The enstranged self: recovering some grounds for pluralism in education

Abstract

For something approaching 50 years, multicultural education has been accepted as an educational, social and moral good by liberal educators. Its instantiation in the practices of education has, in various ways, largely depended on a series of strategies for making the other (the stranger) familiar within the majority culture. This essay suggests that such a cultural and pedagogical focus on the other may be a mistake. Drawing on literary cultures that span both time and space it demonstrates how a more original, radical and effective pedagogy of pluralism and multiculturalism might be grounded on a very different set of ideas about the self than those that have come to dominate education over the last 50 years. The first section argues for the re-habilitation of the notion of enstrangement, which has, since the early part of the nineteenth century, been displaced by the much more aggressive and alienating (Marxian and post-Marxian) notion of estrangement. This forms the ground for re-thinking our relationship to the self and the other and thus to the other and the world. The second section looks specifically at how we are enstranged onto-psychologically, epistemically and culturally and the implications of these forms of enstrangement for education. The third part concentrates on how a pedagogy of enstrangement can constructively open up new possibilities in, and for, multicultural education as a moral endeavour.

Failures of meaning in religious education

“…The Baudrillardian model of language, interpreted in the light of Conroy's (2009),work on liminality and enstrangement, suggests there is a need for managed discomfort if religious education is to be emotionally transformative and restore its primary role as a site for meaning making. Religious language must escape the mundane, that 'circuit of "liberated" words, gratuitously useable, circulating as exchange value' (Baudrillard 1993, 203), resisting simplifications or totally alienated significations.…”

The Givenness of the Human Learning Experience and Its Incompatibility with Information Analytics

“…It is not the alterity of the other which determines this inner realm, as though the data of self-knowledge were marked by meta-data which stated 'inner voice', while the data of interpersonal communication carry 'someone else's voice' metadata. Rather, the recognition of incompleteness is a constitutive function of individual subjectivity (Conroy, 2009) and the subject is the locus and ground of meaning.…”

Beginning teacher agency in the enactment of fundamental British values: a multi-method case study

“…While boundary practices (Waitoller & Kozleski, 2013;Tsui & Law, 2007) recognise the discontinuities of settings, the case of teacher preparation for values education also requires a recognition of the discontinuities internal to professional identities (Leitch & Conroy, 2014). Fractures and fissures are refracted within one another, down to the level of the individual being made strange from within (Conroy, 2009). These are challenges which the authors are aware of from a range of professional perspectives, coming from academic roles which themselves straddle boundaries: between teacher education and academic studies in education in the case of the lead author, and between university based teacher education and third sector work in global citizenship education in the case of two others.…”