Joanna Haynes

Power and resistance: Reflections on the rhetoric and reality of using participatory methods to promote student voice and engagement in higher education

The focus of this article is methods for facilitating student voice and engagement in higher education, specifically participatory methods. Across the student voice and engagement literature there is a growing emphasis on promoting collaborative partnerships between staff and students. However, there is a lack of detail and criticality with regards to (1) exactly how genuine partnerships can be achieved and (2) comparing the vision for and the reality of positioning ‘students as partners’ in the current higher education climate. In this article, we evaluate the potential of participatory methods to facilitate quality partnerships between staff and students. Drawing on our experiences of being involved in a participatory project in one higher education institution, we offer reflective narratives from three different partners who participated in the project: student, lecturer and researcher. We use these narratives to explore the nature of the partnerships between lecturers and students, focusing specifically on issues of resistance and power. We conclude by considering the implications for how we conceptualise and implement student voice and engagement projects in higher education.

The realm of meaning: imagination, narrative and playfulness in philosophical exploration with young children

Censorship of childrens voices takes many forms: restricting access to texts, constraining the space in which they are viewed, failing to validate childrens responses, interpreting their ideas within limiting perspectives on childrens thinking. This paper considers the educators role in discussion with children, drawing out the connections between the ethical commitment to listen to child/ren and beliefs about forms of knowing that underpin pedagogy. In our professional development work we have noticed that childrens responses to picturebooks can evoke sentimental reactions from adults. Such sentimentality leads adults to distance themselves from child(hood) and to miss opportunities for philosophical exploration. Moving away from developmentality, and inspired by semiotics, this paper offers alternative readings of childrens responses to picturebooks, in the context of philosophical talk in an early-years setting. The framework for analysis of childrens work with Tusk tusk by David McKee is informed by Frickers (2007) notion of ‘epistemic prejudice’.

Freedom and the Urge to Think in Philosophy with Children

Pupils’ accounts of their experiences of philosophical enquiry express a great sense of freedom and confidence. The freedom offered in philosophy with children appears to strengthen pupil voice, transforming children into powerful independent thinkers and learners. This article reflects on the association between freedom and learning. It draws on the ideas of A.S. Neill and J. Krishnamurti, both founders of schools that value freedom highly, as a necessary condition for deep learning and as a positive social outcome of real education. The paper explains how philosophy with children lifts constraints on pupil and teacher thinking and promotes the desire and courage to question and reason with others, translating this way of being into everyday life. When adopted as an authentic form of critical pedagogy, rather than an instrumental means to other ends, philosophy with children contributes to the democratisation of schools and the educational experience.

Intra-generational education: Imagining a post-age pedagogy

Abstract This article discusses the idea of intra-generational education. Drawing on Braidotti’s nomadic subject and Barad’s conception of agency, we consider what intra-generational education might look like ontologically, in the light of critical posthumanism, in terms of natureculture world, nomadism and a vibrant indeterminacy of knowing subjects. In order to explore the idea of intra-generationalism and its pedagogical implications, we introduce four concepts: homelessness, agelessness, playfulness and wakefulness. These may appear improbable in the context of education policy-making today, but they are born of theorising our practices in the age-transgressive field of Philosophy with Children. We argue that these concepts help to reconfigure intra-generational relations, ways of being and becoming. They express the longing, corporeality and visionary epistemology of nomadic enquiry. These inventions express a non-hierarchical philosophy of immanence. We draw some tentative conclusions about educational practices more generally.

Informal Aspects of "Becoming Peer" in Undergraduate Research: "Still Connected but Going Our Separate Ways".

This study is grounded in a research project, the CARITAS project (Collaborative Application of Research Into Tutoring for Autonomous Study), which ran in our university from 2007 to 2009. Tutors from a variety of programmes collaborated to review literature and to investigate both formal and informal support for students involved in ‘independent’ studies. Our approach to the research was particularly informed by Boud and Lee’s (2005) notion of ‘becoming peer’, the idea that students (and tutors) need to learn about, and get involved in the culture of academic practices as well as the topics of academic discourse. This paper presents ideas which emerged from discussions held in focus groups with students undertaking undergraduate research projects. Analysis of themes in these discussions highlighted the character and significance of informal peer relationships. These relations played an important part in helping students to give and take care and support, to manage their tasks and to enjoy the challenges of self-directed study. We suggest that universities need to pay careful attention to creating and sustaining supportive conditions and pedagogic spaces in which such informal social relations can flourish. In thinking about academic success at university, proper recognition should be given to the significance of such informal learning relations among students.

Racism, Prevent and education: insisting on an open space

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the links between the Brexit referendum and changes to the nature of racism in Britain, and following on from this, the implications of the counter-terrorist Prevent agenda with regard to universities.,First, the authors discuss the Brexit referendum and its links to changes in the nature of racism in England, drawing on Burnett’s (2013) work to demonstrate how “local conditions, national politics and global conditions” have prompted violent racism in new areas of the country. Within this atmosphere of heightened tension, anti-Muslim abuse and attacks have risen over the past two years, with a proportion of these incidents taking place in universities. The authors then examine the implications of the counter-terrorist Prevent agenda, then disturbing trends that characterise students as vulnerable and university life as potentially damaging to wellbeing, and how these link to anti-extremism dialogue that is expressed in an epidemiological and therapeutic language; the vulnerable are framed pathologically, as “at risk” of radicalisation.,The authors argue that educators’ statutory duty to “have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism” is in considerable tension with the university statutory duty to uphold the freedom of speech/academic freedom; this “duty of care” effectively requires university staff to act as agents of the state. The authors argue that this threatens to damage trust between staff and students, restrict critical enquiry and limit discussion, particularly in the current circumstances of sector insecurity that have arisen from a combination of neoliberal policies and falling student numbers.,Developing the argument on how these conditions present a threat to the freedom of speech/academic freedom, in the final section, the authors argue that universities must keep spaces open for uncertainty, controversy and disagreement.

Stepping through the daylight gate: compassionate spaces for learning in higher education

Abstract This paper is concerned with troubling emotions felt or aroused in all aspects of academic practice, including teaching, learning, research and relationships. It discusses the emergent processes of a research group whose multidisciplinary interests coalesce around discomfort, disturbance and difficulty in the processes of higher education. We talk about what happened in the space when we explored the liminal landscapes of troubling knowledge. The paper draws upon social, philosophical and psychodynamic perspectives on emotions and an epistemology of implicit understanding and affect. In this paper, we discuss ways in which we created and worked with the permissive and loose space of our collaborative pedagogical research group. In this compassionate learning atmosphere, we shared stories of ‘troubled’ academic work. Through this paper, we seek to contribute to a critical understanding of troubling emotions and the work of compassion in higher education. We do this by exploring their educative value in different learning spaces, and by sharing the sense of quiet hope that has enriched our everyday lives.

Philosophy with Children: An Imaginative Democratic Practice

Since the late 1960s there has been a surge of interest in the teaching of philosophy in schools and other education settings besides universities. In Europe, philosopher Jacques Derrida was part of a group of teachers, school and university students and staff researching the teaching of philosophy and seeking to expand its remit, to pose new themes, problems and approaches (Cahen, 2001). In the USA, Professor of Philosophy Matthew Lipman and colleagues (Lipman, Sharp, & Oscanya, 1980) devised the Philosophy for Children programme (P4C), a transformative educational approach designed to bring philosophical problems and methods of philosophical reasoning to school children, from the age of six onwards. P4C, and many variants and offshoots of it, has since been taken up in nursery, primary and secondary schools in more than 60 countries around the world. Its pedagogical approach, the community of enquiry, has been adopted not only in formal education but also in informal, adult and community education, in a wide range of settings.

Philosophy with Teenagers: Nurturing a moral imagination for the 21st century

contexts through case studies which compliment the theoretical frameworks discussed in the first part of the book. The practical examples here, together with astute links between theory and practice that dissect the rhetoric surrounding lifelong learning will make this section of the book particularly relevant to practitioners. In ‘The textual mediation of learning in college contexts’ Satchwell and Ivani consider ‘literacy practices from Further Education college students’ everyday lives in the UK being brought to bear in a formal education context’ (77). In doing so they refer to the Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project and analyse the findings in depth, which demonstrate the role textuality plays across the sector. This will be recognised by Further Education practitioners who strive to resolve the misconception by many students that practical curricula will not involve significant amounts of reading and writing. Included in Jewitt’s chapter ‘Mediating contexts in classroom practices’ is a fascinating account of an innovative and dynamic approach to ‘Macbeth’ adopted in an inner London school, that kept students motivated in a topic that is so often disregarded by students as insuperable. ‘Worlds within worlds—the relational dance between context and learning in the workplace’, sees Unwin et al. argue for ‘a more holistic approach to the conceptualization and exploration of learning in the workplace’ (115). Again, useful and relevant examples are given which will enable the reader to not only draw their own conclusions on the debate, but also to use strategies showcased within their own contexts. In ‘Technology-mediated learning contexts’ Thorpe challenges the assumption that ‘there is a context that exists prior to the use of technology, and that this context is what we mediate in order for learning to be enabled in the virtual environment’ (119). She argues that with the use of technology complex contexts develop, and goes on to explore how these can be effectively manipulated to support learning. Finally, in ‘The boundaries are different out here’ Crossan and Gallagher examine ‘Learning relationships in community-based further education’ through the analysis of three studies which again offers an interesting basis for further debate. Part II, ‘Inferences for learning and context’ contemplates the implications of findings discussed in the earlier chapters in relation to both pedagogical practice and further research. Questions are answered but as might be expected in such a dynamic arena, new questions arise. This is a fascinating book that encourages further debate and will be enjoyed by practitioners, researchers and other interested parties in the field of lifelong learning.