Session Information
23 SES 08 B, Policies & Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion (Part 2)
Paper Session continued from 23 SES 07 B
Contribution
This paper reports on a research program in progress that is concerned with young people who are identified as disengaged within schooling systems. Neoliberal concepts of education dominate the global education policy field with an emphasis on parental choice and privatisation and the production an education marketplace This provides the basis for competition and the construction of an education marketplace that privileges alliances with corporate and philanthropic interests producing new networks of education governance, together with new roles and responsibilities for schools and education systems (Ball 2012).
Within this context, children and young people are constituted as consumers who should be competitive and aspirational around neoliberal values of success. With emphases on individual accountability and competitive aspiration, young people are to ‘blame’ if they do not ‘fit’ the system ( MacGregor, Mills et al 20015) and are positioned within a deficit view and identified as ‘disengaged. In 2000 the OECD reported that on average across OECD countries, one in five students ( 15 years old) can be identified as disaffected from school (Willms 2000), contributing to further concerns about health and wellbeing and long term unemployment. More recent economic and political upheaval across Europe particularly has seen increasing numbers of young people disengaged from formal education. These students challenge the dominant policy discourses for schooling systems that are mostly concerned with the production of success as measured by testing regimes, and there are demands to find ‘alternative’ solutions to increasing participation and providing opportunities for meaningful educational outcomes.
This project explores how such initiatives are being provided by non-government charitable organisations, welfare agencies and local government that in turn are contributing to new policy networks. The programs are ‘outside’ of the formal school’s curriculum and the privileged corporate and philanthropic alliances of education governance. As such, those who are identified as disengaged are positioned as Other, with the education system producing systemic forms of streaming or segregation. This issue has global significance with the needs of increasing numbers of young people disengaging from formal education systems.
The particular focus of this paper is to consider the roles and responsibilities being taken up by agencies outside the formal education system to provide educational opportunities for young people who are disengaged or do not participate in schooling.
It brings together Balls notion of ‘policy effects’ (2015) and Derrida’s understandings of responsibility and hospitality (1992,1999), to attend to the ways in which policy is producing new subjectivities for young people , and the aporetic conditions of being received within systems that then continue to produce the conditions that promote disengagement.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ball, SJ 2012, Global Education Inc, Routledge, London and New York. Ball, SJ 2015, 'What is policy? 21 years later: reflections on the possibilities of policy research', Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 306-313. Biesta, G 2014, The Beautiful Risk of Education, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder London Derrida, J 1992, 'Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"', in D Cornell, M Rosenfeld & DG Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Routledge, New York and London. Derrida, J 1999, 'Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: a dialogue with Jacques Derrida', in R Kearney & M Dooley (eds), Questioning Ethics, Routledge, London and New York. McGregor, G., et al. (2015). "Excluded from school: getting a second chance at meaningful education." International Journal of Inclusive Education 19(6): 608-625. Mills, M 2015, 'The tyranny of no alternative: co-operating in a competitive market place ', International Journal of Inclusive education, vol. 9, no. 11, pp. 1172-1189. Willms, JD 2000, Student Engagement in School Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
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