Cushla Kapitzke

Literacies and libraries - Archives and cybraries

As spatial repositories of dominant and marginalised, residual and emergent cultures, libraries remain key elements in the educational production and reproduction of knowledge and power. As working shrines for those canonical texts of modernity — the dictionary and the encyclopaedia — libraries are sites par excellence for applications of new literacies. This paper aims to redress their omission from the literature on literacy and education. Following a critique of current definitions of information literacy, the paper argues for a critical information literacy for navigation through textual and ideological complexity, diversity, ambiguity, and multiplicity.

‘Smart state’ for a knowledge economy: reconstituting creativity through student subjectivity

Rejecting notions of creativity as self‐realisation through free expression, this article argues that such discourses currently driving education policy comprise intellectual technologies for the production of student subjectivities required by neoliberal contexts. Using a governmentality framework, it locates the conditions of possibility for the creative subject within dominant policy articulations of the global knowledge economy and emerging rationalities of risk and uncertainty. The analysis focuses on an industry school partnership formed by a state education system in Queensland, Australia, and several multinational corporations. It examines how the partnership has emerged as a novel neoliberal space for the constitution of new education figures such as the enterprising teacher and the entrepreneurial student‐worker. These subjectivities are functional to the devolved governing strategy of social investment, which seeks to achieve a broad reconstitution of relationships between students, schools and industry in Queensland.

Reconceptualizing the possible narratives of adolescence

This paper explores various epistemological paradigms available to understand, interpret, and semiotically depict young people. These paradigms all draw upon a metadiscourse of developmental age and stage (e.g. Hall 1914) and then work from particular epistemological views of the world to cast young people in different lights. Using strategic essentialism (Spivak 1996), this paper offers four descriptions of existing paradigms, including biomedical (Erikson 1980), psychological (e.g. Piaget 1973), critical (e.g. Giroux & MacLaren 1982), and postmodern (e.g. Kenway & Bullen 2001). While some of these paradigms have been more distinct in particular cultural, historical, and political contexts, they have overlapped, informing each other as they continue to inform our understandings of young people. Each paradigm carries unique consequences for the role of the learner, the teacher, and the curriculum. This paper explores contemporary manifestations of these paradigms. From this investigation, a potential new space for conceptualising young people is offered. This new space, underpinned by understandings of subjectivity (Grosz 1994), assumes sense of self to be both pivotal in generative learning and closely linked to the context and its dynamics. We aver that such a view of young people and educational settings is necessary at this time of focused attention to the middle years of schooling. In so doing, we explore the potential of classroom life and pre-service teacher education constructed within this new discourse of young people.

Cyber Pedagogy as Critical Social Practice in a Teacher Education Program

The policies and practices of higher education are reeling under the social, economic, and technological changes currently taking place in post-industrial, information societies. New communications and information technologies are constitutive factors in the philosophical and pedagogical shifts that are occurring in university classrooms. This paper uses a case-study methodology to investigate the use made of online technologies in one preservice teacher education context. Cyber technologies and their associated pedagogical activities are conceptualized in the paper not only as tools, but also as social practices. This approach enables a focus on learning and teaching as transformative practices. Following a description of the course content and delivery, the paper turns to an analysis of four key pedagogical features of cyber pedagogy as generated by the data. These are: Teaching and Learning as Self-directed Activity, Change in Student Identities and Self-perceptions, New forms of Technoliteracies, and E-tutorials. The research found that online pedagogies are forming new spatialities, multiliteracies, and identities of communication and learning.

Industry school partnerships: reconstituting spaces of educational governance

Industry school partnerships have emerged recently in Australia as a policy solution for the management of problems associated with integration into the global economy. This paper draws on governmentality theory to examine a transnational partnership, the Gateways to the Aerospace Industry Project, which has been mobilised to manage transition risk for young people in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. It argues that globalisation emerges as an effect of knowledge producing practices and programmes that seek to reconfigure the governmental spaces and subjectivities in and around schools and communities.

Copyrights and Creative Commons Licensing: Pedagogical Innovation in a Higher Education Media Literacy Classroom

This article examines the role of copyrights in contemporary media literacies. It argues that, provided they are ethical, young peoples engagement with text should occur in environments that are as free from restriction as possible. Discussion of open culture ecologies and the emergent education commons is followed by a theorisation of both literacy and copyrights education as forms of epistemology - that is, as effects of knowledge producing discourses and practices. Because Creative Commons licenses respect and are based on existing copyright laws, a brief overview of traditional copyrights for educators is first provided. We then describe the voluntary Creative Commons copyright licensing framework (‘some rights reserved’) as an alternative to conventional ‘all rights reserved’ models. This is followed by an account of a series of workshop activities on copyrights and Creative Commons conducted by the authors in the media literacy classes of a preservice teacher education program in Queensland, Australia. It provides an example of a practical program on critical copyrights that may be adapted and used by schools and other higher education institutions.

Narrative on a doctoral narrative: Reflections on postgraduate study and pedagogy

This paper explores the stages of one student’s intellectual journey through a Doctor of Philosophy program of study in an Australian university. It outlines the theoretical and methodological insights made as she came to understand that data was discourse, entailing a politics and position of power that ran contrary to the aims of the study that the student was undertaking in and on her own community. The article is a reflective narrative produced from the experience of having to come to terms with some of the personal and professional tensions and contradictions that postgraduate study can, and maybe should, engender if it is to be any of real value.

School Education as Social and Economic Governance: Responsibilising communities through industry-school engagement

This article examines shifts in educational and social governance taking place in Queensland, Australia, through Education Queenslands Industry School Engagement Strategy and Gateway Schools program. This significant educational initiative is set within the context of Queenslands social investment agenda first articulated in its education policy framework, Queensland State Education‐2010. The article traces the historic extension of this overarching governmental strategy through establishment of the Gateway Schools concept, brokering state‐wide industry‐school partnerships with key global players in the Queensland economy. Industry sectors that have formed partnerships in Gateway projects include Minerals and Energy, Aerospace, Wine Tourism, Agribusiness, Manufacturing and Engineering, Building and Construction and ICT, with more industries and schools forecast to join the program. It is argued that this ‘post‐bureaucratic’ model of schooling represents a new social settlement of neoliberal governance, which seeks to align educational outcomes with economic objectives, thereby framing the conditions for community self‐governance in Queensland.

The Creativity Imperative: Implications for Education Research

Arguing for the importance of understanding the conditions under which certain forms of the social subject become visible and viable, this chapter conceptualises the current educational focus on ‘creativity’ as a technology of governmentality that has arisen from the perceived need for governing authorities to manage and responsibilise populations for the pervasive uncertainties of the global economy. With reference to the document, Tough Choices or Tough Times, a publication of the National Center on Education and the Economy in the United States, we show how creativity has been reframed as a programmable capacity of the modern student, citizen and worker primarily because it is considered an indispensible source of enterprise and innovation. Education and family life are an integral part of this bio-politics and the ongoing ‘economisation’ of social life. Our concern is that this reductionist understanding of creativity precludes other transgressive and culturally enriching creativities that represent the infinite range of subjectivities associated with imaginative human capacity and activity. It is vital therefore that educational research renders this historical process transparent and opens spaces for more socially inclusive, sustainable and productive ways of being such as those indicated by the three respondees.

Curriculum and religion

Across continents and cultures and periods of history, religious beliefs have underpinned curriculum in institutions of education. More recently, the so-called culture wars and terrorism have moved religion to center stage. In both state and independent education sectors, deep-seated assumptions about the nature of reality, spirituality, ethics and knowledge converge and clash in the curriculum documents of science, history, literacy education, and the like. With a focus on textual genres of power, starting with antiquity, this chapter argues that little has changed through millennia as the secular mysticism of price has replaced theology today in constraining the potentials of education.