Professional education,reflective practice and feminism

This paper offers acritical perspectiveon Schon, and on reflective practice as apedagogy, by engaging with themes in feminism. A comparison between consciousness raising and reflective practice gives insights into the pleasures experienced by practitioners. However, it also suggests that reflection-in-action is not the prerogative of professionals. Consciousness raising and feminist reflexivity in research provide positive examples of political engagement and reflexive self-awareness. The scope of reflective practice is limited by the contexts in which it has been adopted. In the UK reflective practice has been implemented in professions with large female workforces: nursing, teaching and social work. The scope for autonomy in these professions is increasingly limited. Reflective practice, therefore, may be becoming avehicle for self-surveillance and orthodoxy. These socio-political considerations provide the basis for more searching epistemological questions about the nature of professional knowledge and the characteristics of all human labour. Both Marxist and feminist traditions suggest that the capacity to reflect is a characteristic of all humans, while some social scientists have suggested that reflexivity is a particular characteristic of modernity. These views challenge the status of reflective practice as the episteme of professional knowledge. Moreover, Schon's methodology is based on a partial and gender-blind view of professionals. The paper concludes that a reinvigorated research agenda, which engages with these broader themes, is necessary.     

Rethinking difference and sex education: from cultural inclusivity to normative diversity

This paper aimed to problematise what is meant by ‘difference’ and consider what such a reinterpretation might mean for methodological interventions in sex education research. Our concern is the tendency for sex education research to treat difference as a set of categories to be ‘added-on’, such as religious difference, cultural difference and sexual plurality. The danger of this is that it leaves the normative unchallenged, confirming the hegemony of the heteronormative, unraced subject. Constructing difference as an ‘add-on’ fails to address how young people locate themselves in a world in which they negotiate their sexualities through complex ‘glocal’ routes in popular and youth culture. We argue that decentring methodological strategies are required which draw on critiques made by post-colonial and decolonising methodologies. In the first section of the paper, we review the problem of difference, and how it is considered within current debates in youth and sexualities research. This frames a reflection on rethinking our own methodological practices through a consideration of two research moments. In the conclusion, we propose a metaphorical framework to scaffold a reimagining of methodological approaches to ensure that the normative is always a question mark.     

Higher education and feminism in the Arab Gulf

This article explores how higher education is being conceptualized as part of a neo-liberal ‘feminist’ social change project in the post-imperial context of the Arab Gulf. Challenging the tendency to essentialised treatments of gender and women in Muslim countries, it makes visible the diverse experiences and views of a particular group of Gulf purposively sampled women – students, graduates and academics – as it explores how they are situating themselves against available feminist narratives, how they are seeing themselves as citizens and political actors, and how higher education’s spaces and constraints are mediating these processes. A conflicted picture emerges, of mass higher education helping provide women with radical ideas and ambitions, and helping to make public demands and assert self-representation, while their freedoms to act are limited by underlying hegemonic structures that are still predominantly male and against which women variously rationalize their strategic conformity.     

Studying cultural diversity using information and communication technologies in teacher education: pedagogy,power and literacy

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between new technologies, pedagogy and cultural diversity. It is clear from the project discussed in this article that studying diversity issues on-line provides scope for developing what has been called cultural literacy following Bourdieu's (1990) notion of ‘different ways of seeing’. However, there are a number of unintended effects of power that emerge in this new cultural field which need examination. These include the importance of understanding the embodied context as much as the virtual, the need to be explicit about literacy practices to challenge the dominant liberal discourse of ‘voice’ in on-line discussion, and the effects of power that emanate from teaching and learning in this field.     

Poststructural feminism in education: An overview

Feminists in education increasingly use poststructuralism to trouble both discursive and material structures that limit the ways we think about our work. This overview of poststructural feminism presents several key philosophical concepts ? language; discourse; rationality; power, resistance, and freedom; knowledge and truth; and the subject ? as they are typically understood in humanism and then as they have been reinscribed in poststructuralism, paying special attention to how they have been used in education.     

中国少数民族传统体育的文化多元价值

中华文明源远流长且资源丰富,特别是少数民族传统体育资源文化价值,其内涵丰富且形式多样,被不断传承、保护、开发,可以说既是打破了国内体育文化偏于西方竞技体育式的文化单一局面,也能够为少数民族地区文化产业可持续发展提供强有力的保障,进而充分促进少数民族地区经济增长模式有效转型。本文分析了中国少数民族传统体育的文化多元价值,促进少数民族传统体育文化不断传承。     

Liberal studies in technical education

‘Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.’ Francis Bacon.

‘There must be a reasonable fusion of the humanities as well as mathematics, science and technology in the courses.’ Parliamentary and Scientific Committee Memorandum on Higher Education, July 1954.     

Gandhian education in Bali: globalisations and cultural diversity in a time of fundamentalisms

The paper presents findings from a research project undertaken at the Taman Rama Gandhi School in Bali during the first anniversary week of the Bali Bombings in 2003. It explores the school's response to four key components of Gandhi's model of Basic Education (Nai Talim) and shows that the claimed curriculum is framed by two contradictory discourses: a globalisation from above discourse and a Gandhian discourse of tolerance and peace, more consistent with a globalisation from below discourse. The argument is made that the curriculum's commitment to the neo‐liberal capitalist values of the globalisation form above discourse may ultimately thwart the emphasis upon peace and tolerance in the discourse from below.     

论高职教育主体下的通识教育路径

在知识经济时代,高职教育在现代科技文化发展、职业需求多元、就业竞争加剧等多重压力下,必须走出急功近利的短期行为的误区,寻求通过实施通识教育培养全人和对精神教化的历史责任。高职院校实施通识教育,应着眼于理念、知识、行为三个层次的教育结构,构建以入文知识、哲学社会科学知识、文艺心理知识、生活体验为基本主线,并具有高职教育特色的通识教育体系。     

对话与思考:西方教育领域中的"女性主义"本土化探析

西方教育理论中的女性主义思潮以其对性别与教育的独特理解，为我们提供了与世界教育对话的新途径，促使我们重新思考女性教育与妇女解放的互动关系。可以说，无论是在西方，还是在中国，妇女解放的思想并不只是要在两性心理、心理、社会差异等基础上强造一个平等的世界，而是要在两性和谐共处的基础上，争取最大限度的共同自由和全面的发展。     

Liberal education and the criminal justice major

New perspectives on the impact of college on students, on linking general education, the major, electives and extra-classroom experiences toward the goal of “integrated learning,” and renewed emphasis on the importance of producing liberally educated college graduates, present opportunities for criminal justice educators to make their field a keystone in the architecture of a liberal education. In this essay, I argue that the multidisciplinary perspectives that characterize the field of criminal justice, as well as its core intellectual concerns, make criminal justice well-suited to serve as the infrastructure for a high-quality undergraduate liberal education program.