Megan Watkins

Discipline and Learn: Bodies, Pedagogy and Writing explores how discipline is typically construed as a form of subjection in contemporary educational thought and in critical and cultural theory more broadly. It provides a critique of this emphasis on the repressive aspects of discipline highlighting its enabling potential and role in the development of dispositions to learning. The book engages with the work of a range of theorists: Foucault, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty, Mauss and Spinoza and considers their usefulness in theorizing embodiment and learning in the teaching of writing in the early years of school. Emphasis, however, is placed on the work of Bourdieu and his notion of habitus melding theory and practice in an ethnography of contemporary classrooms. This text is invaluable reading for students and academics across the social sciences and humanities interested in questions of embodiment, affect and their relation to learning. This is the most thought-provoking book to be published on pedagogy in a long, long time. Conceptually elegant and empirically rich, it undercuts conventional wisdom and potentially rearranges how we think about teaching, learning and writing. It argues that students’ bodies not just their minds matter in learning, explaining how, in practice, the desire to learn is a mindful bodily disposition. And it shows how, through an enabling form of discipline, teachers can produce a scholarly habitus in all students, including the educationally disadvantaged and defiant. Jane Kenway, Professor of Education, Monash University Discipline and Learn: Bodies, Pedagogy and Writing an excellent book which makes an important contribution to our understanding of both pedagogy and the body and which is sure to spark debate in both fields. It is careful and judicious in its approach but still manages to be provocative and original. Nick Crossley, Professor of Sociology, University of Manchester

Discipline and Learn

Peter Knapp

A comprehensive reference text that examines how the three aspects of language (genre, text and grammar) can be used as resources in teaching and assessing writing. It provides an accessible account of current theories of language and language learning, together with practical ideas for teaching and assessing the genres and grammar of writing across the curriculum.

Technologies for Teaching and Assessing Writing

Genre, Text, Grammar

Catherine Driscoll

Greg Noble

Pedagogy is often glossed as the ‘art and science of teaching’ but this focus typically ties it to the instructional practices of formalised schooling. Like the emerging work on ‘public pedagogies’, the notion of cultural pedagogies signals the importance of the pedagogic in realms other than institutionalised education, but goes beyond the notion of public pedagogies in two ways: it includes spaces which are not so public, and it includes an emphasis on material and non-human actors. This collection foregrounds this broader understanding of pedagogy by framing enquiry through a series of questions and across a range of settings. How, for example, are the processes of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ realised within and across the pedagogic processes specific to various social sites? What ensembles of people, things and practices are brought together in specific institutional and everyday settings to accomplish these processes? This collection brings together researchers whose work across the interdisciplinary nexus of cultural studies, sociology, media studies, education and museology offers significant insights into these ‘cultural pedagogies’ – the practices and relations through which cumulative changes in how we act, feel and think occur. Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct opens up debate across disciplines, theoretical perspectives and empirical foci to explore both what is pedagogical about culture and what is cultural about pedagogy.

Megan Watkins

Books

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