Trashing the System: Social Movement,Intersectional Rhetoric,and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization's Garbage Offensive

Examining the nascent rhetoric of the Young Lords Organization's (YLO) 1969 “garbage offensive,” this essay argues that the long-standing constraints on agency to which they were responding demanded an inventive rhetoric that was decolonizing both in its aim and in its form. Blending diverse forms of discourse produced an intersectional rhetoric that was qualitatively different from other movements at the time. As such, the YLO constructed a collective agency challenging the status quo and, in some ways, foreshadowed more contemporary movement discourses that similarly function intersectionally. Examining the YLO's garbage offensive, then, presents rhetorical scholars with an opportunity to revise our understanding of how marginalized groups craft power through rhetoric.     

Language and literacy on the ground: disconnects between government policy and employer perspectives

Education to meet labour market demands and employer needs is a key priority in New Zealand's education policy. Government agendas for language and literacy education align with global discourses that link economic productivity to quality control, standardisation and proceduralisation through close regulation and funding. Yet, the interviews reported on here, involving employers of migrants, show that employers accept a range of linguistic diversity and judge migrant employees in subjective, complex ways. These employers tend to see effective communication as embedded in the cultures and relationships of their workplaces. Yet, they also tend to form negative judgments about employees based on dominant policy discourses and popular images of migrants as Others. The implications challenge government policy but at the same time point to spaces for critical work on change.     

‘Homophobia Kills’: a disruptive moment in the educational politics of legitimation

This paper explores how students and, to a lesser extent teachers, have engaged with their school's politics of legitimation to participate in a disruptive moment in sex/sexual/gender relations within their school. Over a period of 3 years students have, with the support of some teachers, actively sought to make homophobia an issue of concern within their school. Their activities have served to disrupt the legitimacy of the heterosexist hegemony operating within the school's discursive arrangements. However, powerful normalising discourses worked through the school to contain this disruption. It is the interplay between discourses of legitimacy, disruption and containment which is referred to here as the politics of legitimation.     

Engaging whiteness: How racial power gets reified in education

The central question addressed in this essay is how students engage in a class that focuses on the political and social power of whiteness. Specifically, it looks at how whiteness gets inscribed and reified in our education practices, even as we try to disrupt its normative influence. The essay is based upon an in-depth qualitative study of a graduate seminar dedicated to addressing diversity issues critically. We conclude that despite students' expressed intentions and efforts at disrupting whiteness, they draw upon a variety of discourses that actually serve to protect and secure whiteness's dominant position. Twelve different discourses that students cite are described, grouped into four broad appeals: to self, to progress, to authenticity, and to extremes. Understanding how students invoke these discourses as an implicit way of resisting critical engagements with whiteness can help us to problematize these practices as well as cultivate more productive and enabling interactions.     

Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) on the Education of Girls. An Investigation into his Medieval and Spanish Sources

Abstract

Due to his treatise on the education of girls and women, the “De institutione foeminae christianae” (1524), the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) is repeatedly labelled as “an advocate of woman's education” or “revolutionary feminist”. But, Vives’ treatise must be judged on other grounds than feminist or antifeminist, and must be confronted with patristic, medieval and humanistic ideas to give a clear outline of his personal emphases.

Therefore, Vives’ views are confronted in the first place with those of patristic authors like Jerome and Augustine and medieval moralists like Vincent of Beauvais, Aegidius Romanus, Francesco da Barberino, Christine de Pisan and Konrad Bitschin. Secondly, the circumstances of his treatise are compared with those of Italian pedagogues as Vergerio, Brunt and Piccolomini, and a special link is made with the dedication-process of books of houres from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Conclusion is that Vives’ work was equally influenced by the circumstances of the time of writing and the identity of his addressee, i.e. Catherine of Aragon, “the Spanish Queen in England”, as Vives called her. The impact of Thomas More’s humanist circle on Vives’ treatise is also of great importance.

But scholars have — for several reasons — overlooked the great influence of Vives’ Spanish background, and especially the direct influence of the Catalan Minorite Francesc Eiximenis (ca. 1340- 1409). Not only Vives’ “Institutio” shows many parallels in contenance and style with Eiximenis’ “Llibre de les clones”, there seems to be also an influence of Eiximenis on Vives’ political views in his “De subventione pauperum”. The comparison between Eixmenis and Vives’ views on education of women will preserve tomorrow’s Vives specialists from making rashly attributed claims of originality and will open the eyes for Spanish medieval sources in a so-called “humanist” treatise.     

Issues of Power,Masculinity, and Gender Justice: Sally's story of teaching boys

Despite calls for a more nuanced approach to issues of gender and equity that recognizes how broader relations of gender and power continue to produce injustices for many females, essentialized accounts expressing concern about boys’ poor educational performance remain the most common refrain in dominant equity discourses across Western contexts. This common refrain characteristic of current large scale gender reforms, such as Australia's parliamentary inquiry into the education of boys, Boys: Getting it right, is driven by a standards rather than social justice focus and thus creates silences around issues of gender injustice, power, and constructions of hegemonic masculinity. In this paper, I present “Sally's” story as a disruption of these silences. Sally is a young English teacher at “Penfolds College”, an all boys Catholic school in a large urban centre in Queensland (Australia). Her story, in illustrating how particular boys draw on broader discourses of masculinity to sexually harass and intimidate her, highlights the inadequacies of dominant public and policy discourse in terms of its failure to locate boys’ educational issues within broader contexts of inequitable gender relations.     

Shaking the Tree,Making a Rhizome: Towards a nomadic geophilosophy of science education

This essay enacts a philosophy of science education inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's figurations of rhizomatic and nomadic thought. It imagines rhizomes shaking the tree of modern Western science and science education by destabilising arborescent conceptions of knowledge as hierarchically articulated branches of a central stem or trunk rooted in firm foundations, and explores how becoming nomadic might liberate science educators from the sedentary judgmental positions that serve as the nodal points of Western academic science education theorising. This is demonstrated by commencing two rhizomatic textual assemblages that generate questions, provocations and challenges to dominant discourses and assumptions of contemporary science education. The first of these addresses cultural representations of Sir Isaac Newton and the second makes multiple, hybrid connections among the parasites, mosquitoes, humans, technologies and socio‐technical relations signified by malaria.     

Evaluations and the Forgetfulness of Pedagogical Relations: Remarks on Educational Authority

In this essay, Christiane Thompson addresses the question of evaluative practices, particularly student evaluation of teaching (SET), and their effects with respect to pedagogical relations in the university setting. In the first part of the essay, Thompson draws on Michel Foucault's analysis of power to show how university teaching has come to be defined according to notions of obligation, accountability, and assurance. The forgetfulness of pedagogical relations that results from the increasing use of SET prompts Thompson to rethink the significance of pedagogical relations in the second part of the essay. Referring to the notion of “educational authority” and Foucault's framework of power, Thompson argues that education is about the continuous re‐institution of pedagogical relation to the other. In the final section, Thompson reflects upon the professor's “authority” in terms of constituting a “community of inquiry”: specifically, the seminar is interpreted as a pedagogical setting that implies a different “being‐with” than SET suggests. She concludes by considering what possibilities and limitations the seminar setting offers and how we can discuss this issue (by means of evaluative practice).     

Analogy in William Rowan Hamilton's New Algebra

This essay offers the first analysis of analogy in research-level mathematics, taking as its case the 1837 treatise of William Rowan Hamilton. Analogy spatialized Hamilton's key concepts—knowledge and time—in culturally familiar ways, creating an effective landscape for thinking about the new algebra. It also structurally aligned his theory with the real number system so his objects and operations would behave customarily, thus encompassing the old algebra while systematically bringing into existence the new.     

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.     

The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party,Huey Long,George Wallace,and the Populist Argumentative Frame

This essay argues that a sustained form can be located in the complicated history of populist rhetoric. Despite its chameleonic qualities, the advancement of populism is constituted by alterations in the focus and content, not the structure, of populist activism. This structure, or what I term its argumentative frame, positions a virtuous people against a powerful enemy and expresses disdain toward traditional forms of democratic deliberation and republican representation. I trace these themes through the rhetoric of the People's Party, Huey Long, and George Wallace. I conclude by analyzing the link between populism's persistence in U.S. history and the nation's Founding.     

Food as Touch/Touching the Food: The body in‐place and out‐of‐place in preschool

The article explores the need to eat as a biological and social practice among children in a preschool in Norway. The children in this preschool are aged from one to two years of age, and some of them have just started there. Different events from mealtimes relate to Derrida's concept of touch and Grosz's notion of bodies in‐place and out‐of‐place. How food touches the children and the practitioners is further discussed through a consideration of body/place relations, which are both material and reflect pedagogical discourses. Its overall context is not only touching the food in a concrete sense, but also food as touch seen as a philosophical concept. Analyzing touching relations around the table including movements in materiality, bodies and discourses of eating may empower the youngest children in a preschool setting.     

‘Power,regulation and physically active identities’: the experiences of rural and regional living adolescent girls

Drawing on interpretations of Foucault's techniques of power, we explored the discourses and power relations operative between groups of girls that appeared to influence their participation in Physical Education (PE) and outside of school in sport and physical activity (PA) in rural and regional communities. Interviews and focus groups were conducted in eight secondary schools with female students from Year 9 (n = 22) and 10 (n = 116). Dominant gendered and performance discourses were active in shaping girls’ construction of what it means to be active or ‘sporty’, and these identity positions were normalised and valued. The perceived and real threat of their peer's gaze as a form of surveillance acted to further perpetuate the power of performance discourses; whereby girls measured and (self) regulated their participation. Community settings were normalised as being exclusively for skilled performers and girls self-regulated their non-participation according to judgements made about their own physical abilities. These findings raise questions about the ways in which power relations, as forged in broader sociocultural and institutional discourse–power relations, can infiltrate the level of the PE classroom to regulate and normalise practices in relation to their, and others, PA participation.     

Jefferson's other

This essay investigates how various representations of the public memory of Thomas Jefferson function rhetorically. Curiously, such representations depict a past for which no certain record exists. The portrayal of Jefferson's alleged affair with Sally Hemings in novels, films, and other discourses demonstrates that the rhetoric of public memory, which preserves the relevance and utility of the past for audiences in the present, is often sustained, not by a transparent or even plausible understanding of former persons and events, but by profound and potentially irresolvable confusions over the relationship between what is commemorated and those doing the commemorating. The essay scrutinizes how three different forms of rhetoric respond to such confusion by fashioning memories of Jefferson that reflect contemporary desires to explain the mysteries of his enigmatic past. Consequently, the essay argues that the contemporary public memory of Jefferson is defined by a discursive haunting of his official reputation in which various ghostly counterparts are said to represent what the official record can only suggest.     

Passing by Proxy: Collusive and Convulsive Silence in the Trial of Leopold and Loeb

Despite unfolding as it did during the sexual revolution of the 1920s, Leopold and Loeb's “trial of the century” elicited a deluge of constitutive discourse that struggled against overt articulation and circulation of the boys’ queerness. In this essay, I argue that those discourses—dominant reportage, in camera courtroom conferences, and Clarence Darrow's famous summation—manifested what I label “passing by proxy,” a collusive and convulsive act of straight closeting that speaks queer sexuality despite concerted effort to silence it.     

SEXUALIZED SPACES IN PUBLIC PLACES: IRIGARAY, LEVINAS, AND AN ETHICS OF THE EROTIC

A bstract .  Discourse pertaining to the erotic is absent in our current educational culture. In this essay Shaireen Rasheed elucidates how Luce Irigaray, through her discussion of the erotic, has challenged the conception of language and otherness that underpins modern education. In undertaking a comparative analysis of Irigaray's work on the erotic and Emmanuel Levinas's account of Eros, Rasheed emphasizes that the implications of Irigaray's critique suggest not only a reevaluation of Levinas's "Phenomenology of Eros," but a revaluation of the role of the sexualized body in philosophy. Rasheed concludes by urging educators to think ethically about what discourses of difference mean in the classroom. A pedagogy contextualized within an ethics of the erotic attempts to develop pedagogies to link ideas, practices, and values in order to create discursive spaces where the unutterable could be articulated, where so-called marginalized images could be represented, and where efforts could be made to rethink forms of subjectivity and relations within the oppressive confines of the always heterosexualized classroom.     

The Grand Tour. Language,National Identity and Masculinity

The Grand Tour usually refers to the travel of Englishmen to Italy, where they acquired the taste essential to the gentleman and the paintings and other objects of virtù to display in their country estates. In this paper, I consider not Englishmen abroad but the meaning of the Grand Tour as a cultural and educational practice for elite males in eighteenth-century England. My argument is that as an educational practice, the Grand Tour was highly contradictory, and that it was especially paradoxical in relation to one of its aims, language learning. Using Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism as analytical framework, I explore the shifting power relations between the English and French languages throughout the century, and argue that the Grand Tour played a key role in the elaboration of discourses on language and national identity in the late eighteenth century.     

Misrepresentations of Indigenous History and Science: Public broadcasting,the Internet,and education

This paper examines the role of history in power relations which suppress Indigenous knowledges. History is located as being about power and about how the powerful maintain their power. The paper further examines the Bering Strait theory/myth and ways that discourses in history combine with discourses in science to devalue Indigenous knowledges. The “truth” of science is challenged and examples of manipulation of scientific knowledge are provided, including discussions of a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation made for television production A people's history and an Internet website provided by the American government. These production activities supported by the Canadian and American governments are considered educational activities engaged in the practice of cultural representation in which dominant discourses about Indigenous peoples are presented. The paper challenges dominant misrepresentations of discourses about Indigenous peoples in a discussion of educational practices emphasizing the need of Indigenous peoples to control education and cultural representations. The paper concludes that it is a responsibility of society to educate all students to understand that any portrayal of history comes from a particular vantage point and to understand that dominant society privileges some representations and disadvantages others. If we teach in a critical way and challenge dominant discourses we can begin to create a society in which all persons in Canada and the USA, including Indigenous peoples, have a role to play.     

Orphans of Our Common Worlds

In this article, Therese Lindgren and Magdalena Sjöstrand Öhrfelt compare two discourses that have been influential in the field of early education: the social‐economic and the posthumanist. Studying how the young educable child is articulated in these seemingly contradictory discourses, Lindgren and Sjöstrand Öhrfelt have found that the discourses not only overlap, but, to some extent, they also reinforce each other. Both discourses depict the future as precarious, and along with identifying deficiencies of our time, they seek to justify the need for early intervention in terms of education. The young child is portrayed, on the one hand, as not‐yet‐realized human capital and, on the other, as a site for change and new beginnings. That is, the child figures as the key to a better and more sustainable world. In both discourses, early childhood education and care (ECEC) is depicted as an emancipating project, detaching the child from the child's social and cultural contexts and historical past, making the young educable child an “orphan.”     

Open education and critical pedagogy

This paper argues for a revaluation of the potential of open education to support more critical forms of pedagogy. Section 1 examines contemporary discourses around open education, offering a commentary on the perception of openness as both a disruptive force in education, and a potential solution to contemporary challenges. Section 2 examines the implications of the lack of consensus around what it means to be open, focusing on the example of commercial and proprietary claims to openness commonly known as ‘openwashing’. Section 3 uses Raymond's influential essay on open source software ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as a framework for thinking through these issues, and about alternative power structures in open education. In Section 4, an explicit link is drawn between more equal and democratic power structures and the possibility for developing pedagogies which are critical and reflexive, providing examples which show how certain interpretations of openness can raise opportunities to support critical approaches to pedagogy.