Jake Burdick

Mapping the Complexity of Public Pedagogy Scholarship 1894–2010

The term public pedagogy first appeared in 1894 and has been widely deployed as a theoretical construct in education research to focus on processes and sites of education beyond formal schooling, with a proliferation of its use by feminist and critical theorists occurring since the mid-1990s. This integrative literature review provides the first synthesis of public pedagogy research through a thematic analysis of a sample of 420 publications. Finding that the public pedagogy construct is often undertheorized and ambiguously presented in education research literature, the study identifies five primary categories of extant public pedagogy research: (a) citizenship within and beyond schools, (b) popular culture and everyday life, (c) informal institutions and public spaces, (d) dominant cultural discourses, and (e) public intellectualism and social activism. These categories provide researchers with a conceptual framework for investigating public pedagogy and for locating future scholarship. The study identifies the need for theoretical specificity in research that employs the public pedagogy construct and for empirical studies that investigate the processes of public pedagogy, particularly in terms of the learner’s perspective.

Inquiry as answerability: Toward a methodology of discomfort in researching critical public pedagogies

In this article, the authors argue that inquiry into critical public pedagogies, public sites of counterhegemonic educational activity, requires that researchers’ epistemological, representational, and ethical obligations extend to examine how their practices might undermine the political possibilities of these sites, diminish the transformative potential that public pedagogies hold, and ultimately reinscribe normative, limiting notions of educational possibility. Interweaving a framework from postcolonial thought, poststructural feminist and performative methodologies, and the literary contributions of Mikhail Bakhtin, the authors posit that critical public pedagogies offer us glimpses of the pedagogical Other—forms and practices of education that exist independently of, even in opposition to, the commonsense of education. Without this careful approach to researching sites of learning outside of the known, researchers risk adopting an institutionalized, colonial gaze, applying reductive logics to or even failing completely to experience phenomena that are not easily resolved in existing cultural meanings of teaching and learning.

Learning, Becoming, and the Unknowable: Conceptualizations, Mechanisms, and Process in Public Pedagogy Literature

In a 2009 American Educational Research Association session on the topic of public pedagogy, Bill Ayers, serving as the session’s discussant, posed the problem of public pedagogy being so broadly conceptualized in the literature base that it might actually become meaningless. Ayers’s concern centered on the slippery, ever-proliferating meanings of the term, and the lack of an ontological foundation for the term in anything other than an academic setting—the very space that public pedagogy seeks to escape and challenge. In our previous review of public pedagogy literature (Sandlin, O’Malley, & Burdick, 2011), we found Ayers’s critique to be entirely correct, as work in the subgenre often seems to exist more as a collection tied together by the alliterative phrase than by distinct epistemological, theoretical, empirical, or definitional threads. As such, our review concluded with a call for future research and theorizing that considers the ways in which education operates in noninstitutional spaces and phenomena—in essence to shore up the vast gaps that currently underlie public pedagogy before the concept collapses under the weight of its own unmeaning. Of specific concern to recent scholars (Hickey-Moody, Savage, & Windle, 2010; Rich, 2011a, 2011b; Savage, 2010) has been the lack of theoretical clarity that pervades public pedagogy. One issue they raise is that scholars writing about public pedagogy often fail to clarify how they are defining or conceptualizing what they mean by “pedagogy,” and as we noted in our previous review (Sandlin, O’Malley, & Burdick, 2011), the bs_bs_banner

Erosion and Experience Education for Democracy in a Consumer Society

The theme of this volume, “Education, Democracy, and the Public Good,” clearly owes much to John Dewey’s description of the crucial relationship between the capacity to learn and the ability to mobilize and sustain a just social and political order. In his work, Dewey (1916) illustrated this relationship by suggesting that “democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (p. 101), implicating our very social identities in the fostering of humane forms of coexistence—identities that are developed within the decidedly social space of educational activity. However, as critical educational scholars have noted (see, e.g., Goodman & Saltman, 2002; Molnar, 2005a; Saltman, 2000; Saltman & Gabbard, 2011; Schubert, 2009), enactments of education, democracy, and a public that bear any resemblance to Dewey’s vision are only spectral presences in contemporary American culture, alive perhaps in name only. Goodman and Saltman (2002) argue, for example, that “the promise of democracy appears to have eluded our victory” (p. 1), in the wake of political power being concentrated with the corporate elite and in light of antidemocratic ideologies and practices that are increasingly common in the United States, including “militarism, patriarchy, and hierarchical and authoritarian social relations” (Saltman & Gabbard, 2011, p. 20). Immediately following 9/11, then-President Bush declared, “We can’t let terrorists stop us from shopping,” a statement that directly conflates citizenship in the purportedly democratic West with the capacity to consume—a position that, as we will argue, is also developed via educational activity.

Resistance on Aisle Three?: Exploring the Big Curriculum of Consumption and the (Im)Possibility of Resistance in John Updike’s “A&P”

Abstract In this article, we examine John Updike’s short story “A&P” and its depiction of the grocery store as a curricular space re/presenting consumption and resistance to it. We position Updike’s fictional A&P as a space where the “big curriculum” (Schubert, 2006a) of consumption is enacted in everyday life and explore both how the curriculum of consumption works and how resistance to consumerism might operate. We argue that this story provides insight into how consumption works as educational practice—one that teaches us how to be consumers, how to operate within consumer capitalism, and how to accept consumerism as natural—and also raises more specific questions about consumptive resistance by pointing toward the ways in which our particular positions within cultural narratives determine our individual perceptions of consumption-focused counterhegemonic action. Through an analysis of the fictional A&P in Updike’s story, we examine how physical spaces of consumption such as grocery stores embody particular consumer capitalist ideologies and how shoppers are socialized into behaving in particular ways in such stores. We also address the issue of consumer resistance by focusing on how audiences interpret such consumptive resistance, rather than focusing solely on those resisting. These audiences include the story’s protagonist, Sammy, and by extension us, both as readers of Updike’s story and as viewers of various sites and acts of consumer resistance in current consumer culture. Our examination shifts the focus from the usual object of analysis—those resisting—to the audiences who, like ourselves, interpret that resistance.

Problematizing public engagement within public pedagogy research and practice

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore issues related to how scholars attempt to enact public pedagogy (i.e. doing ‘public engagement’ work) and how they research public pedagogy (i.e. framing and researching artistic and activist ‘public engagement’ as public pedagogy). We focus specifically on three interrelated issues we believe should be addressed by scholars as they continue to theorize, enact, and analyze public pedagogies in the broader public sphere: (a) power dynamics embedded in individualized versus more collective enactments of public intellectualism; (b) conflicting and complicated conceptualizations of the relationship between the public pedagogue and the public, and how that relationship should be enacted; and (c) ethical issues surrounding the framing of public engagement and activist work under the umbrella of ‘pedagogy’.

“Now I Ain’t Sayin’ She a Gold Digger” Wal-Mart Shoppers, Welfare Queens, and Other Gendered Stereotypes of Poor Women in the Big Curriculum of Consumption

In this article, which we present in a format informed by critical performance ethnography/pedagogy, we take up the issue of how we are “taught into” the ideology of consumerism through examining the dominant discourses about (poor) women as shoppers that circulate in popular and political discourses and that work to uphold particular hegemonic ideologies about how to consume and how to behave as consumers within a capitalist economic system. We specifically examine the historical construction of shopping and consumption as “feminine” domains and the consequent negative perception of women as consumers that continues to inform popular discourses about poor women, poor African American women, and women on welfare. We perform a juxtaposed space of academic literature, popular culture representations of female consumers, and interview data from women living in poverty to reconstruct the ways in which dominant discourses about poor women as consumers operate as “controlling images” (Collins, 2000) that perpetuate a “politics of disgust” (Hancock, 2004) that demeans and oppresses poor women. Additionally, we argue that these dominant discourses teach us all the ideology of capitalism, as we learn what is considered “proper” and “improper” economic behavior and use the negative portrayals of women on welfare as foils to justify our own consumptive practices.

Many Mansions: Conceptualizing Translingual Curriculum

ABSTRACT This article presents a vision for fostering multilingualism in schools that extends the notion of translanguaging to include the realm of multilingual curriculum theorizing. We locate our analysis at the intersection of multicultural education, multilingual education, and curriculum studies in order to conceptualize language, culture, and curriculum that are responsive to students’ language practices and cultural locations, as well as reflexive of the dynamics of power and privilege within the classroom. By placing “languaging” practices at the heart of curriculum development, the article takes up Spivak’s postcolonial discursive work, which eloquently articulates the distinctions between translation and transcoding and suggests that the former is a necessary, ethical obligation within the global moment. The article concludes with a review of successful examples of multilingual curriculum development and offers suggestions for future work in this area.

The Li(f)e of the Self: Missing Persons and Auto/Archeological Excavations

This article describes and enacts a process of autobiographical inquiry, auto/archeology, which seeks to address problematic confluences of memory and identity in reconstructing ones historical narrative. Drawing on curriculum theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the author describes a process of excavation in which understandings of a prior selfhood are created via interactions with previously created artifacts—a creative non-fiction essay, in this case. The analysis of this essay, and the resulting reconstitution of a personal history, as well as its enduring effects on the authors present life and work, are provided as an example of how this process might be enacted as a technology for self-study, a pedagogical experience, and an exploration of the desirous nature of identity.

The Paranoid and Psychotic Pedagogies of Conspiracy Theory: Locating the Political in the Sinthome of Conspiratorial Logics

In this chapter, I trace paranoia and the political logic of conspiracy theorizing as responses to a social order characterized by the psychosis of late capitalism. Critiquing the classical academic approaches to conspiracy forwarded by Hofstadter and Jameson, I theorize the conspiracy theorist not as a pathological individual, but as an actor caught in a symptomatic machination of truth seeking that ultimately leads to political inertia. Reading Lacanian theory alongside a map of conspiracy disguised as a resume, I develop an understanding of paranoid psychosis as a cultural effect and I work towards a psychoanalytic account of paranoia as a productive, critical, pedagogical disposition.