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.     

Teaching through an ethics of belonging,care and obligation as a critical approach to transforming education

This paper considers the experiences of a New Zealand family and their ‘disabled’ daughter Clare’s ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ in her early childhood centre and the implications of these experiences for shifting from a discourse of ‘inclusion’ to ‘belonging’ based on ‘an ethics of care and obligation to others’. I argue that the meanings and understandings of ‘inclusion’ for disabled children in education are variable and that they often default to dominant deficit discourses whilst believing themselves to be ‘inclusive’. I also argue that we must consciously develop a critical awareness of how exclusionary power operates in society and in our own settings. In this paper, I present ideas drawn from a ‘pedagogy of listening’ and Te Whaariki – The New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum to critically reflect on some of the early childhood education experiences of Clare and her family. I suggest that teachers’ use of critical reflective ‘child’s questions’ can be used as tools for educational transformation towards the full and meaningful participation of disabled children in education.     

Complicating ‘student behaviour’: exploring the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’

When educators consider ‘student behaviour’, they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out of control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian post-structuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex – as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper, we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration, we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.     

Taking a Long Look at Art: Reflections on the Production and Consumption of Art in Art Therapy and Allied Organisational Settings

This article draws on experiences of looking at art to consider the influence of social context on the production and consumption of art. I draw on art historical discourses and relate these to looking at art in art therapy and related organisational settings. I suggest that professional socialisation profoundly influences how practitioners look and think about what they see. I propose that attention to tacit knowledge about art, extending practices of looking to include contemporary discourse about audiencing, curating and display, and taking time for a long look at art and at the art made in art therapy and allied settings, can enliven and sustain practitioners' ‘ways of seeing’.     

Keeping them in line: choreographing classroom spaces

This paper provides teachers with an opportunity for thinking about the kinds of ‘people’ constructed in their classes, the kinds of ‘dances’ choreographed and the ways space is organised for learning. We argue that this is essential for teachers to think about if they are to enact socially just professional practices. In this study, we explore the ways in which students learn to be particular kinds of people. We understand this as happening through their participation in communities of practice. Becoming a member of a community of practice, of a classroom and of a school is a process of developing a particular identity, modes of behaviour and ways of knowing. It is through these ‘normalising’ practices that power is constituted, boundaries constructed and certain ‘kinds of people’ are recognised, represented and constituted, whilst others are not. All individuals are implicated in these processes and active in the construction of their own as well as others’ identities. This paper locates this discussion using social relations of gender and ethnicity, and considers how diversity and difference are actively constituted and play out in one primary school classroom. How students participate in the spatial practices and the construction of pedagogical spaces, what identities are available to them in these spaces and which they take up, is explored. The metaphor of dance is used to analyse these spaces, a metaphor which helps us to understand the complexity of classroom relationships and the way macro‐social practices are both reflected and reconstituted in classroom practices. We argue that the ways teachers think about how they place students, space students and construct students are crucial for student and teacher learning.     

Funding,reputation and targets: the discursive logics of high-stakes testing

This paper provides insights into teacher and school-based administrators’ responses to policy demands for improved outcomes on high-stakes, standardised literacy and numeracy tests in Australia. Specifically, the research reveals the effects of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and associated policies, in the state of Queensland. Drawing suggestively across Michel Foucault’s notions of disciplinary power and subjectivity, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, the research utilises interviews with teachers and school-based administrators to reveal how high-stakes, standardised testing practices served to discursively constitute performative teacher subjectivities around issues of funding, teacher and school reputation and target-setting within what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’. The paper argues that the contestation evident within this field is also reflective and constitutive of more educative schooling discourses and practices, even as performative logics dominate.     

Privatising educational leadership through technology in the Trumpian era

This article focuses on the changes that the election of Donald Trump enables in education policy domestically and in education discourse internationally. I argue that Trump’s own charismatic leadership style is a distraction from the privatisation that it is facilitating through Betsy DeVos, Trump’s appointment as US Education Secretary. I draw on two contemporary examples of technology-enabled privatisation in education – cyber charters and predictive analytics using big data – to argue that in the Trumpian era, educational leadership may be shifting from corporatised forms, where professionals understood as ‘school leaders’ fulfil corporate objectives through corporatised means. Instead, Trumpian-era privatised educational leadership retreats fully behind the technology boardroom door, where it renders superfluous lead professionals in education institutions, and where its objectives are to generate profit through re-conceptualising learners as data providers. This analysis highlights the need for new tools and methods to describe and explain what is happening, and to help develop understandings of what educational leadership in this new landscape might be, do or achieve.     

Book review

This paper aims to examine the experiences of pupils and professionals who are affected by actual or threatened permanent exclusion (what used to be called being expelled) from school. An ethnographic study based on the writer’s employment within secondary schools and the Children’s Services department of an urban local authority in England explores the idea that professionals may be forced to make decisions about pupils in the face of powerful competition between the politically unchallengeable concepts of tolerance, inclusivity, attainment, and choice. The paper argues that the tensions of multi‐agency working are focussed within what will be called the contested space of the pupil’s ‘extended body’. Permanent exclusion, along with its tendency to prompt a pathological reading of a pupil’s issues, is therefore seen as an authoritarian strategy designed to ameliorate the inherent paradoxical tension experienced by the various professionals working within an education system dedicated to the concept of ‘full inclusion’ but measured and funded on the grounds of academic league tables.     

‘Education is a life marathon rather than a hundred-meter race’: Chinese ‘folk’ comparative discourses on Finnish education

Over the past decade Finnish education has been praised worldwide for its students’ ‘amazing’ results in the OECD PISA studies. Thousands of pedagogical tourists – including policy-makers, researchers and educators – have visited the country to find out about the reasons behind the success and to borrow, often uncritically and un-reflexively, Finnish practices that can help them to become ‘good performers’ too. This has resulted in what we call ‘folk’ comparative discourses on Finland. China is no exception to the rule. In this article we examine a range of books about Finnish education published in the Middle Kingdom (China) for a general rather than narrowly specialist readership. We are interested in how these volumes construct certain images and myths about it and what these tell us about how the authors view Chinese education but also current societal discussions about it. Our approach is based on critical and reflexive interculturality.     

Education for women: whose values count?

This article looks at how far educational approaches to gender equity can be packaged and exported to developing countries. I analyze current discourses on women's education at international, national and local levels. Drawing on detailed ethnographic data from Nepal, I argue that issues around gender and education need to be addressed as ideological in nature, rather than a technical matter of tackling ‘drop out’ from women's literacy classes or getting more girls into school. From talking about ‘change’, ‘transformation’ and ‘access’, we need to think more about what is being changed to what and whose values underlie specific educational approaches.     

In the name of morality: moral responsibility,whiteness and social justice education

This paper argues that the ‘traditional conception of moral responsibility’ authorizes and supports denials of white complicity. First, what is meant by the ‘traditional conception of moral responsibility’ is delineated and the enabling and disenabling characteristics of this view are highlighted. Then, three seemingly good, antiracist discourses that white students often engage in are discussed – the discourse of colour‐blindness, the discourse of meritocracy and the discourse of individual choice – and analysed to show how they are all grounded in the ‘traditional conception of moral responsibility’. The limitations of these discourses are drawn and how these discourses work to conceal white complicity is established. Finally, implications for social justice education are discussed.     

Policy ‘partnerships’? Power dynamics in curriculum reform

In curriculum policy, discourses of ‘policy partnerships’ and ‘communities of practice’ have become increasingly prevalent and were reflected in Western Australian curriculum policy processes from the mid‐1990s to the late 2000s – a period of significant, highly contested change. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study into the impact of curriculum reform on the changing dynamics within and between the government and non‐government education sectors, drawing on critical theory and post‐structuralist approaches to policy analysis within a broader framework of policy network theory. This approach is used to highlight power issues at all levels of the policy trajectory. This research found that despite policy discourses of collaborative and consultative processes to create a ‘shared’ curriculum, the government and non‐government education sectors remain largely distinct due to significant power differentials, as well as structural and cultural differences. The analysis reveals three closely connected emergent themes – limited collaboration, regulated consultation and enhanced state control of curriculum policy agendas. It is argued here that although discourses of ‘policy partnerships’ and ‘community of practice’ are increasingly evidenced in contemporary curriculum policy, they do not take sufficient account of embedded hierarchical power relationships. Further, such discourses can be used as legitimisation strategies to promulgate policy changes which enhance the steerage capacity of the state. Deeply entrenched power differentials operate simultaneously to distort policy partnerships and communities of practice, by both including and excluding particular sets of policy actors.     

Themes and theorisations: rebalancing comparative education?

ABSTRACT

This article illustrates and discusses some elements of the problematique ‘Southern Europe’. The themes stressed include its configuration and the criteria for its conceptualisation. A number of ways to think about ‘Southern Europe are discussed – of course with particular emphasis on the development and theoretical elaboration of comparative education in these countries, as well as on the imbalances in the international debate. That debate is not merely contemporary: there are historical dynamics that have influenced the imbalances of power that were, and can now be, found in definitions of ‘Europe’ and what counted as its political, cultural, historical (and finally, economic) centre.

These complex themes – glossed over by hegemonic and ideological concepts such as the Global North and the Global South – include the territorial articulations of ‘Europe’; what counted and counts as ‘its centre’; the construction of ‘national states’; the changing valuations of ‘the national’; and the vital question of language. Overall, the crucial motif of the article is the ways in which all these themes are refracted and reflected in changing versions of what counts as, what is constructed as, ‘comparative education’.     

Equity,justice and standards: assessment decision making in higher education

Recent concerns about ‘fairness’ in university entrance have highlighted the need to review existing practices in admissions processes. The agendas for equity and social inclusion, however, must also apply to the processes and outcomes of higher education, where considerations of ‘standards’ are additionally crucial. As principles underpinning the assessment process, ‘equity’ and ‘justice’ and ‘academic standards’ are part of taken‐for‐granted cultures and practices which impact on decisions about progression, eligibility for awards and degree classification for individual students. Changing discourses of academic standards have given rise to contrasting decision‐making processes rooted in the role and operation of assessment boards. Contrasting models of assessment board cultures are developed to highlight how practices are beset by conceptual confusions about what is being assessed and the basis for judgements about success and failure in higher education. There is a strong case, not only for critical review of assessment processes, but also for monitoring outcomes for different social groups.     

‘I think we are still very directive’: Teachers’ discourses on democratic student participation

The objective of this study [Susinos, T. (Dir.), ‘Schools moving towards inclusion: Learning from the local community, the student voice and educational support’ (I+D+I, EDU2011-29928-C03-03)] is to gain a deeper understanding of the analysis of the discourses that different education professionals in the Spanish education system have on student participation in schools, based on the premise that they tacitly reflect different models of democracy and advance very diverse school practices. The study is based on the Student Voice Movement, which is defined by its commitment to deliberative democratic education and its role in the development of inclusive schools. In this article, we have conducted a qualitative analysis of the data from 31 in-depth interviews carried out with teachers and other education professionals from nine schools. These teachers’ discourses are summarised in four dimensions, which we have named individual, pedagogical, organisational and socio-political. Some conclusions of this work demonstrate a predominance of discourses linked to an individual and pedagogical dimension of participation, based on the idea that this fundamentally depends on the personal dispositions that some students have. It is less common to appeal to the socio-political dimension, which refers to participation as a citizen's right to debate and make decisions regarding common and public affairs. This suggests that teachers still see their work from a technical point of view, rather than envisaging the school as a space for democratic participation and practice. In short, with this study we aim to contribute to normative theories on participation and democracy in order to expand their empirical and practical support in schools.     

The paradox of virtue: (re)thinking deviance,anorexia and schooling

In this paper we posit a radical retheorization of anorexia as a form of deviance. We examine how the disciplinary practices and moral technologies typical of contemporary secondary schooling signify and enter into the articulation of three ‘virtue discourses’ (discipline, achievement and healthism), and tease out how these ‘virtue discourses’ play into the formation of the ‘anorexic’ subject. Informed by Foucauldian theory, our analysis draws on our life history interview study with teenage girls diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and their parents. We argue that anorexia can be understood not as a form of deviance but as a ‘paradox of virtue’ involving zealous compliance with and taking up of socially and culturally sanctioned ‘virtue discourses’ that are immanent in schooling and wider society.     

Life skills for ‘real life’: How critical thinking is contextualised across vocational programmes

Background: This article presents an analysis of how critical thinking is contextualised in everyday teaching in three vocational education and training (VET) programmes: Vehicle and transport, Restaurant and management, and Health and social care.

Purpose: The main question addressed is: What knowledge discourses permeate different VET-contexts, and hence what kinds of opportunities for critical thinking do they offer students?

Method: The qualitative analysis draws on data from a four-year ethnographic project exploring learning processes that can be characterised as civic education in Swedish vocational education. The analysis presented here used data collected during 85 days of observations of teaching in six VET classes, interviews with 81 students and 10 teachers, and collected teaching material. To explore why some contextualisations provided more opportunities and encouragement for critical thinking than others, we applied Bernsteinian concepts of ‘horizontal and vertical knowledge discourses’ and ‘discursive gaps’.

Findings and conclusions: Overall, teaching that was observed focused primarily on ‘doing’. However, in all three programmes, the analysis identified that there were also situations that touched upon critical thinking. Three major themes were identified: critical thinking related to ‘Personal experiences’, ‘The other(s)’ and ‘Wider perspectives’. It appeared that the frequency and nature of such situations varied with the knowledge discourses permeating the programme. Furthermore, we discuss the manifestations of critical thinking in relation to the wider context of what Bernstein refers to as pedagogic rights; individual enhancement, social inclusion and development of the competence and confidence to participate in political processes.     

‘Shit shows’ or ‘like-minded schools’: charter schools and the neoliberal logic of Teach For America

Over the past three decades, two neoliberal educational reform efforts have emerged in tandem – the charter school movement and Teach For America (TFA). This paper critically examines the relationship between these entities through the lens of TFA corps members placed in charter schools, and explores two types of schools described by interviewees, namely, ‘shit shows,’ and ‘like-minded schools.’ Grounded in corps members’ teaching experiences, this paper argues that even at its best, the close partnership between TFA and charters can create a mutually reinforcing educational subculture that is isolated from broader educational discourses and practices. At its worst, this partnership can result in the ill-advised ‘propping up’ of under-funded, mismanaged, ill-equipped charters that might otherwise struggle to find adequate staffing and, consequently, close. This paper suggests that these two tendencies – toward corps members’ insularity and poor placement – have the potential to conflict with the charter movement’s and TFA’s stated purposes of improving the quality of schooling for disadvantaged and marginalized students.     

Inhabiting the ‘tragic gap’: pre-service teachers practicing racial literacy

Set in the context of a teacher education program, this study examined how three White pre-service teachers participate in book club discussions of children’s literature. We asked: When White pre-service teachers are in a context that enables talk about race, racism and anti-racism, what do they talk about? What conceptual and discursive tools do they use? We were guided by these questions, along with theoretical perspectives of racial literacy, multicultural discourses and a form of critical discourse analysis referred to as ‘positive discourse analysis’ or ‘reconstructive discourse analysis’. Our analysis illustrates that the participants held two questions, what constitutes racism and what makes a person a White ally, without firm resolution in the form and function of their talk. Their discourses illustrate that racial literacy involves what teachers say and also a willingness to stand in the space of indeterminacy, which may create space for new social positions. We argue for a continued theorization of critical discourse analysis alongside of racial literacy and multicultural discourses.