Beyond ‘ignorance’: using the cultural stereotypes of Americans studying in the UK as a resource for learning and teaching about British culture

A course introducing British culture is a standard component of many study abroad programmes running in this country that are aimed at international students who will be spending a limited amount of time in the United Kingdom. However, it is not often acknowledged that such students possess a range of strong pre-conceptions about British culture and society prior to their arrival. Conventional teaching strategies assume student ignorance of the subject. However, an alternative approach which makes us of pre-arrival stereotypes can be more productive in terms of engaging students in active processes of comparative analysis of their new and existing knowledge. A case study of American student stereotypes of the British monarchy is presented and it is suggested that these can be used as the basis for refining student understanding of cultural politics in the United Kingdom. International students, therefore, should not be treated as being culturally ignorant of Britain in the sense of having no knowledge or opinions at all. Rather, it should be understood that they possess a culturally mediated state of subjectivity which I refer to as ‘ignorance’ and that this can become a valuable resource for teaching and learning

Understanding young people's citizenship learning in everyday life: The role of contexts, relationships and dispositions

In this article we present insights from research which has sought to deepen understanding of the ways in which young people (13-21) learn democratic citizenship through their participation in a range of different formal and informal practices and communities. Based on the research, we suggest that such understanding should focus on the interplay between contexts for action, relationships within and across contexts, and the dispositions that young people bring to such contexts and relationships. In the first part of the paper we show how and why we have broadened the narrow parameters of the existing citizenship discourse with its focus on political socialisation to encompass a more wide-ranging conception of citizenship learning which is not just focused on school or the curriculum. In the second part of the paper we describe our research and present two exemplar case studies of young people who formed part of the project. In the third part we present our insights about the nature and character of citizenship learning that we have been able to draw from our research. In the concluding section we highlight those dimensions of citizenship learning that would have remained invisible had we focused exclusively on schools and the curriculum. In this way we demonstrate the potential of the approach to understanding citizenship learning that we have adopted

Towards an ‘ordinary’ cosmopolitanism in everyday academic practice in higher education

In this article, we explore what cosmopolitanism looks like in particular institutional contexts in higher education and the sorts of conditions and pedagogic practices which nurture and sustain this within the overall running and administration of the institution. Cosmopolitanism is sometimes popularly assumed to refer to the global and the culturally diverse, rather as if encounters with different cultures and ethnicities from different geographical locations could add up to a cosmopolitan perspective. Our view of cosmopolitanism and our concern start from local and everyday occurrences or ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’ in the context of higher education. We develop an understanding of cosmopolitanism as embedded practice in the particularities of local institutional contexts and administration and what cosmopolitanism means in the ‘local’. Small illustrative sketches are drawn on to exemplify aspects of ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’ – what it is, why it is important and its enactment in everyday academic practice in higher education

Teaching the Process of Molecular Phylogeny and Systematics: A Multi-Part Inquiry-Based Exercise

Three approaches to molecular phylogenetics are demonstrated to biology students as they explore molecular data from Homo sapiens and four related primates. By analyzing DNA sequences, protein sequences, and chromosomal maps, students are repeatedly challenged to develop hypotheses regarding the ancestry of the five species. Although these exercises were designed to supplement and enhance classroom instruction on phylogeny, cladistics, and systematics in the context of a postsecondary majors-level introductory biology course, the activities themselves require very little prior student exposure to these topics. Thus, they are well suited for students in a wide range of educational levels, including a biology class at the secondary level. In implementing this exercise, we have observed measurable gains, both in student comprehension of molecular phylogeny and in their acceptance of modern evolutionary theory. By engaging students in modern phylogenetic activities, these students better understood how biologists are currently using molecular data to develop a more complete picture of the shared ancestry of all living things

A Practice of Concrete Utopia? Informal Youth Support and the Possibility of 'Redemptive Remembering' in a UK Coal-Mining Area

At a moment when individualised and de-historicised notions of 'aspiration', 'resilience' and 'wellbeing' are proliferating in policy discourse shaping informal youth support practice, this article argues, instead, for a critically historical focus. In reviewing material from an intergenerational ethnographic study of young people in contact with youth support teams in a former coal-mining community in Derbyshire, UK, the case is made for understanding how young working-class people's experience of education is situated within historical geographies of collectively transmitted affect. In the particular coal-mining locality considered, these classed spatialities of feeling have been shaped through traditions of political, trade union and community resistance and mutual aid established over a 200-year period and culminating in the locally bitterly divided national miners' strike of 1984-85. Beginning from an ethnographic field note, the article outlines how such insubordinate community histories - particularly those imagining a radical reconstitution of society - can be silenced when a collective psycho-social space once redolent with hope becomes a space of ruin as a result of politically orchestrated de-industrialisation. Noticing how this compounds young people's experience of marginalisation and leaves them at once adrift from the 'illegitimate' histories that are their legitimate 'heritage', and at the same time subject to the traumatic affective legacy of those same histories, a critical counter-practice in informal youth support is proposed. Drawing on Blochian readings of Freire, the article calls for a form of intergenerational 'redemptive remembering' - a practice of 'concrete utopia' - capable of recovering 'unspeakable' community histories for a collective remaking of resilience and aspiration beyond the received confines of the neoliberal imaginary