogical, and how I use it to engender deliberations about queer presence, representation and place in education. I conclude by speaking on the importance of doing this work as an ethical project for social justice and educational transformation.     

Flowery math: a case for heterodiscoursia in mathematics problems solving in recognition of students’ authorial agency

In an innovative, progressive school, students were asked to solve a fairly routine mathematical problem using real money in a “real-world” scenario. Even though the school values students’ ideas, the reaction of the teacher to one student’s alternative modelling of the problem suggests that he was expecting a particular answer to be provided using routine mathematical models and thinking while not being interested in exploring the student’s unexpected alternative. We place his reasoning for doing so within broad pedagogical discourses that we think define the “allowable” responses of teachers and students in ways that inhibit meaning-making for both. These broad discourses are defined as the progressive constructivist approach, the scaffolding discursive approach, the situation modelling approach and the dialogic approach. We consider the advantages and the potential consequences each might bring to the case. We suggest that extensive consideration of pedagogical discourses in mathematics classes must be reconsidered both for how we understand students’ mathematical meaning-making and how we construct student agency in relationship to culture, whether as apprentices or authors.     

全球化语境与教育学话语自主性的诉求

在全球化语境中诉求教育学话语的自主性应坚持本土情怀与跨文化视野的统一。坚持本土情怀是为了克服身份误置     

The promise and peril of education: the teaching of in/tolerance in an era of globalisation

This article addresses the pedagogical implications and possibilities that globalisation poses for educational policy and praxis as it relates to teaching about difference in an ever more diverse world. Among the most salient questions in an era of accelerated globalisation is how seemingly different cultures, civilisations, nationalities, ethnicities and races are to coexist peacefully in an increasingly borderless world, or whether they are forever destined to experience conflict based on cultural chasms in the guise of a ‘clash of civilisations’. This article highlights the tension between two perspectives on education: education as a force in cultivating intolerance and education as a panacea for intolerance. While not negating the potential for education to remedy social ills, we consider the extent to which education can produce change in the opposite direction. In the following pages, we present a context for our discussion of in/tolerance by providing an overview of the double‐edged, or Janus‐faced, qualities that both education and globalisation possess. We then draw on social‐psychological, anthropological and sociological literatures in bringing together three theoretical constructs—moral exclusion, the genocidal continuum and symbolic violence—in examining how intolerance is created and reproduced within educational settings. Following this overview, we present three vignettes to exemplify the teaching of intolerance in different historical and geo‐political contexts, namely, Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Israel. Finally, we conclude with recommendations that pay particular attention to the kind of education that that teaching of tolerance necessitates.     

论教育语境中的正义

本文旨在探讨教育语境中的正义具有什么内涵,以及是否存在一种被证实的关于正义的教育概念。本文并不主张建立一种积极的教育正义概念,而是主张避免把教育当做服务于教育之外的正义规范的工具。因此,本文重点分析了教育中的不正义,并将其在教育系统的不同层面上进行了归类,从而形成了一种有关教育语境中的不正义的教育现象学,这也就是教育现实得以改善的起点。文章最后指出了克服这些不正义的途径。     

Securitisation and/or Westernisation: dominant discourses of Australian values and the implications for teacher education

Debates concerning the nature, purpose and importance of Australian values have resurfaced in Australia following the election of the Liberal-led Coalition Government in September 2013. Two dominant discourses on Australian values have emerged within recent government rhetoric and public policy, both of which have included a demand for changes to how Australian values are taught and encountered within Australian education and schooling. In our analysis, we suggest that the two dominant discourses, one focusing on securitisation and one on Westernisation, have to this point operated separately, but have both focused on narrow, fixed and forced understandings of Australian values. Exploring the key themes of these two discourses, some important issues for teacher educators are set out, including the need to mediate these discourses against research evidence which suggests the importance of holistic and co-operative pedagogical relationships based on trust and humility for effective values education. Though our analysis focuses on the Australian context, the arguments made are likely to be of interest elsewhere given current debates about national values in education across a range of jurisdictions.     

Good intentions are not enough: a critical examination of diversity and educational leadership scholarship

An emergent strand within mainstream educational leadership scholarship is an engagement with notions of diversity. This is part of a belated recognition that in an increasingly globalising world the largely masculinist, white norms from which most accounts of leadership derive, lack sufficient explanatory power for educational systems. Utilising critical, black and Indigenous feminist work on the recognition of difference, as well as recent feminist scholarship deconstructing diversity discourses in educational leadership, this article outlines the origins of the key diversity discourses from which the educational leadership field draws. It then analyses recent articles on diversity and educational administration, noting how the various diversity discourses have been taken up and the subsequent implications for educational leadership theorising and practices. It concludes by arguing that critical feminist research about the politics of difference, amongst others, provides an important body of scholarship from which to develop self‐reflexive and nuanced engagements with notions of diversity and leadership.     

The cultural politics of national testing and test result release policy in South Korea: a critical discourse analysis

This paper examines the ideological construction of educational discourses embedded within the South Korean print media. Significantly, these discourses have recently promoted the resurrection of a sweeping national testing and test results release policy. Through careful examination of the “test plus release” policy, the authors show how the government has achieved hegemonic power by shaping public opinion through the national testing contexts. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of educational policy texts from the government and top 10 print media sources, this paper analyses how discourses on “accountability”, “the right to know” and “the fairness of the tests” have been produced, reproduced and recontextualized to favour particular perspectives. The authors also examine how government and influential print media discourses interact with political and cultural factors such as “acclaiming the evaluative state”, “education fever” and “meritocratic beliefs” to achieve public consent for the new “test plus release” policy.     

Portuguese,French and British discourses on colonial education: Church–State relations,school expansion and missionary competition in Africa, 1890–1930

This article draws a comparison between the Portuguese in relation to British and French discourses on overseas educational policies at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century until the 1930s. It focuses on three main colonial educational dynamics: school expansion (comparing the public and private sectors); State–Church relations (comparing these relationships at the European and colonial levels); and missionary competition (comparing Catholic with Protestant strategies towards educational incorporation). Colonial discourse is seen here as a power‐knowledge discourse aimed at constructing the colonial subjects as individuals, enabling them to imagine themselves as belonging to a particular cultural polity. The article intends to show how cross‐national discourses on education affect the principles on which theories of schooling are built and the ways in which they influence the first attempts to systematize pedagogical and school models in the colonial peripheries. On the other hand, it tries to understand, within government technologies of domination, the conflicting views, negotiations and ambiguities between global policy formulation and local school system implementation. In this sense, the author sought to analyse the different ways in which concepts such as ‘assimilation’, ‘civilizing mission’, ‘adapted education’, and ‘learning by doing’ were mobilized and appropriated into the colonial education discourses in order to legitimize particular governmental strategies. Two main ideas run through the text: the first attempts to demonstrate the existence of discontinuities between official educational ideologies at home and local system and school expansion strategies in the colonies. The second claims that educational borrowing from other colonies at the Empires' peripheries was, more often that is thought, a crucial feature of colonial educational discourse.