Subversive Pedagogies: Radical Possibility in the Academy by Kate Schick & Claire Timperley

Author:Kate Schick & Claire Timperley [Schick, Kate & Timperley, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032108148
Google: kJaAzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 58397741
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Learning and teaching in neoliberal institutions

The neoliberal university privileges a core set of assumptions about teaching that are rooted in the notion of information transmission: the methods and materials lecturers use are expected to engage and enlarge the mind. Engaging with the abstracted mind – rather than engaging minds situated in, and shaped by, bodies – encourages the valorisation of particular activities and pedagogies. Such pedagogies tend to overlook the importance of university as a setting in which the entire person is shaped, not just their mind. This focus on the mind as the central concern of educators reflects what Paulo Friere (1968) famously called the “banking” model of education. This model assumes that students are vessels into which we, as instructors, are expected to pour our knowledge. The backdrop of this exercise is the lecture hall or seminar room, into which students walk with the assumption (often reinforced by us) that they will set aside their worldly endeavours to focus their minds on the information we present to them. This model of education draws on the Cartesian mind/body split – cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) – which understands the mind as separate from the body and “is foundational to the whole positivist educational enterprise with its notion of knowledge unsullied by human passions, feelings, and emotions; that is, by the presence of the body” (Shapiro 1998, 138). Criticisms of the banking model show, however, that not only is it an unhelpful frame for thinking about teaching and learning (Friere 1968; Giroux 2007; Barske 2018), but that it is based on an incorrect understanding of how we process the world around us.

Extensive research in neuroscience explores the relationship between our embodied selves and our thinking, dispelling the myth that humans are rational beings whose brains can process information without regard for their bodily experiences (Shapiro 2014). Drawing on findings from neuroscience, Amin and Thrift note that “affect precedes decision, rather than the other way around” (2013, 158) and “there is no such thing as thought that exists free from emotion” (160). This research, showing that our emotions and experiences influence how we process the world, subverts the Cartesian mind/body split: we cannot separate our “rational” minds from the affective dimensions of our thought and bodily experiences of the world. Indeed, as Amin and Thrift (2013, 161–2) argue, much of what humans do is precognitive:

affect is a semiconscious phenomenon, consisting of a series of automatisms, many of them developed in childhood, that dictate bodily movement. They arise from suggestion and are not easily available for reflection. These automatisms may often feel like wilful action, but they are not, and they have powerful political consequences…. To ignore the affective, passionate element of reason is to delete much of what reason consists of (my emphasis).

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