Student Teachers’ Storytelling: Countering Neoliberalism in Education

Challenging the way critical thinking is often considered a skill, this article explores possible discursive reasons for the skill-orientation and technicization of this concept. First, using Michel Foucault’s ‘division and rejection’ theory as a discursive analytical lens, the discussion explores the neoliberal alliance of international organizations, national governmental authorities, the media, job markets, schools, and concerned parents. It explores how this alliance promotes the discourse of skill and competence, and prepares the ground for critical thinking’s technicization. Drawing further on Foucault’s decoding of human capital as the essence of neoliberalism, the article explores the way that the technicization of critical thinking fits with a conception of human beings as a complex mix of production and consumption, where, as homo economicus, they become entrepreneurs of themselves. Second, in the light of Foucault’s discursive analytical conception of the will to truth, the article traces a possible historical underpinning of critical thinking’s technicization. It argues that power-knowledge, the dark side of Enlightenment technological rationality, creates an increasingly technical conception of the world that tampers with the criticality of critical thinking. If critical thinking does not render people aware of the power impinging on them, it loses its value and meaning. The article proposes that critical thinking should rather be conceived along the lines of a Foucauldian conception of critique: the art of not being governed, which takes inspiration from Kant’s conception of enlightenment. It explores how to practise Foucauldian critical thinking, how Foucault’s technology of the self can be enacted as the protector of subjectivity against the governmentality of power.

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Sea Queens

Geer

Brown

2023

Promoting Inclusive Education Through the Integration of LGBTIQ+ Issues in the Classroom

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Narratives, as one of the oldest cultural and didactic traditions known to humankind, trace back across numerous civilizations, societies, and histories. At educational institutions, narratives are interdisciplinary and allow for an interactive, cross-competence study of school subjects. However, direct instruction-based methodologies tend to limit student interaction with narrative-based learning. In response to this problem, Turkish professors Gurses, Dogar, and Gunes established a direct constructivist learning model that changed two-dimensional direct instruction to a three-dimensional model. In this chapter, the authors contend that a direct model is insufficient to create LGBTIQ+ inclusiveness; so, they propose an indirect interaction model for narratives in multidisciplinary fields by making use of the figure of an avatar as developed in game studies. They then offer several practical applications of the indirect-interaction-based model to inclusive narratives, and they conclude by emphasizing the game-like nature of a narrative-based inclusive classroom design.

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Student Teachers’ Storytelling: Countering Neoliberalism in Education

Cited by 3 publications

References 23 publications

On the effects of Erasmus+ KA 1 mobilities for continuing professional development in teachers’ biographies: A qualitative research approach with teachers in Portugal

On the effects of Erasmus+ KA 1 mobilities for continuing professional development in teachers’ biographies: A qualitative research approach with teachers in Portugal

Foucauldian critical thinking: An antithesis to technicization

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