Stewart Riddle

One school principal’s journey from the mainstream to the alternative

This paper presents the story of one school principal’s journey from mainstream to alternative schooling. Drawn from a larger project at the school where themes of commitment, community and culture and curriculum connectedness were apparent, this paper focuses on the philosophies and lived experiences of the principal via a narrative method drawing from narrative methodologies, feminist and poststructuralist perspectives. School leadership is a significant factor in school success. In this case, the principal plays a crucial role in the growing story of successful alternative schooling models, and as such, the philosophies and motivations of such leaders need to be more fully examined. Given the current neoliberal climate within many developed countries driving an agenda of high-stakes testing regimes and centralized curricula, it becomes more important than ever to highlight alternative ways of approaching school leadership.

Working within and against the grain of policy in an alternative school

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the ways that teachers in one alternative school blur the boundaries of the political, personal, and philosophical in their efforts to re-engage marginalised and disenfranchised young people. The labours of the school staff at Harmony High offer an intriguing narrative of working both within and against the grain of policy mandates, curriculum narrowing, and the pervasive effects of neoliberalism. Through the physical and social spatiality, critical pedagogical and affective engagement of learners, new schooling assemblages might be formed. The work being done by teachers in alternative schooling contexts such as that of Harmony High – while situated, meaningful and deeply contextualised – offers hope for reconstituting mainstream education in more socially just ways that serve the needs and interests of everybody.

Music as Engaging, Educational Matrix: Exploring the Case of Marginalised Students Attending an "Alternative" Music Industry School.

Harmony High is an alternative school where music functions as an educational magnet to attract marginalised students who have disengaged from the mainstream. Through an investigation of the student perspective, we discover that while acting as a magnet, music also becomes the educational matrix or “heart and soul” that helps to create a school culture with a positive spirit of connectedness and community working to motivate and inspire active learning. Thus Harmony High demonstrates a model highlighting the need for alternative education contexts that adapt to the needs, voice, interests and experiences of disaffected students. This becomes increasingly important in order to offer alternatives to current neoliberal agendas that focus on the standardisation of education in order to meet economic political and market ideals rather than the needs of students.

Musicking as Literacy: Possibilities and Pragmatisms for Literacies Learning

Much work has been done in opening up the field of literacy learning through the work of the New Literacy Studies movement, Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Multiple Literacies Theory, although the potential of music as a particular human artistic, aesthetic, social and emotional experience in connecting young people to their literacy learning is still relatively unmapped. This chapter will present some potential possibilities and pragmatisms for literacy learning, arising from a study that sought to map connections between music, literacy learning and the lives of teenagers. Theoretically and methodologically informed by narrative inquiry and poststructuralist thinking, in particular the work of Gilles Deleuze, the study investigated how literacy links to music in the lifeworlds of young people in an attempt to trouble presupposed distinctions between literacy and music.

Producing pleasure in the contemporary university

Academics working in contemporary universities are experiencing unprecedented and unsustainable pressure in an environment of hyper-performativity, metrics and accountability. From this perspective, the university produces multiple tensions and moments of crises, where it seems that there is limited space left for the intrinsic enjoyment arising from scholarly practices. This book offers a global perspective on how pleasure is central to the endeavours of academics working in the contemporary university, with contributors evaluating the opportunities for the strategic refusal of the quantifying, stultifying and stupefying delimiters of what is possible for academic production. The aim of this book is to open up spaces for conversation, reflection and thought, in order to think, to be and to do differently – pleasurably. Contributors rupture the bounds of what is permissible and possible within their daily lives, habits and practices. As such, this book addresses increasingly significant questions. What are some of the multiple and different ways that we can reclaim pleasure and enhance the durations and intensities of our passions, desires and becomings within the contemporary university? How might these aspirations be realised? What are the spaces for the pleasurable production of research that might be opened up? How might we reconfigure the neoliberal university to be a place of more affect, where desire, laughter and joy join with the work that we seek to undertake and the communities whom we serve?

An Experiment in Writing that Flows

The experiment: to sit under a tree with a glass of wine and to write. To play with words and to attempt to write without purpose beyond the transience of the writing act itself. What would such an event produce? Is there a monstrous vitality made available in the immanence of such an act, or would I simply succumb to my standard writing practice: prepare the abstract, gather the literature, frame the methodology, analyse the data, discuss the findings and offer concluding thoughts? As I grapple with trying to write with Deleuze, I find myself continually returning to the striated and tightly regulated space of academic writing. How can I make use of radical immanent vitalism on the one hand, yet structure my papers in ways that speak to the humanist project of rationality, stability and order? This chapter is my attempt to produce writing that moves a little more towards writing that flows and away from writing that is captured by the academicwritingmachine.

Producing the academic apparatus of the early career researcher-musician-educator

In this chapter the notion of assemblage is put to work in order to understand how the early career researcher-musician-educator comes to be formed from the milieu. An analysis of the relationship between research as knowledge production and the artistic desire for aesthetics and affectivity is undertaken to trouble the boundaries that separate education research from arts practice. The complexities of working both as an artist and a beginning academic in the enterprise university are examined and an argument made for using music as a concept for research-creation, experimenting with possible points of dissonance and consonance, in order to shift thought and practice.

Bringing Monsters to Life Through Encounters with Writing

As researchers, much of our time is spent in the act of ‘writing’. The production of research as writing is considered an essential part of our research outputs, which are measured and policed by citation metrics and ranked journal and publisher lists. For writing to be recognised and counted as research, it must appear in certain outlets, each of which makes its own certain demands of what is judged to be research. This, we fear, feeds a nonsensical academic apparatus, much like a Goldberg machine that has taken on a life of its own, existing only to perpetuate its own complicated systems of connections and cogs and wheels, arbitrary to the originary desire to write and to become-writer. And this academic publishing apparatus privileges its internal machinery, ossifying its peculiar set of connections, trapping our writing production rather than seeking out and augmenting new and different forms of connection between writer and text and reader. We fear that this arrangement of parts produces us as academic writers who are inert, dead, coded, ranked and listless numbers. And so we ask what if we were to put these nonsenses aside and instead undertake experiments and different encounters with writing, where the writing itself becomes our method of inquiry? Following in the pathway created by Laurel Richardson, we investigate what monstrous creations, full of vitality and fervour, might be made possible if we were to bypass the dead and dismembered assemblage and instead plug ourselves directly into the spark? Would such experiments with writing bring us to life or would our monsters simply offer us torment rather than succour?

Artists and Transpedagogy: Possibilities for Enriching Teaching and Learning Through Radical Engagement with the Arts

Over the last decade, cultural institutions have worked hard to connect audiences with contemporary arts practices that are no longer created by a sole person working alone but by artists who work collaboratively and across disciplines.

An Experiment in Educational Research-Creation Using Music as Diagram

In response to the call for this special issue to begin our inquiries with concepts rather than methods, the DeleuzeoGuattarian notion of the diagram is taken up in this article as part of a musical experiment with educational inquiry. In doing so, two musical sound creatures are created through the use of music as a molecular and imperceptible image of thought that is different from language and its semiotic modes of representation. This article asks how music might be plugged into the world and what a musical onto-epistemology could produce as a result. Perhaps educational inquiry would open up to new explorations and different configurations, discursive and non-semantic, through music as diagram.