Situating preparedness education within public pedagogy

Both ‘disaster preparedness’ and ‘public pedagogy’ have been broadly defined and diversely utilised. Preparedness has been dealt within the disciplines such as civil engineering, sociology of disasters, public health and psychology, rather than education. Recently, inquiries into the learning and teaching of preparedness is increasing in the field of education, and some of them position preparedness education within the field of public pedagogy. However, conceptual discussion as to how and why the two fields are associated has been limited. The primary aim of this paper is to fill this gap by drawing on public pedagogy literature that conceptualises ‘publics’ and ‘pedagogies’. By doing so, the paper attempts to respond to Burdick et al’s call for Problematizing Public Pedagogy.

Seeing disadvantage in schools: exploring student teachers’ perceptions of poverty and disadvantage using visual pedagogy

This paper describes exploratory research into the development of innovative visual pedagogies for investigating how pre-service student teachers articulate their views about the effects of poverty on educational attainment. Social class emerges as the strongest factor in poverty and educational disadvantage in the UK. The resulting issues are often awkward for students to discuss and conventional pedagogies may not have effective ‘reach’ here. Findings from this study showed that the visual methods deployed gave students pedagogically well structured spaces for the expression and exchange of a diversity of views about poverty and social class, engaging them in both heated discussions and prolonged ‘silences’. However, the pedagogies did not challenge the stereotypical deficit models of ‘the poor’ which some students expressed. Nevertheless, we argue that reconfigured versions of these visual pedagogies have considerable potential for innovative social justice work in teacher education.