Pedagogical Force Research Articles

Archival F(r)ictions: A Queer Vocabulary for a Live art Pedagogy

ABSTRACT In this article, I consider the global tradition of live art as a pedagogical force that draws on queer affect and resonance. Scholars of performance studies have situated live art in the field of experimental and undisciplined art but have not given enough attention to its pedagogical potential. In southern Africa, live art has been theorised as a practice that is leaky, transgressive, and undisciplined, emphasising risk, extremity and endurance. These conditions are partly shaped by the region’s historic struggle for liberation since the twentieth century but cannot be reduced to this period alone. As an African practitioner and scholar of live art with a Namibian and South African experience and training, I draw on various experiences of performing, workshopping, curating and researching live art, offering a queer vocabulary to develop the pedagogical potential of live art. I posit that this is a vocabulary for Archival F(r)ictions, emphasising the centrality of archival work in live artistic pedagogies. These pedagogical frameworks rely on the principles of critical consciousness, embodied learning and democratic participation as put forward by the Brazilian critical pedagogue Paulo Freire. As a result, I show how gestures of hoeing and smuggling can produce joy, pleasure, and irritations as sites of queer epistemic work.

К. Д. Ушинский - редактор «Журнала Министерства народного просвещения» (к 200-летию со дня рождения)

The aim of the study is to characterise the activities of Konstantin Dmitrievich Ushinsky (1823-1870) as an editor of the Journal of the Ministry of Public Education. The necessity of this publication is explained by the fact that the work of the great Russian teacher as an editor of the main pedagogical journal of Russia has not been reflected in modern papers by Russian scholars, as well as by the 200th anniversary of his birth. The study shows Ushinsky’s efforts to transform the journal, which had previously been a strictly official collection of orders and directives of the Ministry, as well as random special papers, into a printing centre that united progressive pedagogical forces in Russia. Ushinsky’s relationship with the Ministers of Public Education E. P. Kovalevsky and A. V. Golovnin, with some authors, such as I. S. Bellustin, is revealed. As a result, the conclusion about the importance of K. D. Ushinsky’s activities for the development of the progressive Russian pedagogical press is made and the need for further research of K. D. Ushinsky’s heritage is emphasised.

Violence, Education, and the Tradition of the Oppressed in Benjamin and Du Bois

This paper discusses two thinkers who locate the possibility of revolutionary historical change in political projects oriented toward the formation of subjects and cultivation of sensibility. I begin by considering the relationship between historical violence and education in the works of Walter Benjamin. After introducing the provocative association of education with divine violence found in “Toward the Critique of Violence,” I expand on Benjamin’s conception of pedagogical force. Highlighting the centrality of education in Benjamin’s early work, I argue that his account of learning does not depend on the mastery of students by teachers, nor more generally on the mastery of objective reality by a sovereign subject, but on the mastery of the educational relationship by tradition. Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s discussion of the abolition of slavery, I close by describing the revolutionary cultivation of sensibility as a dynamic and collectively achieved mode of historical learning.

The pleasures of ambiguity: pedagogy and musical apprenticeship in an Istanbul art studio

Abstract‘Dealing with ambiguity’ has become a pressing concern in many spheres of contemporary life, often presented as a ‘survival skill’ in an uncertain world. Working with ambiguity also plays a crucial role in the musical pedagogy of the Ottoman‐Turkish ney (Sufi reed flute), the playing of which I discuss in this article. Rather than a constraint or deficiency to be resolved, in the context of ney apprenticeship, ambiguity emerges as a desired pedagogical force not only valued but also deliberately amplified. My aim is to show how ambiguity is embraced here as a productive condition that maximizes possibilities for artistic exploration, freedom of discernment, and aesthetic pleasures.

Re-storying place: The pedagogical force of walking in the work of Indigenous artist-activists Émilie Monnet and Cam

Walking plays a generative and pedagogical role in the work of contemporary artists Émilie Monnet (Anishnaabe/French) and Cam (Innu/Québecois), both of whom work and live in the region known as a Tiohtià:ke to the Haudenosaunee, as Mooniyang to the Anishinaabeg, and as Montréal to many others. This article proposes that recent artistic interventions and participatory projects offered by Monnet and Cam infuse the international discourse about walking as a pedagogical force with their distinct perspectives as Indigenous women. They employ walking to reinforce their presence, to learn from place, to contest colonial narratives and exclusions conveyed by visual culture, to honour their ancestors, to indigenize collective memory by amplifying Indigenous voices and contributing to the re-storying of place, a concept inspired by Potawatomi environmental biologist Robin Kimmerer. Monnet is an interdisciplinary artist who combines theatre, performance, image and sound art as a performer, creator and director. She is also the founding director of Onishka, an mutlimedia Indigenous arts organization. Cam is a street artist and the lead coordinator of Unceded Voices, a street art convergence for artists who are Indigenous women, women of colour, queer, two-spirit and gender non-conforming. She is also currently the national coordinator of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. With a shared awareness that the dynamics that comprise place are intrinsically relational and dialogical, the work of Cam and Monnet intervenes in the felt and seen world to reinforce their sense of belonging to this region. Walking is integral to their respective research, creation and collaboration that enables their work to contest dominant colonial narratives while honouring the contributions of those who have been disavowed.

Theatre and performance as healing forces – saving the Open Society? A case study of The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards and Subpoetics performative endeavours as ways of enhancing empathy and building intercultural dialogue in the light of critical pedagogy

In the various versions of democracy’s orientations around the world nowadays, we can discern cracks, but still not a crucial break from the project of (an) open society. The inner reality of this phenomenon can be deciphered and dealt with in many ways. The two case studies (The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards as well as Subpoetics International) analysed in the article, present theatre as healing and pedagogical forces, which can save the core of Open Society. Generally speaking, this can be achieved by strengthening intercultural dialogue and empathy while applying strict rules of the craft and technique. The two mentioned theatre-performance groups present high-functioning varieties of open society and also focus on the threats and obstacles which may be encountered in contemporary society. Beyond varied activities, the Workcenter and Subpoetics also carry out educational and workshop-based work connecting people from all paths of life and all around the world, creating an international network, which is both healing and creative. In both cases they are groups producing works of very powerful physiology and intensity, which seek the human truth in troubled times.

Physical possibilities: pedagogical presence in Chaucer

With interest in body studies increasing, scholars are reconsidering the bodies of teachers, especially as online learning gains prominence in the realm of educational innovation. They question the lessening role and even complete disappearance of teachers’ physical presence, while acknowledging that the teacher’s body constitutes a force that guides and transforms the educational experience of students. Teachers’ bodies have always served as a pedagogical force – potentially useful or detrimental – in classrooms. Medieval thinkers, especially poets, also recognized the powers of teachers’ bodies. Chaucer, for one, portrays a spectrum of possibilities regarding the effects of a teacher’s physical presence, particularly in Fragments VIII and IX of the Canterbury Tales, depicting the morally ambiguous auctoritee and limitations of the physical presence of a teacher. The contemporary classroom, the physical world inhabited by both students and teachers, can perhaps be better navigated by the map provided by Chaucer, which illustrates the possibilities of presence.

До 100-річчя журналу «Вільна українська школа» (1917–1920): історія освіти крізь призму джерелознавства

When the independence of Ukraine was proclaimed in 1991, the Ukrainian educational Vilna Ukrainska Shkola (Free Ukrainian School) journal (1917–1920) suppressed during the Soviet period was introduced to the scientific space. This journal was created by the famous Ukrainian pedagogues during the period of the Ukrainian revolution (1917–1921), the formation of the Ukrainian state, and the national education development. Based on the analysis of the journal collection, the article considers that the journal is an important source in studying the Ukrainian and foreign history of education (education systems, education reforms, biographical information about teachers, public organisations, types of educational organisations, etc.). It is argued that it played a special role in consolidation of cultural, educational, pedagogical forces around the idea of national education system formation on the basis of the best national and European practice.

Interpreting Pedagogical Acts: Acts 8.26–40 and Narrative Reflexivity as Pedagogy

This article foregrounds a fact so basic that it often goes unnoticed: stories frequently depict the acts of reading and/or interpreting stories; many narratives are themselves concerned with proper modes of narrative interpretation. I contend that such scenes work rhetorically to inculcate particular kinds of hermeneutical skills in their audiences, and thus can be read as pedagogical scenarios vis-à-vis implied readers. I begin the article by introducing the contemporary notion of narrative reflexivity and situating that concept within the broader literary sub-field of rhetorical narratology. Then, I turn to Acts 8.26–40 as a brief case study in order to demonstrate how narrative reflexivity can help us to think in fresh ways about the pedagogical force of ancient narratives. Specifically, I argue that this story in Acts reflexively commends the following hermeneutical principle for its readers: because reading is not synonymous with understanding, one ought to have an authoritative interpretive guide, and embrace a hermeneutic of hospitality towards the received narrative. Finally, I highlight several examples from ancient literature that demonstrate why my proposed reading coheres with ancient views about pedagogy and textual interpretation more broadly.

Animate affects: censorship, reckless pedagogies, and beautiful feelings

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that affect bears a potent teaching capacity. To do so, it explores the intensities that built around a student-teacher's dismissal from a US school placement. In this incident, the topic of homophobia in a poetry lesson elicited a buzz among students that enacted a pedagogy that exceeded the speaking subject. It was these animating capacities of affect, the author argues, that were deemed particularly threatening by the school. Affect as pedagogy puts pressure on legacies that position the human, usually the teacher, as the sole locus of pedagogy in the classroom and that privilege telos-driven notions of curricular ‘progress’. The paper concludes by drawing connections between the animating capacities of affect and larger debates around trigger warnings on curricular materials. The author suggests that, rather than seeking to foreclose intensities in classrooms, educators might pay more attention to how affect offers richly generative, but often overlooked, sites of pedagogical force.

Authorship and Love

This early essay from German media theorist Friedrich Kittler examines a number of epistemic shifts occurring in late 18th-century Germany, anticipating in both methodology and content his groundbreaking 1985 work Aufschreibesysteme [ Discourse Networks]. Of primary concern to Kittler here is the invention of what he calls (drawing upon Foucault) the ‘authorship-function’, product of a new constellation of medial, pedagogical and juridical forces. Alongside broader societal transformations (the transition from societies of the law to societies of the norm, the appearance of new sexualities), Kittler documents the emergence of the author in the late 18th century through analyses of new pedagogical practices (including the invention of hermeneutics), changes in childhood alphabetization, and new erotic relationships between authors and their readers.

Understanding Digital Health as Public Pedagogy: A Critical Framework

This paper argues on behalf of a public pedagogy approach to developing a critical understanding of digital health technologies. It begins by appraising the hitherto polarised articulations of digital innovation as either techno-utopian or techno-dystopian, examining these expectations of technology and considering the tensions between them. It subsequently outlines how a public pedagogy approach can help mediate between these views, offering a more contextualised, socio-political perspective of mHealth. This approach teases out the nuances of digital health by engaging with the complexities of embodied learning. Furthermore, it urges caution against viewing these pedagogical forces as one of transference, or simple governance. To this end, we therefore contextualise our critique of digital health, within an attempt to reconstitute an understanding of public pedagogies of technology.

The Education of Grown-ups: An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell

Abstract Just as there was a time when it was uncommon, not to say unfashionable and perhaps professionally treacherous, for philosophers to write about Ralph Waldo Emerson, there was also a time when the pertinence of Stanley Cavell’s work for philosophy was a point of controversy. Now there is little reason to worry or complain that his work is not getting sufficient attention, so this essay is not undertaken in a mode of defense or complaint, but instead in a mood of wonder. I am interested in the phenomenon and practice of reading Cavell’s writing--work that appears capable of inspiring new writing while also causing the inspired to feel afraid of, or otherwise estranged from, the work. Panicked by its pedagogical force, a reader trying to write new things may be led to defer or diminish the work that inspired those new things, finding that the inspiration suffocates new initiatives in prose. In this essay I attend closely to how these and other issues in the aesthetics of reading appear when reading Cavell. My invocation of Cavell’s notion that "philosophy becomes the education of grownups" is meant to associate the aesthetics of reading Cavell’s work with the more general experience of education as it continues into maturity, regardless of discipline.

Beyond school boundaries: new health imperatives, families and schools

This article draws upon research examining the impact of new health imperatives on schools in the United Kingdom. Specifically, it examines features of emerging surveillant relations, which not only speak to the changing nature of health-related practices in schools but have particular currency for broader understandings of theorisations of surveillance, and which complicate the view that schools are bounded or territorialised in enacting forms of governance. The article explores how the assemblages through which these biopedagogies are formed constitute emerging interdependent relations between schools and families. The article recognises the presence of amalgamated and extended pedagogies in schools; approaches within which deliberate attempts were made to ensure whether what students learn in schools was continued beyond the formal school contexts. Among the schools that took part in the research reported in this article, many of them recognised that families constituted a site of learning about health. To this end, there were deliberate attempts to inculcate particular health values and meanings within school and to extend these across other sites of learning such as within the family. The use of surveillant practices utilised to achieve this end is a specific focus of this article and speaks to the broader aspects of what Giroux and others have referred to as ‘public pedagogy’ which recognise public, popular and cultural spaces as pedagogical sites. The article concludes by suggesting that studies in biopedagogy would benefit not only from a more nuanced understanding of the surveillant forces of pedagogy, but also of the pedagogical flows and forces of what are seen as forms of surveillance.

Attending to Sites of Learning: London and pedagogies of scale

This essay attends to the ecologies of learning that are afforded by performative encounters in cities. What might it mean for theatre-makers if its spaces, events, streets, pathways, buildings, vistas and so on are all considered to have pedagogical force? How might attending to architectural scale and urban perspectives invite new ways to witness, embody and inhabit cities? The essay reflects on three performative events that took place in different parts of London in 2010 and 2011, each of which referenced the scale of London's architectural cityscape within its dramaturgical structure. The argument is constructed on the idea that the theatrical imagination has the capacity to interrupt fixed geographies of scale, and that, reciprocally, the geographical imaginary of space invites affective relationships with the performative materiality of the city. The process of exploring what is at stake if we apply these theoretical insights to pedagogy opens social constructivist theories of learning to critical scrutiny, and poses new questions about experiential learning. This paper asks, therefore, how the relationship between theatre and learning might be re-shaped by understanding the affect of scale, habit, temporality and spatiality.

The Post-9/11 Militarization of Higher Education and the Popular Culture of Depravity: Threats to the Future of American Democracy

This article argues that the values of militarization are no longer restricted to foreign policy ventures; the ideals of war in a post-9/11 America have become normalized, serving as a powerful educational force that shapes everyday lives, memories, and daily experiences.The military has become a way of life, producing modes of education, goods, jobs, communication, and institutions that transcend traditional understandings of the role, territory, and place of the military in American society. Military values, social relations, and practices now bleed into every aspect of American life.What is distinctive about the militarization of the social order is that war becomes a source of pride rather than alarm, a powerful cultural and pedagogical force in which organized violence is elevated to a place of national honor, recycled endlessly through a screen culture that bathes in blood, death, and war porn. A primitive tribalism now grips American society as its democratic institutions and public spheres become inseparable from the military. The article analyzes how militarization has furthered in the U.S. both an aesthetics of depravity and a culture of cruelty, influencing spheres as seemingly remote from each other as higher education and the broader cultural apparatuses of popular and media culture. The article concludes by pointing to a number of struggles both inside and outside of higher education that need to address the threat of the new militarism.

Reading and Being Read: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as Literary Agent

Reading and Being ReadJamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as Literary Agent Lesley Larkin (bio) If as teachers of literature we teach reading, literature can be our teacher as well as our object of investigation. . . . Our own undecidable meaning is in the irreducible figure that stands in for the eyes of the other. This is the effortful task: to displace the fear of our faceless students, behind whom are the eyes of the global others. Otherwise, who crawls into the place of the “human” of “humanism” at the end of the day, even in the name of diversity? —Gayatri Spivak Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master’s yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings. —Jamaica Kincaid In her 2003 work, Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak calls for university teachers to understand literature as a teacher in its own right. “If as teachers of literature we teach reading,” Spivak writes, then “literature can be our teacher as well as our object of investigation” (23). Imagining literature—especially literature categorized as “ethnic” or “global”—as a pedagogical agent, Spivak calls for a shift in institutional power, one that counters the intransigent asymmetry in Western universities that presents ethnic and global “others” to Western subjects for analysis rather than dialogue. Such reading encounters avoid submitting readers to a counterhegemonic gaze while they ponder feelings of self-difference1 (“our own undecidable meaning”) in response to encounters with ethnic difference (Death 23). Such reading encounters are also, Spivak suggests, scenes of subjection at which readers occupy the “place of the human” in contradistinction to persons figured by the ethnic literary text (Death 23). Despite multiculturalism’s effort to challenge the exclusive category of the human, the privileged “place” of this category in the university has not been eliminated. And although the postmodern human2 is not ascribed the stability that was previously the hallmark, however false, of its predecessors, it is imbued with a similar privilege—one that is transacted against “others” retained as objects of intellectual labor. In the context of contemporary literary studies, the place of the human continues to be occupied by privileged reading subjects.3 [End Page 193] It is against the interpellation of the postmodern human that Spivak warns her audience of literature professors. And it is to literature that she turns for remedy. But her solution is not simple, for readers, particularly university students, are often blind to the lessons in critical self-reflection many works of ethnic literature offer—not least because they are encouraged to view such literature instrumentally. (How will reading this work help me compete against global peers?) Encounters with ethnic literatures are not enough to dislodge readers from positions of privilege or to “displace the fear” of lost privilege Spivak identifies in her “faceless students” (Death 23). Acknowledging that the presence of diverse literatures is not a sufficient condition for the wholesale reordering of power relations within the academy, Spivak presents literature not as an object to be mastered but as a pedagogical agent—a teacher. It is with Spivak’s call in mind that I turn to Jamaica Kincaid’s devastating account of tourism, A Small Place (1988), which anticipates and extends Spivak’s formulation of literature as pedagogical agent. Kincaid’s brief collection of essays, which takes on Antigua’s tourist economy, selfish tourists, hapless “natives,” corrupt politicians, and the slavers and slaves that preceded them all, functions quite deliberately as a teacher. Using second-person address throughout, A Small Place points the finger at its actual readers, critiquing contemporary reading practices for their affinity with global tourism and imperialism. Even more dramatically, this text teaches readers how to read it as it unfolds. Rhonda Frederick has captured the pedagogical force of A Small Place in a persuasive essay detailing her teaching strategies. Arguing against the impulse to mollify “mainstream” students by encouraging identificatory reading...

Du Bois’s “Afterthought”: A Pedagogical Variant for Continental Philosophy

Du Bois’s “Afterthought”A Pedagogical Variant for Continental Philosophy Hernando A. Estévez The Souls of Black Folk is a pedagogical text that echoes continental philosophy’s aim of preparing humankind for the genuine practice of philosophical life through critique. In this text, Du Bois uses pedagogy to expose destructive and oppressive aspects of the Western tradition in its conflicting ideas and practices. In particular, I read Du Bois’s “afterthought” in Souls of Black Folk as a form of critique that is expressly pedagogical, in that it prepares black individuals to play their destined role in this new era of history, and it calls for a continuous rethinking of the politics of higher education. While describing his early academic, political, and intellectual journey, Du Bois alludes to his initial and persistent concern with the impact of education on the formation of black men’s civil subjectivity. According to Du Bois, “My problem then was how, into the inevitable and logical democracy which was spreading over the world, could black folk in America and particularly in the South be openly and effectively admitted; and the colored people of the world allowed their self-government?” (Du Bois [1940] 1983, 29). For Du Bois such a question has sufficient political and social force to de-center the truths produced by the Western tradition as well as the precepts determining individuals’ subjectivity and self-government. Self-governance underlies Du Bois’s pedagogical and political projects as it is responsible for transforming black individuals’ self-perception and their relation to society. Du Bois approaches autonomy and self-governance pedagogically, by awakening individuals’ capacities for them by means of critique, through [End Page 82] questioning the historical basis on which the black race has been determined politically by the Western tradition. Du Bois’s essay Of the Training of Black Men (1902)1 begins by describing three “streams of thought,” which carry within the depth of their ideological flow ideas and ideals about humanity. Each stream has an epistemological and ontological force, which organizes the source of knowledge about the nature of black individuals’ being and existence. The force of the first stream of thought calls for an ethos that could unify humanity by multiplying its wants through worldwide cooperation. The second stream affirms the racism produced by theories explaining the origin of the black race, and the third calls for a civil struggle of black and whitened individuals whose political ideals challenge the presumed universal validity of the first two. Each stream of thought is followed by an afterthought, which questions the epistemological ground for moral and ontological claims of each of the three streams regarding the relationship between black individuals and the world. Du Bois deploys the pedagogical force of the afterthought most effectively in the political strength of the third stream of thought, in the emergence of suspicion. Through suspicion, a different possibility appears for thinking black individuals’ relationship with the world. This suspicion initiates a descriptive and normative analysis by challenging the pedagogical system on which beliefs and ideas about black individuals’ reality and future have been invented. In other words, suspicion dislodges history’s determinism by provoking self-reflection through critique of the Western philosophical tradition. In the words of Du Bois, And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought—the thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying “Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity—vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!” To be sure behind the thought lurks afterthought,—suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue? (Du Bois [1903] 2006, 68; my emphasis) Furthermore, the “afterthought” and its immanent force of suspicion explore other subjective dimensions—the desires, struggles and dreams of the black race—which reveals alternative modes of being in the world.2 The political shift initiated by the afterthought’s critique is capable of opening up new historical categories and reconstructing the arena in which subjectivity occupies a new theoretical framework. The afterthought identifies and supersedes...

Global flows as gendered cultural pedagogies: learning gangsta in the ‘Durty South’

This article theorizes empirical data from an ethnographic project conducted in and around the economically disadvantaged suburb of Noble Park in southeast suburban Melbourne (Victoria, Australia). Exploring the politics around gendered identities of young people involved in the research, particularly Australian-Sudanese men, the authors theorize global flows of ‘gangsta culture’ as gendered cultural pedagogies that are (re)produced by young men who live in the area. In highlighting the pedagogical role of gangsta culture, the authors read Appadurai's theories of globalization and the imagination in relation to theories of hegemonic masculinity, to argue global flows of gangsta culture are gendered and carry with them specific kinds of idealized masculinities in relation to which young people in the study produce themselves. The authors also argue that gangsta culture clearly is not an American phenomenon, despite commonly being associated as such. Rather, its reach is globalizing, appearing everywhere global media texts form part of local communities. Gangsta pedagogies are thus in motion and disjunctive, operating transnationally and having differentiated effects in the lives of young participants involved in the research. In line with this, gangsta masculinities are ubiquitous and constitute sites of constant contest and reconstruction, with the young men involved in this research constructing their masculinities dialogically, in relation to the perceptions of peers, family members, teachers, members of the community and in relation to the contours of local space. Whether young people choose to actively engage with gangsta culture, or are unwillingly engaged with it by virtue of the spaces they traverse, its pedagogical forces effect both problematic and productive performances of racialized, gendered and spatialized identities.

A Memory of Justice as a Democratic Pedagogical Force

Read through the strictures of realpolitik, the decision to conciliate the transition to democracy in Argentina via the public educational display of Trial of the Military (in 1985) can be deemed a...