Post-structuralism and Marxism: education as knowledge capitalism

This paper argues for ‘post-structural Marxisms’ as the pedagogical practice of reading and rereading Marx in a critical manner. It is less concerned to give an account of social class or of the changing historical relevance of this concept in relation to education than to argue for the continued relevance of Marx and Marxism, especially in relation to what shall be called ‘knowledge capitalism’. First, the paper briefly discusses the concept of the social in the post-modern condition before reviewing the relations between post-structuralism and Marxism, and giving responses to the crisis of Marxism. Post-structuralism, it is argued, is neither anti-structuralist nor anti-Marxist. Secondly, the paper provides an account of Deleuze's Marxism (libidinal materialism), using it to analyse education as a form of ‘knowledge capitalism’.     

The problem of large classes in science: An experiment in co‐operative learning

After reviewing the uses made of concept maps in research, as an aid to instruction and as a form of assessment, the problems of scoring maps objectively are discussed. Maps created de novo by 15‐16 year‐old pupils, before and after their introduction to Mendelian genetics, are used to investigate the properties of a scoring system based on that developed by Novak et al. (1983). The maps have been scored separately for a number of features ('branching’, ‘general to specific’, ‘closed units’, ‘terminology’, ‘relationships’ and ‘ hierarchy ‘) and compared with performance on genetics examination‐type questions. The components are not all independent, and do not have strong relationships with performance. The limitations of analytic methods of scoring concept maps are discussed.     

The making of a moral British Bangladeshi

This article traces changing notions of a moral upbringing among British Bangladesh families in London. It reviews ideas of the making of a moral person (manush corano) in Bangladesh and contrasts those with contemporary practices and ideas about the good child in London. It argues that in London, British Bangladeshis have embraced a form of Islam that for them represents progress on the ‘Bengali culture’ that they have left behind and the ‘Western modernity’ that they live amongst, it is a third way. For British Bangladeshi children this involves socialisation into a global Muslim community (umma) and an Islamist interpretation of Islam. Learning to recite the Qur’an correctly (tajweed) is an important manifestation of the third way.     

Competitive Sport,Winning and Education

Abstract

Competition in education, school sport in particular, remains a controversial issue. The author recognizes that competition is a contested concept and examines both the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ critiques against the moral desirability of having competitive sport as a part of the compulsory curriculum. The questions of selfishness and of winning are discussed, before the role of the teacher is examined. The author concludes that competitive sport is not per se a form of mis‐education. It can be rather, if taught with understanding and skill, a form of education in which moral values are not only inherently demanded but are encouraged in practice.     

In-betweenness in moving images: six experimental tactics of video-ethnography to narrate South Asian immigrant girls’ subjectivities

ABSTRACT

After exploring the interactions between moving image-based art practices and anthropology in recent decades, and the permeable membranes in ethnographic research, we will describe six tactics of video-ethnography used to create experimental narratives with a group of South Asian immigrant girls. Positioned in feminist critical poststructuralism, postcolonial theory and film theory, the research gives visibility to how the participants construct their identities when attending secondary school in Catalonia. Learning from artists like Ursula Biemann and Trinh T. Minh-ha, we have experimented with visual modes of producing cultural knowledge, with the aim of narrating migrant subjectivities and difference through moving images. Specifically, we focus on the production of stories through video-ethnographic research, based on the contributions of Michel de Certeau, who describes tactics as mobile, situated and fluid. In the end, this video-ethnographic research has experimented with reflexivity, ‘facing’, re-framing, in-betweenness, the interval, and spectatorship as tactics of narrating ‘otherness’     

Don’t we care?: the ethics and emotional labour of early years professionalism

This paper argues that early childhood education and care (ECEC) has a legitimate aspiration to be a ‘caring profession’ like others such as nursing or social work, defined by a moral purpose. For example, practitioners often draw on an ethic of care as evidence of their professionalism. However, the discourse of professionalism in England completely excludes the ethical vocabulary of care. Nevertheless, it necessarily depends on gendered dispositions towards emotional labour, often promoted by training programmes as ‘professional’ demeanours. Taking control of the professionalisation agenda therefore requires practitioners to demonstrate a critical understanding of their practice as ‘emotion work’. At the same time, reconceptualising practice within a political ethic of care may allow the workforce, and new trainees in particular, to champion ‘caring’ as a sustainable element of professional work, expressed not only in maternal, dyadic key‐working but in advocacy for care as a social principle.     

Maternal Attribution and Chinese Immigrant Children’s Social Skills: The Mediating Role of Authoritative Parenting Practices

SYNOPSIS

Objective . This study explores the contributions of Chinese immigrant mothers’ parenting cognitions and parenting practices to their children’s social skills. Design . We used a cross-sectional design to examine the mediating role of authoritative parenting in associations between Chinese immigrant mothers’ parenting attributions and their children’s social skills. Chinese immigrant mothers (N = 208, M _age = 37.36 years) reported their attributions regarding successes and failures in their daily caregiving experiences, authoritative parenting practices, and demographic information. Their preschool children’s (M _age = 4.51 years, 46.2% females) social skills in school were rated by their teachers. Results . Maternal attributions of successful events to uncontrollable causes and unsuccessful events to controllable causes were associated with more authoritative parenting. In turn, more authoritative parenting was associated with more competent social skills in children. In contrast, maternal attributions of successful events to controllable causes and unsuccessful events to uncontrollable causes were associated with less authoritative parenting, which in turn was associated with poorer social skills in children. Conclusions . Promoting Chinese immigrant mothers’ attributions that preserve positive efficacy during daily parenting tasks may enhance their engagement in warm, autonomy-promoting and regulatory parenting, which in turn may facilitate their children’s social skills.     

Moral spaces,the struggle for an intergenerational environmental ethics and the social ecology of families: an ‘other’ form of environmental education

‘Green families’ in Australia were studied so as to shed light on how a more durable, everyday environmental ethic and ecopolitic might slowly be enacted in the intimacy of the home ‘place’ over an extended period of time in rapidly changing socio‐cultural‐ecological conditions. Of particular interest to this study of the green household, or postmodern oikos, was how its proximal ‘moral spaces’ have been nurtured intergenerationally by family members from within the broader global climate of what Zygmunt Bauman refers to as the ‘moral lag’ of postmodernity. Three layers of interpretive findings about the social ecology and family dynamics of this oikos are presented in an effort to provide detailed understandings about families’ eco being, dwelling and becoming. Implications for education for the environment can be gleaned from the ‘best’ ecopedagogical practices found in the home that are ‘other’ than those occurring in the formal education sector. This study adds to the theorizations of ‘social ecology’, ‘experiential education’, ‘ecopedagogy’ and, more generally, the notion of an everyday ‘ecocentrism’, while providing some clues for how environmental education in schools might mirror pedagogical aspects of the postmodern oikos.     

‘It really hurts and it is bullying’: moral learning as political practice

Through socio-cultural analysis of the discourse of bullying, the present article aims to show that moral learning is less about teaching children the difference between right and wrong and more about making available to them what Tappan and Wertsch describe as the mediational means to engage in their own moral learning. Bullying is explained in Bakhtinian terms as a form of ‘authoritative discourse’. Both moral education and manipulative adolescent bullying are presented as, in a broad sense, forms of political practice. The same 13-year-old girl was recorded as she talked with peer ‘counsellors’ about her own bullying and then a fortnight later in the course of directing and featuring in a tutor-group video which aimed to introduce younger pupils to their new school. Through the inter-animation of social voices, new moral ideas are appropriated by the participants. In a succession of ‘zones of proximal development’, students support and ‘scaffold’ each other’s thinking in their progression towards changed levels of moral awareness.     

Folded Files,Unfolding Narratives: Psycho-Pedagogical Observation in the Belgian Juvenile Reformatories, 1912–1945.

ABSTRACT

The establishment of the Central Observation Institute in Mol in 1913 marks the introduction of scientific expertise in Belgium’s youth delinquency policy. The child at risk was subjected to a series of observations, resulting in an observation report (‘waarnemingsverslag’) that contained the psychological, moral and physical characteristics of the delinquent child, and suggested strategies for its re-education. This article focuses foremost on the technologies of observation in the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to earlier research, the observation report is not used as a ‘key to the past’ but the article aims to historicise the observation report in its own right. Using M’charek’s concept of ‘folded object’, the process of truth being created in the observation report is discussed, paying attention to the various actors at work in the reformatory and examining the dynamic relationships between the observation institution and the juvenile reformatories in the production and use of observation files.     

Morality in parents’ stories of preschool choice: narrating identity positions of good parenting

This article aims to contribute to our understanding of how moral aspects of parents’ choices of preschool play a part in the processes of marketisation and privatisation of childcare in Sweden. The paper explores parents’ narratives of preschool choice as moral claims of parental identities. The analysed data are based on a study of how parents make sense of their preschool choice during life-story interviews. Our results point out good parenting as having to do with making distinctions between what is ‘good and bad’ and ‘right and wrong’ regardless of whether the choices concern preschools or the behaviour of preschool teachers and parents. Culturally available discourses become visible through the making of these distinctions in ways that ultimately point to the subject position of parents as particular choosers as related to a prevailing discourse of parental responsibility.     

Business as un-usual through dislocatory moments – change for sustainability and scope for subjectivity in classroom practice

This paper makes a contribution to the debate that has been described as a tension between instrumental and emancipatory educational objectives in environment and sustainability education. The contribution involves a methodological approach (introd-) using the concept ‘dislocatory moments’, to identify and analyse moments in classroom practice that address educational objectives relating to ‘change for sustainability’ and ‘thinking and acting independently’. A case of business education, when ‘sustainable development’ is integrated in a series of lessons, is used to exemplify the approach involving analysis of the emergence and closure of a dislocatory moment and the change of logics that occur. The illustrative case shows how room for subjectivity and change can be intertwined in educational practice. It is suggested that the methodological approach could be used in empirical research of classroom practice to further knowledge about the kind of situations that contribute to ‘business as un-usual’ without compromising emancipatory education ideals.     

NAPCE Newsletter

It is Jeremy Henzell-Thomas's conviction that the contemporary preoccupation with the so-called ‘clash of civilizations’ is as ill-founded as it is unhelpful. The assumption of an adversarial stance to which it leads is fuelled by, and affirms, a polarized thinking which does disservice to fundamental truths about unity and diversity. Drawing on theology and philosophy, he examines the etymology of key words –‘identity’, ‘authenticity’, ‘originality’, ‘fitra’ (nature) – to argue for the need to transcend difference in order to achieve (universal) identity. ‘We share a common identity as human beings, and, beyond that, a common origin within the source of Creation.’ If we are to honour the spiritual needs of young people and provide an education which is genuinely holistic, we need teachers who are prepared to listen to what young people are saying and to enter into a relationship with them that goes beyond the personal, the social and the moral.     

Literature‐informed,one‐turn action research: three cases and a commentary

Although action research is a common feature of courses of initial teacher training, the evidence as to its efficacy, in encouraging reflection among trainees, is mixed. This article discusses cases of action research assignments carried out by three trainees into their own practice in relation to (a) behaviour management, (b) monitoring and assessing, and (c) pupil‐centred education. The assignments are analysed using Bloom et al's. (1964) typology of thinking skills, Handal & Lauvas's (1987) model of reflective practice, and typologies of action research by Noffke (1997) and Rearick and Feldman (1999). They are positioned as cases of ‘literature‐informed, one‐turn’ action research; a concept which is discussed in relation to other concepts of action research.     

Bakhtinian Dialogic and Vygotskian Dialectic: Compatabilities and contradictions in the classroom?

Abstract

This article explores two central notions of ‘dialectics’ and ‘dialogics’ based on the work of Vygotsky (drawing on philosophers such as Hegel, Spinoza, Engels and Marx) and Bakhtin (drawing on members of the Bakhtin Circle and writers such as Dostoevsky and Rabelais) respectively, as well their varying interanimations within Stalin-Marxist Russian societyIt is proposed that these two positions are incommensurably located alongside one another in contemporary education. I argue that Bakhtin offers diametrically oppositional educational provocations to those of Vygotsky.The implications of these interpretations will be explored with consideration of their underlying philosophical incompatibilities and contradictions, as well as the opportunities such a consideration pose for educational practice today.     

Located in the thin of it: Young children’s use of thin moral concepts

One important socio-cultural medium through which young children’s moral understanding is cultivated is parent/child discourse. Of particular interest to us was young children’s use of basic (‘thin’) evaluative concepts (good, bad, right and wrong), which are ubiquitous in everyday discourse and serve as a potential bridge from the non-moral to the moral domain. We investigated 14 2–5-year-old children’s (and their parents’) use of thin evaluative concepts and found that while they frequently used good and bad to morally evaluate other people’s and their own psychological/dispositional states and behaviors—as well as, less frequently, to highlight relevant standards, expectations and rules—they did not use right and wrong. In contrast, a sample of US written and spoken public conversation revealed that adults did. Reasons for this are discussed, along with the frequency of different types of moral evaluations, differences between children and their parents, and age-related trends.     

The poverty of contractarian moral education

ABSTRACT

In A Theory of Moral Education, Michael Hand claims that a directive moral education that seeks to persuade children that a particular conception of contractarian morality is justified can be undertaken without falling foul of the requirement not to indoctrinate. In this article, we set out a series of challenges to Hand’s argument. First, we argue that Hand’s focus on ‘reasonable disagreement’ regarding the status of a moral conception is a red-herring. Second, we argue that the endorsement of moral contractarianism and the prohibition on indoctrination pull in different directions: if contractarianism is sound, then teachers or governments should be less worried about indoctrination than Hand suggests. Third, we argue that moral contractarianism is mistaken; teachers should look elsewhere for guidance on the moral norms and principles towards which they should direct their pupils.     

Conversing on ethics,morality and education

In philosophical use, ‘ethics’ and ‘moral philosophy’ are more closely synonymous—one deriving from Greek, ethikē and the other from Latin moralis. In typical social science paradigms, there generally prevails a consensual sense of contemporary everyday use of ethics, except where earlier usage sustains discourse in terms of morals—as with moral psychology. This article takes a recent publication in this journal by Patrick Welch to propose a ‘conversation’ between theoretic and empirical approaches to ethics and morals. This is illustrated using works by Joseph Ratzinger to suggest a natural law approach that brings together premises and empirics in ethical and moral discourse and action. This kind of integration helps the discovery and owning of truth that is ‘not of one’s own making’. Such a synthetic approach is especially relevant to raising student identity with ethical/moral issues and in assisting their building of psychological structures and processes that support education in ethical/moral reasoning and action.     

Money versus the soul: neoliberal economics in the education modernisation reform in post-soviet Russia

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the case of Russia’s post-Soviet education reform, the paper explores the interaction between borrowed reformatory solutions and culture codes in the process of neoliberal educational modernisation. Through the examination of the concept of ‘commercial service’ the article shows how bottom-up societal resistance is maintained and normalised in the real-life language of the reform debate among policy-makers, teachers, parents and the general public. Building on policy-as-discourse studies, the analysis unpacks specific conceptual frames behind societal interpretation of educational commercialisation. The article finds that the public debate is stalled by an extreme polarisation and a seeming intractability of such conceptual categories as ‘money’, ‘commerce’, ‘moral upbringing’, and ‘the soul.’ It further argues that instead of mediating borrowed and domestic social meanings, the official reform narrative serves to strengthen the polarisation of opinions, while leaving under-conceptualised a number of important links between market values of competitive individualism, material profit and entrepreneurship and domestic values of egalitarianism, collegiality, moral education and non-materialist values. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of the state in transmitting borrowed policy ideas to the public and the interplay between grassroots resistance and national education policies.