Higher Education and the Practice of Hope by Jeanne Marie Iorio & Clifton S. Tanabe

Author:Jeanne Marie Iorio & Clifton S. Tanabe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811386459
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Wide-Awake, Committed, and a Collective

I sit with three academics, two established scholars (full professors) and an emerging scholar (lecturer/assistant professor). We sit in a restaurant, away from the large international research conference taking place and the reason for why we can be together in this restaurant. This is an international group, representative of both the United States and Australia. Drink and food orders are placed and then all eyes are on me as I have asked each of them to join me in a dialogue about how each of them engage as a public intellectual. Clif and I have known each of these of people for a while and we have seen how they engage with the public—how they ask questions and constantly interrupt the dogmas dictating how a teacher educator is expected to be in the higher education classroom. We want to know if they think of themselves as public intellectuals and how they might define this in their work and their context.

“Two-pronged” is how a full professor at an American public university immediately shares—for her the public intellectual is not just about the academic but also viewing the undergraduate student as public intellectual. Knowledge, wisdom, responsibility are all used to describe this view of both the academic and student. She notes that not every academic she works with in the school of education shares her view, then bluntly stating, “I don’t give a fuck of what colleagues think of me” further describing how her work has always been driven by activism and advocacy. Her roots in the field go back to work with Paulo Freire and have continued in collaboration with local communities, migrants, and refugees. For this public intellectual, the local and global communities are connected and she can be found working with refugees in European cities and cities local to her university in the United States. “Collectivism” is how she describes this work—and it moves into her early childhood teacher education course. Her undergraduate students engage in assignments that document the lives and stories of migrant and refugee families. These lives and stories are central to how teaching is imagined for these emerging teachers. The expectations this academic demands of herself are the same she demands of her students—to listen and respond to community where they are, as a collective. There is power in the collective.

The collective is something that becomes a point of agreement across the group as food arrives, tastes are shared, and the conversation continues. The other professor at the table, also representative of an American public university describes the collective as a think tank—a think tank he brings together himself and his graduate assistants as group of public intellectuals. This is what he identifies as an “entry point” into articulating the public intellectual space. The creation of this space offers access, an affordance of a space to engage as a public intellectual. He finds it is a “negotiated space” that changes dependent on the issues, conversations, and questions emerging. There is a

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