Paula M. Salvio

‘A democracy tempered by the rate of exchange’: Audit culture and the sell‐out of progressive writing curriculum

Abstract In this article, the authors draw on the concept of ‘audit culture’ to examine the political and professional implications for teachers emerging from contemporary, commercially distributed, writing programmes. They argue that, in adapting what began as a progressive understanding of children’s writing and teacher professionalism for commercial distribution, fundamental values and concerns have been lost. Drawing on the work of James Britton, the authors assert that the market ideologies of audit culture have turned the idea of teacher professionalism on its head, naming the professional not as the teacher who continually develops her/his expertise through intellectual inquiry into the lives, strengths and needs of the children in the classroom but, rather, as the teacher who submits her/himself to constant measures of fidelity to a particlar programme, and to documentation of practices, supervision and correction. The authors argue for a return to the values of Jimmy Britton: commitment to the promotion of play, social engagmentment, freedom of thought and intellectual and emotional experimentation.

Uncanny Exposures: A Study of the Wartime Photojournalism of Lee Miller.

Abstract Taking the World War II photojournalism of Lee Miller as my point of departure, this article has several purposes. First, it introduces the wartime photojournalism of Lee Miller to education. I situate Miller’s use of surrealist photography within emerging curricular discourses that take as axiomatic the significance of the unconscious in education and thus the challenge of representing histories that are simultaneously present, but cannot be perceived or integrated into conventional historical narratives. Second, I provide a textual analysis of Lee Miller’s wartime oeuvre with specific attention paid to how this work alters education’s “field of vision” of trauma. While this analysis makes no claims to exhaust education’s possibilities for framing the war photography of Lee Miller, it will show how Miller’s use of surrealist rhetoric and framing devices offered her the expressive power to represent traumatic experiences that resist being integrated into larger social and cultural contexts. By thinking through Miller’s war photography, this article contributes to the scholarship in education that is dedicated to establishing a psychoanalytic history of learning and teaching that is capacious enough to address the “difficult knowledge” we too often cast beyond the pale of the curriculum and to expanding the rhetorical tactics possible for representing such difficult knowledge.

Reconstructing memory through the archives: public pedagogy, citizenship and Letizia Battaglia’s photographic record of mafia violence

This essay shuttles between the archive in its literal sense as a site of storage, and in its figurative senses as a migrating, foundational concept that is fused with affect and speaks of memory and forgetting, disavowal and betrayals. I maintain that a productive ground for theorising the archive as a site of radical public teaching can be found in the public pedagogical projects of anti-mafia activists currently working in Sicily. In the following pages, I focus on the photojournalism of Sicilian anti-mafia activist Letizia Battaglia. Bound up with traditions of social documentary and autobiography, Battaglia’s collection of over 6000 photographs of the mafia’s internal war in Sicily works as a moving, portable archive that takes place at the breakdown of memory and challenges the world to understand organised crime as far more than Sicily’s ‘local problem’. Drawing on the work of D.W. Winnicott, Masud Khan and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, I argue that Battaglia’s photographic archive creates a social protective shield that exemplifies how archives can psychically and physically protect communities who have suffered societal trauma by expanding the arc of remembering and, in turn, challenge the state repression of memory.

Exercising ‘The Right To Research’: Youth-Based Community Media Production as Transformative Action

Abstract This article explores the participatory media practices used by the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a non‐profit community‐based media organisation in New York City. Taking as her point of departure a digital media investigation into bodegas in the south Bronx (neighbourhood grocery stores), the author explores how uses the power of art and design to cultivate civic engagement among youth, in part by strengthening participants’ public speaking, digital media and research skills. In interviews with participants, the author finds that this work mitigates participants’ expressed fears of being dismissed as boring when speaking with public officials, a fear taken seriously through a reading of the work of child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Winnicott worried that the person who felt boring too often retreated from participating in civic life. If, argues the author, youth are to claim what Appadurai describes as the fundamental ‘human right to research’ in the public realm, then the civic as well as the psychological dimensions that enable participants to engage in transformative action must be strengthened.

“Eating Democracy”: School Lunch and the Social Meaning of Eating in Critical Times

This chapter opens the archive of the US school lunch in an effort to more fully explore the principles of democracy, taste, emotional life, and eating that informed and continues to inform the US public school lunch programs. My reading of the Committee on Food Habits led by Margaret Mead in 1940 is informed by Hannah Arendt’s concept of “enlarged mentality,” the psychoanalytic scholarship of Marion Milner on “the play of difference,” and the concepts of potential space and transitional objects introduced by child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott.

Anne Sexton's recorded therapy: commentary on Skorczewski.

“I , who reportedly write so truthfully about myself, so openly, am not that open,” wrote Anne Sexton about keeping a journal for the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in 1967. Despite her reputation for prying open her family album and writing about addictions, divorce, adultery, and the myths encrypted in what she described as the Gothic New England family romance, Sexton winced at descriptions that cast her as a confessional poet. “I’m often being personal,” she explained to her students at Colgate, “but I’m not being personal about myself,” suggesting with characteristic irony and prescience that the personal is already a plural condition. Sexton was often described by critics as “primitive,” and criticized for using poetry to act out her personal problems, her “small wounds,” resorting to what the critic Robert Boyers (1974) described as “excessive selfdramatization, even spilling into undertones of self-pity” (p, 207). James Dickey criticized her for dwelling “on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience” (quoted in Ostriker 1988, p. 264), and her teacher John Holmes warned against bringing readers “too close to home” by offering them lyrics about abortion, menopause, female sexuality, and the anguish

Strains and Sensibilities: Art and Romanticism in Educational Research

A review of Touching Eternity: The Enduring Outcomes of Teaching by Tom Barone, New York, Teachers College Press, 2001, The Art of Writing Inquiry, edited by Lorri Neilsen, Ardra L. Cole, and J. Gary Knowles, Halifax, Backalong Books, 2001, Writing Research/Researching Writingby Gary William Rasberry, New York, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2001, and Being, Seeking and Telling: Expressive Approaches to Qualitative Adult Education Research, edited by Peter Willis, Robert Smith, and Emily Collins, Flaxton, Queensland, Post Pressed, 2000