Alan Bainbridge

When learning becomes a fetish: the pledge, turn and prestige of magic tricks

Abstract It is our contention that the process of higher education could be read as a commodity and in both Marxian and Freudian assumptions, a fetish. Instrumental in this discussion are Marx’s theorising of the commodity fetish that deceives by conflating the distinction between use and exchange value; and Freud’s re-visiting of his theory of fetishism, where he considers the fetish in the context of dealing with separation and loss in everyday life. This paper highlights how the consequence of fetishised behaviour has led to violent outcomes, such as the policy decision in England to introduce a ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ (TEF). We argue that the TEF may bring about the death of learning in HE and diminish the role of academic staff. Nevertheless, influenced by Winnicott, Cixous and Biesta, we offer a more hopeful ‘Teaching that is Good Enough Framework’.

Education then and now: making the case for ecol-agogy

ABSTRACT The processes, settings and outcomes of human education have distinctive impacts on the human and non-human world. This paper sets out to discuss what may have motivated the initiation of human education, how it has been maintained why the outcome has wide-ranging, and often negative, planetary impacts. The analysis offers a multi-disciplinary account of education, from pre-history to the present, noting that humans, past and present are born into an ‘open world’ that requires world building or, niche construction. As a result, cultural and genetic evolution are out of synchronisation instigating an existential threat and the anxious experience of ‘adaptive-lag’ leading to the motive for continued niche construction. Education is presented as a particular type of niche construction requiring teachers and the use of symbolic verbal language to help learners move from simplistic ‘split’ thinking to the more mature position where the needs of self and others can be met.

Understanding Attitudes Towards Native Wildlife and Biodiversity in the UK: The Role of Zoos

The present paper draws from a study of the role of zoos in forming attitudes towards biodiversity and native wild carnivores that are considered for reintroduction. The project is being developed by an interdisciplinary team (wildlife conservation, psychology, education) working towards the development of a questionnaire to investigate this topic in the UK. Research suggests that experiences with live animals in zoos may encourage empathy, through personal connection, which in turn facilitates greater concern towards biodiversity. Concomitantly, the reintroduction of wild carnivores to their native habitats may contribute to biodiversity by helping regulate ecosystem dynamics. Carnivores also carry a rich cultural and historical heritage. IUCN guidelines state the need for public support to establish a reintroduced population in the wild, therefore, carnivore restoration efforts benefit from the understanding of the human dimensions. A pilot study was carried out in Kent (spring 2015) using focus groups and interviews to investigate attitudes towards biodiversity, with particular focus on two species of carnivores native to the British Isles and currently considered for reintroduction (the European lynx Lynx lynx and the pine marten Martes martes) and the role of zoos in promoting support towards biodiversity conservation. Results suggest an association between seeing native wild carnivore species in the zoo and emotional responses such as ‘breaking down fears’, but also concerns about a disconnect between people and nature, and misunderstanding about the role of zoos in ‘protecting’ species. Below we offer a discussion of the themes that emerged from the analysis of focus groups and interviews in relation to biodiversity.

Developing an Education Professional Practice: Four Common Experiences

This chapter makes the case that due to a shared commonality situated in early experiences of education settings, developing an education professional practice is potentially unique to most other professions. Having already experienced being ‘in education’, evokes memories, felt and thought, of past classroom experiences which collide within early negotiations to develop the role of an education professional. Beginning education professionals are seen: to have career pathways are associated with earlier life experiences, reject professional knowledge in favour of practical experience and benefit from reflective activities that reveal the tension between personal and professional understandings of educational practices.

Developing a Professional Identity: Negotiating the Borders of Professional Practice

The importance of considering marginal situations such as the interface between personal agency and the objective reality of education settings is highlighted here. It is accepted that the margins between being and not being a professional create an existential angst that has parallels with the formation of a self-identity. Finally, it is claimed that a professional identity is most likely to be formed within a caring or supportive environment that facilitates an understanding of the needs of the self and others. A mechanism for how past education experiences impact professional development is provided in relation to the sociality of human ‘outpourings’, the impact of individual recognition of the ‘other’ on self-confidence and unconscious tension inherent in crossing border country.

Encountering Education at Three Levels: Social, Individual and Unconscious

The discussion of the response to the objective reality of education practice highlights the sequential relationship between Berger and Luckmann, Honneth and Hirschhorn. It has been shown so far that the theme of personal agency can be explored from the perspective of externalisation (social), self-respect (individual) and basic-assumption social defences (unconscious). The theme of the objective reality of education settings has been shown to be related to objectification (social), self-esteem (individual) and the social defence of organisational rituals (unconscious).

Reasons to be Cheerful: Embracing Anxiety in Education

The concluding remarks from this research indicate that tentative movements towards beginning a dialogue between education and psychoanalysis will be beneficial. The application of psychoanalytic theory does not require education to become ‘therapeutic’ but simply to allow a space where the influence of the past on the present can be considered. Neither is it suggested that psychoanalysis offers the only insight into this complex arena. What it does offer, supported by the use of narratives, is the possibility of using a language to discuss professional development that implicates the individual and their values, thereby, avoiding a limiting technical-rational approach and facilitating a move beyond superficiality. This approach provides an opportunity for new education professionals to maintain a coherent life narrative that is meaningful and motivating.

Stories of Hope and Holding

The analytic model that has been developed here seeks to provide an effective means to engage new education professionals in a meaningful reflexive dialogue. The collection of two narratives has highlighted how the past and present can be implicated in the development of an education-based professional practice. It has also identified the usefulness of using agency and responses to the reality of education settings to explore early career development. The case studies, along with the associated formative interviews, show this model to be eminently useful and to lead to insight that is far more nuanced and significant to individuals than, for example, adhering to a ‘standards’ focused discussion. Ultimately it can be argued that a Life History Narrative is sufficient to develop an education biography.

Collecting Narratives of a New Education Professional Practice

It is argued that narratives provide both a means of human meaning making and research methodology. This research has focused on the collection of Life Story and Professional Development Narratives. These have been analysed using three techniques, gestalt, Narrative Process Coding System and ‘future-blind’ panels. A major feature of the design and analysis was the continual identification of themes within each analytic technique referred to as education subjectivities that reflect the lived experiences in educational settings. It is the comparison of these that leads to the production of the education biography for each participant.

When the Personal Encounters the Professional: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

It has been noted how the interaction between the personal and the professional within such settings sets the stage for the psychoanalytic phenomena of transference, countertransference and defence mechanisms. Subsequently, these phenomena were considered in the context of the rejection of professional knowledge in favour of practice and therefore highlighted the need to consider wider social contexts and how the associated knowledge and practices emerge. Particularly by considering, (1) how unconscious process may defend against social structures, (2) the process by which humans construct a social and cultural world as well considering, (3) the role that recognition has on developing identity. The specific focus concentrates on how individuals and societies or groups interact to create both a meaningful self-identity and a shared objective reality.