Educational States of Suspension

In response to the growing emphasis on learning outcomes, life-long learning, and what could be called the learning society, scholars are turning to alternative educational logics that problematize the reduction of education to learning. In this article, we draw on these critics but also extend their thinking in two ways. First, we use Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze to posit two educational logics—tinkering and hacking, respectively—that suspend and render inoperative learning logics, expectations, and evaluative metrics. Second, we argue that contemporary artists and designers such as Katerina Kamprani and Grupo de Arte Callejero have much to offer educational philosophers and theorists interested in practices of suspension. In conclusion, we suggest ways in which educators can tinker with and hack into the curriculum by playing with the quintessential embodiment of learning: the test.     

Imported or Important Theory? Sociological interrogations of disablement and special education

Drawing from sociologies of disablement this discussion affirms the importance of such theorising for identifying the epistemological basis, and therefore the implications for policy and practice, of special education. The discussion is both timely and necessary as professional resilience reinvents special education as consistent with inclusive education. This has been achieved through linguistic adjustments which eschew challenges to underlying assumptions about difference and schooling. Unless a sociological analysis is applied to educational practices to frame inclusive education as a project in cultural politics, special educational theory will reduce inclusive education to the functionalist endeavour of assimilation. This paper extends the discussion with Clark, Dyson, Millward and Skidmore (1995) to suggest that applying sociology to special educational needs is not an importation of theory to force intellectual closure by reducing educational complexities. Rather, sociologies of disability expose exclusions as mediated through curriculum, pedagogy and organisational practices to extend the possibilities for generating inclusive educational cultures.     

Destination unknown: An exploratory study of full-time faculty off the tenure track

The source of data in this study is the 1989 National Survey of Faculty by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.     

Through the Gateway: ten years after

Before the Open University opened in 1971, an ambitious multi‐media pilot course was mounted by the BBC in collaboration with the National Extension College, including a preparatory course in social sciences, Man in Society. A group of students who enrolled for this course in 1970 were contacted by their tutor ten years later and asked to complete a questionnaire about their lives since 1970 and their views on the course. This article outlines their responses and discusses their relatively high level of educational qualifications, their ambitions in 1970 and the extent to which these have been realised, and their views of the various elements of the course. Radio and television were found to be the least useful components of the package and reasons are suggested for this. NEC's 1981 course, Preparing for Social Science, is discussed and differences from its predecessor described.