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

Brown, Tony; Devine, Nesta; Leslie, Elsie; Paiti, Margaret; Sila'ila'i, Emilie; Umaki, S.; Williams, Jay C.

doi:10.1080/14681360601162345

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…The "inquiry" methods associated with constructivist reform, characterised by greater learner and teacher autonomy, would be less acceptable in many Eastern or Pacific cultures where curricula, teacher/student roles and the collective good are defined differently (e.g. Brown et al, 2006). Further, the alleged autonomy understood within the "reform" agenda conflicts with the reality teachers have come to accept in some countries, assessed as they are through legislative documentation and recognised through the filter of their compliance with this.…”

Section: Conceptions Of Policy Led Curriculum Changementioning

confidence: 99%

The Political Shaping of Teacher Education in the STEM Areas

Brown¹

2017

The SAGE Handbook of Research on Teacher Education

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league tables, which are supposedly indicative of wider economic competitiveness. They have been seduced by the appeal of raising standards in a statistically defined world. What had been introduced to measure school performance, however, now defines what it is and polices its boundaries. That is, such comparisons have transformed the content of what they compare and the demands on the teachers preparing to meet these newly defined challenges. A possible consequence of this has been an overly restrictive understanding of mathematics and science through being referenced to their socioeconomic potential. But whilst these subjects have become a priority across nations through research funding and the like, growth in these subjects is hampered by a shortage of people qualifying either because of perceived or actual difficulty, or because of their lack of popularity for other reasons. Yet policy responses to these economic priorities and actual teacher supply have been conceptualised in diverse ways across different countries. This chapter examines some examples of policy initiatives consequential to this recasting of mathematics and science. It firstly explores the impact on teacher education in these areas with reference to two very different state-led responses to changing teacher preparation. In some countries teacher education increasingly comprises a vocational employment-based model of training located primarily in schools. England is a prominent example, with similar models being introduced in New Zealand and the United States. This approach is in sharp contrast to models followed in continental Europe subject to the Bologna Process, where student teachers spend much more time in university (e.g. five years in Finland where a masters' degree is required). These two approaches reveal radically different conceptions of how teacher quality might be improved in the name of international competitiveness. In the first, teacher education has been wrested from its traditional home within the academy where universities play a support role to what has become "school-led" training where government funds for teacher education have been diverted to schools. Teacher professional identity has been referenced to skill development within this frame and the wider assessment culture. The second model, meanwhile, is similarly concerned

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Section: Conceptions Of Policy Led Curriculum Changementioning

confidence: 99%

The Political Shaping of Teacher Education in the STEM Areas

Brown¹

2017

The SAGE Handbook of Research on Teacher Education

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“…For example, a few researchers sympathetic to constructivism noted resistance in some quarters, such as "veteran" or "traditional" teachers who were unable to shift so fundamentally in terms of their beliefs in what it is to be a teacher (Cohen, 1990;Lloyd, 1999;Wilson & Goldenberg, 1998). The inquiry methods would also have been less acceptable in many Eastern or Pacific cultures, where curricula, teacher/student roles and the collective good are defined differently (Brown, Devine, Leslie, Paiti, Sila'ila'i, Umaki & Williams, 2007). Further, the alleged autonomy understood within the "reform" agenda conflicts with the reality teachers have come to accept in many countries, assessed as they are through legislative documentation and recognized through the filter of their compliance with this.…”

Section: "Reform" As a Context For Mathematics Education Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutional Contexts for Research in Mathematics Education

Brown

Clarke

2012

Third International Handbook of Mathematics Education

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Mathematics has maintained an enduring image as a field of knowledge lending its resources to many intellectual pursuits and utilitarian enterprises. School mathematics, however, has increasingly learned to respond to a commonly conceived purpose of supplying the world's workforce with the resources needed to support economic wellbeing. The emergent regulation in support of this response has in some instances tempered more humanistic or idealistic conceptions of why we want to study mathematics. What had been introduced to measure school mathematics now defines and polices its boundaries. It has also privileged Western concerns in setting internationalized agenda. Mathematics, mathematics education and mathematics education research, this chapter suggests, are each conceptualized according to their location, reflecting and shaping each other, yet with each being governed by slightly different priorities. It is argued that schooling is increasingly shaped and judged by its perceived capacity to deliver success in terms of international competitiveness linked to economic agenda. This results in school mathematics being shaped to meet assessment requirements. The chapter shows how research increasingly finds its terms of reference set according to measuring delivery in these terms. It also shows how researchers become complicit in promoting particular conceptions of teaching and in constructing the field as an ideological battleground. Such complicity, it is suggested, combined with the relative insularity of the field, prevents us from occupying other worlds that might define us and serve us in different ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the prospects of research in mathematics education and the extent to which this activity is enabled or restricted by existing institutional contexts in reshaping its ambitions to engage with the diversity of future needs.

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“…The authors in a book edited by Sharon Todd (1997) have discussed the place of desire and fantasy in teaching and learning. Other authors exploring this territory include Brown, Hardy, and Brown / Desire and Drive in Researcher Subjectivity 407 Wilson (1993), Appel (1996), Jagodzinski (2001), Pitt (1998), England and Brown (2001), Atkinson (2002Atkinson ( , 2004, England (2004, 2005), Brown et al (2006), andBrown et al (2007).…”

Section: The Psychoanalysis Of Freud and Lacanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Desire and Drive in Researcher Subjectivity: The Broken Mirror of Lacan

Brown

2008

Qualitative Inquiry

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This article offers an account of how a researcher's subjectivity might be seen as being stitched into the fabric of practitioner research. It uses Lacan's notion of the mirror phase in suggesting that the subject of reflection is not quite what he or she might seem to be. The Freudian concept of desire is considered in relation to the motivations that reflective research models produce. This is contrasted with his concept of drive read against a research attitude where excessive belief in the linguistic forms of such research risks usurping the life one might seek to locate. The article draws on a contemporary reading of the terms as offered by the Lacanian social commentator Slavoj Ž ižek. Two examples are provided of teachers carrying out practitioner research for higher degrees. These document the awkwardness the teachers experience in building conceptions of self through reflective work as personal ideas are processed in social space.T his article seeks to better understand how practitioner research affects researchers' sense of who they are and the world in which they operate. It considers how the stories such researchers tell contribute to an evolving sense of self but a self implicated in alternative understandings of social worlds. The article commences by briefly reviewing the status of the individual in successive understandings of practitioner research. It suggests that the selfaware individual of Gadamerian hermeneutics as present in early versions of action research (e.g., Elliott, 1991) has been usurped by an individual rather less sure of his or her personal and social boundaries. A specific theme to be pursued relates to how individuals craft personal experience through socially generated discourses. It is suggested that the researcher's subjectivity is a function of this crafting. Yet this process cannot have clear outcomes, as a strict separation between the individual and the external world can never be achieved within the discursive terrain of practitioner research.

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

Cited by 12 publications

References 26 publications

The Political Shaping of Teacher Education in the STEM Areas

The Political Shaping of Teacher Education in the STEM Areas

Institutional Contexts for Research in Mathematics Education

Desire and Drive in Researcher Subjectivity: The Broken Mirror of Lacan

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