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Introduction: Texts,
Power and Pedagogy |
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Linda J. Rogers
Full Text, click here: 
Abstract:
None Available
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David Phillips
Abstract:
From the question of usury to the reorganization of
relationships to the land and our neighbors, individuals have
sought to privatize the temporal, material, and spatial as
property for gain. Today, capitalism and its proponents face their
ultimate challenge: the immediate and efficient privatization of
knowledge, setting as their ultimate goal the dispensability of
"man." Knowledge in a global context is perceived and
promoted as central to nation-state competitiveness. Its
production and consumption are precisely manipulated and
regulated. As such, knowledge workers have become increasingly
central to economic and political reorganization, evidenced by the
university’s increasing integration into the private sector,
both from a fiscal and a social perspective. This phenomenon,
often referred to as the "corporatization of higher
education," aggressively and effectively rearticulates
knowledge as intellectual property, institutionalizing and
facilitating its eventual enclosure. To this end, knowledge
increasingly exhibits properties of a private good while
maintaining the ideological fantasy as that of a public good
operating in the "free market." In reformulating
economic theory in general and its constituents in particular,
capital captures any social surplus while simultaneously shifting
the cost of negative externalities to the public domain. These
externalities include the eradication of a global intellectual
commons. This paper addresses capital’s overarching need to
regulate the activities of knowledge workers and the mechanisms
through which this is accomplished, which include the
reformulation of economic theory vis-B-vis the personification of
its constitutive elements.[ back
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Jamie Magnusson
Abstract: In
1998 the Icelandic Parliament passed a bill that effectively gave
a biotechnology corporation, deCODE Genetics, the exclusive rights
to a centralized database linking genotype with phenotype data
that can purportedly verify family inheritance patterns over
generations, even dating back to the 9th century. In this paper I
examine the ways in which universities and corporations collude in
a race to own the means to manipulate human life and its
evolutionary expression is linked to the ways in which global
racism and militarism are constituted through market relations in
the 21st century.
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Linda Muzzin
Abstract: Professional education at its founding as
well as in the contemporary university is constructed as a threat
by critical scholars—to academic freedom, institutional
autonomy, and equity. More recently, the research that supports
professions such as medicine, engineering, and law has been
constructed as providing a solution to the funding shortfalls due
to postsecondary restructuring. Consideration of the rhetoric
around professional schools thus provides particularly fertile
ground for the development of a politically engaged semiotics. My
analysis is based on my direct 10-year involvement with the
pharmaceutical sciences, as well as more recent research in which
my colleagues and I interviewed full-time and part-time faculty
across various professional schools at different sites in Canada.
In the first part of this article, I present a compressed synopsis
of discourses on professions and professional education in
universities as they relate to equity and academic capitalism. I
argue that systems of professional knowledge are gendered and
racialized. This leads to a few thoughts toward a politically
engaged "emancipatory" discourse addressing the brave
new world of professional education. [ back
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Patricia Burdell and Linda J. Rogers
Abstract: After years of high school teaching in urban
schools, the two of us worked our way through graduate degrees and
academic institutions so that we might be positioned to share our
knowledge and build bridges between public schools and teacher
education. We have forged partnerships with committed
professionals in urban school districts and worked within our
academic departments to facilitate the engagement of teacher
education candidates in urban field experiences and to have our
work in urban public schools valued by our academic colleagues.
However, it seems that the more we strive to include urban
teachers when push comes to shove, concerns over rank, tenure,
merit, and systems of hierarchy and rewards not only ignore these
efforts, but actively discourage them. This paper is about
understanding our disillusionment and offers a possible way out of
this dilemma.[ back
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Lou Denti and Gil Guerin
Abstract:
I remember Michael sitting in an IEP
[Individualized Education Plan] meeting last November when he was
a seventh grader. He had been kicked out of Lincoln Intermediate,
Priority (alternative ed.), Grant Street Intermediate and then
sent to Juvenile Hall within a six-month period. He had home
instruction for a short time this summer and has been waiting to
be placed somewhere for a few months. Probation is involved. He
seems much more humble than I remember him a year ago—we’ll
see! He hopes to go back to Lincoln by second semester if he
complies with the terms of probation. This includes doing well in
school and attending regularly. Michael reads between third and
beginning fourth grade level. He has a history of poor attendance
and fighting in school. (statement from Michael’s special
education teacher)
Even in the brief description given here by
his teacher, it is clear that, without comprehensive
interventions, Michael is at a high risk for school and community
failure. His history of learning disability, school expulsions,
and incarceration suggests complicated problems that are not
easily remedied. The first part of this article examines what is
known about youth whose school experiences and patterns of
behavior are similar to Michael’s. Based on this information,
the article discusses interventions that could improve Michel’s
chances of success and provides a model for a comprehensive
intervention program. The second part of the article revisits
Michael’s case, provides new information that evolved over the
course of a semester, and compares actual interventions with those
identified in the model.
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Lis Nielsen
Abstract: Interest in semiotics and metaphors has
grown tremendously in recent years in cognitive science as well as
other areas. This article considers the question of how this
interest should be dealt with within the tradition of Bildung and
the science of education. Contemporary diagnosis, a new method in
the field of educational philosophy, is introduced. It concerns
how the interest in metaphors and semiotics should be interpreted
in a contemporary context. With regard to metaphors, the Danish
tradition of focusing on "the living word" is presented
and discussed in particular. On the basis of this perspective the
analyses of "the concept system" by the Russian
psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky and the cognitive semanticists Lakoff
and Johnson are criticized. With regard to semiotics, the American
scientist and philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce is presented as a
thinker who takes an approach relevant for modern cognitive
science, and his concept of "growing thoughts" is
examined.
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Tomasz Szkudlarek
Abstract: In this paper I use the Nietzschean
perspective of the "invisibility of the active force"
(developed in poststructuralism) to analyze the case of
educational theory and—in this perspective—to develop a kind
of a deconstructive reading of its "empty spaces" that
represent the forces calling the academic theory of education to
life and cannot be narrated within its body. Both in the past and
in the present, these forces are linked to political power capable
of exercising hegemony. However, their nature shifts in time from
discipline and surveillance, theoretically simulated as humanistic
value orientation, toward liberal economy with consumerist
seduction, simulated as individualized competence training. This
process of simulation is traced back to Rousseau, Herbart, and
some traits of socialist pedagogy and is analyzed in contemporary
economic reformulations of educational thinking. The recent
changes within the academic theories of education are semiotically
analyzed as discourse colonization exercised through the use of
"exciting" metaphors. One of the results of such
displacements within educational thinking is a separation of
ethics and technical rationality. Their link was meant to found
the project of academic theory of education, as initiated by
Herbart.
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Full Text, click here:
Roy Harris
Reviewed by Stephan Pierson
Abstract:
None Available
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