Session Information
23 SES 07 B, Politics of Equity and Inclusion
Paper Session
Contribution
The paper reports ethnographic investigation of local educators who are able, against the thrust of a generalized policy framework in education which troubles them, to promote oppositional educational practices that they believe will be in the interests of currently marginalized young people in their localities.
The background to the paper is that evidence is piling up that three decades of neo-liberal educational experimentation in most European and English-speaking countries has been a disaster (e.g. Alexander 2009; Lingard 2010). But still the disciplinary effects of neo-liberal frameworks on education remain powerful. Concepts of accountability, competition, and ranking dominate education policy discourse. The policy framework assumes that it is individual teachers and students who are to blame for schools that perform ‘poorly’, and ignores the point that the major influences on the school performance of children exist outside rather than inside the school. Such framing directly inhibits the professionalism of educators, and promotes a conservative and backward-looking conception of the appropriate relationships between schools and their communities. A paradigm of measurement prevails in which dehumanized numbers/scores are the focus of attention rather than the minds and spirits of the young people being ‘educated’.
Although ostensibly intended to assist all students, neo-liberal education policies tend to privilege the culture and experience of middle-class students and their families and communities. Many of the ‘othered’, ‘failing’ young people are described in policy terms as being ‘at risk’ of poor performance within the normalized system of schooling. But without redressing the nature of schooling itself and questioning why it fails to engage such young people, the ‘problem’ ends up being defined as that of the ‘at risk’ children themselves, who are assumed to have failed to adapt and to cope with the requirements of the supposedly neutral and normal school system. Such unreflective assumptions have been pillars of three decades of neo-liberal education policy.
The point of the paper is that education, if it is to be socially responsible and equitable, must be sufficiently inclusive of the lives and cultures of ‘others’, those outside the circle of privilege, including the most disadvantaged students and their communities, in order to make a positive difference in their lives. By ‘positive’ difference, I do not mean merely attempting to induct young people who have been put at a disadvantage into the valorised cultural capital that comes more-or-less naturally to those of us who are already within the circle of privilege. The position I am putting is that educators need to counter such typical valorisation of privileged dispositions and capitals and, instead, aspire to a ‘new social democratic imaginary’ (Lingard 2010) which builds on a sense of hope and justice for all students.
The data presented illustrate some such possibilities.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
- Alexander, R. (Ed) (2009) Children, their world, their education: Final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary review. London: Routledge. - Angus, L (2004) Globalization and educational change: bringing about the reshaping and re-norming of practice. Journal of Education Policy, 19(1), 23-42. - Angus, L. (1986) Research traditions, ideology and critical ethnography, Discourse, 7 (1), 61-77. - Ball, S. (2006) Education policy and social class, London: Routledge. - Choules, K. (2007) The shifting sands of social justice discourse: From situating the problem with ‘them’, to situating it with ‘us’, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 29(5), 461-481. - Hebson, G., Earnshaw, T. & Marchington, L. (2007) Too emotional to be capable? The changing nature of emotion work in definitions of ‘capable teaching’, Journal of Education Policy, 22(6), 675-694. - Lingard, B. (2010) Policy borrowing, policy learning: Testing times in Australian schooling, Critical Studies in Education, 51 (2),129-147. - Smyth, J., Angus, L., Down, B. & McInerney, P. (2009) Activist and socially critical school and community renewal: Social justice in exploitative times, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. - Te Riele, K. (2006) Youth ‘at risk’: Further marginalizing the marginalized? Journal of Education Policy, 21 (2), 129-145. - Thomson, P., Hall, C. and Jones, K. (2010) Maggie’s day: A small-scale analysis of English education policy, Journal of Education Policy, 25 (5), 639-656. - Willis, P. (2003). Foot soldiers of modernity: the dialectics of cultural consumption and the 21st-century school, Harvard Education Review, 73(3), 390-415.
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