The force of gardening: Investigating children's learning in a food garden
- Authors: Green, Monica , Duhn, Iris
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Journal of Environmental Education Vol. 31, no. 1 (2015), p. 60-73
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- Description: School gardens are becoming increasingly recognised as important sites for learning and for bringing children into relationship with food. Despite the well-known educational and health benefits of gardening, children's interactions with the non-human entities and forces within garden surroundings are less understood and examined in the wider garden literature. Using a relational materialist approach (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010) that considers the material artefacts that constitute a learning environment, this article examines children's interactions with the animate and inanimate life forces through three specific garden photographs. The photos belong to data derived from a study that examined food, ecology and design pedagogies in three Australian primary schools. This paper argues that children's interactions with the non-human materialities of a garden are a vital dimension of gardening practice. The agential powers of gardens have great capacity to mobilise and inform children's inhabitation of food gardens. © The Author(s) 2015.
Schoolchildren, governmentality and national e-safety policy discourse. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education.
- Authors: Hope, Andrew
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education Vol. 36, no. 3 (2015), p. 343-353
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- Description: The introduction of widespread school Internet access in industrialised countries has been accompanied by the materialisation of what can be labelled as a national school e-safety agenda. Drawing upon Foucault's notions of discourse and governmentality, this paper explores how e-safety policy documents serve to constrain the conceptual environment, seeking to determine and limit individuals' thoughts on this matter. Analysing UK and US government texts, it is argued that four main themes arise that subvert critical, informed debate about children online. Namely, the discursive construction of e-kids, the muting of schoolchildren's voices, the responsibilisation of students and ‘diagnostic inflation’ through realist risk discourses. These issues can be interpreted as an attempt to engender control through particular strategies of governmentality. While recognising that students may resist such attempts at control, it is concluded that the issue of children's digital rights need to be more prominent in e-safety policies.
Creep: the growing surveillance of students’ online activities
- Authors: Hope, Andrew
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Education and Society Vol. 36, no. 1 (2018), p. 55-72
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- Description: Recently there has been a growth in the surveillance of students' online activities. This has been facilitated not only by the increasing numbers of digital devices, but also through surveillance creep (Marx, 1998). Drawing upon this concept and associated ideas, including data creep, policy creep and concept creep, this paper explores the digital monitoring of students via classroom management software, social media surveillance and education apps. It is concluded that driven by commercialisation, commodification and normalisation surveillance creep is problematic insofar as it results in over-blocking, undermines digital rights, invades privacy, appropriates personal property and proprietorially harvests data. Language