This chapter explores much of the current research about the value and effect of the Arts in education and assists you to develop your own thinking about the importance of Arts education. This research is framed by an understanding of developing modes of engagement in Arts education, and a discussion of the importance of personal agency and Arts education as ‘praxis’. Finally, the notions of learning ‘in’ and ‘through’ the Arts are explored to enable you to understand the types of learning in which your students can engage.

Throughout this book, you have been challenged to look at the role the Arts play in society and in education. Various methodologies have been suggested and each specific Arts area has been broken down for you. The tools are now in place for you to organise Arts learning and teaching in your classroom. You also have reflective tools to apply to the learning and teaching you undertake. In this final chapter, we challenge you to imagine your Arts-rich classroom. What do you want the Arts to look like and how do you want your students to engage in them? These decisions will reflect your vision and rationale for teaching the Arts and your many experiences in working with the Arts as you have progressed through this book. These decisions are best made by the person who decides the ‘what’ and ‘how’ for their students every day: you.

This chapter will explore the fundamentals of drama, both as a skill and as a methodology for teaching other curricular requirements. It also offers practical activities and assessment practices, as well as theoretical underpinnings and methods to further develop teaching methodologies beyond this text. You will have the confidence and knowledge to engage learners of all ages and abilities to explore their own ideas through dramatic performance and to evaluate the performance of others. The key to drama is not only the development of skills, but also the ability to apply processes and value these processes as equal to the end product of a drama activity. The application of drama in literacy, numeracy and other areas of learning will be embedded throughout. In Australia, much of the focus on drama in the classroom is from a Western perspective.

The chapter outlines the long history of the maker’s knowledge tradition from Hippocrates to Vico. It explores five specific paradigmatic moments during which the fundamental intertwinement between making and knowing was problematised. First, it addresses the Hippocratic cogitations on the nature of knowledge as a practical and theoretical activity. Second, it engages with Plato and Aristotle’s desperate attempts to purify episteme from any practical concerns. Third, it follows the transformation of the concept of episteme in the post-Aristotelian debates on the so-called stochastic arts. Fourth, it explores how the very concept of ‘knowledge by making and doing’ is gradually concocted in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Finally, it shows how the idea of knowing by making is gradually integrated into the epistemology of modern science and history since Giordano Bruno.

This chapter traces social medicine to Shibli Shumayyil, a medical doctor and key figure of the Nahḍa, an intellectual and cultural movement that spanned from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. He envisioned social medicine as a tool for social reform, diagnosing its social ills, and proposing a cure. Shumayyil and his successors rejected the colonial justification of social medicine, instead promoting social medicine as a means to free people from all kinds of oppression, ignorance, and injustice. Throughout the twentieth century until today, as poverty, authoritarianism, and social conflicts escalated in the Arab world, doctors increasingly became advocates for the marginalized, the poor, and the oppressed. The chapter examines the work of several revolutionary doctors in Tunisia, Sudan, and Egypt, who used their practice as a form of protest, praxis, and critique. Not only did these doctors embody the meaning that Guérin originally gave to social medicine but they also incorporated Shumayyil’s idea of medicine as a form of progressive clinical sociology.

In this final chapter, we would like to extend the metaphor of the ‘unseen half’ by exploring how sociological theory itself is ‘unseen’ in early childhood, primary and secondary educational contexts, at least outside of pre-service teacher education and academia itself. When stories about education settings, educational-related issues or educational research findings enter the public milieu via the media, there is rarely any explicit acknowledgement of the theoretical perspectives that might have informed the analysis of the story, issue, or ‘problem’. We propose that ignoring these theoretical influences is due less to a lack of theoretical presence and more to theory’s unfortunate relegation to the background as bland, unintelligible, irrelevant or even elitist.

This book concludes by reiterating the importance of avoiding grand narratives in research on sustainable development in international law. While each chapter revolves around its unique theme, my adoption of TWAIL helped unite these separate parts to tell a single story on Africa’s intersection with sustainable development’s legal evolution, conceptualisation, and implementation. Even so, this book is more than just writing about sustainable development or Africa as it deeply explores how international law should evolve, going forward. Finally, I end this book by drawing on TWAIL’s hopeful agenda by foreshadowing my future research interests in re-reading the law and politics of ecological crises as everyday occurrences and not as episodic events in international law.

African American teachers are in high demand in urban schools. Presupposing these spaces as operating within a matrix of domination for African Americans in the United States, in this chapter, two African American scholars of differing genders model womanist thinking as politic educational ethics and praxis. hooks, Fanon, and Lorde elucidate the Black subject’s ontological condition as a problem of spectatorship. Womanist theory responds to sociopolitical forces devaluing the self as minoritized subject. Through critical self-reflexivity that acknowledges the debilitating white normative gaze and the inner turmoil of its subjugation, womanist thinking offers a normative syntax of freedom. A womanist praxis of radical subjectivity and a pedagogy of love excavates one’s inner visions for oneself and for one’s students that engenders self-authorship.

This article discusses David Tracy’s implicit and explicit reflection on the church as a community of Christian praxis. The church is both a social and a theological reality, just like its theological partner-reality ‘the world’. This means that no concrete expression of the Christian church may pronounce itself wholly or uniquely adequate to its theological field; neither can any boundary between ‘church’ and ‘world’ be rendered theologically determinate or fundamental. So Tracy’s thinking focuses on the centre of the church, not on its boundaries. As gift and sacrament, the church participates in God’s grace as disclosed in God’s self-manifestation in Jesus Christ. In bearing witness to this event, the church’s critical and self-critical praxis of love is borne upon mystical-prophetic discourses and dialogues with otherness without and within. Ecclesiology, therefore, emerges only in fragments and not as a closed system. Tracy’s ecclesiology is everywhere a function of an account of God and reality. A Christian church that learns a Tracyean route to naming God aspires actively, contemplatively, and fragmentarily to realise itself in answering fashion as an ‘institution of love’.

This chapter explores activism as an ethical practice and in doing so discusses the relationships between social life, political action, and ethical values. Anthropologists have approached the ethics of activism through ethnographies of activist movements’ moral critiques of the present, their utopian imaginaries for the future, and the creation of new political subjects and ways of being. This chapter draws on those anthropological discussions of social movements, putting work on union activism in Argentina in dialogue with ethnographies of feminist, queer, and alter-globalization activism, as well as voluntary social action. Drawing on the experience of unionism among public sector employees in Argentina, I show how activism builds from the understanding of an essential being or character that can be cultivated as a collective ethical subject to enable action in the world to change the world (praxis). This takes considerable work on the self and selves, not all of which is fully open to reflection. I argue that by interpreting practices of organization as ethical practices, we recognize the relational aspect of politics and the importance of affective processes of collective self-cultivation alongside rational and material imperatives to engage in political struggle.

Abstract: As a product of constructed imaginations, national identity is fragile, especially in pluralistic democracies where cohesion depends on the faithful execution of an aspirational ideal, such as “the American Creed,” a statement about fairness and merit. Cohesion is difficult to build and easily fractured. When fractured, the humanities may provide the material needed to stitch together a new identity, one that emerges out of the old. Repairing fractures and maintaining a cohesive democratic identity is the work of citizens serving as custodians of democracy. But failure is always a possibility.

The work of Paulo Freire has had an enduring impact on the development of progressive, democratic pedagogies around the world. Freire’s ideas on democracy emerged from his experiences with impoverished communities in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. For Freire, democratic education is a part of the process of humanization: becoming more fully human through transformative, critical, dialogical reflection and action. From a Freirean perspective, democracy is not just a form of government but a mode of being: a distinctive approach to living, with others, in a world that is always dynamically in the making. Democratic life demands a willingness to live uncertainties and an acknowledgment of our incompleteness. Freire delineates a number of key democratic virtues, including humility, openness, tolerance, and a willingness to listen. He argues against both authoritarian and “anything goes” pedagogical orientations. This chapter discusses Freire’s views on democracy and education in the light of his wider ontological, epistemological, and ethical position, and considers the ongoing significance of his ideas in the twenty-first century.

This chapter analyses the shape of liberation interpretation, emphasizing an alignment between the factors that constitute a liberationist hermeneutic of contemporary reception and the factors that constitute a liberationist hermeneutic of biblical text production.

We discuss the broad organizational power-structures that regulate the virtues of doing science, the values upheld, and the introduction of novices into the scientific community. Aristotle’s scheme of knowledge is used to introduce the relevance of a value-laden praxis, of phronesis, which is the virtue of ‘doing’. We discuss these ideological issues in the context of classic philosophical notions put forth by Hannah Arendt (and her work on action) and Bruno Latour (and his work on praxis, actor networks, and inscription devices). This chapter thus serves as a broad foundation for analyses of the ways in which scientific virtues are deeply intertwined with the activities of psychological science. It sketches psychology as action-based and virtue-laden, based on the notion of a dynamic praxis consisting of interacting agents.

The previous chapters, in exploring various aspects of human rights and the implications of seeing social work as a human rights profession, have touched on many important practice issues in relation to social work. The issues are not new. Ethics, social control, the place of policy and advocacy, professionalism, the role of expertise, linking the personal and the political, cultural relativism, need definition, empowerment and so on are all familiar and are frequently contested within social work. In the preceding chapters, however, they have arisen not out of a consideration of social work per se but rather out of a discussion of human rights and the possible implications of a human rights approach to practice. Various social work practice principles emerged from these discussions, and the purpose of this chapter is to bring these together in order to derive an overall picture of human rights-based social work. This will be done around three organising themes: theoretical foundations, empowerment and contextual/universal issues.

This chapter develops a critical language ethnography approach to community-based research. The authors propose that this approach can offer rich qualitative insights into those everyday interactions through which children and adults acquire and impart locally accepted norms for language use in their communities while also co-constructing social identities and collective practices that can resist and change oppressive structures. The chapter reviews ethnographic projects that work not only to depict the cultural underpinnings of community life but that also seek to disrupt those structural forces that produce inequities across communities. By integrating insights from the fields of Language Socialization (LS) and Critical Ethnography (CE), the authors seek to bring into conversation complementary subfields within anthropology, sociolinguistics, and education that share a commitment to community-centered research. The chapter is organized thematically around three themes of power, praxis, and positionality and it provides a critical case analysis to illustrate the ways in which a critical language ethnography can be used to analyze everyday interaction in communities.