Session Information
23 SES 07 C, Theorizing Globally Distributed Educational Work
Symposium
Contribution
This two-part symposium’s point of departure is a critical step away from the conference theme, ‘urban education’. We question the idea of ‘urban education’ and its centre-locality assumptions to consider educational work in other social spaces. This critical stance re-focuses attention on educational work in other work, occupational and community settings dispersed across time and space. It shifts attention away from core-periphery orderings of education and understandings of teaching valorised in traditional narratives of the teaching profession and their construction.
Our concept of ‘educational work’ reframes ‘teaching’ as a highly distributed, embedded set of endeavours specific to particular space-times. Re-theorising educational work in this way suggests an inclusive and context sensitive way of understanding educational work, and who teaches, where, when, how and why they do it.
We use our research on ‘teaching outside the centre’ to talk back to the urban centre privileged in the 2011 ECER conference theme. Talking back means reframing analysis in ways that privilege the non-urban periphery both literally—in issues of geography, movement and regionalism—and figuratively, by focusing on non privileged, often invisible educational work done by human service workers in different global sites. In so doing, we of necessity privilege the work of women engaged in educational work with themselves and others.
The papers build on feminist and sociological theorisations of teaching as work and recent developments in global sociology to question assumptions embedded in established centre-periphery views of teaching (Seddon, Henriksson, Niemeyer, 2010). Reporting on specific cases of educational work in human service contexts, each presenter offers a snapshot of educational work ‘in the negative’. In the photographic sense, we reverse light and shade in our analyses of educational work in order to shed a different sort of ‘light’ on ‘urban education’ and its accompanying narratives. This methodological strategy problematises established institutional and conceptual boundaries defining the ‘teaching occupation’. It makes visible the practices and practitioners of educational work, and the way they contest privileged re-territorialising narratives and policies of globalisation and neoliberal reforms.
The symposium contributes to an expanded conceptualisation of ‘teaching’ and its reconfiguration as a globally distributed occupational order. It provides evidence of the way work practices and identities in human service work are being reconfigured and the significance of occupational boundary work in these politics. Papers build theory that challenges ethnocentric and exclusive conceptualisations of professions and teacher professionalism that only recognise and advocate for the top hierarchy, the ‘native’ heartland actors but ignore the less important ‘dirty-workers’ of education that are called into service when workforce needs compel. They also show how space carries meaning, positioning invisible worlds relative to (and often lesser than) those lands known as ‘urban’ and other cores. In interrogating these moral orders that privilege some accounts of teaching over others, this symposium analyses makes explicit the values and politics of what gets counted as teaching, what sort of teaching counts as valuable, and what is rendered invisible or gets dismissed.
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