Co-constructing imaginative spaces: public art in pre-service teacher education

This documentary account explores the potential of public art pedagogy to co-construct imaginative spaces in pre-service teacher education. Based upon a collaborative venture between two professors and an arts-based educational organization, the present article describes and analyzes key features and relations that were influential in transforming the response of a resistant professor and students. Using arts-based educational research methodology, this research finds that at least five thematic ingredients were influential in designing an education event with public art that promoted the generation of imaginative inquiry in teacher education: a base of trust; a naturalistic encounter; the choice to “shake-it-up”; a jolt of awareness; and a longer shelf-life. Strategies and insights for furthering the integration of public art into pre-service teacher education are included.     

Personal Grooming and Outward Appearance in Early Muslim Societies

Past Muslim Societies have placed much importance on the outward appearance and personal grooming of both men and women based on the assumption that both physical attributes and clothing and adornment are benevolence God showers upon the believers. This is reflected in Medieval Muslim legal texts which provide much information regarding clothing, adornment and grooming. Along with shaping legal norms, those sources also contain discussion and response to a changing reality. This is a demonstration of the desirable and the existing alike and a reflection of a relationship of dependency and influence between reality and the written legal texts. The discussion of these sources shows that past Muslim societies, like many others, used the importance of the outward appearance as a means to determining social relationship in general and hierarchical gender-based relations specifically. For themselves men have decided that fostering their outward appearance and keeping the rules of hygiene are fulfilment of God's wishes, but women are ordered to do so for two different reasons integrating belief in God and a patriarchal world view: becoming attractive to men and fulfilling their sexual destiny as this is the patriarch wish. At the same time it is important to mention that both men and women attend to their outward appearance for additional reasons, such as the wish to show their socio-economic status and power.     

Habermas's "Theory of Communicative Action" and Siebren Miedema, Part One: The Ideological Context for Intellectual Appropriation

This essay is the first of a two part analysis that focuses on Siebren Miedema's application of Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action to critical pedagogy and action research. Part One clarifies the distinctive elements of critical theory and method, identifies the central debates over Habermas's universal pragmatics and discourse ethics and sets the stage for a theoretical and methodological critique in Part Two. Siebren Miedema's formulation of Habermas's theory of communicative action demonstrates one particular strategy for the theoretical appropriation of critical theory. The author argues that Miedema's conception of a separate mode of action, called pedagogical action, exemplifies an inadequate understanding of the modes of action distinguished by Habermas. Although the author sympathizes with Miedema's call to apply Habermas's insights to the pedagogical realm, he concludes that Miedema's approach would drastically limit the theory's critical potential and he calls for pedagogical elaborations to be consistent with Habermas's critical theory and method.