This past year Secondary Education faculty members Kent den Heyer, jan jagodzinski and Jason Wallin published books in their areas of expertise.
Paranoid Pedagogies: Education, Culture, and Paranoia
This book, edited by Jason Wallin and colleague Jennifer Sandlin, explores the under-analyzed significance and function of paranoia as a psychological habitus of the contemporary educational and social moment. The editors and contributors argue that the desire for epistemological truth beyond uncertainty characteristic of paranoia continues to profoundly shape the aesthetic texture and imaginaries of educational thought and practice. Attending to the psychoanalytic, post-psychoanalytic, and critical significance of paranoia as a mode of engaging with the world, this book further inquires into the ways in which paranoia functions to shape the social order and the material desire of subjects operating within it. Furthermore, the book aims to understand how the paranoiac imaginary endemic to contemporary educational thought manifests itself throughout the social field and what issues it makes manifest for teachers, teacher educators, and academics working toward social transformation. Includes a chapter by Secondary Education faculty member jan jagodzinski.
Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question
This volume, edited by jan jagodzinski, weaves together a variety of perspectives aimed at confronting a spectrum of ethico-political global challenges arising in the Anthropocene which affect the future of life on planet earth. In this book, the authors offer a multi-faceted approach to address the consequences of its imaginary and projective directions. The chapters span the disciplines of political economy, cybernetics, environmentalism, bio-science, psychoanalysis, bioacoustics, documentary film, installation art, geoperformativity, and glitch aesthetics. The first section attempts to flesh out new aspects of current debates. Questions over the Capitaloscene are explored via conflations of class and climate, revisiting the eco-Marxist analysis of capitalism, and the financial system that thrives on debt. The second section explores the imaginary narratives that raise questions regarding non-human involvement. The third section addresses 'geoartisty,' the counter artistic responses to the speculariztion of climate disasters, questioning eco-documentaries, and what a post-anthropocentric art might look like. The last section addresses the pedagogical response to the Anthropocene. Includes chapters by Secondary Education faculty member Jason Wallin, graduate student Jessie Beier, and Elementary Education faculty member Patti Pente.
Next Acts: Educational Impasse, Events and a One-Legged Magpie
This publication offers both an invitation and a provocation to anyone interested in the promise of positive curriculum change here in Alberta and, indeed, globally. Kent den Heyer's international reputation as a scholar stands alongside his advocacy for and commitment to the leadership of teachers in curriculum development and renewal. Evidence of this includes his numerous publications in the field of curriculum change and leadership, as well as his ten years of service on the Alberta Teachers' Association's Curriculum Committee.
Next Acts: Educational Impasse, Events and a One-Legged Magpie is an important resource for several reasons. It represents a compilation of den Heyer's work that has informed the work of schools and researchers involved in the Association's Great School for All international school partnership program. The collection ranges from reflections on the purposes of education to critiques of the growing reliance on standardized testing as a path to reform. The publication also offers an alternative narrative to a currently accepted view that curriculum resides in the detailed prescriptions of government documents and committees, rather than what he calls "a thinking education," in which the curriculum lives in the encounter between teacher, student and the object of inquiry. This publication invites teachers-both as individuals and as groups-to take up the leadership work ahead of curriculum making (which could be one such encounter for the profession).