The pedagogy of saneness: a schizoaffective storying of resisting sane pedagogy

This article is an autoethnographic account of a ‘schizoaffective’ sufferer learning about and navigating the environs of saneness as a graduate student resisting traditional sane pedagogic structures. Culling from theories found in adult education, Whiteness Studies, and Mad Studies to show that saneness can be conceptualized as a site of critical pedagogy, the author narrates numerous ways in which saneness is embedded in schools and society. In addition, he describes how sane performativity is taught and made educational by inducting a new notion into educational studies: the pedagogy of saneness.     

The Gateway Science Workshop Program: Enhancing Student Performance and Retention in the Sciences Through Peer-Facilitated Discussion

Minority student attrition and underachievement is a long-standing and widespread concern in higher education. It is especially acute in introductory science courses which are prerequisites for students planning to pursue science-related careers. Poor performance in these courses often results in attrition of minorities from the science fields. This is a particular concern at selective universities where minority students enter with excellent academic credentials but receive lower average grades and have lower retention rates than majority students with similar credentials. This paper reports the first year results of a large scale peer-facilitated workshop program designed to increase performance and retention in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics at a selective research university. After adjusting for grade point average or SAT-Math score, workshop participants earned higher final grades than nonparticipants in Biology and Chemistry, but not in Physics. Similar effects on retention were found. While, positive effects of the program were observed in both majority and minority students, effect sizes were generally largest for minority students. Because of practical constraints in Physics, implementation of the program was not optimal, possibly accounting for the differential success of the program across disciplines.     

Use of Computer-Mediated Communication in a Teaching Practicum Course

This study investigates how Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) can be effectively used in a teaching practicum course to enhance preservice teachers learning. We constructed a web-based CMC system and used it in a Teaching Practicum course. Computer science preservice teachers and experienced secondary school computer teachers, who served as mentors, participated in the study. The research findings indicate that the preservice teachers considered the CMC system helpful for supporting their learning. The findings also indicate that some initiating/follow-up discussion styles of the mentors were more effective than others in promoting interactions in the discussion forum. It was also found that a teaching-video-enhanced CMC environment is valuable in improving quality of mentoring and in increasing preservice teachers reflection on teaching.     

Computer adaptive testing,big data and algorithmic approaches to education

This article critically considers the promise of computer adaptive testing (CAT) and digital data to provide better and quicker data that will improve the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of schooling. In particular, it uses the case of the Australian NAPLAN test that will become an online, adaptive test from 2016. The article argues that CATs are specific examples of technological ensembles which are producing, and working through, new subjectivities. In particular, CATs leverage opportunities for big data and algorithmic approaches to education that are symptomatic of what Deleuze saw as the shift from disciplinary to control institutions and societies.     

Yesterday’s conservationists: how were they educated about the outdoors and the environment?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of early-life educational experiences on the development of environmental attitudes among historical conservation individuals. Five key individuals who were active in conservation and environmental issues were identified in this study. Specifically, the goal was to discover what caused conservation and environmental ideals and behaviors among the historical figures chosen for this study. The factors found to be consistent in influencing the environmental attitudes of historical environmental/conservation scholars are interaction with nature (alone or with friends), family and education (reading).     

Lazy multiculturalism: cultural essentialism and the persistence of the Multicultural Day in Australian schools

ABSTRACT

Multicultural Days are a regular event in Australian schools. While they are viewed as a vehicle for cultural inclusion and strengthening community, they have long been critiqued for their avoidance of a more critical engagement with deeper issues around cultural complexity. The intent of this paper is not simply to add to this critique but to understand why such forms of lazy multiculturalism persist in schools. Taking an ethnographic orientation to the field of multicultural education, it examines one school's approach to the Multicultural Day. The paper considers how, despite engaging in professional learning designed to challenge established practice in this area, teachers resisted the intellectual task of doing diversity differently. The ethnographic methods used in the study not only allowed for an examination of the practices this school engaged in, they drew attention to how teachers might modify their practice and develop a deeper understanding of cultural complexity.     

Datafication,testing events and the outside of thought

Education is undergoing various transformations due to new data-driven educational technologies and the management of educational data through data infrastructures. These technologies are frequently promoted to parents and the profession as being ‘revolutionary’ because they represent a new generation of learning. While computer adaptive tests may arguably improve various efficiencies, the argument that they will revolutionise education requires evaluation. In this paper we draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to theorise (a) the desire for data amongst policymakers and (b) the effects of data infrastructures as systems that coordinate educational thought. We argue that, rather than revolutionising learning as promised, datafication in computer-based modes merely offers more intense expressions of longstanding possibilities for learning. We describe three types of events—breaks, cracks and ruptures—and argue that data-events translate cracks (imperceptible changes that constitute learning) into breaks (information), but either cannot generate rupture (difference) or represent rupture as error. However, the intensification of learning through datafication may, we suggest, rupture educational thought more broadly.     

‘What Do You Read,My Lord?’ Oral and Silent Reading in Shakespeare’s Plays

ABSTRACT

There are many references to reading, and some to writing, in Shakespeare’s plays; a list is provided in an Appendix. They are analysed for what they reveal about the social status of literacy in Shakespeare’s day, and the references to reading are analysed further according to oral v. silent reading, and whether characters have company on stage, or are (or believe themselves to be) alone. Only a few characters are depicted as illiterate, sometimes for comic effect, more often for purposes of the plot. All persons of rank, and most others, are depicted as literate. It seems that in Shakespeare’s time, even among the highly educated, the practice of oral reading for varied purposes, even when alone, was still alive. One effect was, serendipitously, to give Shakespeare the freedom to manipulate reading practices plausibly, and brilliantly, for his own purposes.     

Introduction

This paper conceptualises think tanks and edu-businesses in relation to education policy work in the Australian polity. It situates the enhanced influence of both in relation to the restructured state, which has lost some key capacities in relation to the generation of research and ideas for policy. This restructuring has been strongly influenced by the techniques of new public management, the auditing of education through national and international testing and new forms of network governance, which have opened up spaces for the increased influence of think tanks and edu-businesses across the policy cycle in education. We see here the workings of a ‘polycentric state’. The paper also considers changing concepts of ‘evidence’, ‘expertise’ and ‘influence’ in respect of the involvement of think tanks and edu-businesses in circulating policy ideas and affecting policy development in Australian education. This introduction to this special issue of The Australian Educational Researcher serves as a provocation to further research on this new policy scenario.