The moral journey of learning a pedagogy: a qualitative exploration of student–teachers’ formal and informal writing of dialogic pedagogy

YesStudents of education encounter a range of pedagogies yet how future teachers’ appropriate moral principles are little understood. We conducted an investigation into this process with 10 international students of education attending an intensive course on ‘dialogic pedagogy’ in a university in Finland. The data comprising student learning journals and essays were coded for the level of questioning, acceptance and irreverence. In the findings, reverential acceptance was more frequent than questioning and irreverence; however, our qualitative analysis also found a large number of micro-transitions between questioning, acceptance and irreverence suggesting a dynamic interplay. Recognising this vacillation as part of a moral journey may support better understanding of what it means to engage with a different pedagogy

Navigating Authoritative Discourses in a Multilingual Classroom: Conversations With Policy and Practice

Using Bakhtinian concepts of persuasive and authoritative discourse, this study reports on science and English language arts instructional practices in a multilingual, rural, fourth-grade classroom in Kenya. Situated in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) and through the use of case study, the study explores classroom discourse data to illustrate how teachers use instructional practices to reproduce, contest, or navigate prevailing institutional monolingual policies when mediating students’ access to literacy and content. By analyzing classroom discourse, the authors argue that restrictive language policies that aspire for fixity disconnect multilingual learners from their daily realities. In contrast, they call for a (re)construction of multilingual pedagogy that capitalizes on the strengths of learners, teachers, and linguistic communities by embracing students’ languages and language varieties in language learning and literacy development. In particular, implications are drawn for the use of EMI for emerging bilingual and multilingual learners. The authors identify the need to prepare teachers for a multilingual reality through legitimizing multilingual pedagogies such as translanguaging

Understanding and examining teacher resilience from multiple perspectives

In this chapter, I argue that differing conceptualisations of the construct of resilience shape and enrich the research questions and methodology used to examine it. In addition, the conceptual focus has implications for questions such as whose responsibility it is for the development of resilience. Research conducted within two Australian projects, Keeping Cool and BRiTE (Building Resilience in Teacher Education) is used as an illustration of the impact of a changing conceptual focus. For example, beginning with a psychological perspective led to an examination of risk and protective factors for individuals. More contextual approaches involved a comparison of countries. Recent systemic views support a model that encompasses both personal and contextual characteristics, as well as strategies used and outcomes achieved. It is argued that taking multiple perspectives in this programme of work has enabled the incorporation of a broad range of research methods and findings, and contributed to a deeper understanding of the construct of teacher resilience

Framing Young Children’s Humour and Practitioner Responses to it Using a Bakhtinian Carnivalesque Lens

This article presents findings from a pilot study offering an alternative framing of children's humour and laughter in an early childhood education setting. It employs a Bakhtinian carnivalesque lens to explore the nature of children's humour in an urban nursery, and investigate the framing of children's humour and laughter outside the popular paradigm of developmental psychology. In addition, it addresses the challenge that children's humour can present for early childhood practitioners, turning to Bakhtin's analysis of carnival to frame children's humour as carnivalesque. This conception is then offered as a part of a potential explanation for practitioners' occasional resistance to children's humour, proposing that dominating, authoritative discourses within early childhood education play a significant role in this. The article draws on a number of theorists, including Bakhtin more widely, to address reasons why humour is not valued pedagogically within the UK early childhood field, and suggests that further research in the area is imperative, in order that we gain a better understanding of the place and significance of children's humour within early childhood practice

Non-affirmative Theory of Education as a Foundation for Curriculum Studies, Didaktik and Educational Leadership

This chapter presents non-affirmative theory of education as the foundation for a new research program in education, allowing us to bridge educational leadership, curriculum studies and Didaktik. We demonstrate the strengths of this framework by analyzing literature from educational leadership and curriculum theory/didaktik. In contrast to both socialization-oriented explanations locating curriculum and leadership within existing society, and transformation-oriented models viewing education as revolutionary or super-ordinate to society, non-affirmative theory explains the relation between education and politics, economy and culture, respectively, as non-hierarchical. Here critical deliberation and discursive practices mediate between politics, culture, economy and education, driven by individual agency in historically developed cultural and societal institutions. While transformative and socialization models typically result in instrumental notions of leadership and teaching, non-affirmative education theory, previously developed within German and Nordic education, instead views leadership and teaching as relational and hermeneutic, drawing on ontological core concepts of modern education: recognition; summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit. Understanding educational leadership, school development and teaching then requires a comparative multi-level approach informed by discursive institutionalism and organization theory, in addition to theorizing leadership and teaching as cultural-historical and critical-hermeneutic activity. Globalisation and contemporary challenges to deliberative democracy also call for rethinking modern nation-state based theorizing of education in a cosmopolitan light. Non-affirmative education theory allows us to understand and promote recognition based democratic citizenship (political, economical and cultural) that respects cultural, ethical and epistemological variations in a globopolitan era. We hope an American-European-Asian comparative dialogue is enhanced by theorizing education with a non-affirmative approach