Pedagogy of the anxious: rethinking critical pedagogy in the context of neoliberal autonomy and responsibilization

Critical pedagogy, and the work of Paulo Freire in particular, understands the struggle for emancipation as involving the emergence, as historical subjects, of those who have been marginalized. In this regard, this tradition could be said to foreground a politics of the subject as central to its philosophy. However, scholars of critical pedagogy have not adequately attended to the reorganization of subjectivity that neoliberalism itself proposes. In the context of a pervasive anxiety produced by contemporary processes of precarity and fragmentation, neoliberalism asks us to understand ourselves on the basis of principles of individual responsibility, autonomy, and competition. Starting from the Foucauldian notion of governmentality and the Lacanian notions of drive and desire, I describe how this neoliberal recomposition of the subject poses a challenge to key principles in critical pedagogy. Thus, Freire’s account of the paralysis that characterizes the oppressed stands in contrast to the particular autonomy and hypermobility that neoliberalism demands. Likewise, the privileging of the sphere of consciousness in Freire overlooks the structure of libidinal investments within neoliberal circuits of consumption and communication. This interrogation has implications for critical education in the present, which I argue should invite students to betray the compulsions of their anxious autonomy in favor of a collective commitment and enlivened agency.     

Long-term impacts of two secondary school environmental studies programs on environmental behaviour: the shadows of patriarchy and neoliberalism

Abstract

A survey of alumni of two longstanding interdisciplinary secondary school environmental studies programs revealed that the vast majority of alumni reported being engaged in pro-environmental behaviours, which they attributed to participation in the programs five to twenty-three years prior. That finding in itself is worth sharing. Digging deeper, however, revealed that most reported behaviours were in the private rather than public sphere. Women alumni reported engaging in more household and marketplace-oriented behaviours. Further, a small number of men from the rural school expressed hostility towards environmental concerns using aggressively sexist and homophobic discourse. A feminist analysis takes into account structural forces such as patriarchy and neoliberalism to interpret the findings and illuminates gendered dimensions of pro- and anti-environmental behaviours.     

Performance power: the impact of neoliberalism on social justice educators’ ways of speaking about their educational practice

ABSTRACT

Few studies have attended to the specific influence of neoliberalism on education for social justice, despite the complex ways in which the competing discourses of neoliberalism and social justice work side by side in local educational settings. This article reports data derived from interviews with 28 educators committed to social justice education from across Ontario, Canada. Participants were asked how they perceived the impact of neoliberalism on education and on their teaching practice. Findings were interpreted through critical democratic theory and discourse analysis. An unanticipated finding is the influence of neoliberal discourse on the ways that educators spoke about their teaching practice for social justice. The study found that discourse of performance is one arena where competing discourses of neoliberalism and social justice not only coexist but also intersect. This finding has important implications for the transformative potential of social justice education through more concentrated attention to the power embedded in everyday speech acts. Attending more to the performative potential of neoliberal discourse toward social justice ends can be a mechanism for resistance and teacher agency.     

培养道德生活主体:21世纪道德教育改革之本

现行道德教育与社会发展的诸多不适应 ,根本问题在于道德教育主体性价值的丧失。 2 1世纪道德教育改革的本质在于培养道德生活主体 ,这是由道德的内在规律、人类发展的历史必然、社会主义建设的现实需要以及对我国道德教育的总体反思决定的。道德生活主体应具备四个基本特征——为我性、自主性、能动性和创造性。道德教育改革的基本思路即唤起个体的自我意识 ,尊重个体的主体地位 ,发展个体的主体能力以及塑造个体的主体人格 ,旨在最终实现道德教育科学化和人性化的统一     

离退休人员不良心态的自我调适与社会救济

良好心态是老年人享受幸福生活的决定因素,全社会要形成全面关心老年人的社会风气;社会各界、各团体及老年工作者要学会参与对老年群体、个体心理和心态的调查研充;要针对老年人的不同心态,用不同的方法,做好转换不良心态的过细工作．让老年群众真正过上幸福生活。     

More than words in a text: learning to conduct qualitative research in the midst of a major life event

The process of becoming a qualitative researcher is fraught with challenges that are not always knowable prior to engaging in research. Coursework, reading, discussions, and writing about the process provide a foundation but cannot replace the experiential value of engaging in research. This autobiographical intrinsic case study describes the author’s first attempt conducting qualitative research as a doctoral student documenting additional challenges after the participant, my mother, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Using document analysis, I chronicled and made meaning of this first experience, especially how my relationship with the participant impacted my understanding and applying the concepts of rapport, reflexivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity.     

School leadership for equity: lessons from the literature

Responding to Thrupp's [2003. “The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism.” School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 23 (2): 169] call for writers on school leadership to offer ‘analyses which provide more critical messages about social inequality and neoliberal and managerialist policies’ we use Foucault's [2000. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Power, edited by J. D. Faubion, 326–348. London: Penguin Books] theory of power to ask what lessons we might learn from the literature on school leadership for equity. We begin by offering a definition of neoliberalism; new managerialism; leadership and equity, with the aim of revealing the relationship between the macropolitical discourse of neoliberalism and the actions of school leaders in the micropolitical arena of schools. In so doing, we examine some of the literature on school leadership for equity that post-dates Thrupp's [2003. “The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism.” School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 23 (2): 149–172] analysis, seeking evidence of critical engagement with/resistance to neoliberal policy. We identify three approaches to leadership for equity that have been used to enhance equity in schools internationally: (i) critical reflection; (ii) the cultivation of a ‘common vision’ of equity and (iii) ‘transforming dialogue’. We consider if such initiatives avoid the hegemonic trap of neoliberalism, which captures and disarms would be opponents of new managerial policy. We conclude by arguing that, in spite of the dominance of neoliberalism, head teachers have the power to speak up, and speak out, against social injustice.     

(Re)igniting a sociological imagination in adult education: the continuing relevance of classical theory

This article argues that sociology has been a foundational discipline for the field of adult education, but it has been largely implicit, until recently. This article contextualizes classical theories of sociology within contemporary critiques, reviews the historical roots of sociology and then briefly introduces the classical theories illustrating the continual presence of sociological thinking in the adult education field. Finally, it periodizes the lineage of the sociology of adult education, highlighting recent contributions. With 30 years of neoliberalism, social justice is eroding, authoritarianism is increasing and democracy—as the idea of a self-governing people deliberating issues of mutual concern in the public sphere—is further subordinated to the idea of society as an economy for exchanging goods and services. It is time to (re)ignite a sociological imagination among adult educators/learners, building on familiarity with both classical and contemporary sociology theories, more robust sociological analysis of the field and a (re)commitment to the historical principles of social justice and deep democracy. While international in focus, Canadian exemplars will be used.     

The processual life of neoliberalisation: permutations of value systems and normative commitments in a co-operative trust setting

ABSTRACT

Since 2010 the government in England has committed to accelerating the expansion of academies (‘state-funded independent schools’) through displacing the role of local government as principal manager and overseer of schools. In response increasing numbers of schools are embracing the co-operative trust model to improve economies of scale, facilitate stakeholding and community resilience and resist capture from the monopolising tendencies of some large multi-academy trusts seeking wholesale takeover of certain underperforming schools. Yet there are concerns that co-operative schools do not represent a radical departure from routines of neoliberalism – defined by managerial deference, technocratic efficiency, upward accountability and performativity – despite clear signs that co-operative schools promote themselves as jointly-owned, democratically-controlled enterprises. In this paper, I adopt a ‘processual view of neoliberalisation’ [Peck, J., and A. Tickell. 2002. “Neoliberalizing Space.” Antipode 34 (3): 380–404] to complicate the idea that co-operative schools can be judged in binary terms of ‘either/or’ – neoliberal or democratic, exclusionary or participatory – and instead point to the variegated organisational life of co-operative schools and their messy actualities as they straddle competing and sometimes conflicting sets of interests, motives and demands in their practice of school governance.     

Learning for an unknown context: a comparative case study on some Swedish and Polish Political Science students' experiences of the transition from university to working life

This comparative small‐scale (Swedish and Polish sample) longitudinal qualitative study investigates political science students' conceptions of their studies, their future profession and their workplace learning. The students (10 in Sweden and 11 in Poland) were interviewed twice, first when they were at the end of their studies and a second time when they had worked for approximately one year. The questions asked were designed to try to understand the transition from higher education to work life. The results indicate that they bring with them a set of academic generic skills from their education when they enter working life. Furthermore, the students in the two countries have very different perceptions of the subject Political Science, and the expectations they have regarding their studies and future working life also differ considerably.     

Effects from audit culture and neoliberalism on university teaching: an autoethnographic perspective

Spanish university culture revolves mainly around the evaluation of professionals on the basis of the amount of work published in high-impact journals (weight assessments). The paper is shaped as an autoethnography, focusing mainly on the author’s life at university. Data collection and analysis set off from 2011, during the lecturer’s first year of working at university. The research aims principally at reflecting upon the highly demanding processes undergone by a lecturer, which might have a negative impact on other personal and professional domains. However, we also seek to show the weaknesses of the accreditation system as well as to consider the need to design a system that is able to put the emphasis back on the value of real academic work.     

ePortfolios and eGovernment: From technology to the entrepreneurial self

Abstract

We analyse the electronic portfolio (ePortfolio) in higher education policy and practice.While evangelical accounts of the ePortfolio celebrate its power as a new eLearning technology,we argue that it allows the mutually-reinforcing couple of neoliberalism and the enterprising self to function in ways in which individual difference can be presented, cultured and grown, all the time within a standardised framework which relentlessly polices the limits of the acceptable and unacceptable. We point to the ePortfolio as a practice of (self-) government, arguing that grander policy coalesces out of a halting, experimental set of technological instruments for thinking about how life should be lived.     

A day in the life (and death) of a public university

This is a narrative of an actual day in the author's working life at a large public university in the southern hemisphere. It is an enquiry into life, and death, at the university. It attempts to balance a critical and informed perspective with a lived perspective and, as a story that contributes to a developing genre of academic writing, it works to counter the dominant neo-liberal discourse in the university by reaffirming the value of the imagination. It reflects on a remarkable–unremarkable day to show the complexity of being an individual subject, situated in language, hailed by different discourses, feeling and sometimes thinking contradictory things at once, in a contemporary university context.     

Communists,Humboldtians, neoliberals and dissidents: or the path to a post-communist homo oeconomicus

The neoliberalisation of higher education in post-communist central and eastern Europe, the new EU member states, is not seen as being distinct. Implementation of the Bologna Process and Lisbon Strategy means it has become part of the competitive global sphere of higher education. The transformation of post-communist higher education has attracted little attention, but it is in fact an example of an unprecedented radical 25 year-long transformation: from centralised non-research-orientated communist policy to the radical autonomous Humboldtian environment that emerged after the fall of communism to a strong European neoliberalisation. This article highlights not only the gradual and unique nature of these processes but also shows how they have merged to form the current neoliberalist hybrid. Focusing primarily on former Czecho-Slovakia and the subsequent Slovak and Czech Republics, it details the education policy strategies and initiatives that have contributed to this process. By examining the new educational policy framework at a Slovak university, it shows how Humboldtian culture encountered neoliberal culture: a distinct feature of post-communist neoliberalisation. It is suggested that the Slovak and Czech implementation of neoliberalism has not proved immune to forms of governance similar to those found under communism; rather the two have fused together.     

寻找自我的历程——论托尼·莫里森《宠儿》中人物的主体性

《宠儿》揭示的一个重要主题：虽然主客体转变的过程荆棘丛生。然而经过一代又一代人的努力，美国黑人民族终将从奴隶制的阴影下走出，面对现在和未来。     

Refusing to settle for pigeons and parks: urban environmental education in the age of neoliberalism

The institutionalization of neoliberal reforms that began to take hold in the 1970s were by and large ‘common-sense governance’ by the 1990s. While the growing predominance of neoliberal discourse and marginalization of alternatives in environmental education is disconcerting on the level of policy, this paper explores an equally troubling phenomenon: the deepening of a neoliberal logic, such that it pervades the way we understand and relate with the world. Specifically, this paper draws upon an experience at a recent environmental education conference whereby participants were invited to explore three place-based inquiries inspired by Aldo Leopold in an urban environment: what is happening here? what has happened here? and what should happen here? Although the intention of the workshop was to explore some of the challenges involved in implementing a critical pedagogy of place, many of the participants seemed unwilling to criticize the way in which an urban downtown core suppresses the more-than-human aspects of place. We contend that environmental education is a key arena for debating the limits of neoliberalism and explore how these well-intentioned, but ultimately uncritical responses, run the risk of being appropriated by the ecologically destructive logic-informing neoliberal natures.