Section archive - Theories & Approaches

This paper synthesizes literature related to critical race theory (CRT) and disability theory to elucidate the need for a critical ability theory in teacher education. Combining the tenets of CRT and disability theories provides a lens for viewing how power and privilege affect public and private conceptions of what it means to have a special need.

The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of early care and education professionals working in community-based child care and Head Start centers as to their educational goals; hindrances, motivations, and benefits to taking coursework/degree completion; and the impact of the early childhood coursework on his or her everyday work with children and families. The findings reveal that the majority of teachers in for profit and non-profit centers viewed the degree as a personal goal. The possibility therefore of increasing their future income and becoming more knowledgeable and marketable in their career was attractive to these teachers as motivators to go on for higher education. The directors, by contrast saw their coursework as enhancing their self-confidence and self-esteem, which in their opinion could make them a more effective director.

This article argues that induction into research techniques as a means of exploring practical challenges can lead to knowledge production and ownership. Its explicit aim is to introduce student teachers to a range of information sources, including a variety of research tools, with which they engage critically to gain confidence in making well-informed though flexible and cautious professional decisions. It offers examples of the use of small-scale research projects as a valid means of ‘discovery learning’ in pre-service teacher education. The authors recognise that engagement in research remains a minority activity for practising teachers. However, participants' writings show that it is possible as a novice researcher to understand the potential and pitfalls of research, to generate new knowledge and to undergo deep personal learning through designing and implementing a small-scale project.

This article engages with Guattari’s query about, how to make a classroom operate like a work of art? Guattari’s thinking engenders a way of thinking about art as an affective event that has the capacity to invent new relations and new ways of learning. In the first section, the authors attend to concepts like “objectile” and “depth perception” in order to think about difference affectively. From there they discuss Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image in order to problematize humanist notions of recognition and generosity and propose a politics of experimentation that is never fully intelligible and known.