Special Issue: The Spaces of Pedagogy

This special issue began as a symposium delivered at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting in 2016. That year, the AERA conference theme invited participants to reimagine and remake the research field in order to address challenges and new conditions of the contemporary world with a focus on the intersection of research, politics, and social analysis. The call for papers noted a multitude of changes including “unprecedented global migration and demographic shifts” and the social challenges they present, while highlighting “the role of education researchers as public scholars who contribute to public understanding, political debate, and professional practice in increasingly diverse democracies in the United States and around the globe.” Yet while the call suggested a potential avenue to considering alternate approaches to what is conventionally detached academic inquiry by advocating for “effective intellectual work,” there were still – and continue to be – a wide array of obstructions to thinking and researching in ways that move beyond the very real effects educators face inside and outside classrooms on a daily basis. There is still the need for engagement of the unstated assumptions and erasures around the language and the tacit “salvation theme” (Franklin et al., 2003) that troubled the meeting’s call and its admonition to the field to revive diverse democracies through the thinking and scholarship it produces. This special issue argues that the field of education, rather than encompassing a kind of unity, is constituted by and through a multiplicity of competing epistemologies, philosophical traditions, agendas, and styles.

With this framework in mind, the first five papers in this special issue all initially conceptualized spaces of pedagogical practices and perspectives that reticulated assumptions underlying pedagogy, participation, engagement, and action in ways that are deliberately reflexive about the politics of knowledge and inquiry, that untangle the ways in which institutions govern what is properly desirable – and possible – in those spaces, and that ultimately hope to achieve transformative effects. A sixth paper, added as a result of the discussion initiated by the symposium presentation, considers the notion that the overarching concern in the special issue is how to make sense of our present conditions and constraints associated with economic retrenchment and attacks on public institutions, those executed through real maneuvers and the wholesale policy “thought collective” (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009) of neoliberalism, while still being alert to potential openings that might affirm spaces that sustain and provoke educational possibilities. Taking present-day examples of the ways that we engage with our students, teach, think, and collaborate with our various communities, these papers argue for a heterogeneity of interpretive tools that can attend to the complexities of such endeavors, for and in the public sphere.

The first paper, “Reevaluating Collegiality: Relationality, Learning Communities, and Possibilities” by Mary K. Chang, considers Confucian relationality and its attendant focus on interdependence among individuals within communities. By closely examining learning communities in higher education, Chang argues that the traditional – and ultimately limiting – view of such faculty groups, in which educators share pedagogical tools and methods, tends to neglect the ways that a relational and reflexive framework can otherwise uncover the myriad other connections and interrelations among and through an institution that not only impact individual faculty members but the institution itself. In so doing, Chang is able to reposition notions of collegiality and expand our understanding of learning communities that the institution otherwise forecloses on. Pivoting to another aspect of the limiting effects of higher education institutions, Cathy Kanoelani Ikeda writes of the praxis of Native Hawaiian epistemology at work as policy. In “Carving Out Inclusive Sanctuaries for Participation in Higher Education,” Ikeda analyzes how an indigenous form of “third space” can be deployed in a way that exposes colonizing assumptions about teaching and learning, and the very physical spaces of a university’s architecture in which those processes take place.

Hannah M. Tavares, in the third paper, “Public Scholars, Legitimation, and the ‘Subject of History’ Predicament,” takes on the interrelations between and among higher education scholars and academics, school practitioners, and community organizations, reflecting on her own work with a diasporic Filipino community in Hawai'i. In this way, Tavares comes to a reconceptualization of community that does not fit neatly into academic discourses, and one that challenges her own position of privilege as a researcher in educational foundations by reflecting upon just how transformational academic research and academic partnerships actually are in the lives of community members. In the fourth paper, “Pedagogical Possibilities of Becoming and the Transitional Space,” Amy N. Sojot explores the spaces – real, methodological, and reflexive – afforded by both the realization and deployment of Ellsworth’s (2005) “pedagogical hinge,” in which ordinary space becomes transitional through a momentary pivot when one “catches” oneself in particular epistemological moments and contexts. Sojot then investigates how these pivotal moments allow the self to engage in a form of becoming, rather than fixed being, and what the implications of that becoming are for considerations of pedagogy and where and how it can occur.

Questioning the conflation of the terms “school” and “education” in both everyday discourse as well as in academic language, I argue in the fifth paper, “Dangerous Liaisons: Metonymic Effects Between School and Education,” that these descriptors in fact operate upon one another in particular ways, and in ways that often foreclose on considering pedagogical alternatives. Using Nietzsche’s theorization of metaphor, I look at how the application of these terms as synonymous often hinders our ability to see the various processes at work in “education” outside of our assumptions about “school,” and I argue that a shift in our perspective can create new openings in terms of spaces and interpretations of what “education” can be and how it can be deployed to respond to the present neoliberal moment. In the sixth paper, “Neoliberalism, Education Policy and the Life of the Academic: A Poetics of Pedagogical Resistance,” Andrew Gibbons reads the first five papers in this special issue as exemplars of the failures of neoliberal modes of thought, and how neoliberalism is unable to articulate a response to expressions of knowledge, critique, indigeneity, and the individual. In developing this critical approach, Gibbons is able to reframe and reticulate the original purposes of this collection of papers, and situate them in the ongoing debate over spaces of pedagogy and the neoliberal present. By doing so, the dialogue among these papers not only attempts to provide a corrective to the call of the 2016 AERA meeting (and by extension academic research as defined by that, and subsequent, meetings), but to the engagements of academic spaces – and what is possible to develop within and against them – as well.