Caroline Pelletier

Emancipation, equality and education : Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu and the question of performativity

Jacques Rancières work has had significant impact in philosophy and literary theory, but remains largely undiscussed in the field of education. This article is a review of the relevance of Rancières work to education research. Rancières argument about education emerges from his critique of Bourdieu, which states that Bourdieu reinforces inequality by presuming it as the starting point of his analysis. What is at stake is the question of performativity, and the means by which discourse has effects. This debate has implications for considering the basis of claims to truth in literary and social science discourse. Parallels are drawn between Judith Butlers and Rancières portrayal of the relationship between discourse and subjection, as well as their attention to discursive ‘imitation’ in making inequality representable. The article concludes with a discussion of the problematic which Rancières work suggests for education research.

Learning to play in digital games

There is growing interest in the use of games for educational purposes, particularly with regard to teaching curriculum subjects. Much of the research, however, has focused either on the content of games or the learning theory they illustrate. This paper presents a methodology that allows for an examination of how players learn to play. The focus is on understanding learning within specific instances of play. Rather than generalising from such studies, it is argued that understanding such processes is crucial for incorporating specific games into educational systems. Three case studies are presented that illustrate the application of this method. We also evaluate its usefulness and limitations. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues in researching learning from games, and suggestions for how research methods in this area might be developed.

Ranciere and the Poetics of the Social Sciences.

This article reviews the significance of Jacques Rancière’s work for methodological debates in the social sciences, and education specifically. It explores the implications of constructing research as an aesthetic, rather than primarily a methodological, endeavour. What is at stake in this distinction is the means by which research intervenes in social order and how it assumes political significance, with Rancière arguing against a notion of science as the other of ideology. Rancière’s argument for a democratic research practice organized around a ‘method of equality’ is situated in relation to openly ideological feminist ethnography. The implications of Rancière’s work for investigating affect in academic discourse and subjectification in education are reviewed in the conclusion.

Game Design as Textual Poaching: Media Literacy, Creativity and Game-Making

This article addresses practices of textual appropriation in computer games made by young people. By focusing on how young peoples production work makes reference to popular media texts, it examines the basis on which such work claims to be legible as a game text: how it claims to be literate in the context of an after-school game-making club. The analysis builds on studies of ‘identity work’ at play in childrens discussions of popular media, but develops this by looking at practices of media production rather than consumption. To realise this move, the article draw on methods of textual analysis developed for the study of multimodal, interactive texts. The article contributes to debates about the nature of creativity and how this can be taught and learned, particularly with respect to media education. It draws on an account of creativity developed by Vygotsky, in which creativity is described in terms of the transformation of cultural resources using semiotic tools, including concepts. This account allows the positioning moves realised by young peoples game texts in terms of creative literacy practices to be traced, whilst avoiding notions of creativity which are either reductively skill based or unhelpfully celebratory.

Reconfiguring Interactivity, Agency and Pleasure in the Education and Computer Games Debate — Using Žižek's Concept of Interpassivity to Analyse Educational Play

Digital or computer games have recently attracted the interest of education researchers and policy-makers for two main reasons: their interactivity, which is said to allow greater agency, and their inherent pleasures, which are linked to increased motivation to learn. However, the relationship between pleasure, agency and motivation in educational technologies is undertheorised. This article aims to situate these concepts within a framework that might identify more precisely how games can be considered to be educational. The framework is based on Žižeks theory of subjectivity in cyberspace, and in particular on his notion of interpassivity, which is defined in relation to interactivity. The usefulness of this concept is explored first by examining three approaches to theorising cyberspace and their respective manifestations in key texts on educational game play. Žižeks analysis of cyberspace in terms of socio-symbolic relations is then outlined to suggest how games might be considered educational in so far as they provide opportunities to manipulate and experiment with the rules underpinning our sense of reality and identity. This resembles Brechts notion of the educational value of theatre. The conclusion emphasises that the terms on which games are understood to be educational relate to the social interests which education is understood to serve.

Reconsidering ‘ethics’ and ‘quality’ in healthcare research: the case for an iterative ethical paradigm

BackgroundUK-based research conducted within a healthcare setting generally requires approval from the National Research Ethics Service. Research ethics committees are required to assess a vast range of proposals, differing in both their topic and methodology. We argue the methodological benchmarks with which research ethics committees are generally familiar and which form the basis of assessments of quality do not fit with the aims and objectives of many forms of qualitative inquiry and their more iterative goals of describing social processes/mechanisms and making visible the complexities of social practices. We review current debates in the literature related to ethical review and social research, and illustrate the importance of re-visiting the notion of ethics in healthcare research.DiscussionWe present an analysis of two contrasting paradigms of ethics. We argue that the first of these is characteristic of the ways that NHS ethics boards currently tend to operate, and the second is an alternative paradigm, that we have labelled the ‘iterative’ paradigm, which draws explicitly on methodological issues in qualitative research to produce an alternative vision of ethics. We suggest that there is an urgent need to re-think the ways that ethical issues are conceptualised in NHS ethical procedures. In particular, we argue that embedded in the current paradigm is a restricted notion of ‘quality’, which frames how ethics are developed and worked through. Specific, pre-defined outcome measures are generally seen as the traditional marker of quality, which means that research questions that focus on processes rather than on ‘outcomes’ may be regarded as problematic. We show that the alternative ‘iterative’ paradigm offers a useful starting point for moving beyond these limited views.SummaryWe conclude that a ‘one size fits all’ standardisation of ethical procedures and approach to ethical review acts against the production of knowledge about healthcare and dramatically restricts what can be known about the social practices and conditions of healthcare. Our central argument is that assessment of ethical implications is important, but that the current paradigm does not facilitate an adequate understanding of the very issues it aims to invigilate.

The missing self: competence, the person and Foucault

Any conversation about the use of meta-analytic techniques in judging sufficiency should also consider the challenges of interpreting cumulative findings from quasi-experimental education studies. A non-randomised study may suffer from serious confounding, such as selection bias, which accounts for the findings more convincingly than the nominal intervention. Moreover, a study that starts out randomised may become confounded by participant attrition. Given the difficulties inherent in conducting medical education research, a narrative review should probably always accompany a meta-analysis, and should play an important role in the drawing of conclusions from the results.

Playful Simulations Rather Than Serious Games Medical Simulation as a Cultural Practice

Medical simulation has historically been studied in terms of the delivery of learning outcomes or the social construction of knowledge. Consequently, simulation-based medical education has been researched primarily in terms of the transfer of skills or the reproduction of professional communities of practice. We make a case for studying simulation-based medical education as a cultural practice, situating it within a history of gaming and simulation, and which, by virtue of distinctive aesthetics, does not simply teach skills or reproduce professional practices but rather transforms how medicine can be made sense of. Three concepts from the field of game studies—play, narrative, and simulation—are deployed to interpret an ethnographic study of hospital-based simulation centers and describe underreported phenomena, including the cooperative work involved in maintaining a fictional world, the narrative conventions by which medical intervention are portrayed, and the political consequences of simulating the division of labor.

Playing at doctors and nurses: technology, play and medical simulation

In this chapter we discuss how concepts of play and interactive story-telling can be used to make sense of simulation-based clinical education. We argue that role-playing clinical situations affects how such situations can be made sense of, because they are shaped by contemporary narrative conventions for the representation of bodily injury, and by the emotional pleasures fulfilled by mimicry and pretence. The argument has implications for interpreting the educational and ethical significance of digital, simulation technologies for representing the body, and for interpreting how such technologies introduce novel social practices—notably play—into existing institutional settings.

Fantasies of medical reality: An observational study of simulation-based medical education

Medicine is increasingly taught in immersive simulated environments to supplement the apprenticeship model of work-based learning. Clinical research on this educational practice focuses on its realism, defined as a property of simulation technology. We treat realism as a function of subjective but collectively organized perception and imbued with fantasy, which we define by drawing on Lacanian studies of virtual reality and workplace organization. Data from an observational study of four simulation centres in London teaching hospitals is drawn on to present an account of what was taught and learned about medicine, including medical failure, when medical practice was simulated.