Building Teacherly Roles Together

Given that learner agency in making meaning from subjective learning experiences is central to constructivism, how can teachers provide structure without diminishing that agency? This paper comprises an a/r/tographic analysis of a practice-based research project situated outside formal education, which shares the teacher’s role across a community learning group. This group collectively chose and researched a new topic for each session, sharing this research in session and discussing the lesson this made. This model not only provides the basis for a consensual education, but also offers opportunity for empowerment through collectively taking ownership of learning, demonstrating that as engaged learners we can shape the structures through which we build learning agency. As education and culture shape each other, so learners emerge as critical citizens able to re/form community and culture for mutual benefit, open in turn to being re/formed by them. Understanding learning as a creative process, this paper juxtaposes Gert Biesta’s concept of creative practice as a dialogue with the world against the re-emergent concept of cultural democracy. Education re/produces cultural values; by not assuming control of learners’ education for them – by not inhabiting the role of teacher – we do not diminish the space for new, emergent structures to be realised. This paper seeks to show that by performing the teacher’s functions between us, we increase our intrinsic motivation for learning, also allowing for possibilities of new knowledge emerging. As will be shown, constructivism needs no singular teachers, only people to learn alongside and share the practice of learning with.

Only as Special as Necessary: Adapted Books in a Universal Design Perspective

Providing access to high quality books for all types of readers is a premise for cultural democracy. Many people, however, have challenges reading mainstream books. There might be diverse reasons why people find reading challenging. Some examples are reading impairments, reduced vision, cognitive impairments, learning a new language, or due to stress, fatigue or illness. To ensure everyone access to literature, it is therefore vital to produce books that can (and will) be read by a wide range of users. This case study addresses the following research questions: Do adapted books represent accessible or universal design? Can adapted books be perceived as motivating to read for all types of readers? Are “special books” necessary to ensure that all users have access to high quality literature? In Norway, the association Books for Everyone develops adapted, printed fictional books to accommodate various types of reading challenges. This paper examines the production of these books and uses this collection to investigate the research questions. The main finding is that most of the books by Books for Everyone can be considered examples of universal design, rather than “special books” directed at a very narrow user group. Moreover, there seems to be a limited need for “special books”, except for books targeting readers with severe cognitive or sensory impairments. By applying the universal design approach, fictional literature can potentially make books more accessible for all types of readers.

Years in Cultural Studies: 1986

Since its infancy, the pluralistic tendencies of the cultural studies project denied methodological and procedural consistency and resisted any disciplining of cultural studies as an attempt at authoritarian policing. Over the course of the 1980s, cultural studies continued to spread beyond the United Kingdom to Australia and the United States, initially, and the rest of the world soon thereafter. Movements towards the bridging of the longstanding divisions between fact and interpretation—between the social sciences and the humanities—under the sign of a principled approach to cultural democracy saw the Althusserian Marxism characteristic of earlier cultural studies scholarship expanded by way of a critical re/engagement of the works of Gramsci. This period of ideological critique allowed for a bold intellectual, political commitment to the re/conceptualization of culture as a site of class struggle, hegemonic formation, and structural signification. Particularly, the year 1986 saw major strides in this direction with the publication of monumental manuscripts by Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe.

The Aesthetic Model of Disability

This chapter explores the questions of how and why certain behaviours are perceived as an expression of a disability – and not, for example, as an mic expression – and what role art can play when it comes to constructing and (re)framing disability as a phenomenon. The chapter is based on three field studies conducted at the NewYoungArt [NyUngKunst] festival in Northern Norway during the period 2017–2019, and uses dissemination methodology derived from art-based research and performance ethnography (Denzin, 2003; Haseman & Mafe, 2009; McNiff, 2007). The authors’ purpose is to present the “aesthetic model of disability”. This is a new model that clearly deviates from the medical model, but which complements the social model of disability and the Nordic GAP model (Owens, 2015; Shakespeare, 2004). The theoretical framework consists of Rancière (2012), Seel (2003) and Dewey (1934), among others. With this chapter, the authors wish to contribute to cultural democracy by identifying an opportunity, through applied art, for people with disabilities.