Pedagogies of care, care-full epistemological practice and ‘other’ caring subjectivities in enabling education

ABSTRACT

This article explores and conceptualises the emergent and historic presence of a feminised pedagogical praxis in Australian Enabling (university access) programs. Analysing a participatory project at a regional university that sought to map these pedagogies, it specifically aims to visibilise the complexities of careful pedagogical practices which challenge deficit and assimilationist renditions of equity and inclusion, and which foster the possibilities for re-narrativisations of self, community and other. Such pedagogical practices not only develop ethics and practices of care but foreground careful recognition of the epistemological contributions of subjects from non-traditional backgrounds. These pedagogies of difference and other pedagogical subjectivities are situated within a broader context in which hegemonic careless masculinities render these transformative feminised pedagogies invisibilised, devalued and denigrated. Our paper concludes with suggestions for the ways in which these pedagogies of care and other caring subjectivities might be nurtured and rendered powerful within our current context.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This does not include: (a) a course leading to a higher education award; or (b) any course that the Minister determines is not an enabling course for the purposes of this Act.

2 We refer to teaching staff participants interchangeably as teachers/teaching staff/academics/educators to reflect the different ways that the participants referred to themselves and their colleagues.

3 This differs for example from the more generic use of affect/desire as a key thematic in understanding the nature of power/resistance in critical thinkers such as Guattari and Delueze (2004) and Massumi (2015) particularly with our focus on the gendered nature of affective relationships of power. However, it does border with the deeply relational, micropolitical and emergent focus of (political) possibility in Massumi's recent work (2015) and Deleuzean work which identifies how desire/affect manifests in different subjectivities of active and reactive desire for example, and with the focus on the formation of particular subjectivities as key to our understanding of the (re)production and possibilities of disruption of unequal power differentials and hierarchies (Robinson 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) University of Newcastle [grant number Seed Grant ‘Mapping Enabling Pedagogies’].