Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy (original) (raw)
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Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy (a book)
The whole book is available at: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/manifesto-for-a-post-critical-pedagogy/ The Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy was written in September 2016 and first presented at Liverpool Hope University on 17th October 2016. At that launch event, we heard a keynote response from Tyson Lewis and further invited responses from Geert Thyssen and Olga Ververi. From the outset, having made the Manifesto available online in open access, we were encouraged by the enthusiastic response and the genuine interest shown by colleagues internationally. We therefore chose to invite further responses, to broaden the conversation, but did so specifically from early- to mid-career scholars. Hence, we also include here responses from Oren Ergas, Norm Friesen, and Stefan Ramaekers. We provide no commentary here on the Manifesto itself, or the responses that follow it in this book, other than to say that, as a manifesto it is intended to be short and to contain no references. The responses are more academic in style but still adopt a more conversational tone than a regular text, and they vary in length. The conversation form is taken up more fully in the final chapter in which we seek to address some of the questions they raise in ways that, we hope, provide further provocation and keep the conversation open.
Policy Futures in Education, 2011
In November 2010 the authors finished the writing of a manifesto for education. The manifesto was an attempt to respond to a number of issues concerning education, both in the field of educational research and in the wider socio-political environment. This is the text of that manifesto followed by two commentaries in which the authors try to highlight some of the reasons that have led to the writing of the manifesto, and in which an attempt is made to situate the manifesto in a number of discussions and debates.
ELiSS-Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences, 2008
This paper, based on the reflections of two academic social scientists, offers a starting point for dialogue about the importance of critical pedagogy within the university today, and about the potentially transformative possibilities of higher education more generally. We first explain how the current context of HE, framed through neoliberal restructuring, is reshaping opportunities for alternative forms of education and knowledge production to emerge. We then consider how insights from both critical pedagogy and popular education inform our work in this climate.
Educational Philosophy and Theory
This article is a collective writing experiment undertaken by philosophers of education affiliated with the PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain). When asked to reflect on questions concerning the Philosophy of Education in a New Key in May 2020, it was unsurprising that the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on society and on education were foremost in our minds. We wanted to consider important philosophical and educational questions raised by the pandemic, while acknowledging that, first and foremost, it is a human tragedy. With nearly a million deaths reported worldwide to date, and with everyone effected in one way or another by Covid-19, there is a degree of discomfort, and a responsibility to be sensitive, in reflecting and writing about it academically. Members of this 'Covid Collective' come from various countries, with perspectives from Great Britain and Ireland well represented, and we see academic practice as a globally connected enterprise, especially since the digital revolution in academic publishing. The concerns raised in this article relate to but move beyond Covid-19, reflecting the impact of neoliberalism [and other political developments] on geopolitics with educational concerns as central to our focus.
MANIFESTATIONS OF THE POST-CRITICAL: FROM SHARED PRINCIPLES TO NEW PEDAGOGICAL PATHS
MANIFESTATIONS OF THE POST-CRITICAL: FROM SHARED PRINCIPLES TO NEW PEDAGOGICAL PATHS, 2020
In this introduction we give an account of the reasons for writing the Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy. These stem from our experiences in the field of educational research, as well as our work with teachers and future teachers, which we felt increasingly reflected the exhaustion of the critical paradigm in the humanities and social sciences, as discussed by Bruno Latour, Jacques Rancière and others. We summarise the main claims of the Manifesto, i.e. the principles we defend there, and explain why we find it important to do so. We elaborate on what we mean by principles with reference to the concept of «requirements» developed by Isabelle Stengers. We conclude with an overview of the projects that have emerged since the publication of the Manifesto illustrating the various ways in which the post-critical perspective has been taken up in educational research. In particular we highlight how this has been taken up in the development of specifically educational accounts of higher education, teaching, and upbringing.
2021
This paper was written for the doctoral course/module Education Policy at the University of Glasgow. The UK Department for Education’s ‘Higher education: free speech and academic freedom command paper CP 394’ (henceforth HEFSAF and referenced in-text as (DfE, 2021) was initially published in February 2021 and is under consideration before Parliament. The HEFSAF proposes to strengthen academic freedom and freedom of speech within the context of English higher education. As a member of the higher education community, I feel that, in time, the implications of such a proposed policy can reach further than England. This paper attempts to illuminate how the HEFSAF furthers cultural hegemony. Specifically, this paper argues that the policy represents an expansion of neoliberal and neoconservative cultural hegemony within the context of UK higher education by inflaming pre-existing culture wars that focus on the conflation of the ideas ‘academic freedom’ and ‘free speech’. I choose the lens of hegemony and more specifically cultural hegemony in part due to the notion of repressive tolerance. In discussing radical teaching, Brookfield and Holst (2011:109) make reference to Marcuse (1965) and repressive tolerance, arguing that a person’s upbringing is steeped within a particular ideology that manifests itself in the choices that they make when presented with a range of perspectives on a particular topic. As a result, such a person may choose a perspective that most aligns with their ‘ideological conditioning’ (ibid) which to them might appear as common sense and/or ‘normal’. Consequently, an educator’s role is to ensure all ideas are considered critically and fully, and this can extend to the awareness, studies and understanding of education policy by educators. Discourse used within policy can represent the political nature of the day; specifically, the language used within policy can help educators to understand how ideas and identities are constructed to then understand how cultural hegemony ‘is secured and contested, and of the prospects for emancipatory social change’ (Olssen, Todd & O’Neil, 2004:36).
Academic Language and Learning (ALL) is a relatively recent practice field in Australian Higher Education (HE). Throughout its history, the institutional positioning of ALL has varied significantly in line with an incessantly changing HE environment. Most recently, neoliberal policies and discourses are reconfiguring the professional identities of ALL practitioners and complicating their relationship with students, increasingly depriving both of a hospitable home in universities. Implicit in these discourses is also the depoliticisation of the ALL teacher-student relation and assumptions of mastery of these educators over their object of knowledge, the students. Rather than aligning ALL practitioners with neoliberal subject positionings, this conceptual paper explores the framing of ALL practitioners, particularly their relations with students, in terms of Derridean hospitality. The article details Derrida's deconstruction of the concept of hospitality in order to (1) examine the complex power dynamics that structure the relationship between ALL practitioners and the student guest/foreigner and (2) insist on an ethical responsiveness to student difference based on responsibility for the other and a radical opening to the new. Derrida's ideas of hospitality, the paper argues, offers an alternative language for thinking, speaking, and enacting ALL practitioner-student relations and opens new ethico-political horizons.
Handbuch Bildungs- und Erziehungssoziologie, 2021
Within the last few years, the discourses of authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of politics across the globe. Increasingly, pedagogy has been implicated in this process by becoming less a practice for freedom than an instrumentalized theory and practice for domination, particularly as the culture of education has been transformed to serve the culture of business or reduced to a regressive form of instrumental rationality. This lecture challenges this reactionary mode of education and pedagogy, particularly in its neoliberal versions, and explores how critical pedagogy might provide the theoretical and practical foundation for rethinking the purpose of education and the nature of politics itself, and how these two realms are inseparable. As a moral and political practice, pedagogy is represents not only a struggle over knowledge and values, but also over agency itself. Central to any viable notion of a critical pedagogy is the understanding that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. In this case, it draws attention to the ways in which knowledge, power, desire, and experience are produced under specific basic conditions of learning and in doing so rejects the notion that teaching is just a method or is removed from matters of values, norms, and power. In addition, central to such a task is rethinking the role of educators as public intellectuals and their responsibility not only to address crucial social problems but also to interrogate critically what it might mean to produce those pedagogical practices and formative cultures that are essential to any substantive democracy. An important issue addressed in this case is that pedagogy is always a moral and political practice and points not only to a struggle over agency and power, but also presupposes discourses of critique and
Post-Critique, Politics, and the Political in Educational Philosophy
On Education. Journal for Research and Debate, 2020
The recent Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy introduced a specifically pedagogical register into theoretical and methodological consideration of post-critique. Focusing on a specific aspect of the Manifesto – the view that the political concerns of much critical educational research position education as instrumental to politics to the extent that the “educational” in educational research is left out of the picture – I ask to what extent we can defend the view that education and politics should be separate in our enquiries? Drawing on a particular account of the separation of education and politics I suggest that what is at issue is not the political as such but the particular, sociological, register of politics at work in critical educational research. To bracket out the political is potentially to leave everyday flesh and blood experiences of education out of the picture.