This informal group meets to read and discuss critical theories of education, learning, pedagogy and knowledge.
It is a space to play with new ideas, question arguments, create common languages, seek connections between theory and practices of pedagogy, and expand our imaginations of what higher education is and can be.
All are welcome to come and invited to suggest readings, recordings, visuals or other texts that are relevant to critically theorising education.
Autumn Term 2013 – Anti-Pedagogy
This term’s reading will focus on arguments against ‘pedagogy’ as an art, craft, science or discipline. We will spend several weeks on close readings of Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford University Press, 1991). Following that, we will read whatever we decide to that emerges in response.
Unless otherwise noted, readings are from: Rancière, J. (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. Kristin Ross, Stanford: Stanford University Press [originally published in France in 1987].
1 October, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
Introduction and ‘An intellectual adventure‘
Chapter 1, Rancière (1991)
15 October, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
‘The ignorant one’s lesson’
Chapter 2, Rancière (1991)
29 October, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
‘Reason between equals’
Chapter 3, Rancière (1991)
12 November, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
‘The society of contempt’
Chapter 4, Rancière (1991)
26 November, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
‘The emancipator and his monkey’
Chapter 5, Rancière (1991)
10 December, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
Reading to be confirmed
Additional reading, Summer 2013
Dean, J. (2009) ‘Politics without politics’, Parallax, 15(3): 20–36.
Lewis, T. (2010) ‘Paulo Freire’s last laugh: rethinking critical pedagogy’s funny bone through Jacques Rancière’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Special Issue: Rancière, public education and the taming of democracy, 42(5–5): 635–648.
Pelletier, C. (2009) ‘Emancipation, equality and education: Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu and the question of performativity’, unpublished paper, Institute of Education.
Power, N. (2010) ‘Axiomatic equality: Rancière and the politics of contemporary education’, Eurozine, July.
Past terms
Spring Term 2013 – Foundations
All groups will take place in the 2nd floor common room of Bridge House unless otherwise indicated.
29 January, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
Griffiths, M. (2012) ‘Is it possible to live a philosophical, educational life in education, nowadays?’ Journal of Philosophy of Education, 46(3): 397–413.
12 February, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
Greene, M. (1997) ‘Teaching as possibility: a light in dark times’, The Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice, 1(1).
26 February, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
Apple, M. (2011) Education and Power, 3rd ed., NY: Routledge.
12 March, 1:00–2:00 p.m.
Naidoo, R. (2004) ‘Fields and institutional strategy: Bourdieu on the relationship between higher education, inequality and society’, Special Issue: Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education: the theory of practice and the practice of theory, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(4): 457–471.