I am now assigning Walter Wippersberg’s 1994 Film, Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich  – Dark, Mysterious Austria, to all my students! If you teach qualitative methods, consider including this in your syllabus.

Produced for Austria’s SBS-TV, this films poks fun at old-school ethnography from anthropologists and the National Geographic-esque like exposes on the exotic Africans and South American natives.

“A team of the All African Television network wanders into the darkest regions of the Eastern Alps. They observe the habits and rituals of the natives and make not one, but two ethnological major break-through discoveries.” IMDB

badethnography tell us that at

“At 5:40, we learn that the team has disproved the theory that Europeans are monogamous; starting at about 7:50, they describe the elaborate costumes and militaristic symbolism of clans of the Tyrol region of Austria; and at 15:00, there’s a great discussion of the curious obsession with “patently useless activities,” such as biking for no other purpose than biking itself.

Aside from the humorous commentary, it’s a great way of illustrating the sociological imagination,  which requires us to step out of our own culture and try to look at it through the eyes of an outsider — and, as C. Wright Mills put it, to recapture the ability to be astonished by what we normally take for granted.”

via badethnography via culturalbytes

The Peace Poets

We are young artist educators committed to teaching with a focus on our collective liberation. Our goal is to create safe spaces that allow us to deconstruct race, class and gender as a community. Our workshops focus on Hip Hop, youth empowerment, conflict resolution, community healing and cultural identity through spoken word poetry, music and theater.

We use music and poetry in the service of our collective struggle for justice. Through performances and workshops we open spaces for all people to embrace their role as leaders and compañeros in the construction of more just local and global communities.

HIP HOP FOR HEALING:

As children of Hip Hop, we recognize its amazing potential to transform and liberate.
We also recognize how industries have exploited the culture and market appeal of this sacred force.
Our workshops focus on the true legacy of Hip Hop, its history and healing properties.
It’s roots in African and indigineous cultures.
It’s ability to tell the stories of the most marganilized and silenced in our society.
Through creative writing, performance and beatboxing, we take it back.. way back!“

The first studio on the right side, inside South Wing of Bethanien HOUSE…opposite playground, under the New york Squat.. MARIANNENPLATZ 2A, Berlin Kreuzberg…

Macgilchrist, Felicitas, & Christophe, Barbara. (2011). Translating globalization theories into educational research: Thoughts on recent shifts in Holocaust education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(1), 145-158.

Abstract: Much educational research on globalization aims to prepare students to be successful citizens in a global society. We propose a set of three concepts, drawing on systems theory (Nassehi, Stichweh) and theories of the subject (Butler, Foucault), to think the global which enables educational research to step back from hegemonic discourses and reflect on current practices. Globalization is understood in this approach as referring to: (1) a cognitive shift; (2) expanding relevancy spaces; and (3) new forms of subjectivation. The framework is illustrated with examples from educational policy and learning materials, with an extended look at how globalization is articulated in recent shifts in Holocaust education.

And other articles in

• Discourse
• Journal of Curriculum Studies
• Journal of Educational Policy
• British Journal of Sociology of Education
• Journal of Language, Identity & Education
• Journal of Moral Education
• Journal of Political Science Education
• Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies
• Pedagogy, Culture & Society
• Ethnography and Education
• International Studies in Sociology of Education
• Classroom Discourse
• Curriculum Journal
• Language, Culture & Curriculum

…and many more education journals.

First account of the momentous student movement that shook the world—in the voices of the students themselves

The autumn and winter of 2010 saw an unprecedented wave of student protests across the UK, in response to the coalition government’s savage cuts in state funding for higher education, cuts which formed the basis for an ideological attack on the nature of education itself. Involving universities and schools, occupations, sit-ins and demonstrations, these protests spread with remarkable speed. Rather than a series of isolated incidents, they formed part of a spreading movement that spans the entire western world: ever since the wall street crash of 2008 there has been growing social and political turbulence in the heartlands of capital. From the US to Europe, students have been in the vanguard of protest against governments’ harsh austerity measures.

Tracing these worldwide protests, this new book explores how the protests spread and how they were organized, through the unprecedented use of social networking media such as facebook and twitter. It looks, too, at events on the ground, the demonstrations, and the police tactics: kettling, cavalry charges and violent assault. From Athens to Rome, San Francisco to London, this new book looks at how the new student protests developed into a strong and challenging movement that demands another way to run the world. Consisting largely of the voices that participated in the struggle, Springtime will become an essential point of reference as the struggles continue and spread.

Now I have finally found an article which argues this. It’s all about the “three-second-rule”.

Apparently, the brain has a three-second window which typography should make the most of. The eye should be able to take in the whole line in under 3 seconds. Textbooks in particular, writes the author, don’t adhere to this three-second-rule. Nor did this blog until I changed the design today.

Thanks to Robert Maier for the reference: Ernst Pöppel: Was geschieht beim Lesen? In: APuZ (Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte) 42-43/2009, S. 45

(Check Ernst Pöppel’s very amusing, informative and entirely subversive Personal Publication Platform.)

UNSW School of Education is hosting a series of public lectures throughout 2011. The third lecture of the year will be conducted by Dr Kalervo Gulson entitled Identity schools, globalised education policy and re-imagining marketization.

Abstract
In this paper, I will explore the relationship between identity, globalization and the micro-processes of choice that provide education policy and curriculum options, and which have denationalized prior ideas of public and private education. Specifically, I will focus on tracing the establishment of ‘identity schools’ in many countries, including the US, Australia and Canada. These public and private schools have been primarily initiated along singular identity lines pertaining to, for example, ethnicity and religion, and are often hard-fought for responses to the manifest failure of public schooling to address the educational needs of certain groups. These schools provide significant social, political and educational benefits for students who have been historically marginalized, and play important roles as part of community control and the insertion of cultural legitimacy in schooling. However, as these schools are also enabled through marketised educational policies, this has led some scholars to argue that education and economic policies that promote ‘identity schools’ are a new force in conservative politics that simultaneously promote school choice and school competition, while also complicating progressive and conservative education. I will conclude by briefly touching on the paradoxes of consuming as solidarity, consumers (students and parents) as part of social movements, and choice as progressive politics.