Pedagogical Force Research Articles

Street Smarts/Smart Streets: Public Pedagogies and the Streetscape

Street Smarts/Smart Streets: Public Pedagogies and the Streetscape

"Writing in the Margins": Brazilian Hip-Hop as an Educational Project

Hip-hop culture's force as part of globalization in the fields of economics, popular aesthetics, and identity politics has been well documented. However, its articulation to educational practices has received less attention. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in 1999 and 2002 in a youth correctional facility to analyze how state institutional practices mediate hip-hop's educational project in São Paulo, Brazil. This analysis historicizes culture and education as they pertain to popular culture and the state in urban Brazil, and evaluates hip-hop's pedagogical force in the local workshop setting.

Screening Race

A critical reading of the “hood” movies of the past decade is offered. The author discusses the possibilities of a critical, ethnic cinema, a cinema that honors racial and cultural difference. Such a cinema operates as a political and pedagogical force in the cultural wars surrounding race in America today.

On Pedagogy, Trauma and Difficult Memory: Remembering Namatjira, our Beloved

Abstract One of the projects engaged in within the text Rethinking Indigenous Education(RIE) (McConaghy, 2000) was an analysis of the colonial regimes that are reproduced within Indigenous education, often despite our emancipatory intentions. Through a detailed critique of the various competitions for epistemic authority in the field, the book explores the structural processes by which certain knowledges are legitimated as “truths” and the material and symbolic effects of these.The focus of the book was on the imagined worlds of various traditions of knowing Indigenous education and their claims to authority. It was a “how” rather than a “who” story that dealt with theoretical assumptions, broad-brush policy and curriculum inquiry and that attempted to avoid the identity politics that had gripped Indigenous education for more than a decade. Importantly the book also suggested that rather than being cumulative, critique is a process that needs to be ongoing, done again and again. This paper, Remembering Namatjira, has sought to move beyond the main projects of RIE, many of them structural in nature, to an analysis of more intimate aspects of Indigenous education. It addresses some of the “who” issues, not in terms of representation politics, who can know and speak what, but in terms of the psychic difficulties that we attach to knowledge in Indigenous education. Whereas RIE drew upon postcolonial and feminist insights, this paper considers the contribution of psychoanalysis to thinking through some of the more intractable issues that remain unexamined or underexamined in the field. Among the issues addressed are the fundamental dilemmas around our ambivalences in education; the notion of pedagogical force (and transferences, resistances and obstacles to learning); the work of ethical witnessing; and issues of difficult knowledge, or knowledge and memories that we cannot bear to know. Central to the work of rethinking Indigenous education again, in moving beyond deconstruction, is the process of making meaning out of the ruins of our lovely knowledges (Britzman, 2003), our comfort knowledges, about what should be done in Indigenous education.

Educational Intervention and Therapy

This article reviews educational intervention for students with learning disabilities. Included are many of the decisions about placement and teaching as well as the legal and pedagogical forces that influence those decisions. The topics include the influence of special education legislation, delivery systems, changing ideas about placement and levels of services, and the psychological bases for intervention.

A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition

his national survey of freshman writing programs, he estimated that only about one in five programs contains any literature, and the ones that have a literary component are likely to be devoting a semester to introducing literature rather than using literature to help teach writing. A survey of textbooks or a glance through CCCC convention programs would support the same conclusion. We have denied students who are seeking to improve their writing the benefits of reading an entire body of excellent writing. It is not unlike telling music students that they should not listen to Bach or Mahler. Why have we taken such a seemingly illogical stance? Three reasons seem to me important: the pedagogical sins of teachers in the past, the revival of rhetoric, and changing attitudes about the purposes and goals of freshman composition. Those of us who can remember how literature was often treated in writing classes are not surprised that it did not survive as a major pedagogical force. Its virtual disappearance, however, was not, I think, the result of all those theoretical reasons given in some recent articles on the topic. In large part, literature disappeared from the composition classes in this country because it was badly misused by teachers desperate to teach literature, teachers who really should not be blamed for trying to teach the one subject they knew. However, a teaching approach will not disappear merely because it is misguided or downright wrong. It will disappear only when there is something to replace it. Remember Thomas Kuhn's argument that a paradigm will not just disappear. It will vanish-or whatever paradigms do-only when it is replaced by another paradigm. So it is

The Critical Balance: Reader, Text, and Meaning

SUBJECTIVITY SEEMS TO BE CRITICAL HIGH FASHION these days. Despite differences in their positions, critics as diverse as David Bleich, Robert Crosman, Stanley Fish, and Norman Holland' have all suggested that the reader (or critic) rather than the text (or author) makes meaning. In many ways, this growing concern with reader responses has been a positive pedagogical force. In particular, it has underscored some weaknesses of what can loosely be called objective criticism, where the text as an independent object is so firmly the focus of interest that the reader as an individual is often ignored. Yet while we agree with the subjectivists that responses are the appropriate point of departure for any literary inquiry, this new focus on reader responses has its limitations as well. While it humanizes the classroom by giving primacy to the students' own readings, and while it helps explain how those readings happen, it does not really help us in improving the reading of a text not immediately accessible to the student. Recently we went to see the filmJulia, based on Lillian Hellman's memoirs. The people behind us had never heard of Dashiell Hammett, and since the film never told them who he was (depending instead on assumed prior knowledge of Hellman's relationship with him), they misheard the name Dash as Dad. From that perspective, of course, the story-complete with scenes in bed-took on an explicitly incestuous cast. What can we as teachers do with such an interpretation-or with an interpretation of Antigone (and we have had them) based on the assumption that Strophe and Antistrophe are characters? Of course, if one believes with Crosman that there is not such a thing as a misreading,2 then we don't need to do anything because all interpretations must be equal-and our understanding of the film is no better than