Editorial

The aim of this paper is to reflect upon the ways in which 'sex', as an unchanging biological given, is often implicitly taken for granted in tertiary sex education. The paper details my own attempt to move beyond what I have come to experience as the predictable order of teaching students about sex and sexuality: the exploration of sexuality and gender anchored by the unquestioned assumption of biological sexual difference. I provide a practical example of introducing new material ism in science, and social science critiques of sex, into a tertiary level course. Consideration is given to the importance of fostering critical thinking in education: principally in being open-minded to evidence that challenges one's own belief system.     

Textual Authority in Bram Stoker's Dracula; or,What's Really at Stake in Action Research?

In a previous issue of Educational Action Research, Jean‐Claude Couture revisited his involvement in a university action research project with particular reference to his complicity in – and, eventually, resistance to – working for the interests of the university. In his essay, entitled ‘Dracula as action researcher’. Couture uses the 1992 movie, Bram Stoker's Dracula, as a source of metaphors and analogies for rewriting the story of his involvement in the project. In this response to Couture. I suggest that the movie offers fewer textual resources for the deconstruction he attempts than does Bram Stoker's original novel and, more importantly, that Couture may have thus overlooked important resources for resisting his positioning as an accomplice of the university. I also suggest that juxtaposing Couture's story of action research with Bram Stoker's version of the Dracula legend highlights crucial questions about the mobilisation of textual authority in educational action research.     

Applying Conceptual Blending to Model Coordinated Use of Multiple Ontological Metaphors

Energy is an abstract science concept, so the ways that we think and talk about energy rely heavily on ontological metaphors: metaphors for what kind of thing energy is. Two commonly used ontological metaphors for energy are energy as a substance and energy as a vertical location. Our previous work has demonstrated that students and experts can productively use both the substance and location ontologies for energy. In this paper, we use Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual blending framework to demonstrate that experts and novices can successfully blend the substance and location ontologies into a coherent mental model in order to reason about energy. Our data come from classroom recordings of a physics professor teaching a physics course for the life sciences, and from an interview with an undergraduate student in that course. We analyze these data using predicate analysis and gesture analysis, looking at verbal utterances, gestures, and the interaction between them. This analysis yields evidence that the speakers are blending the substance and location ontologies into a single blended mental space.     

Educating World Teachers for Cosmopolitan Classrooms and Schools

This essay responds to the question of what it might mean to educate “world teachers” for cosmopolitan classrooms and schools through an examination of an ethnographic play entitled Satellite Kids. The author begins with the idea that teachers need to develop or build up “intercultural capital”, that is, knowledge and dispositions that will help them in intercultural exchanges of teaching and learning. The author then explores what such knowledge and dispositions might entail through an analysis of Satellite Kids. The play's focus on issues of power, identity, and intercultural conflict within a Canadian cosmopolitan school makes an interesting case study for exploring what intercultural knowledge and dispositions might look and sound like, and how the educational project of building intercultural capital is different from the project of multicultural education that has been dominant in Western teacher education throughout 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.     

Images of thinking in feminist materialisms: ontological divergences and the production of researcher subjectivities

Qualitative feminist studies are much challenged by the contemporary critique of social constructionist postmodernism, as well as the renewed search for the body and materiality. The result is (at least) two diverging research accounts: a renewed feminist materialism, relying on some foundational ontologies and what has been called a new materialist feminist account that constitutes radical ontological rewritings. The aim of this paper is to investigate what kind of researcher subjectivities these different accounts produce for qualitative inquiry. This investigation will be unfolded using an example from a collaborative research process involving 10 PhD students. The example is woven into Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions on the Image of Thought and the three images of thinking outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. The investigation shows that although the aim of our collaborative process was to resist the assumed Cogito/“I” of philosophy and qualitative inquiry, we still got caught up in taken-for-granted images of thinking and doing analysis. A deterritorializing of habits of thinking and practicing in order for new and other researcher subjectivities to emerge required collaborative efforts that put to work a rhizomatic image of thinking and operated from within an ontology of difference.     

Gender & Education Association: a case study in feminist education?

This article focuses on feminist activist academics who were instrumental in creating the UK Gender & Education Association at the turn of the twenty-first century. Drawing on my own intellectual biography (David, M. E. 2003. Personal and Political: Feminisms, Sociology and Family Lives Stoke-on-Trent. Trentham Books.) linked to the collective biography and life history of feminism in academia over the last 50 years, Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion and Pedagogies (David, M. E. 2014. Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion & Pedagogies. Farnham: Wheatsheaf.), I consider how we, as feminist educators, developed our pedagogies and professional approaches to gender and education. In so doing, I also look at three cohorts or generations of feminist academics, from the university pioneers of second-wave feminists like myself, through to those who might be considered third wave feminists. In this it is clear that whilst feminist values of women's liberation and/or gender equality shine through, there are clear differences of emphasis. This is in relation to personal, political and professional values, and approaches to education through teaching or the social sciences. Indeed, neither feminism nor gender was in the lexicon of higher education or public policy when we were starting out, and by the third cohort gender equality had become incorporated into forms of neo-liberalism. In reviewing the developments of feminisms in higher education, I also look towards what might be considered a feminist future in global higher education, given learning from previous waves to new waves of feminists such as fourth wave and beyond. Here I briefly consider the work of our EU Daphne funded research project (2013–2015) into challenging gender-related violence (GRV) through education and training for professionals working with children and young people.     

Implementing feminist theory in engineering: obstacles within the gender studies tradition

Scholars have noted that there is hesitation to utilise findings from gender studies in engineering education. Issues within gender studies may be part of the matching problem. Debates concerning two concepts for new engineering paradigms are investigated: care and heterogeneity. Their appeals and the respective complications which they tend to be associated with are revisited. Two examples are explored in detail. The tensions revealed lead to the contents of technical work. More social sciences content in engineering education is sometimes suggested, as a way to support more humane approaches. But, if the calculations that decide how many bolts of what dimension are to be put where are ‘masculinist reductionism’, it still remains that someone will have to do those calculations. Is emphasis on social issues really what we want from engineers?     

Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: the potential of Sen's capability approach for sociologists of education

Rationality and Freedom AMARTYA SEN, 2002 London, Harvard University Press 736 pp., £25.04 ISBN 0 674 00947 9 Valuing Freedoms. Sen's Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction SABINA ALKIRE, 2002 Oxford, Oxford University Press 340 pp., £45.00 ISBN 0 19 924579 This important selection of essays by the in.uential Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, deals with economic theory and social philosophy. Sabina Alkire's book combines a lucid exposition of the significance of Sen's work with an analysis of how it might be operationalised in development practice. Together with Sen's popular and now very widely read exposition of his key ideas in Development as Freedom (Sen, 1999) the works provide a new language to understand important social and economic processes. These recently published works also indicate some new directions debates concerning Sen's innovative ideas are taking. On the one hand, the connections across disciplines that Sen's work represents are being explored, partly by Sen himself and partly by those who have interpreted his ideas. On the other hand, the implications of Sen's work for examining practical approaches to social justice are emerging. While Sen's ideas have posed some central questions for debates in philosophy concerning equality, for discussions on social choice in economics, and for the reframing of the de.nition of ‘development’ in development studies, his work has had surprisingly little impact on discussions in sociology of education. Before considering what some of the potential of his thinking is for sociologists of education, some elements of his thinking need explanation.     

Socio-Political-Cultural Foundations of Environmental Education

Abstract

This research project identified concepts from the social sciences that are prerequisite for understanding or analyzing environmental issues. Concepts were identified through a review of social science textbooks and educational materials and through interviews with social scientists. A list of 57 concepts was sent to a validity panel to rate each concept for clarity, acceptability to environmental education, and importance to environmental education. Means and standard deviations were calculated. Results showed that the panelists generally thought the concepts were acceptable and important to environmental education. Concepts were then revised and 6 were added based on panelists' comments.     

Ethnographic locations: the geographies of feminist post-structural ethnography

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this paper explores three key elements of what I call the geography of ethnography. These include: (1) the spatial politics involved in constructing a research ‘site’; (2) the shifting location of the ethnographer in research practice; and (3) the liminal space of the focus group. Anchored in specific interactions in ‘the field,’ the paper demonstrates how integrating insights from cultural geography and feminist post-structuralism can yield new ethnographic understandings. I argue that educational ethnographers need to better account for the geography of ethnography in order to attend to the power-laden sphere of ethnographic research.     

Spatializing critical education: progress and cautions

Recently critical scholars have shown a renewed interest in spatial relations in educational contexts. In this essay we use selections from Gulson and Symes's edited volume Spatial theories of education as a point of departure to examine what spatial analysis can contribute to the critical education traditions. We argue that, when done thoughtfully, spatial theory can shed new light on existing and taken-for-granted social relations in education, though we raise cautions regarding particular forms of its application. In the process we connect the more recent attempts to ‘spatialize’ critical education to the ways in which space has been dealt with in past moments of critical work. Finally, we conclude by advocating for the expansion of the types of methodological tools used by critical theorists of spatial relations and of critical projects more broadly.     

Consequences of Project Organisation in Graduate Education

It is a common assumption that disciplinary differences in the organisation of research and knowledge structure have implications for graduate students' learning processes. The present study indicates, however, that even though the inclusion of master's degree students in faculty member's research projects are much more common in the natural sciences than in the humanities and the social sciences, such projects improve quality and effectiveness of graduate education in all fields of learning. Disciplinary differences imply, nevertheless, that projects should be organised differently. Graduate education in the humanities and the social sciences should be organised as research seminars and umbrella projects of individual student theses to a greater extent, rather than trying to apply a research organisation model developed in laboratory fields.     

Globalisation and science education: the case of Sustainability by the Bay

It is impossible to consider contemporary science education in isolation from globalisation as the dominant logic, rethinking and reconfiguring social and cultural life in which it is located. Carter (J Res Sci Teach 42, 561–580, 2005) calls for a close reading of policy documents, curriculum projects, research studies and a range of other science education texts using key concepts from globalisation theory to elucidate the ways in which globalisation shapes and is expressed within science education. In this paper, we consider an example from our own practice of a school-based curriculum project, Sustainable Living by the Bay, as one such instance. The first section reviews neoliberalism and neoconservativism necessary to understand how globalisation penetrates education, while the second outlines aspects of the curriculum project itself. As there were many different facets to the development and implementation of a project like Sustainable Living by the Bay, there is space only to elaborate two examples of the globalisation discourse. The first example concerns the government policy initiative that funded the project while the second example focuses on learner- centred pedagogies as globalisation’s pedagogies of choice.     

Meta-ethnography of autoethnographies: a worked example of the method using educational studies

ABSTRACT

Despite questions about autoethnography in the ethnography and education research family, autoethnography is published in selective peer-reviewed journals in education and in the social and health sciences. Even critics of autoethnographic studies note their ‘rising acceptance in the past 15 years’ [Delamont, S. 2009. “The Only Honest Thing: Autoethnography, Reflexivity and Small Crises in Fieldwork.” Ethnography and Education 4 (1): 51–63]. However, there has been less effort towards qualitative meta-synthesis to learn what other insights might be gained from collections of studies. With the advent of meta-autoethnography [Ellis, C. 2009. Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections of Life and Work. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press], each author can find a way to synthesise her/his own autoethnographic works, however, synthesising autoethnographies of different authors has received no attention. This article examines a critical, systematic approach to the meta-ethnography of autoethnographies and offers a worked example of the method using educational studies.     

Case studies in history education: thinking action research through an epistemological framework

ABSTRACT

Key studies in history education (from France and the USA) are discussed and compared in order to explore their methodological issues in terms of the types of knowledge they can generate about teaching and learning. An epistemological framework that relates the history of historians as an inquiry to that of the classroom provides the criteria for this comparative analysis, which is inscribed in Abbott’s epistemologico-institutional social sciences analysis through the identification of two basic debates that structure history education research, namely subject-matter knowledge vs pedagogical practices, and teaching and learning rules of methods vs habits of thinking. This analysis points out the conditions for the development of a formative school history inquiry (to have students work on their own explanations, to put into play their set of beliefs about history), which determine the modalities of a specific action research. These modalities are detailed by the example of an action research on the case of the teaching of the French Revolution in the last grade of primary school: the sharing of pedagogical (by the professor) and academic (by the researchers) decisions, the collective production of data throughout the process.     

Platonic & Freirean Interpretations of W. E. B. Du Bois's, “Of The Coming of John”

In the current Neoliberal climate of educational reform, the enlightenment project in education is more susceptible than ever to the machinations of historical amnesia. The notion that education can be transformative in a positive sense represents a moral ideal that teachers in the foundations of education find increasingly difficult to integrate into their pedagogies. As an antidote to this cultural forgetting, the article makes the case that W. E. B. Du Bois's lone fictionalized chapter in The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Coming of John,” can be used in classrooms to reinvigorate students’ thinking not only about the enlightenment project in education in a general sense, but more specifically, about the paradoxical and tragic dimensions that accompany this project and tradition. I argue that Du Bois's bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, can be most fruitfully interpreted when read alongside Plato's “turning around of the soul” (periagoge) and Paulo Freire's concept conscientization. When these 3 enlightenment-oriented narratives are studied in concert, they have an enormous potential to help cultivate the moral, political, and aesthetic sensibilities of our students as they construct their vocational identity as teachers in relation to the enlightenment project in education.     

Thinking in Nearness: Seven Steps on the Way to a Heideggerian Approach to Education

This paper explores the concept of Gelassenheit as developed in the later thought of Martin Heidegger. It seeks to show the relevance of this to aspects of education, especially to the ways that teaching can be enhanced in order to do better justice both to the learners and to what is studied. Thinking in this way helps to overcome the dominance of representational thought, a kind of thinking that imposes barriers on the understanding and restrictions on how the world can come to be. In the end the thinking illustrated by Gelassenheit constitutes a more responsible and more responsive relationship to the truth. My paper provides examples of ways that this can enhance education. In the end, with a caveat, I revisit and re‐examine aspects of Heidegger's work about which I think there is reason to be cautious. This is to encourage a degree of vigilance in relation to Heidegger's thought, but in a way that does not deny its powerful insights.     

‘Next thing you know,her hair turned green’: absurdity and uncertainty in high-stakes teacher test space

This article explores what happens behind the closed doors and in the ‘black box’ of high-stakes educational testing. Our specific concern is licensure exams that are often gatekeepers into teacher education programs and the profession. Leveraging the spatial turn across critical social theory and other disciplines, we conceptualize the test space of these exams in order to account for the powerful reach that test companies have into teacher education and the ‘ideal’ restrictive space that test takers navigate. Against this conceptual background, we share findings from a larger qualitative study to illustrate how test takers ‘practice’ test space into something more manageable and familiar by leveraging various affordances presented to them. Overall, our study accounts for the spatial dimension of high-stakes educational tests and initiates productive ways to begin thinking about the structure and agency of these spaces.     

A Wittgenstein Approach to the Learning of OO-modeling

The paper uses Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories about the relationship between thought, language, and objects of the world to explore the assumption that OO-thinking resembles natural thinking. The paper imports from research in linguistic philosophy to computer science education research. I show how UML class diagrams (i.e., an artificial context-free language) correspond to the logically perfect languages described in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein disputes his previous theories by showing that natural languages are not constructed by rules of mathematical logic, but are language games where the meaning of a word is constructed through its use in social contexts. Contradicting the claim that OO-thinking is easy to learn because of its similarity to natural thinking, I claim that OO-thinking is difficult to learn because of its differences from natural thinking. The nature of these differences is not currently well known or appreciated. I suggest how explicit attention to the nature and implications of different language games may improve the teaching and learning of OO-modeling as well as programming.     

Singing into Language: Sudanese Australian young women create public pedagogy

This article examines the ethnocinematic research project Cross-Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education, and its relationship to the evolving notion of public pedagogies. The project explores the potential of alternative pedagogies, which include popular culture, especially audiovisual forms, to engage teachers and learners with one another in collaborative pedagogical methods. The author's collaborative work with students from refugee backgrounds involves what Giroux calls a ‘spectrum of social practices’ utilising a variety of media platforms. This article draws from the lived experiences of one particular co-participant, Achol Baroch, and her 15 Sudanese Australian co-participants. Their experiences of secondary education are traced through this arts-based participatory project using the emerging practice of ethnocinema, a type of ethnographic documentary film which is generative, interculturally collaborative and aligned with the transformative goals of critical pedagogy.