The Ethos of Critical Research and the Idea of a Coming Research Community

Critical educational research offers the researcher a position and an ethos of comfort. Even the declared recognition of the relativity of principles, norms or criteria so characteristic of much critical research does not prevent it from looking immediately for a way out of this uncomfortable situation i.e. to keep to the idea that comfort (for the researcher) is needed and desirable. However, we suggest that this uncomfortable condition is constitutive for critical educational research and may be even for education as such. Therefore the article can be considered as a genealogical analysis of this comfortable critical research, in which we show how the birth of the milieu of the modern school goes together with the instauration of two forms of a comfortable research ‘ethos’: a research ethos rooted in a pastoral milieu and a research ethos rooted in a bureaucratic milieu. In the last section of the article we indicate that another ‘experimental’ ethos of research is possible, including the acceptance of discomfort. This is the ethos of a critical researcher as an inhabitant of a coming research community and as being exposed to the present.     

Rescaling the local: multi-academy trusts,private monopoly and statecraft in England

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery. Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance. Monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy. In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.     

Agency and structure in academic development practices: are we liberating academic teachers or are we part of a machinery supressing them?

This text taps into an ongoing discussion about academic development. It challenges an image of academic development as precarious and liminal and explores academic development as powerful. Sources of power are described and put into the context of values, ideologies, and policies governing higher education of today. It is our hope that readers will be inspired to problematise their own academic development practices and to reclaim a phase in the history of the profession where members displayed more of a political awareness.     

The governmentality of childhood obesity: Coca-Cola,public health and primary schools

In this paper, we examine the emergence of what might seem an unexpected policy outcome – a large multinational corporation, frequently blamed for exacerbating childhood obesity, operating as an officially sanctioned driver of anti-obesity initiatives in primary schools across the globe. We draw on Foucault's notion of governmentality to examine the pedagogical work of two international programmes devised and funded by Coca-Cola. We demonstrate how these programmes work simultaneously as marketing campaigns and as governmental strategies to position children as responsible for their own health, conflate (ill)health with body weight and strategically employ the concept of energy balance. We argue that these programmes not only act to unite the interests of corporations, governments and schools, but also seek to use schools to reshape the very ideas of health and a ‘healthy life’. We conclude by considering two sets of ethical and political issues that come sharply as corporations like Coca-Cola continue to exploit the policy space created by the ‘obesity epidemic’.     

Governing ‘eco-certified children’ through pastoral power: critical perspectives on education for sustainable development

This article analyses how ‘eco-certified children’ are constructed as desirable subjects in teaching materials addressing education for sustainable development. We are interested in how discourses structure this cherished practice and how this practice has become ‘natural’ and obvious for us. A discourse analysis is carried out by looking at the material through the lens of Foucault’s notion of pastoral power. The analysis departs from teaching material addressing issues on sustainable development: (1) textbooks for primary and secondary school; (2) games targeted at preschool and school children; and (3) children’s books about sustainable development. The results show that the discourse of education for sustainable development is characterized by scientific and mathematical objectivity and faith in technological development. It emphasizes the right of the individual and the obligation to make free, however ‘correct’, choices. In the teaching materials, the eco-certified child therefore emerges as knowing, conscious, rational, sacrificing and active. This child is constructed through knitting together personal guilt with global threats, detailed individual activities with rescuing the flock and the planet. In a concluding discussion, we discuss how ESD is framed in a neoliberal ideology. With the help of ESD, an economic discourse becomes dressed in an almost poetic language.     

Governmentality and My School: School Principals in Societies of Control

Abstract

The introduction of new accountabilities and techniques of government for the purposes of educational reform have created new complexities and tensions for school leadership. Policies such as the publishing of league tables in the UK, high stakes testing in the US and the introduction of the My School website in Australia are particularly significant for school principals. In this article I appeal to the work of Foucault and Deleuze to provide an alternate approach to understanding how principals are constituted as subjects through a range of practices and discourses associated with the introduction of the My School website. I specifically draw upon Foucault’s notion of governmentality and Deleuze’s notion of societies of control to provoke new lines of thought into these government practices. I argue that it is through the performative in the education system that school principals are becoming perpetually assessable subjects.     

DIMINISHED STATES? NATIONAL POWER IN EUROPEAN EDUCATION POLICY

ABSTRACT:  The increasing research on international organisations' education policy lacks analyses of the relation between international organisations and nation states. This paper aims to analyse the power of nation states in international education policy. Focusing on the new degree system in higher education in Europe, partly from Foucault's governmentality perspective, the paper suggests that nation states retain power while operating in international settings. The study's conclusions argue that the nation states' power might be a chance for further participation of affected people.     

Putting “the system” into a school autonomy reform: the case of the Independent Public Schools program

The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school communities with a range of responsibilities. This paper seeks to better understand the kind of post-welfare form of government IPS enacts. Using concepts from the governmentality literature, this paper analyses documents related to the program, and interview data collected from key government officials responsible for the initiative. It finds that while IPS renders operable a neoliberal critique of the public sector by implementing the processes of contractualization, it also diverges from the ideal schema of neoliberalism. Analysis reveals that a number of strategic, pragmatic and political concerns have resulted in what some may view as a contradictory rationality of “the system” being instituted as a key element in this autonomizing reform. The paper calls for attention to the actual operationalizing of neoliberal reform projects to gain a nuanced understanding of modern regimes of rule.     

Self-made school and the everyday making in Buenos Aires slums

Abstract

A governmentality ethnographic approach is adopted to examine the everyday making of school in Buenos Aires slums. By addressing events at the intersection of the life of school and of the neighborhood, in this article we problematize schooling – how it is put together and the tensions that beset it on a daily basis. The notion of the self-made school is proposed as a way to delve into how management society calls on the population to manage itself. We identify micro-procedures that take the shape of silent struggles to turn the school/neighborhood into a place to live. As a hypothesis, we propose that school is produced at the intersection of everyday struggles and the struggle for the everyday in the context of the precarization of life in the age of management. From a methodological standpoint what are at play are not dichotomies, but rather the stickiness and tension of daily practices.