Australian Women's Book Review: Online

Hecate's
Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434
Editor:  Barbara Brook
Contributing Assistant Editor:  Katie Hughes
Photomontage:  Set in Stone, Adele Flood

Volume 12, 2000

Thinking about bodies, pleasure, training and education

Taught Bodies, edited by Clare O'Farrell, Daphne Meadmore, Erica McWilliam & Colin Symes.
Eruptions: new thinking across the disciplines ser. vol 5,. Peter Lang 2000, 215 pp. Paperback. No price given. Available through amazon.com
Pedagogical Pleasures by Erica McWilliam
Eruptions: new thinking across the disciplines ser. vol 1., Peter Lang 1999, 197 pp. Paperback. No price given. Available through amazon.com

Reviewed by Alison Bartlett

Taught Bodies is collection of interdisciplinary essays stemming from a conference with the theme Pedagogy and the Body, held at QUT in 1997. I attended this conference with my four month old baby, thinking that a conference on the body would surely embrace the presence of this extra tiny body to whom I was so attached as a newly configured maternal and breastfeeding academic. But I misread the extent to which we can usurp what we have been taught as bodies and perhaps the extent to which we can apply our theorising about the body. As soon as my baby started gooing and gaaing in the ranked lecture theatre, I took her outside, reluctantly handed her over to her father and went back to plan B, as an academic attending a conference without her new baby. In one of the essays in this volume, Barbara Brook discusses the design of the lecture theatre in regulating behaviours such as this. She analyses it as:

a site of performance in which the attention of a large audience is expected to converge on the isolated figure of the performer … spatially, sight lines are carefully designed to focus on the lectern or other central point, which is often also the location of a fixed microphone; there is restricted access to the outside world: no external windows and a limited number of exits, all within view of the lecturer.

The effectiveness of this and any theatre design depends on the docile and (therefore) receptive bodies of its audience, something I implicitly understood and responded to as a nursing mother/conference attender, much to my chagrin.

As well as the lecture theatre space, other sites of performance for analysis in this volume include the examination, handwriting, sexual harassment, crime television, film, art exhibitions, physical theatre practices and Western traditions of teaching sexuality. All are linked through their relation to the training of bodies and, like pedagogies and bodies, are wildly eclectic. The chapters I enjoyed reading most were those that used examples of particular, lived bodies. Alison Jones' analysis of the physical training required to produce “nice, neat” handwriting, and the implications directly attributable to the writer's character, including traits of gender and race, are just fascinating, especially when particular memories, including her own, are analysed. Similarly, Brook's examples from her action research to amplify some of the assumptions made about “academic” bodies and spaces are eye-opening. The student responses to a junior female lecturer “impersonating” her straight white male colleague by reading the text of his lecture in a lecture theatre; or the physical barriers encountered by an invited speaker (on disability access) in a wheelchair, are two such examples. Bronwen Levy's foregrounding of race in her paper by quoting Aboriginal women's narratives about their education is also a salutary reminder of how easily whiteness can be forgotten.

There are several essays that importantly address the new managerialism of corporate universities and its translation into pedagogic practices. Caroline Hatcher emphasises the ways in which values like passion, caring and empathy are being “taught” to managers as a series of stylised bodily comportments as well as cognitive processes. While the ethics of a caring management appear to me to be applaudable, Hatcher questions the intention behind teaching emotions we've always accepted to be genuine, spontaneous and unrehearsed. Picking up on the pedagogical implications for such managerial discourses, Erica McWilliam's lively chapter scrutinises the ways in which teachers are being asked to redesign themselves as corporate professionals to service clients and consumers, where “corporate logos, learning packages and snappy briefcases replace temper tantrums as well as Tupperware lunchboxes”. McWilliam's image of the “well-worn” teacher, and Bronwen Levy's later speculation on the teacher's cardigan, seem to signal the demise of my wardrobe, something I'm always conscious of when I encounter nifty-suited colleagues from business and public relations.

While McWilliam argues that teaching is now being undervalued with the emphasis on student-centred learning and teachers facilitating, Kirkpatrick and Thorpe suggest that the “personality cult” of teachers as passionate, caring, charismatic performers is, paradoxically, being promoted in the coverage of the Australian Awards for University Teaching. I found this a particularly fascinating discussion. The authors argue that the rhetoric of the Awards reproduce a simplistic model of teaching as transmission, and learning as reception. Students are pathologised as deficient and needy, and constructed as “a universal, transcendental subject to be aroused, motivated, excited, and stimulated”. The emphasis on good teaching, according to newspaper coverage of all winning teachers, is on arousing “a desiring but initially resistant body”. This has all the suggestions of date-rape to me; perhaps more palatably, the authors use a medical metaphor to critique the prerequisite quality of teacher enthusiasm as “the vaccine teachers need to inoculate students against the potential boredom that university education would otherwise be”.

It was with a good dose of such teacherly enthusiasm that I read Pedagogical Pleasures, which shares an interest in many of the issues taken up by individual authors in Taught Bodies. As an academic who often struggles to find pleasure in the teaching aspect of my work, as a parent who will have to investigate schooling in a year or two, and as the partner of a student-teacher who continually questions my teaching practices, I was particularly interested in reading a book with this title. McWilliam writes from her position as a tertiary educator of teachers, particularly as supervisor of their practicum work, and as a long-time school teacher before that. This isn't a how-to text of pedagogical pleasures however, as McWilliam warns in the preface, although pleasure (even through teaching) may well be a biproduct of reading this book. Rather, McWilliam seeks to upset or “trouble” some of the current assumptions invested in current imperatives like “best practice” and “excellence in teaching”.

Drawing on her own experiences, on those of her students and colleagues and other narratives, McWilliam places issues like punishment, student-teacher relationships and learning pleasure alongside narratives from different times, so that current norms become unsettled as one of a number of continually shifting discourses on the topic. Current teaching values and policies come to be positioned not as the pinnacle of the “long march of progress”, but as just another discourse competing as “truth”. The historical contingency of teaching practices is made immediately apparent in the first paragraph, where McWilliam tells an anecdote of herself as a child of the 1950s listening to her mother and two uncles (all teachers) around the kitchen table laughing as one of them “re-enacted what he called 'the old one-two', vigorously shaking an imaginary recalcitrant student up and down, then side to side, much to the amusement of the entire family”. I couldn't help laughing at this (familiar) story, at the same time feeling some discomfort at my pleasure, recognising its inappropriateness as a practice today, and this is McWilliam's point. The anecdote feeds the proposition that pedagogical pleasures today are differently constituted and, following Foucault and Cryle, that the types of pleasures available to us can be, and have historically been, learnt.

Applying this to current issues, McWilliam boldly takes on the relative novelty of concepts like sexual harassment, child-abuse, and EQ, and traces the ways in which these concepts are utilised to enact increased and more covert forms of surveillance, self-regulation and policing of norms. Goleman's best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence, for example, is convincingly posited as a source of training in the increased control and governance of emotions, which is necessary to produce docile citizens for a globalised, multi-national, market-driven economy. And the managerialist discourses employed by Ramsden are set beside (shock! horror!) the discursive strategies of Freire's and McLaren's critical pedagogy of a decade earlier. McWilliam rarely takes up a position of judgement herself (contrary to my desire), explaining that she is “more interested in the play across elements within the discursive organization of relational pedagogy than in pronouncing on their wisdom or otherwise”.

I enjoyed this book increasingly, perhaps having learnt by the end to take pleasure from McWilliam's playful paralleling of discourses and their moral imperatives, and also because the matter of bodies becomes increasingly important. In the “Body to Body” chapter (as against “face-to-face” teaching) the differences made by gendered and raced bodies are teased apart from the popular (Hollywood-produced) images of influential professors, and the appearance of authority is dismantled as a series of stylised poses in the performance of knowledge. Our recent reinvention as providers of learning modules and flexible delivery is probed in terms of the teacher's (bodily) absence and the differently experienced pleasures this entails. And public media events like the Australian Awards for University Teaching and the Rock Eisteddfod are later mobilised to complicate the “quality” discourses of “teaching excellence” being promoted in (or imposed on) educational institutions as enterprising organisations. In this text, every key work is given “the old one-two”.

McWilliam uses a broad sweep of texts, from a private school master's meditation on Socratic values to Jane Gallop's application of Lacanian psychoanalysis to her accusation of sexual harassment from female students. Policy documents and government reports are set alongside tabloid newspaper cuttings and poststructuralist theory. And through all this is laced what is playfully called “smartarserie”: “the vital work of remediating the irony deficiency that is a hallmark of so many academic texts on teaching”. This highly accessible, thoughtful and provocative text will be of interest to educators, poststructuralists, feminists, parents and pleasure-seekers everywhere.

Alison Bartlett teaches body-to-body and distance education in Toowoomba at USQ. She has recently edited a collection of essays with Gina Mercer called Postgraduate Research Supervision: Transforming (R)elations (forthcoming, Peter Lang).

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434		Editor: Barbara Brook Contributing Assistant Editor: Katie Hughes *Photomontage: Set in Stone, Adele Flood*
Volume 12, 2000

Thinking about bodies, pleasure, training and education Taught Bodies, edited by Clare O'Farrell, Daphne Meadmore, Erica McWilliam & Colin Symes. Eruptions: new thinking across the disciplines ser. vol 5,. Peter Lang 2000, 215 pp. Paperback. No price given. Available through amazon.com Pedagogical Pleasures by Erica McWilliam Eruptions: new thinking across the disciplines ser. vol 1., Peter Lang 1999, 197 pp. Paperback. No price given. Available through amazon.com Reviewed by Alison Bartlett Taught Bodies is collection of interdisciplinary essays stemming from a conference with the theme Pedagogy and the Body, held at QUT in 1997. I attended this conference with my four month old baby, thinking that a conference on the body would surely embrace the presence of this extra tiny body to whom I was so attached as a newly configured maternal and breastfeeding academic. But I misread the extent to which we can usurp what we have been taught as bodies and perhaps the extent to which we can apply our theorising about the body. As soon as my baby started gooing and gaaing in the ranked lecture theatre, I took her outside, reluctantly handed her over to her father and went back to plan B, as an academic attending a conference without her new baby. In one of the essays in this volume, Barbara Brook discusses the design of the lecture theatre in regulating behaviours such as this. She analyses it as: a site of performance in which the attention of a large audience is expected to converge on the isolated figure of the performer … spatially, sight lines are carefully designed to focus on the lectern or other central point, which is often also the location of a fixed microphone; there is restricted access to the outside world: no external windows and a limited number of exits, all within view of the lecturer. The effectiveness of this and any theatre design depends on the docile and (therefore) receptive bodies of its audience, something I implicitly understood and responded to as a nursing mother/conference attender, much to my chagrin. As well as the lecture theatre space, other sites of performance for analysis in this volume include the examination, handwriting, sexual harassment, crime television, film, art exhibitions, physical theatre practices and Western traditions of teaching sexuality. All are linked through their relation to the training of bodies and, like pedagogies and bodies, are wildly eclectic. The chapters I enjoyed reading most were those that used examples of particular, lived bodies. Alison Jones' analysis of the physical training required to produce “nice, neat” handwriting, and the implications directly attributable to the writer's character, including traits of gender and race, are just fascinating, especially when particular memories, including her own, are analysed. Similarly, Brook's examples from her action research to amplify some of the assumptions made about “academic” bodies and spaces are eye-opening. The student responses to a junior female lecturer “impersonating” her straight white male colleague by reading the text of his lecture in a lecture theatre; or the physical barriers encountered by an invited speaker (on disability access) in a wheelchair, are two such examples. Bronwen Levy's foregrounding of race in her paper by quoting Aboriginal women's narratives about their education is also a salutary reminder of how easily whiteness can be forgotten. There are several essays that importantly address the new managerialism of corporate universities and its translation into pedagogic practices. Caroline Hatcher emphasises the ways in which values like passion, caring and empathy are being “taught” to managers as a series of stylised bodily comportments as well as cognitive processes. While the ethics of a caring management appear to me to be applaudable, Hatcher questions the intention behind teaching emotions we've always accepted to be genuine, spontaneous and unrehearsed. Picking up on the pedagogical implications for such managerial discourses, Erica McWilliam's lively chapter scrutinises the ways in which teachers are being asked to redesign themselves as corporate professionals to service clients and consumers, where “corporate logos, learning packages and snappy briefcases replace temper tantrums as well as Tupperware lunchboxes”. McWilliam's image of the “well-worn” teacher, and Bronwen Levy's later speculation on the teacher's cardigan, seem to signal the demise of my wardrobe, something I'm always conscious of when I encounter nifty-suited colleagues from business and public relations. While McWilliam argues that teaching is now being undervalued with the emphasis on student-centred learning and teachers facilitating, Kirkpatrick and Thorpe suggest that the “personality cult” of teachers as passionate, caring, charismatic performers is, paradoxically, being promoted in the coverage of the Australian Awards for University Teaching. I found this a particularly fascinating discussion. The authors argue that the rhetoric of the Awards reproduce a simplistic model of teaching as transmission, and learning as reception. Students are pathologised as deficient and needy, and constructed as “a universal, transcendental subject to be aroused, motivated, excited, and stimulated”. The emphasis on good teaching, according to newspaper coverage of all winning teachers, is on arousing “a desiring but initially resistant body”. This has all the suggestions of date-rape to me; perhaps more palatably, the authors use a medical metaphor to critique the prerequisite quality of teacher enthusiasm as “the vaccine teachers need to inoculate students against the potential boredom that university education would otherwise be”. It was with a good dose of such teacherly enthusiasm that I read Pedagogical Pleasures, which shares an interest in many of the issues taken up by individual authors in Taught Bodies. As an academic who often struggles to find pleasure in the teaching aspect of my work, as a parent who will have to investigate schooling in a year or two, and as the partner of a student-teacher who continually questions my teaching practices, I was particularly interested in reading a book with this title. McWilliam writes from her position as a tertiary educator of teachers, particularly as supervisor of their practicum work, and as a long-time school teacher before that. This isn't a how-to text of pedagogical pleasures however, as McWilliam warns in the preface, although pleasure (even through teaching) may well be a biproduct of reading this book. Rather, McWilliam seeks to upset or “trouble” some of the current assumptions invested in current imperatives like “best practice” and “excellence in teaching”. Drawing on her own experiences, on those of her students and colleagues and other narratives, McWilliam places issues like punishment, student-teacher relationships and learning pleasure alongside narratives from different times, so that current norms become unsettled as one of a number of continually shifting discourses on the topic. Current teaching values and policies come to be positioned not as the pinnacle of the “long march of progress”, but as just another discourse competing as “truth”. The historical contingency of teaching practices is made immediately apparent in the first paragraph, where McWilliam tells an anecdote of herself as a child of the 1950s listening to her mother and two uncles (all teachers) around the kitchen table laughing as one of them “re-enacted what he called 'the old one-two', vigorously shaking an imaginary recalcitrant student up and down, then side to side, much to the amusement of the entire family”. I couldn't help laughing at this (familiar) story, at the same time feeling some discomfort at my pleasure, recognising its inappropriateness as a practice today, and this is McWilliam's point. The anecdote feeds the proposition that pedagogical pleasures today are differently constituted and, following Foucault and Cryle, that the types of pleasures available to us can be, and have historically been, learnt. Applying this to current issues, McWilliam boldly takes on the relative novelty of concepts like sexual harassment, child-abuse, and EQ, and traces the ways in which these concepts are utilised to enact increased and more covert forms of surveillance, self-regulation and policing of norms. Goleman's best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence, for example, is convincingly posited as a source of training in the increased control and governance of emotions, which is necessary to produce docile citizens for a globalised, multi-national, market-driven economy. And the managerialist discourses employed by Ramsden are set beside (shock! horror!) the discursive strategies of Freire's and McLaren's critical pedagogy of a decade earlier. McWilliam rarely takes up a position of judgement herself (contrary to my desire), explaining that she is “more interested in the play across elements within the discursive organization of relational pedagogy than in pronouncing on their wisdom or otherwise”. I enjoyed this book increasingly, perhaps having learnt by the end to take pleasure from McWilliam's playful paralleling of discourses and their moral imperatives, and also because the matter of bodies becomes increasingly important. In the “Body to Body” chapter (as against “face-to-face” teaching) the differences made by gendered and raced bodies are teased apart from the popular (Hollywood-produced) images of influential professors, and the appearance of authority is dismantled as a series of stylised poses in the performance of knowledge. Our recent reinvention as providers of learning modules and flexible delivery is probed in terms of the teacher's (bodily) absence and the differently experienced pleasures this entails. And public media events like the Australian Awards for University Teaching and the Rock Eisteddfod are later mobilised to complicate the “quality” discourses of “teaching excellence” being promoted in (or imposed on) educational institutions as enterprising organisations. In this text, every key work is given “the old one-two”. McWilliam uses a broad sweep of texts, from a private school master's meditation on Socratic values to Jane Gallop's application of Lacanian psychoanalysis to her accusation of sexual harassment from female students. Policy documents and government reports are set alongside tabloid newspaper cuttings and poststructuralist theory. And through all this is laced what is playfully called “smartarserie”: “the vital work of remediating the irony deficiency that is a hallmark of so many academic texts on teaching”. This highly accessible, thoughtful and provocative text will be of interest to educators, poststructuralists, feminists, parents and pleasure-seekers everywhere. Alison Bartlett teaches body-to-body and distance education in Toowoomba at USQ. She has recently edited a collection of essays with Gina Mercer called Postgraduate Research Supervision: Transforming (R)elations (forthcoming, Peter Lang).