Adventures in cultural learning

Abstract

Surprising celebratory spectacles An inspiring interview with Jennifer Miller, conducted by Tessa Overbeek, about Circus Amok, a New York City-based circus-theatre company which Miller founded in 1989, provides a very good insight into what we would like to call a contemporary adventure in cultural learning. 1 The playwright, director, juggler, dancer, stilt walker, fire eater, and teacher of performance courses at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, as Overbeek describes Miller, wanted to provide free public art while simultaneously creating a local public platform, tailored to the city, to address contemporary needs and urgent sociocultural issues-public housing, urban planning, immigration, unequal rights for minorities, police violence, public health care, and education policies. Overbeek describes accurately how acrobatic performance fuses with politically engaged debate on the stage: Like traditional circus shows, Circus Amok's performances are made up of separate numbers, which can include anything from dancing on stilts to acrobatics, but also juggling and clowning, sometimes combined with text, something rarely heard in the circus. Both clubs and statements about topics such as racial profiling or radical feminism may fly back and forth between jugglers. 2 From 1994 onwards Circus Amok started touring the city and temporarily occupying public spaces, such as parks, playgrounds, squares, and streets. In doing so, and because their shows are freely accessible, they managed to be inclusive and to reach out to varied audiences. Moreover, the format of a circus show seemed to work, as Miller describes further in the interview: Circus works incredibly well with issues of social justice. It's a popular form in the old-school-sense, and it is a celebratory form. It is enticing, it is available, it has a blasting band, it is joyful and it is free. The fact that it is celebratory is a particular nugget, because people don't often combine a sense of celebration with a sense of concern in the way that Amok does. 3

Tracking the Educationalization of the World: Prospects for an emancipated history of education

“…Provided they take a de-moralized, culturally and nationally emancipated, and comparative stance, histories may, of course, take diff erent approaches: as discourse analyses, as (new) cultural history, as gender history, as post-colonial history, as visuality, or as (new) materiality in history (Dussel, 2012;Polenghi & Bandini, 2016;Priem & te Heesen, 2016;Herman & Roberts, 2017;McLeod, in press). In many senses, these approaches are brought together in new curriculum history (Popkewitz, Franklin, & Pereyra, 2001;Baker, 2009;Depaepe, 2012;Popkewitz, 2015;Lesko, in press), with the curriculum understood as a culturally pre-defi ned melting pot between dominant social and moral ideals and institutions, confi guring in each case particular educational practices and materialities (Tröhler, 2016b) that all deserve to be examined historically and to be told.…”

Radical Conservatism and International Nationalism: The Peasant Arts Movement and Its Search for the Country Heart of England

“…The Kings and the Blounts owned craft workshops, and there were other craftspeople who were inspired to move to the area, but above all, the PAM was an attempt to foster 'cultural learning', which is the acquiring of skills and knowledge 'in a cultural context, or to a cultural end'. 1 This cultural learning was directed towards the preservation of the 'country heart' in the race, namely the 'love of Earth', which was demonstrated by 'fruitful uses' and by the traditional crafts that were 'essential to normal life'. 2 In other words, the movement promoted traditional rural life where country people could survive by providing for all their needs themselves.…”