Repositioning Academics as Public Intellectuals: Rethinking Early Childhood Teacher Education

• In Event: 58.082 - Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: 58.082-4 - Disrupting the Status Quo in Early Childhood Research: Shifting Toward New Possibilities

Abstract

This paper will focus on rethinking academics as public intellectuals (Author & Author, 2015; 2015; 2016); countering the present view of academics as service providers (Newson, 2004; Edmundson, 1997) as perpetuated by the neoliberal context of higher education (Apple, 2001; Cote, de Peuter, and Day, 2007; Giroux, 2005, 2007; 2013; Saunders, 2011a; 2011b; Marginson, 2004). We begin by constructing academics as public intellectuals (Giroux, 2013/2014; Said, 1996) with some foundational characteristics -- academics willing to think through and raise questions that may not be welcomed, face and question accepted practices and dominant doctrines, and engage with the corporatization of the university. In this manner, the public intellectual is “neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense of being, unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do” (Said, 1996, p. 23). Included in the discussion will be concrete examples of how an academic as public intellectuals is currently being enacted in an early childhood teacher education program and the necessary policies and structures that must exist in order to support this re-positioning of academics as public intellectuals. In particular, group publications questioning and confronting issues within the field (Agius, et al, 2015; Agius, et al, 2015), considering theories focused on the public intellectual and defining public intellectual in terms of the course, content taught, and the context will be shared.
Through this research, we are seeking to challenge the accepted discussions, practices, and conclusions about early childhood teacher education that are underpinned by neoliberalism. This includes interrogating single “truths” (for example, developmental milestones, universal child ) so easily part of the neoliberal agenda in early childhood and rethinking governing structures and policies that perpetuate neoliberalism. We use writing and in particular, narrative as “a way of understanding one’s own and others’ actions, of organizing events and objects into a meaningful whole, and of connecting and seeing the consequences of actions and events over time” (Chase, 2005, p. 656). Further, we find writing as a process, “a way of wondering, reasoning, connecting, questioning, creating, illustrating, and representing” (Pindedo-Burns, 2015, p. 167). Narrative invites access for all within the public to consider while also giving us as researchers and writers a new context in which to consider the choices within higher education (Leavy, 2009). Drawn from Arendt’s (1968/1994, 1958/1998, 2005) connections between political action and narrative (or storytelling), Berger (2013) describes how “telling a provocative story that stirs people to think what they are doing” (p. 4). This intent is the throughline for our narratives -- we present each narrative as a provocation to consider how the academic might be imagined as public intellectual.

Authors

• Jeanne Marie Iorio, Victoria University - Melbourne

• Clifton S. Tanabe, University of Hawaii - Manoa