Call for Papers

December 2011 English Teaching

http://edlinked.soe.waikato.ac.nz/research/journal/view.php?id=63&p=1%3Cscrip

English Teaching: practice and critique, Volume 11, Number 1 (May 2012):

Focus: Research methodologies as framing the study of English/literacy teaching and learning

Abstracts should be sent to the editors before December 1, 2011 and full articles by March 1, 2012 at the very latest to ensure an effective review process. 

March   2012: 1-4 Mar

ESREA Life History and Biography Conference Expanding connections: Learning, the body and the environment; Perspectives from life history and auto/biographical narrative research

Venue: University of Southern Denmark, Institute of Philosophy, Education and the Study of Religions

Conference URL: http://www.esrea.org/conferences_and_seminars?l=en

Organisers: European Society for Research on the Education of Adults Address: Marianne Horsdal, University of Southern Denmark URL: http://www.esrea.org/?l=en  Enquiries: horsdal@ifpr.sdu.dk

Notes: ESREA will be offering 3 bursaries (300 Euro each) for doctoral students. All abstracts for paper or other suggested presentations must be submitted by Monday 7th November2011; Final versions of papers (no more than 5000 words including references) must be submitted by Monday 6th February 2012

Themes: Adult learning; Embodied learning

April   2012: 2-4 Apr

Discourse-Power-Resistance 12 Conference

Venue: Plymouth College of Art, Tavistock Place, Plymouth PL4 8AT 

Conference URL: http://www.dprconference.com/home; Organisers: Jerome Satterthwaite; Enquiries: enquiries@dprconference.com

Notes: Further details of speakers, abstract and events will be added to website in the near future

Themes: Social sciences, arts, humanities, education and the creative arts are under attack; Poetics: Practice as Learning, Learning in Practice; Research, learning, teaching: impact; Sustainable impact

April   2012: 24-25 Apr

Discourses of Inclusion in Neo-Liberal Higher Education Venue: Milton Keynes

Conference URL: http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/research/conference-2012

Organisers: Centre for Inclusion and Curriculum, Open University Address: Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA URL: http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/

Themes: Widening Participation and Access, Lifelong Learning, Equity, Equality and Diversity

SCUTREA CONFERENCE 2012 (Leicester, 3rd – 5^th July 2012)

Call for Papers: Theme: Adult Education and Well-Being

 It’s usually assumed that learning throughout adult life is ‘good for you’. Whether undertaken in leisure time for intellectual stimulus or for social reasons, or within or beyond a job for skills acquisition and career development, the learner is clear that there will be personal benefits. But what is the evidence for all of this? Much work has been undertaken in recent years on the theme of ‘well-being’. But how is that research to be critiqued? How is well-being to be measured? How does well-being relate to ‘happiness’, to ‘personal’ or ‘spiritual’ development, or to ‘social capital’? To what extent is ‘well-being’ to do with the cultivation of an ‘inner life’, with a sense of social well-being, or with the fact of gaining confidence and skills to get a (better) job? What happens to patterns of learning when communities decline and decay? How is learning part of re-generation? How are all of these addressed at a time when distance and on-line learning is on the increase? What other concepts come into play? What understandings of ‘self’ are at work? Can on-line learning facilitate personal and social development as much as face-to-face study? How, if at all, are aspects of personal development assessed in adult education today? In an age of attention to skills and competencies, to what extent do professional studies programmes attend to personal development issues? What has the requirement for formal academic validation of programmes across professions affected the personal developmental aspects of learning? How do recent economic and political factors and decisions impinge upon all these areas?

rhizome

SPARKES, A. C. 2007. Embodiment, academics, and the audit culture: a story seeking consideration. Qualitative Research, 7, 521.

why: #embodiment

because          this locates and bounds social life; it establishes the requirement to be rigorous in determining the nature of dis/connections: within and between material objects

social life happens within and between bodies – ideas, experiences, metaphors, transformations, sedimentations, echoes and shards of meanings happen within, to, between and surrounding bodies

it is part of an explorations of the socio-material – that bodies are part of the world, part of a social / material continuum

bodies have a racial and a gendered identity – this may not be explicitly brought into the discussion, but they are always and already there – lurking (invisibilised or ignored)

bodies refuse Cartesian dualities – the mind is in / part of the body; knowing can be articulated through the senses: the physicality of ideas

Sparkes (2007) narrates a story about REF that offers no analysis, a story and a series of reactions: with embodiment we notice the physicality  – that attends anger, fear & disappointment

it seems I have chanced upon a sensorial turn in anthropology – one in which ‘Doing Sensory Ethnography investigates the possibilities afforded by attending to the senses in ethnographic research and representation. An acknowledgement that sensoriality is fundamental to how we learn about, understand and represent other people’s lives is increasingly central to academic and applied practice in the social sciences and humanities.’

 “ethnography is a process of creating and representing knowledge (about society, culture and individuals) that is based on ethnographers’ own experiences.”

PINK, S. 2009. Rethinking ethnography through the senses. Doing sensory ethnography. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

it locates literacy within other semiotic means of communication, such as visual and gestural ‘modes’, thereby focussing on ‘multi modality’ or on ‘multi literacies’ rather than on just ‘literacy’ which they see as  less central to the communicative needs of a globalising world (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001; Cope and Kalanztis, 2000).

I have elsewhere made a distinction between ‘quality-as-embodied’ and ‘quality-as-an abstraction’ and now wish to explore this further.

The distinction I made was between a notion of quality that had significant material representation – websites, spiral bound booklets, policy papers but seemed to have no direct lived dimension. This was in contrast to the experiences of practitioners that had clearly articulated and embodied dimensions beyond a written or policy sanctioned frame located within professional motivations and aspirations

un/reconciled literacies: how to teachers conceptualise adult language and literacy as a pedagogic subject

This paper explores how teachers encounter and conceptualise different ideas of literacy. The first initial explorations of literacy - based on a series of text which invited them to answer the direct question: what does it mean to be literate - demonstrated a series of understandably common sense perceptions.

Common sense perceptions that have a highly developed policy infrastructure to support them. Other notions of literacy have been introduced and there is a strong awareness in the group that these are of some significance.

The group are well qualified and experienced - mainly post-graduates (one doctoral student) who are confident and competent scholars able to engage with the ideas.

These ideas are an enormous challenge; they have the potential to fundamentally undermine institutionally sanctioned (required) approaches to teaching literacy.  The first lecture in which I offered sociocultural perspectives as an alternative to skills was met with varied responses.

One student liked the idea - he works with students on a one-to-one basis and could immediately see how this implied approach might translate into practice.

Another students expressed concern about the impossibility of the implied approach. I am interested in this and suspect that the line of thought is something t do with situation. The significance of a socio-cultural view of literacy is not directly related to its pedagogic implications. In other words, there is a sense in which what is pedagogically convenient does not determine ontology, the ontology of literacy as a lived, embodied practice. But the relation between these dimensions - literacy ontology and literacy conceptions might well be influenced by the situation ie policy sanctioned views on literacy and a training course in how best to implement them.

Do I teach a subject or deliver a curriculum?

I think here I may be echoing debates about teacher education or teacher training. Do I teach a subject or deliver a curriculum? This is a rhetorical question. But it neatly captures a very real tension that I explore along with my trainees.

The paper seeks to extend, develop and further explore tensions tentatively suggested in my doctoral thesis: a tension between quality as abstract (textualisation) and quality as embodied.

As a intuitive writer - I chose to use the concept embodied rather than practice. As this offers the potential to recognise race and gender as dimensions of professional experience. But also seemed to enable a grasping of what might so far have been unarticulated experiences, implied, inferred, captured in passing through narrative.

A practice is a mediated action with a history
Scollon 2001: 66

Quality as embodied rather than as practised.  There is no mediated action in the embodiment of quality. It suggests a series of moments rather than an extended and clearly articulated approach. In embodiment is contained the notion of tension between competing discourses, compromise, contradiction and negotiated settlement.

Scollan, R. (2001) Mediated Discourses: the Nexus of Practice. London: Routledge cited by Baynham and Prinsloo (2009) the future of literacy studies, Palgrave