Talks
Forthcoming talks
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Being Elegantly Subversive: Transformative Community Education initiatives in Australia
Where: 43rd Annual Conference Dallas, Texas “Blazing New Trails" , The National Community Education Association Dates: 5th November 2008 - 8th November 2008
This presentation will focus on two very successful (but different) community education programs in Australia – Hands on Learning and ruMAD (Are You Making a Difference) – where both explicitly but differently address the need to authentically and productively engage and re-engage marginalised students in their own education so that they see that “school is for me”. The theoretical framework for both of these programs is CORE Pedagogy within the context of pedagogical reciprocity:
Through their pedagogical reciprocity, these programs ensure that what the teachers and students did together was:
• Connecting to and engaging with the students’ cultural knowledge
• Owned by the students so that all students were able to see themselves as represented in the work as ‘ownership in their education reduces the conditions that produce their alienation’
• Responding to students’ lived experiences and, actively and consciously, critically commenting on that experience; and finally
• Empowering students with a belief that what they do will make a difference to their lives and the opportunity to voice and discover their own authentic and authoritative life.
My research indicates that, for students who do not come from “mainstream” culture (the “gold” standard of school success), it is necessary (but not sufficient) to privilege student backgrounds in classroom pedagogy. Where this occurs under conditions of pedagogical reciprocity, the students have developed a strong sense of identity and learn the “rules” of the dominator culture (hooks, 1994; Sarra, 2003), empowering the students actively to contend with and resist the claims of the dominant stance (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).
These programs establish that both authentic student (and teacher) engagement and student (and teacher) resistance are evident in ‘the tensions between official discourses and minority discourses’ (Luke, 1996, 38). I found evidence to support Bourdieu’s claim for ‘potential open spaces’ and ‘dynamic boundaries’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, 104); that for at least some teachers it is possible to establish critical practice regardless of the socio-economic status of a school and its community. A minority of the teachers recognised the possibility of transformative engagement and ‘assumed that learning is never confined solely to an institutionalised classroom…thereby working to challenge the construction of certain forms of knowledge as always and only available to the elite’ (hooks, 2003, 41).
These programs demonstrate that it is possible, through pedagogical reciprocity, for teachers to reconceive student engagement ‘where difference is accorded respect and all voices are deemed worthy. [This] can make the classroom a place where students come out of shame…to experience their vulnerability among a community of learners who will dare to hold them up should they falter or fail’ (hooks, 2003, 103).
The remaining challenge for teacher pedagogy is to address how the issue of authority can link to democratic processes in the classroom. I found that a CORE pedagogy rejects ‘pedagogical terrorism’ and in its stead considers ‘representations, histories, and experiences that allow students to critically address the construction of their own subjectivities as they simultaneously engage in an ongoing “process of negotiation between self and other”’ (Giroux, 1994. 214).
LikeEducation, Democracy and Social Justice: The Australian experience
Where: Learning Democracy by Doing - Alternative Practices in Citizenship Learning and Participatory Democracy , Transformative Learning Centre Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto Dates: 16th October 2008 - 18th October 2008
This presentation begins with an examination of the Australian educational context in relation to the policy reforms of the previous governments (1996-2007) which have been characterised as Marketisation, Privatisation and Rationalisation. This has resulted in a flight of cultural capital and the creation of sink schools, where parents have abandoned the public education system, with non-government schools growing at almost 20 times the rate of government schools in the past decade. The election of a new Labor government in November 2007 has suggested an “education revolution”. While families with social power use education to ‘stake a claim’, families without such cultural and social capital rely on governments to assert those claims or receive compensation for ‘unenforceable claims’'. The second part of the presentation explores possibilities for educational policy beyond compensation, and proposes a re-examination of education provision in disadvantaged communities suggesting that in order to solve such problems we need to be linking curriculum, pedagogy, assessment to identity, politics, and social justice where teachers take an historical and sociological perspective beyond the classroom and the school – becoming “elegantly subversive” through a strong sense of collective effort that may be built on isolated individual projects.
Walking the Walk - Not Talking the Talk: Doing Transformative Pedagogy
Where: Critical Pedagogy and Participatory Learning for Social Transformation: The Role of Higher Education, Arts Faculty Dates: 8th October 2008 - 10th October 2008
This paper and workshop session is a dialogic collaboration between students and their teacher. We focus on the critical and empowering learning experiences of the Graduate Diploma of Education students and their lecturer as they share and recount their various understandings of what it meant and felt like to do Transformative Pedagogy. Various strategies and tools based on the ideas of critical pedagogues Ira Shor, bell hooks and Barry Kanpol will be highlighted to demonstrate what critical pedagogy might look like and how it can be implemented in the Australian University setting.
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