Advancing book clubs as non-formal learning to facilitate critical public pedagogy in organizations

Book clubs are a well-known form of social engagement and are beneficial for those who take part, yet book clubs are not fully realized within management as a site for learning. This is unfortunate because book clubs that read fiction can foster social processes and help employees in search of more critical and emancipatory forms of learning. We theoretically synthesize the literature to advance current thinking with regard to book clubs as critical public pedagogy in organizations. We begin by introducing book clubs as non-formal adult learning. Then, book clubs that employ fiction as a cultural artifact are presented as a way for members to build relationships, learn together, and to engage in cultural change work. Next, the traditional notions of book clubs are made pedagogically complex through the lens of critical public pedagogy. Finally, we offer two implications: (1) as public pedagogy, book clubs can act as an alternative to traditional learning structures in organizations; and (2) book clubs, when valued as public pedagogy, can be fostered by those in management learning and HRD for consciousness raising and challenging existing mental models in their organizations.

See the light: ‘Biking-with’ as an a/r/tographic method of public pedagogy

Given the prevalence of cycling as a recreational activity and mode of transportation, cities are continuously increasingly incorporating cycling into their plans for the future. Considering the rise of cycling in popular and academic discourse, it is paramount to consider the lived experience of cycling and be able to conduct and disseminate research in a meaningful way. Drawing upon a/r/tography as a methodology, whereby the artist/researcher/teacher coexist, this article explores ‘biking-with’ as a political practice and critical public pedagogy opposed to dominant discourse of mobility and space in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The findings suggest that ‘biking-with’ as civic action and challenge norms around private/public space.

Remaking the #Syllabus: Crowdsourcing Resistance Praxis as Critical Public Pedagogy

Between 2014 and 2017, the creation of hashtag syllabi—bricolage iterations of reading lists created by or circulated among educators on Twitter—emerged as a direct response for teaching about three highly publicized incidents of racial violence in the United States. Educators used hashtags as a means of sharing resources with their networks to provide non-normative literatures from marginalized scholars for teaching to transgress in the wake of Mike Brown’s slaying in Ferguson, Missouri; the massacre of nine congregants at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; and the fatal car attack on anti-fascist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia. Acting on Chakravartty et al.’s provocation to center scholars of color in course syllabi as a pedagogical strategy to disrupt the reification of white supremacy in communication and media studies, I consider the creation of three hashtag syllabi related to these events as a form of critical resistance praxis in the emerging framework of digital intersectionality theory. I present a brief textual analysis of the aforementioned syllabi, triangulated with data from online conversations linked to them via their hashtags and derivative works produced by their creators and users to map two social media assisted strategies for doing critical public pedagogy.

Education in the Trump Era: Educators’ Mobilizations as Critical Public Pedagogy

In this article, teacher mobilizations in 2018–2019 are presented and analyzed as a form of critical public pedagogy. Critical public pedagogy is an important theoretical framework to understand educator radicalization in the United States, in the context of the ongoing capitalist assault on public education, increased authoritarianism, the growing climate of hostility inside and outside schools, coupled with the emboldened rhetoric of hate and bigotry that is legitimized by the highest office in the nation.

Walking Borders, Risk and Belonging

Walking borders, risk & belonging makes a case for using walking as a biographical interviewmethod (WIBM) in order to do critical public pedagogy—using conjunctural analysis—that engagesin unsettling and troubling the white, male privilege and basis of walking, and indeed the‘turn’ to walking rooted in Eurocentric practices. The authors build upon a long history of: i) usingwalking, participatory and arts-based methods (ethno-mimesis) to do social research on migrationwith migrants, and; ii) the importance of creating space for stories of asylum, migration andmarginalisation to be shared and heard through critical pedagogy, critical journalism, and walkingas an arts-based research method.

Speculative Harbouring: Wading into Critical Pedagogy and Practices of Care

This text explicates a particular pedagogical event—Speculative Harbouring—a postgraduate workshop in which students from different disciplines formed around concerns of how we might better care for, and with, urban harbours. The harbour we attended to is presently referred to as Blackwattle Bay, which is a site in Eora Nation, Sydney, Australia currently undergoing significant redevelopment. The purpose of the workshop, or rather walkshop, was two-fold: to introduce participants to research practices from a range of disciplines, and to construct a field-guide to highlight ways in which Blackwattle Bay is, has, and might be, inhabited, cared for (or not) and the complex ecological and social demands this creates. To begin the walkshop, participants each shared a different method for examining place from their disciplinary field. During the twoday event, these different methods were activated through the practice of walking and were used to produce the Speculative Harbouring Field-Guide to Blackwattle Bay. In our discussion, we draw on feminist practices and politics of care, in particular, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s articulation of “matters of care,” alongside Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing” and notions of critical public pedagogy, to examine ways in which walking and reflecting can attune people to learning to care and how a field guide might facilitate such attuning.

The School of Site: Istanbul Walkabouts

This article focuses on the potentialities of employing the practice of walking as a critical public pedagogy in the context of the transforming territories of northern Istanbul. It will initially give background information on the current processes of neoliberal urbanization taking place in northern Istanbul. It will then, based on the experience of the independent walking project Istanbul Walkabouts, discuss how walking can be used as a critical methodology outside and in academia to question hegemonic approaches to land, record the terra incognita areas of cities, and produce alternative modes of mapping. Ultimately, it will emphasize how performing critical walking in the precarious geographies of northern Istanbul with diverse publics can trigger experiential and place-based (un)learning, produce multiple epistemologies, and generate a community that is critically engaged with top-down approaches to urbanization.