Handbook of Cultural Studies and Education

Peter Pericles Trifonas, Susan Jagger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351202374
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Social Sciences

The Handbook of Cultural Studies in Education brings together interdisciplinary voices to ask critical questions about the meanings of diverse forms of cultural studies and the ways in which it can enrich both education scholarship and practice. Examining multiple forms, mechanisms, and actors of resistance in cultural studies, it seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice by examining the theme of resistance in multiple fields and contested spaces from a holistic multi-dimensional perspective converging insights from leading scholars, practitioners, and community activists. Particular focus is paid to the practical role and impact of these converging fields in challenging, rupturing, subverting, and changing the dominant socio-economic, political, and cultural forces that work to maintain injustice and inequity in various educational contexts. With contributions from international scholars, this handbook serves as a key transdisciplinary resource for scholars and students interested in how and in what forms Cultural Studies can be applied to education.

Part I
Curriculum and Pedagogy

1
Education Writes Back

On the Future/Present of Cultural Studies of Education

Robert J. Helfenbein

While the history of cultural studies cites origins in adult education (Morley & Chen, 1996; Nelson et al., 1992) and contemporary scholars continue to note the need for cultural studies work in schools (Grossberg, 2005), the discourse within the field tends to be one-way. This chapter suggests an overview of the cultural studies work from scholars within education and offers new trajectories for future collaborations and sites of inquiry. Specifically, this chapter notes the important conjuncture of forces at work in public education in the contemporary US context and suggests that cultural studies analysis may be needed now more than ever. Using recent literature representing the “spatial turn” in social theory, this offering provides linkages between the discursive construction of educative spaces, the material lived experiences of those who spend time there, and the concomitant ethics that such constructions require. As free-market fundamentalism, neoconservative ideological formations, and representations of youth and youth culture are all in play, this perspective from the world of education—both in the material and academic sense—intends to reinvigorate the conversation.

I begin with an anecdote from my practice as a teacher educator. I was teaching a course in secondary social studies methods—these are preservice teachers who hope to teach history, civics, geography, or sociology in secondary education—with a mix of undergraduates and certification-only students in which each student does a ten-minute mini-lesson on any topic of their choosing. They try out a variety of techniques and formats, in many ways trying to find their teacher voice. We stress in this course the role of social studies education in preparing citizens for a participatory democracy and hold the position that the social sciences are only as important as we’re able to apply what we learn to our contemporary context. Because of the time constraints, current events and controversial issues have consistently been popular and discussions have tended to be lively. But . . . something interesting has happened the last several times I have taught the course.

My question is this: What does it mean that, in a room full of preservice social studies educators, neither the war in Afghanistan nor the War on Terror has even come up?

This anecdote will be left hanging for the moment and returned to in the conclusion. To begin again—a little more formally—I offer three questions:

1. What possibilities are opened up for research in social education by adopting a cultural studies theoretical approach? And how would one employ this framework in social education research?
2. To what ends does the inclusion or omission of this framework lead (or, rather, what is at stake?)?
3. And what possibilities does a return to education as a site of analysis hold for the field of cultural studies?¹

Cultural studies—a controversial and contested approach to the study of the social world—embraces a theoretical approach to the study of interactions between the lived experiences and interpretations of people and the social structures that act upon and encode meaning to those experiences (Grossberg, Nelson, & Treichler, 1992; Gaztambide-Fernandez, Harding, & Sorde-Marti, 2004; Carlson & Dimitriadis, 2003). Four major themes of cultural studies (materialism, anti-essentialism, social constructivism, and radical contextuality) provide a format for investigating the complexities of social education within contemporary and emerging social formations.

The insistence on a radical contextuality to the exploration of the creation of systems of political and cultural power forms the point of departure for a cultural studies approach. New directions for social research and theorizing—whether in education or not—would all benefit from the interdisciplinarity, materiality, and anti-essentialism of a cultural studies interpretation. The project here applies a cultural studies approach to the study of education, theorizes the subsequent benefit to contemporary research in social studies education, and attempts to “write back”—to suggest a return to cultural studies’ attention to education as both a site for analytical work and another entrée into the broader political project of a cultural studies commitment.

A Cultural Studies Approach

Cultural studies, coming from the Birmingham tradition, identified four major themes (materialism, anti-essentialism, constructionism, and radical contextuality) to provide a framework for inquiry on the complexities of contemporary and emerging social formations. As an interpretive framework in which to situate a cultural studies approach to education, the four major themes of cultural studies will be applied to major works and issues in the educational discourse.

Materialism

An important beginning commitment within a cultural studies approach emphasizes a material reality that affects the social world in which people live, think, and work. Culture, while certainly central to the analysis, represents only a portion of that lived reality. The material aspects of schools, schooling practices, and the ideologies that calls them into existence have clear and direct impact on the lives of the students, families, and educators within those contexts. Paulo Freire, widely known by educational theorists but rarely an explicit part of conversations with classroom teachers, suggests that cultural identity, “cannot pretend to exhaust the whole meaning of the phenomenon ‘identity’ [and] [i]n truth, we are neither only what we inherit nor only what we acquire but, instead, stem from the dynamic relationship between what we inherit and what we acquire” (Freire 1998, p. 69). Bringing this focus on the dynamic relationship provides an opportunity to additionally take into account the materiality of people’s existence and seeks to understand the complexity of that interaction with the sociocultural; in short, culture is not enough.

Anti-Essentialism (or Anti Anti-Essentialism)

As relationships of power and culture vary within the interactions of the moment, cultural studies reminds us that they are not guaranteed. A cultural studies approach rejects any notion of essentialism that, a priori, closes the boundaries and possibilities of subjects. This is not to say that these relationships and dynamics do not exist, but rather the project becomes one of exposing and embracing the complexity of evolving relationships within the context of lived experience. It is within this complexity that Paul Gilroy discusses identity and its relation to race. His position rejects any “biological or epistemological absolutes” but recognizes that racial identity forms a political possibility for the construction of community, the organization of action, and an investigation of social power (Gilroy, 1991). In this way, “anti anti-essentialism” embraces both the concept that there are no essential, guaranteed relationships (i.e. determinism) and the concept that relationships can and do exist within a material context that matters.

Constructionism

Certainly quite a bit of theoretical work has taken up the question of the role of culture in the construction of human lived experience. Cultural studies rejects static notions of cultural relations as it recognizes the failure to recognize the complexity of social interactions as well as the tendency to reify misconceptions, stereotypes, and bias as truth. This common error can be seen clearly in the contemporary standards and accountability movement in education, suggesting that knowledge can be communicated directly from transmitter to receiver. This model, often described by critics in the intentionally loaded terms of bank deposits or bullets, assumes that the cultural identities of both parties are closed systems and that no mediation of the message occurs in the process of communication. This practice and ideological framework particularly holds true in schools and schooling. Conversely, by understanding culture as an open, fluid system serves to create the space for new possibilities, or what Grossberg (2005) calls better truths.

Radical Contextuality

Unapologetically calling for a rhetoric of complexity, a cultural studies approach refuses the reduction of theories of power to a unitary force, theories of culture to a homogenous state of being, or theory itself without an intentional, reflective analysis into the consequences of such intellectual choices. The context of each must continually be considered and reconsidered; it is insufficient to simply assume how power or culture power works. As in Raymond Williams’s notion of culture as a “field of struggle,” the project then becomes the pursuit of those better truths that create the space for a politics.

In a discussion of the need for cultural studies in higher education, Giroux, Shumway, Smith, and Sosnoski (1984) raise issues that have the potential to translate into critical work on public schooling more broadly. Giroux et al. argue for “an understanding of both the enabling and constraining dimensions of culture” (p. 1), in a similar way that a literacy scholar, Lisa Delpit (1995), argues that students should be explicitly taught the concept of a “culture of power.” She suggests that students—and for that matter, teachers—should come to terms with the notion that games of power are continually being played all around them. She writes,

I tell them that their language and cultural style is unique and wonderful but that there is a political power game that is being played, and if they want to be in on that game there are certain games that they too must play.

(p. 40)

Delpit’s concept of games within games not only provides for the enabling functions of home and social interactions but also begins to expose the constraints placed on members of the broader social context. These constraints, varied and shifting, are relations of power and at work on the students as they go through their own process of identity work. The exposure of these relations to students—in this case in the pursuit of literacy but certainly applicable to something like civic education—actively and explicitly engages them with the everyday field of struggle of contemporary culture.

Possibilities, Frameworks, and “What Is at Stake”

A quick review of the research in social education suggests that currently the themes of multiculturalism, education for citizenship (particularly in a global context), and information technology embedded within the curriculum hold particular prominence in the field. How these three strands weave together remains an interesting aspect to complex and multifaceted questions that cultural studies is particularly poised to address. This being the case, a “detour through theory” (see Grossberg, 1997) seems to be appropriate for a discussion of new directions for research in social education. This detour delineates a particular cultural studies approach that includes: (1) a description of the theoretical underpinnings of cultural studies, specifically as originating in the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies; (2) an exploration of how this theoretical frame has influenced my own research method; and (3) an offering of the spaces of possibility for continued intersection between cultural studies theoretical work and research in social education. In sum, this project seeks to seriously address Stuart Hall’s charge that “theory is always a detour on the way to something more important” (cited in Grossberg, 1997, p. 346).

This detour through theory promises new ways in which to engage in the project of social education. This particular cultural studies approach insists on including in our analysis both the social construction of structural constraints and the material effects of those constraints in lived experience. Constructions, like whiteness, for example, are precisely that—constructed—yet the material, tangible effects of these forces are laden with issues of power and privilege and play out in classrooms, playgrounds, and neighborhoods every day. How people form identities and multiculturalisms in response to global structures of power remains to be seen. They are untidy, sliding signifiers that are taken up strategically by people in ways multitudinous and contradictory. Both the analysis of the ways in which people do this and the suggesting of ways in which to utilize such formations politically needs to precisely be the project of social education (see Helfenbein, 2008).

The intersections of citizenship, multiculturalism, and technology—again, three major themes in social education research—do indeed sound familiar as one takes up a cultural studies approach. Questions emerge almost organically: how do information technology and its ability to connect and disconnect affect issues of citizenship, sovereignty, identity? What does citizenship mean in a multicultural context? In an increasingly global context? What do we mean by culture and, perhaps most importantly, how does culture mean within all of this? All three of these issues play important roles in what many—however and however poorly defined—call globalization. Cultural studies, as an approach, would add identity, power, agency, and structure (perhaps even space and place) to the mix and a tangled knot of forces becomes the object of analysis.

Furthermore, as noted above, cultural studies embraces an explicit political project in taking up its work; it seeks to intervene in the contemporary world. Kathy Hytten, an important scholar early in thinking through the connections of cultural studies and education in the US context, points to this commitment as an ethics. She writes,

[C]ultural studies is an expressly left intellectual project that is political, interventionist, socially committed, ethically charged and critical. Its aims are both to interpret cultural phenomenon and to intervene in the world in transformative an empowering ways.

(Hytten, 1998a, n.p.)

Explicitly claiming that cultural studies as an approach follows both intellectual and politically interventionist trajectories seems particularly relevant to the work of teacher education and the study of educative spaces. Certainly, what the project of teacher education attempts is an introduction to those who would teach both the realities of school and schooling in contemporary society but also a hope at instilling a degree of agency in prospective teachers. The hope lies in creating a sense that effective educators can do their work in schools in ways that contribute to a more progressive future in the broader social world. These ambitions not only reflect a fundamental tension in the work of teacher education (i.e. how does one simultaneously work for the state and attempt to transform the state) but also help explicate some of the appeal of cultural studies; for example, cultural studies’ own rejection of these constructed dichotomies and a willingness to embrace those inherent contradictions often presents way of working that both attracts and repels. To push this point even further, Hytten (1998b) suggests that cultural studies work includes an ethical imperative—a provocation that, writing from the position of education, writes back to cultural studies.

The ethical point is that academic work is not simply a commodity for other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Cultural Studies and Education: Engaging Heterotopias of Difference
• PART I Curriculum and Pedagogy
• PART II Difference and Diversity
• PART III Languages and Literacies
• PART IV Media and Technology
• PART V Ecology and Place
• PART VI Arts and Aesthetic Inquiry
• Index