Heather Greenhalgh-Spencer

Social Class as Flow and Mutability: The Barbados Case.

This article draws on ethnographic research that examines the contemporary articulation of class identity in the postcolonial elite school setting of Old College high school in Barbados. From the qualitative data derived from this study, we argue that social class is better conceived as a series of flows, mutations, performances and performatives. We complicate the common-sense notion that class is a stable structure that allows for the categorization of people by providing a nuanced look into the lived experiences of students and alumni at this elite school. We focus on the wearing of uniforms, the use of technological devices, the deployment of language, and student-lead articulations of social class in an increasingly globalized space. Class is defined and (re-)shaped by students’ belongings and longings, all of which, too, are, mutable, and can readily mutate in accordance with local and global circumstances of supply and demand.

Social Media, Digital Technology, and Education: Personalized Learning and Questions of Autonomy, Authority, and Public/Community

In this chapter I foreground three key philosophical concepts that are of renewed interest in new (technology-enabled) schooling spaces: autonomy, authority, and the notion of a public or community. In order to give concrete examples of how these philosophical questions play out, I use personalized learning (PL) as an example where digital technology and social media have changed the ideologies, policies, and practices of education. I draw attention to the ways that autonomy, authority, and public/community emerge within PL contexts. I begin the chapter by defining PL and describing three key components of PL: data-driven instruction, student agency, and the use of social media sites (SMS) to create social connections. I then flesh out some of the questions that a philosophical orientation opens regarding autonomy, authority, and community in PL contexts.

Transdisciplinary Content Pedagogy in Undergraduate Engineering Education: Being Pulled Up Short

Transdisciplinary education offers an opportunity to enhance complex problem-solving skills for engineers (among other disciplines), increase efficacy for diverse students, and increase possibilities for deep learning experiences. In order to test the efficacy of Transdisciplinary (TD) content pedagogy, we undertook a quasi-experimental case study design research project where we compared the levels of engagement, trust, collaboration, and problem-solving skills developed in an undergraduate mechanical engineering course and compared those results with a ‘control’ mechanical engineering course that was on the same subject matter and taught by the same teacher. Findings suggest that the TD course does increase collaboration, problem-solving, and engagement. Our results also show that TD content pedagogy allows students to engage in rich learning experiences that create moments where they see the world differently, where they are ‘pulled up short’; and this approach may give students important advantages in the classroom and the workforce.

Digitalizing tradition: Staging postcolonial elite school identities in the online environment

This chapter probes deeply into the tangled historicities that animate British-bequeathed elite schools now operating in new competitive transnational educational markets in selected post-developmental states. The scenarios of this competition are increasingly moving online in photo and video-sharing websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Flicker and in the websites that individual schools are creating to consecrate their school heritages. Drawing from data gathered in a nine-country international study of schools across the world, the theoretical and methodological emphasis in this chapter is on extending the ethnographic focus of this research to a discursive and textual analysis of an emerging digital environment. We examine closely the work that elite institutions in two specific postcolonial societies are doing with their historical archives, preserved cultural objects, architecture, emblems, mottos and their school curricula as they marshal these cultural resources at the crossroads of profound change precipitated by globalization and attendant neoliberal imperatives. This change is articulated across the whole gamut of global forces, connections, and aspirations. It is in relation to and through these dynamics that postcolonial elite schools must now position and reposition themselves – acting and intervening in and responding to new globalizing circumstances that often cut at right angles to the historical narratives and the very social organization of these educational institutions with legacies linked to England. Globalizing developments have precipitated efforts on the part of these schools to mobilize their rich heritages and pasts as a material resource and not simply as a matter of indelible and inviolate tradition. History, then, we maintain in this context, cannot be reduced to the realm of epiphenomena of securely linear school chronologies. Instead, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “Theses,” we look at the way in which postcolonial school histories are “active in the present” and the way in which schools in India and Barbados are adroitly and selectively managing their school identities in the light of globalization. The results of these interventions are not guaranteed. They often run up against the revolution of rising expectations of school youngsters and their parents, the taste for global cultures and global futures indicative of the global ambitions of the young, and the pressures of alumni and other stakeholder interests which must be navigated.

8.3 Critical Interdisciplinarity and Noticing Absences

This chapter explores the hows of doing research by bringing a critical lens from an outside field of research to bear on one’s own field of research: Critical Interdisciplinarity. In this research methodology, one draws on various studies, metaphors, and terms from one field in order to ask questions of, illuminate, or challenge some assumptions in another field. Using critical interdisciplinarity as a research methodology—as with any research methodology—involves acts of interpretation. In order to excavate how interpretive moments shape the research process, I will draw on my research study “Re-thinking Bodies in the Traditional Classroom Space”. I will briefly talk about this research project on bodies, trying to key in on moments where acts of interpretation came to the fore during the research process. I will then highlight the hows of doing my research study by foregrounding the ways that theory, interdisciplinary work, and personal experiences shape how we see the world and how we do research. I will highlight: the role of theory, the role of interdisciplinarity, and the role of background knowledges and experiences.

The Visual Field of Barbadian Elite Schooling: Towards Postcolonial Social Aesthetics

In this chapter, we explore schooling in the postcolonial context as a particular type of cultural artifact. Eschewing dominant qualitative research tendencies that privilege the word and the text over the visual and the physical, we argue that deeper complexities and nuances come to the fore when we focus on the visual fields, noting that the visual field is always a production enmeshed within a social context.