John P. Portelli

Engagement for What? Beyond Popular Discourses of Student Engagement.

In the last decade educational research about school improvement and effective schools increasingly identifies the significance of student engagement especially in relation to the academic success of students. There are several issues and concerns, relating both to the meaning and justification or aims of student engagement, that arise from this work that call for a philosophical inquiry. This paper offers an initial philosophical inquiry of student engagement. The paper is divided into two sections. The first section critically examines meanings and definitions of student engagement from current literature. The second section addresses several related issues, such as concerns of the purpose of student engagement, and the criteria, standards, and norms used to determine the quality and degree of engagement. It is argued that without considering such philosophical issues, empirical and psychological work on student engagement could simply, and at times unwittingly, reproduce existing dominant views that promote a deficient and exclusionary mentality. In contrast, we propose a conception of student engagement based on critical-democratic practice which entails the enactment of a curriculum of life.

Traces of the Deleuzian nomad in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

ABSTRACT In a Deleuzian-inspired deconstruction of identity, home, and subjectivity, the authors explore the cultivation of the self in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Beneath the struggle for subjectivity and identity, there exists a discourse of survival that creates an image of the immigrant as the wandering and uncertain citizen. In this context, traces of the Deleuzian nomad are identified and explored in Lalami’s characters. These individuals embody qualities attributed to nomads by continuously disrupting different manifestations of fixity in their lives through various forms of resistance. For the characters in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, possibilities for connection are visible in their struggle to disrupt the perception of a fixed identity. The tapestry of identities created reveals a nomadic potential that interrupts linear notions of being. The consequent creative force enables identities to be negotiated in an in-between space that is decentred and thrives in the realm of unpredictability.

Performance power: the impact of neoliberalism on social justice educators’ ways of speaking about their educational practice

ABSTRACT Few studies have attended to the specific influence of neoliberalism on education for social justice, despite the complex ways in which the competing discourses of neoliberalism and social justice work side by side in local educational settings. This article reports data derived from interviews with 28 educators committed to social justice education from across Ontario, Canada. Participants were asked how they perceived the impact of neoliberalism on education and on their teaching practice. Findings were interpreted through critical democratic theory and discourse analysis. An unanticipated finding is the influence of neoliberal discourse on the ways that educators spoke about their teaching practice for social justice. The study found that discourse of performance is one arena where competing discourses of neoliberalism and social justice not only coexist but also intersect. This finding has important implications for the transformative potential of social justice education through more concentrated attention to the power embedded in everyday speech acts. Attending more to the performative potential of neoliberal discourse toward social justice ends can be a mechanism for resistance and teacher agency.