Navigating 21st century contexts: Reflections on education and knowledge-authority orders

Terri Seddon ACU Melbourne

Where are we?

21st century contexts and ‘contextual literacy’ Unpacking contexts as knowledge-authority orders Spaces of orientation

• National spaces • Global-national borderlands

Educational work and analytic borderlands Which way for education research?

21st century contexts

My School, My University, My Country, My World, My Google, Myself… What is the point today of the institutions and systems built in the 19th century to provide various forms of education: the schools, the working man’s colleges, the universities? In the world of the information society is education better left as an unfettered relationship between a consenting individual and their smart phone? (Yates, 2012: 260)

Disturbing work– transforming politics •  Fragmentation, hollowing, de-centering old occupational

orders and spaces, • Ethical dilemmas in work and work ethos because established

values and what’s is valued are challenged. • Conditions throw identities together whether or not they

recognise themselves as collectivity • Strategies that create fragmentation-fabrication - how they are

used, by whom, with what effects, • Resources (economic, cultural, knowledge, social, political)

used for and against fragmentation-fabrication. • Struggles over boundaries and contents, boundary definitions

and belonging, and the authority to define boundaries, •  ‘We’ – a dangerous pronoun?

Contextual literacy?

In order to achieve the greater professionalism that has been called for, it is clear that educational leaders need to understand and be able to act concurrently on the context, organization and leadership of the school, as well as the interrelationship among these three areas. Successful educational leadership involves being contextually literate, organizationally savvy, and leadership smart, as well as being the prime vehicle for linking all three areas

(Mulford, 2010: 695)

Unpacking  ‘context’  

‘A  context’  is    not  just  a  political  economy  but  deeply  influenced  by  cultural  understandings  that  create  an  ‘actual  and  symbolic  …  matrix    for  action  and  a  textual  medium’  that  gives  meaning  to  change.  Context  constitutes    a  social  ‘milieu,  institutional  matrix  and  medium  of  meaning’  (Seddon,  1993:  6).    

Micro-context Meso-context Macro-context

Global context

Contexts as spaces of orientation Spatialisation and contextualisation combine, interweave and entwine, co-creating particular ‘spaces’ and ‘orientations’

Place: is ‘doubly constructed’. It is ‘built or in some way physically carved out’ [and] also interpreted narrated, perceived, felt, understood, and imagined’ (Gieryn, 2000: 465). Problematic: mobilising particular epistemologies discursively constructs, authorises, and endorses particular ‘domains of action and surfaces of intervention’ (Sobe, 2014) Platforms for thinking and acting: ‘emerge through particular forms of labour– knowledge-authority work that, consciously and unconsciously, weaves materialities and meaningfulness together through social and cultural boundary work.

Educational contexts as spaces of orientation

SOCIETIES

Social orders

Sociality

Historical memory

Civility

STATES

Political orders

Governing

Forms of rule

Hard & soft

power

Learning Teachers’ work

Governmentality - Transgression

National education contextualised and territorialised citizens Education emerged as an ‘extensive and elaborate human institution’ that emerged in the Middle Ages to become ‘a malleable instrument of the political state - an agency charged with the transformation of immature human beings into appropriately-socialized adult citizens’ (Hamilton, 1989: 11) This space of socialisation and teachings made citizens: …. civil identities with citizen capabilities or power to act, where activities are transacted 'through words and persuasion and not through force and violence' (Arendt 1958, 26).

Recontextualising: Travelling policies making 21st century contexts

http://www.nesetweb.eu/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/pisawordcloud.jpg?itok=JIrjA0oN

De- and re-territorialising spaces of orientation

SOCIETIES

Social orders

Sociality

Historical memory

Civility

STATES

Political orders

Governing

Forms of rule

Hard & soft

power

Learning TEACHER-TRAINER-COACH-MANAGER etc

Governmentality - Transgression

Educational work and analytic borderlands

Educational work makes, orients and enacts platforms for thinking and action, which yield learning forms civil identities and builds citizen capabilities (powers to act).

• Making spaces of encounter • Constructing platforms for looking • Access to sedimented and authorised vocabularies, and

our stories-so-far •  Tough love resting on I-thou relation

New forms of civility? Implications for educational work

‘Europe’ is not an outcome of 'cultural traditions' or the realisation of a 'continent of "humane values'". Rather, it is 'a learning process, and of late, learning to break with its past, a past of religious totalitarianism ... of monolingual nationals, of conquest, plunder, genocide, and self-destruction' (Therborn, 2002: 15).

National stories – socialisation & teaching International ‘skills’ – governing abstractions or spaces for translation Transnational civilities – words as entrée to worlds, meanings, and platforms for action

Which way for education research?

Issues for discussion Research as sedimented historical memories

Forms of narrativity, archipelagoes of knowledges, communicating-translating across boundaries

Research as public conversation

Conceptual narratives, discipline norms, unit of reference, public discourse that matters, recognisable disciplinarity

Research as knowledge-authority work

Stepping into unknowns, making & evidencing claims, offering vocabularies, concepts and narrative themes, organising & sustaining educational knowledge spaces.