Working-class women in academic spaces: finding our muchness

In the Burton, T., dir. [2010. Alice in Wonderland (Film). Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures] cinematographic reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, there is a moment when the Mad Hatter looks sincerely at Alice and tells her that inside her, something is missing – that she used to be much more muchier – that she has somehow lost her muchness. Seeing middle-class upward mobility within academia as a precarious space in which I must negotiate my own muchness, I explore and theorise the phenomenon of muchness through an autoethnographic lens that focuses on events in my and my mother's lives and analyse these events through theories of new materialism.     

Enacting post-reflexive teacher education

The purpose of this article is to re-conceptualize Schön’s call for a phenomenology of practice – moving away from reflection and towards post-reflexion – by explicitly drawing on philosophical and methodological tenets of phenomenology, specifically some of Vagle’s theorizing of a post-intentional phenomenology. Finally, we use this conception of post-reflexion to articulate a set of three concrete post-reflexive pedagogies of teacher education – An Affective Pedagogy; A Post-Reflexive Entangled Pedagogy; and An Interrogated “Assumptions of Normality” Pedagogy.     

Literature of broadcasting: Books in review

BEST TELEVISION PLAYS. Ed. by Gore Vidal. New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1956. 250 pp. 35c.

TELEVISION PLAYS BY PADDY GHAYEFSKY. By Paddy Chayefsky. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1955. 268 pp. $1.50 (paperback).

TOP TV SHOWS OF THE YEAR, 1954–55. Ed. by Irving Settel New York: Hastings House, 1955. 269 pp. $5.50.

TELEVISION SCRIPTS FOR STAGING AND STUDY. By Rudy Bretz and Edward Stasheff. New York: Hill and Wang, Inc., 1953. 332 pp. $4.95.

TELEVISION'S IMPACT ON AMERICAN CULTURE. By William Y. Elliott. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press 1956. 382 pp. $4.95.

MASS COMMUNICATIONS. By Erik Barnouw. New York: Rine‐hart and Company, Inc., 1957. pp. 280. $4.00.

CONSUMER RESEARCH WITH PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES. By Dietz Leonhard. Shenandoah, Iowa: World Publishing Co., 1955. 151 pp.

ON HUMAN COMMUNICATIONS: A Review, a Survey and a Criticism. By Colin Cherry. New York: The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1957. 333 pp.

TELEVISION TECHNIQUES, revised edition, by Hoyland Bettinger, revised by Sol Cornberg. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955. 236 pp. $3.75.

TV MEASUREMENT FOR THE SPONSOR. By American Research Bureau, Inc., 1956. 53 pp. (Free.)

FOUR THEORIES OF THE PRESS. By Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1956. 153 pp. $3.50.     

The audacity of building community: a teacher looks at the end of every fork

In this article, I theorize a specific pedagogical moment as a teacher educator by taking up a particular aspect of phenomenological philosophy – the phenomenological reduction – and a particular conception of pedagogy informed by Bourdieu’s philosophies – nomos and habitus – in order to put them in closer dialog with one another. I also bring the theoretical and conceptual work of other critical and poststructural thinkers – hooks and Boler – to bear on a nagging pedagogical concern I experienced as a teacher educator when one of my students made me painfully aware of something I had missed, creating a landscape for how each may be imagined as not only exercises of teaching but as larger commitments to practice and theory, relationship with learners, as well as relationship with self. This concern became a phenomenological pedagogical moment of self-discovery and defined possibility in the classroom where I learned to shift and suspend pedagogical practices and step back to take a moment to see what had yet to be noticed, a time in which I chose to eat a naked lunch.     

Responding to technical writing in an introductory engineering class: The role of genre and discipline

A case study of an experienced professor's comments on a design report in a first‐year engineering class was conducted over the period of an academic year. When compared with the commenting styles of technical writing teachers, the engineering professor's comments were found to be highly directive, and thus at odds with the preference for facilitative comments that prevails in composition studies. However, differences in genre conventions explain much of the discrepancy.     

Literature of broadcasting: Books in review

THE TELEVISION COMMERCIAL, revised edition, by Harry Wayne McMahan. New York: Hastings House, 1957. 223 pp. $6.50.

THE AGE OF TELEVISION. By Leo Bogart. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1956. 348 pp. $6.50. Text edition, $4.75.

ELEMENTS OF COLOR IN PROFESSIONAL MOTION PICTURES, prepared by a Special Committee of the SMPTE, W. R. Holm, Chairman. Published (1957) by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, 55 West 42nd Street, New York 36; 104 pages, 27 in color, 53/4”; by 81/2”; hard‐bound. Price is $3.50 for single copies.

TELEVISION AUDIENCE RESEARCH FOR GREAT BRITAIN. By Arthur C. Nielsen. A. C. Nielson Company, 1955. 143 pp.

SAY IT SAFELY. By Paul P. Ashley. The University of Washington Press, 1957. 117 pp. $2.50.     

Literacy learning as cruelly optimistic: recovering possible lost futures through transmedial storytelling

In this article, we “think with” theories of affect and transmedial storytelling to explore the cruel optimism that standardised reading pedagogies (e.g. read alouds; leveled readers/independent reading) can produce for readers. We draw on particular moments in a first grade classroom to argue that such pedagogies transmit “normalizing” affects that promise upward mobility, college and career readiness/success, classroom community, and happiness but instead produce literate identities, which cruelly reinforce the racialised, gendered and classist myth of meritocracy. According to Blackman (2019), cruel optimism is harmful because it normalises particular fictions and fantasies that are presented as scientific truths without acknowledging that these dominant stories are but one narrative, thereby closing off other ways of knowing, being and doing. This work offers pedagogical possibilities for bodies that are often read as unsuccessful (e.g. disengaged and struggling) and/or successful (e.g. happy and engaged) and explains how the guise of optimism can fail to acknowledge the larger social, political and economic forces at play. These forces shape the unfolding of academic realities that are simultaneously connected to the past, present and future.     

Attuning to In-the-Red Frequencies with/in Readers Workshop

In this article, we ‘think with’ the theoretical concepts of flow, rupture, layering, and sampling to affectively attune to ‘in-the-red frequencies’ flowing across/with-in a New York City primary classroom—that is, alternative sonic frequencies that trouble and refuse hegemonic literacy practices. These hip-hop concepts theorise affect in relation to Black intellectual frameworks for moving, feeling, and sounding. Such frameworks honour philosophical practices emerging from Black people's lived experiences—practices that, historically, have been perceptually coded out of legibility by white supremacist institutions. Ultimately, we argue that thinking with flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling enables more equitable practices that push literacies ‘into the red,’ namely, by respecting multiple perspectives, histories, and truths; accounting for power, privilege, positioning, and complicity; and highlighting ‘otherwise’ social worlds not predicated on hegemonic whiteness, anti-blackness, and socio-political violence.