How poetry and song can grapple with the dialectics of crisis and agency, and become tools for transformative research

Nick Hopwood — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Activist scholarship inspired by a cultural-historical tradition often seeks to foster agency with people facing crisis. The aim is to develop new understandings and bases for action that can help people break away from the status quo and change what is possible. Cultural-historical theory understands crisis and agency dialectically, linking both to individual and social transformation. Dialectic understandings of crisis foreground breakdown and renewal. Dialectic understandings of agency foreground personal contributions with social consequence and contingency. I argue that these understandings are crucial as a point of departure in research where we stand alongside others on grappling with matters of equity and justice. However, establishing these as a shared basis for resisting, reimaging and rebelliously acting is not straightforward and requires countering dominant neoliberal framings. Arts-based forms have significant potential to enable precisely such disruptive thinking. The line ‘Dance on the shark’s wing’, opens a poem by Nikos Kavadias, bluring the lines between the real and the imagined, the fearful and the possible. ‘No One Is Alone’, a song from Sondheim’s ‘Into the Woods’, tells a story of how individual interest is overcome through collective wisdom and consequential action. These examples are discussed as potential transformative tools that could provoke and support collective radical imagination based on coherent understandings of individual agentic contributions to collective struggles. An argument is presented to embrace arts genres as means to destabilise engrained ways of thinking about crisis and agency, thus strengthening collaborative efforts in activist research

Quantitative-Cumulative and Qualitative-Transformational Changes in the Continuous Becoming of Teachers

Erika Germanos, Wolff-Michael Roth — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Professional development is a critical concept in the literature on teaching and teacher education. However, in this literature, continuous growth (learning)—e.g., improve teaching strategies, elaborate a variety of activities or integrate new technologies into their practice—is not distinguished from (crisis-like) change to qualitatively different forms of experience—e.g., engage students in learning, implement student-centered practices, consider students' individual needs and further learning. Based on a case study of the change a Brazilian teacher experienced over the course of an 8-year period, we develop an approach based on ideas of the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky that not only theorizes a distinction between learning and development but also the articulation between the two processes whereby continuous change turns into discontinuous change.

Outlines. Critical Practice Studies

How poetry and song can grapple with the dialectics of crisis and agency, and become tools for transformative research

Quantitative-Cumulative and Qualitative-Transformational Changes in the Continuous Becoming of Teachers