Marginalized knowledges are the intergenerational knowledges and skills from communities worldwide that hegemonic forces have pushed to the margins of society. These include facts, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, behaviors, and competencies. Marginalized knowledges are part of the human capital that materially poor rural and urban peoples have developed over time—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. These knowledges are situated and contextualized in a given time and locality, and have evolved to fulfill economic, social, environmental, spiritual, or cultural needs. School systems worldwide in the 19th and 20th centuries adopted an official, hegemonic curriculum that ignored and displaced these vital knowledges at a great loss to poor communities. Fortunately, different pedagogies exist today (e.g., pedagogy of place; funds of knowledge; civic service) that seek to bring these knowledges to the center of school life and provide a complementary, parallel role to that of the school’s official curriculum.
Article
Cleo Mees and Tom Murray
Visual and screen-based research practices have a long history in social-science, humanities, education, and creative-arts based disciplines as methods of qualitative research. While approaches may vary substantially across visual anthropology, sociology, history, media, or cultural studies, in each case visual research technologies, processes, and materials are employed to elicit knowledge that may elude purely textual discursive forms. As a growing body of visual and screen-based research has made previously-latent aspects of the world explicit, there has been a concomitant appreciation that visual practices are multisensory and must also be situated within a broader exploration of embodied knowledge and multisensory (beyond the visual) research practice. As audio-visual projects such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2013), Rithy Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003), and Margaret Loescher’s Cameras at the Addy (2003) all demonstrate, screen-based research practices are both modes of, and routes to, knowledge. These projects also demonstrate ways in which screen-based visual research may differ from research exclusively delivered in written form, most specifically in their capacity to document and audio-visually represent intersubjective, embodied, affective, and dynamic relationships between researchers and the subjects of their research. Increasingly, as a range of fields reveal that the incorporative body works as an integrated “perceptive field” as it processes sensory stimuli, visual and screen-based research practices will fulfil an important role in facilitating scholarly access to intuitive, affective, embodied, and analytical comprehension.
Article
Noah De Lissovoy and Alex J. Armonda
In neoliberalism, an emphasis on free markets and fiscal austerity, along with a hostility to the commons and the public, coincide with an insistence on the inevitability of capitalism. In education, neoliberalism is associated with the privatization and marketization of schools and districts at the macro level, and an alienation and fragmentation at the level of curriculum, in which knowledge and teaching are reduced to a mechanized sequence of discrete items and acts. As it erodes the relationship between teachers and their work in the name of efficiency, neoliberalism transforms schools into spaces of epistemological and ontological foreclosure. In this context, an approach to curriculum is necessary that is concerned not just with the common senses that education reinforces but also with the basic possibilities for being, knowing, and agency that it makes available. Thus, the deep imbrication of racism in neoliberalism (expressed in the discourse of color-blindness and in state violence) means that in order to imagine alternatives to the latter we need to understand and interrupt the logic of coloniality that has organized capitalism from its origin, and which is intensified in the neoliberal moment. Furthermore, as the ideological work of schooling increasingly inheres in the ubiquitous rituals themselves of neoliberal accountability’s culture of constant assessment and auditing, a liberatory commitment means staging a public curriculum of collective refusal. These broad emancipatory principles suggest that, in practical terms, teachers ought to move beyond private resistance at the classroom level—a form of subversion that leaves intact the material and institutional practices that secure neoliberal governmentality—and begin to participate in larger actions against privatization, standardized testing, and budget cuts. Likewise, at the level of knowledge production, curriculum for liberation should expose the white and Western technicist rationality that undergirds neoliberal education. Affirming epistemological diversity, liberatory curriculum should prioritize non-Western texts and standpoints; explore the links between politics, culture, and spirituality; and ask what it would look like for society as a whole to start from marginalized values and understandings.
Article
Teresa Cremin and Debra Myhill
In the field of writing in education two strong, even common-sense, views exist, drawing largely on everyday logic rather than evidenced justification: first, that to teach writing effectively teachers must be writers themselves and second, that professional writers, those who are writers themselves, have a valuable role to play in supporting young writers. But rarely have these views been brought together to explore what teachers can learn about being a writer from those who are writers. Nor are these perspectives unquestioned. The positioning of teachers as writers within and beyond the classroom has been the subject of intense academic and practitioner debate for decades. For years professional writers have visited schools to talk about their work and have run workshops and led residencies. However relatively few peer-reviewed studies exist into the value of their engagement in education, and those that do, in a manner similar to the studies examining teachers as writers, tend to rely upon self-reports without observational evidence to triangulate the perspectives offered. Furthermore, the evidence base with regard to the impact on student outcomes of teachers’ positioning themselves as writers in the classroom is scant. Nor is there a body of evidence documenting the impact of professional writers on student outcomes.Historically, these two foci - teachers as writers and professional writers in education - have been researched separately; in this article we draw them together.
Predominantly professional writers in education work directly with students as visiting artists, and have been positioned and positioned themselves as offering enrichment opportunities to students. They have not therefore been able to make a sustained impact on the teaching of writing. Moreover, while writers’ published texts are read, studied, and analyzed in school (as examples for young people to emulate), their compositional processes receive little attention, and the craft knowledge on which writers draw is rarely foregrounded. In addition, writing is often viewed as the most marginalized creative art, in part due to its inclusion within English, which itself has been sidelined in the arts debate.
Notwithstanding these challenges, research and development studies have begun to create new opportunities for collaboration, with teachers and professional writers sharing their expertise as pedagogues and as writers in order to support students’ development as creative writers. In such work the challenges, constraints, and consequences of students and teachers identifying themselves as writers in school has been evidenced. In addition, research has sought to document the practices of professional writers, analyzing for example their reading histories, composing practices, and craft knowledge in order to feedforward new insights into classroom practice. It is thus gradually becoming recognized that professional writers’ knowledge and understanding of the art and craft of writing deserves increased practitioner attention for their educative possibilities; they have the potential to support teachers’ understanding of being a writer and of how they teach writing. This in turn may impact upon students’ own identities as writers, their understanding of what it means to be a writer, and their attitudes to and outcomes in writing.
Article
Lisa Kervin and Barbara Comber
Teacher research is well established internationally. Teacher research serves an important role for teacher education, both as the object of academic study and as a practice within programs and the profession. Teacher research has the potential to build teacher knowledge for practice, in practice, and of practice. An understanding of the role of research in these different types of knowledge, enables a demonstration of both the richness of and potential for the education field. Research has an important role in both preservice and in-service education and the potential to bring about change personally, professionally, and politically.
Article
Charlene Tan and Connie S.L. Ng
In light of the broad, multidimensional, and contestable nature of constructivism, a central debate concerns the object of construction. What do we mean when we say that a learner is constructing something? Three general categories, with overlaps in between, are: the construction of meaning, the construction of knowledge, and the construction of knowledge claims. To construct meaning is to make sense of something by understanding both its parts and overall message. To construct knowledge is to obtain what philosophers traditionally call “justified true belief.” There are three conditions in this formulation of knowledge: belief, truth, and justification. Beliefs are intentional, meaningful, and representational, directing a person to attain truth and avoid error with respect to the very thing that person accepts. As for the notions of truth and justification, there are three major theories of truth, namely the correspondence theory, coherence theory, and pragmatic theory; and seven main types of justification, namely perception, reason, memory, testimony, faith, introspection, and intuition. Finally, to construct a knowledge claim is to indicate that one thinks that one knows something. The crucial difference between knowledge and a knowledge claim is that the latter has not acquired the status of knowledge. There are two main implications for teaching and learning that arise from an epistemological exploration of the concept of constructivism: First, educators need to be clear about what they want their students to construct, and how the latter should go about doing it. Informed by learner profiles and other contingent factors, educators should encourage their students to construct meanings, knowledge, and knowledge claims, individually and collaboratively, throughout their schooling years. Second, educators need to guard against some common misconceptions on constructivism in the schooling context. Constructivism, contrary to popular belief, is compatible with direct instruction, teacher guidance, structured learning, content learning, traditional assessment, and standardized testing. In sum, there are no pedagogical approaches and assessment modes that are necessarily constructivist or anticonstructivist. A variety of teaching methods, resources, and learning environments should therefore be employed to support students in their constructing process.
Article
Jodi Latremouille, Lesley Tait, and David W. Jardine
Images and practices of relations, aliveness, and love provide a way to reconcile knowledge and its schooled pursuit with the wisdom required in our current, ecologically desperate times. This desperation is rooted, in part, in threads of the efficiency movement that were inherited by education in the early 1900s and left schools with a curriculum legacy that has become exhausted and counterproductive. This inheritance can be countered with ideas from the traditions of hermeneutics and ecological thought. But they are also countered with life-affirming and life-sustaining Cree ideas: wahkohtowin, wicihitowin, and sakihitowin. Practicing these ideas can help align work inside and outside schools with the characteristic spirit (ethos) of our earthly being, and can provide the grounds for a pointed critique of, and alternative to, the regnant regimes of contemporary schooling. wahkohtowin means, briefly put, “all things are related/all things are our relations” and wicihitowin refers to “the life-giving energy that is generated when people face each other as relatives and build trusting relationships by connecting with others in respectful ways.” sakihitowin means “love.” Reimagining curriculum as constituted by living fields of relations while also considering not only the energeia, the “aliveness” that is generated in the face-to-face care of and learning the ways of such living fields, but also the deep affection that is both needed for and produced by such reimagining, increases the prospects of our ecological future and the future of the more-than-human world.
Article
Indigenous knowledges (IK) are complex, intact, resilient, and adaptable systems generated by and through diverse Indigenous peoples with long-term ties to place and land. Key challenges include ongoing perceptions of IK as primitive, isolated, and/or static knowledge, in spite of research that confirms Indigenous knowledges as [w]holistic, dynamic, and scientific. Enduring methodological questions include how to effectively Indigenize or shape Indigenous spaces in higher education for the benefit of Indigenous students. As surface descriptions of IK and Indigenous methodologies are insufficient for an authentic understanding, specific examples are included that illustrate how Alaska Native knowledges and methodologies are presented in higher education. Concluding sections include a brief case study of the University of Alaska system’s engagement of Indigenous knowledges and content; this section also considers issues of control and constraints of authentic integration of Alaska Native knowledges in a Western higher education system.
Article
Crain Soudien and Linda Chisholm
The key issue with which the South African debate around curriculum reform has been concerned, as has been the case in many countries around the world, is what should be at its core. There is agreement in this debate that the curriculum should deal with South Africa’s apartheid legacy of exclusion and that it should prepare young people for the complexity of living in a new modern world order. There is little agreement, however, about what counts as valuable knowledge for meeting these purposes. In the process, as the new curriculum has been developed and revised, multiple schools of thought have emerged. Two, however, have taken clear form: social realism and social constructivism. The former took issue with what they described as post-modern relativism in the new curriculum. The target of their critique was the lost opportunity to affirm the importance of what they called “powerful knowledge.” The new curriculum manifested a susceptibility, in its weak delineation of the boundaries of different disciplines, to the prominence of everyday knowledge. What children needed to learn was powerful knowledge that contained understandings of the deep grammars, restricted codes, and specialist areas of knowledge. In response, constructivists argued, through concepts such as “funds of knowledge,” that South African children inhabited a world of multiple knowledges and that it was important that they were able to valorize the legitimacy of these knowledges, including indigenous forms, in their formal learning experiences. The debate is ongoing and reaches into the heart of policymaking in South Africa.
Article
Children with disabilities have a variety of needs that require the expertise of several individuals. Multidisciplinary teams include professionals such as teachers, psychologists, social workers, physiotherapists, and resource teachers, who provide support services that help children with disabilities in inclusive educational environments. These teams often include social workers, but in India the role of the social worker is often overlooked and social workers have to struggle to prove their value. Historically, very few social worker education programs have offered specializations or training in inclusive education, and most social workers who worked with children with disabilities in inclusive settings learn the requisite knowledge, attitudes, and skills on the job. Many used the traditional model of social work rehabilitation, which focuses on the individual without relating to social and environmental contexts. The Center for Disability Studies and Action at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, designed a full-time master’s program in Social Work in Disability Studies and Action, which trains social work professionals to work holistically with people with disabilities, including children with disabilities in inclusive educational settings. The master’s program combines the professional skills and knowledge components for social workers with the core values of inclusive education.
Article
Theodore Savich, Evan Marquise Taylor, and Craig Willey
Where does one enact boundaries for what can be known systematically? Is mathematics one branch of knowledge, separate from, say, social justice or chemistry, or is it possible to understand mathematics, justice, and the physical sciences within one system of knowing? Early Habermas provides a typology of human interests that constitute different knowledge types, beginning with the empirical or analytic, traversing the hermeneutic or historical, and terminating with critical or emancipatory knowledge. Brandom’s reconstruction of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit describes three responsibilities that are the norms for systematicity as well as an “algebra of normativity,” which is a “mathematical” way of understanding recognitive communities. The stories that those recognitive communities tell and retell are curricula. Although Habermas is primarily understood as a sociologist, critical or emancipatory knowledge is very much about the unity of being and knowing that occurs within individuals as they act intentionally in the world, reflect on those actions, and become more through the process of self-actualization. This notion of criticality is more or less absent from mathematics education discourses but is a powerful organizing thread from Kant through Hegel, to Habermas. Instead, most mathematics educators are concerned with critical theory as it pertains to social critique, centering social justice through critical race theory, critical disabilities studies and other critical theories. The tension between understanding emancipation at the level of individuals compared with political emancipation of marginalized groups enforces an ambiguity about who is being emancipated, what they are being emancipated from, and what role mathematics plays as either liberating or oppressive. Moreover, this tension is related to deep epistemological questions about how people come to know and repeat anything at all.
Article
Angus Macfarlane, Sonja Macfarlane, and Toby Curtis
In the context of Māori and Indigenous ways of knowing, a recurring theme in professional educative discourse is the notion that it would be advantageous for educators and researchers to attain enhanced understandings of Māori worldviews, Maōri histories, Maōri experiences of struggle, Māori lived realities—and of the nascent, yet optimistic, contentions by Māori about their roles in theoretical developments and educational jurisdictions. How might adopting a power-sharing partnership approach within these parameters strengthen research endeavors? How might such an approach be mutually beneficial? How might it be monitored? These and other questions continue to be posed by Māori. What is consistently being recommended by Māori is the need for researchers to broaden and deepen their awareness and respect for knowledge that flows from different, yet potentially complementary, streams—in this case, the Māori and Western knowledge streams. Progress is happening, but it is not embedded within the culture or research that is with, about and for Māori. We argue that it is now timely for social scientists, cultural critics, political analysis, research funders, and academics to move from commentary to commitment.
In this article, the authors propose that by exploring Māori philosophies and developing a deeper and more meaningful understanding of theoretical models that can potentially enhance and deepen cultural awareness, both Māori and non-Māori researchers can be assisted and supported, in their respective fields, to achieve more culturally robust, inclusive, and sustainable research findings. Such models provide frameworks—in essence, an adaptable set of options—for research operations that acknowledge voices, histories, and contributions and thereby support both cultural enhancement and culturally safe research practice.
Article
Danilo Romeu Streck and Telmo Adams
Since the second half of the 20th century, research practices in social science and the humanities in Latin America and the Caribbean have been developed alongside criticisms of positivist methodologies. Some of the main interventions are reviewed by scholars such as Orlando Fals Borda, João Bosco Guedes Pinto, Michel Thiollent, Paulo Freire, Carlos Rodrigues Brandão, and Oscar Jara. Participation is central to all of these, but each contain nuances that must be identified, explained, and analyzed. Furthermore, these interventions relate to the field of popular education or, more broadly, to practices associated with critical educational proposals.
Article
Maropeng Modiba and Sandra Stewart
Postcolonial ethnographic studies in Africa and, specifically, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region tend to demonstrate varying sensitivity to local knowledge systems and culture. Ethnographers, both local and international, differ in the ways in which they engage with these aspects. Studies expose shifts, or lack thereof, in the mindsets of researchers. In general, researchers take for granted their cultural ideals and how to embrace broader responsibilities beyond the education or development initiatives they are studying. Although rhetorically supportive of the education/development of the subaltern, some studies selected and reviewed in this article indicate the researchers’ missionary dispositions and reliance on preconceived notions in making sense of the behavior and environments studied. To varying degrees fragmentations in perceptions, anthropological empathy, reluctance to acknowledge African contexts and ways of living as adequate in themselves stand out rather than deliberate efforts to preserve the internal cultures and knowledge systems of the communities and expand their knowledge and skills in sustainable ways.
Article
Nancy Lesko, Jacqueline Simmons, and Jamie Uva
Adolescence has been defined as a unique stage of development, and youth are marked and understood by their differences from adults and children. This perceived border between youth and adults also influences curriculum development, since knowledge for youth is often determined by their current developmental stage and/or what they need to know and be able to do when they are adults. Thus, curricular knowledge often participates in keeping youth “less than” adults. When we start with a conception of youth that emphasizes their competence or power, curricular options open. If we recognize that youth can take on political organizing or use social media in more sophisticated ways than adults, schools’ tight management of youth appears overzealous and miseducative. To rethink conceptions of youth, educators must confront the power differentials built into and maintained by school curricular knowledge.
Article
Esther Sayers
Artists who teach or teachers who make art? To explore the identity of the artist-teacher in contemporary educational contexts, the ethical differences between the two fields of art and learning need to be considered. Equity is sought between the needs of the learner and the demands of an artist’s practice; a tension exists here because the nurture of the learner and the challenge of art can be in conflict. The dual role of artist and of teacher have to be continually navigated in order to maintain the composite and ever-changing identity of the artist-teacher. The answer to the question of how to teach art comes through investigating attitudes to knowledge in terms of the hermeneutical discourses of “reproduction” and “production” as a means to understand developments in pedagogy for art education since the Renaissance. An understanding of the specific epistemological discourses that must be navigated by artist-teachers when they develop strategies for learning explicate the role of art practices in considering the question: What to teach? The answer lies in debates around technical skills and the capacity for critical thought.
Article
Deepak Kumar
Education was always given a place of pride in Indian civilization and culture. It was the process through which different kinds of knowledge were acquired and disseminated. Its significance was always recognized, but its structures varied according to time and place. Ancient Indian texts and mythologies are full of references to erudite gurus and their gurukulas (hermitages), wherein both the poor and the princes studied. Post Buddha, the viharas and the mahaviras were also centers of learning. Examples are the learning centers at Taxila, Nalanda, and Vikramshila. Interactions with Islamic culture brought maktabs and madrasas, and these were not very different from the previous learning centers. They all emphasized the significance of knowledge and conceived it in terms of temporal and spiritual (this worldly and otherworldly, i.e., para-apara, laukik-alaukik, maqul-manqul, ilm-i-duniya, and ilm-i-adyan). This was true of Europe as well. The great shift comes with the Renaissance and the Reformation, and these heralded some kind of an age of reason and modernity leading to the scientific and industrial revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. India was not aloof to these changes but could not keep pace with them. Education here suffered severe limitations in terms of caste, creed, theology, and so on. The result was India’s gradual colonization.
Big changes in both knowledge production and generation came riding the wave of colonization. Here it is important to note that under the East India Company, perhaps for the first time in Indian history, the state emerged as the producer of knowledge and the sole arbiter of what was to be delivered and to whom. The Company’s education policies in India had become more interventionist. The downward filtration policy, which was chosen as the course to transform Indian society, started neglecting the vernacular schools, thereby neglecting popular education, and it was the entry of the Christian missionaries, from the second decade of the 19th century onward, together with the activities of native educational societies that promoted popular education through new contents and methods of education. The beginning of the 20th century brought new hopes for middle-class Indians. Their “vision” of a new India, as evident in the writings in periodicals, pamphlets, and other contemporary publications, included the growth of technical and medical education, scientific research, and agricultural experiments, as well as the institutional dissemination of knowledge, among others. Although this vision was unitary, in a broad “national” sense it was discursive, with controversies and differences of opinions shadowing “national” goals in education and at times stunting its clear growth.
Article
Reese Butterfuss, Jasmine Kim, and Panayiota Kendeou
Reading comprehension requires the construction of a coherent mental representation of the information in a text. Reading involves three interrelated elements—the reader, the text, and the activity, all situated into a broader sociocultural context. The complexity inherent in reading comprehension has given rise to a multitude of influential models and frameworks that attempt to account for the various processes that give rise to reading comprehension: for example, activation of prior knowledge and integration of incoming information with currently active memory contents. Other models and frameworks attempt to account for the components that constitute reading comprehension, such as decoding, vocabulary, and language comprehension.
Many of the most prominent models of reading comprehension describe single readers engaging with single texts. Several recent models attempt to account for the additional complexity of comprehending multiple texts. Along with engaging in comprehension of multiple texts comes the need to contend with multiple information sources (i.e., sourcing). As such, researchers have developed models and frameworks to capture the processes learners engage in when the need to engage in sourcing arises, such as when readers encounter conflicting information.
Much theorizing in the reading comprehension literature has implicated typical readers, which suggests that many models and frameworks may not represent all readers across various skill levels. Existing research has identified several sources of individual differences in reading comprehension that in part determine the success of comprehension processes. Such individual differences include working memory, executive functions, vocabulary, inferencing, and prior knowledge. Prior knowledge is particularly important because of its power to both facilitate and interfere with comprehension processes. As such, the need to overcome the disruptive influence of incorrect prior knowledge (i.e., knowledge revision) becomes especially important when readers encounter information that conflicts with that prior knowledge.
Article
Maria Teresa Tatto
Beliefs defined as the cognitive basis for the articulation of values and behaviors that mediate teaching practice can serve as powerful indicators of teacher education influence on current and prospective teachers’ thinking. Notwithstanding the importance of this construct, the field seems to lack across the board agreement concerning the kinds of beliefs that are essential for effective teaching, and whether and how opportunities to learn and other experiences have the potential to influence beliefs and knowledge in ways that may equip teachers to interpret, frame and guide action, and to fruitfully engage all pupils with powerful learning experiences. Large-scale international comparative studies provide the opportunity to develop shared definitions that facilitate the exploration of these questions within and across nations.
Article
Lucia Mason
Individuals of all ages have misconceptions about phenomena of the natural and physical world. They may think, for example, that summer is hotter because the Earth is closer to the Sun, and it is colder in winter because the Earth is farther away from the Sun. This explanation is not compatible with the scientific explanation of the phenomenon. Scientific learning often implies the revision of naïve conceptions, or conceptual change, which is not a quick and easy process. Researchers have addressed the question of the nature of conceptual change in terms of what the acquisition of new science knowledge entails when students hold misconceptions and need to revise their mental representations. Various approaches have been proposed to account for the mechanisms that underlie conceptual change and to draw implications for teaching and learning processes.
For some decades conceptual change was only examined from a purely cognitive perspective (“cold” conceptual change), while more recently motivational and emotional aspects (“warm” conceptual change) have received attention. Research findings indicate that individual differences in misconceived prior knowledge, along with differences in achievement goals, self-efficacy, interest, and epistemic beliefs, as well as differences in the emotions experienced in learning contexts, are all associated with conceptual change. More recently, research has challenged the idea that misconceptions disappear permanently after conceptual change has taken place. Previously acquired, incorrect information still competes with the newly acquired correct information. The executive function of inhibition seems to be involved when naïve and scientific conceptions co-exist in the learner’s memory and the latter is used to produce a correct answer. Further research is needed on the role of inhibitory control in relation to learning concepts and affective states during scientific learning.
