A White Veneer: Education policy,space and “race” in the inner city

This paper explores how neo-liberal education policy change and urban renewal in inner Sydney and London has interacted with “raced” and classed educational identities. I draw on two examples of policy change, the Building the Future policy development in the inner city area of Sydney and the “Excellence in Cities” partnership programme in East London. The paper outlines, and applies, a spatial education policy sociology framework to explore the interplay of space, place, “race” and education policy. This paper suggests that in inner Sydney and London “whiteness” as a racial construct is present but noticeably absent and that this absent presence creates a “white veneer” around educational policy change and urban renewal.     

The cultural politics of school relocations: an ethnographic study of an Istanbul neighbourhood school

ABSTRACT

In Turkey, the social and economic changes of the past couple of decades have facilitated a neoliberal reconstruction of the city and a concomitant reorganisation of its educational spaces. The interaction between the urban space economy and school spaces has been documented by various studies, most of which point to the interplay between education policies and the racialised restructuring of urban spaces. In Turkey, this process has been particularly convoluted, perhaps more so than anywhere else. With reference to a particular school relocation/closing case, this article examines how school relocations induced by urban transformation have interacted with the desecularisation of the education system in Turkey. By drawing on the responses of a specific neighbourhood to the relocation of their school, I argue that school relocations are inextricably linked to the material and symbolic reorganisation of neighbourhoods and lead to the destabilisation of secular middle class neighbourhoods and their schools. And by showing how neoliberalisation interacts with inherited regulatory systems, through this research article I aim to contribute to the existing literature on the interaction between education policy and urban space.     

From Brown to Ayers v. Fordice: the changing shape of racial desegregation in US higher education

Racial desegregation in higher education is taking on a new direction as the twenty‐first century approaches. The Brown v. Board of Education decision brought down legal racial barriers to segregated education, and this landmark US Supreme Court ruling was implicitly intended to apply to higher education as well. The positive changes for African Americans in removing racial barriers contributed significantly to the civil rights movement and opening avenues of opportunity. Yet, there has always been a fundamental tension between the removal of the vestiges of racial segregation to create equal educational opportunity, and the activist stance of addressing historical and current discriminatory educational policies. This is evident in the recent higher education desegregation and affirmative cases as the Federal Courts advocate the colour‐blind interpretation of higher education desegregation law and educational policy, while African Americans argue in favour of the enhancement of the public Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the explicit use of race as a form of diversity. This article examines the salient positions and racial identity politics surrounding this tension. I also argue that broader issues of racial control and power need to be addressed by educational institutions, the courts and the larger society in the debate about race, social justice and the removal of the vestiges of segregation.     

Post‐Fordism and the Theorisation of Educational Change: what's in a name?

Post‐Fordist approaches offer a stimulating account of recent educational restructuring. There is, however, a problem with the term itself and the way it has framed and defined the debate. Mot only does it combine a number of diverse frameworks, applications and conclusions, but it also composites different levels of definitional coherence. In this way post‐Fordist education tries to operate as a generalised metaphor whilst also incorporating more tightly‐defined conceptual narratives. The result is that these different meanings become collapsed and the term itself swamped by overuse. A consequence is that the model is less able to offer an incisive or distinctive perspective on educational change. When specific post‐Fordist narratives are used to interrogate educational restructuring it is clear that they are unable to capture the range of levels in which change is both generated and manifest. This raises a broader issue for educational theorisation—identifying the structures that mediate and link the economic and educational realms (and in particular, the role of politics and ideology). A further conclusion is that grand theoretical designs need to be chaperoned by a policy analysis approach or at least a more detailed account of the policy sector to be explained.     

Policy prolepsis in education: Encounters,becomings, and phantasms

We argue that the concept of a policy prolepsis is a category of becoming-policy that actualizes educational practices within spaces of desired policy initiatives and implementations. Policy prolepses represent a range of emergent policy ontologies produced through the interface of educational actors’ senses of policy and their estimations of possible outcomes. We use Deleuze's (1990) logic of sense to argue that becoming-policy occurs in a pre-conscious space, and that this space is produced politically and used strategically for desired, yet ostensibly unformed, policy outcomes. Educational policy, then, is an ontological activity representing a myriad of policy outcomes through the management of semiotic desires and actors’ inferences about these persuasive signs. The paper illustrates the practical idea of policy prolepsis by demonstrating how policy apparitions use fear in becoming-policy. Policy apparitions, then, are just one species of policy prolepses that utilize the affect of fear to manipulate educational actors’ interpretations.     

Feeling Heard: Inclusive Education,Transformative Learning,and Productive Struggle

Developments in international inclusive education policy, including in prominent UN documents, often refer to the aim of a quality education for all. Yet, it remains unclear: What exactly is meant by quality education? And, under what conditions are quality educational experiences possible for all learners? In this essay, Diana Murdoch, Andrea English, Allison Hintz, and Kersti Tyson bring together research on inclusive education with philosophy of transformative learning, in particular John Dewey and phenomenology, to further the discussion on these two questions. The authors argue that teacher–learner relationships, of a particular kind, are necessary for fostering environments wherein all learners have access to quality educational experiences associated with productive struggle as an indispensable aspect of transformative learning processes. They define such relationships as “educational relationships that support students to feel heard.” In developing their argument, the authors first analyze the concept of productive struggle, an aspect of learning increasingly recognized in research and policy as an indicator of quality education. Second, they discuss three necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for the teacher to cultivate educational relationships that support students to feel heard. Third, they draw out connections between environments that support feeling heard and those that support productive struggle, and they discuss teachers' challenges and risk-taking in creating such environments. The authors close with a discussion of implications for international policy, practice, and research.     

B Is For Burqa,C Is For Censorship: The Miseducative Effects of Censoring Muslim Girls and Women's Sartorial Discourse

In this article, I add a discursive analysis to the discussion about Muslim girls and women's dress in non-Muslim educational contexts. I argue that a law or policy that prohibits the wearing of khimar, burqa, chador, niqab, hijab, or jilbab in the context of public schools is a form of censorship in educational contexts. This sartorial censorship is miseducative in the sense that it impedes the achievement of important educational goals, especially in public education. I consider the public nature of public education and discuss three sets of miseducative effects: First, the examination of discursive processes, including the production of social norms, is limited. Second, the critical uptake of the banned discourse by female Muslim students themselves is foreclosed, and their agency hindered. Third, a metadiscourse arises that translates individual sartorial discursive acts into generalized terms (such as “veils” and “headscarves”) without noticing what is lost in translation.     

Disallowing Recommendations for Practice and Policy: a Proposal that Is Both Too Much and Too Little

Robinson et al. (Educ Psychol Rev 25(2):291-302, 2013) offer a thoughtful and powerful argument for a policy change for primary educational research journals. This policy change would “disallow recommendations for practice” (p. 10) in primary educational research journals. They provided compelling examples of works in which authors have either offered implications that go beyond their research design (i.e., stating causal relationships based on correlational data) or speculations and implications that go (way) beyond the results of their study. In my response, I first identify the many points made by Robinson et al. with which I agree and make it clear that I believe this discussion is a healthy one for the field. I do not, however, concur with the recommendation for an editorial policy change for primary research journals and offer reasons why the policy recommended is both too much and too little to deal with the issues they have identified as well as additional issues I find concerning in the submission and publication of studies in primary research journals.     

Mediatizing educational policy: the journalistic field,science policy,and cross‐field effects

This paper is concerned to demonstrate the usefulness of the theory of Bourdieu, including the concepts of field, logics of practice and habitus, to understanding relationships between media and policy, what Fairclough has called the ‘mediatization’ of policy. Specifically, the paper draws upon Bourdieu’s accessible account of the journalistic field as outlined in On television and journalism. The usefulness of this work is illustrated through a case study of a recent Australian science policy, The chance to change. As this policy went through various iterations and media representations, its naming and structure became more aphoristic. This is the mediatization of contemporary policy, which often results in policy as sound bite. The case study also shows the cross‐field effects of this policy in education, illustrating how today educational policy can be spawned from developments in other public policy fields.     

Education policy: explaining,framing and forming

This paper presents a new heuristic device for the analysis of educational policy. Through an examination of the Evaluative State and the work of Brian Fay, the paper considers the way in which educational policy is subject to rational and linear forms of policy action and implementation. To counter this, positioning theory is deployed to consider the way in which we are produced both by discourse and the language of the ‘moment’ in discursive acts. Using the work of Gee, the paper contends that policy texts and policy Discourse ‘themselves form policy, that is, they position policy-explanation and policy-framing within the bounds of the institution and so give policy form’. Problematically, such mechanisms may succumb to the ‘death of subject’ and accordingly I offer a third method by which we might conceive of education policy: the discursively produced position call. Subsequently, I propose a tri-partite theory for the examination and understanding of policy: policy-explaining, the production of policy texts; policy-framing, the ways in which all can be positioned by texts and Discourse to produce the meanings imbued upon policy; and, policy-forming, the impact of moment-by-moment conversational acts for their production of the policy text itself, that is, the ways in which policy is locally formed rather than locally mediated.     

Reproducing or Challenging Power in the Questions We Ask and the Methods We Use: A Framework for Activist Research in Urban Education

Many have argued that educational research does little to change (and may actually reproduce) the social-structural inequalities shaping the quality of high-poverty urban schools. Building from this premise, this paper asks: How can university-based scholars of urban education do research that encourages, produces, or informs change in urban schools and the conditions that shape them? I examine two broad aspects of urban educational research: the questions we ask and the methods we use. In both cases, I critique the dominant paradigm of technical rationality—one in which school failure is approached as a localized technical problem unveiled through neutral, objective, and experimental research methods. In contrast, I propose a paradigm of “political rationality” (Klees, Rizzini, & Dewees, 2000, Children on the streets of the Americas: homelessness, education and globalization in the United States, Brazil and Cuba. New York: Routledge) that approaches school failure and research practice as political issues situated within and shaped by social relations of power. Innovations in urban education research that reflect the logic of political rationality include: more contextualized and politicized analyses of urban schools, and the expanded use of engaged, collaborative, and participatory research methods. Drawing on this work and my experience implementing a participatory research project, I propose a framework for activist research in urban education, and critically evaluate the limits and possibilities of such work to effect change in urban schools.Kysa Nygreen is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Community Studies Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.     

Is it Possible to Live a Philosophical,Educational Life in Education,Nowadays?

I consider if and how far it is possible to live an educational philosophical life, in the fast‐changing, globalised world of Higher Education. I begin with Socrates’ account of a philosophical life in the Apology. I examine some tensions within different conceptions of what it is to do philosophy. I then go on to focus more closely on what it might be to live a philosophical, educational life in which educational processes and outcomes are influenced by philosophy, using examples taken from published sources and from conversational interviews with philosophers carried out by myself with Kenneth Wain, Bas Levering and Richard Pring. I then outline the directions of current European policy for Higher Education. Finally I discuss how far current policies and trends leave room for doing philosophy of education, concluding that it is possible, but only for individuals who are very much in sympathy with current policy trends or who are creative in constructing smoke screens.     

Net-Deepening of School Discipline

This study presents findings from an ethnographic content analysis of 15 chronological district-wide annual codes of student conduct from a large urban US school district. I frame policy creation and modification processes as reflections of societal shifts in perceptions of student behaviors. I looked to the policy documents to explore the possibility that school organizations have, over time, shifted toward school discipline frameworks that get students into deeper trouble today than in years past. The analysis yielded policy changes that, over time, make severe punishment increasingly likely. I refer to the change phenomena as net-deepening of school discipline. I address the pitfalls that net-deepening policy changes pose, with an emphasis on the potential for net-deepening to undermine the effectiveness of proactive and restorative forms of school discipline. The article offers to educators, policy-makers, and researchers conceptual and analytical considerations for developing proactive restorative discipline policies that meets the educational needs of all students.     

Educational policy‐making in post‐communist Ukraine as an example of emerging governmentality: discourse analysis of curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999–2003)

Educational policy‐making in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is still building upon the ambivalences and uncertainties of post‐communist transformation. The international support, expertise and discourses – coupled with communist legacies, stalled democratic developments and national discourses – produce unique effects on education in each of these countries. This paper is an attempt to conceptualise educational policy‐making (with its disparities between ‘democratised’ discourses and ‘Sovietised’ practices) as a form of emerging governmentality or governmentality‐in‐the‐making on the level of the state, using Ukraine as a case study. Analysing policy‐making through the perspective of emerging governmentality brings into focus the genealogy of post‐independent reforms, which is (as a part of the technologies of government) threaded into a broader governmental project of restructuring the state and legitimising its rationality. The final empirical part of the paper presents a discourse analysis of selected curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999–2003) and embedded in them the complex interplay of internal and external discourses, which work together to construct and justify the emerging governmental rationality of post‐communist Ukraine.     

Interest groups and the State in contemporary Spanish education policy

This paper analyses the role of educational interest groups in the context of current educational policy in Spain. The paper focuses on the historical and structural factors that are the basis for understanding the constitution of educational interests. It argues that the historical educational dualism and the political opposition between public and private education explains not only the emergence and political position of each educational actor, but also the dynamics of interaction between them and their strategies to influence policy making and implementation. The final section of the paper analyses the relationship between interest groups and the State. It argues that the diverse and heterogeneous educational demands lead to a specific form of educational politics and explain the conditioned relative autonomy of the Spanish State in education policy making.     

Explosions of Stupidity: Notes for an Urbanist Pedagogy

In this article, Derek R. Ford develops an urbanist pedagogy, a particular mode of educational praxis that arises out of — and, more importantly, is oriented toward — the creation of the urban, a praxis that is internal to and constitutive of urban revolt. Ford does so with the help of two thinkers who are seldom theorized together: Henri Lefebvre and Jean‐François Lyotard. Taken together, Lefebvre and Lyotard allow him to advance a conception of the urban not as an object, thing, or distinct space (like the city), but as an incommunicable process that entails two distinct and interrelated creative educational elements: explosive confrontation and stupor. At the end of the article, Ford reads this urbanist pedagogy through a set of protest movements in West Germany.     

Planning Technical and Vocational Education and Training: the case of Namibia [1]

ABSTRACT

In 1991, shortly after independence, the government of Namibia established a Presidential Commission on Higher Education. The Commission's report contains almost 200 recommendations covering the whole field of post‐school education. The account presented here concentrates on technical and vocational education, access to higher education and inter‐relationships between the various levels of the educational system. Technical and vocational education at the time of independence was fragmented, inappropriate in a number of ways and not well supported. Fundamental change was necessary. Solutions need to be found around a set of baste principles, including: the need for a coherent system of linked qualifications, the importance of a national training policy enunciated by government, strategies which are responsive to employment requirements and which meet the needs of disadvantaged groups, special access routes for students who have missed out on educational opportunities, adequate provision for pre‐service and in‐service instructor training and teacher education.

     

‘A space for you to be who you are’: an ethnographic portrait of reterritorializing Indigenous student identities

ABSTRACT

This article explores the discourse practices of an Indigenous, community-based charter school and its efforts to create space for Indigenous both/and identities across rural–urban divides. The ethnographic portrait of Urban Native Middle School (UNMS) analyzes the discourse of making ‘a space for you’, which brings together rural and urban youth to braid binary constructs such as Indigenous and western knowledge, into a discourse of Indigenous persistence constraining contexts of schooling. We use the concept of ‘reterritorialization’ to discuss the significance of UNMS’s community effort to create a transformative space and place of educational opportunity with youth. The local efforts of this small community to reterritorialize schooling were ultimately weakened under the one-size-fits-all accountability metrics of No Child Left Behind policy. This ethnographic analysis ‘talks back’ to static definitions of identity, space and learning outcomes which fail to recognize the dynamic and diverse interests of Indigenous communities across rural – urban landscapes.     

Letter‐space: Typographic Translations of Urban Place

This article discusses a Bachelor of Design honours year typography project in the medium of letterpress. The Letter‐space project positioned letterpress as a textual, spatial and structural visual language, through which the experiences and meanings of a local urban place were translated, mapped and given form through typographic design. We outline and contextualise the pedagogical approach we took in this project. In Letter‐space a pedagogy based on the principles of situated and reflective learning drew urban place and letterpress into a theorised practice. Metaphorical frameworks advanced in urban theory offered new insights into the ways in which urban place could be understood. These metaphors provided departure points for specific place‐based investigation and interpretation. The subject of urban place and the medium of letterpress interacted through their shared language of structure and compositional order, facilitating the processes of mapping and translation. Examples of the student work produced in the project are discussed and show how theory and practice interacted through conceptual and metaphorical structures. The Letter‐space project advanced the students’ structural understanding of the principles and practices of typographic design, while at the same time deepened an awareness of the complex relationships which form and order familiar urban places