Victoria Perselli

Re‐envisioning research, re‐presenting self: putting arts media to work in the analysis and synthesis of data on ‘difference’ and ‘dis/ability’

In this paper the author would like to share a small section of text that emerged in the process of analyzing and synthesizing data from her self‐study research into her role as a coordinator for special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream infant education in the UK. The section consists of three Imaginative Conjectures in which she re‐envisions her research: as stage play, television documentary and feminist film narrative respectively. This text emerged as a result of a powerfully felt need to come to new understandings around ‘difference’ and ‘disability’; to break away from the technicist approach to SEN, its descriptors, labels and categories, and to rethink relationships between self and others in this context. Specifically, the text represents a psychological struggle towards alternative conceptualizations of teaching and learning—memory, affect, imaginative conjecture—which technical rational, market‐oriented manifestations of schooling (‘teacher‐proof’ curricula; the ‘audits and bids’ routines of SEN funding, for example,) tend to obscure. Whilst much current educational discussion emphasizes the need to ‘think otherwise’ and ‘do differently’ in response to changing social and individual needs and desires in relation to schooling, the systemic constraints experienced by teachers often make this hard to achieve. By adopting an oblique sense of persona and place, and in particular by admitting into her work the eye of the visual artist, the author was eventually enabled to arrive at a representation of practice that altered significantly her understandings of Self, Self to Others and Self to Curriculum. This paper seeks to explain, at least in part, how this came about.In this paper the author would like to share a small section of text that emerged in the process of analyzing and synthesizing data from her self‐study research into her role as a coordinator for special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream infant education in the UK. The section consists of three Imaginative Conjectures in which she re‐envisions her research: as stage play, television documentary and feminist film narrative respectively. This text emerged as a result of a powerfully felt need to come to new understandings around ‘difference’ and ‘disability’; to break away from the technicist approach to SEN, its descriptors, labels and categories, and to rethink relationships between self and others in this context. Specifically, the text represents a psychological struggle towards alternative conceptualizations of teaching and learning—memory, affect, imaginative conjecture—which technical rational, market‐oriented manifestations of schooling (‘teacher‐proof’ curricula; the ‘audits and bids’ routines ...

'Teaching for England': five poems

“Teaching for England” consists of five allegorical poems exploring the axes of self to social and political to personal within the life of a teacher, as she struggles to relocate her affective engagement in her work at a time of political and emotional trauma. The poems offer scathing commentary on the technical rationalism that presently dominates mainstream education in the U.K. and the author’s disappointment with New Labor. They represent her attempt to write self-deprecatingly, humorously, and against the grain of this ideology, while simultaneously harboring the possibility for (self) transformation.

A Little Night Reading: Marx, Assessment, and the Professional Doctorate in Education

Many contradictions are inherent in the act of facilitating doctoral students’ research projects from an agenda of widening participation in higher education. Indeed, this statement is already laden with conflicting ideology and, as you may have noticed, devoid of agency. This is because the persona of the teacher in academe is frequently neutered: “sexless and voided, like a broken pole” (Perselli, in press) by the impositions and demands of a range of similarly disembodied authorities and sponsors, including those who still adhere to the omniscient third person and passive voice—the “norms” of scientific reporting.

Theory, Theorising and Pedagogies of Change

Diverse contemporary perspectives regarding what education is and what it is for, combined with a more generalised insistence that change—rather than continuity—is a relentless and irreversible feature of professional life-experience ‘in postmodernity’, can be evidenced via the proliferation of particular linguistic tropes and research foci currently reverberating around the globe (Schon, 1973; Stronach & MacLure, 1997; Milella, 2007; Toscano, 2007). Curious collocations (Perselli, 2014b, 2015) such as ‘widening participation’ ‘inclusive education’, ‘lifelong learning’, ‘quality assurance’, ‘audit society’ and ‘the new public management’ have all been constructed and co-opted—as is the way with language—into our educational systems and structures via aspirant agendas of ‘access’, ‘accountability’, ‘excellence’, ‘improvement’, ‘impact’ and so forth. A common assumption behind these collocations is that education workers form part of a more general populous characterised as ‘the learning society’, with Higher Education (HE) nominated as the conduit through which substantial portions of this populous will eventually pass (Crosland, 1966; Hood, 1991; Power, 1994, 1999; UNESCO, 1994, 2009; Reisman, 1997; EHEA, 1999; OECD, 2000; ESIB, 2005; European Commission, 2007, 2014; Chang, 2008).