The imagined community of sexually liberal citizens: educational reforms since the 1970s

Recent integration discourses in Europe locate problems of equality, gender, and sexuality among migrant youth. Educating and testing the values of future citizens is supposed to guarantee their conformity with ‘western’ and ‘modern’ values. By analyzing educational reform discourses in multicultural Luxembourg, the paper aims to challenge these contemporary narratives in two ways: (1) In a historical analysis, the paper traces conservative reform resistance in the case of sex education which is often overlooked due to the focus on migrants; (2) In placing sex education’s reform legitimation and resistance within (a) broader educational reform discourses of inequality and citizenship and (b) contemporary narrations of the reforms and their taboos, the paper reconstructs how liberals and conservatives join an alliance over sexuality education of ‘the Other’. The sociological–historical discourse analysis critically questions the ethnicization of sexuality by disclosing its homogenizing use to cover conservative resistance within the citizen’s community.     

‘Ye've got to ‘ave balls to play this game sir!’ Boys,peers and fears: the negative influence of school‐based ‘cultural accomplices’ in constructing hegemonic masculinities

The ongoing moral panic surrounding adolescent boys continues to cause concern, proving pivotal in popular discourses centring on the ‘problem of youth’. Drawing on ethnographic data from a large co‐educational secondary school, this paper illustrates how school outcomes are adversely affected by working class boys' investments in peer regulated ‘hegemonic’ masculinity. Echoing traditional working class masculine identities formed in relation to the physical requirements of industrial labour, these performances reject associations with activities constructed as ‘feminine’, leading to disaffection with schoolwork. The paper argues that, in a school culture of pervasive homophobia, some teachers paradoxically acted as ‘cultural accomplices’, naturalizing compulsory heterosexuality in engaging alienated and disruptive young men. Moreover, evidence suggests that this is an emerging response to managerialist pressures to ‘continuously improve’ grades by adopting ‘boy friendly’ approaches. This renders questionable strategies predicated on naturalizing assumptions about boys and makes problematic calls for more ‘role models’ without investigating how gendered pedagogies affect schooling for girls and boys.     

Youth temporalities and the cost of Singapore's educational success

This article presents a different portrait of Singapore's educational success, using data collected from a qualitative in-depth interview study of a group of Singaporean youths, showing the cost of its education policies in terms of youth subjectivities. How the participants categorise their temporalities, that is, their lived experiences of time, shows how a modernistic temporality geared towards credentialist and materialist goals is regarded as more legitimate than temporalities such as creative becomings, engagement or coevalness. Juxtaposing the discourse of legitimate/illegitimate temporalities against the discourse of education reform, this article defamiliarises the ways in which temporalities are valorised. This article also highlights how, by promoting narrow forms of ‘love’ for the country, and ‘creative’ and ‘critical’ thinking, educational reform can manage subjectivities to accept, rather than contest, existing personal, national, and global realities.     

Hope without illusion: telling the story of democratic educational renewal

In this article, the author reflects on his participation in a project in democratic educational renewal in an inner‐city high school in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1990s. He frames the case study within a number of broader questions in democratic educational research and theory having to do with the need to construct narratives of hope without illusion. Such research narratives, he argues, are rooted in a recognition that culture is contested and thus open rather than determined. Progressive stories open up possibilities for critical reflection and strategic action at various sites, and they cross the borders between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ accounts. To develop these ideas, he draws on a number of poststructural theorists, including most notably Gramsci and Foucault. He situates the case study within the context of an analysis of the new cultural politics of: corporate‐sponsored school reform, the surveillance and policing of urban youth, and the ‘othering’ of progressives voices in urban education.     

Silicon startup schools: technocracy,algorithmic imaginaries and venture philanthropy in corporate education reform

Technology companies are investing billions of dollars in educational technology, but also creating their own alternative schools. This article traces the emergence of four prototypical ‘silicon startup schools’ as exemplars of a technocratic mode of corporatized education reform: IBM’s P-TECH, part of its Smarter Cities program; AltSchool, a chain of schools based on ‘makerspaces’ established by a former Google executive; Kahn Lab School, a new ‘experimental’ school launched by the founder of the online Kahn Academy; and XQ Super School Project, a ‘crowdsourcing’ project to redesign American high schools funded philanthropically by the wife of Steve Jobs of Apple. Startup schools are analysed as prototype educational institutions that originate in the culture, discourse and ideals of Silicon Valley venture capital and startup culture, and that are intended to relocate its practices to the whole social, technical, political and economic infrastructure of schooling. These new schools are being designed as scalable technical platforms; funded by commercial ‘venture philanthropy’ sources; and staffed and managed by executives and engineers from some of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups and web companies. Together, they constitute a powerful shared ‘algorithmic imaginary’ that seeks to ‘disrupt’ public schooling through the technocratic expertise of Silicon Valley venture philanthropists.     

The public face of teacher identity—narrative construction of teacher identity in public policy documents

Youth ‘at risk’ is the currently favoured label used in Australian policy for youth whose educational outcomes are considered too low, with an emphasis on the risk of not completing senior secondary education. Although some research has identified factors contributing to this risk as stemming from complex interactions between individual and family circumstances as well as characteristics of schools and society, policy identification of youth ‘at risk’ has tended to simplistically focus on personal attributes of young people. Moreover, this identification has set up a false distinction between a supposed problematic minority versus a ‘normal’ majority. Thus, the dominant conceptualization of youth ‘at risk’ draws attention to what is wrong with these youth, rather than to what may be wrong with schooling. This paper examines both empirical observations and discursive conceptualizations to critique the ‘youth at risk’ label, and proposes use of the concept of ‘marginalized students’ instead, which identifies individuals not through their personal characteristics but through their relationship with schooling. This approach allows recognition that marginalization is at least in part a product of schools and society, and requires action in those arenas.     

Constituting neoliberal subjects? ‘Aspiration’ as technology of government in UK policy discourse

Since the 2000s, successive governments in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have embraced the idea of ‘raising aspiration’ among young people as a solution to persisting educational and socio-economic inequalities. Previous analyses have argued that these policies tend to individualise structural disadvantage and promote a ‘deficit’ view of working-class youth. This paper adopts a novel approach to analysing aspiration discourses combining Michel Foucault’s four dimensions of ‘ethics’ and Mitchell Dean’s notion of ‘formation of identities’. Applying Foucault’s and Dean’s work in this way provides a new lens that enables an examination of how policy encourages particular forms of subjectivation, and, therefore, seeks to govern individuals. The findings presented in the paper complicate previous research by showing that raising aspiration strategies portray disadvantaged youth both in terms of ‘deficit’ and ‘potential’, resulting in a requirement for inner transformation and mobility through attitudinal change. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for the identity formation of young people and for conceptualising contemporary forms of governmentality.     

Ethnographic locations: the geographies of feminist post-structural ethnography

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this paper explores three key elements of what I call the geography of ethnography. These include: (1) the spatial politics involved in constructing a research ‘site’; (2) the shifting location of the ethnographer in research practice; and (3) the liminal space of the focus group. Anchored in specific interactions in ‘the field,’ the paper demonstrates how integrating insights from cultural geography and feminist post-structuralism can yield new ethnographic understandings. I argue that educational ethnographers need to better account for the geography of ethnography in order to attend to the power-laden sphere of ethnographic research.     

User or student: constructing the subject in Edtech incubator

ABSTRACT

This research focuses on ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ about education and learning emanating from the Edtech research and development sector. MindCet, the first Edtech incubator in Israel, aims to bring ‘disruptive innovation’ to the educational field, mainly by bringing in tech start-ups with their problem solving culture and practices. This centre acts as an intermediary between techno-business and education. Based on Biesta’s notion of ‘the new language of learning,’ my research shows how the learning imagined and constructed in techno-business production casts the student as a ‘user.’ I will argue that the construction of learners as ‘users,’ not ‘students,’ is crucial to understanding education technology production and discourse. This user-focused understanding of learning has implications for the commodification and depoliticization of education, and is an important factor in neo-liberal educational reforms and venture philanthropy interventions, both globally and locally.     

Securing the self: risk and aspiration in the post‐16 curriculum

This paper examines the social meaning of subject choice in the post‐16 context through a case study of Media Studies in a selective school. Students' accounts are discussed in terms of both their enjoyment of the subject and their negotiation of its ‘legitimacy’. The analysis of their comments in interviews stresses the subject's precarious position in a school where a relatively traditional hierarchy of subjects still prevails. It also considers the strength of family ‘projects’ in framing children's educational ‘choices’. Media Studies is discussed as a negotiable option primarily facilitating projections into a new middle‐class sense of self‐hood.     

Departing from the beaten path: international schools in China as a response to discrimination and academic failure in the Chinese educational system

International schools are commonly depicted in the academic literature and popular press as offering elite educational credentials to an elite, oftentimes international, student body. In this paper, I draw on a case study of a Canadian international school to argue that a new form of international school is emerging in China – one that offers a haven for domestic students from certain competitive and discriminatory features of the Chinese educational system. Fieldwork was conducted at a Canadian curriculum high school for Chinese citizens in Beijing. Most students at the school were internal migrants or children of China’s ‘new rich’ entrepreneurial class; that is, their families had economic resources but occupied precarious social positions in contemporary Chinese society. Analyses reveal that the international school offers a pathway to obtain baseline academic credentials in the absence of other opportunities for progress in the Chinese educational system. Together with evidence of dramatic growth in international schools and tracks in China, this case study suggests the emergence of a new type of international education programme that departs from a picture of international education as ‘elite’ in terms of student body, academic environment, and expected educational trajectories of graduates. The paper also develops our understanding of class and educational strategies in contemporary China.     

Neoliberal contradictions in two private niches of educational ‘choice’

This article brings together ethnographies of two privileged educational settings in the United States – a private school in California’s Central Valley following the progressivist Sudbury model, and an affluent New England boarding school’s summer enrichment program. Each of these institutions serves as an alternative to and/or extension of publicly accessible education institutions during a neoliberal era of marketization and growing educational inequality. By comparing findings from ethnographic studies of each institution, we find that both celebrate open access and socially responsible pedagogical values in ways that obscure mechanisms of exclusion and an entrenched individualist ideology. We discuss two particular contradictions that manifest in both settings: first, a discourse of openness and inclusivity that belies the ways in which access is mediated by constructions of who best ‘fits’ the special learning community; and second, an outspoken allegiance to socially engaged values of diversity and democracy that belies the ways in which these values are commodified and appropriated for students’ individual advantage(s). In comparing such sites, we argue for the importance of tracing the mechanisms of advantage in under-researched ‘niches’ of the dynamically shifting and unequally accessed neoliberal marketplace for educational opportunity.     

Religion,education and the post-secular child

This essay endeavours to reframe current discussion of the relationship of religion to education by highlighting an often seriously neglected element of contemporary educational thought: the changing, post-secular understanding of childhood in the globalised age. Drawing upon recent ethnographies of childhood, and an older anthropological scholarship, the essay seeks to illuminate the place of religion and religious experience in the education of the young by interrogating prevailing and competing perceptions of childhood that often implicitly underpin the discussion of the relationship of the ‘post-secular’ to both liberal and critical-constructivist accounts of educational purpose. In rehabilitating this core concern with childhood, the essay also seeks to recover the ‘pre-secular’ child of folklore, myth, fairytale and romantic aesthetics in order to propose that current Western conceptions of the child are constitutively implicated in these living legacies.     

Independent learning crossing cultures: learning cultures and shifting meanings

This paper contrasts the notion of ‘independent learning’ as perceived by two informant groups at a UK institution of higher education: (1) teachers, educators and providers of education and (2) their students or ‘consumers’ of education. Both informant groups are staff and students studying in a culture different to that of their first education. They are identified in their receiving institution as ‘international’, or have identified themselves as such. The experience of transition into a UK University was explored with both informant groups, through interviews and focus groups, over a cycle of two years. ‘Independent learning’ as rhetoric and practice emerged for both groups as an issue in their transition from familiar to unfamiliar learning culture. Three key insights emerged. Firstly, a mismatch is identified between teacher perceptions and student interpretation of ‘independent learning’ expectations and practice. Secondly, it emerges that student experience of the learning culture is in a state of continuous flux, evolving between first arrival and end of programme through cycles of bafflement and empowerment. Finally, both students and teachers identify a number of strategies for dealing with this experience of ‘transitional’ independence. The paper concludes by recommending a notion of ‘phased scaffolding’ that might inform educational practice and by reflecting on the implications for the educator in revisiting received educational discourse from the perspective of participants negotiating a second learning culture.     

Designing and using an organisational culture inquiry tool to glimpse the relational nature of leadership and organisational culture within a South Australian primary school

This case study research found that the relational leadership and organisational culture at a public primary school situated in a high poverty location in South Australia was built upon the strength of the inter-relationships between the teachers, teachers and leadership, and between teachers and students. Supported by what we called ‘dynamic inter-relationships’ and a ‘commitment to ongoing growth’ manifesting as key themes across the qualitative survey data generated by the school’s participants, we found the individual strengths of staff served the ‘on-going formation of organisational life’. Cognisant of these disclosed relational underpinnings, the research provided recommendations to the school’s leadership team about how they could best progress their educational reform agenda. The findings affirmed an Appreciative Inquiry inspired approach designed for the research was ‘fit for purpose’ as it generated extensive qualitative data from the teachers and leaders, offering opportunity for deep interpretive analysis using hermeneutic methodology of the school’s relational leadership and organisational culture. The research findings were subsequently confirmed by the teachers and leaders through a dialogic presentation of the research findings as an accurate representation of the culture of their school.     

Education and Race: the racialisation of class inequalities'?

Throughout most of the 1960s there was considerable optimism among education policy makers that schools could foster equality of opportunity: could mitigate social class disparities in educational achievements. During the 1980s a growing number of local education authorities have produced policy documents which are designed to remedy racism, ‘racial’ inequalities and ‘racial’ disparities in achievements. This article argues that these more recent initiatives mirror very clearly the earlier, class based, definitions of problems, explanatory paradigms and policy recommendations. It suggests that the racialisation of structural inequalities, the politicisation of ‘race’ issues locally and the contradictions generated by four particular crises of legitimacy within education provide the context within which antiracist policies can be understood. It asks what lessons can be learned from the demise and failure of earlier class‐based education policies.     

The use of feedback mechanisms in interpreting the robustness of a neoliberal educational assemblage

This article demonstrates how using feedback mechanisms or ‘loops’ as heuristic devices can help ethnographers explain the interior logic, robustness and contradictions within complex educational assemblages. After reviewing the use of feedback mechanisms in the natural and social sciences, particularly practice theory, the article presents two feedback loops drawn from the first author's four-year ethnographic study of class culture and neoliberal schooling in suburban Ohio, USA. The first identifies ‘hypercredentialing’ as the key process underlying the production of the performative worth of achievement-oriented students; the second identifies ‘reflexive awareness’ as a key process underlying the insufficient performativity of under- and lower-achieving students. The article uncovers hidden dynamics regarding neoliberal governmentality and performativity within a particular educational context and, more broadly, shows how using feedback mechanisms enables ethnographers to make cultural processes, as well as their interpretations of them, more transparent.     

Constructing and educating 'problem children': the case of post-communist Estonia

Estonia is a post-communist Baltic state in which neoliberal market ideologies and still prevailing socialist norms exist side by side in educational policies and practices. It is no longer self-evident what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘problematic’. Special education class for students regarded as having problems is a new innovation in Estonia. The paper analyses the history and current changes and discusses how a ‘problem child’ is constructed in Estonian teachers' perceptions and in the pedagogical methods used with these children. The paper draws on teachers' writings and on an ethnographic study in a special education class. Some comparisons with Finnish educational policies and ethnographic research on secondary schools are made. The findings suggests that in Estonia, a ‘problem child’ is a student who does not conform to the norms of the school, and in focus is behaviour that disturbs the teacher: problems in relation to schools' regulations of time, voice, embodiment and equipment, lack of engagement and unruly behaviour. We reflect the Estonian case with some comparisons with Finland using the concept ‘professional pupil’ introduced in an ethnographic research.     

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.     

Inclusive practice within the lived cultures of school communities: research case studies in teaching,learning and inclusion

This paper provides an account of a teacher's use of theory as a tool to develop inclusive practice through a social studies programme in a new entrant class. The account illustrates the ways in which the teacher drew on research to assist in the facilitation of an inclusive educational environment. Presented are research case studies the teacher encountered in an in-service teacher education programme, and the ‘social constructionist’ and ‘personal tragedy’ models that were used as theoretical tools to assist the teacher's planning and teaching practice. Mounted cameras, broadcast microphones and pre- and post-unit interviews with the teacher and students were used to explore the lived culture of the classroom, and the nature and effectiveness of the strategies the teacher used. An ‘interrupted narrative’ methodology engages the reader in the interplay between research and theory in the research case studies. Four major strategies used by the teacher have been identified and these are presented as theoretical tools for other teachers and teacher educators to use, critique and develop to support inclusive practice in their own contexts.