Esther Priyadharshini

The attractions of teaching: an investigation into why people change careers to teach

Questions related to motivation of trainee teachers who have changed careers and become trainee teachers are examined. Perceptions held by recruits that led them to choose teaching are then analysed and factors that may deter trainee teachers from remaining in the profession are considered.

Boredom and Schooling: A cross-disciplinary exploration

This paper undertakes a wide‐ranging exploration of the concept of boredom from contrasting perspectives across different disciplines with a view to informing the pedagogy of schooling. It notes the rise of the concept in recent times, and juxtaposes diverse views on the perceived forms, causes, effects and responses to boredom, along the way referring to implications for schooling. Based on this examination, the paper puts forward the idea that boredom needs to be recognized as a legitimate human emotion that can be central to learning and creativity. At the same time, it also points out that there is room to reimagine a pedagogy that can engage in a more informed manner with the complexity of the experience and concludes with an exploration of some concepts—autonomy and control, struggle and flow—which can help in this endeavour.

Patient narratives: The potential for “patient-centred” interprofessional learning?

The central theme of the paper is concerned with the educational potential that patient narratives may hold for improving patient-centred interprofessional care. It follows the processes of a research project that was required to provide an educational intervention in a multiprofessionally-staffed stroke rehabilitation ward. It discusses the evolution of the project, focusing on the ways in which patient narratives were constructed, the purposes they served, and the responses of professionals to the narratives in subsequent workshops. Along the way, the paper reflects on the responses of patients that problematise the notion of “patient-centred” care. Together with the responses of professionals to the narratives, the paper raises questions about the obstacles to and possibilities for such care.

Doing femininities and masculinities in a ‘feminized’ sporting arena: the case of mixed-sex cheerleading

Abstract This paper examines arguments that have been espoused for the educative and transformative potential of mixed-sex sports, and explores whether such promise can be attained and what the obstacles may be, in the context of the UK university-level, competitive cheerleading. Drawing on critical and feminist literature on the functioning of hegemonic masculinities, hyper-femininities and alternative, more inclusive gender performances, the paper analyses the narratives of three participants in what is often recognized as the ‘feminized’ activity of cheerleading. It suggests that: a) having experience of mixed-sex team membership can have a progressive influence on the gender narratives and performances of both male and female participants; b) mixed-sex teams, however, are not a panacea to rectify gender stereotypes and inequalities and c) if the implicit transformative potential of mixed-sex cheerleading is to be fully realized, then explicit organizational, promotional and structural changes to the sport itself will be needed. The paper concludes with suggestions for a new research agenda that focuses on the terms and conditions under which gender is ‘learnt’ and performed in a range of mixed-sex sporting contexts, and how these contexts serve to shape the ‘gender pedagogies’ of sports in particular ways. Such an approach will open significant new directions for research, policy and practice in the interconnected fields of gender, sport and education.

Between Aspiration and Achievement: Structure and Agency in Young Migrant Lives

This article puts forward the argument that young migrants considering Higher and Further Education require robust structural support that attends to their psycho-social, communal, and material needs. Despite evidence of young migrants having high aspirations to achieve in this country, policy in the United Kingdom increasingly presents them with structural barriers rather than structures of support. This argument is based on findings from a recent research project which was conducted in the East Anglian region of the UK with children originally from central and eastern Europe. The children were all aged between 13–15 years and living in designated deprived areas. The article situates the projects findings in the context of the wider literature on aspirations in relation to education and employment, and examines the implications of recent UK government policy changes on the structures impacting on migrant youths agency to achieve through Higher and Further Education. The authors suggest that migrant students are uncomfortably suspended in the gulf between desires and outcomes, with government policies failing to match the vibrancy of their agency to achieve.

From Prom Queen to Zombie Barbie: A tutorial in make up, gender and living death.

This chapter is preoccupied with a set of questions circulating around zombies, femininity and public pedagogy. What can the zombie offer women? How can we read acts of making up as zombies by (predominantly young) women? What meanings arise from zombie enactments that seem to tear down traditional performances of femininity? In relation to the hugely popular YouTube zombie make up tutorials, what is the ‘pedagogy’ at play, i.e. what is being taught/learnt through zombifying a female archetype? And can these tutorials say something to nascent theorisations about ‘public pedagogy’?

Thinking with Trickster: Sporadic Illuminations for Educational Research.

Moments of restriction or impasse – situations that are seemingly intransigent, offering no alternatives or poor alternatives, predicaments leading to less than satisfactory resolutions or unhappy compromises – abound in the practice of educational research. This paper speculates on the possibilities offered by thinking with ‘Trickster’ – a shadowy, unconventional figure of myth and folklore – in such moments of impasse, and asks if this source of inspiration may allow for flashes of illumination and thus, room for newness to enter the world. Drawing on some ‘difficult’ moments from two rather different research projects, the paper reflects on what thinking with Trickster might have to offer to the praxis of educational research, especially in terms of methodology and ethics.

Analysis as assemblage: Making sense of polysemous texts

ABSTRACT Accomplishing critical literacy within a mediascape where texts present as polysemous and ambiguous may be the challenge of our times. This article uses the example of a seemingly paradoxical newspaper column, which contains paratextual elements, to illustrate how an assemblage of critical analytical approaches is needed to make fuller sense of the text. The column is read in three ways, focusing first on the main column, its location, imagined audience, its use of rhetorical devices such as satire, irony, humor, and repetition to critique the state of global football. The second reading uses a postcolonial feminist perspective to focus exclusively on the curious supplementary tailpieces (shirttails) that end the column. It reveals how specific translation strategies and the representation of certain bodies as sexually voracious, deviant, and excessive frame such bodies as absurd exotic-erotic objects of a neo-colonial gaze. The third reading leans on Derridean ideas of writing and text to understand the seemingly discrepant relationship between column and shirttails, and raises critical questions about the role of the reader/readership. Each analysis brings different sensibilities to the work and illustrates the value of assembling multiple analytical approaches to work towards critical media literacy. The conditions and caveats of such working arrangements are also considered.

Food, Youth and Education

Food, Youth and Education Roland Barthes analyses food as ‘... an organic system, organically integrated into its specific type of civilization’ (Barthes, 2008, p. 34). If so, what do our current preoccupations about food, its conceptualisation, provision and education in the context of schooling say about contemporary civilisation? The papers in this special issue draw on contexts from across the globe to focus on what is fast becoming a field of ideological battle in contemporary education – that of food, and education about food, in the lives of school-goers. As Hightower-Weaver and Robert (2011) tell us, school food is political and the papers drawn together here trace the outlines of these politics. Collectively, they deal with a range of perplexing questions: How should we understand the context within which programmes on healthy eating, food and education arise – at a time of an ‘obesity epidemic’ that sits directly alongside that of food bank growth, poverty, hunger and malnutrition? How much weight do we assign to nutritional value as a guide to school policies on food, and how much to children’s experiences and views of dining halls? How much should we value a controlled environment versus children’s rights/agency to shape this environment and its offerings? How should we deal with the boundaries that place food and healthy eating/living matters as either largely individually determined or as governed by social and environmental factors? The special issue itself came into being with the observation that research on food education and provision in schools (through mid-day meals for instance) seemed firmly focused on the nutritional role of food to the exclusion of any social dynamics it might engender. Such an overwhelmingly instrumental approach seemed lop-sided with the wealth of anthropological and sociological research revealing food to be integral to a range of issues like identity, status, power, social relations and disadvantage. The set of papers gathered here act as a corrective to such instrumental perspectives, but, just as importantly, they steer us in different directions that engender a more complex and nuanced understanding of the functioning of food in the institutional and social lives of children and young people. The six papers in this special issue fall largely into three categories of critique: of the discourse of food and policy initiatives; of the provision of school food; and critique of the ways in which schools ‘educate’ about food and health. Together they expose a lacuna in how this territory is conceptualised and perhaps, a certain poverty in acknowledging pupils’ agency and savviness about food, its social role and the relationships it allows across a diversity of spatial and social settings.

Reimagining Knowledge Terrains:The Economic and Social Research Council, governmentalism and the social science landscape

This article analyses publications that pronounce on the health and direction of the social sciences in the United Kingdom, focusing on those commissioned or published by an authoritative source like the Economic and Social Research Council. It speculates on the ways in which fields of study are imagined and shaped through the mix of emotions – fears, desires and ambitions – that can underlie the collective writing of such documents. Using lessons from post-colonial criticism, governmentalised ways of ‘knowing’, ‘representing’ and ‘imagining’ are critically examined and a case is put forward for other ways of envisioning the field. An argument is made for a more cosmopolitan, eclectic outlook to define and describe the social sciences, and the field of education in particular, and the need for a greater awareness of and scepticism towards a ‘governmentalism’ that may limit the diversity of the social sciences and the vibrancy of the social science imagination itself. Such thinking has implications that stretch beyond the United Kingdom, to other states that are also preoccupied with governing and shaping the social sciences.