Fran Huckaby scrutinizes the messages around us

Fort Worth, TX

4/2/2009

By: by Rachel Stowe Master '91

“We weave worlds with words,” writes M. Francyne Huckaby, Ph.D., assistant professor of curriculum studies in the TCU College of Education & Center for Urban Education.

“Words are things. Words — whether true or untrue — form who we are. Images are also things — things that silently express complex messages about who we are or are not.”

In a chapter of the upcoming Handbook of Public Pedagogy, Huckaby goes well beyond the classroom to explore the impact of words and images.

She analyzes documentaries, TV shows, songs, images and even a Norman Rockwell painting. She also includes some of her own poetry.

Both as a paper and as a multimedia presentation, Huckaby’s work “forces educators to expand the notion of education beyond the schoolhouse walls,” said Kris Sloan, assistant professor in the School of Education at St. Edward’s University in Austin, who recently heard Huckaby present the paper.

“Dr. Huckaby’s most recent work compels us to see the project of education from a holistic perspective, beyond the cognitive domain, beyond the brain, beyond the accumulation of a set of discreet skills, to also include not only the body, but the spirit. In these ways, Dr. Huckaby’s work continues to inspire me as a curriculum worker and a teacher educator,” Sloan said.

Thinking Outside the Classroom

The term “pedagogy” traditionally refers to teaching methods or tools. But learning doesn’t occur solely in a classroom setting. It reaches into every corner and facet of life. “Public pedagogies”- music, paintings, commercials, movies or even conversations - can have a profound impact on how people think about themselves and others.

According to Huckaby’s chapter: “Too frequently we conceptually confine pedagogy to the intentional practices of teachers within classroom boundaries; however, whether acknowledged or not, pedagogy breaks through imposed borders to take on numerous forms and enactments in many sites. I propose that our focus on planned pedagogy within schools has left us less well equipped to recognize and critically understand the workings of pedagogies circulating in our daily lives.”

Handbook of Public Pedagogy is 600-ish-page, 45-chapter tome that will feature writings from such heavy-hitting public intellectuals as racial justice champion Cornel West, child advocate Jonathan Kozol and Noam Chomsky, who is credited as the father of modern linguistics.

“It’s a very exciting book,” Huckaby said, explaining that while scholars talk about public pedagogies and publish articles “here and there,” it is an area that has not been thoroughly explored. “The book is important because it takes the work of scholars from varied disciplines and begins to conceptualize public pedagogy and the ways people interpret and use it.”

Personal Experience

“Dr. Huckaby’s work for our book illuminates how our perception of our own bodies is shaped, formed and deformed by the powerful pedagogies of race, the media and everyday life,” said Steven “Jake” Burdick, one of the book editors.

“Her work artfully intertwines theory with lived experience to explain how the seemingly mundane and commonplace world is always educating us, even illustrating how her own thinking was transformed by the simple observation of her pets playing in a mirror. Many of the other chapters within the book emphasize the cognitive, rational or interventionist spaces of learning in the public sphere, but Dr. Huckaby’s chapter emphasizes the kinds of learning that occur before, below and behind thinking, illustrating how potentially limited our traditional understandings of learning and education might be.”

Burdick also applauds her as a writer: “She effortlessly shifts from the vernacular to the academic to the poetic, prosaically riffing on her overarching themes and creating a vivid textual experience for the reader.”

Bridging the Gap Between Classroom and Community

Huckaby earned her BA at Austin College and her Ed.D. at TCU before serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Papua New Guinea, where she and her husband helped establish the first primary schools and school boards in six Highland villages.

She earned her PhD at Texas A&M in 2005 — and accolades for her dissertation. “Challenging Hegemony in Education: Specific Parrhesiastic Scholars, Care of the Self, and Relations of Power” was honored with the Qualitative Research Special Interest Group’s prestigious Outstanding Dissertation Award at the 2007 American Educational Research Association conference. “Her clarity of explaining her ways of analyzing technologies of the self within relations of power is an enormous contribution. This is then a model for power analysis,” the award committee commended.

Huckaby’s interest in public pedagogy began in the late 1980s, early in her higher education journey and long before she knew the scholarly words to describe it.

“I used to talk about my work as bridging the gap between a more formal school setting and community. I talked about community education, formal and informal forms of education,” she recalled. “But it wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I was exposed to people who were talking and writing about public pedagogies and conceptualizing it.”

In spring 2008, Huckaby was teaching a course on education scholar Paulo Freire and was invited to present a lecture on politics of the body to a political science/women’s studies class. “So I thought about combining the ideas of Paulo Freire and politics of the body,” she said. When she presented that paper at the Curriculum and Pedagogy Conference, one of the editors of Handbook of Public Pedagogy contacted her about including the piece in the upcoming book.

Molded by Words, Images

Titled “Public Pedagogies: Everyday Politics on and of the Body,” Huckaby’s chapter is slated for the Handbook section covering informal sites of learning.

“What I’m trying to do in the chapter is explore the ways we are taught. We learn who we are and what we are — and who others are and what others are — through the dailiness of our lives and the discourses,” she said, explaining that discourses are “messages that surround us” which we may or may not help create.

“The argument I’m trying to make is that those discourses shape who we think we are and who we think others are, and we begin to act accordingly to those ideas or ideals,” she said. “A lot of times we just assume things about ourselves to be true or assume things about others to be true and we act as though they are true.”

Huckaby builds an argument that they may not actually be true. Degrading names don’t define individuals. “Mediated” images — such as airbrushed-enhanced magazine covers — don’t define true beauty.

“We get fed stories, we get fed lies and we accept them as though that is the case. So I’m trying to warn that maybe we shouldn’t accept so quickly and maybe we should try to question more.”

Huckaby’s desire is that her chapter will prompt readers to question.

“I hope readers can walk away with a more sophisticated or nuanced understanding of the ways in which the world — or the world around them — shapes who they are and who they think they are and who other people are, and begin to question, not just accept it as matter of fact,” she said.

Source: TCU Endeavors