Grace and Dorothy: Collisions of Femininity and Physical Activity in Two Early Twentieth-Century Book Series for Girls

Dorothy Dixon and Grace Harlowe, featured characters of two early twentieth-century book series for girls, were initially represented as skilled, confident young women negotiating femininity through traditionally masculine adventures. As each series developed, the nature of their active participation diminished. These adventure stories may be interpreted as symbols of feminine resistance to cultural assumptions of masculine superiority in skilled physical activity. I argue that these female characters support, through their continuous iterations of femininity, the ideological attribution of maleness to physical skill and adventure.     

Liquid subjects: news media and public political pedagogy

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between news media and political education within consumer society. We argue that political education today needs to be understood as part of consumerism and media culture, in which individuals selectively expose themselves to and scrutinize various media representations not only of political issues, but also of political subjectivity and action. Individuals learn about how they might become political and act politically through their engagements with the news, in the context of the characteristics of liquid modernity, namely consumer culture, individualization, and choice. When examined through a lens of public pedagogy, political education becomes intertwined with consumer culture and the role of media in the education and socialization of political subjectivity. In this paper, we look at one example of the relationship between news and the education of political subjectivity by drawing from a larger research study, which examined the role of mainstream and alternative media in citizens’ political mobilization on climate change. We argue that news consumption is part of a public political pedagogy through which individuals negotiate becoming liquid subjects, that is, citizens who take a critical, monitorial, and individualistic consumer approach to becoming political and taking part in social change.     

In amongst the glitter and the squashed blueberries: crafting a collaborative lens for children’s literacy pedagogy in a community setting

ABSTRACT

In this article, we bring together relational arts practice (Kester, 2004) with collaborative ethnography (Campbell and Lassiter, 2015) in order to propose art not as a way of teaching children literacy, but as a lens to enable researchers and practitioners to view children’s literacies differently. Both relational arts practice and collaborative ethnography decentre researcher/artist expertise, providing an understanding that “knowing” is embodied, material and tacit (Ingold, 2013). This has led us to extend understandings of multimodal literacy to stress the embodied and situated nature of meaning making, viewed through a collaborative lens (Hackett, 2014a; Heydon and Rowsell, 2015; Kuby et al, 2015; Pahl and Pool, 2011). We illustrate this approach to researching literacy pedagogy by offering a series of “little” (Olsson, 2013) moments of place/body memory (Somerville, 2013), which emerged from our collaborative dialogic research at a series of den building events for families and their young children. Within our study, an arts practice lens offered a more situated, and entwined way of working that led to joint and blurred outcomes in relation to literacy pedagogy.     

Methodological Approaches to Comparing Pedagogical Innovations Using Technology

The study of educational innovations has become increasingly important in education research as many countries around the world have embarked on education reforms that aim to change both the goals and practices in education. There is also a general expectation that such innovations can be leveraged or supported by the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in the learning and teaching process. However, comparative studies of innovations are relatively rare. SITES M2, as an international comparative study of innovative pedagogical practices involving 28 participating systems, thus faced important methodological challenges the solution of which was no less an innovation in itself. This paper examines the methods of analysis used and the kind of research findings that resulted from the work of three research teams that had conducted comparisons of the case studies of innovation collected, including the work of the SITES M2 International Coordinating Centre (ICC). Even though all three studies attempted to examine similarities and differences across multiple case studies, the analysis conducted by the ICC looked for characterizations of the innovations while the other two studies developed meaningful ways to compare the cases in terms of levels of innovation across a number of dimensions. In discussing the methodological differences across these studies, this paper pays special attention to how one could compare different innovations in terms of their levels or extents of innovation and what such comparisons may contribute to our learning from technology-supported education innovations.     

Thackeray’ s view of women reflected in Vanity Fair

In Vanity Fair Thackeray clearly demonstrated his view of women through the characterization of the two main female figures.In Thackeray’ s opinion,Becky Sharp was a rebellious figure,the Victorian " adventuress",while Amelia was the traditional submissive Victorian woman," Angel in the House".Via the narrator’ s comments,the author expressed his own view of women.On the one hand,he approved of Becky’ s rebellion,self-consciousness,courage,self-reliance in times of adversity,and on the other hand disapproved of Amelia’ s weakness,passiveness.As victims of the patriarchal society,both of the women were accorded with much sympathy.     

Trauma narratives and nomos in teacher education

The present article draws on data from a three-year study of pedagogy in teacher education that attempts to disrupt normative structures of reading and being in the teacher education classroom. The author uses Bourdieu’s work to emphasize the ways in which academic fields become ruled by unspoken rules and practices – “nomos” – and demonstrates a use of trauma narratives in teacher education that can disrupt such unspoken rules and practices. The article challenges taken-for-granted assumptions in teacher education that students must be positioned as future teachers; that reading educational research and texts should be a priority; that writing assignments should be privileged; and that a cognitive approach to learning in teacher education should be privileged.     

A culturally relevant teaching course: Reflecting pre‐service teachers’ thinking

As professors of Culturally Relevant Teaching, we seek to expand pre‐service teachers’ understanding of cultures through critical examination of personal cultural backgrounds, as well as, of those diverse groups who historically have experienced oppression in US society and its educational system. We share the story of how we develop and implement the course, setting it in the context of our teaching for a social justice‐oriented teacher education program in a predominantly White, rural, state university college. We indicate the literature from which we developed the course content and its activities; we analyze pre‐service teachers’ awareness of their cultural identities; and, describe the implications of this knowledge for teaching as reflected in the cultural autobiographies and narratives pre‐service students write at the beginning and end of the course. We hope this study will be helpful to other multicultural educators implementing similar courses.     

Supervising the Teacher Education Practicum: A Self-Study with a Critical Friend

ABSTRACT

If the practicum is the most valued element of a teacher education program, how good is each teacher candidate’s learning and how well is it supported by the university supervisor? While most self-studies of teacher education practices focus on practices in the university classroom, this article reports an analysis of a supervisor’s practices, with special attention to underlying assumptions of the supervisor. Data permitted identification of patterns in the supervisor’s pedagogy and in teacher candidates’ responses to that pedagogy. The supervisor’s underlying assumptions and the contribution of conversations with a critical friend were identified. A table was constructed to contrast the assumptions in two stances toward supervision, one characterized as transmission and the other as interpretation. Conclusions emphasize the importance of listening to each candidate’s voice and including a metacognitive element in a supervisory conversation after a lesson observation.     

From western TESOL classrooms to home practice: a case study with two ‘privileged’ Saudi teachers

This article is located in the debates concerning the continued problems underlying the cultural politics of English-speaking Western countries’ Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) programmes and ‘Western’ pedagogies. It examines two Saudi TESOL teachers’ pedagogical enactments in their home teaching contexts after returning from their Western-based TESOL programmes. It aims to obtain insights into questions of knowledge construction, pedagogy and training in Western TESOL programmes and their impacts on these teachers’ teaching in Saudi settings. We argue that these teachers have never been passive in the entire process nor have they been naïve about the cultural politics of TESOL. They have appeared to proactively take advantage of being trained in the West to teach effectively and to appropriate their given privileged status in the home contexts. They have also appeared to do so with awareness and with a strong sense of agency. This very aspect of agency, as we argue, deserves substantial scholarly attention in future research. We also argue that to move beyond the mindset that positions periphery teachers at the receiving end of Western TESOL training and as the recipient of Western TESOL pedagogical experiments, it is no longer valid to assume the enlightening and educating role of such training.     

Corporal punishment and the pain provoked by the community of enquiry pedagogy in the university classroom

Abstract

Education for transformation and social justice calls for critical, reflective, imaginative and independent thinkers with enquiring minds and a strong sense of curiosity – the ends and means of what Jonathan Jansen calls a ‘pedagogy to disrupt’ and Gert Biesta a ‘pedagogy of interruption’. For this reason, I introduced an innovative pedagogy in some of my courses at the School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg – the internationally established ‘community of enquiry’ pedagogy. I report on how in an Ethics course the pedagogy opened up a space for undergraduate students to disclose their own experiences of corporal punishment in the schools where they were placed for teaching practice. The pedagogy made room for a critical incident to emerge that was painful for both tutors and students, but, as I argue, crucial for participation, inclusion and the demands of open-mindedness, critical thinking and also solidarity required in a deliberative democracy.