Changing Pedagogical Spaces: Difference, Diversity and Inclusion

Professor Penny Jane BurkeDirector of the Paulo Freire Institute-UK

UALL annual conference 2014 p.burke@roehampton.a.uk

Marketising Diversity

pedagogical stratification

• To examine the effects of global neo-liberalism on pedagogies in higher education

• increasing pressure for universities to position themselves as ‘world-class’

• to compete in a highly stratified field driven by discourses of ‘excellence’ & league tables

• See Pedagogical Stratification: The Changing Landscape of Higher Education (Stevenson, Burke and Whelan, 2014) York: Higher Education Academy

Neoliberal regimes

• imperative to develop human capital • massification - achieved by increasing student

fees • Neoliberal individualisation - responsibility &

reward - financial return to individual graduate

• WP increases student numbers - therefore the HEIs’ market

Marketised HE

• marketized frameworks: ‘likely to erode the potential of higher education to contribute to equity’

• Market mechanisms: ‘exert pressure on universities to comply with consumer demand’

From Naidoo, Rajani (2003).

‘delivery’ ‘styles’ ‘efficiency’…

discourses of ‘flexibility’

• flexible provision to address diversified market

• individualise the requirement to ‘be flexible’ • doing more with less • target-setting - individual value • insidious inequalities -made invisible through

dominant discourses of teaching and learning in the neoliberal university

Meritocracy: HE should be available to all who have the potential to benefit from university study, regardless of social background ‘potential’ tends to be profoundly shaped by particular values, perspectives and judgements

e.g. being witty, dressing with style and being motivated

Discourses of derision & deficit

• the (disadvantged) student is often derisively constructed as lacking determination, discipline or the passion to learn

• subjects those associated with disadvantage, diversity and difference to processes of self-correction

• focal point of a project of transformation is turned on to the individual

Reconceptualising pedagogies…

• we form & reform our identities in & through pedagogical spaces – shaped by the emotional

• emotions ‘produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects’ (Ahmed, 2004)

• Pedagogical histories connected to ‘dividing practices’ (Foucault, 1977…)

Fraser’s concept of social justice • On the status model, misrecognition is neither a psychical deformation

nor an impediment to ethical self-realization. Rather it constitutes an institutionalized relation of subordination and a violation of justice. To be misrecognized, accordingly, is not to suffer distorted identity or impaired subjectivity as a result of being depreciated by others. It is rather to be constituted by institutionalized patterns of cultural value in ways that prevent one from participating as a peer in social life. On the status model then, misrecognition is relayed not through deprecatory attitudes or re-standing discourses, but rather through social institutions. It arises, more precisely, when institutions structure interaction according to cultural norms that impede parity of participation (Fraser, 2003: 29, my emphasis).

blaming the victim…

• When misrecognition is identified with internal distortions in the structure of the self-conscious of the oppressed, it is but a short step to blaming the victim (…) Misrecognition is a matter of externally manifest and publicly verifiable impediments to some people’s standing as full members of society. To redress it, again, means to overcome subordination. This in turn means changing institutions and social practices (Fraser, 2003: 31, my emphasis).

McNay’s critique

• McNay (2008) critique’s Fraser’s ‘objectivist perspectives’:

• Leads to misrecognition being considered ‘primarily as externally imposed injuries rather than as lived identities’ (McNay, 2008: 150).

Embodied identities • ‘Embodied identity helps to think through the ways different bodies take up and use the different higher education spaces available, and the ways that higher education spaces and practices are constructed and re/shaped in relation to the different bodies that move through and are positioned within them’ (Burke, 2012)

‘Formations of Gender and HE Pedagogies’ (GaP)

• Research team: PJ Burke (PI), Professor Gill Crozier, Professor Becky Francis, Dr Barbara Read (School of Education) and Julie Hall and Jo Peat (Learning & Teaching Enhancement Unit)

• 64 students (across 6 subject areas) -- individually interviewed • 18 Executive Student Consultants participated intensively across a

range of methods and project activities. • 23 HE lecturers (from 6 subject areas) participated in 12 focus

group discussions • 20 observations of classroom practice -- with reflective meetings as

a follow-up. • 17 students and 22 staff from 16 additional HEIs across England

participated in intensive series of workshops and discussions.

internalising processes of misrecognition

• Discussions can make me feel anxious. I am scared of being stupid like and then no one says something and I am thinking it and the lecturer points it out. Then I think I should have said it to show how clever I was but I didn’t and no one else did. But I am just too scared to put my hand up or just say it. Sometimes I even feel nauseous –like I want to be sick just to say a sentence. And I’m not a shy person but I’m just very nervous (female student).

‘shame’ is a social emotion

• [Shame] exists with reference to how we anticipate others may see and reject us’ – but it is experienced as internalized disappointment with self i.e. it exists with reference to how we judge our own shortcomings, feelings of failure or inadequacy (Raphael Reed et al, 2007: 19).

‘feminisation’ of teaching and learning

• Part of me thinks it’s not my job to look after them. I have a husband and 2 children at home that I have to look after, I have to get these students through, I’m not their mother, I have no intention of being their mother … and sometimes I get really cross that there is an expectation from the university, from my PC and from society, that I am going to mind these students. (Female lecturer)

• I feel because of retention rates and all these systems which are in place when you first … I am expected to be caring, more caring than I actually want to be. (Male lecturer)

Fear…and emotion as a tool

• It’s perhaps fear of taking initiative … is it fear … have we created that perhaps a bit? (Male lecturer).

• There’s something about some courses that’s feeding into that passivity, this kind of ‘I’ll just stand at the front and talk and you’ll just listen. (Female Lecturer)

• Emotions as ‘tools that can be used by subjects in the project of life and career enhancement’ (Goleman, 1995 in Ahmed, 2004)

problem of differentiation & proximity

• Female Student: And here [university] seems like heaven in this respect, no matter if you are a girl or a boy if you talk you are listened to, you are heard. So it’s so much different [than school]. We have two girls in our class, they are so loud, they are so…they don’t pay attention, seriously they couldn’t care less about what we are talking [about], and they continue to interrupt and stuff. There are guys that don’t give anything to the course, but still it’s not because they are guys or girls, because they are people like that, they don’t care (Female student).

marking out difference • I would say, it sounds so bad, I would say like maybe eighty percent,

this is just me, this is a guestimate, eighty percent of people who come from a lower class, whose parents didn’t go to university, might not address learning in general with as quite a passion as those who maybe came from middleclass, or those who had their parents who went to university. Like going back to what I said when I came here I saw university as the way to finish it, because college wasn’t. I went to a secondary school which although it was state it was quite top end, we had the PM’s children there, and from there you always had high expectations bred into that sort of way of thinking. You moved into that way of thinking, that that is the way forward, and that is a normal thing to do, whereas people who went to other schools might not see it like that, like some say oh, I can get a job without a degree, they don’t really…or they say I only need three GCSEs, they don’t aim for high enough because they don’t know any higher (Male Student)).

Pedagogies & the perpetuation of a politics of misrecognition

• But it’s impossible to educate, you know, in the sense that we don’t have time to sit down and navel gaze about how we can engage these people better in order to do this, that and the other or do we look right back at our admissions criteria and say, ‘ok, we only choose the ones who are like us.’? (Female lecturer)

Teaching Inclusively: Changing Pedagogical Spaces

• A key concept is ‘praxis’ and this emphasises the dialogic relationship between critical reflection and action. …in order to create inclusive teaching practices, conceptual resources are essential for reshaping both understanding and action and this is an iterative and cyclical process – reflection-action and action-reflection.

Transformative pedagogies

• Demystify practices and forms of knowledge • Difference as key resource for processes of

collaborative meaning-making (but in a framework that recognises structural inequalities & power relations)

• questioning and critical approaches are encouraged - without the fear of making ‘mistakes’

• requires sophisticated levels of understanding on the part of the teacher of complex pedagogical relations and the operation of power in the classroom.

potential of social technologies • The blog enhances the opportunity for students to be more aware of

different viewpoints, which can potentially expand the students’ capacity for reading and understanding at a deeper level. In conventional lecture settings, it is rather difficult to know what other students grasp from the same reading material unless tutorials are structured into the programme and these typically occur after course inputs. The circulation of blog postings before the lectures is not only beneficial for students but also for the lecturer, as students but also for the lecturer, as she or he can be more aware of what level of understanding the students have from the reading and what is required to engage with students’ understanding and to stretch it during the lecture and subsequent discussion.

• from Hemmi, Bayne, and Land (2009) Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2009), 25, 19–30

potential to form collaborative processes of meaning-making

• Wiki textuality has the potential to be radically different from more orthodox, non-digital modes of writing within formal higher education, in that the wiki space is one which is fundamentally unstable and collectively produced, with a tendency to problematize conventional notions of authorship and ownership.

• from Hemmi, Bayne, and Land (2009) Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2009), 25, 19–30

Circle of knowledge • There is no genuine instruction in

whose process no research is performed by way of question, investigation, curiosity, creativity just as there is no research in the course of which researchers do not learn – after all, by coming to know, they learn, and after having learned something, they communicate, they teach. The role of the university…is to immerse itself, utterly seriously, in the moment of this circle (Freire, 2009: 169-170).

Thank you!

• p.burke@roehampton.ac.uk• http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/Research-Cent

res/Paulo-Freire-Institute/http://• www.roehampton.ac.uk/staff/Penny-Jane-

Burke/• http://www.routledge.com/books/details/978

0415568241/