Educational Counter-Cultures: Confrontations, Images, Vision

This book is a song of resistance. Drawing on rich cross-cultural perspectives from Pakistan, Israel, Canada, the US and the UK, the authors challenge readers to envision new ways of thinking for education: ways which draw on imagination, the arts and the collective experience of subjugated cultures and ways of knowing.

Michael Apple opens with a critique of the new hegemonic blocks he identifies in US education policy, deconstructing the political and rhetorical moves that effectively maintain the notion of educating in the ‘right’ way. Mike Cole and Terry Wrigley each examine and rethink what they see as discourses of despair embedded in the opposing paradigms of postmodernism and the School Effectiveness and School Improvement movements. Elizabeth Atkinson and Richard Bond deconstruct two forms of silencing: the silencing of sexualities within educational practice and the silencing of indigenous voices within Canadian Higher Education. Farid Panjwani and Halleli Pinson explore the contested discourses of power and control in religious education in Pakistan and citizenship education in Israel.

Jean McNiff and Revital Heimann also focus on Israel, as the context for a reconceptualisation of peace education based on a real recognition of the fractured nature of human relations. Jerome Satterthwaite invites us to see contemporary educational practices through the eyes of both the mystic and the astrophysicist; Alan Bleakley explores learning to ‘know’ within medical training through the senses; and John Danvers and Victoria Perselli illustrate how poetry, art images and notions of performance can move us towards emancipatory ways of knowing that resist contemporary technico-rationalist discourses. These authors offer multiple perspectives on resistance and they have a common purpose: to see, think and do education otherwise.

This book is for all those students, tutors and researchers interested in opposing dominant educational discourses and instead exploring other ways of knowing. It is of deep significance to students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level engaged in education, policy studies and professional training, and to teachers and researchers in all phases of education and training.

Jerome Satterthwaite teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Plymouth. He is the organizer of the annual Plymouth conferences on Discourse, Power, Resistance.

Wendy Martin is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Plymouth.