Feeling political

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Dannreuther
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
The Body ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Global Trends ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Embodied Pedagogy ◽  
Opening Up

By exploring some of the challenges of teaching a radical politics in the neo-liberal university, the article looks to the writings of radical pedagogues like Freire and Giroux to position hope as an important resource for critical pedagogy for teachers. Drawing on Coole’s work on Merleau-Ponty, the article examines the potential of a critical pedagogy that taps into the body, rather than a mind, as a vessel for capturing hope and thus as a way of opening up a new resource for linking hope to educational practice. These resources are discussed in relation to debates concerning the politics of artistic practices, particularly with regard to how an embodied pedagogy might work around the constraints imposed by neo-liberal universities. Three themes are identified as warranting further discussion for an embodied pedagogy and their implications are reflected upon. These relate to how we view the student as embodying hope, how we view the classroom as a place of rich connections and how we capture learning through richness and reflection. The United Kingdom is the focus of the article, but there is a wider relevance given ongoing global trends in and debates about higher education.

scholarly journals The Dimension of the Body in Higher Education: Matrix of Meanings in Students’ Diaries

Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramiro Tau ◽  
Laure Kloetzer ◽  
Simon Henein
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
General Process ◽  
Emotional Dimension ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
The Mind

AbstractIn this paper, we attempt to show some consequences of bringing the body back into higher education, through the use of performing arts in the curricular context of scientific programs. We start by arguing that dominant traditions in higher education reproduced the mind-body dualism that shaped the social matrix of meanings on knowledge transmission. We highlight the limits of the modern disembodied and decontextualized reason and suggest that, considering the students’ and teachers’ bodies as non-relevant aspects, or even obstacles, leads to the invisibilization of fundamental aspects involved in teaching and learning processes. We thus conducted a study, from a socio-cultural perspective, in which we analyse the emerging matrix of meanings given to the body and bodily engagement by students, through a systematic qualitative analysis of 47 personal diaries. We structured the results and the discussion around five interpretative axes: (1) the production of diaries enables historicization, while the richness of bodily experience expands the boundaries of diaries into non-textual modalities; (2) curricular context modulates the emergent meanings of the body; (3) physical and symbolic spaces guide the matrix of bodily meanings; (4) the bodily dimension of the courses facilitates the emergence of an emotional dimension to get in touch with others and to register one's own emotional experiences; and (5) the body functions as a condition for biographical continuity. These axes are discussed under the light of the general process of consciousness-raising and resignification of the situated body in the educational practice.

scholarly journals What does it Mean to be a Man? Trans Masculinities, Bodily Practices, and Reflexive Embodiment

2021 ◽  
pp. 1097184X2110085
Author(s):  
Sofia Aboim ◽  
Pedro Vasconcelos
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Reflexive Practice ◽  
Bodily Experiences ◽  
To Come

Confronted with the centrality of the body for trans-masculine individuals interviewed in the United Kingdom and Portugal, we explore how bodily-reflexive practices are central for doing masculinity. Following Connell’s early insight that bodies needed to come back to the political and sociological agendas, we propose that bodily-reflexive practice is a concept suited to account for the production of trans-masculinities. Although multiple, the journeys of trans-masculine individuals demonstrate how bodily experiences shape and redefine masculinities in ways that illuminate the nexus between bodies, embodiments, and discursive enactments of masculinity. Rather than oppositions between bodily conformity to and transgression of the norms of hegemonic masculinity, often encountered in idealizations of the medicalized transsexual against the genderqueer rebel, lived bodily experiences shape masculinities beyond linear oppositions. Tensions between natural and technological, material and discursive, or feminine and masculine were keys for understanding trans-masculine narratives about the body, embodiment, and identity.

scholarly journals The Hybridisation of Conventional Higher Education: UK Perspective

2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Distance Learning ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Open Learning ◽  
Tertiary Sector ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Radical Approach

Before the creation of the United Kingdom Open University (UKOU) - its Charter was given in 1969 and the first students were admitted in 1971 - the full-time residential model of higher education was pervasive, with part-time and distance modes of study seen as separate and inferior. The UKOU demonstrated the effectiveness of distance learning but also, because of its success, in some ways inhibited change in the mainstream tertiary sector. As social and political pressures on the sector grew, higher education providers were forced to innovate and models of “open learning” offered ways forward. As a result, the distinction between “distance” and “face-to-face” delivery rapidly eroded during the 1990s. However, barriers still remain to a more radical approach to provision as a whole.

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