Karen Charman
Victoria University
Welcome to the first edition of the Journal of Public Pedagogies. This journal is a publication of the Public Pedagogies Institute (PPI). The focus of the journal is to publish articles that engage in discussion about learning and teaching outside formal educational institutions. These areas include arts, community engagement, social pedagogy, public history, work in and research on public institutions like museums, libraries, neighborhood houses, community centers, practice, research and evaluation in public pedagogies. The intent of this journal is to actively promote multiple ways of knowing and being in the world speaking within and to the public sphere. This journal celebrates the transformative articulations that express multidisciplinary conceptions of the public while challenging how these ways of being and knowing are pedagogical within the everyday.
The whole notion of what constitutes Public Pedagogies is something the Institute and this Journal sees as evolving. In our call for papers for our 2015 conference we were deeply informed by the work of Mike Burdick, Jennifer A. Sandlin and Michael P. O’Malley (2014) in their edited collection Problematizing Public Pedagogy and The Handbook of Public Pedagogy (2010). We were fortunate, through funding provided by Victoria and Deakin Universities, to have Jennifer Sandlin as one of our keynote speakers. Perhaps because of the neo-liberal and conservative times we find ourselves in or because the best ‘work’ occurs beyond the remit and often constraints of formal sites of learning and teaching the Public Pedagogies Institute has continued to grow. At our 2015 conference we collected responses to the question what is public pedagogy? This exploration takes us into other questions such as what is learning and what is the relationship of learning to the term pedagogy.
In some instances the very irreducibility of public pedagogies is what is engaging about the term.
What effect is neo-liberalism having on the term public? Can thinking educationally through the term public pedagogies create a space or an intervention?
Whose knowledge is valued in more formal institutions? It could be argued that an increasing shift toward vocational education within formal institutions of learning is completely reductive in the generation of other forms of knowledge.
In this inaugural journal issue you will find articles that reflect the breadth of our 2015 conference—Turning Learning Inside Out. Meghan Kelly engages the sometimes false binaries between institutional and community learning in a project undertaken in Kelabit Highlands. In her article ‘Public learning derived from institutional learning: the case study of the Kelabit Highlands Community Museum development’, the focus is on the reciprocal learning that occurs through studies abroad programs. Belinda MacGill in ‘Public Pedagogy: representational shifts in Indigenous political narratives’ looks at the problematics of the representation of indigenous people through contrasting murals painted by indigenous artists at the Geelong Powerhouse, and material culture in the South Australian Museum. She suggests the Geelong Powerhouse potentially offers meaningful micro encounters and within these encounters new notions of citizenship.
Debbie Qadri in ‘Public Art, public pedagogy and community participation in making’, argues for the recognition of community involvement in making public art. Often negated or considered less than other public art, this article attends to the richness and multi-layered experience of community art in public spaces. ‘Pocketing prayer, pedagogy and purple hair: A Story of Place and Belonging 2010 – 2015’ Flossie Peitsch problematizes knowledge bringing to the fore what may not normally be considered of value.
In ‘The deep end: pedagogy, poetry and the public pool’ informed by new materialism Lucinda McKnight explores causality and design in the public space of the swimming pool. Her expression of this pedagogy, perhaps the pedagogy of new materialism, is expressed poetically. In ‘The phenomenology of monologue writing as pedagogy’ Scott Welsh looks at the playwright’s practice of writing as an act of public pedagogy. In this article he looks at the use of monologue to create empathy in teacher education classes.
I hope you enjoy reading these articles, as we are extremely pleased with this first edition. Thank you to the peer reviewers for their work in supporting this first edition! I would also like to give a big thank you to Dr. Jayson Cooper, Assistant Editor and Claire Rafferty Editorial Assistant, for all of their work and for making editorial meetings fun. Lastly, a note of thanks to the College of Education, Victoria University, Melbourne Australia, for their generous grant that enabled us to get this edition up and running.
Dr. Karen Charman
Editor
President, Public Pedagogies Institute