Detoxing Practices: Challenging Pedagogical Objectives and Research Practices

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: The (Im)possibility of Methods in Curriculum Study and Teacher Education, and Its “Alternative” Investigation

Abstract

The proposed paper aims to reflect challenging practices for “traditional” systems of thought in German speaking theoretical and inclusive pedagogy. Both are concerned with educational practices (Benner, 2012), theoretical-critical approaches put educational terms “in crisis”; but then again both hardly ever reflect upon the politics of doing research that influence methods in educational research and styles of reasoning (Popkewitz, 1997). Starting from insights from pedagogical fieldwork to create an inclusive society, the paper will discuss traditions in academia and how they form reasoning that in turn norms practical work; the looping back from practices of refugee-work into a different scholarly thinking will be highlighted.
In a project called “detoxing narratives” researchers seek to actively include “other” voices like migrants, refugees, or dis/abled persons into the process of doing culture that builds upon all forms of narrations to provide possibilities to speak up and take part in this doing. In an associated reflexive research project, we analyze the practices and methods of storytelling and coming into practice of theoretical ideas: we gather data on the contents and structure of narratives, on the performances and interaction when telling and/or enacting, and finally we produce field notes for self-reference. This data is central to understand distinctive ways of doing culture and provides insights into the construction of self and other. In the reflection of the process of narrating the limitations of our scholarly work and the systems of reasoning involved in the German speaking context come into view. First, participatory approaches in the practices in our work challenge the understanding of disability that inclusive education in the German context mainly is about (Biewer, 2017). Second the discourse on education practice is separated from theorizing “other- or alienness” and from research on narration. Short: historic understandings and the separation of academic disciplines and discourses with their distinctive methods and scholarly interpretation limit research and therefore findings (cf. Biesta, 2011; 2007).
That said, the paper will engage with a critique of styles of reasoning that became the common sense of how “we” are professionalized to do educational research. It implies to re-exam the theoretical framework of education research to highlight possibilities of those approaches and to challenge concepts and theories, to “un-think” embodied research categories in education by broadening research perspectives to “foreign” discourses in humanities and social sciences (Bellmann, 2011). The analysis will include a discussion on research ethics as practices like the ones in the “detoxing”-project work with a certain presupposition and needs to be “de-colonised.” The overall question will be how the understanding of phenomena and action in research is possible and to what end the research perspective and methods might help or hinder “practical” work in workshops like the above mentioned. In that, the paper will contribute to methodological discussions, ethic considerations, and the question of “translations” between and for practices (whether in academia or pedagogical work) that are interacting on different levels and that are essential for what Hacking calls “looping effects” (Hacking, 1995).

Author

• Sabine Krause, TU Dortmund University