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.     

Physical Education as ‘Means without Ends’: Towards a new concept of physical education

Abstract

This article is concerned with the educational value of raising the human body at school. Drawing inspiration from the work of Giorgio Agamben, I develop a new perspective that explores the possibility of taking the concept of physical education in a literal sense. This is to say that the specific educational content of physical education (in contradistinction to organized sporting life outside school) resides in its concentration on the physical ‘as such’. This is not an obvious path to explore, because defenders of physical education as a rule have to compete against the (dualist) prejudice that this discipline is merely an instrument to train the body or to keep it fit, and that it therefore should not be considered as a serious endeavour. Therefore, more often than not, apologists try to justify the relevance of physical education on the very ground that it is a practice that is concerned with something ‘beyond’ the merely physical that is at stake in movement activity. I argue, however, that this line of thought excludes the possibility of conceiving an alternative approach that relates the concentration on ‘entirely physical’ activities (as opposed to ‘merely physical’ activities) to an experience of potentiality. I develop this idea on the basis of an analysis of repetitive, rhythmical and collective body-exercise (e.g. running in a group or basic callisthenics).     

Biopolitics and the ‘subject’ of labor in science education

Viewing science education as a site of biopolitical engagement—intervention into forces that seek to define, control, and exploit life (biopower)—requires that science educators ask after how individuals and populations are governed by technologies of power. In this paper, I argue that microanalyses, the analysis of everyday practices and discourses, are integral to biopolitical engagement, are needed to examine practices that constitute subjectivities and maintain oppressive social conditions. As an example of a microanalysis I will discuss how repetitive close-ended lab/assessment tasks, as well as discourses surrounding careers in science, can work to constitute students as depoliticized, self-investing subjects of human capital. I also explore the relationship between science education, (bio)labor and its relation to biopolitics, which remains an underdeveloped area of science education. This paper, part of my doctoral work, began to take shape in 2011, shortly after the 2008 economic crisis achieved a tiny breached in the thick neoliberal stupor of everyday (educational) life.     

The Promissory Future(s) of Education: Rethinking scientific literacy in the era of biocapitalism

This article investigates the biopolitical dimensions that have grown out of the union between biocapitalism and current science education reform in the US. Drawing on science and technology study theorists, I utilize the analytics of promissory valuation and salvationary discourses to understand how scientific literacy in the neo‐Sputnik era has deeply involved educational life in biocapitalist circuits of exchange and production. I lay out this emerging terrain of ‘futuricity’ through a biopolitical analysis of the National Academies highly influential policy recommendation on science education, Rising Above the Gathering Storm as well as the Association of American Universities' National Defense Education and Innovation Initiative. Here it is argued that the educational subject usually seen as a site of human capital investment can better be understood as a ‘biovalue’ in at least two senses: the educational subject's body as a site of investment and as an extractable source of value directly related to the larger globally competitive regime of the rapidly growing bioeconomy. I conclude my analysis of the vital politics at play in the biocapitalist articulation of science education with an alternative model of scientific literacy that is based in what I call biodemocratic practices. I explore such a rereading of scientific literacy through the example of the GrowHaus—a sustainable urban farm situated in a marginalized community in a major US city. The GrowHaus offers a model of scientific literacy that rejects extractive ethics associated with biocapitalist production and instead promotes a sustainable and socially just practice of science.     

Surpassing Our Own Histories: autobiographical methods for environmental education research

In this article I appraise selected examples of the research on significant life experiences reported and discussed in a recent special issue of this journal by comparing the ways in which these studies use (and justify the use of) retrospective accounts of experience with autobiographical approaches to curriculum inquiry that have been informed by phenomenology and hermeneutics. I argue that the conservative and socially reproductive logic of significant life experiences research invites environmental educators to repeat rather than to improve upon their own histories and that, if we are to use autobiographical methods in environmental education research, we should try to do so in a way that generates new possibilities for educational experience, rather than merely replicates the experiences of a previous generation.     

Rethinking emancipation with Freire and Rancière: A plea for a thing-centred pedagogy

Abstract

In this article, I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about emancipation. My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire’s work, but which at the same time takes it in a new direction. More precisely, I confront Freire with Jacques Rancière. Not only is the latter’s work on education fully predicated on the idea of emancipation. For both Freire and Rancière, literacy initiation practice can be seen as an archetypical model for understanding the emancipatory moment in education. For both, educational practices are never neutral, as they decide to a great extent on the fate of our common world. Reflecting on similarities and differences in both their positions, I will propose to conceive of critical pedagogy in terms of a thing-centred pedagogy. As such, I take a clear position in the discussion between teacher- and student-centred approaches. According to Rancière, it is the full devotion to a ‘thing’, i.e. to a subject matter we study, which makes emancipation possible. Over and against Freire’s defense of emancipatory education, I highlight with Rancière the importance of educational emancipation.     

A Reflection on a Participatory Video Project: Possibilities and Challenges for Promoting Participatory Cultures among Adult Learners

The recent media environment offers a great opportunity for people to create and share messages through ubiquitous connections. In doing so, they may be participating in shaping their cultures. This potential, however, is crippled for some because not everyone has proper media production skills, especially those who may need the skills most to bring out their experiences and perspectives through media. Therefore, it is necessary to provide people with educational opportunities to develop their media production skills. Within this context, I conducted a video project with a group of adults for 5 weeks in order to offer them an opportunity to develop their video production skills and express their common concerns through video, in hopes of promoting participatory cultures. In this article, I reflect on the processes and outcomes of the project and elucidate the challenges that I encountered.     

School-Based Mindfulness Training and the Economisation of Attention: A Stieglerian View

Educational theorists may be right to suggest that providing mindfulness training in schools can challenge oppressive pedagogies and overcome Western dualism. Before concluding that this training is liberatory, however, one must go beyond pedagogy and consider schooling’s role in enacting the educational neurofuture envisioned by mindfulness discourse. Mindfulness training, this article argues, is a biopolitical human enhancement strategy. Its goal is to insulate youth from pathologies that stem from digital capitalism’s economisation of attention. I use Bernard Stiegler’s Platonic depiction of the ambiguousness of all attention channelling mechanisms as pharmaka—containing both poison and cure—to suggest that this training is a double-edged sword. Does the inculcation of mindfulness in schoolchildren empower them; or is it merely an exercise in pathology-proofing them in their capacity as the next generation of unpaid digital labourers? The answer, I maintain, depends on whether young people can use the Internet’s political potentialities to mitigate the exploitation of their unpaid online labour time. That is, on whether the exploitative ‘digital pharmakon’—the capitalistic Web—can at the same time be socio-politically curative.     

Cartesian and corporeal agency: women’s studies students’ reflections on body experience

This article explores young women’s agency in relation to the body and the possible role of women’s studies in interpreting body experiences and constructing agency. The article is based on written accounts of one’s body experience written by Finnish students of women’s studies. The young women’s accounts manifested two types of agency: the accounts on agency relating to the body focused around attempts of resistance to cultural body ideals and conventional heterosexual roles. This ideal subjectivity relies on an individualistic and Cartesian understanding of agency, emphasising the young woman’s independence from culture, other people and her own body. The accounts on agency within the body expressed experiences of overcoming the mind/body dichotomy and connecting bodily to the surrounding world. I suggest that a shift from the implicit curriculum of Cartesian agency to a curriculum of corporeal agency could prove useful in educational contexts.     

Biopolitical Utopianism in Educational Theory

In this paper I shift the center of utopian debates away from questions of ideology towards the question of power. As a new point of departure, I analyze Foucault's notion of biopower as well as Hardt and Negri's theory of biopolitics. Arguing for a new hermeneutic of biopolitics in education, I then apply this lens to evaluate the educational philosophy of John Dewey. In conclusion, the paper suggests that while Hardt and Negri are missing an educational theory, John Dewey is missing a concept of democracy adequate to the biopolitical struggles of the multitude. Thus, I call for a synthesis of Dewey and Hardt and Negri in order to generate a biopedagogical practice beyond both traditional models of education as well as current standardization.     

Against the Dark: Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse

I argue that analyses of racial(ised) discourse and policy processes in education must grapple with cultural disregard for and disgust with blackness. This article explains how a theorization of antiblackness allows one to more precisely identify and respond to racism in education discourse and in the formation and implementation of education policy. I contend that deeply embedded within racialized policy discourses is not merely a concern about disproportionality or inequality, but also a concern with the bodies of Black people, the signification of (their) Blackness, and the threat posed by the Black to the educational well-being of other students. Using school (de)segregation as an example, I demonstrate how policy discourse is informed by antiblackness, and consider what an awareness of antiblackness means for educational policy and practice.     

“Pretty Darned Cold”: Single Mother Students and the Community College Climate in Post-Welfare Reform America

Feminist analyses of the “chilly climate” have documented the ways in which women have been and continue to be marginalized within institutions of higher education. Yet there has been little attention to the relationship between the “chilly climate” and the lived experiences of particular populations in specific educational settings. This article attends to that relationship and draws on a two-year ethnographic study that focused on single mothers attending a community college in the Midwestern United States. Situating their experiences within the particulars of post-welfare reform America and the dynamics of the institution they attend, I argue that the educational climate these women face is particularly chilly, something that is evident in the various attitudes, practices, and policies they encounter in their interactions with faculty, staff, and other students. In addition to analyzing the ways in which the “chilly climate” influences both academic and social aspects of single mother students' experiences, I offer specific suggestions for ways in which colleges and universities can create a more welcoming and supportive environment for members of this particular student population.     

教育技术学专业本科教学计划的理论与实践研究

本文介绍了对全国40多所高等院校教育技术学专业本科教学计划的调研情况,论述了教育技术学专业本科教学计划的定位、目标、规格和制订原则,提出了按能力本位构建教育技术学专业本科教学计划模式的设想。     

Cultivating humanity or educating the human? Two options for education in the knowledge age

Ever since the idea of the ‘knowledge society’ came into circulation, there have been discussions about what the term empirically might mean and normatively should mean. In the literature we can find a rather wide spectrum, ranging from a utilitarian interpretation of the knowledge society as a knowledge economy, via a more humanistic conception of the knowledge society as a knowledge sharing society, up to an explicitly political interpretation of the knowledge society as a knowledge democracy. Although in theory there is a wide range of interpretations and manifestations, in practice there has been a strong convergence towards the idea of the knowledge society as a knowledge economy. On this interpretation the particular task for education is seen as that of the production of flexible lifelong learners who are able to adjust and adapt to the ever-changing conditions of global capitalism. In this paper I raise the question how we might conceive of the educational task in light of the particular expectations that come from such an interpretation of the knowledge society. Against the idea that an adequate response requires that educators focus on the cultivation of the human being’s humanity, I challenge the humanistic underpinnings of the idea of education as cultivation. Instead, I suggest a different direction that moves the educational task away from the cultivation of the self towards the exposure towards the world.     

Critical perspectives in educational leadership: a new ‘theory turn’?

In this article, I argue that we are witnessing a new phase or ‘theory turn’ in the field of educational leadership. These more critical perspectives in the field of educational leadership have typically been marginalised by the larger body of orthodox approaches due to a perceived lack of focus on best practice and ‘what works’ discourses, and especially in recent years with the rise of the school effectiveness and improvement movement. However, critical perspectives in educational leadership constitute an essential and vibrant part of educational leadership scholarship and discourse. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of discourse, through this article, I examine how critical perspectives have been constituted historically, with some of the main themes of research. This foregrounding also highlights a number of limitations with more orthodox and hegemonic leadership discourses. I identify a number of key writers in the field and situate them in the current theory turn, that is, an emphasis of theoretically informed research that have been prolific over the last 5–10 years.     

The Reciprocal Relationship Between Technology and Psychology

This article describes the design and implementation of the year 2 curriculum and student learning experiences in the Michigan State University Master of Arts in Educational Technology program. We discuss the ways that this second set of courses builds on the first year of the program that students encounter, and also describe the theoretical impetus and design-based implications for learning how to teach with technology in effective and creative ways. Students in this group usually come in with some prior knowledge of educational theory, as well as some experience of working with classroom technologies. We intentionally build upon this prior knowledge, to take it to the next level of a more sophisticated TPACK-oriented understanding of learning in technology-driven contexts. Our year 2 courses move classical educational psychology theories of learning, along with educational research issues, squarely into the modern context of educational technology and teacher leadership. Our curriculum design focuses centrally on making meaningful experiences for teachers around technology, and helping them develop the knowledge and skills to create such experiences for their students. Our goal is to develop teachers who see themselves as flexible designers of learning experiences through the creative re-purposing of existing technologies.     

Laughter as Immanent Life-Affirmation: Reconsidering the educational value of laughter through a Bakhtinian lens

Abstract

In this article I try to conceive a new approach towards laughter in the context of formal schooling. I focus on laughter in so far as it is a bodily response during which we are entirely delivered to uncontrollable, spasmodic reactions. To see the educational relevance of this particular kind of laughter, as well as to understand why laughter is often dealt with in a very negative way in pedagogical contexts, this phenomenon should be carefully distinguished from humor or amusement. I build my argument for a smaller part on the basis of conceptual analysis, and to a greater extent on Bakhtin’s work on the transition from Medieval folk culture to Modern civilized culture, in which he claims that a reduction from laughing as a strongly physical experience to mere forms of amusement or humor actually implies that laughter no longer possesses its inherent equalizing and communizing potential. In a sense, laughter forms a threat to any organization of social existence according to similarities and differences in identity and position, and this explains why we usually try to suppress it, or why we try to render it functional in view of the continuation of a societal regime or pedagogical order. More positively formulated, laughter may be said to have an intrinsic educational meaning, because it allows a significant transformation of individual and collective existence.     

A STUDY ON MARK TWAIN'S THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN——AN ANALYSIS OF THE MEANING OF HUCK'S ADVENTURES

Huck,the hero of this novel,is a“bad boy”as Twain says.Indeed,he is good,warm-hearted,active and brave.He also has a native shrewdness,a cheerfulness that is hard toputdown compassionate tolerance,and an instinctive tendency to reach the right decisionsabout important matters.Twain moreover,gives huck's adventre,which means escape.Huck notonly adventures to help Jim to escape from the lavery,but also helps himself toescape from the aristocratic“civilizing”society.It shows his brave to fi…     

Michael Pressley's Contributions to the History and Future of Strategies Research

The recently fashionable theories of positive psychology have educational ramifications at virtually every level of engagement, culminating in the model of positive education. In this critical review, I scrutinize positive education as a potential theory in educational psychology. Special attention is given to conceptual controversies and suggested educational interventions. Positive psychologists have yet to explore in detail the school as a positive institution. They have written at length, however, about such positive personal traits as moral virtue and resiliency, and about positive emotions both as embodied in experiences of classroom “flow” and as facilitators of students’ personal resources. Because the empirical evidence concerning these positive factors remains partly mixed or tentative, and because most of them had a home in other theoretical frameworks before the advent of positive psychology, searching questions remain about the effectiveness and originality of positive education. This article addresses some of those questions.     

Foucault at School: Discipline,Education and Agency in Harry Potter

The formative power of children's literature is both great and suspicious. As a resource of socialization, the construction and experience of children's literature can be seen as modes of disciplinary coercion such as Michel Foucault has anatomized. Harry Potter, as a “craze” phenomenon, has attracted particular controversy due to its intense commercialization and dissemination, raising questions about its socializing roles. Here I argue that Harry Potter itself addresses, represents, and reflects on socializing disciplines as both psychological and socio-historical processes, with special focus on and implications for educational scenes and methods. Discipline is shown to be inevitable and necessary, but not only in the coercive ways of Foucault. It is no less important for constructing the self in positive senses. Hogwarts, as the central site of action, becomes a stage for a wide variety of educational models and disciplinary modes and goals. These range from Dolores Umbridge, whose classroom is coercively disciplinary in full Foucauldian sense; through Snape's abuses of power, Albus Dumbledore's modelling of educational and moral values, and Harry's own role as student-teacher exemplifying educational principles which Jerome Bruner and others have called a “community of learning.” This variety of educational experiences explores the possibilities through which discipline emerges not only as coercive, but also as formative in ways that are maturing, strengthening, and rewarding: a possibility with strong implications for questions of socialization and creativity in general. Harry Potter concludes with a reconstitution of self and society, in a way that endorses discipline even as it suspects its coercive abuses. This becomes not only a personal project but an explicitly social and political one, requiring both critique and investment in culture. Socialization then is shown to be a process of formation that is not merely coercive but creative.