Minecraft and children’s digital making: implications for media literacy education

This article aims to contribute new knowledge about the media literacies children assemble as they play the digital game Minecraft which it describes as a children's digital making platform. The article argues media literacy's tendency to use socio-cultural and humanist accounts of media participation limit its ability to fully explain digital making practices. Socio-material and performative literacy theories are used to introduce a framework for exploring digital media literacies across four nodes: digital materials, media production, conceptual understanding and media analysis [Dezuanni, M. 2015.“The Building Blocks of Digital Media Literacy: Socio-material Participation and the Production of Media Knowledge.”Journal of Curriculum Studies 47 (3): 416–419]. The article's second half outlines how the author uses digital ethnography in his home to understand children's Minecraft digital making and the article's theoretical claims are explored using empirical data. The conclusion considers the ramifications of digital making for media literacy research and practice.     

A fragile autonomy in a performativity culture? Exploring positions in the recontextualising field in a Norwegian rural municipality

Internationally, the autonomy of schools and teachers is under pressure. In Norway, recent policies emphasise output control through national testing, combined with holding schools and teachers accountable for students’ results. Whereas recent research documents that the autonomy of schools and teachers is weakening in Oslo, there is little research on the rural parts of Norway. Recent political intentions aim to improve the results by establishing a better learning environment and classroom management. These intentions are related to the regulative discourse, ‘the rules of social order’, which is crucial to control as it dominates the instructional discourse. Two different projects were implemented in a rural municipality. Analysing their positions on three levels (author, actor and identity) this study finds considerable autonomy from the state in the pedagogic recontextualising field. However, this autonomy may be fragile as the teachers seem to have surrendered personal values. If teachers are disciplined, then the state may effectively reduce the potential discursive gap by reducing the autonomy of key agents in education. Investigating teachers’ rationalisations is imperative if we are to understand the relations between interests, ideology and class, and thereby the potential for autonomy in the recontextualising field in a performativity culture.     

The ethics of competition: accountability policy enactment in Chilean schools’ everyday life

ABSTRACT

Public policies have a moral order, an ethical horizon. They offer a vocabulary of imagined micro-policies. Using the case of Chile, this paper examines the ways in which accountability policies are reworked within schools and how they affect actors’ subjectivities. It adds new findings to the existing body of research on school accountability policies, offering in-depth evidence based on the case of Chile, which has a high-stakes testing model and a widespread competitive voucher system. The research is based on case studies of ten public and private subsidised schools, framed by a sociological perspective of policy enactment theory. The research findings show the ways that accountability policies are recreated, expanded, and intensified at the local level, permeating an ethic of competition. The analysis focuses on three qualitative trends: school actors’ sense-making of test scores and labels; zones of safety and risk for teachers under an accountability regime; and the emergence of a sticky web of persuasion, surveillance, and coercion among school members in order to improve performance. The practices examined are not understood as ‘secondary effects’ or an ‘implementation problem’, as if they occur unconnected from the policy rationale. The outcomes are consistent with the policy itself in interaction with school life.     

Performativity,Faith and Professional Identity: Student Religious Education Teachers and The Ambiguities of Objectivity

Abstract

This paper considers the way in which Christian Religious Education (RE) teachers articulate the difficulties and challenges they experience both in school and with their peers as they navigate their way through their Initial Teacher Education. The paper offers a unique exploration of the relationship between elements of the three discourses of faith identity, emerging professional identity and the requirements of a performative teacher training context. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 184 student RE teachers across three universities. It became clear that all students interpreted the Standards and policy guidelines ambiguously, as being value-laden or value-free. The idea of the ‘good teacher’ as someone who was, by very definition, neutral and objective immediately made the faith position of students problematic. This is a key point in relation to the notion of performativity and education and the disproportionate impact it made on Christian students. It appeared as though many Christian students were concerned to stress that although their faith was personally important for them it was not something that contributed to their understanding of a ‘good teacher’.     

Non-performativity of university and subjectification of students: the question of equality and diversity in UK universities

Universities in the United Kingdom have experienced a transformation in the context of the government’s initiatives to widen participation and rapid socio-economic changes locally and globally. With more diverse students entering higher education, universities need to consider how they can create an inclusive environment. Indeed, in order to stress their openness and (international) excellence, many universities proclaim their ‘commitment’ to diversity and difference. However, as Sara Ahmed suggests, institutional speech acts, such as a claim to promote equality and diversity, do not go beyond pluralist understandings of diversity and are non-performative. Through the examination of policies and practices concerning issues of equality and diversity in English universities, this article, firstly, considers whether universities are successful in promoting equality amongst different (ethnic) groups. Then, through a case study of a university, it examines how students become raced, classed, gendered, or nationed subjects, while they struggle to form their own agency.     

Performativity,fabrication and trust: exploring computer-mediated moderation

Based on research conducted in an English secondary school, this paper explores computer-mediated moderation as a performative tool. The Module Assessment Meeting (MAM) was the moderation approach under investigation. I mobilise ethnographic data generated by a key informant, and triangulated with that from other actors in the setting, in order to examine some of the meanings underpinning moderation within a performative environment. I argue that in this particular case performativity has become entrenched in teachers' day-to-day practices, and not only affects those practices but also teachers' sense of self. I suggest that MAM represented performative and fabricated conditions and (re)defined what the key participant experienced as a vital constituent of her educational identities – trust. From examining the case in point, I hope to have illustrated for those interested in teachers' work some of the implications of the interface between technology and performativity.     

ON THE PERFORMATIVITY OF JOURNALISTIC IDENTITY

The concept of “ritual” has played an important role in research within mass media and journalism studies in the last decades. Both ethnographic and anthropological research in media studies has devoted attention to an elaboration of its theoretical scope. However, as this paper argues, reading the concept in the perspective of Butler's theory of performativity can considerably deepen our understanding of the relation between rituals and journalistic identity. As such, the paper wishes to re-evaluate important work in the field of newsroom ethnography and aims to show to what extent rituals at the same time constitute the occupational values of journalists and may offer them a way of subverting the dominant journalistic paradigm.     

In living memory: Abortion as cultural amnesia

This essay argues that abortion is more than the termination of a pregnancy: it is a metaphor for cultural amnesia. Early medical anti‐abortion rhetoric in the United States established women's bodies as rhetorical sites of cultural memory. Physicians formed a system of mnemonics: cultural truth about humanity was located in women's reproductive physiology, protocols for accessing that truth were formed via diagnostic practices, and a network of bodies (discursive and corporeal) was established through which truth could circulate. In the face of increasing numbers of abortions, physicians made the act of listening to the female body a culturally genealogical act.     

Critical Thinking Beyond Skill

The aim of this article is to investigate possibilities for conceptions of critical thinking beyond the established educational framework that emphasizes skills. Distancing ourselves from the older rationalist framework, we explain that what we think wrong with the skills perspective is, amongst other things, its absolutization of performativity and outcomes. In reviewing the relevant discourse, we accept that it is possible for the skills paradigm to be change‐friendly and context‐sensitive but we argue that it is oblivious to other, non‐purposive kinds of rationality that are indispensable to critical thought. Our suggestion is that there is an aporetic element in critical thought that is missing from contemporary educational positions. We consider some other efforts to redeem the surplus of criticality that performativity fails to take into account and conclude that the aporetic element that we highlight accommodates better than other theories do the significance of thematizing the taken‐for‐granted instead of focusing on problem solving.     

Validating Teacher Performativity through Lifelong School-University Collaboration

Abstract

The main point of this article is that more credence should be given in teacher education to performative dimensions of teaching. I agree with David Carr (1999) that the requisite capabilities are probably best learned in actual schools. I employ Turnbull’s (2000) conception of performativity, which speaks of tacit cultural learning. Following Wilfred Carr (1987) I go back to Aristotle, and to debate between Gadamer and Habermas, before arriving at the view that expert teaching practice should be in the spirit of phronesis. The article then proposes that school-university collaboration should be the standard motif of teacher preparation, the context within which the spirit of phronesis can be realized and modeled.