Thanks everyone for all of the helpful hints.
I've had to put the project aside for a few weeks while I am engaged in teaching practice, as a student teacher on placement in a working-class state high school. I guess my interests are mainly in the 'education' of working-class children.
This is something I am doing because I am myself 'forced to sell my labour-power' and teaching seems as (un)objectionable as almost any other means of doing so. I'm telling myself that it is 'fieldwork' and that, somehow, it is analogous to Foucault working in the mental hospital! I'm getting a good idea of how much disciplining of teachers is involved, as much as of students.
I've been wondering lately how Foucault's work on 'the care of the self' and on school discipline might sit alongside Ranciere's critique of Bourdieu in _The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation_. It seems to me that Ranciere's ideas don't fit well within what Foucault discusses as 'strategic games of power' ... but they still seem to have a materialist aspect to them, reminding me at times of Althusser, despite Ranciere's pointed critique of Althusser's work on ideology and science. I'm also interested to hear if anyone has read Ranciere's 'The Flesh of Words', and how that might relate to his work on education, or if anyone has thoughts on Ranciere in relation to Foucault in any respect. I've found Ranciere's work to be both compelling and confusing over the years, and have never known really what to do with it.
I did find an interesting paper from Canada that reads Foucault with Hilda Neatby against Dewey and Vygotsky, the details are as follows (free download):
James M. Pitsula, 'Unlikely Allies: Hilda Neatby, Michel Foucault, and the Critique of Progressive Education', CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 26, 4 (2001): 383–400
http://www.csse.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE26-4/CJE26-4-Pitsula.pdf
Thanks again for all of the references, I have saved them and will look them up in two weeks, as soon as I finish this teaching prac.
David
On 10/09/2005, at 6:22 PM, kev wrote:
I've had to put the project aside for a few weeks while I am engaged in teaching practice, as a student teacher on placement in a working-class state high school. I guess my interests are mainly in the 'education' of working-class children.
This is something I am doing because I am myself 'forced to sell my labour-power' and teaching seems as (un)objectionable as almost any other means of doing so. I'm telling myself that it is 'fieldwork' and that, somehow, it is analogous to Foucault working in the mental hospital! I'm getting a good idea of how much disciplining of teachers is involved, as much as of students.
I've been wondering lately how Foucault's work on 'the care of the self' and on school discipline might sit alongside Ranciere's critique of Bourdieu in _The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation_. It seems to me that Ranciere's ideas don't fit well within what Foucault discusses as 'strategic games of power' ... but they still seem to have a materialist aspect to them, reminding me at times of Althusser, despite Ranciere's pointed critique of Althusser's work on ideology and science. I'm also interested to hear if anyone has read Ranciere's 'The Flesh of Words', and how that might relate to his work on education, or if anyone has thoughts on Ranciere in relation to Foucault in any respect. I've found Ranciere's work to be both compelling and confusing over the years, and have never known really what to do with it.
I did find an interesting paper from Canada that reads Foucault with Hilda Neatby against Dewey and Vygotsky, the details are as follows (free download):
James M. Pitsula, 'Unlikely Allies: Hilda Neatby, Michel Foucault, and the Critique of Progressive Education', CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 26, 4 (2001): 383–400
http://www.csse.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE26-4/CJE26-4-Pitsula.pdf
Thanks again for all of the references, I have saved them and will look them up in two weeks, as soon as I finish this teaching prac.
David
On 10/09/2005, at 6:22 PM, kev wrote:
cleo h. cherryholmes' 'power and criticism: poststructural
investigations in education' is a good starting place. the critical
pedagogy movement (including scholars like henry giroux) have also
profited greatly from foucault's work. of course, you needn't go too
far: foucault references education throughout 'discipline and punish'
and 'history of sexuality, volume 1'. see here for a discussion he
engaged in with french high skoolers :
http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200206/0260.html.
on the bottom of page 215 of the sheridan translation of 'discipline
and punish', foucault gives a a tidy delineation of discipline as a
type of power and buries a curious injunction in the middle of the
paragraph : "one day we should show how intra-familial relations,
essentially in the parents-children cell, have become 'disciplined',
absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first educational
and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which have
made the family the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary
question of the normal and the abnormal."
i hope someone reading this list might take up this project, which to
me would necessarily entail tying a study of disciplinary power to
studies of the subjugation of children (farson 74, for example).
remember that 'discipline and punish' was written for "those one
supervises, trains and corrects", for "madmen, children at home and at
school, the colonized" (p29); remember too that foucault struggled his
entire life to empower young people, protesting shoulder-to-shoulder
with his students in may '68, consistently endorsing the suspension of
laws banning consensual adult-child sexual relations, etc.
for another angle on discipline, you might look to hegel's
gymnasialreden - like foucault, he believed that discipline constructs
our subjecitivity, but unlike foucault, he sees mechanical drill (for
example) as being capable (ironically) of shaking folks out of
mindless routines. as a skilled musician might relate, only after
you've learned to mechnically reproduce notes on a page in a given
instrument can you begin to just play, that is, to get carried away by
the music. alternatively, one might argue that only after foucault had
been educated at the best skools could he design such an erudite
critique of disciplinary power.
lastly, a good read that i recommend highly is edgar friedenberg's
'the dignity of youth and other atavisms', specifically the chapter
profiling the modern high skool. ... happy hunting.
----------------------- kevin.sanchez@xxxxxxxxx
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