Using critical and post-critical pedagogies to pick at the seams of patriarchy from ‘the inside’

ABSTRACT

This article explores the use of critical and post-critical pedagogies in a rural Australian high school for the purposes of unsettling life-limiting gender beliefs and practices. The paper problematises two examples whereby site-specific knowledges, curriculum dictates, media texts and critical pedagogies were enmeshed to create politically charged spaces for re-seeing, re-thinking and re-doing gender. The first example involves a unit of work in which students were required to critically analyse and evaluate a well-known Australian documentary film for the particular version of hypermasculinity that it was valorising. The second example involves the collaborative critiquing of a well-known local text. At the conclusion of the paper, I turn a critically reflexive eye upon myself as a way of considering the ethics and issues for educators of challenging power asymmetries from ‘the inside’. It is at this point that I discover it is possibly I who have been disrupted most of all.     

Using “Sesame Street” to facilitate children’s recognition of letters and numbers

How can adults who watch “Sesame Street” with children facilitate the children’s recognition of the letters and numbers presented on the show? In order to examine this question, each of 95 preschool children watched three specially edited versions of “Sesame Street” with an adult who either (a) asked the child questions and provided feedback, (b) only asked questions, (c) directed the child’s attention to the screen, or (d) simply watched the shows with the child. Those children in the Questions + Feedback condition and the Questions condition scored significantly higher on a delayed posttest than did children who just watched the shows with an adult. There were no other significant differences among the treatment conditions. Results indicate that adults can increase children’s recognition of letters and numbers presented on “Sesame Street” by asking the children to name the letters and numbers as they are presented. Other interpretations are also discussed.     

The funding of early care and education programmes in Sweden, 1845–1943

What significance did donations, bequests, tuition fees and fund‐raising events have for early care and education programmes during the nineteenth and early twentieth century? Through an examination of 24 Swedish infant schools, day nurseries and free kindergartens, this article verifies that donations and bequests were essential for the economy of these programmes. Revenues from fundraisers were, however, not as important as previous research suggests. Balls, concerts and coffee parties were arranged quite frequently, but their function was to create publicity rather than to raise revenues. Instead, fees and interest revenues played a larger part in the economy of these programmes than previous research has suggested. Thus, this article raises a series of questions regarding the funding of such programmes, national differences in this respect and the development of fund‐raising strategies over time, opening up the field for further studies in this area of research.     

“Radiorrhea”: an examination of mid-century youth and radio culture in Belgian pedagogies of leisure, 1945–1965

Abstract

The article examines the various discourses, engaged in by social observers and experts alike, on the relationship between radio, music, and youth during the 1950s and 60s. Through articles, inquiries, and surveys led by Belgian pedagogues, psychologists, educators, social workers, and journalists, the author moves from the topic of radio to the larger subject of leisure, analysing the issues raised by these social actors regarding the way in which adolescents of the era listened to radio, music, and sound in general. By analysing these discussions, we see that several problems with the radio emerge: first, the issue of distracted listening; second, the issue with noise; and third, the issue with modern music. These concerns reveal that there existed, from an adult sociocultural perspective, a “good” way of listening to radio and “good” genres of music to appreciate. In conclusion, the author explains how the “pedagogy of leisure” was effectively a means for society to control and domesticate the cultural practices of the era’s youth.     

The impact of e-learning,gender-groupings and learning pedagogies in biology undergraduate female and male students’ attitudes and achievement

Education and Information Technologies - This study aimed to compare female and male students’ attitudes and achievements within different learning settings determined by e-learning and...     

Regulating the unthinkable: Bernstein’s pedagogic device and the paradox of control

Drawing upon Bernstein’s writings on the pedagogic device, this article examines how critical thinking is regulated in Singapore through the process of pedagogic recontextualization. The potential of critical thinking to speak to alternative possibilities and notions of individual autonomy as well as its assumptions of a liberal arrangement of society are problematized in Singapore. By documenting how such curricular discourses are articulated by the state and taken up in schools and classrooms, the article provides a sociological account of the relations between the organization of knowledge and the distribution of social power and control. The analysis reveals that even as official understandings of critical thinking are transmitted in the classroom, alternative, non-official orders of meaning are inevitably made available. Showing how teachers and students act to resist and challenge these prescribed understandings the article argues that the very ideas of change and indeterminacy are fundamentally built into the pedagogic device.     

Pa’lante,siempre pa’lante: pedagogies of the home among Puerto Rican college educated families

Research focused on Latinas/os in higher education often examines patterns of failure, while neglecting factors that contribute to Latina/o generational familial success. This article focuses on intergenerational strategies taught within college-educated Puerto Rican households that assist in academic achievement and success in higher education. Delgado Bernal theorized pedagogies of the home to explain co-constructed cultural knowledge within Chicana/o households to challenge deficit perspectives. Through analysis of educational oral histories of four college-educated Puerto Rican families, pedagogies of the home are extended. The Puerto Rican college-educated children demonstrate sin pelos en la lengua (without mincing words), contradictions among college completers, and pa’lante siempre pa’lante (always moving forward) as strategies employed in navigating higher education. In rearticulating, pedagogies of the home for the Puerto Rican community, institutions of higher education can better respond to the various experiences of Latinas/os.     

Forms of mathematical interaction in different social settings: examples from students’, teachers’ and teacher–students’ communication about mathematics

The study presented in this article investigates forms of mathematical interaction in different social settings. One major interest is to better understand mathematics teachers’ joint professional discourse while observing and analysing young students mathematical interaction followed by teacher’s intervention. The teachers’ joint professional discourse is about a combined learning and talking between two students before an intervention by their teacher (setting 1) and then it is about the students learning together with the teacher during their mathematical work (setting 2). The joint professional teachers’ discourse constitutes setting 3. This combination of social settings 1 and 2 is taken as an opportunity for mathematics teachers’ professionalisation process when interpreting the students’ mathematical interactions in a more and more professional and sensible way. The epistemological analysis of mathematical sign-systems in communication and interaction in these three settings gives evidence of different types of mathematical talk, which are explained depending on the according social setting. Whereas the interaction between students or between teachers is affected by phases of a process-oriented and investigated talk, the interaction between students and teachers is mainly closed and structured by the ideas of the teacher and by the expectations of the students.

Correction to: Development of Children’s monitoring and control when learning from texts: effects of age and test format

Metacognition and Learning - The article Development of Children’s monitoring and control when learning from texts: effects of age and test format, written by Martina Steiner, Mariëtte...     

Politicising the ‘personal’: the resistant potential of creative pedagogies in teaching and learning ‘sensitive’ issues

Drawing upon student narratives gleaned through qualitative interviews, this paper argues that teaching and learning ‘sensitive’ issues surrounding gender and sexualities through ‘creative’ pedagogies can be a mode of resistance against the reproduction of problematic social discourses, and to the negative impacts of neoliberalism on student’s learning within higher education. The findings point to the importance of speaking about sensitive issues; the value of creative approaches for enhancing learning; and that together these can enable students to articulate an agenda for social change. Students saw the ‘personal as political’ – of sharing personal journeys around sensitive issues as important. They further spoke of ‘apathy’ in an neoliberal era of student ‘consumers’ and how this could curtail ‘creative’ teaching and jeopardise learning. Overall, it is argued that creative approaches to teaching and learning sensitive issues can invoke a resistant potentiality which exposes the ‘hidden injuries’ (Gill, 2010) of the neoliberal university.     

Multiplying the origins of mass schooling: an analysis of the preconditions common to schooling and the school building process in Sweden, 1840–1900

The emergence of mass schooling is undoubtedly one of the most significant transformations that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article takes a new approach to this fundamental issue by analysing the historical conditions required for the construction of school buildings and the advent of mass schooling, in the 1840–1900 period. Using the school building process as a point of departure, the growth of schooling is tied not only to well-known factors such as industrialisation, state formation processes and the decentralisation of school systems, but also to the expansion of the market economy, modernisation of the credit market, liberalisation of the real property market, changes in local tax systems, and the expansion of the building materials market. Thus, a broader and largely novel explanation of the emergence of mass schooling is accomplished.     

Reading This Bridge Called My Back for pedagogies of coalition,remediation, and a razor’s edge

In this article, I examine the engagement of pre-service teachers with US feminist of color theory. Centering coalition relations, re-mediation, and dialogic narrative, I argue that the field of women of color thought is pedagogical in thinking through the intersectional and multidimensional problems of teaching and schooling, particularly when working with under-resourced schools and displaced and dispossessed students and their families. A framework based on the intellectual labor of US women of color, where the pedagogies of coalition, re-mediation, and dialogic narratives create powerful epistemological interventions that support pre-service teachers as they think about the complex problems of schools in this era of the defunding and the dismantlement of public education. It is a US women of color pedagogy that engages teachers in developing alternative accounts of their relationship to the world, how these new accounts are unavoidably theoretical and provide a starting point for new thinking about pedagogy, power, and praxis.     

Teachers’ professional learning to affirm transgender,non-binary,and gender-creative youth: experiences and recommendations from the field

Abstract

This paper critically examines the professional learning needs called for by educators working to support transgender, non-binary, and gender-creative (trans) youth and makes recommendations for practice. Interviews were conducted with 26 educators (preschool to secondary) who have worked directly with trans students (any child whose behaviour does not match stereotypes for their sex category assigned at birth, or who identifies with a gender different from their sex category assigned at birth). We examine two new concepts related to professional learning and educator preparation that emerged from theorising the data and related literature: pedagogies of exposure and culture of conversation. The limits and possibilities offered by these approaches are critically examined through the research base on teacher learning. Recommendations are made for teacher preparation, professional development and related practices to better create and sustain learning environments that affirm gender diversity.