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).
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
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.
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