Designing interdisciplinary instruction: exploring disciplinary and conceptual differences as a resource

This article presents a “telling case” of an interdisciplinary, team-teaching experience that explores how participants eschewed ethnocentricism of their fields of study in order to learn from each other, while providing instruction to students and analysing data collected from the class (a graduate course on literature and pedagogy). Through the process, the participants (a professor of English education and a professor of literature) ground the perspectives of literary interpretation in their field of study and languaculture, and developed a conceptual framework that guided their interactions and analysis of the discursive actions of the class. An ethnographic perspective served as the conceptual frame and informed how the participants observed, described, and developed claims about classroom interactions. Through this study, the participants answer calls for more examples of how faculty in higher education engage in interdisciplinary teaching and research and the need for faculty to develop conceptual ethnographic frameworks for their collaborations.     

Pedagogical approaches to exploring theory–practice relationships in an outdoor education teacher education programme

Understanding theory–practice relationships in pre-service teacher education is an enduring concern for many teacher educators. Drawing on data from an investigation into the theory–practice nexus in an outdoor education teacher education programme, this article examines pedagogical approaches to exploring theory and practice with pre-service teachers. The investigation, a qualitative case study, examined the views of the programme’s teacher educators (authors) using an analytical lens informed by two similar theoretical models.

The article focuses on elements that were found to be central to pedagogical approaches within the programme: self-awareness, experience, reflexivity, and a “community of learners.” While the approaches represent a departure from “theory application” and “theory–practice integration” approaches, and a move towards praxis development, the study highlighted challenges and issues including the need for teacher educators to scrutinise theory–practice relationships in their own teaching and discourse. Implications and possibilities for future practice are considered.     

White on White: Researcher Reflexivity and the Logics of Privilege in White Schools Undertaking Reform

I use this paper to reexamine my role as a White researcher on a multi-racial research team. I reanalyze data I collected during an evaluation project to reveal how I avoided seeing race in the schools I visited and how I dodged discussions of race with members of those school communities. By analyzing my own discursive practice, I introduce a series of logics enacted through a variety of strategies that I used to manage race talk. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) an analysis of the strategies I used to sustain White privilege and (2) an examination of the logics of those strategies in order to understand the power they have in reproducing inequity. Only by understanding the self-perpetuating nature of White privilege will we be able to begin to dismantle it. Jenny Gordon is an assistant professor in the Division of Education, School of Education and Human Development at Binghamton University. She teaches foundations courses for elementary education and courses on qualitative research methods. Her scholarly work includes articles on methodological issues pertaining to qualitative research methods and narratives on the impact of race on research and teaching.     

Enabling transformation through critical engagement and reflexivity: a case study of South African academics

ABSTRACT

Scholars writing on agency argue that normally, individuals who experience social structures as comfortable will tend to want to reproduce them while those who experience these structures as oppressive will want to change them. This is a bleak outlook because it suggests that those in positions of power and influence are less likely to seek to overhaul the very system of rewards and punishments that benefits them. However, there are exceptions to this pattern: instances where those who experience the structures as comfortable, nevertheless, work at transforming them. This article introduces an alternative perspective to current transformation discourses by seeking to understand why such exceptions exist. It argues that critical engagement is an important dimension of such transformation, and examines how it interacts with reflexivity to shape individual choices and reformulate interest. Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of in-depth interviews with 10 academics who have been identified as agents of change at one university in South Africa, we reveal how individuals are able to shift their understanding of what is or is not in their interest in a context where raced, gendered and classed interests are deeply embedded in the fabric of the society. In such contexts, reflexivity and critical personal engagement with one’s context can lead to a shift in interest and then consciousness as the individual comes to see and experience things from a different vantage point, opening up the possibility for a changed relationship with the social structure and its constraints and determining influence.     

社会学的反思性和社会学本科教学的反思

反思性是社会学的一个重要特质。我国社会学本科教学目前存在诸多问题,社会学教育工作者要充分发挥批判性反思精神,做好大学新生的启蒙教育工作,编写出更多新颖生动的本土化教材,对有无学术志向的两类学生因材施教,多给学生创造社会实践机会,提高社会学本科人才培养的质量。     

How epistemic reflexivity enables teacher educators’ teaching for diversity: Exploring a pedagogical framework for critical thinking

Recent research points to the importance of teacher educators teaching for diversity in initial teacher education programmes. Teaching for diversity is an approach to teacher education in which an understanding of specialist literature and a focus on critical thinking supports a social justice agenda as opposed to merely using different tips and tricks to prepare future teachers for teaching diverse learners in the classroom. In this study, we explored how Australian and New Zealand teacher educators negotiated a social justice agenda in teacher education programmes, using a new transdisciplinary framework of epistemic reflexivity. The Epistemic Reflexivity for Teacher Education (ER-TED) framework draws on epistemic cognition (Clark Chinn’s Aims, Ideals, Reliable epistemic processes – AIR – framework) and Margaret Archer’s reflexivity to explore knowledge claims in teacher educators’ pedagogical decision-making. The findings identified how teacher educators in our study discerned and deliberated with respect to epistemic aims for justification, which involve transformative critical thinking and critical thinking for self. They reported good knowledge (ideals) as being scholarly in nature, and reliable epistemic processes based on higher-order thinking (analysis and evaluating competing ideas) or engaging with multiple perspectives. The teacher educators in our study are clear examples of how strong overall evaluative epistemic stances enable teaching for social justice. We argue that the ER-TED framework can help us as a profession to address teaching for diversity in teacher education programmes based on the belief that the pursuit of social justice requires an evaluativist epistemic stance.     

Chinese education and Pierre Bourdieu: Power of reproduction and potential for change

Abstract

In the edited book “Bourdieu and Chinese Education”, a group of scholars in China, Australia, Canada, and the USA engage in a dialogue with Bourdieu and raise persistent questions not only about issues of equity, competition, and change in Chinese education, but also about the value, venture, and violence in using established Western intellectual frameworks for analysing Chinese education. In response to these questions, this special issue analyses and discusses Chinese rural education, teacher education, language education, health and physical education, and transnational education; and proposes a series of new conceptualisations, for example, regression- and network-based field analysis, Bourdieu-Chinese philosophy encounter, field of mediation, localised pedagogical capital, and new Chinese habituses (e.g., contemptuous habitus, diasporic cosmopolitan habitus, habitus (re)structuring). Such collective effort responds to the strident, and sometimes misleading, castigation of Bourdieu for determinism; and also disputes the non-reflexive, celebratory tone that consecrates the French sociologist and his canonical theorem, and hence reproduces the symbolic violence in the doxic academia. In this vein, the special issue is respectful for, but not restricted to, Bourdieu’s sociology, showing no timidity in questioning and contesting the framework of the famed thinker when research problems and findings demand so.     

关于Banach空间自反性问题的讨论

阐述和总结了时Banach空间自反性问题所做的工作，并在此基础上利用时偶映射的概念与(S)性质给出了Banach空间自反的一些新的充要务件和充分条件。     

Post-colonial science education: the challenge of negotiating researcher positioning

In this paper, I describe a methodology that I employed, and resultant methods that I designed, to facilitate a Critical Discourse Analysis exploring perspectives on Western modern science as a school subject discipline in a given Caribbean context. Using specific themes from post-colonial theory, I sought to engage with some of the viewpoints presented by key stakeholders in secondary science education in the research setting. This paper reports on the methodological framework for the research study, illustrating some of the philosophical challenges encountered during the development of the research methods. Specifically, I discuss the tensions associated with the pursuit of researcher legitimacy, the use of ‘scientific’ methods of inquiry in a work that seeks to be decolonizing, and the challenge of stimulating conversation about a topic for which participants might not possess readily formulated opinions. My response to these challenges resulted in methods that utilized a unique adaptation of Stephenson's Q methodology. Although these tensions are far from being fully resolved, the approach outlined helps contribute to our understanding of the complexities of negotiation that can occur when conducting research of this nature.     

Unlearning adultism at Green Shoots: a reflexive ethnographic analysis of age inequality within an environmental education programme

In 2010, I volunteered at Green Shoots, a service-learning educational non-profit school focused around environmental justice. While the school claimed to operate under an egalitarian, empowering ‘community of practice’ framework, the experiences of youth and myself revealed a hierarchal power dynamic that put unequal demands on youth and left them feeling disrespected. Blending ethnographic and reflexive statements, I examine this age inequality, called adultism, and how it affected the community of practice at Green Shoots as well as myself. Findings reveal that adultist expectations were placed on youth in conversations and in work demands. Adultism also intersected with other social locations such as race/gender/class and led youth to engage in resistance strategies against me, an adult they could control. Finally, I conclude that adultism must be addressed within educational settings and we as educators must reflect on our own adultism to truly educate for social and environmental justice.