Dorothy A. Lander

The consuming (no)body of online learners: re-membering e-communities of practice

This paper unfolds through the eating, speaking mouths of online learners and teachers and theorists as a way of exploring the educative potential of holding in tension the ambiguous virtues of the body and the (no)body in formal and informal electronic learning environments. Online learning research commonly devalues the body and takes the body for granted as a feature of the learning process. The limited research on the body in online learning ranges from seeking ways to compensate for the online invisibility and inaudibility of a sensing, passionate, relational body online, to celebrating the (no)body in virtual space where learning in relationship is not marked and shaped by the power differentials of class, gender, race, (dis)ability, regional accents, size, beauty, and age. An analysis of autobiographical and qualitative research texts of online learners and teachers re-members the body through the eating, speaking mouth, and calls for a re-embodiment of electronic comm unities of practice that redefines ritual practices, hospitality, and learning in relationship.

A Provocation: Quality is service

In this article I trace the process of uncovering a unifying thread in the multiple meanings of quality in work. I do this by reflecting on the process of assembling my evaluation dossier after my first year as an assistant professor. As a parallel and alternative process to the traditional assessment of the work of academics, I perform a critically reflexive self-assessment exercise that applies the action-research methodology of appreciative inquiry to the artefacts of my working autobiography. I re-present the quality moments of other university actors in the process of remembering the best of my lived experience of quality related to the traditional evaluation categories of teaching, research and service. I arrive at a provocative account of quality to the effect that quality across the span of teaching, research, and service work resembles service constituted as a morally response-able relationship.

Metaphors of loss and transition: An appreciative inquiry

In this qualitative research study, we have used the arts-based research methodology, Appreciative Inquiry, to conduct a broadly based thematic and narrative analysis of art, loss/transition, and healing in formal/institutional and informal/family healthcare settings. Drawing on 21 loosely structured 1-hour interviews with African, British, Canadian and US caregivers, we have identified 13 overlapping themes of loss and healing. We use these themes to assess the broad scope of art in formal and informal care and palliation; to embed loss as an intrinsic health issue; and to consider arts capacity to offer insight and resolution in professional/family care partnerships as well as population health. We suggest that experiential and narrative data offer as valid an “evidence base” as quantitative data to explore the many critical dimensions of art-for-health theory and practice. Our findings underscore the vital and welcome interaction of art and science in global healthcare practice, education, research and policy.

Back to the Future of the Service University: Re-Membering Consumers Who PAR-Take

My work-in-process involves re-presenting the practices of the university and providing an alternative perspective to the market ‘calculation’ of quality, which is packaged as knowledge services. The ‘bean-counting’ approach to services renders quality devoid of ‘meaning’ (Readings, 1996; Giberson, 1999) and works to appropriate the moral connotations of service into a singular market discourse on quality. According to Sosteric et al. (1998: 3) the ‘service university vision’ creates a tighter union between universities and corporations, predicated on the assumption ‘that universities should operate as businesses in the service of a client market’. My research commitment is to disentangle services and service into their different discourses by re-presenting the lived experience of quality and service in an adaptation of the participatory action research (PAR) methodology known as appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; http://www.appreciative-inquiry.org). The poststructural practices of ‘negotiating enabling violations’ (Spivak, 1989) and the feminist dialogic of response-ably subverting naturalized and oppressive hierarchies (Bauer and McKinstry, 1993) are implicated in the methodology of appreciative inquiry. Negotiating ‘space of action’ (Holmer-Nadesan, 1996) for a rival discourse reconstitutes the university as a service organization.

The Legacy of the Social Gospel in Adult Education

Abstract The Social Gospel movement usually associated within liberal Protestantism during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in North America and Europe, converged with progressive adult education and community leadership as the means for reshaping society into the democratic Kingdom of God on earth, through the development of people (see Fisher 1997; Kidd 1975). Although the term has fallen into disfavor and disuse in adult education—to disassociate from its racializing and colonizing Eurocentric ideology (Lander 2003)—the influence of the social gospel in non-governmental and voluntary organizations (e.g. YMCA, YWCA, Red Cross, and Womens Institutes) and harm reduction programs related to the homeless, child protection, prostitution, substance abuse, violence against women, safe sex, gambling, and smoking (see Forsythe and Lander 2003; Cook 2003) continues to the present day. In this paper, I trace the continuities and discontinuities of the social gospel in contemporary adult educational discourses and programs. The writings of adult educators Eduard Lindeman (US) and Roby Kidd (Canada) locate the convergence with the social gospel in the linkages between individual and collective morality, between social action and personal salvation/transformation. These linkages tie the social gospel to other social movements of the Progressive era—civil rights for former slaves, womens suffrage, settlement houses, the Chautauqua movement, temperance, and the cooperative movement. Christian socialism was the inspiration for the social gospel in Europe and for evangelical feminism, whereas in academic settings in North America, adult education filtered the social gospel through the lens of theologians such as Washington Gladden, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Walter Rauschenbusch (US) or theologians turned adult educators, such as E.A. (Ned) Corbett and Alfred Fitzpatrick (Canada) (Kidd 1975; Lasch 1990; Walter 2003).

Re-casting shakespeare: gendered performances and performativity of leadership

The executive development courses offered jointly by the Praxis Centre of Cranfield Universitys School of Management and Shakespeares Globe Theatre in the summer of 1999 and 2000 were the impulse for this article. I respond to the gendered implications of re-presenting and performing Shakespearean roles as a training guide to leadership and business success. My critical analysis adapts Lyotards (1984) market performativity and Butlers (1990) gender performativity to pose the promise and perils of performing leadership roles based on Shakespeares characters. This paper re-presents a performative instance of resistance to the dominant masculine metaphors that management education draws out of Shakespeare. I interrupt the play and re-cast the organizational leader and performance consultant as a moral agent who performs the service discourse of the feminine-in-management based on ‘the Other’ in Shakespeare.

IMAG/in/ING: a reflexive review of artist Rose Adams’ Brain Imaging exhibit

The focus of this Exhibition Review Essay is Rose Adams’ solo multi‐media exhibit IMAG/in/ING: Brain Imaging, featured at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts in Canning, Nova Scotia in May 2010. We frame our review as a critically reflexive dialogue, which draws attention to what ‘struck’ us. Our shared ‘struck bys’ offer a way of making new connections between tacit knowing and explicit knowledge, especially about the lived experience of the human brain, including the brain with Alzheimer’s Disease. Referencing ten images from Rose’s exhibit that evoked ‘striking’ moments, we construct and negotiate a shared sense of situations, interweaving the immediate event of the exhibition with our shared life histories, which include Rose and others viewing the exhibition. Art in formal and informal care settings as our mutual research interest suffuses much of the content of what struck us in Rose’s art. We layer our critically reflexive dialogue, composed as in‐the‐moment reflexive activity tied to how we feel, what we say, and how we respond to others, with the artifice of pertinent references to scholarly and popular literature. We conclude that relational responses – our struck bys – emerge during in‐the‐moment viewing of visual art and conversation. We draw new connections between art and science, the natural world and human social existence, and between art, neuroscience and reflective/reflexive practices.