Dialect,power and politics: standard English and adolescent identities

This paper examines the official requirement for the promotion of standard English using Bourdieu's concepts of the production and reproduction of legitimate language. It explores the political drive behind the demand for this standard dialect in England and, through a survey on the views of fifty‐two 14 and 15 year olds, analyses the impact that this is having on adolescent identities in an inner‐city London school. The students perceive non‐standard English as a vehicle through which they can express their ‘true’ selves and construct a collective teenage identity. They use language to construct a division between themselves as teenagers and the adult ‘others’. Although the students do not necessarily want to use non‐standard English in the classroom, or with their teachers, educators need to consider how to afford pupils access to the ‘official language’, which grants privilege and power, without devaluing the identities which they may associate with other dialect forms. The final part of the paper explores the value of Cummin's concept of ‘transformative pedagogy’ (2002) in relation to the study of dialect with adolescents.     

Deconstructing immigrant girls’ identities through the production of visual narratives in a Catalan urban primary school

In this article, the research findings of a deconstructive visual ethnography focused on the production of immigrant girls’ identities will be analysed. This collaborative research project involved experimentation with a dialogic curriculum aimed at creating diverse identity narratives with immigrant girls at an urban primary school in Barcelona. Using a theory of subjectivity based on feminist post‐structuralism and subaltern studies, I will deconstruct: (1) the role of ‘subjugated knowledges’ when the curriculum is used to rewrite children’s cross‐cultural narratives; (2) the production of local/global children’s identities through the interaction between ethnic, racial, gender, age and social class subjective and learning positions; and (3) the creation of new curricular spaces and times in which differences are empowered and distance is transformed between schools and families, public and private knowledge, official and subaltern identities, as well as between teaching and research.     

The art of self-making: identity and citizenship education in late-modernity

Taking the English National Curriculum as its main example, this article argues that an overly nationalistic, normative and ‘fact-based’ citizenship education curriculum is failing to engage the dimensions of young people’s identities which they experience as deeply meaningful. There is thus a chasm – albeit a false one – between official discourses and pedagogies of citizenship and what young people consider to be their ‘real’ selves. I argue that citizenship education must develop a more sophisticated understanding of the complexities of how identities are formed and performed, especially in light of globalisation and increasing migration. I also make a somewhat unorthodox argument for conceptualising ‘relating-to-otherness’ in the same way that we think of music consumption. This has implications for how we experience, interpret, value and create ‘others’. The article also makes some recommendations for how these ideas can begin to be implemented in educational settings.     

The contributions of Bernstein’s sociology to education development research

Global and national agendas to improve the ‘quality’ of Education For All have brought focus to pedagogic processes in developing country contexts. How can development research pay attention to the social and political significance of pedagogical projects and understand the micro-processes of classroom reform? This paper considers how Basil Bernstein’s sociological theories helped develop a nuanced account of pedagogic reform in a study of Indian primary education. I explore how the analysis encouraged by Bernstein’s concepts of recontextualisation and educational codes may contribute to current thinking on the role and significance of pedagogy in development research and evaluation activities. The paper also raises caution about the selectiveness and limits of efforts to capture, identify, measure or assess pedagogic processes and change. A Bernsteinian research approach is not immune from producing the kinds of reductionist accounts of pedagogy of which the analysis is wary.     

Improving Practice through Reflective Enquiry: confessions of a first‐time action researcher

A number of key constructs underpin educational action research. This paper focuses on the concept of ‘truth’ and by doing so hopes to highlight some debate in this area. In reflecting upon what ‘truth’ might mean to those involved in action research, I shall critically evaluate Thorndike's ‘Law of Effect’ and Bruner's ‘Three Forms of Representation’, and explain how these perspectives might help us find ‘the truth’ of an area under study and how they might inform the methodology of research. I shall close by suggesting that teacher‐researchers should allow for a constructivist approach in their action research methodology in order to help them in their sense‐making process.     

The politics of ‘lifelong learning’ in post‐1997 Hong Kong

This article is concerned with the politics of lifelong learning policy in post‐1997 Hong Kong (HK). The paper is in four parts. Continuing Education, recast as ‘lifelong learning’, is to be the cornerstone of the post‐Handover education reform agenda. The lineaments of a familiar discourse are evident in the Education Commission policy documents. However, to view recent HK education policy just in terms of an apparent convergence with global trends would be to neglect the ways in which the discourse of lifelong learning has been tactically deployed to serve local political agendas. In the second part of this paper, I outline what Scott has called HK’s ‘disarticulated’ political system following its retrocession to China and attempts by an executive‐led administration to demonstrate ‘performance legitimacy’—through major policy reforms—in the absence of (democratic) political legitimacy. Beijing’s designation of HK as a (depoliticized) ‘economic’ city within greater China must also be taken into account. It is against this political background that the strategic deployment of a ‘lifelong learning’ discourse needs to be seen. In the third section of this paper, I examine three recent policy episodes to illustrate how lifelong learning discourse has been adopted and has evolved to meet changing circumstances in HK. Finally, I look at the issue of public consultation. The politics of education policy in HK may be seen to mirror at a micro‐level, the current macro‐level contested interpretations of HK’s future polity.     

My tongue on your theory: the bittersweet reminder of every-thing unnameable

ABSTRACT

Across research in UK Higher Education, the most immanent demands for quality have taken the shape of the Research Assessment Exercise and the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The theorist, Martin, is cautious of the relationship academics have engendered with the process of the REF, asking are we actually creating a Frankenstein monster, becoming complicit in generating quality thresholds and standards that will become our own tormentors? I am taken by the idea of the monster when pursuing alternative discourses of childhood in educational research – fear of its potential to torment seduces me with the promise of dis-order, de-formity, chaos and mutation. The aim of this paper is to resist a fixed, knowable form of ‘quality’ (in) research, moving between the idea of ‘monster’ and the formlessness of ‘monstrosity’ to oppose the epistemological, ontological and ethical paradigms of reason.     

Experience is Not The Whole Story: The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey's Democracy and Education

The central objective of Dewey's Democracy and Education is to explain ‘what is needed to live a meaningful life and how can education contribute?’ While most acquainted with Dewey's educational philosophy know that ‘experience’ plays a central role, the role of ‘situations’ may be less familiar or understood. This essay explains why ‘situation’ is inseparable from ‘experience’ and deeply important to Democracy and Education’s educational methods and rationales. First, a prefatory section explores how experience is invoked and involved in pedagogical practice, especially experience insofar as it is (a) experimental, (b) direct, and (c) social‐moral in character. The second and main section on situations follows. After a brief introduction to Dewey's special philosophical use of ‘situation’, I examine how situations are implicated in (a) student interest and motivation; (b) ‘aims’ and ‘criteria’ in problem‐solving; and (c) moral education (habits, values, and judgements). What should become abundantly clear from these examinations is that there could be no such thing as meaningful education, as Dewey understood it, without educators’ conscious, intentional, and imaginative deployment of experience and situations.     

The historical formation of modern education and the junction of the ‘educational lower class’: Poor education as the denominator of social position and status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Finland

Modern industrial society liberated the sources of livelihood, gave birth to salaried labour and began to cater for social mobility, i.e. broke the foundations of traditional estate society. Traditional trades and socialization mechanisms attached to families were replaced by mass production and education. Education played a crucial role in the project of modern industrialized society. Its task was, besides production of a productive labour force, i.e. good workers, also the production of good citizens and decent personalities. Education always works, however, in the other direction, too. By opening up life‐paths and chances for some, it simultaneously closes them off from others. It also plays the key role as the producer of social exclusion and indigence and eventually as the producer of normality and deviance permeating through the entire society. This paper is based on a comprehensive, long‐term research project funded by the Academy of Finland. Its goal is to locate the historically changing meaning of scarce education and no education at all as the denominator, producer and outcome of social exclusion and indigence. The authors are also interested in the change in the whole way of life or ‘habitus’ or moral citizenship demanded of the modern educated man and as its reverse side the habitus of the non‐educated man. The analysis of exclusion is extended from as early as the time of ‘absolute poverty’ of the nineteenth‐century European modern society to the time of ‘relative deprivation’ of postindustrial welfare societies in the late twentieth century. The research seeks answers to how education and indigence have been linked at various points in time and especially how the so‐called modern Nordic welfare model defines the interrelations of education, citizenship, labour market citizenship and exclusion, i.e. the borderlines classifying the population. The criteria of social exclusion have to be defined in the context of historical time and nation and it is not possible to use the same criteria in a historically comparative analysis. ‘Educational lower class’ is used as the tool referring to the excluded. The aim is to define its criteria, composition, outcomes and birth mechanisms at a certain point in time by means of concrete sociohistorical research. Theoretical interest is focused on clarification of the concept ‘educational lower class’ as a ‘zero‐line’ concept of the theory of marginal utility, although we are well aware that the explication of that line is as ‘relative’ as the frequently presented efforts to draw the line between relative poverty and relative deprivation. The concrete part of this research is concentrated on the formation of the modern Finnish educational system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is based on comprehensive and versatile historical data. The educational ‘zero‐line’ is located both from above, i.e. from the direction of official educational discourse, and also from the middle and below, i.e. from the viewpoints of public discourse and the users of education. Committee reports, legislation, public documents, clarifications and statistics are used as sources for outlining the official discourse. The intermediary level of discourse is analysed with the help of historical data from the press and periodicals. The ‘citizen's viewpoints’ of the objects of education are searched for in written biographies, interviews and archives of enterprises.     

The place of theory: locating the New Zealand ‘education’ Ph.D. experience, 1948–1998

The year 1998 marked 50 years of doctoral study in New Zealand, and in 1999 I embarked on a history of Ph.D. theses in Education. Influenced by Foucaultian genealogy, this employed a fusion of bibliographic, archival and life‐history interview methods. One hundred and eighty‐three Education theses were identified and 57 of these graduates interviewed. How has New Zealand’s ‘corpus’ of Education Ph.D. thesis production been enabled and constrained by its temporal/spatial location? To address this, I draw on geographical debates on ‘space’ and ‘place’. The first part contextualises thesis topics, theories and methods in discourses of international scholarship, New Zealand politics and social change. The second part narrates a parallel history of the changing circumstances and sites of thesis production—biographical, domestic and institutional. It integrates students’ accounts of thesis work’s epistemological, methodological, spatial and technological dimensions to suggest a history of New Zealand doctoral candidates’ experience.     

New generation’s career aspirations and new ways of marginalization in a postindustrial economy

The 1990s, a decade of democratic advances and consumption euphoria in South Korea, heralded a new wind called ‘neoliberal education’. It is within this historical juncture that I conducted an ethnographic research on low‐income youths who had dropped out of mainstream high schools. While I investigated these youths’ educational and career aspirations, I examined how discourses in neoliberal freedom and free marketization shape (and are shaping) these youths’ self‐fashioning. Central to my analysis is how this process of identity construction is intersected with class marginality. A predominate number of youths in my research express their preference in service sector and/or entertainment industries. The paper addresses how neoliberal discourses and consumerism ;rhetoric are negotiated and transformed in youth’s narratives on aspirations. The analysis speaks to the ideological pitfall of neoliberalism, echoing critical scholars’ thesis that neoliberalistic education with free market principles perpetuated and broadened existing inequalities.     

On Art and Knowledge

I comment upon the recent blossoming of writing on art, knowledge and research and connect this to its material roots in the changing nature of higher education. I find much of this writing wanting in that it implies a division of art into ‘knowledge‐producing’ and ‘non knowledge‐producing’ art. I examine how art objects might be said to generate knowledge, particularly the kind of propositional knowledge which sits at the centre of both traditional epistemology and ‘knowledge transfer’ in the contemporary academy. Although there are many ways in which artworks might variously generate such knowledge, I conclude that there is none that is common to all. I go on to examine other kinds of knowledge, particularly Gilbert Ryle's ‘knowledge‐how’ and use this as a staging post to suggest that there is yet another kind of knowledge, produced by all works of art. Finally I borrow some ideas from recent work in the philosophy of science to suggest a concrete mechanism by which this knowledge is made available to us.     

The return of the repressed?: the gender politics of emergent forms of professionalism in education

Three distinct discourses frame this paper: ‘new public managerialism’, new modes of governmentality, and new masculinities and femininities. This paper considers the changing forms of governance in projects of educational professionalism emerging in the nested contexts of teaching, teacher training, and academic research within departments of education. It takes the production of the subject position of the manager/wo‐manager as central to managerialist regimes theorized as provoking and potentiating modes of recruitment, refusal, and mis/recognition. It illustrates this through a heuristic relational schemata constituted by the dominance of the managerialist—audit gaze. Taking a theoretically similar but methodologically different (i.e. non‐empirical) approach (or liberty?), one understands subject positions like Prichard and Deem, as produced ‘through a series of discursive or communicative practices’ realized in different ‘conditions of possibility’. The notion of ‘communicative practice’ was also put under scrutiny, given the monovocal as opposed to the dialogic nature of audit: ‘Audit is essentially a relationship of power between scrutinizer and observed: the latter are rendered objects of information, never subjects in communication’.1 This paper was originally given as part of a symposium on gender and teacher training in higher education at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference Leeds, 13–15 September 2001. The paper has been subsequently revised as a result of conversations with other colleagues in the Professional Education Research and Reading Group, Cathy Aymer and Toyin Okitikipi. It has also been significantly reworked in the light of reviews and we thank our reviewers for their insights. One is, thus, interested in the ubiquity of the ‘managerialist subject position’ as a limit condition for the professional self and how gender gets reworked within this. One is aware that the paper slides across the domains of teaching, teacher training, and academic and professional work identities. It is not presented as an orthodox ‘labour process’ account, neither is it a conventional sociological reading of ‘professionalism’. The authors wish to deliberately keep open the possibilities provided by this lack of specificity through exercising the sociological imagination. The following is best considered an experiment in social critique deriving from a post‐structuralist methodological stance. The aim is to capture through metaphorical means the temperature and tempo of some experiential dimensions of the gendered regulation of educational subjectivities, thought as a central psychosocial feature of the ‘domaining effect’ of audit.     

Denying the sexual subject: schools' regulation of student sexuality

This article examines some of the discourses and practices through which schools produce and regulate student sexual identities. It suggests that schools' ‘official culture’ can be seen as a discursive strategy which identifies a preferred student subject that is ‘non‐sexual’. This preference is communicated through the contradictory nature of discourses and practices which constitute ‘official school culture’ around student sexuality. These discourses work to simultaneously acknowledge student sexuality and position young people as ‘childlike’. Through the tension created by these contradictory positionings, schools can be seen to undermine the kind of sexual agency that young people might access to support their sexual well‐being. It is concluded that schools' deployment of discourses around sexuality produces student sexual positionings that may in fact dilute sexuality education's ‘effectiveness’ (in terms of the production of sexually responsible citizens).     

Mind the gap: Dewey on educational bridge‐building

This is the first of four commentaries discussing John Dewey's short essay, ‘Education as engineering’. The essay provides a fascinating model of how the example of engineering could guide the interaction between educational research and practice. It has much in common with Herbart's ideas on how ‘pedagogical tact’ bridges the gap between theory and practice. Re‐introducing both Dewey and Herbart's ideas could help to overcome the current naivity of ‘evidence‐based’ school improvement.     

Emotional journeys: young people and transitions to university

This paper offers an interpretation of the role of emotions in understanding the transitions that young people make to university. I draw on qualitative research with a group of non‐traditional students, entering elite universities, to argue that youth transitions are emotional as well instrumental affairs. I argue that choice‐making processes incorporate both trust in, and fear of, the transitions infrastructure, and that these emotions infuse more instrumental judgements about the economic benefits of higher education. I also demonstrate that emotional aspects of class – including feelings of entitlement to education and the rejection of normative student identities – constitute the experience of ‘being’ or ‘doing’ a student. A broader understanding of how young people become university students then depends not just on developing a new identity but on the complex interaction between emotion and infrastructure.     

Working against globalisation: the role of the media and national education in Singapore

This article discusses how the media and schools are used as disciplinary apparatuses to resist and work against globalisation in Singapore. Aihwa Ong calls the deployment of state ideological apparatuses, such as the media and schools, acts of ‘reassemblage’, when technocrats resort to assemble institutions, diverse Government practice and political values to engage in citizenship production. The National Education curriculum package introduced to Singapore schools is one example of ‘reassemblage’, which aims to reinvent subject‐citizens who are perceived as lacking cultural mooring and a national identity. I argue that in the context of globalisation, this cultural experimentation of constructing a national identity and creating a sense of belonging is fraught with ruptures, as ‘youthscapes’ and new communication technologies are potentially the liminal spaces where other sources of identities are up for grabs. These liminal spaces further allow youths to perform ‘elective belonging’ rather than a sense of belonging bound by the ‘national’ and ‘local’.     

Reconstructing professionalism in ECEC: the case for the ‘critically reflective emotional professional’

This paper is concerned to present professionalism in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as a sociocultural construction. In particular the article is concerned with how professional identities are inflected by autobiography and the spaces and opportunities that exist for the construction of alternative professional identities. Drawing on a recent empirical study with nursery workers in London a critical appraisal of hegemonic discourses is presented and a consideration of ‘professionalism from within’ is offered. A specific focus is placed upon the notion of the ‘critically reflective emotional professional’ and how that might be taken up or resisted at different levels of the ECEC policy–practitioner landscape.     

‘Let's Save Energy!’: incorporating an environmental education dimension in the teaching of energy

A curricular unit called ‘Let's Save Energy!.’ was developed and tested as part of a project of Science Materials for Secondary Education. The project is focused on human needs, and how Science relates to them. This paper discusses how E.E. is built into a ‘traditional’ science topic (Energy), and some of the activities used to develop an awareness about the need and ways to ‘save’ Energy. A simulation game is presented with a focus on international co‐operation and environmental protection. The process of the development of the materials, and some results of its use in the classroom with 15/16‐year‐old pupils are discussed.