Away with all teachers: The cultural politics of home schooling

In the United States and a number of nations, one of the most powerful dynamics of educational 'reform' involves the movement toward home schooling. The national media have spoken glowingly about it and the number of children being schooled at home is growing rapidly. In large part, this is stimulated by the circulation of anti-statist discourses and by the continuation and expansion of claims about school failure. In these accounts, the sources of educational problems are multiple: teacher education institutions produce teachers who are unprepared academically and unskilled in teaching the 'basics'; state funded (public, in the US sense of the word) schools have been taken over by 'progressive' models of teaching that are unworkable; these same schools do not teach 'traditional' cultural and religious knowledge, beliefs, and values; and public schools do not listen to conservative parents and are much too bureaucratic. Supporters of home schooling are usually religious fundamentalists who have increasing power in the USA and elsewhere. They have formed a national coalition and have joined in a tense rightist hegemonic alliance with neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, an alliance that seeks to reconstruct our common-sense about education and about all things social. The article shows how the movement toward home schooling has become more extensive and more dangerous than has usually been thought. In the process, home schooling is situated within the larger conservative and authoritarian populist ideological, religious, and social movements that provide much of its impetus. Connections are suggested with other protectionist impulses and connections are made to the history of and concerns about the growth of activist government. Finally, the article points to how it may actually hurt many other students who are not home schooled.     

The politics of Britishness: multiculturalism,schooling and social cohesion

This paper is set against a backdrop of contemporary concerns about Britishness. It explores the dominant view that unprecedented levels of cultural diversity within western contexts such as the UK are undermining social cohesion and are attributable to minority groups’ failure to connect or assimilate with mainstream ‘British’ (read White Anglo) culture. The paper focuses on how these issues play out for several of the key teachers at ‘Hamilton Court’, a large English comprehensive multicultural school. Despite the school being a socially cohesive space, these teachers were concerned with students’ lack of affiliation with ‘British’ culture. The paper examines these concerns through critical lenses that problematise reductionist and racialised understandings of Britishness and assumptions that associate an affiliation with Britishness with generating social cohesion. Against this backdrop, the paper provides further warrant for continued critical discussion about issues of Britishness, multiculturalism and schooling.     

Democracy,inclusive schooling and the politics of education

Drawing on a variety of social and political theories about the nature and future of democracy, this paper develops athesis about the politics of inclusive education. It concludes with a brief preliminary evaluation of the potential of the UK Labour Government's Education Action Zones policy for the development and governance of inclusive schools.     

A queer politics of emotion: reimagining sexualities and schooling

This paper draws together [Hochschild's (1979) Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85: 551–575; (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press] concepts of emotional labour and feeling rules with Ahmed's affective economies [(2004a) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge; (2004b) “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22 (2): 117–139; (2008) “Sociable Happiness.” Emotion, Space and Society 1: 10–13; (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press] and queer phenomenology [(2006a) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press; (2006b) “Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 12 (4): 543–574] as a way to address wider questions about sexuality and schooling. It highlights the value of the everyday politics of emotion for elucidating and clarifying the specificities, pertinence and complementarities of Hochschild's and Ahmed's work for reimagining the relationship between sexualities and schooling. The combination of their approaches allows for a focus on the individual, bodily management of emotions while demonstrating the connectedness of bodies and spaces. It enables disruption of ‘inclusive’ and ‘progressive’ educational approaches that leave heterosexuality uninterrupted and provides insight into how power works in and across the bodies, discourses, practices, relations and spaces of schools to maintain a collective orientation towards heterosexuality. It also counters linear narratives of progressive change, elucidating how change is a hopeful but messy process of simultaneous constraint, transgression and transformation. Key moments from a three-year study with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBT-Q) teachers entering into civil partnerships in Ireland serve as exploratory examples of the theoretical ideas put forward in this paper.     

Gender inequalities in primary schooling: The roles of poverty and adverse cultural practice

This paper suggests a simple model for the relationships between poverty, schooling and gender inequality. It argues that poverty—at both national and household levels—is associated with an under-enrolment of school-age children, but that the gendered outcomes of such under-enrolment are the product of cultural practice, rather than of poverty per se. Using detailed case study material from two African countries, evidence is presented to show the variety and extent of adverse cultural practice which impede the attendance and performance of girls at school, relative to boys. It follows that gender inequalities in schooling outcomes, measured in both qualitative and quantitative terms, will not necessarily be reduced as incomes rise.     

Social difference and the politics of schooling in Africa: a Ghanaian case study

This paper examines the implications of ‘social difference’ for schooling in African contexts. It highlights theoretical and philosophical engagements with ‘difference’ that could help explore and search for viable educational options in Africa. The paper engages voices of university students interviewed in a longitudinal ethnographic research study on schooling done in Ghana. Issues and questions about knowledge production, identity development and representation in pluralistic schooling contexts are raised. Insights about local knowledges, individual agency and resistance as they relate to possibilities for rethinking schooling and education in Africa are also explored. The students' narratives reveal how dialogues about school and educators' practices about difference and diversity are [not] addressed with respect to the students' schooling. Lessons on the possibilities of inclusive schooling environments are offered.     

Empowerment and cultural conflict: Navajo parents and the schooling of their children

This article is about contemporary Navajo parents caught between the traditional Navajo world of their elders and the dominant world of their Anglo neighbors. Ethnohistorical and current sociocultural factors influencing the attitudes of Navajo parents toward their children's schools are viewed in light of current arguments suggesting that one means of changing the school failure rates of some minority groups is through parent and student “empowerment.” Differences between Navajos and Anglos are particularly evident in interactions over schoolrelated issues and parenting. Through an analysis of power and cultural differences, the current practices are seen to be ineffective, indeed, “disabling” rather than “empowering” these parents.     

Driven to the Margins: Disabled students,inclusive schooling and the politics of possibility

This paper takes up Touraine's (2000) call for situating schools at the front of social democratisation to place inclusive schooling as a conceptual and strategic subset of the broader democratic project. In this respect the work of Bernstein (1996) and Knight (2000) become particularly helpful in providing a conceptual platform for critique of traditional forms of special education as hindrances to the extension of democratic schooling to that profoundly dispossessed people who are captured within the discursive net of special educational needs .     

Educational choice and achievement: The case of secondary schools in the Arab Republic of Egypt

Before 1952 university education in Egypt was generally for the wealthier classes because the universities charged fees and only the richer families could pay those fees. For less wealthy families payment was more difficult, not only because of the direct cost of higher education, but also because of the high opportunity cost of sending children to study. After the 1952 revolution the Egyptian government introduced free education at all levels and encouraged those who wanted to further their education to enter universities. Thus elitism was eradicated from Egyptian higher education. This paper uses data from a sample of Egyptian university students and analyses the determinants of secondary school choice and the factors likely to affect secondary school certificate marks. In particular we are interested in the effect of family background, represented here by father's occupation.The results suggest that individuals with fathers in higher occupational categories tend to go to private schools rather than public schools. They also tend to choose general schools rather than technical or Koranic schools. In turn, high social background as well as attendance at a private school, have a positive and significant effect on examination marks. These findings are alarming because Egypt has a rate of increase in population of over 2% and the supply of university places will therefore have to be rationed. The most likely screening factor would be examination results and as a consequence Egyptian universities may in the future become elitist once more.     

Engineering Play: Children's software and the cultural politics of edutainment

The late 1980s saw the emergence of a new genre of instructional media, ‘edutainment’, which utilized the capabilities of multimedia personal computers to animate software designed to both educate and entertain young children. This paper describes the production of, marketing of and play with edutainment software as a contemporary example of long-standing tensions between the cultural categories of education and entertainment, play and learning. Like prior efforts to wed learning and play, edutainment was founded on the ideal of broadening access to academic learning. Yet, as it became a mainstream commercial enterprise, it was increasingly targeted towards accelerating the achievement of successful children. After first describing the industry and marketing context of edutainment, this paper describes cases of play with edutainment software in an after-school computer club. The analysis utilizes the concepts of “multimedia genre’ and “participation genre” to read across sites of production, distribution and consumption to examine how genres of entertainment, education and edutainment are constituted through the circulation of and play with media artifacts. As in the case of the industry and marketing context, instances of play with edutainment titles follow certain genre conventions of engagement. Titles that are based on academic content and modes of engagement, even with a wrapper of entertainment style, invite a competitive orientation and interaction focused on fulfilling the minimal conditions for moving ahead and getting credit for completion of a task. Unlike more exploratory or construction-oriented software titles, these genres of software are marketed and keyed to the social demands of middle class achievement.     

拓展评价的视阈——20世纪美国教育评价研究的发展历程

美国教育评价研究的发展经历了三个阶段:20世纪初期至50年代的屏蔽价值关注“目标达成”的阶段、20世纪50年代至70年代的价值渗透关注过程的“方案评价”阶段、20世纪70年代至今的关注价值评定“综合”阶段。研究视域围绕着对教育目标的批评和实施过程的批评得到拓展,其中缠绕着各类教育参与者的价值的融合。