Science Fiction Curriculum, Cyborg Teachers, and Youth Culture(s) is a collection of essays sutured together by their use of science fiction as a departure from contemporary educational «realities». The authors, inspired by the visions, styles, and insights of various science fiction texts, films, and rap music, seek to transform the future of educational possibilities. Science Fiction Curriculum offers alternative paths to current regressive educational practices, policies, and reforms, and invites readers to venture into uncharted dimensions.
"Critical Theory and Science Fiction: A Lens Into Technology in Education," looks to show that reflection is our quantum leap into a past that provides the reasons for our challenges in education. Through reflection, we gain perspectives on how to best change a future that will ultimately become our history. "This text is an important and much-needed contribution to the study and analysis of the issues of technology and science fiction and their relationship to curriculum as well as the broader field of education. Jackson develops a critical theory of technology. Rather than simply accepting technological advancements, the work demystifies and questions the impacts of technology in new, critical, insightful, and exciting ways. A must-read." -William M. Reynolds, Georgia Southern University, "Curriculum: A River Runs Through It" "Using science fiction as a way to look at contemporary education philosophy and practice would seem an unlikely technique, and so it is likely to succeed. Science fiction remains remarkably advanced over the education establishment, which like the military is always getting ready to deal with the previous situation. Utopia-Gr., u-topos-means nowhere, or, moving the space, now here. Only the arts anticipate the future because only the artist lives in the present." -Eric McLuhan, "The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake, and Laws of Media: The New Science" (Marshall McLuhan, co-author)
The essays in this book examine various forms of popular culture and the ways in which they represent, shape, and are constrained by notions about and issues within higher education. From an exploration of rap music to an analysis of how the academy presents and markets itself on the World Wide Web, the essays focus attention on higher education issues that are bound up in the workings and effects of popular culture.
In spite of Connie Willis’s numerous science fiction awards and her groundbreaking history as a woman in the field, there is a surprising dearth of critical publication surrounding her work. Taking Doomsday Book as its cue, this collection argues that Connie Willis’s most famous novel, along with the rest of her oeuvre, performs science fiction’s task of cognitive estrangement by highlighting our human inability to read the times correctly—and yet also affirming the ethical imperative to attempt to truly observe and record our temporal location. Willis’s fiction emphasizes that doomsdays happen every day, and they risk being forgotten by some, even as their trauma repeats for others. However, disasters also have the potential to upend accepted knowledge and transform the social order for the better, and this collection considers the ways that Willis pairs comic and tragic modes to reflect these uncertainties.
A New Youth? provides a cross-cultural perspective on the challenges and problems posed by young people's transition to adulthood. The authors address questions such as: What are the experiences of being young in different European countries? What can we learn about the differences of being young in non-European countries? Are young people developing new attitudes towards society? What are the risks associated with the transition of youth to adulthood? Can we identify new attitudes about citizenship? On a more general level, are there experiences and new social meanings associated with youth? The volume is comparative between various European and non-European countries in order to identify the emerging models of transition. These characteristics are connected with broader social, political and cultural changes: changes related to extended education, increasing women's participation in the labour market, changing welfare regimes, as well as changes in political regimes and in the representation and construction of individual identities and biographies, towards an increasing individualization. The work offers critical reflections in the realm of sociology of youth by providing broader understandings of the term 'youth'. The detailed analysis of new forms of marginality and social exclusion among young people offers valuable insight for policy development and political debate.
This revised edition of the Popular Culture Primer is an introductory text that traces the history of popular culture and cultural studies. Besides covering the traditional subjects such as the influence of the Frankfurt School and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, this book covers the cultural studies of science and technology, the biosciences, drugs, and sports as well as other often-ignored topics such as science fiction, fan cultures, and childhood studies. It looks at the impact these topics have on our understanding of education and popular culture. The Popular Culture Primer is an essential text for any class devoted to teaching the history and importance of the subject.
This edited volume supports implementation of a critical literacy of popular culture for new times. It explores popular and media texts that are meaningful to youth and their lives. It questions how these texts position youth as literate social practitioners. Based on theories of Critical and New Literacies that encourage questioning of social norms, the chapters challenge an audience of teachers, teacher educators, and literacy focused scholars in higher education to creatively integrate popular and media texts into their curriculum. Focal texts include science fiction, dystopian and other youth central novels, picture books that disrupt traditional narratives, graphic novels, video-games, other arts-based texts (film/novel hybrids) and even the lives of youth readers themselves as texts that offer rich possibilities for transformative literacy. Syllabi and concrete examples of classroom practices have been included by each chapter author
This second edition of Making Sense of Mass Education has been comprehensively updated and expands on the previous edition's structure of derailing traditional myths about education as a point of discussion. It also features two new chapters on Big Data and Globalisation and what they mean for the Australian classroom.
In this book, Morris explores the intersection of curriculum studies, Holocaust studies, and psychoanalysis, using the Holocaust to raise issues of memory and representation. Arguing that memory is the larger category under which history is subsumed, she examines the ways in which the Holocaust is represented in texts written by historians and by novelists. For both, psychological transference, repression, denial, projection, and reversal contribute heavily to shaping personal memories, and may therefore determine the ways in which they construct the past. The way the Holocaust is represented in curricula is the way it is remembered. Interrogations of this memory are crucial to our understandings of who we are in today's world. The subject of this text--how this memory is represented and how the process of remembering it is taught--is thus central to education today.
