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210 Pages·2012·1.2 MB·English
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Politics, Participation & Power Relations CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE FUTURE OF LEARNING AND TEACHING Volume 4 This series represents a forum for important issues that do and will affect how learning and teaching are thought about and practised. All educational venues and situations are undergoing change because of information and communications technology, globalization and paradigmatic shifts in determining what knowledge is valued. Our scope includes matters in primary, secondary and tertiary education as well as community-based informal circumstances. Important and significant differences between information and knowledge represent a departure from traditional educational offerings heightening the need for further and deeper understanding of the implications such opportunities have for influencing what happens in schools, colleges and universities around the globe. An inclusive approach helps attend to important current and future issues related to learners, teachers and the variety of cultures and venues in which educational efforts occur. We invite forward-looking contributions that reflect an international comparative perspective illustrating similarities and differences in situations, problems, solutions and outcomes. Edited by Michael Kompf ( POLITICS, PARTICIPATION & POWER RELATIONS Transdisciplinary Approaches to Critical Citizenship in the Classroom and Community Edited by Richard C. Mitchell Brock University, Canada Shannon A. Moore Brock University, Canada A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-94-6091-741-7 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-742-4 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-743-1 (e-book) Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands www.sensepublishers.com Printed on acid-free paper Cover Photo credit: This photo was taken by photographer Mario Garcia-Baeza and shows a group of American bankers assembled on a Chicago rooftop during their annual conference in October, 2011 while peering down on “Occupy Chicago” protesters. The photo originally appeared in the article “Community Groups, Labor and ‘Occupy Chicago’ Protest Mortgage Bankers Association, Seven Thousand Strong” by: Yana Kunichoff, an Assistant Editor with Truthout - an independent, web-based news organization - on 12 October, 2011. The editors chose this photo as it represents a key dimension of the highly conflicted nature of contemporary capitalist relations and much of their corrupt underpinning being directly confronted by citizens in a free and democratic movement. These citizens are exercising their rights to assembly, to peaceful protest and to freedom of the press - acts of critical citizenship being debated in this text that many have died for in the recent “Arab Spring” uprisings. All Rights Reserved © 2012 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction: Politics, participation and power relations: transdisciplinary approaches to critical citizenship 1 Richard C. Mitchell and Shannon A. Moore 2. School power and democratic citizenship education in China: Experiences from three secondary schools 9 Wangbei Ye 3. Critical citizenship, popular theatre, and the social imagination of pre-service teachers 35 Sandra J. Wolf 4. The corporatization of the university: Post neo-liberalism and the decline and fall of democratic learning 51 Emery Hyslop-Margison and Josephine L. Savarese 5. Deliberative democracy, people’s agency and education: A case of dialogic transformation of a school system 63 Gaysu R. Arvind 6. Synthesizing participatory human rights education and critical consciousness in Australian schools: Possibilities and challenges for educators developing a model of human rights education 83 Keith Heggart 7. Children’s rights and teachers’ responsibilities: A case study of developing a rights respecting initial teacher education programme 101 Lee Jerome 8. Critical citizens or neo-liberal consumers? Utopian visions and pragmatic uses of human rights education in a secondary school in England 119 Sam Mejias and Hugh Starkey 9. The politics of critical citizenship education: Human rights for conformity or emancipation? 137 Helen Trivers and Hugh Starkey v TABLE OF CONTENTS 10. Writing community: Composing as transformation and realization 153 Paul L. Thomas 11. Media representations of Muslim women wearing the burka: Criticism and implications 169 May Al-Fartousi and Dolana Mogadime 12. Transdisciplinary approaches to young people’s citizenship: From bystanders to action 183 Shannon A. Moore and Richard C. Mitchell Author biography 207 vi RICHARD C. MITCHELL AND SHANNON A. MOORE INTRODUCTION Politics, Participation and Power Relations: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Critical Citizenship The notion of what constitutes an effective cultural or political expression of democratic citizenship in this post-millennial, post-colonial, even post neo-liberal moment is increasingly fluid as we write this Introduction for our second edited text on these themes (see Moore & Mitchell, 2008). As Hyslop-Margison and Thayer (2009, p. xv) have noted “these are extremely tenuous times for modern democratic states and for democracy more generally” as world society drifts dangerously towards “neo-liberal capitalist collapse” without the emergence of any viable alternative paradigms. This is so much more the case since our project was conceived that we’re reminded of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s (2005) “afterthought” that we live now in a time of “liquid modernity … among a multitude of competing values, norms, and lifestyles without a firm and reliable guarantee of being in the right [that] is hazardous and commands a high psychological price” (p. 1095). We remain cautiously optimistic, in the sense that th 20 century Brazilian educator Paulo Freire espoused, particularly as we observe the contemporaneous revolutions/revelations occurring in numerous Middle Eastern states- each one facilitated in their own geopolitical space through the phenomena of globalised social media. Recalling Freire’s contributions Henry A. Giroux (2010b) reflects on this approach to pedagogy: What Freire made clear is that … education is a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social relations that enable students to explore for themselves the possibilities of what it means to be engaged citizens, while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy (para. 5). This “substantive” approach to participatory democracy could be argued to possess at least a few common baselines. Parenthetically even the most optimistic of critical educators could not have forecast the new boundaries being created by populist uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya in the final months of this project. Indeed, even a short year ago any critique that decades-old military dictatorships and their frequently oppressive oil-based oligarchies would or could be toppled in a few weeks through such means would have been received as preposterous. Yet here we stand. R.C. Mitchell and S.A. Moore, Politics, Participation & Power Relations 1–7. © 2012 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. R.C. MITCHELL AND S.A. MOORE Two other recent scholarly contributions from a burgeoning literature on similar themes are noteworthy here (Earls, 2011; Rhoads & Szelényi, 2011). Each for the most part avoids any broad attempt to redefine American-style capitalist approaches to democratic citizenship - perhaps in both cases innocently enough by virtue of a cultural myopia. Written from eminent US-based academic institutions, the first comes from a 2009 Harvard symposium on ‘child citizenship’ with special editor Felton Earls of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2011), and recounts a broad range of mostly astute international presentations th marking the 20 anniversary the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). In a critical reflection on the citizenship of Guantanamo prisoner and former Canadian child soldier Omar Khadr, one of us has previously argued that this treaty represents a “transdisciplinary … alternative model for citizenship education” (Mitchell, 2010, p. 38) by clearly marking out the new terrain children are travelling in this period from “rights to citizenship”, as Earls (2011, p. 6) also rightly declares. One of numerous highly regarded contributors in their collection is British-based international legal scholar Geraldine Van Bueren (2011, p. 30) who theorises a “multi-generational citizenship” recognising children as both national and international citizens - perhaps the closest to many of the theoretical and political themes running throughout our anthology. The second selection from scholarly literature is by Rhoads and Szelényi (2011) who address the influence of “Euro-American authored ‘capitalocentrism’ ” (p. 4), but entirely omit the whole notion of children as active citizens or agents of change in this discourse and in the street. Drawing again upon a diverse group of international faculty and students from China’s Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China, University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and Hungary’s Central European University, these authors analyse “global citizenship” from the standpoint of the academy (Rhoads & Szelényi, 2011, p. 16). They view the role of the university in marking out this shifting terrain as a still dominant force for good, but start off with an observation that neoliberalism is “a confusing descriptor, since what we see today in terms of global economics is a near total victory of conservativism and the power of neoconservative geopolitical influence” (p. 13). This passage seems somewhat out of touch with their chapter from Argentina on that nation’s resistance to neoliberalism as well as the current pitched street battles say in the ancient cities of Greece, coincidentally one of the ancient birthplaces of democracy. While their Argentine analysis goes some way in responding to Hyslop-Margison and Thayer’s 2009 critique that too few alternative paradigms are being contemplated, in the end they make little of the sad overture being replayed in most of the international academy to accompany the bankrupt rearrangement of global capital’s deck chairs. This same odious overture is heard throughout the Hollywood documentary Inside Job directed by Charles H. Ferguson (2010). As co-editors, we envisioned some of the process for creating any viable alternative paradigm may be undertaken within the transdisciplinary framework of active, participatory and inclusive expressions of child and youth citizenship presented here. Despite criticisms valid and otherwise, we are still keenly 2 INTRODUCTION interested in how to live and teach the participatory principles underlying democratic citizenship from the perspective of Freire. Thus, the volume began to take shape during our investigation of how 29-year-old Canadian activist Craig Kielburger - Nobel Prize nominee and 1995 co-founder of the international non- governmental organisation Free the Children at 13 years of age - defined and understood the concept in his work. With programs in 4,000 North American schools, the Kielburger brothers (older brother and Harvard-educated lawyer Marc is his co-founder/co-director) have built more than 500 schools in 16 countries, and employ more than 100 people in their Toronto-based charity (Kielburger & Kielburger, 2006). In 2009 they took in nearly $16 million in donations along with $8 million more in the US as part of what they identify as “the world’s largest network of children helping children through education”. Throughout their evolution and growth from an elementary school and home-based initiative, they have also quietly challenged the foundations of Canadian tax law related to charitable fundraising through their somewhat radical approach to social enterprise (Wingrove, 2010). In line with some of the thinking espoused by democratic theorist Amartya Sen (see also Arvind, this volume), we present findings from an interview with Kielburger during that study along with selections from other mainly marginalised populations in Canada, England, India, Australia, the US and China while observing that the rise of democratic freedoms is certainly one of the principal developments of our time. We agree with Sen’s (1999) assertion that in the distant future when people look back at what happened in the 20th (and early 21st centuries), they will find it difficult not to accept the emergence of democratic freedoms as the most striking development of the period. Certainly the still emancipatory, liberatory march of women, children and other minorities from chattel to rights-bearers forms a large portion of these new chapters in the story of global citizenship. Nevertheless, in contrast to the often sanguine tone taken by Rhoads and Szelényi (2011), we are concerned with this evolution in the same way as Henry A. Giroux (2010a) observes below: Imposed amnesia is the modus operandi of the current moment. Not only is historical memory now sacrificed to the spectacles of consumerism, celebrity culture, hyped-up violence and a market-driven obsession with the self, but the very formative culture that makes compassion, justice and an engaged citizenry foundational to democracy has been erased from the language of mainstream politics and the diverse cultural apparatuses that support it. Unbridled individualism along with the gospel of profit and unchecked competition undermine both the importance of democratic public spheres and the necessity for a language that talks about shared responsibilities, the public good and the meaning of a just society. (para. 2) As in our first iteration, we respond to this capitalist hollowing out of public spaces in many democratic spheres by turning again in this anthology to a transdisciplinary collection of critical pedagogues for contemporary expressions of global and local citizenship. In this, we have also taken inspiration from thinkers 3

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