Session Information
23 SES 10 B, Advocacy for Educational Policy Change: Strategies, Trajectories, and Lessons from Diverse Actors in Four Countries
Symposium
Contribution
This paper examines a struggle over the meaning of school fees in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, it reports findings from a study that examined how People for Education (P4E), an advocacy group engaged in the successful campaign for policy to limit fees collected in government-funded schools to cover costs of activities and materials. The study asked: 1) What rhetorical strategies did P4E use in its campaign to influence school fees policy? and 2) How did the policy’s historical and social contexts influence the success of P4E’s efforts? The study views the social world, including policy, as discursively constructed. Thus, changing policy requires changing dominant policy discourses. Actors bring about discursive changes through argumentation (Fischer & Gottweis, 2012) including struggles over policy meanings. Groups mobilize their policy meanings through discourses that reflect their theories of how the social world works and should work using diverse strategies to persuade others to adopt the policy solutions they advocate (Fulcher, 1999). The discourses and strategies available to groups are limited by broader cultural discourses (Fischer, 2003) and the policy’s social and historical contexts. Data was gathered from 83 documents including: web pages, reports, newsletters, and other documents produced by P4E; news articles published from 2002-2015; parliamentary transcripts; legislation; books; and academic articles. The data were first analyzed using rhetorical analysis (Winton, 2013) and then used to construct a historical narrative that highlighted contextual influences (Brewer, 2014). The findings of the rhetorical analysis were examined in relation to the historical narrative to understand how Ontario’s school fees policy’s contexts influenced P4E’s campaign and its outcomes. The findings show that P4E constructed the practice of collecting school fees as a problem because it produced inequitable outcomes in a school system ostensibly committed to equity. P4E mobilized this meaning through research reports and the media, using diverse appeals to ethos (e.g., citing experts’ support), logos (e.g., collecting and citing unique numeric data) and pathos (e.g., describing challenges fees pose on students and the shame experienced by those who cannot afford them). In 2011, Ontario’s government introduced the Fees for Learning Materials and Activities Guideline. The Guideline reflects and responds to the meaning of school fees mobilized by P4E. Contextual factors that contributed to this successful outcome include Ontarians’ belief in equality of opportunity, legislation, and a permissive fundraising policy. The findings instruct policy advocates in Europe and beyond to connect their persuasive efforts to the policy’s contexts.
References
Brewer, C. A. (2014). Historicizing in critical policy analysis: The production of cultural histories and microhistories. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(3), 273-288. Fischer, F. (2003). Reframing public policy: Discursive politics and deliberative practices. New York: Oxford University Press Inc. Fischer, F., & Gottweis, H. (2012). Introduction: The argumentative turn revisited. In F. Fischer & H. Gottweis (Eds.), The argumentative turn revisited: Public policy as communicative practice (pp. 1–30). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fulcher, G. (1999). Disabling policies? A comparative approach to education policy and disability (2nd ed.). Sheffield, Great Britain: Philip Armstrong Publications. Winton, S. (2013). Rhetorical analysis in critical policy research. Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(2), 158-177.
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