Tomorrow’s a mystery: constructions of the future and ‘un/becoming’ amongst ‘early’ and ‘late’ career academics

Abstract

Constructing a secure sense of a professional future has become increasingly difficult for early career researchers, whilst concerns about present and future job in/security have also been expressed in relation to already-established academics. In this paper, we draw on qualitative data from a U.K. study to explore everyday conceptualisations of the future for both ‘early career’ and ‘late career’ academics, in the context of increased fears and actualities of occupational precarity. We utilise theories of the social construction of time, as well as a conception of precarity and ‘precarization’ utilised by Butler (2009a, 2009b) and Lorey (2015), relating to ‘politically induced’ forms of insecurity that are a direct product of neoliberalism. The research reveals a variety of forms and levels of concern and anxiety by both groups for their own futures, and for the future of the academy as a whole.     

Hutchins’s University of Utopia: Institutional Independence,Academic Freedom,and Radical Restructuring

In a crisis-plagued world looking to higher education for knowledge, wisdom, and solutions, higher education itself is stumbling. Its transformational thinking has frozen up like an overstressed computer program; and we need, in effect, to “push the reset button.” In 1953, the renowned and controversial president of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins, authored a refreshing and provocative work, The University of Utopia, containing ideas that still challenge today’s paradigms. He argued for institutional independence over “accountability,” “outcomes,” and “stakeholders.” He indicted educational evils he called “industrialization,” “specialization,” “philosophical diversity,” and “social and political conformity” and suggested ways to defeat them. Although his 56-year-old thoughts on reconceptualizing the multiversity are not a panacea, they could help higher education make a fresh start. This essay reintroduces the modern reader to Hutchins’s iconoclastic and stimulating ideas in the hope of restarting the stalled agenda for educational reform.     

Understanding: ‘Knowledge’, ‘Belief’ and ‘Understanding’

The following paper is intended as an exercise in friendly criticism of one of Harvey Siegel's and Mike Smith's (Knowing, Believing and Understanding, this volume). I'm in substantial sympathy with the general thrust of their paper and my remarks merely provide some criticism of their discussion's conceptual coherence and clarity and a correspondingly slightly adjusted version of what they have to say. My focus is limited to the conceptions of knowledge, belief and understanding and their inter-relationships in terms of which they offer suggestions to science educators.     

A critical exploration of Colombian teacher education from Freire’s ‘directivity’ perspective

The paper presents an exploration of Colombian teacher education from Paulo Freire’s ‘directivity’ perspective, which involves the political notion of education and the struggle for social justice. It examines certain existing tensions in teacher education, and analyses critically their implications for the teaching profession regarding an alternative pedagogical framework and new approaches for the professional identity-formation toward teaching for social justice. The paper also discusses the challenges for education research in Colombia, a country that both dreams of education as the nation’s future and fights against its inherent sense of adversity.     

Bits,Bytes and Dinosaurs: using Levinas and Freire to address the concept of ‘twenty-first century learning’

Abstract

The discourse of twenty-first century learning argues that education should prepare students for successful living in the twenty-first century workplace and society. It challenges all educators with the idea that contemporary education is unable to do so, as it is designed to replicate an industrial age model, essentially rear-focused, rather than future-focused. Future-focused preparation takes account of the startling effect on economy and society caused by rapid technological change, to the extent that the future cannot be accurately predicted. It is a discourse that effectively renders knowledge obsolete, and which relies increasingly on communication technologies and online pedagogies. This is however an education which in some respects deepens the loss of identity characteristic of contemporary times. Thus, it has negative implications for face-to-face interactions in community which underpins the development of democratic practices. This article challenges these futuristic discourses by appealing to two philosophers of the twentieth century, namely Emmanuel Levinas and Paulo Freire. It considers the Levinasian concepts of the Other and the face, and the Freirean concepts of humanisation and critical education to argue that they offer a discourse of possibility and hope. These thinkers enable the argument that, despite rapid change, there are certain attributes and dispositions that transcend time and place, which schools have not only a right, but an obligation to develop.     

To Freire or not to Freire: Educational freedom and the populist right-wing ‘Escola sem Partido’ movement in Brazil

This article addresses key topics of academic freedom and critical pedagogy during a time of right-wing populist politics. The rise of the far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil’s presidency in 2019 was accompanied by a vow to eradicate any vestige of the ideas of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire from the country’s schools. Bolsonaro’s campaign was supported by ultra-conservative groups that have as their core mission a traditional Christian and anti-Communist educational agenda. At the forefront of these groups is the influential and conspicuous ‘Escola sem Partido’ (ESP) movement that has forcefully campaigned against Freire’s critical pedagogy across the country and promoted physical and online abuse of teachers since 2014. This article asks how Freire’s philosophies can be an ally in the struggle for democratic education in the current political climate in Brazil. It employs a method of dialogical narrative to bring Freire’s theories and critical methodology to life and test their potency against the ESP educational philosophies. It initially employs Freire’s core ideas to examine the ESP policies and parliamentary bills. In the second part, it analyses documents and online content produced by civil society resistance to ESP pressures. The findings show the vitality of Freire’s pedagogical philosophy to empower oppressed communities in their demands for quality education. The narrative concludes by demonstrating the vital role of the critical consciousness process and of Freire’s pedagogy of freedom to support ongoing struggles by teachers and communities to block ESP attempts to abolish critical thinking in Brazilian public education.     

Rejecting Dialogue for Perspective: Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and John Calvin’s Divine Pedagogy

James Estep's integration of Vygotsky's work on the Zone of Proximal Development into Christian education and pedagogy falls short of a distinctly evangelical form of integration. Using Ken Badley's schemata of Integration of Faith and Learning, this article distinguishes Estep's “paradigmatic” integration from a more thoroughgoing “perspectival” integration. Perspectival integration best displays the connections between Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and evangelical thinking by using the divine accommodation of John Calvin, as described in the work of Arnold Huijgen.     

Vygotsky’s ‘Thought and Word’

The last chapter of Vygotsky’s last book, Thinking and Speech, is a compressed argument about the construction of consciousness through the internalisation of language. This article comments on Vygotsky’s analysis of the ‘voyage into the interior’ undertaken by oral speech as it is internalised and abbreviated into ‘inner speech’, and then further concentrated as non-verbal thought. The article focuses on the part that literature and especially poetry play in Vygotsky’s argument in this chapter, and suggests that in exploring the condensed semantics of inner speech Vygotsky is implicitly describing how poets turn private thoughts into ‘symbols for others’. It concludes with a commentary on Vygotsky’s use of Mandelshtam’s poem ‘The Swallow’, from which he draws his epigraph.     

Charles Peirce’s Rhetoric and the Pedagogy of Active Learning

Abstract

Although John Dewey has had the most profound effect on education, less is known about the philosophy of education of the original founder of pragmatism, Charles Peirce Using Peirce’s theory of formal rhetoric, I try to show that Peirce’s philosophy of education, when fully understood, is aligned with Dewey’s pedagogy of experiential learning, and can provide a justification for the promotion of active learning in the classroom. Peirce’s rhetoric, as one part of his logical or semiotic theory, argues that reasoning alone is not sufficient to gain knowledge, but that it must be embedded within a community of inquiry, of a certain sort. Applying this to the classroom, I argue that we, as teachers, should endeavor to create the features of a proper community of inquiry in the classroom, one that emphasizes engagement of the students in doing research rather than passively receiving information about its results.     

Dystopia and disutopia: Hope and hopelessness in German pupils’ future narratives

Within the academic field of futures in education there has been concern that pupils’ negative and pessimistic future scenarios could be deleterious to their minds. Eckersley (Futures 31:73–90, 1999) argues that pessimism among young people can produce cynicism, mistrust, anger, apathy and an approach to life based on instant gratification. This article suggests that we need to discuss negative and pessimistic future visions in a more profound and complex way since these contain both hope and hopelessness. A pessimistic view of the future does not have to be negative in itself: it can also illustrate a critical awareness of contemporary social order. This article therefore aims to explore hope and hopelessness in young people’s dystopias about the future. Adopting dystopias may open up possibilities, whereas adopting disutopias will only lead one to believe that there are no alternatives to the current dominant model of global capitalism. Even a dystopia that predicts the end of the world as we know it might be the beginning of a world that we have not seen yet.     

Science as experience,exploration, and experiments: elementary teachers’ notions of ‘doing science’

ABSTRACT

Much of the literature on science teaching suggests that elementary teachers lack relevant prior experiences with science. This study begins to reframe the deficit approach to research in science teaching by privileging the experiences elementary teachers have had with science – both in and out of schools – throughout their lives. Our work uses identity as a lens to examine the complexities of elementary teachers’ narrative accounts of their experiences with science over the course of their lives. Our findings identify components of teachers’ science-related experiences in order to lay the groundwork for making connections between teachers’ personal experiences and professional practice. This work demonstrates that teachers’ storied lives are important for educational researchers and teacher educators, as they reveal elements of teaching knowledge that may be productive and resourceful for refining teachers’ science practice.     

School choice as ‘motherwork’: valuing African‐American women’s educational advocacy and resistance

This study draws on in‐depth interview data to discuss the school choices and educational advocacy roles of 14 African‐American mothers. The narratives of the study’s participants, who have low‐income or working‐class status, show how race, class and gender factors influence their school choice‐making and their value of education. The author asserts that the mothers’ school choice‐making constitutes an important act of cultural resistance and empowerment called motherwork. Analysis of the study’s findings challenges conventional notions of parent involvement and counters prevalent stereotypes that portray African‐American mothers as uncaring. Attention is given to the inequities that the mothers face in the educational marketplace and how they seek agency. Educators are urged to consider how the mothers perceive themselves and construct their educational involvement roles in order to engage parents in empowering and meaningful ways.     

Intentionality and Thinking as ‘Hearing’. A Response to Biesta’s Agenda

In his 2012 article Philosophy of Education for the Public Good: Five Challenges and an Agenda, Gert Biesta identifies five substantial issues about the future of education and the work required to address these issues. This article employs a Heideggerian reading of education to evaluate ‘Biesta’s truth’. I argue that Biesta’s point of view (a) underestimates knowledge’s predominance and relativism; (b) frames intentionality in pre-Heideggerian terms, which—although not a problem in itself because an individual is free to choose a particular perspective on the concept—raises the issue of consistency in Biesta’s theoretical framework; and (c) a final criticism concerns Biesta’s choice of tools for engaging with the identified challenges: The primary tools Biesta uses are intrinsic to the perspective he challenges. The use of a ‘first person perspective’ to frame pedagogy that focuses on the subject and ‘subjectification’ reaffirms the fundamental Western gesture that makes human beings subjects who ‘stand-over-and-against’ the world. I argue that it is possible to penetrate Plato’s ‘theoretical gaze’ and find a ‘weak’ alternative to an all-encompassing point of view of education through a Heideggerian approach that regards intentionality and thinking as ‘hearing’.     

Online education as ‘vanguard’ higher education: exploring masculinities,ideologies, and gerontology

Drawing inspiration from Clegg’s [2008. “Femininities/masculinities and a Sense Self – Thinking Gendered Academic Identities and the Intellectual Self.” Gender and Education 20 (3): 209–221, 241] statement that ‘less traditional universities and areas of course provision and research might be important sites to investigate in relation to academic identity’, I undertake a single strategic case study of an expert, older, male critical educator, employed as an instructor in two ‘less traditional’, for-profit settings: one online university and one brick and mortar university. The article departs from a theoretical consideration of ‘future directions’ of three subfields: masculinities and higher education (HE) from critical and feminist perspectives, masculinities (and other identities) online (through the Internet research subfield of gender and technology), and masculinities and aging from critical and feminist gerontological perspectives. It employs the methodological strategy of ‘sketches’, arguing that these settings, which appear to position critical and feminist pedagogues in the proverbial ‘belly of the beast’, are important spaces in which to explore how a critical pedagogue navigates ‘less traditional’ HE settings.     

Scientific ‘Laws’, ‘Hypotheses’ and ‘Theories’

Some commonly held erroneous notions about the terms laws, hypotheses and theories are pointed out with specific examples from different branches of science.     

‘It’s a life-changing point for me’: critical consciousness,collective empowerment and global awareness as activist identity change in ‘popular education’

The Youth Global Awareness Programme (YGAP) is a 2-week residential ‘popular education’ programme for young, diverse, international, labour movement activists, run by the International Federation of Workers Education Associations in Cape Town, South Africa. In this mixed method study (N = 47), we draw on the Social Identity Approach to Education and Learning. We propose that the participatory, peer-to-peer learning during YGAP leads to activist identity change, where critical consciousness, collective empowerment and global awareness develop as group norms. The first longitudinal questionnaire study found significant increases in activist identity and critical consciousness, which predicted increased collective empowerment. In the second focus group study, data were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis and two themes provide compelling evidence of learning during YGAP as identity change processes. Participants’ commonalities and differences enhanced activist identities with global awareness. Simultaneously, new knowledge, passion, hope and connection to a global activist community created collective empowerment.

     

Pedagogy,empowerment and discipline: comparative perspectives of novice teachers in England and Turkey reflecting on ‘the other’

This article discusses the views of Turkish and British novice teachers on pedagogy and pedagogical relationships with school students when confronted with the pedagogical practices of the ‘Other’ in particular policy contexts. Experiences of those practices were gained by novice teachers during an exchange visit for British and Turkish university students in the period 2008–2009. Data was collected through questionnaires and focus group interviews. Findings suggest that Turkish and British novice teachers initially constructed the ‘Other’ as very different from themselves. The views of members of both groups were heavily influenced by the cultural contexts in which they trained and worked. British novice teachers tended to take as axiomatic constructivist and inclusive approaches to pedagogy and the relevance to successful pedagogy of listening to students’ voices. Turkish novice teachers questioned both, many seeing control and dissemination of knowledge as central to pedagogy and student teacher relationships.     

Paulo Freire and ‘the need for a kind of education in hope’

This paper explores Paulo Freire’s philosophy of hope. This is significant because, for Freire, it was human hope that rendered education possible, necessary and necessarily political. Like other areas of his thought, however, his reading of hope contained ambiguities and contradictions, and the paper explores these by locating Freire’s thought in the wider context of the philosophy of hope. It focuses in particular on the divergent interpretations Freire provides regarding the objective and the experience of hope. It argues that many of the conflicting demands placed on the radical educator stem from the tensions and vagaries one finds within his philosophy. The paper concludes by discussing the wider significance of Freire in light of the discourse of ‘complex hope’ that is developing within educational studies.     

The moral in Paulo Freire’s educational work: What moral education can learn from Paulo Freire

The Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire had a great influence on theory and practice of education across the world. Freire presented his theory and work as educational and political, not as moral. In this article, the legacy of Paulo Freire will be analysed from a moral education perspective. Nine pedagogical principles will be presented and the changes he contributed in different academic disciplines will be analysed. We conclude that in particular, his focus on social justice, empowerment and transformation can make moral education more linked to society, and more part of a process of humanisation.