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From one Graduate Diploma Secondary student taking a pro-diversity course that both authors had a connection with there was a very angry response, encapsulated by the statement “This course made me feel guilty to be an Australian”. We are aware that negative student evaluations can be part of the territory for tertiary teachers working in diversity courses. The purpose of this paper is to explore the students’ confronting comment which will be construed as a type of offer that is being extended to us – an offer that we are refusing. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “exterior assemblages”, and we shift our gaze to consider “what constitutes the territory” that is our response to the pre-service teacher’s evaluative claim.

The specific methods we deployed involved an eclectic appropriation of various tools. We embarked on this process of exploration by journaling, collective reflection and informal discussions with other colleagues. Our journals responded to the question: What constitutes the place that is the territory that is our refusal of the student’s offer? In order to explore this place we: kept a hand-written journal; used conventional text and arts based practice techniques in our journaling; discussed our journal entries periodically (face to face, via Skype and via e-mail); discussed this project with colleagues – giving them knowledge that we were doing this – and that we might write journal entries about these conversations; and read a variety of relevant texts We engaged in these processes for a three month period. At the end of this period we shared journals, and set about the task of analysing them. We engaged in a number of analyses and detailed our findings over the next month. Further, over a longer period of time we engaged with this incident and our journal entries and presented a series of in progress papers at a variety of conferences and seminars. The analysis of the data generated involved discourse analysis and dialogue.

A series of key discourses were identified and listed in the paper.

The key identified ideas are briefly linked to a series of implications for practitioners.

One of the key practical implications is the suggestion that where disagreements surface in education that one response to such moments might be for the parties to consider where they are located.

The paper outlines a way of thinking about disagreements that has useful implications when considering issues relating to pedagogical strategies aiming to work towards social justice.

The paper is an original response to a critical moment that occurred for two lecturers in pre-service teacher education.

Critical discussion of the social conditions that shape educational thinking and practice is now embedded in accredited teacher education programmes. Beneath beliefs that critique of educational inequality is desirable, however, lie more problematic questions around critical pedagogies, ethics and power. Emotional investments can work to protect habituated ways of thinking, despite attempts to move students beyond their comfort zone. This strategic process can shift attitudes and promote intellectual and emotional growth, but can also produce defensive reactions. This paper, a self-study in relation to an incident in a tertiary education programme, examines how student feedback on content and pedagogy positions teachers and learners. The purpose of this paper is to frame and reframe ways in which learner feedback to critical approaches might be read. The argument examines, through dialogue, the potential of disruptive teaching approaches for recontextualising both learner and teacher response. Such exploration articulates particular tensions and challenges inherent in critical teacher education pedagogies.

This is a reflective practitioner piece – involving journaling and the use of dialogue – to explore a critical incident.

This is an exploratory piece – the authors explore the workings of tension in critical/poststructural pedagogical work.

The deployment of dialogue as a method and as a way of presenting key issues is somewhat novel. The paper works through quite complex terrain in an accessible and reasonably clear fashion.

THE Conservative Government elected on June 18th last has lost no time in putting into practice its avowed principle of reducing direct taxation. Late in July it flew a kite through an inspired leak showing that it intended to save millions on education, one small part of which would be £10 million, purporting to be “saved” by making readers pay for books borrowed through public libraries. First indications of this were in a story included in The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and other papers, and as this story was not denied by the Government, the Library Association thought it proper to issue a press statement immediately, with the message that the Association was totally opposed to the introduction of such charges.

Gatekeepers in social research are regularly taken for granted in the associated methods literature, yet they constitute an interesting social phenomenon in themselves as powerful and normally unpaid agents of research access. Questions relating to the recruitment of potential gatekeepers and to the nature of the rewards that they might seek are under-considered and locating key gatekeepers is often characterised (perhaps inadvertently) as a matter of luck or happenstance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper is a multi-sited ethnography based on maritime industry conferences held annually in Europe and Asia. The two authors attended 18 of these conferences either as regular delegate or as a speaker. In these conferences, they maintained fieldnotes and formally and informally interviewed participants both face to face and e-mail.

Every year executives come together at commercially organised conferences focussed upon human resource management in the shipping industry. At these events, major global players discuss a programme of issues related to the business of recruiting and training seafarers. However, these international conferences are both much more and much less than they seem. They are crucial in establishing reputational capital and provide researchers with key venues for negotiating research access.

This paper argues that unlike most conferences, these can only be seen as “field configuring events” to a very limited extent but that they nonetheless serve an important purpose in securing symbolic, and more significantly reputational, capital for both individual delegates and interested academics. The paper further argues that resourceful researchers can mobilise such capital in their favour in negotiating research access contributing new ideas to the literature on gatekeepers and on research access.

We understand that at the Annual Meeting of the Iron and Steel Institute it was decided to expel all the alien‐enemy members of that body. In commenting upon this action The Engineer observes that it is some time since the name of the German Emperor was removed from the list of honorary members of the Institution of Civil Engineers, but that up to the present time ordinary alien‐enemy members of this Institution have not been expelled. The same observation applies to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

LOUGHBOROUGH was the first of the post‐war schools to be established in 1946. This resulted from negotiations of representatives of the Library Association Council with technical and other colleges which followed their failure to secure facilities within the universities on the terms of the L.A. remaining the sole certificating body. The late Dr. Herbert Schofield accepted their terms and added a library school to already varied fields of training within his college.

WE are as yet without the means of verifying the forecast in our last issue that there would be a cutting of library estimates this year. There has been some; one library authority known to us having ordered a five per cent. cut. The fact still is that such retrenchments can only be made at the expense of a very few items of our estimates, and of these the book fund is the severest sufferer. This is a fact that cannot always be brought home to finance committees who only think as a rule in gross figures, and do not know that the library estimate consists mainly of fixed charges. The librarian who forms an estimate in anticipation of cuts does not aft quite honestly, but in the way of the world at present he may, like the Unjust Steward, be acting wisely. But it is pitiful to think that this should even be a matter for discussion.