Megan Watkins

Disparate bodies : the role of the teacher in contemporary pedagogic practice

The teacher’s body has a dubious status within contemporary pedagogic practice. The impact of progressivism in many western countries, with its emphasis on student‐centred learning, has resulted in a marginalisation of the teacher’s role in many classrooms. While its influence appears to be waning, in Australian primary schools, student‐centred methodologies such as group‐based and independent learning tend to dominate classroom practice. Relegated to the role of facilitator the teacher’s overall presence and bodily impact in classrooms has been greatly reduced. Drawing on a study of the practice of two kindergarten teachers in two schools in Sydney, Australia, this article will examine the ways in which they embody pedagogic space, the regimen they create and the techniques they employ in teaching their students how to write. In a sense the title ‘Disparate bodies’ has a dual focus. Not only does it relate to the different ways in which the two teachers deploy their bodies in the classroom, it also refers to the differential embodiment of their students which results from the affects that their teachers’ pedagogies engender.

Habit and Habituation Governance and the Social

This article examines the issues that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions have been implicated in processes of governance. We argue that habit has typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components of personhood – will, character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end. In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology – we explore the tensions between its use and interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/Ravaisson–Bergson–Deleuze lineages. The article then identifies how these questions are addressed across the contributions collected in this special issue.

Thwarting desire : discursive constraint and pedagogic practice

This article examines the ways in which the desire to teach is often thwarted within contemporary pedagogic practice by a set of discursive constraints that draws heavily on both progressivist notions of teaching and learning and neoliberal forms of governance. In many Western countries teaching is conceived more as facilitation rather than instruction. In primary/elementary schools in Australia, for example, this has resulted in a shift in emphasis from whole‐class instruction to group‐based and independent learning. To investigate this shift, and its impact on teaching, a series of interviews was conducted with 12 teachers and their principals across three state primary/elementary schools. While a range of perspectives was evident, it became clear that the desire to teach was more obviously realized through whole‐class instruction and teachers also considered this a more effective means of curriculum delivery. Many, however, were reluctant to admit this as they felt that instruction was not deemed ‘appropriate pedagogy’. In addition to this, neoliberal practices concerning organization and accountability were also seen to be impacting upon these teachers, all of which had a constraining influence on their desire to teach.

Asian migration and education cultures in the Anglo-sphere

ABSTRACT Asian migration is transforming education cultures in the Anglo-sphere. This is epitomised in the mounting debates about ‘tiger mothers’ and ‘dragon children’, and competition and segregation in schools. Anxiety and aspiration within these spaces are increasingly ethnicised, with children of Asian migrants both admired and resented for their educational success. This paper presents some frameworks for understanding how Asian migration both shapes and impacts upon education outcomes, systems and cultures, focusing on Australia, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. It challenges the cultural essentialism that prevails in academic and popular discussion of ‘Asian success’, arguing that educational behaviour cannot be reduced to ethnic categories, whether these are ethnic ‘learning styles’ (e.g. the ‘Chinese learner’) or ‘cultural’ family practices (e.g. ‘Confucian parenting’). In also presenting an overview of papers in this special issue, this introduction showcases the explanatory models offered by our authors, which locate Asian migrants within broader social, historical and geo-political contexts. This includes global markets and national policies around migration and education, classed trajectories and articulations, local formations of ‘ethnic capital’, and transnational assemblages that produce education and mobility as means for social advancement. These are the broader contexts within which education cultures are produced.

The Erasure of Habit: Tracing the pedagogic body

While education involves much more than a set of habits, their formation is integral to learning. Within many Western countries, however, habit formation is no longer considered a pedagogic goal. Students may still acquire certain habits of learning as a function of schooling, but the process whereby teachers utilize a form of instruction designed to encourage the habituation of particular knowledge and skills in students now seems something of an anachronism. This article focuses on the erasure of habit in the teaching of writing within the New South Wales education system in Australia. A genealogy of the pedagogic body is undertaken through an examination of primary school syllabus documents. In tracing the body it is revealed that while habit formation was once a central pedagogic tenet, its influence has now waned. With a resultant change in pedagogy, the body has been reformed with new postures of learning framed by the progressivist disciplinarity of teaching.

Teaching bodies/learning desire: rethinking the role of desire in the pedagogic process

Desire is a crucial aspect of the pedagogic process. For too long, however, there has been a dichotomous relationship between understandings of teacher and student desire. The former is often configured as a pedagogic anachronism, problematised and needing to be contained. Conversely, the latter is essentialised as a force that should not be restrained by the processes of institutionalised education. Neither of these ideas is useful for thinking through complex issues around pedagogy. Overall, desire in education requires greater theoretical exploration. Within mainstream education it is rarely raised as an issue. Poststructuralist theorising, on the other hand, particularly in its use of psychoanalysis, tends to simply sexualise desire, which obscures more productive interpretations of its role in learning. There needs to be a reconceptualisation of the role of desire in the pedagogic process that moves beyond these formulations. The intention of this article is to rethink the nature and function of pedagogic desire. Drawing on a range of sources it considers current conceptions of both teacher and student desire and theorisations of desire and the body in education. Finally, it proposes an alternate model drawing upon Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and the philosophical insights of Spinoza’s monist logic.

Discipline, Consciousness and the Formation of a Scholarly Habitus

Sociologies of the body tend to focus on disciplinary power in generally negative terms, with embodiment conceived as an unconscious and subjectifying process. The agentic potential of disciplinary force receives little attention. Within education, emphasis is likewise given to discipline as a form of subjection as opposed to a force that can also equip students with the capacity to learn. This paper will explore the enabling dimensions of embodiment and how these can be generated through the pedagogic practices of institutionalised schooling. Its central concern is the formation of a scholarly habitus in the primary years of education. In exploring this it provides a reassessment of Bourdieus concept of habitus; in particular, his failure to deal adequately with the role of consciousness in theorising the pedagogic.

Multicultural Education: The State of Play from an Australian Perspective.

This article reports on the first comprehensive survey of public school teachers in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) around issues of multicultural and English as Second Language (ESL) education. While there is substantial literature on multicultural education – what it should and shouldn’t be – there is much that is left unexplored in research in the area, not least of which is the characteristics of the teaching labour force. In this article, we ‘take stock’ of multicultural education, not by engaging with philosophical debates about multiculturalism as an ethical or policy practice, but as an auditing of what exists in the name of multicultural education. Drawing on a sample of over 5000 respondents, the article documents the changing cultural profile of the profession and highlights gaps in pre-service training and professional learning of teachers in terms of meeting the needs of Australia’s increasingly culturally and linguistically complex school populations.

Thinking beyond Recognition: Multiculturalism, Cultural Intelligence, and the Professional Capacities of Teachers.

Multiculturalism as public policy has provided a set of programs which frame how individuals view and respond to the cultural diversity found in Australia’s cities and towns. This is nowhere more evident than in Australian schools where, from the early 1970s, a range of programs have not only assisted students and their parents with a language background other than English (LBOTE)—such as through English as a Second Language (ESL) support and community liaison—but have sought to ensure all students develop a particular ethic in dealing with cultural difference through programs of inclusive curricula and anti-racism. There is much to commend in these programs and recognition of their ongoing benefits is important to combat the regular critiques of multiculturalism by opportunistic politicians and shock jocks keen to capitalize on community concerns around social cohesion, the plight of refugees, and border control. Yet, despite these benefits, we argue that multicultural education, as it is currently practiced in schools, doesn’t quite address the challenges of the complex world in which we live, and needs to be rethought. All too often it is governed by regimes of cultural recognition premised on a view of culture as difference, shaped by assumptions about distinct, cohesive, and unchanging ethnic communities within the larger national community, which is also construed as cohesive and distinct (Noble 2009). This was the social imaginary upon which early multiculturalism was based but it is a poor fit for the more hybridized and dynamic identities of students and their wider communities in the globalized world of today. Reproducing this imaginary, we suggest, may contribute to, rather than address, the problems confronting students from ethnic minorities. Moreover, this multiculturalism has been premised on a moral discourse of tolerance and respect which, while sounding progressive, fosters an unreflexive civility that reproduces a politics of identity but detracts from a critical interrogation of the constitutive nature of cultural practices. Now more than ever, as Australia is in the process of implementing a National Curriculum that promotes intercultural understanding as a capability to be fostered across the curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA] 2013), thought needs to be given to the skills and knowledges students need for living in the worlds they

The 'schooled identities' of Australian multiculturalism : professional vision, reflexive civility and education for a culturally complex world

Since their inception in Australia in the 1970s, multicultural policies have been met with general but qualified public support (Ang, Brand, Noble and Sternberg, 2006; Dunn et al., 2004). The national and international contexts since 2001, however, have heightened anxieties around immigration and social cohesion, evoking the claims of a ‘crisis’ around multiculturalism (Lentin and Tilley, 2011). This has exacerbated a longstanding lack of clarity about what multiculturalism actually means, both here and overseas (Parekh, 2006; Modood, 2007). In 2011, however, against the international trend, the Australian Government (2011) reasserted its policy commitment to multiculturalism. Yet, multiculturalism is still in a moment of uncertainty and re-evaluation, not just because of criticism from conservative commentators (Donnelly, 2005), but because there is some concern that policies developed in the 1970s and 1980s may no longer be as relevant in Australia’s increasingly transnational, culturally complex and technologically mediated societies (Modood, 2007).