Katsushika Hokusai and a Poetics of Nostalgia

Abstract

This article addresses the activation of aesthetics through the examination of an acute sensitivity to melancholy and time permeating the literary and pictorial arts of Japan. In medieval court circles, this sensitivity was activated through a pervasive sense of aware, a poignant reflection on the pathos of things. This sensibility became the motivating force for court verse, and through this medium, for the mature projects of the ukiyo-e ‘floating world picture’ artist Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai reached back to aware sensibilities, subjects and conventions in celebrations of the poetic that sustained cultural memories resonating classical lyric and pastoral themes. This paper examines how this elegiac sensibility activated Hokusai’s preoccupations with poetic allusion in his late representations of scholar-poets and the unfinished series of Hyakunin isshu uba-ga etoki, ‘One hundred poems, by one hundred poets, explained by the nurse’. It examines four works to explain how their synthesis of the visual and poetic could sustain aware themes and tropes over time to maintain a distinctive sense of this aesthetic sensibility in Japan.     

Notes on British education: an American's perspective

Abstract

This paper argues that the Scottish Education Department (SED) has dispensed with its earlier advocacy of human relations management approaches to staff development. The concept of ‘collaboration’, stressed in the National Committee for the In‐service Training of Teachers (NCITT) reports of 1984, is not mentioned in the SED's consultation paper School Teachers’ Professional Development into the 1990s. The period between 1979 and 1984 is analysed briefly. This period was typified by a declared preference for collaborative INSET. Consideration is given to the SED's consultation paper School Teachers’ Professional Development into the 1990s, and the SED's concept of ‘professional development’ is examined. The SED's management ethos as implied in Curriculum and Assessment in Scotland: a policy for the 1990s is incorporated into the analysis.     

Of Slumdogs and Schoolmasters: Jacotot,Rancière and Mitra on self-organized learning

Abstract

This article argues that the concept and practice of ‘self-organized learning’, as pioneered by Sugata Mitra (and his team) in the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiments (1999–2005) that inspired the novel Q & A (2006) and the resulting movie, Slumdog millionaire (2008) bear direct, but not uncritical comparison with Jacques Rancière’s account of ‘universal teaching’ discovered by maverick nineteenth century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot. In both cases, it is argued, there is a deliberate dissociation of two functions of ‘teaching’ that are often conflated: knowledge and mastery. Mitra’s development of computer-mediated learning among the supposedly ‘ignorant’ of India’s slums, and Rancière’s insistence on equality as a presupposition rather than a goal, both emphasize the agency of the student at the centre of learning, but in ways that displace both established pedagogical methods of ‘explication’ and the neoliberal ideology of ‘schooling’ as the harmonizing of individual and social functions of education.     

Reading ads,reading the world

This paper challenges the reductive notion of children as ‘efferent'¹1 A term used by Rosenblatt (1938 Rosenblatt, L. 1938. Literature as Exploration. New York: Appleton-Century. [Google Scholar]) to critique the teaching of reading which involved students in ‘taking away’ a particular meaning. readers who learn to decode written language in order to ‘take away’ knowledge. This anachronistic idea has become entrenched in current UK curriculum and education policy. However, it is well established that decoding letters and sounds is only one aspect of reading, that reading is cultural and that learning to read, not only words but also images and sounds, develops children's comprehension and criticality. With this in mind, I seek to share a process through which children and young people were able to develop as readers with a particular focus on the reading of media texts. I present an account of media education activity which focused on the way children read media texts, in the classroom. I suggest that with appropriate pedagogic and conceptual tools children develop as critical, cultural and collaborative readers of words, images, sounds and texts and thereby of the world.     

Wuwei (non-action) Philosophy and Actions: Rethinking ‘actions’ in school reform

This inquiry aims to enrich conversation regarding school reform. The author asks about what other discourses are possible when the action-oriented question of how to ‘act’ is a major approach to ‘fix’ current educational problems. Drawing from Taoist philosophy of wuwei (non-action), the author provides a frame to review current school reform movement. Political philosophy of wuwei highlights non-interference or non-intervention governance. Laozi discusses his theory of governance that a sage leader should take and explicates the paradox of non-action: By not doing, everything is done. The paradox of wuwei complicates dialogues in the field of curriculum theory by opening spaces for taking effortless actions in the midst of standardization and accountability reform movement.     

The Teacher Education Reform Process in Ethiopia: Some consequences on educators and its implications

With the emergence of the discourse of TESO, teacher education in Ethiopia has been struggling to change rhetoric and practice by reaffirming a managerially driven reform performance. The terrain is now characterized by fresh, but globally dominant rhetoric. Salient in the emerging discourse is reform mottos and agendas such as ‘active learning’, ‘competence’, ‘participatory’, ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘system overhaul’. However, the process pursued by the ‘reform’ task performers is noticeably and evidently characterized as a managerial approach which sidesteps pedagogues and pedagogy in favor of fulfilling instrumental, central and market‐oriented agendas. The process has so far signaled a ‘reform’ process which I typically refer to as peripheralization of pedagogical practitioners. Conspicuously absent in the process is a critical vision of learning to teach and a structural continuum that connects faculty and school. The process has so far clung to the reinscribing of traditional modes of doing teacher education which has fallen far short of fulfilling what is in the high sounding rhetoric.     

Small Talk: Children’s Everyday ‘Molecule’ Ideas

This paper reports on 6–11-year-old children’s ‘sayings and doings’ (Harré 2002) as they explore molecule artefacts in dialectical-interactive teaching interviews (Fleer, Cultural Studies of Science Education 3:781–786, 2008; Hedegaard et al. 2008). This sociocultural study was designed to explore children’s everyday awareness of and meaning-making with cultural molecular artefacts. Our everyday world is populated with an ever increasing range of molecular or nanoworld words, symbols, images, and games. What do children today say about these artefacts that are used to represent molecular world entities? What are the material and social resources that can influence a child’s everyday and developing scientific ideas about ‘molecules’? How do children interact with these cognitive tools when given expert assistance? What meaning-making is afforded when children are socially and materially assisted in using molecular tools in early chemical and nanoworld thinking? Tool-dependent discursive studies show that provision of cultural artefacts can assist and direct developmental thinking across many domains of science (Schoultz et al., Human Development 44:103–118, 2001; Siegal 2008). Young children’s use of molecular artefacts as cognitive tools has not received much attention to date (Jakab 2009a, b). This study shows 6–11-year-old children expressing everyday ideas of molecular artefacts and raising their own questions about the artefacts. They are seen beginning to domesticate (Erneling 2010) the words, symbols, and images to their own purposes when given the opportunity to interact with such artefacts in supported activity. Discursive analysis supports the notion that using ‘molecules’ as cultural tools can help young children to begin ‘putting on molecular spectacles’ (Kind 2004). Playing with an interactive game (ICT) is shown to be particularly helpful in assisting children’s early meaning-making with representations of molecules, atoms, and their chemical symbols.     

Linking Goals of Governmentality with Policies of Assessment

The Student Performance Standards policy in Queensland, Australia bears a resemblance to similar technologies currently employed in other countries to test children throughout their schooling. Drawing on the Foucauldian understanding of governmentality, assessment practices are positioned as technologies of government regularly used to achieve certain social and political goals, i.e. governing a school population by convenient means. Through a close investigation of the policy cycle of the Student Performance Standards, contradictions of policy making and interpretation are evident. Testing practices are shown to reflect a centralised thrust which presents a paradox in an educational bureaucracy which is presently involved in devolution. It is the political balancing act of keeping the language of policy making in accordance with what is in the child's best interests as well as satisfying the needs of government to ‘know’ a population so that it can act in ways which are considered to be appropriate to state building, that keeps assessment practices on the agenda of governmentality.     

A new equity deal for schools: a case study of policy‐making in Queensland,Australia

In this paper we draw on concepts from policy sociology to analyse the new equity deal for schools in Queensland, Australia. We examine this ‘new deal’ through an analysis of the language of ‘inclusion’ and ‘educational risk’ in key policy documents associated with a major reform of public education in Queensland. In addition, we analyse the interview talk of key policy actors involved in policy framing, carriage and monitoring. We note that globalism has increased rather than reduced social inequity. At the same time, good quality accessible education can play a crucial role in challenging the inequalities produced by global informationalism. In Queensland, Australia, equity is still on the agenda, but in radically new neo‐liberal economic ways. The focus is individualistic—each individual needs to be tracked because they are potentially ‘at‐risk’ of ‘school failure’. Identification of ‘at‐risk’ students has been devolved to the level of the school and district, and intervention strategies have to be devised at the local level. Stories of success are then to be shared/networked with other schools. We suggest that while ‘target group equity’ strategies were limited in terms of addressing issues of social exclusion and inequity, the new deal on equity, a market‐individualistic approach is an inadequate alternative.

In tough times you stick together. … This was Labor’s ‘inclusive’ society: a social democracy sustained by the wealth‐generating power of free markets and economic integration with the world economy, and made strong by a practical ethic of social cooperation and fair distribution. (Watson, 2002 Watson, D. 2002. Recollections of a bleeding heart. A portrait of Paul Keating PM, Sydney: Random House.  [Google Scholar], p. 316)     

The construction of national identity through primary school history: the Irish case

Much recent sociological work on education makes reference to gender, sexual, ethnic, local and political ‘project’ identities, yet there remains a need to bring the nation, and the state, back in; to also question the way in which ‘national’ identities are constructed in a context of globalisation and localisation. Through an analysis of Irish primary history curriculum statements from 1971 and 1999, I identify some key features of the state’s response to identity construction in a globalised context. They include a focus on pupils becoming skilled in reflexively producing identity, and a focus on a ‘boundless’ globalised identity. These changes are not unproblematic.

You will know all too well that Ireland is a country at war with its past—or, at least, with conflicting versions of its several pasts. But we are each of us in a struggle with those … on a much more deeply personal level than we sometimes know. (The character ‘Sr. Mary Rose Kennedy’ in Joseph O’Connor’s novel Inishowen) (O’Connor, 2000 O’Connor, J. 2000. Inishowen, London: Secker & Warburg.  [Google Scholar], p. 42)     

The Stranger Within: Dostoevsky’s underground

Abstract

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s influential novel Notes from underground, we find one of the most memorable characters in nineteenth century literature. The Underground Man, around whom everything else in this book revolves, is in some respects utterly repugnant: he is self-centred, obsessive and cruel. Yet he is also highly intelligent, honest and reflective, and he has suffered significantly at the hands of others. Reading Notes from underground can be a harrowing experience but also an educative one, for in an encounter with what at first seems unfamiliar and disorienting we can awaken the ‘stranger within’. Dostoevsky’s work, if we are ready for it, can shake us from our slumbers and allow us to see that what appears to be strange may in fact be deeply familiar to us.     

The Early Literacy Support Programme (ELS) and the blend and clash of national educational policy ideologies in England

In this article we consider the development of key policy issues in England, related to the area of literacy learning and children who are considered to have difficulties in literacy in their early years. We trace the tensions which have arisen since the 1980s between different policies and practices in these areas. These tensions include pressures to raise standards of literacy and to support children with difficulties, and the establishment of a prescribed curriculum for young children. In particular, we focus on the blend and clash of national educational policy ideals in areas related to literacy and children who have been categorised as having ‘special educational needs’, and how these have influenced the development of the Early Literacy Support Programme (ELS) (DfES, 2001 Department for Education and Skills 2001a Early Literacy Support Programme, materials to support teachers working in partnership with teaching assistants London DfES  [Google Scholar]a; 2001 Department for Education and Skills 2001b Early Literacy Support Programme, session materials for teaching assistants London DfES  [Google Scholar]b). This is a programme set up by the Department for Education and Science in England for children in Year 1, aged 5 to 6 years old.     

Cumbria; An Open Tech Feasibility Study

A recent FEU paper, ‘TDLB Standards in Further Education’, advocates that in future, ‘initial teaching training’ and progression routes for staff in AFHE should be founded on ’national, competence‐based standards’. ¹ 1. ‘TDLB Standars in Further Education’, FEU, London, February 1992      

Have the changes introduced by the 2004 Higher Education Act made higher education admissions in England wider and fairer?

‘Widening participation’ and ‘fair access’ have been contested policy areas in English higher education since at least the early 1990s. They were key facets of the 2003 White Paper – The Future of Higher Education – and the subsequent 2004 Higher Education Act, with stated objectives that the reach of higher education should be wider and fairer. In particular, there has been considerable concern about admissions to ‘top universities’, which have remained socially as well as academically exclusive. The principal policy tools used by the Act were the introduction of variable tuition fees, expanded student grants, discretionary bursaries and the new Office for Fair Access (OFFA). This paper draws on publicly available statistics to assess whether the changes implemented by the 2004 Office for Fair Access (OFFA). 2004. Producing Access Agreements: OFFA guidance to institutions, Bristol: OFFA.  [Google Scholar] Act have indeed made access to English higher education wider and fairer in relation to young people progressing from state schools and colleges and from lower socio‐economic groups. It concludes that, while there is some evidence for modest improvements, these have been concentrated outside the ‘top universities’, which have seen slippage relative to the rest of the sector. The paper concludes with a discussion of the reasons why financial inducements appear to be a flawed and naive approach to influencing student demand.     

The White Working Class,Racism and Respectability: Victims,Degenerates and Interest-Convergence

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that race and class inequalities cannot be fully understood in isolation: their intersectional quality is explored through an analysis of how the White working class were portrayed in popular and political discourse during late 2008 (the timing is highly significant). While global capitalism reeled on the edge of financial melt-down, the essential values of neo-liberalism were reasserted as natural, moral and efficient through two apparently contrasting discourses. First, a victim discourse presented White working people, and their children in particular, as suffering educationally because of minoritised racial groups and their advocates. Second a discourse of degeneracy presented an immoral and barbaric underclass as a threat to social and economic order. Applying the ‘interest-convergence principle’, from Critical Race Theory, the discourses amount to a strategic mobilisation of White interests where the ‘White, but not quite’ status of the working class (Allen, 2009 Allen, R.L. 2009. “What about poor White people?”. In Handbook of Social Justice in Education, Edited by: Ayers, W., Quinn, T. and Stovall, D. 209–230. New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]) provides a buffer zone at a time of economic and cultural crisis which secures societal White supremacy and provides a further setback to progressive reforms that focus on race, gender and disability equality. The existence of poor Whites, therefore, is not only consistent with a regime of White supremacy – they are actually an essential part of the processes that sustain it.     

Disordered eating and disordered schooling: what schools do to middle class girls

This paper focuses upon relationships barely explored in the sociology of education either in the UK or elsewhere that lie between the practices and processes of formal education and the aetiology (the ‘causations’) and development of eating disorders, specifically, anorexia nervosa (AN) in young women and girls. In so doing, it also touches on other relationships relatively under explored in the sociology of education, between formal education and ‘the middle class’. Our analyses point to the ways in which social trends outside schools relating to ‘the body’ and health generate and intersect with what we refer to as performance and perfection codes following Bernstein (2000 Bernstein B (2000) Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity (Boston, Rowman & Littlefield)  [Google Scholar]) and Evans and Davies (2004 Evans J Davies B (2004) The embodiment of consciousness: Bernstein, health and schooling in: J. Evans, B. Davies & J. Wright (Eds) Body, knowledge and control: studies in the sociology of physical education and health (London, Routledge/Falmer)  [Google Scholar]). These create conditions of school work that, while increasingly difficult for many students, may be deeply damaging to the identities and health of the vulnerable few, especially if they coincide with other problematic features of their lives. Our request, as articulated through the voices of the young people in our study, is for greater understanding of the ways in which formal education and schooling may be implicated in the production of disordered eating and ill‐health. Such understanding might better equip teachers and others to help young people, irrespective of their class and cultural background, avoid falling prey to conditions that may damage or even potentially destroy their young lives.     

The Social background to teaching in the united states: An English assessment

ABSTRACT

Since 9/11 the European Court of Human Rights (the European Court) has raised anew the question of the relationship between religion and public education. In its reasoning, the European Court has had to consider competing normative accounts of the secular, either to accept or deny claims to religious liberty within Europe's public education system. This article argues that the trajectory on which the term ‘secularism’ had been used by the European Court pointed increasingly towards secular fundamentalism. This study is located at the cutting edge of religion, education and the law and builds on previous work in the field (Arthur, 1998 Arthur, J. 1998. British human rights legislation and religiously affiliated schools and colleges. Education and the Law, 10(4): 225–236. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 2008 Arthur, J. 2008. Learning under the cross: legal challenges to ‘cultural-religious symbolism’ in public schools. Education and the Law, 20(4): 337–349. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). It examines, through extensive research of legal cases, the most important developments of the usage of secular and secular education in modern discourse and explores the background to these concepts. Unless otherwise stated, religion in this article shall refer to the Christian tradition because Christianity has been the historical context for the development of the concept of ‘secular’ in Europe. The paper outlines three models of secular education before moving on to scrutinise how the European Court has understood and evaluated various legal cases before it on the interaction between secular States, public education and notions of religious symbolism and influence. The paper will discuss the significance of the European Court's reasoning and decisions for public education within a secular State context and offer some conclusions on the implications of these decisions. It examines the legal principles that underpin the European Court's supervision of the State's role in the provision of education. It focuses on the chimeric goal of neutrality and highlights the risks attached to the use of an ideological conception of secularism that could lead potentially to the complete removal of the religious as a vital cultural and intellectual dimension of public education.     

Hannah Arendt and Norwegian Muslim children’s schooling: in pursuit of democratic practices

The aim of this paper is to consider whether Hannah Arendt’s (1996) [Arendt, H. (1958/1998 Arendt, H. (1958/1998). Vita Activa. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago. [Google Scholar]). Vita Activa. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago] concept of ‘public space’ is a potentially useful and creative way of thinking about aspects of Muslim children’s experiences within the context of education. Following a terror attack in 2011, when 77 people were killed, the then Norwegian prime minister stated that ‘our answer to this violence is more openness and more democracy but not naivety’. Accordingly, this paper draws on data so as to put concepts drawn from Arendt to work. In so doing, we indicate possibilities for ‘more openness and more democracy’ where Norwegian children can have Islam as an important element within their lives in ways that avoid the charge of naivety.     

Education and Families in The Spirit of Community: questions of identity,individuality and diversity

ABSTRACT

This paper [1] [1] Sections of this article will appear as part of chapter 1 in Demaine & Entwistle (1996), and some sections were included as part of a paper entitled ‘The politics of identity and the identity of sociology’ presented to the International Sociology of Education Conference on ‘Pedagogy, Identity and the Politics of Difference’ at Sheffield, United Kingdom, 3‐5 January 1996. examines communitarian argument on schools, families and youth culture in Amitai Etzioni's influential book, The Spirit of Community. The paper concludes that in lieu of detailed policy argument Etzioni's readers are presented with appeals to ‘changes of heart’ and a circular (and inconclusive) account of the supposed role of various social institutions in inculcating ‘appropriate moral values’. The paper also discusses Ray Pahl's critique of communitarianism and his account of identity, individuality and diversity in what he refers to as the ‘friendly society’.

     

The conflicts and contradictions of working in a mass higher education system

Education must be a force for opportunity and social justice, not for the entrenchment of privilege. We must make certain that the opportunities that higher education brings are available to all those who have the potential to benefit from them, regardless of their background (DfES, 2003 Department for Education and Skills. 2003. The Future of Higher Education, London: The Stationery Office. Cm 5735 [Google Scholar] : 67).

We will continue to widen participation in higher education and encourage students of all backgrounds with academic potential to go to university (Queen’s Speech, 15 November 2006).