Erica McWilliam

Against Professional Development.

This paper raises questions about the sort of knowledge which has come to count as professional development knowledge. The author interrogates the curriculum and pedagogy of academic professional development programs in Australian universities, drawing parallels with Third World development programs. She argues that professional development knowledge is privileged over disciplinary knowledge in setting lifelong learning agendas for academics, and notes some problematic consequences of this for academics engaged in professional development programs.

Changing the Academic Subject.

The article examines the ways in which rationalities of risk currently work to produce the academic as a self-managing worker within the ‘post-welfare’ university as a risk-conscious organization. It explores how risk minimization as audit (individual, departmental, organizational), engages all individuals within the university in doing particular sorts of work on themselves, the work of turning themselves into ‘professional experts’. The theme is developed drawing on Mary Douglass theorizing of ‘risk-as-danger’, Marilyn Stratherns inquiry into the ‘audit explosion’ in universities, Ericson and Haggertys work on knowledge and professionalism within the risk-conscious organization, and Castels understanding of the changing nature of the practitioner–client relationship in risk-conscious organizations.

Educating the creative workforce: New directions for twenty‐first century schooling

This article sets out reasons for arguing that creativity is not garnish to the roast of industry or of education—i.e. the reasoning behind Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyis insistence that creativity is not only about elites but involves everyone. This article investigates three key domains—scholarship, commerce and learning—to argue the importance of moving creativity from the margins of formal education to its centre. First, the article elaborates the scholarly work being done to bring definitional clarity to the concept of creativity, moving it from the realm of mystery, serendipity and individual genius to a definitional field that is more amenable to analysis. It then provides evidence about the extent to which creative capacity is being understood to be a powerful economic driver, not simply the province of the arts and the hobbyist. Finally, it examines new learning theory and its implications for formal education, noting both the possibilities and pitfalls in preparing young people for creative workforc...

Touchy Subjects: a risky inquiry into pedagogical pleasure

Abstract This paper provides an analysis of pedagogy as an erotic field. The complexity of pedagogy work is addressed in terms of what the notion of an ambiguous and duplicitous ‘erotics of pedagogy’ can contribute to our understanding of teaching and learning. I note the ambivalence of feminist and other progressive educators about desire and pleasure in pedagogy, and attempt to make a case for reclaiming the notions of pedagogical ‘erotics’ and ‘seduction’ away from the ‘merely malevolent’. I draw on literary criticism to provide new conceptualisations and some historical exemplars of pedagogical events. This analysis is then brought to bear on a terrain of current educational discourse. In this sense, the paper is attempting to introduce into educational scholarship ways of theorising pedagogical events that have been developing for some time in the humanities.

Getting tense about genealogy

The paper responds to the growing interest in genealogical method as a means of inquiry in education research. The three authors bring together their collective understanding of the nature and purpose of genealogy as a method deriving from the work of Michel Foucault. The authors then indicate how such understandings were applied by each of them to a particular scholarly task. In elaborating the uses and the pitfalls of genealogical approaches by this means, the writers makeit clear that thereis no blueprint for genealogical use. Rather, working through genealogical methods demands from the researcher a strong grasp of the epistemological and theoretical tensions involved in asking how our present educational practices function as they do.

What game are we in? Living with academic development

This article explores the anxieties and political struggles around the professionalisation of academic development in contemporary universities. It seeks to go beyond the work of classification and categorisation of ‘roles and identities’ of academic developers with its attendant oppositional or conciliatory metaphors, to re‐describe the contemporary field of academic development in universities through an ironic lens. We work with Foucault’s notion of ‘games of truth and error’ and Rorty’s scholarship of ‘re‐description’ in an attempt to tell the contradictions and tensions of the field more effectively. We discuss the implications that arise from these for academic development to engage productively in the ongoing reinvention of the academy. Cet article explore les anxiétés et les luttes politiques entourant la professionnalisation du développement pédagogique dans les universités contemporaines. L’article cherche à aller plus loin que les efforts de classification et de catégorisation déjà entrepris quant aux ‘rôles et identités’ des conseillers pédagogiques, avec leurs métaphores d’opposition et de conciliation, de façon à re‐décrire le champs contemporain du développement pédagogique universitaire au moyen d’une lentille ironique. A l’aide de notions telles que les ‘jeux de vérité et d’erreur’ de Foucault ou l’approche de ‘re‐description’ de Rorty, nous cherchons à indentifier les contradictions et les tensions du champs d’une façon davantage efficace. Nous discutons des implications qui émanent de celles‐ci de façon à ce que le développement pédagogique puisse s’engager de façon productive dans la réinvention perpétuelle du milieu académique.

Transdisciplinarity for creative futures: what barriers and opportunities?

The call to ‘creativity’ has become increasingly familiar as a catch‐phrase of higher education policy. Much current academic and policy discussion, however, is based on assertions of the importance of ‘more creativity’ without any clear sense of what the implications are for the disciplinary cultures that organise knowledge work within universities. This paper explores ways that transdisciplinarity can assist in making creativity more evident in the teaching and research activities of universities. It draws on transdisciplinary activity in the Creative Industries Faculty of one Australian university to explore this issue. The argument put here is that a transdisciplinary knowledge environment has a greater capacity to inform creative work futures. Such an environment is not so easily created in practice, as the paper demonstrates by elaborating lessons learnt from a transdisciplinary re‐structure within the authors’ own university context.

W(h)ither Practitioner Research

The purpose of this paper is to understand better the possibilities for practitioner research as a mode of educational inquiry that is yet to be legitimated within the academy. The paper maps the current state of play, and then moves on to consider what might yet be done to optimise its potential to contribute to rigorous new thinking about educational practice. Its exploration is in three parts: first, it seeks to account for the ambivalent status of practitioner research in the larger context of the modern university; second, it moves on from this account to argue both the value and the limitations of practitioner research as a contemporary mode of knowledge production in education; and finally, it suggests ways that practitioner research might be less delimited in terms of its capacities to produce knowledge that is useful to a wider range of stakeholders.

An unprotected species? On teachers as risky subjects

This paper explores the issue of teacher vulnerability at a time of ‘child panic’. It does so by first elaborating risk‐consciousness as a powerful social and cultural rationality for producing moral climates and organisational identities, and then investigating how this rationality works through the fraught issue of teacher touch. Empirical data is drawn from two studies of teacher work in Australian and New Zealand schools to demonstrate that the relatively recent historical phenomenon of heightened teacher vulnerability to allegations of abusive touch is an effect of a new regime of truth that constitutes child protection. It is a regime that produces new tyrannies for the teacher at the same time that it works to eliminate tyrannies for the child.

From Literacy to Multiliteracies: Diverse Learners and Pedagogical Practice

In this paper, we provide specific examples of the educational promises and problems that arise as multiliteracies pedagogical initiatives encounter conventional institutional beliefs and practices in mainstream schooling. This paper documents and characterizes the ways in which two specific digital learning initiatives were played out in two distinctive traditional schooling contexts, as experienced by two different student groups: one comprising an elite mainstream and the other an excluded minority. By learning from the instructive complications that arose out of attempts by innovative and well-meaning educators to provide students with more relevant learning experiences than currently exist in mainstream schooling, this paper contributes fresh perspectives and more nuanced understandings of how diverse learners and their teachers negotiate the opportunities and challenges of the New London Groups vision of a multiliteracies approach to literacy and learning. We conclude by arguing that, where multiliteracies are understood as “garnish” to the “pedagogical roast” of traditional code-based and print-based academic literacies, they will continue to work on the sidelines of mainstream schooling and be seen only as either useful extensions or helpful interventions for high-performing and at-risk students respectively.