Key Questions
- Where does education happen?
- How does the context (physical, cultural, emotional and intellectual) affect the process of education?
Examples in Reviewed Articles
Technologies of Context are those that focus on the environment, physical and otherwise, in which the educational activity happens. The first key question, Where does education happen? gives rise to technologies that delimit the physical and temporal space and structure of an educational activity. Thus, schools are technologies of Context, both in general (“Education happens in schools”), and in particular (Concordia University is a school). Though school is the most common concept within this realm of application, there are myriad specificities and divergent technologies that structure alternative approaches to where education is conducted. Schools themselves are not homogeneous, and elementary schools carry vastly different connotations to universities, for example, in terms of how the space is arranged, who is expected to learn there and what, when classes take place, who teaches them, how are they supposed to look. Beyond schools with their classes, there are workshops and culture circles and educational trips and family interactions, all of which can be considered educational depending on how they are leveraged for the educational mission.
The second key question, How does the context (physical, cultural, emotional and intellectual) affect the process of education?, complements the first one by considering how the non-physical context in which the educational activity happens affects it. This is a central question for critical pedagogy, clearly reflected in points 4, 9, 11, and 14 in Kincheloe’s concepts. Critical pedagogical approaches tend to depart from complex reconstructions and analyses of the students’ context to derive Methodologies and Lessons appropriate to the particular population in their given context. These analyses serve as tools of Context that establish an idea not just of how the world around the student is, but of how it should affect the intervention of the teacher.
Analysis of reviewed articles
The majority of the articles reviewed construct complex analyses of Context as a way to frame the teachers’ praxis and inform the structure of specific interventions. Gadotti (2008) does this at the most general level, contextualizing all liberatory educations within the current global political and socioeconomic climate. Then, he proposes the Utopia as a more specific contextual tool that will influence the praxis of any given teacher: by constructing the idealized world, the pedagogical activity is given direction and goal.
Fasching-Varner et al. (2020) elaborate on this use of Contextual tools, starting their own investigations by analyzing their own intellectual context and influences. This is different from the construction of Theory tools in other articles in that the construction of their intellectual history is not just created to answer Theory questions but also to provide an understanding of how and why the writers are informed by their medium when designing their own practice.
Moving closer to the student, Fasching-Varner et al. (2020) and Frankenstein (1987) are interested in the broad cultural context of the subject they are teaching, and they dedicate a substantial part of their article to constructing analyses of the general perception and influence of their subject on teachers, students, and the broader society. Their approaches are determined by these constructs in that they explicitly base the content of their interventions in addressing the specific issues that they perceive at this level.
Meanwhile, Elsasser and Irvine (1987), Sagaram (2020) and Zimmet (1987) start from close analyses of their student populations to construct the rest of their program. They describe specific interventions taking place in a particular time and place, and so their analysis is narrowly focused to the particular populations they are teaching. Though the populations are very different across the articles, the analyses the the authors construct are similar in shape and purpose: they assess the strengths of their student population and, more importantly, their issues and threats as members of underprivileged groups. Their interventions are then directed towards addressing them specifically.
Finally, Blikstein (2008) and McLean (2020) rely on observing the students’ context to derive specific interventions at the Lesson level. Though their initial program is not closely derived from their students’ particular context, it is still carefully analyzed to come up with activities that respond to and interact with the students’ environment and concerns. Frankenstein (1987), meanwhile, makes similar use of context to come up with topics for her mathematics lessons. These three approaches are very closely connected to the use of generative themes, and they illustrate how context analysis can serve as an integral part of developing not just programs that match the social interests of the student population, but also activities and interventions that respond to the moment-to-moment interests and concerns of the individuals participating in these classes.