Davies’s (1997a) focus on critical literacy highlights the importance of equipping learners not simply with knowledge but with the tools through which they can become their own knowledge producers. Davies is working within a poststructuralist framework and the research discussed here is based on observational data. Davies gives us the case of Mr Good, a […]

The fifth task that Davies notes is that we have to recognize the limits of any critique or potential transformation. Central to this is developing a reflexive awareness of ourselves as sentient beings and the place of language and meaning in the production of feeling. In this respect Lankshear et al. (1997: 83) describe how […]

Fourth, and relatedly, Davies indicates how we need to engage in moral and philosophical critique of discourse. This is not, however, to assert our moral superiority or ascendancy over others but it is to more fully understand how truth is constructed at different points in time and in different discourses. Gee (1996) points out how […]

Millard’s (1997) research illustrates the great variety of reading prac­tices that young people engage in both within and outside school. In this respect the third task that Davies urges is that we should read and speak ourselves into the possibilities of different discourses and contexts. We might, for example, ask what a cyborg conceptualization of […]

The second task that Davies suggests is to move beyond linear and rational thought and to embrace and celebrate multiple and contra­dictory ways of knowing. This is because this will help us to undermine the power of dominant discourses. It will also encourage movement through openness and openings and raise questions for us about the […]

Feminism has been extremely critical of the masculinity of Cartesian rationality and the concomitant separation of body and mind. In coming to learn this we might be encouraged to think that as feminists we therefore do not need to ‘know’ masculine forms of rationality as they have been ruled outside legitimate ways of feminist being […]

As Wittgenstein teaches us, the task of freeing ourselves from the intellectual pictures that hold us captive is not only immensely hard, it is never done, for we are always going to find ourselves held by new metaphysical mirages, fall for new temptations to forsake the ordinary. (Moi, 1999: xiv) I have described conceptual literacy […]

[A]rguing about what words (ought to) mean is not a trivial business — it is not ‘mere words’, ‘hair-splitting’, or ‘just semantics’ — when these arguments are over what I have called socially contested terms. Such arguments are what lead to the adoption of social beliefs and the theories behind them, and these theories and […]

The standard idea of a philosophical quibble concerns how thinkers answer or respond to a problem whose answer is seen as there to be found, as though the question or the problem were subordinate to some good reason that philosophy would simply recognise (rather than create) . . . But feminist questions have rarely taken […]

There is then a difference between claiming that experience does not give us the truth, and concluding that experience cannot tell us anything except stories. (Ramazanoglu and Holland, 1999: 387) Maynard (1994) comments that Harding’s (1987) conceptualization of ‘strong objectivity’ includes a critical scrutiny of the researcher’s own beliefs and cultural agendas. Indeed, one of […]