‘Foreigners in Our Schools’ : Cultural Diversity, Othering, and the Desire for Justice in Schools

This study explored ‘cultural diversity’ in urban schools in Portugal by conducting discourse analysis on interviews with school practitioners. Findings show that ‘cultural diversity’ was dominantly anchored in Othering ‘foreigners’ that mainly associated ‘non-native speakers’ to difficulties in integration, participation and teachers’pedagogical work. However, contradicting discourses somewhat resisted Othering by highlighting meaningful differences, all students’ rights, and calling for pedagogical changes. By showing the ambivalences in how students, teachers and pedagogical relationships are viewed, we both alert for an exclusionary conceptualization of ‘cultural diversity’, and question Othering as a fundamentalizing discourse to fully govern ‘cultural diversity’ in schools.

Queer Pedagogy

This essayistic chapter dissects case studies of two international queer feature films from the 1980s and two queer shorts from twenty-first-century Quebec, all of which boldly grapple with—and arguably perform—queer pedagogy: Abuse (Arthur J. Bressan Jr., 1983, USA), A Strange Love Affair (Eric de Kuyper, 1985, Belgium, Netherlands), Rituels queer (Richard E. Bump and Ryan Conrad, 2013, USA, Quebec), and Rousings (Jamie Ross, web series, 2015, Quebec). Alongside, the author ponders pedagogical relationships over the years with his queer students, in terms of both their scholarly and artistic work and anecdotal memories of interactive relations between mentor and students. Inspired by Jane Gallop’s anecdotal theory, and in the shadow of the #MeToo sex panic, this autobiographical essay calls for far-ranging cultural and political conversations about sexuality and pedagogy, and their complex relations to cinephilia and the specificity of queer cultures.

Pedagogy in Theory and Practice

Pedagogy can be understood as methods and practices of teaching, and/or a way of being with children. In this paper, I use critical exposition and narrative to reflect on Max van Manen’s (2012) theory of pedagogy as a relationship between adults and children. My writing is organized into alternating sections of exposition (theory) and narrative (practice) to illustrate the interplay between thinking and doing that typifies pedagogical relationships, and to demonstrate how pedagogy unfolds in the unpredictable, unexpected, unprecedented, and unique actions each of us perform in the relational events of our being with children.

Curriculum in a Third Space

Curriculum in a third space has become an important theory in the field of curriculum studies in the postcolonial and postmodern context, in which new approaches to social and cultural differences in education have been developed. Curriculum and education in the early 21st century face the challenging tasks of responding in a time of uncertainty, complexity, paradoxes, and crisis: How do educators navigate the central relationship between the knower and the known while both are destabilized in a postmodern condition? What are curricular responses to the issue of identity, difference, and power relationships at schools in order to carve out alternative pathways beyond dualistic either/or thinking? How can differences and tensions be transformed into productive sites for curriculum and pedagogical creativity? The notion of the third space characterized by the alterity of psychical and social difference, the necessity for cultural translation, and the creativity of dynamic hybridity, addresses such critical questions. Curriculum in a third space embraces creative tensionality, decentering and estrangement, and making passages in the midst of hybridity. Translating between the planned curriculum and experienced curriculum mobilizes the highly contested site of identity, difference, and community into an ongoing process of attending to the language of the (maternal) other, building connections between the human subject and the academic subject, and nurturing a curriculum community that welcomes the stranger. As the notion of a third space is often formulated in intercultural, transnational, and global situations, internationalizing curriculum studies becomes a movement of differentiating and passaging within, between, and among the individual, the local, the national, and the global in a third space. Aligned with such a vision of curriculum, a pedagogy of a third space is also set in motion by hybrid resistance, openness to displacement, and fluid interdisciplinary collaboration. Pedagogies in specific subject areas open up third possibilities through building dynamic relationships between school knowledge and home experiences, transforming pedagogical relationships, and navigating blended classrooms of face-to-face and digital interactions.

Nonverbal Immediacy in Teaching Process: A Case Study in Secondary Education

Communication holds a leading position in education and more specifically in the learning process. Especially the communication which takes place between teacher and student is one of the most important skills in education. If teaching communication is well established, pedagogical relationships are promoted and a positive pedagogical environment is created. Within this framework this article aims at pointing out the positive impact of the teacher’s nonverbal immediacy in the teaching and learning processes. Teaching immediacy is a powerful learning incentive and renders the learning process more efficient. The results of a case study examining nonverbal immediacy of the secondary education teachers of an Upper Secondary General Education School (Lyceum) are presented.

Governing ‘disadvantage’ through funded early years places and reconfigured spaces

This article examines how the policy of funded early years places for ‘disadvantaged’ 2-year-olds (FNP) in England reconfigures spaces within early childhood and care (ECEC) in new ways of working with young children. Using practitioners’ interview data from early years settings in London, this article uses Foucauldian technologies of governmentality to shed light on how FNP responds to the problem of ‘disadvantage’ as new mobile modes of governance. The paper explores how practitioners reconfigure their established spaces to incorporate provision and practice suitable for 2-year-olds and the challenges practitioners face in implementing the policy. The analysis considers ‘space as assemblage’ by focusing on three key themes: dividing spaces through split rationality, dividing practices through othering and the reconfiguration of established ways of working. The themes trace how policy-driven technologies re-interpret ECEC in narrow and alternative ways by making a set of practices possible, engendering new pedagogical relationships. This article highlights the complex conditions of (im)possibility for ‘doing’ ECEC under austerity. When viewed in the broader context, policy reforms are increasingly reaching into ECEC as strategic spaces for new modes of governing, sustained by a global agenda in neoliberal education reforms.

A construção da identidade profissional do professor cooperante de Educação Física [The construction of the Physical Education cooperating teacher’s professional identity]

This research focuses on the construction of the supervising teaching practice professional identity of the cooperating teacher. To this end, it explored the discourses on the teaching practices and teacher education experiences; the legitimate participation in teacher education and working spaces; and the teaching perspectives that substantiate the pedagogical relationships and learning trajectories in the context of professional practice. A case study was conducted to examine the narratives of cooperating teachers, an experienced and a beginner on the supervisory roles and tasks of the pedagogical practice of Physical Education pre-service teachers during an academic year. Data were gathered through interviews. The qualitative inductive thematic analysis was informed by grounded theory coding procedures. Themes included: i) challenges in interacting with the pre- service teachers; and ii) challenges in the (re)configuration of the supervisory practices. The reconstruction of the cooperating teacher’s professional identity happens in the doing of their roles, the confrontation with the challenges encountered, the negotiation of interactions with the pre-service teachers, and the implementation of teaching perspectives that inform their practices and pedagogical supervision relations.

MODERN APPROACHES IN THE ORGANIZATION OF THE PEDAGOGICAL NTERACTON BETWEEN KINDERGARTEN TEACHER AND THE FAMILY

In the modern society, with this fast growing technical progress, there are lots of changes in the social relationships between people, the psychological rules in the society are broken. The relationship between parents and children is changing, and the role of the family as one of the most important institutions of socialization is becoming increasingly less than before. Concerned about economic survival and well-being, parents put in the background the communication and upbringing of their children or leave this obligation to the teachers, but they forget that the parent is the first teacher of the children, they are the ones who influence children`s values and way of thinking, they are their role model. For this reason, the kindergarten, as the first social institution outside of home, has the responsibility to create effective, real, scientifically based interaction with the family. Although the family and the kindergarten are two systems, different in structure and methods of pedagogical interaction, they are closely connected in a common goal – raising and educating children and should not be against each other. This article present a model for improving the social and pedagogical relationships between the family and kindergarten.

Representações sociais sobre escola e identidade profissional docente: Um estudo com estagiários em um curso de Licenciatura em Ciências no Brasil

The goal of this work is to investigate representations of the school institution held by graduate students of the Science Teacher Education Program at a public university in Brazil. We aim to answer the following questions: What are the representations of the school institution imagined by the researched students? How important are those representations to the process of teacher education? We analyzed 79 sketches made by the students in the period 2011 to 2013 during their internship program. Students complemented their sketches by brief oral and written narratives about them. Using qualitative analysis of social representations about school institution from a cultural and historic perspective, we identified three major and not exclusive conceptions of school: 1) the school environments produce an open-close play, with various levels of control and disciplining; 2) the pedagogical relationships are associated to teacher authority, disciplining and transmission of knowledge; and, finally, 3) the objects of the school point to the idea of the school institution as an isolated environment, with its own culture. The presence of these representations indicates the prevalence of a long process of production and recognition of aspects of the scholar culture by the students, which could contribute to reflexive practices in the proposals of teacher education programs.