Pedagogy and subjectivity: Creating our own students.

Education students often expect that teacher education will teach them how to 'manage' their students. This expectation is founded upon a notion that the subjectivities of teacher and students are fixed and that it is, therefore, possible to 'know' what the students are like. Using Louis Althusser's notion of 'interpellation' this paper discusses how various theories of learning position teachers and students and can create different kinds of students (and teachers). If teachers can learn to manage their own thinking about the nature of their students, perhaps by learning a wide range of conceptual systems, they can in fact call different kinds of student into being

Life, the crocodile, the Pisikoa and the wind: representations of teaching in the writings of three pacific authors.

In the course of research involving the experiences of teachers of Pacific ancestry in New Zealand public schools, I became interested in the ways in which teachers were represented in Pacific thinking. Published works give relatively easy access to at least some of the patterns of thought evoked by the term teacher. In this paper I shall look at the kinds of teacher and teaching shown by Ruparuke Petaia, Albert Wendt and Sia Figiel. These authors, all confidently Samoan, portray some of the complexities of learning and teaching from within Samoan sensibilities. ÂLife", "the Crocodile", "the Pisikoa" and "the Wind" are all the names of teachers in this literature. My discussion of Kidnapped by Petaia (1974), Ola by Wendt (1991) and Where we once belonged by Figiel (1996) is not chronologically ordered so much as thematically arranged. The three themes are: decolonisation of education, the European teacher of Pasifika students and the Samoan teacher of Samoan students. Petaia presents a decolonising stance: the teacher as instrument of colonisation or enslavement. This perception is followed through by a discussion of Figiel's character, Siniva, who likewise rejects European knowledge as a form of darkness, and a brief reference to this idea by Wendt. Both Wendt and Figiel portray European teachers as arrogant in their assumptions about the universal nature of their knowledge, and as comic figures of enlightenment colonisation, somehow cut off from embodied human experience. Wendt sees the Samoan teacher as ineffectual, an instrument of a kind of hopeless enlightenment, frustrated by regulations and village traditions, while Fig iel sees her as a real presence in village life but a tragic figure of local ignorance

Reflective engagement in cultural history: a Lacanian perspective on Pasifika teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand

How do we understand our own cultural histories and how do these understandings impact on our senses of self? This paper addresses the case of Pacific islander migration into New Zealand. It is based on a study fuelled by a group of Pacific island teachers exploring their own experiences of becoming teachers in New Zealand schools. The paper raises some theoretical issues relating to cultural identity as understood in relation to educational practices at the interfaces of cultures. By examining how notions of Pacific cultural identity for individuals are held in place by particular self-images the paper asks how such identities might be seen as reaching out to possible futures. The paper concludes with some tentative thoughts on how an individual might work towards strengthening a historical sense of self and a more productive reflective/reflexive conception of engagement in a situation of cultural minority

Is peer review in academic publishing still working?

Peer review is central to academic publishing. Yet for many it is a mysterious and contentious practice, which can cause distress for both reviewers, and those whose work is reviewed. This paper, produced by the Editors’ Collective, examines the past and future of peer review in academic publishing. The first sections consider how peer review has been defined and practised in changing academic contexts, and its educational significance in the development of scholarship. The paper then explores major historical and contemporary issues around identity, diversity, anonymity, and the review process, and the related power of editors versus reviewers in academic publishing. Finally, the paper discusses the case of new scholars as reviewers engaging in neoliberal labour, before concluding with some brief recommendations based on our analysis

Collective writing: An inquiry into praxis

This is the second text in the series collectively written by members of the Editors' Collective, which comprises a series of individual and collaborative reflections upon the experience of contributing to the previous and first text written by the Editors' Collective: 'Towards a Philosophy of Academic Publishing.' In the article, contributors reflect upon their experience of collective writing and summarize the main themes and challenges. They show that the act of collective writing disturbs the existing systems of academic knowledge creation, and link these disturbances to the age of the digital reason. They conclude that the collaborative and collective action is a thing of learning-by-doing, and that collective writing seems to offer a possible way forward from the co-opting of academic activities by economics. Through detaching knowledge creation from economy, collaborative and collective writing address the problem of forming new collective intelligences

Prison Education in Aotearoa New Zealand: From Justice to Corrections

This article considers the changes in policy discourse relating to education in prisons, in the New Zealand context, in the period between the 1950s and the early 21st century. The earlier belief in education as a means to rehabilitation has been replaced by a narrow focus on programmes specifically intended to change the criminal behaviour for which the prisoner has been sentenced. But even these programmes are hard to get into, and available only to selected prison inmates after they have served two thirds of their sentences. Informal education, including physical education and vocational education, have been severely retrenched, as have all forms of work and activity. In this paper I argue that this situation is a logical outcome of the neoliberal construction of education as a private rather than a social or public good, of the reconceptualisation of the public service as an agency of its principal, the party or parties in power. The depersonalising of the inmates of prisons as “prisoners” serves to justify this situation at the same time as it validates the “freedom” of those who conform to social and legal expectations

Pedagogy and subjectivity: Creating our own students

Education students often expect that teacher education will teach them how to 'manage' their students. This expectation is founded upon a notion that the subjectivities of teacher and students are fixed and that it is, therefore, possible to 'know' what the students are like. Using Louis Althusser's notion of 'interpellation' this paper discusses how various theories of learning position teachers and students and can create d *rent kinds of students (and teachers). If teachers can learn to manage their own thinking about the nature of their students, perhaps by learning a wide range of conceptual systems, they can in fact call different kinds of student into being

Neo-liberalism and constructions of democracy: The impact on teachers' work

In New Zealand teachers have been working in a neo-liberal policy context now for 10 years The assumptions and imperatives of this political programme have had time to affect the working conditions of teachers in a multitude of ways. This paper is an attempt to unravel some of the implications and effects of neo-liberal political theory on teachers' work