Transcript Changing Pedagogical Spaces: Difference, Diversity and

Changing Pedagogical Spaces:
Difference, Diversity and Inclusion
Professor Penny Jane Burke
Director of the Paulo Freire Institute-UK
UALL annual conference 2014
[email protected]
Marketising Diversity
pedagogical stratification
• To examine the effects of global neo-liberalism
on pedagogies in higher education
• increasing pressure for universities to position
themselves as ‘world-class’
• to compete in a highly stratified field driven by
discourses of ‘excellence’ & league tables
•
See Pedagogical Stratification: The Changing Landscape of Higher Education
(Stevenson, Burke and Whelan, 2014) York: Higher Education Academy
Neoliberal regimes
• imperative to develop human capital
• massification - achieved by increasing student
fees
• Neoliberal individualisation - responsibility &
reward - financial return to individual
graduate
• WP increases student numbers - therefore the
HEIs’ market
Marketised HE
• marketized frameworks: ‘likely to erode the
potential of higher education to contribute to
equity’
• Market mechanisms: ‘exert pressure on
universities to comply with consumer
demand’
From Naidoo, Rajani (2003).
‘delivery’ ‘styles’ ‘efficiency’…
discourses of ‘flexibility’
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flexible provision to address diversified market
individualise the requirement to ‘be flexible’
doing more with less
target-setting - individual value
insidious inequalities -made invisible through
dominant discourses of teaching and learning
in the neoliberal university
Meritocracy: HE should be available to all who have the potential to
benefit from university study, regardless of social background
‘potential’ tends to be profoundly shaped by particular values,
perspectives and judgements
e.g. being witty, dressing with style
and being motivated
Discourses of derision & deficit
• the (disadvantged) student is often derisively
constructed as lacking determination,
discipline or the passion to learn
• subjects those associated with disadvantage,
diversity and difference to processes of selfcorrection
• focal point of a project of transformation is
turned on to the individual
Reconceptualising pedagogies…
• we form & reform our identities in & through
pedagogical spaces – shaped by the emotional
• emotions ‘produce the very surfaces and
boundaries that allow the individual and the
social to be delineated as if they are objects’
(Ahmed, 2004)
• Pedagogical histories connected to ‘dividing
practices’ (Foucault, 1977…)
Fraser’s concept of social justice
• On the status model, misrecognition is neither a psychical deformation nor
an impediment to ethical self-realization. Rather it constitutes an
institutionalized relation of subordination and a violation of justice. To be
misrecognized, accordingly, is not to suffer distorted identity or impaired
subjectivity as a result of being depreciated by others. It is rather to be
constituted by institutionalized patterns of cultural value in ways that
prevent one from participating as a peer in social life. On the status model
then, misrecognition is relayed not through deprecatory attitudes or restanding discourses, but rather through social institutions. It arises, more
precisely, when institutions structure interaction according to cultural
norms that impede parity of participation (Fraser, 2003: 29, my
emphasis).
blaming the victim…
• When misrecognition is identified with internal
distortions in the structure of the self-conscious
of the oppressed, it is but a short step to blaming
the victim (…) Misrecognition is a matter of
externally manifest and publicly verifiable
impediments to some people’s standing as full
members of society. To redress it, again, means
to overcome subordination. This in turn means
changing institutions and social practices
(Fraser, 2003: 31, my emphasis).
McNay’s critique
• McNay (2008) critique’s Fraser’s ‘objectivist
perspectives’:
• Leads to misrecognition being considered
‘primarily as externally imposed injuries
rather than as lived identities’ (McNay, 2008:
150).
Embodied
•
identities
‘Embodied identity helps to
think through the ways
different bodies take up and
use the different higher
education spaces available,
and the ways that higher
education spaces and
practices are constructed
and re/shaped in relation to
the different bodies that
move through and are
positioned within them’
(Burke, 2012)
‘Formations of Gender and HE
Pedagogies’ (GaP)
• Research team: PJ Burke (PI), Professor Gill Crozier, Professor Becky
Francis, Dr Barbara Read (School of Education) and Julie Hall and Jo
Peat (Learning & Teaching Enhancement Unit)
• 64 students (across 6 subject areas) -- individually interviewed
• 18 Executive Student Consultants participated intensively across a
range of methods and project activities.
• 23 HE lecturers (from 6 subject areas) participated in 12 focus group
discussions
• 20 observations of classroom practice -- with reflective meetings as
a follow-up.
• 17 students and 22 staff from 16 additional HEIs across England
participated in intensive series of workshops and discussions.
internalising processes of
misrecognition
• Discussions can make me feel anxious. I am
scared of being stupid like and then no one says
something and I am thinking it and the lecturer
points it out. Then I think I should have said it to
show how clever I was but I didn’t and no one else
did. But I am just too scared to put my hand up or
just say it. Sometimes I even feel nauseous –like I
want to be sick just to say a sentence. And I’m not
a shy person but I’m just very nervous (female
student).
‘shame’ is a social emotion
• [Shame] exists with reference to how we
anticipate others may see and reject us’ –
but it is experienced as internalized
disappointment with self i.e. it exists with
reference to how we judge our own
shortcomings, feelings of failure or inadequacy
(Raphael Reed et al, 2007: 19).
‘feminisation’ of teaching and learning
• Part of me thinks it’s not my job to look after them. I have a
husband and 2 children at home that I have to look after, I
have to get these students through, I’m not their mother, I
have no intention of being their mother … and sometimes I
get really cross that there is an expectation from the
university, from my PC and from society, that I am going to
mind these students. (Female lecturer)
• I feel because of retention rates and all these systems which
are in place when you first … I am expected to be caring,
more caring than I actually want to be. (Male lecturer)
Fear…and emotion as a tool
• It’s perhaps fear of taking initiative … is it fear …
have we created that perhaps a bit? (Male
lecturer).
• There’s something about some courses that’s
feeding into that passivity, this kind of ‘I’ll just
stand at the front and talk and you’ll just listen.
(Female Lecturer)
• Emotions as ‘tools that can be used by subjects in
the project of life and career enhancement’
(Goleman, 1995 in Ahmed, 2004)
problem of differentiation & proximity
• Female Student: And here [university] seems like
heaven in this respect, no matter if you are a girl
or a boy if you talk you are listened to, you are
heard. So it’s so much different [than school]. We
have two girls in our class, they are so loud, they
are so…they don’t pay attention, seriously they
couldn’t care less about what we are talking
[about], and they continue to interrupt and stuff.
There are guys that don’t give anything to the
course, but still it’s not because they are guys or
girls, because they are people like that, they don’t
care (Female student).
marking out difference
• I would say, it sounds so bad, I would say like maybe eighty percent,
this is just me, this is a guestimate, eighty percent of people who
come from a lower class, whose parents didn’t go to university,
might not address learning in general with as quite a passion as
those who maybe came from middleclass, or those who had their
parents who went to university. Like going back to what I said
when I came here I saw university as the way to finish it, because
college wasn’t. I went to a secondary school which although it was
state it was quite top end, we had the PM’s children there, and from
there you always had high expectations bred into that sort of way of
thinking. You moved into that way of thinking, that that is the
way forward, and that is a normal thing to do, whereas people
who went to other schools might not see it like that, like some say
oh, I can get a job without a degree, they don’t really…or they say
I only need three GCSEs, they don’t aim for high enough because
they don’t know any higher (Male Student)).
Pedagogies & the perpetuation of a
politics of misrecognition
• But it’s impossible to educate, you know, in the
sense that we don’t have time to sit down and
navel gaze about how we can engage these
people better in order to do this, that and the
other or do we look right back at our
admissions criteria and say, ‘ok, we only
choose the ones who are like us.’? (Female
lecturer)
Teaching Inclusively: Changing
Pedagogical Spaces
• A key concept is ‘praxis’ and
this emphasises the dialogic
relationship between
critical reflection and
action. …in order to create
inclusive teaching practices,
conceptual resources are
essential for reshaping both
understanding and action
and this is an iterative and
cyclical process – reflectionaction and action-reflection.
Transformative pedagogies
• Demystify practices and forms of knowledge
• Difference as key resource for processes of
collaborative meaning-making (but in a framework that
recognises structural inequalities & power relations)
• questioning and critical approaches are encouraged without the fear of making ‘mistakes’
• requires sophisticated levels of understanding on the
part of the teacher of complex pedagogical relations
and the operation of power in the classroom.
potential of social technologies
• The blog enhances the opportunity for students to be more aware of
different viewpoints, which can potentially expand the students’
capacity for reading and understanding at a deeper level. In
conventional lecture settings, it is rather difficult to know what
other students grasp from the same reading material unless
tutorials are structured into the programme and these typically
occur after course inputs. The circulation of blog postings before the
lectures is not only beneficial for students but also for the lecturer,
as students but also for the lecturer, as she or he can be more aware
of what level of understanding the students have from the reading
and what is required to engage with students’ understanding and to
stretch it during the lecture and subsequent discussion.
• from Hemmi, Bayne, and Land (2009) Journal of Computer Assisted
Learning (2009), 25, 19–30
potential to form collaborative
processes of meaning-making
• Wiki textuality has the potential to be radically
different from more orthodox, non-digital
modes of writing within formal higher
education, in that the wiki space is one which
is fundamentally unstable and collectively
produced, with a tendency to problematize
conventional notions of authorship and
ownership.
•
from Hemmi, Bayne, and Land (2009) Journal of Computer Assisted Learning
(2009), 25, 19–30
Circle of knowledge
• There is no genuine instruction in
whose process no research is
performed by way of question,
investigation, curiosity, creativity
just as there is no research in the
course of which researchers do
not learn – after all, by coming to
know, they learn, and after having
learned something, they
communicate, they teach. The
role of the university…is to
immerse itself, utterly seriously,
in the moment of this circle
(Freire, 2009: 169-170).
Thank you!
• [email protected]
• http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/ResearchCentres/Paulo-Freire-Institute/http://
• www.roehampton.ac.uk/staff/Penny-JaneBurke/
• http://www.routledge.com/books/details/978
0415568241/