Student researchers in the middle : using visual images to make sense of inclusive education

Using ‘visual narrative’ theoretically and practically, this paper explores issues of inclusive education, during a period of curriculum reform and renewal in Australia. In Australia, the middle years of schooling, Years 5 to 9, are well researched and known as a period when students disengage with learning and participation in schooling. Research in the middle years affirms the importance of engaging with ‘student voice’. In this special edition, we are aiming to highlight how the use of visual imagery can be a rich source of understanding, illustrating students’ self-knowledge of schooling. Methodologically we refer to our research approach as ‘visual narrative’. Other writers in this edition use the term ‘photo voice’. For researchers it is important to highlight the differing orientations that ‘visual narrative’ and ‘photo voice’ signify. The terms are not mutually exclusive but highlight differing research possibilities and emphasis. Our argument, through the use of visual narrative produced by middle years’ students, is that visual texts open out some innovative possibilities for understanding inclusive education and supporting new relationships with our research community. Such approaches are not new; however, in a field such as special education that purports to support marginalised groups, liberatory research methods are under-represented. This paper aims to open out these discussions and provide a way forwards for teachers and researchers interested in breaking apart why it is that inclusive education remains a never-ending struggle.

Healing the physical/spiritual divide through a holistic and hermeneutic approach to education

In this special edition of the journal, attention is being given to the two dimensions of spirituality and physicality. In this particular paper I argue that there is an unhelpful divide that is often assumed to exist between these two dimensions and that this divide can be transcended or healed' through a holistic and hermeneutic approach to education. Rather than give our focus to narrower concerns such as spiritual education and physical education, we ought instead to pursue education in such a way that it is understood to necessarily be inclusive of both the physical and the spiritual simultaneously. That is, our spirituality is necessarily embodied in the physical. In order to make this argument, references to holistic education shall mainly draw upon the works of Dewey and Gadamer.

Delight and revolution: literary studies, aesthetics and ideology

 A commissioned article for the special edition on the future of English as a discipline.

Who is he now? The unearthly David Bowie

The question that has led and organised this special edition on David Bowie draws provocative attention to the way his career has been narrated by the constant transformation and recasting of his star image. By asking who is he now? the edition recognises that Bowie is a chameleon figure, one who reinvents himself in and across the media and art platforms that he is found in. This process of renewal means that Bowie constantly kills himself, an artistic suicide that allows for dramatic event moments to populate his music, and for a rebirth to emerge at the same time or shortly after he expires. Bowie has killed Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke to name but a few of his alter-egos. In this environment of death and resurrection, Bowie becomes a heightened, exaggerated enigma, a figure who constantly seems to be artificial or constructed and yet whose work asks us to look for his real self behind the mask – to ask the question, is this now the real Bowie that faces us? Of course, the answer is always no because Bowie is a contradictory constellation of images, stories and sounds whose star image rests on remaining an enigma, and like all stars in our midst, exists as a representation. Nonetheless, with Bowie - with this hyper- schizophrenic, confessional artist – the fan desire to get to know him, to immerse oneself in his worlds, fantasises, and projections - is particularly acute. With the unexpected release of The Next Day ((Iso/Columbia) on the 8th March 2013, the day of his 66th birthday, Bowie was resurrected again. The album and subsequent music videos drew explicitly on the question of who Bowie was and had been, creating a media frenzy around his past work, fan nostalgia for previous Bowie incarnations, and a pleasurable negotiation with his new output. In this special edition, edited by life-long Bowie fans, with contributions from die-hard Bowie aficionados, we seek to find him in the fragments and remains of what once was, and in the new enchantments of his latest work.