Teaching and Translation
FALSE CHOICES ABOUT TEACHING If you are looking for a cutting edge diagnosis of contemporary debates over teaching, we recommend John Dewey’s Child and Curriculum (written in 1902!). Talk of teaching today reveals a pronounced case of the dichotomous thinking that troubled Dewey: on the one side, there is the principled refusal to teach in the name of the creativity and initiative of students; on the other side, there is the teacher who is monologically trying to impose a body of knowledge on passive students. We see this sort of argument in one way, in Paulo Freire; in another way, in Jacques Ranciere. Like Dewey, we argue that there is a third way that avoids the false choice between imposing a teacher’s point of view or granting privilege to the student’s point of view. It is not the third way of dialogue, or at least not dialogue the way it is sometimes presented: each learning from the other, or a Socratic leading of the student to the teacher’s intended conclusions. Rather, we find the ideas of translation and third space to be potentially productive here.
Teaching Thinking Across Boundaries: Making Sense of Fates, Identities, and Heritages
By Rom 7, the learning and teaching has been brought to the level of “pure knowledge” that investigates the necessity of humans’ need for external and unconditional help from the Divine. What else must Paul teach and must his learners learn when The Epistle unfolds in Rom 8 and beyond? This and the next chapters will seek to answer this curricular and pedagogic question. To investigate this question of curriculum design, one’s mental clockwork and ideational landscape should stay tuned to the mid-first century. Rome was then a city of Greco-Roman gods, such as Zeus, whom the Romans renamed Jupiter, of imperial powers, of Roman law, of slavery, of migrants of mixed ethnicities, of imported and dislocated populations, and of masculinity, trade, and prosperity. On the surface, it was referred to as peace upon strength (i.e. Pax Romana). In every corner of the Empire, there were undercurrents of suspicion, hatred, and rivalry.
Femininity as Performance.
As girls at school, as women at work, we are used to performing. We are used, too, to dramaturgical metaphors which tell us that life is a performance in which we do nothing but act out a series of roles [1] or indeed that these roles can be peeled away like layers of an onion to reveal a repressed core, a true self, which has been inhibited, clouded by the layers of social conditioning which obscure it [2]. Such views form much of the common sense of ideas about gender socialisation in relation to education. Girls are conditioned into passivity, the story often goes, this is why they do badly at school: implicitly, femininity is seen as a series of roles often imposed by agents of socialisation, of whom the worst offenders are taken to be women: mothers and female teachers. But I want to tell a different story, one of female success, one which criticises the idea that socialisation works to render girls and women wimpish, feminine and passive. Let me begin with an example, one which can be multiplied many times over. A woman teacher, one of my students, receives a well-deserved distinction for her Master's degree. She received more or less straight 'A's for all her work, but still she cannot believe that the distinction belongs to her; it is as though the person with her name exists somewhere else, outside her body: this powerful person that she cannot recognise as herself. Instead, she feels that she is hopeless, consistently panics about her performance and appears to have little confidence in herself. She can, however, express her views clearly and forcefully and the external examiner in her viva thanked her for the tutorial! I am sure this story has resonances for many women. Indeed, I am sure that I related this story because I too have been constantly aware that the Valerie Walkerdine that people speak well of feels as though it belongs to someone else, someone who I do not recognise as me. How come, for many women, the powerful part of themselves has been so split off as to feel that it belongs to someone else? It is not the case that here is a simple passive wimp femininity, but a power which is both desired, strived after, yet almost too dangerous to be acknowledged as belonging to the woman herself. In this paper I shall explore this phenomenon, using work from both poststructuralism and psychoanalysis and using data from my research on gender and schooling (Walkerdine et al., 1989) to illustrate my arguments.