This article takes its retrospective lead from the oppressive schooling years during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to reflect on the educational significance of artistic activities through considering aesthetic virtues and moral agency cultivated in these activities. Describing an unconventional educational milieu where schooling was deliberately ‘dismantled’, I emphasize the important role that artistic endeavours can play in building a person’s aesthetic strength and moral power to overcome the adversity of life, hence for the fuller human development. By blending philosophical discussion (...) with historical manifestation, I stress the less articulated educational discourse that makes dance relevant to the educational formation of epistemic virtues and moral sensibilities. Joining in the emerging efforts to improving the worlds of schools, curricula, and pedagogies, I argue that the contingent integration of different histories, life conditions, and social and cultural discourses are ‘transformative’ sites for pedagogy. Thus, I seek to shed historically fresh light on the ways of thinking of schooling, education, and the arts for hope and possibility to ultimately argue for ways that can speak to the diversity of global societies today. (shrink)

In this article, I explore my own classroom practices as a teacher of a university course on curriculum in order to investigate the potential emancipatory significance of a Rancièrean conversation-oriented curriculum. To provide a lived account of how emancipatory education with the premise of equality can be embraced, albeit not without challenges, in actual classroom practices, I focus on my most unsuccessful teaching experience—one in which I was routinely confronted by unusually prolonged periods of silence from my students. I first (...) explore how I responded to the challenges which emerged from my commitment to positioning myself and my students as intellectual equals. Then, I attempt to articulate the emancipatory significances of inviting my students to aesthetically attend to the curricular materials, class conversations, and the silence itself. I also reveal how a Rancièrean reading of my practice exposed my own deep ties to an institutionalized distribution of time and helped me to re-imagine the meanings of success and failure in an emancipatory education. (shrink)

When postgraduate researchers’ interests lie outside the body of knowledge with which their supervisors are familiar, different supervisory approaches are called for. In such situations, questions concerning the appropriateness of traditional models arise, which almost invariably involve a budding candidate’s relationship with a knowing-established researcher/supervisor. Supervisory relationships involving creative practice-led research in particular confront significant challenges by new and emerging themes, questions, processes and practices. My lack of disciplinary knowledge regarding two PhD candidates’ projects led me some years ago to (...) question the effects of this lack and to search for effective ways of dealing with it. A subsequent commitment to different modes of candidate/supervisor collaborations was based on three assumptions: One, a supervisor is not, in the first instance, a conveyor or purveyor of knowledge. Two, postgraduate researchers already have substantial and refined pockets of relevant knowledge to draw on. Three, and very importantly, they are able to activate networks of distributed knowledge, often outside of the University. The argument presented in this article draws theoretically on Jacques Rancière and Hannah Arendt’s ideas of pedagogy and public space, as well as notions of cosmopolitics, mode 2 knowledge and not-knowing in Art & Design. Reflections on my experiences of supervising PhD and Master of Art & Design candidates, together with ideas offered by contributors to a book I have recently edited, will locate moments of choice and the emergence of the unforeseeable, of vigilance towards singular events as much as collective understanding. (shrink)

‘The Western tradition’, as passe-partout, includes fringe figures, émigrés and migrants. Rather than looking to resources at the core of the Western tradition to overcome its own blindnesses, I am more interested in its gaps and peripheries, where other thoughts and renegade knowledges take hold. It is in the contact zones with strangers that glimpses of any culture’s philosophical blindness become possible and changes towards a different understanding of knowledge can begin. In the context of education, I am above all (...) interested in PhD candidates who wish to draw on the bodies and modes of knowledge they bring with them to the university. Some are not well represented: Indigenous and other non-Western traditions, non-English languages, and the renegade knowledges of marginalised groups. My context is that of creative practice-led PhD theses at AUT University, Auckland which have made me aware of the importance of cosmopolitics to understand education in the context of entangled histories of colonisation and domination; border-crossing interdependencies; new types of conflict and new ways of building communities. My study thus explores aspects of transculturation—involving not only ethnic cultures but also different disciplinary knowledge cultures. The place that no-one owns in Western tradition, the place of fringe figures, émigrés and migrants, may offer a point from which non-traditional candidates’ thoughts can lever off to build connections with their own stores of knowledge. This usually means for Western supervisors that they need to recognise their ignorance towards parts of their own traditions, as well as those of their candidates. The proposition I will explore is that the emergent research of non-traditional candidates can thrive on gaps and on the fringes—provided that both candidates and supervisors are able to be porous to the unknown and ‘troubled by the presumption of equality’. The potential of the gap, the unknown, which simultaneously separates and connects candidates and supervisors, can be the beginning of generating a thing in common. This is a rich and creative place for new thought, which may open the academy to transcultural knowledge. (shrink)