Teaching and Teacher Education 22 (2006) 753–758

Editorial

Guest editors’ introduction to special theme issue:Marginalised pedagogues?

For Jose Elio Anteliz, Herbert Radcliffe-Brownand Maurice Danaher

The words that a father speaks to his children inthe privacy of home are not heard by the world,but, as in whispering galleries, they are clearlyheard at the end, and by posterity.

Jean Paul Richter

To sum up the whole with a ‘Saw’ of much use,Be just and be generous,—don’t be profuse!—Pay the debts that you owe,—keep your word toyour friends,But—DON’T SET YOUR CANDLESALIGHT AT BOTH ENDS!!—For of this be assured, if you ‘go it’ too fast,You’ll be ‘dish’d’ like Sir Guy,And like him perhaps, dieA poor, old, half-starved, Country Parson at last!

Richard Harris Barham, ‘‘The Lay of St. Cuth-bert; Or The Devil’s Dinner-Party: A Legend of theNorth Countree’’, The Ingoldsby Legends

Yet in my lineaments they traceSome features of my father’s face.Lord Byron, ‘‘Parisina’’

1. Background and rationale

Writing in the International Handbook of Tea-

chers and Teaching, Good, Biddle, and Goodson(1997) referred to ‘‘the recent flowering of works onthe lives of teachers’’ (p. 672). Although this‘‘flowering’’ can be traced to earlier publications(see for example in the Australian context Connell(1985) and Turney, Eltis, Towler, & Wright, 1986),its existence is reflected in the creation and expan-

sion of Special Interest Groups in various Educa-tional Research Associations: Lives of Teachers inthe American Educational Research Association;Teachers’ Work and Lives in the AustralianAssociation for Educational Research; PrimarySchool Teachers’ Work in the British EducationalResearch Association; and Continuing ProfessionalDevelopment for Teachers and Leaders in Schoolsin the European Educational Research Association.In addition, there is the publication of texts such asthe collections edited by Goodson and Hargreaves(1996) and Tattam (1998), entitled respectivelyTeachers’ Professional Lives and Tales from the

Blackboard; books like Huberman, with Grounauer,and Marti’s (1993) The Lives of Teachers andMuchmore’s (2004) A Teacher’s Life: Stories of

Literacy, Teacher Thinking and Professional Devel-

opment; and texts written by authors who havecontributed to this volume, including June A.Gordon’s (2000, 2002) The Color of Teaching andBeyond the Classroom Walls: Ethnographic Inquiry

As Pedagogy. There are also the cinematic repre-sentations of educators’ lives, from Robin Williamas John Keating in Dead Poets Society (1989) toJulie Walters’ memorable portrayal of Dame MarieStubbs in Ahead of the Class (2005).

These developments are manifestations of therecognition of the crucial links between what

educators do and who they are—that is, betweentheir work and their identities. Given the ‘‘flower-ing’’ noted by Good et al. (1997), it is timely tointerrogate those links in relation to a particulartopic: the impact on educators of teaching so-called‘minority’ learners. By this term we mean thediversity of individuals and groups who by onemeasure or another are defined as ‘different’ fromthe ‘mainstream’, including on the basis of age,

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ethnicity, gender, location, political and/or religiousaffiliations, and socioeconomic position. Given that‘difference’ often shades into ‘deficit’ and ‘discrimi-nation’, it is necessary to consider the extent towhich educators teaching these learners see them-selves as ‘marginalised’—and/or perhaps as ‘privi-leged’ to be working with these learners, as‘innovators’ because they are away from thesurveillance directed at ‘mainstream’ educationand so on. Through a close examination of severalincarnations of this ‘difference’, we have sought toexplore in this special theme issue of Teaching and

Teacher Education the character and existence of‘‘marginalised pedagogues’’ through posing suchquestions as the following:

� What attracts educators to teaching learners whoare ‘different’ or ‘minority’?� What distinctive challenges and opportunities for

the educators’ work arise from their interactionswith ‘minority’ learners?� What are the effects of such interactions on the

educators’ identities?� What are the implications of these international

studies for extending understandings of botheducators’ lives and the education of ‘minority’learners?

The aims of the special theme issue have been asfollows:

� to represent a broad diversity of internationalstudies of the work and identities of educatorsteaching ‘minority’ learners;� to investigate whether and how these educators

construct themselves as ‘marginalised’ and/or asother kinds of pedagogues;� to link that investigation to the broader literature

on educators’ lives and the education of ‘minor-ity’ learners.

2. Process and structure

Agreement in principle to the proposed themeissue having been gained from the journal editors,the issue guest editors contacted a number ofpotential contributing authors from among theirshared professional networks and others known tobe working in the field of educators’ work andidentities. Indeed, the interest was so great that itbecame necessary to negotiate with some of theauthors a proposed additional theme issue in aseparate journal.

Each article published here draws on the longstanding and substantial scholarship of its respec-tive author/s and has been anonymously peerreviewed by at least three reviewers using the‘double blind’ refereeing system and then carefullycopyedited by at least one of the guest editors, tomaximise the quality of the published articles. Thepenultimate versions of the articles were sent toHelen Currie, who as Adviser for Minority EthnicAchievement in the Children’s Services Departmentat the Wokingham District Council in Wokinghamin the United Kingdom has been able to providedistinctive insights into the impact on educators’identities of working with ‘minority’ learners.

What has resulted from this process has been thepublication of seven articles representing the workand identities of educators in six countries (Aus-tralia, Japan, Nigeria, Italy, the United States ofAmerica and Canada) engaging with six sources of‘minority’ existence (otherness, immigration, mobi-lity, ethnicity, urban location/socioeconomic statusand sex, sexual and gender differences). We contendthat this diversity of coverage encapsulates much ofthe corresponding diversity of lived experience inthe early 21st century and that the authors’ analysesof these manifestations of diversity constitute asignificant contribution both to celebrating thepositive and enabling dimensions of such ‘minority’existence and to disrupting and subverting its lesspositive and more disempowering implications.

In the first article, Phyllida Coombes and GeoffDanaher, respectively former and current lecturersin the innovative Skills for Tertiary EducationPreparatory Studies (STEPS) pre-undergraduate,preparatory program at Central Queensland Uni-versity in Australia, explore the STEPS students’minority status arising from their ‘otherness’ inrelation to traditional university students on ac-count of their often damaged schooling experiencesand other life circumstances. The authors explainthe success of the STEPS teachers’ strategies oftransformative learning in order to boost thestudents’ success. In doing so, the teachers’ workand identities are positively influenced by helpingtheir students to achieve in an often uncomprehend-ing and sometimes hostile broader universityenvironment and in doing so to move from themargins to the educational centre.

June A. Gordon, Associate Professor of Educa-tion at the University of California, Santa Cruz inthe United States of America, uses the second articleto depict the reverse situation of particular groups

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being assigned to the educational margins throughher portrayal of the generally negative educationalexperiences of ‘newcomers’ or immigrants in Japan(although these experiences extend also to certainJapanese ethnic minorities). That portrayal revealsthe correspondingly negative impact on teachersallocated to working with these students, generallywith inadequate training and a lack of under-standing of the students’ needs and aspirations.Gordon argues that there are integral relationshipsbetween the teachers’ identities and the perceivedstatus and representational strategies on the onehand and those identities and the nation’s ongoingrenegotiation of its identity in relation to successivewaves of immigrants on the other.

In the third article, Abdurrahman Umar, Direc-tor of Academic Services at the National Teachers’Institute in Nigeria, focuses on the teacher educa-tion curriculum’s efficacy in preparing teachers fortheir work with disadvantaged children, particularlythose of nomadic pastoralists, in that country. Notsurprisingly, Umar finds a considerable dissonancebetween the curriculum and the teachers’ existentialrealities, on the basis of which some teachers haveurged significant changes to both that curriculumand the opportunities for and strategies of profes-sional development available to them. Umar con-tends that, while in many ways the teachers of thenomadic pastoralists constitute ‘margins withinmargins’ by being disadvantaged in an alreadypoorly paid and undervalued profession in Nigeria,their desire for professional growth represents thegrounds for some optimism for the future.

Francesca Gobbo, Professor of InterculturalEducation and Anthropology of Education at theUniversity of Turin in Italy, uses the fourth articleto investigate another site of minority status arisingfrom mobility: the Veneto attrazionisti viaggianti orfairground and circus people. Gobbo analysessomething that is often overlooked: the pedagogicaland enculturating role performed by parents andother family members. In doing so she asserts thatthese people are indeed marginalised pedagogues onaccount of their teaching their children how to liveand work ‘along the margins’ and ‘across theborders’ of the Italian economy and society.

In the fifth article, Alberto J. Rodriguez, Associ-ate Professor at San Diego State University in theUnited States of America, deploys the vividmetaphor of ‘the politics of domestication’ and‘curriculum as pasture’ to argue that the sciencecurriculum constitutes a site of uncritical acceptance

of the status quo and hence of perpetuating themarginalisation of various groups of learners,including those from ethnic minorities. In thatcontext, the work and identities of Latina/o teachereducators and pre-service teachers are placed underconsiderable strain and their efforts to enhancelearning outcomes for children from those ethnicminorities are rendered problematic. Rodriguezargues that strategies are required urgently tochallenge and contest this politics of domesticationand curriculum as pasture.

Gerald J. Brunetti, Professor of Education at SaintMary’s College of California in the United States ofAmerica, turns in the sixth article to what he terms‘resilience under fire’ to characterise the work andidentities of experienced, inner city high schoolteachers in the United States. He uses the results ofquantitative and qualitative research to elicit thevaried perspectives of teachers at Presidio HighSchool in a large Californian city and in particularthe reasons that they have remained in jobs that areoften stressful and highly demanding as a result ofworking with students from ethnic minorities who aregenerally socioeconomically impoverished. Brunetticontends that greater support mechanisms wouldenhance the teachers’ resilience under fire andpromote their retention in greater numbers.

In the seventh and final article, Andre P. Grace,Professor at the University of Alberta in Canada,focuses on the possibilities and problems of ‘writingthe queer self’—that is, of using autobiography tomediate inclusive teacher education in Canada. Theminority status depicted in this article is that of sex,sexual and gender differences and the link with thequestion of marginalised pedagogues lies in theauthor’s autobiographical account of being margin-alised as a teacher and teacher educator as aconsequence of his sexual identity. Through strate-gies such as the establishment of Agape, a focusgroup in his university’s teacher education program,Grace asserts the crucial importance of writing thequeer self as work for social justice and as an ethicalcultural practice.

The theme issue concludes with Helen Currie’srespondent’s text, in which she also uses elements ofautobiography to trace her own journey as amarginalised pedagogue through working withethnic and occupational Travellers and membersof ethnic minorities. In exploring some of thearticles’ separate and shared intersections among‘minorities’, ‘margins’, ‘misfits’ and ‘mainstreams’,Currie links those intersections with references to

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her colleagues’ perceptions of what constitutesmarginalisation for their students and themselvesand to ongoing changes to national and localeducation policy-making. Currie ends with a clarioncall for refocusing our collective attention on theinterface between our learning and our humanity asa means of seeking to position every learner andevery educator at the centre, rather than at themargins, of educational provision.

3. Implications and significance

Part of both the implications and the significanceof this special theme issue of Teaching and Teacher

Education can be gauged by the range of thenecessarily restricted terms selected by the second-named guest editor for crossreferencing across thearticles in the issue and listed here in alphabeticalorder:

� at risk students� curriculum� disadvantaged� discrimination� English language learners� equity� Hispanic� identity� minority� newcomer� nomadic groups� other� outsider� resilience� self� social in/justice� stereotype/ing� transformative education/learning.

In one sense, this list represents in microcosm thestrategies of marginalisation and the tactics ofresistance and subversion (de Certeau, 1984) im-manent in any human community throughouthistory and the contemporary world. In anothersense, these selected terms highlight the contextua-lised and contingent particularities and specificitiesattending the provision of formal education in thesix countries and the six sources of minorityexistence traversed in this theme issue. The latterpoint is surely part of the explanation of thecontinued power of the forces of marginalisation,

despite the compelling analyses of the foundationsof those forces presented here.

We hope that readers of this theme issue willdevelop their own responses to the questions posedabove by linking their current conceptual andexperiential knowledge with the multiple engagementswith the questions presented in the articles that follow:

� What attracts educators to teaching learners whoare ‘different’ or ‘minority’?� What distinctive challenges and opportunities for

the educators’ work arise from their interactionswith ‘minority’ learners?� What are the effects of such interactions on the

educators’ identities?� What are the implications of these international

studies for extending understandings of botheducators’ lives and the education of ‘minority’learners?

In closing, we hope also that in combination thiseditorial introduction, the articles and the respon-dent’s text will be seen as constituting one amongseveral possible ways of fulfilling the aims for thetheme issue outlined above:

� to represent a broad diversity of internationalstudies of the work and identities of educatorsteaching ‘minority’ learners;� to investigate whether and how these educators

construct themselves as ‘marginalised’ and/or asother kinds of pedagogues;� to link that investigation to the broader literature

on educators’ lives and the education of ‘minor-ity’ learners.

Certainly it is vital that the task of researchingand interrogating the links between work andidentities in the lives of educators—whether margin-alised pedagogues or otherwise—continues andexpands.

Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to record our grateful thanks toseveral groups of people, without whom this themeissue would not have been possible:

� the authors for sharing the fruits of theirscholarship, for responding to tight timelinesand in some cases for surmounting the vagariesof electronic communication;

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� Helen Currie for writing the respondent’s text ingood order at a time of reduced mobility;� the editors (Sara Delamont, John Fitz and Lesley

Pugsley) and the editorial assistants (KarenFoster, Angela Jones, Alison Seedhouse andBethan Thomas) for so hospitably creating ahome for the theme issue in Teaching and Teacher

Education;� the referees who ensured that each article received

at least three ‘double blind’ peer reviews and whosefeedback has considerably strengthened the clarityand coherence of the published text:J Hanafi Atan, Professor, School of Distance

Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Pe-nang, Malaysia;

J Gill Clarke, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law,Arts and Social Sciences, University of South-ampton, Southampton, United Kingdom;

J Patricia Cranton, Adjunct Assistant Professorof Adult Learning, Teachers College, Colum-bia University, New York City, United Statesof America;

J Geoff Danaher, Lecturer in Communicationand Literacy, Division of Teaching andLearning Services, Central Queensland Uni-versity, Rockhampton, Australia;

J Bronwyn Ellis, Adjunct, Centre for RegionalEngagement, University of South Australia,Whyalla, Australia;

J Yvonne Findlay, Senior Lecturer, Faculty ofEducation, Canterbury Christ Church Uni-versity, Canterbury, United Kingdom;

J Bobby Harreveld, Senior Lecturer, Faculty ofArts, Humanities and Education, CentralQueensland University, Rockhampton, Aus-tralia;

J Neil Harrison, Lecturer in Indigenous Educa-tion, Faculty of Education, Health andProfessional Studies, University of New Eng-land, Armidale, Australia;

J Maırin Kenny, Independent Scholar, Dublin,Ireland;

J Cathy Kiddle, Independent Scholar, Totnes,United Kingdom;

J Alison Mander, Lecturer in Teaching andLearning Studies, Faculty of Education, Uni-versity of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba,Australia;

J Teresa Moore, Senior Lecturer, Faculty ofArts, Humanities and Education, CentralQueensland University, Rockhampton, Aus-tralia;

J Beverley Moriarty, Senior Lecturer, Facultyof Arts, Humanities and Education, CentralQueensland University, Gladstone, Australia;

J Shirley O’Neill, Associate Professor, Facultyof Education, University of Southern Queens-land, Toowoomba, Australia;

J Jason Pennells, Education Advisor, Interna-tional Extension College, Cambridge, UnitedKingdom;

J Shirley Reushle, Senior Lecturer in SchoolPedagogies/Online Pedagogies, Faculty ofEducation, University of Southern Queens-land, Toowoomba, Australia;

J Andrew Scown, Vice-President (Academic),RMIT International University, Vietnam;

J Michael Shevlin, Senior Lecturer in SpecialEducational Needs, Faculty of Social andHuman Sciences, Trinity College Dublin,Dublin, Ireland;

J James M. Skidmore, Associate Professor ofGerman Studies, Faculty of Arts, Universityof Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada;

J Jennifer Sumsion, Associate Professor, Col-lege of Humanities and Social Sciences,Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia;

J Konai Thaman, UNESCO Chair in TeacherEducation and Culture, Faculty of Arts andLaw, University of the South Pacific, Fiji;

J Bernadette Walker-Gibbs, Senior Lecturer,Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Education,Central Queensland University, Rockhamp-ton, Australia.

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Emilio A. AntelizDivision of Extension, Coordinacion de Extension,

Faculty of Engineering, Universidad Central de

Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela

E-mail address: eanteliz@reacciun.ve

Phyllida CoombesIndependent Scholor

Cawarral, Australia

Patrick Alan DanaherFaculty of Education and

Centre for Research in Transformative Pedagogies,

University of Southern Queensland,

Toowoomba, Australia

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