Showing papers in "Critical Studies in Education in 2012"
TL;DR: The authors draw on the work of political theorists like Mouffe and Ranciere to critique the depoliticisation reflected in recent Australian federal government recent education policy, particularly its notion of an education revolution that pre-empts politics through a utopian harmonisation of difference and a r...
Abstract: Despite its ideological saturation, recent neo-liberal education policy has been deeply depoliticising in the sense of reducing properly political concerns to matters of technical efficiency. This depoliticisation is reflected in the hegemony of a managerial discourse and the decontestation of terms like ‘quality’ and ‘effectiveness’, as well as in the apparent consensus around the necessity of particular practices, such as the adoption of ‘standards’ and the implementation of high-stakes testing regimes. The reduction of the political to the technical is not only anti-political but also anti-democratic, with violence often unrecognised behind appeals to consensus, commonsense and ‘rationality’. This study draws on the work of political theorists like Mouffe and Ranciere to critique the depoliticisation reflected in recent Australian federal government recent education policy, particularly its notion of an ‘education revolution’ that pre-empts politics through a utopian harmonisation of difference and a r...
115 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored how mandated literacy assessment is reorganising teachers' work in the context of Australia's National Assessment Program, which was implemented in 2008 Students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are tested annually, with school results publicly available The wider policy context and emergence of different forms of interconnected educational work associated with the testing phenomenon are described taking an institutional ethnography approach.
Abstract: This paper explores how mandated literacy assessment is reorganising teachers' work in the context of Australia's National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy, which was implemented in 2008 Students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are tested annually, with school results publicly available The wider policy context and the emergence of different forms of interconnected educational work associated with the testing phenomenon are described Taking an institutional ethnography approach, the local effects of the federal policy regime are examined through a case study of one school What mandated literacy assessment does to educators' work in a culturally diverse low-socioeconomic school community is discussed Key themes include strategic exclusions of students from the testing process, appropriations and adaptations of literacy theory, work intensification and ethical mediation of results Questions concerning equity are raised about the differential effects of policy in different school contexts
111 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a review essay draws on Fraser's work as featured in Adding insult to injury: Nancy Fraser debates her critics to explore issues of schooling and social justice, focusing on the applicability and usefulness of Fraser's three-dimensional model for understanding matters of justice in education.
Abstract: This review essay draws on Nancy Fraser's work as featured in Adding insult to injury: Nancy Fraser debates her critics to explore issues of schooling and social justice. The review focuses on the applicability and usefulness of Fraser's three-dimensional model for understanding matters of justice in education. It begins with an overview of the principles of economic, cultural and political justice as they are reflected in specific examples of equity and schooling policy and practice. This is followed by (1) a consideration of Fraser's concerns that current forms of identity politics are reifying group identity and displacing matters of distributive justice and (2) with an account of her concerns about the political justice issues of representation and misframing in the contemporary global era. With reference to the sphere of Indigenous education, the review examines some of the problematics involved in pursuing distributive, recognitive and representative justice. Fraser's ‘status model’ is presented as ...
106 citations
TL;DR: The authors argues that there is a pressing need for progressive educational change and that ideas are an important component for such change and for rethinking practices, although not enough in and of themselves.
Abstract: This paper seeks to challenge the view that there are no alternatives today to global neo-liberalism and its manifestation within schooling systems and educational practices, particularly as high stakes testing and reductive pedagogies and curricula. The paper challenges the fast and shallow learning endemic to these practices, arguing instead for a different temporality of learning and school change. Indeed, the paper argues that there is a pressing need for progressive educational change and that ideas are an important component for such change and for rethinking practices, although not enough in and of themselves. The paper works with a broad Enlightenment construction of pedagogies and a conception of school reform framed by values of democratic citizenship and social responsibility and the need to connect with school communities, especially those communities disadvantaged by contemporary economic and policy settings. In disadvantaged communities, schools and teachers need to work with community funds...
85 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the culture of education policy making in Shanghai using the conceptual tool of a 'global assemblage' and highlighted the active roles played by the municipal government and other local educational stakeholders in assembling their own logics, tactics and counter-measures in the contested space of the assemblages.
Abstract: This paper explores the culture of education policy making in Shanghai using the conceptual tool of a ‘global assemblage’. A global assemblage is essentially a collection of ideas and practices that arise from the interplay between a global form and situated sociocultural elements. Focusing on the global form of curriculum reform, this paper explains how the Shanghai municipal government justifies the introduction of the ‘Second Curriculum Reform’ using the global imperative while maintaining its socialist ideology and central control on high-stakes exams. This paper highlights the active roles played by the municipal government and other local educational stakeholders in assembling their own logics, tactics and counter-measures in the contested space of the assemblage. It is argued that the success of the curriculum reform is mediated and vitiated by the sociocultural elements of a dominant exam-oriented culture and the traditional approaches of memorisation, repeated practice and didactic teaching. The ...
66 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a particular approach to epistemological action as "critical praxis" is proposed where we bring together the ideas of ideology critique, self-reflective consciousness and emancipatory action.
Abstract: A particular approach to epistemological action as ‘critical praxis’ is proposed where we bring together the ideas of ideology critique, self-reflective consciousness and emancipatory action. Critical praxis for educators seeks to move beyond the constraints of formal teaching, knowledge and curriculum and instead encourages communities, teachers and students to work together in producing new understandings and practices for the public good. As teacher educators, we are attempting to design a research methodology that will enable our field of practice to be theorised and to encourage a movement towards new critical understandings of teaching and learning for our students and for ourselves. This is a process of reflexive practice that endeavours to constantly and systematically interrogate our own views and to move beyond the status quo of conservative educational systems, procedures and rigidities so that knowledge is a legitimate investigation of possibility and transformation. In this article, we report...
43 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide a critical analysis of the ways in which market-driven and neoconservative values shape the experiences of junior faculty of color in American research universities. And they argue that in order to substantively improve conditions for junior faculty, there is a need for those concerned with change to fine-tune understandings of the US academy.
Abstract: In higher education today, an overwhelming acceptance of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies that advance corporate logics of efficiency, competition and profit maximization is commonplace. Market-driven logics and neoconservative ideals shape decision-making about what is taught, how material is taught, who teaches, who does research, who belongs, what counts as valid research and, ultimately, the purposes of higher education. Against this backdrop, in this essay, I provide a critical analysis of the ways in which market-driven and neoconservative values shape the experiences of junior faculty of color in American research universities. That is to say, I am concerned with the ways in which neoliberal racialization structures the lives of junior faculty of color in the US academy. In my analysis, I reason that in order to substantively improve conditions for junior faculty of color, there is a need for those concerned with change to fine-tune understandings of the US academy – its history and new re...
42 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue the need for new ideas to assist in the creation of a new social imaginary post-neo-liberalism to frame rethought educational systems, policy, and schooling.
Abstract: This paper argues the need for new ideas to assist in the creation of a new social imaginary post-neo-liberalism to frame rethought educational systems, policy and schooling. This is an attempt to reclaim progressive, democratic and social justice purposes for schooling well beyond dominant human capital renditions. While acknowledging the significance of ideas to this agenda, the paper also acknowledges that more socially just schooling systems will only be achieved when policy also confronts the extent of social inequality within any nation. The focus is ideas for practice.
42 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the school choice experience as framed by the My School website for participating middle-class families and found that participants possessed highly developed strategies for locating and achieving enrolment in school-of-choice and therefore did not seek to apply available data on My School to decision-making, despite each participant reviewing the available data.
Abstract: With the launch of the ‘My School’ website in 2010, Australia became a relative latecomer to the publication of national school performance comparisons. This paper primarily seeks to explore the school choice experience as framed by ‘My School’ website, for participating middle-class families. We will draw on Bourdieusian theory of cultural capital and relationship networks and Australian-based school choice research in order to contribute to understandings regarding the application of ‘My School’ data within participating families. Data collection consisted of qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with five families, each based within inner-city suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria. The findings of this small-scale study indicate that participating middle-class families possessed highly developed strategies for locating and achieving enrolment in school-of-choice and therefore did not seek to apply available data on ‘My School’ to decision-making, despite each participant reviewing the available data.
41 citations
TL;DR: The Shape of the Australian Curriculum Version 2.0 as mentioned in this paper explores the assumptions and contradictions that inhere in the Australian curriculum and concludes that the introduction of an Australian curriculum is actually narrow and conservative and implicit assumptions about knowledge, pedagogy and power have been camouflaged.
Abstract: The Australian curriculum to be introduced in all Australian schools over the next few years provides two competing narratives about curriculum. An overt narrative provides an unproblematic view of curriculum where the rhetoric and discourse that promotes a ‘world-class curriculum’ effectively obscures a second narrative. This second narrative indicates that the bases of the proposed curriculum are actually narrow and conservative and where implicit assumptions about knowledge, pedagogy and power have been camouflaged. This article will critically analyse The Shape of the Australian Curriculum Version 2.0, one of the key policy documents that informs the organisation and content of the second phase of the Australian curriculum. In a tradition that has its origins in the work of Freire and other critical education theorists, this article explores the assumptions and contradictions that inhere in The Shape of the Australian Curriculum. This article concludes that the introduction of an Australian curriculum...
39 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that public schools around the world have been hijacked and deformed beyond recognition by the forces of the economy over the past three decades and provide an analysis and a way out of this miasma around the notion of the socially just school.
Abstract: Public schools around the world have been hijacked and deformed beyond recognition by the forces of the economy over the past three decades. This paper provides an analysis and a way out of this miasma around the notion of the socially just school. While not another prescription, this orientation is argued to be the most hopeful possibility for those parts of the community that have lost the most through the spot-welding of schools onto the economy.
TL;DR: In this moment of tremendous change, investing in old ways of doing education is not the best way forward as mentioned in this paper, and they recognise that knowledge and learning will be pivotal to the social and personal transformations necessary to address the idiosyncratic challenges of our times.
Abstract: In this moment of tremendous change, investing in old ways of doing education is not the best way forward. In offering a Charter for Change we recognise that knowledge and learning will be pivotal to the social and personal transformations necessary to address the idiosyncratic challenges of our times. The transformed economic system emerging from the current financial crisis will require human capacities that only education can nurture, based on deep knowledge, practical imagination, creative participation, intellectual inquisitiveness and collaborative commitment – not just on the part of a knowledge elite, but of the many in the labour force and in the broader society. Extending opportunity to those marginalized by poverty and discrimination over the longer run depends almost entirely on the education system, including the reduction of high school drop-out rates, increasing access to college and introducing lifelong learning programs in community colleges for adults who have been displaced by economic ...
TL;DR: In this article, Ranciere argues against the progressive temporality of pedagogic relations and provides an alternative thesis that equality is a point of departure for social and pedagogical encounters, emphasising the importance of aesthetics and the distribution of the sensible as a mechanism for understanding who is un/able to be seen, speak and produce knowledge.
Abstract: Jacques Ranciere remains neglected within educational debates. In this paper I examine the potential of his philosophies for enacting critical interventions in relation to contemporary (higher) educational concerns. Ranciere argues against the progressive temporality of pedagogic relations and provides an alternative thesis that equality is a point of departure for social and pedagogic encounters. He also emphasises the importance of aesthetics and the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as a mechanism for understanding who is un/able to be seen, speak and produce knowledge. These arguments are examined through an analysis of two research-based art installations: Sociologists Talking (2008, 2009) and The Idea of a University (2010). I consider the potential for ‘alternative’ forms of knowledge production and communication to enact different pedagogic methods and re/distribute the sensory spaces in which research and teaching take place.
TL;DR: In this paper, Tarc identifies two tensions in the history of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma: first, between its design for meritocratic competition and its internationalist vision and, secondly, between the IB as a global commodity and its localised interpretations.
Abstract: This paper explores two of the tensions Tarc identifies in the history of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma: firstly, between its design for meritocratic competition and its internationalist vision and, secondly, between the IB as a global commodity and its localised interpretations. Using data from three case studies of Australian schools offering both the IB Diploma and the local government curriculum, and student responses to an online survey across 26 such schools, the analysis shows how choices behind the IB's growing popularity foreground strategies for optimising meritocratic competition. Framed through Bourdieu's concepts of field and ‘rules of the game’, the analysis shows how students act on their own comparative analyses of each curriculum to optimise their chances to access desirable university pathways within the local rules of the game for university placement. Schools are shown to offer the IB Diploma to recruit and retain academically ambitious students by pooling their relative...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw on ethnographic observation data taken from a school-based study of two groups of 12-13-year-old pupils identified as high achieving and popular to explore how relations between teachers and pupils are mediated and constituted through the spectre of neoliberal values and sensibilities.
Abstract: In this paper I draw on ethnographic observation data taken from a school-based study of two groups of 12–13-year-old pupils identified as high achieving and popular to explore how relations between teachers and pupils are mediated and constituted through the spectre of neoliberal values and sensibilities – zero-sum thinking, individualism and competition. Specifically, I demonstrate how certain high-achieving male and female pupils respond to and negotiate competing challenges summoned through the classroom – pushes to be competitive, autonomous and achieve academically, and pulls to court the acceptance of others and become or remain popular. This highlights the deep interconnections between neoliberalism and pedagogy and school-based orientations to learning. At the same time, it draws attention to resistance and the efficacy of the interpellating demands of neoliberal discourses in the context of intersecting dynamics of gender, friendship and popularity. I conclude the paper by considering how neolib...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the leadership experiences of a white, middle-class principal of a rural Indigenous school and argue the central imperative of a leadership that rejects these understandings and engages in a critical situational analysis of Indigenous politics, relations and experience.
Abstract: Drawing on a broader study that focused on examining principal leadership for equity and diversity, this paper presents the leadership experiences of ‘Jane’, a White, middle-class principal of a rural Indigenous school. The paper highlights how Jane's leadership is inextricably shaped by her assumptions about race and the political dynamics and historical specificities of her school community. A central focus is on Jane's tendency to deploy culturally reductionist understandings of Indigeneity that position it as incompatible or incommensurable with White culture/western schooling. The paper argues the central imperative of a leadership that rejects these understandings and engages in a critical situational analysis of Indigenous politics, relations and experience. Such an analysis is presented as imperative to supporting representative justice in that it moves beyond merely according a voice to Indigenous people to a focus on better understanding, problematising and remedying the racial relations that contribute to Indigenous oppression.
TL;DR: A recent study of governing bodies in England and Wales argues that the trend to corporatising school governance will diminish the capacity of schools to learn how they can understand cultural traditions and accommodate them in their curricula and teaching strategies as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: School improvement depends upon mediating the cultural conditions of learning as young people journey between their parochial worlds and the public world of cosmopolitan society. Governing bodies have a crucial role in including or diminishing the representation of different cultural traditions and in enabling or frustrating the expression of voice and deliberation of differences whose resolution is central to the mediation of and responsiveness to learning needs. A recent study of governing bodies in England and Wales argues that the trend to corporatising school governance will diminish the capacity of schools to learn how they can understand cultural traditions and accommodate them in their curricula and teaching strategies. A democratic, stakeholder model remains crucial to the effective practice of governing schools. By deliberating and reconciling social and cultural differences, governance constitutes the practices for mediating particular and cosmopolitan worlds and thus the conditions for engaging young people in their learning, as well as in the preparation for citizenship in civil society.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw upon Hannah Arendt's On Revolution to provide a theory of remaking in which citizens come together to constitute a body politic that secures their freedom to deliberate and act on their shared public concerns.
Abstract: The collective action predicaments of the time require citizens to participate in remaking the governance of civil society so that they can become engaged and cooperate together. Can citizens become makers of civil society? This article draws upon Hannah Arendt's On Revolution to provide a theory of remaking in which citizens come together to constitute a body politic that secures their freedom to deliberate and act on their shared public concerns. Contemporary theories seeking to democratise the governance of civil society – Bang, Newman and Bevir – are undermined by flawed dualities of structure and action. This article considers Archun Fung's studies of experimental community governance provide potentially an Arendtian model for remaking civil society based on democratic participation and deliberation.
TL;DR: This paper argued that what is at risk are not students but contemporary common sense notions of schooling and that education is a necessarily risky endeavor and that all students should be placed at risk of learning.
Abstract: This article troubles constructions of ‘at-risk students.’ Utilizing Ranciere's discussion of dissensus, the author first argues that what is at risk are not students but contemporary common sense notions of schooling. From this perspective, students' labeled as ‘at risk’ ways of knowing and being that interrupt ideas and ideals about the purpose and function of schooling. In order to make this argument, the author links Ranciere and others' discussions of the importance of dissensus to questions of sense-making, the dangers of resonance in consensus, and the possibilities in the dissonance of dissensus. These assertions are then further complicated by the assertion that education is a necessarily risky endeavor and that all students should be placed at risk of learning. Understanding all students as at risk is significant as it simultaneously provides a space for students' complex constellations of identity to be treated with dignity in learning experiences and creates a less punitive context in which di...
TL;DR: The AUCEA's "Position Paper" (2008 Universities and community engagement (Position paper 2008-2010) suggests that its uneasy synthesis of neoliberal, social inclusion and civic engagement discourses into a hybrid UCE discourse semantically privileges neoliberal forms of engagement as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: University–community engagement (UCE) represents a hybrid discourse and a set of practices within contemporary higher education. As a modality of research and teaching, ‘engagement’ denotes the process of universities forming partnerships with external communities for the promised generation of mutually beneficial and socially responsive knowledge, leading to enhanced economic, social and cultural developments. A critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge) of the Australian Universities Community Engagement Alliance's (AUCEA) ‘Position Paper’(2008 Universities and community engagement (Position paper 2008–2010)), as reported in this article, suggests that its uneasy synthesis of neoliberal, social inclusion and civic engagement discourses into a hybrid UCE discourse semantically privileges neoliberal forms of engagement. Perhaps, as a result, the AUCEA seems to have missed an opportunity to influence the Australian ‘widening p...
TL;DR: The authors argue for a Gandhian account of economics, which priortises need over greed as a way to think about a progressive grounding of education in economic purposes, arguing that schooling's role in the preparation of workers and consumers is nonetheless important.
Abstract: This paper begins from a position of critique of the dominant neo-liberal, human capital framing of education policy today. However, unlike most critiques of this kind, the paper argues that schooling's role in the preparation of workers and consumers is nonetheless important. Education does, of necessity, have economic purposes. To this end, the paper challenges the hegemony of neo-liberalism and lays bare some of its flawed basic assumptions. Instead, the paper argues for a Gandhian account of economics, which priortises need over greed as a way to think about a progressive grounding of education in economic purposes.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that schools are currently sandwiched between demands of the economy on one side and increasingly fundamentalist communities on the other; that schools need some degree of autonomy from each; that the greatest challenge of the century is how we can live together despite our differences; and that the only way of successfully meeting this challenge is for schools to put social justice at the heart of their activities.
Abstract: It is the contention of this paper that schools are currently sandwiched between demands of the economy on one side and increasingly fundamentalist communities on the other; that schools need some degree of autonomy from each; that the greatest challenge of the century is how we can live together despite our differences; and that the only way of successfully meeting this challenge is for schools to put social justice at the heart of their activities, activities that are best informed by the cultivation of reasoned imagination – that is, by an aesthetic approach to the development of intellectual, social, cultural, economic and personal identities.
TL;DR: This paper explored the perspectives of parent users of high-quality childcare in Australia and found that irrespective of educational attainment, parents conceptualise "quality" in childcare in ways that are consistent with, but also extend beyond, regulation.
Abstract: In the context of market-based childcare provision, governments in many industrialised countries use regulation to ensure quality standards and practices. Limited research, however, has investigated parents' perceptions of childcare quality and whether what parents value as contributors to quality resonates with regulatory frameworks. This article critically uses the Bourdieuian notion of ‘taste’ to explore the perspectives of parent users of high-quality childcare in Australia. Findings from six case studies show that irrespective of educational attainment, parents conceptualise ‘quality’ in childcare in ways that are consistent with, but also extend beyond, regulation. Parents identified factors such as engagement with the local community, not-for-profit community-based provision, and stability of committed staff who experience high job satisfaction as important to the provision of quality childcare. Identification of these factors highlights regulation as a potential discursive strategy that neutralise...
TL;DR: The authors trace three traditions and bodies of work: The Chicago School of Sociology, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and the New Sociology of Education, and find the places where they cannot explain away the particularity of texts and practices in their ambiguity and plentitude.
Abstract: In this paper, I trace three traditions and bodies of work: The Chicago School of Sociology, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and the New Sociology of Education. Each of these traditions evolved in distinct though overlapping ways. Taken together, they offer a productive set of resources for thinking through the complexities of popular culture and education today. These traditions are of course not meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive. Rather, I approach them as pieces of ‘context’ to evoke the work of Leslie Fiedler – ways of drawing circles around particular texts. The goal, as always, is to find the places where they cannot explain away the particularity of texts and practices in their ‘ambiguity and plentitude.’ I hope to encourage a particular kind of critical disposition towards popular texts.
TL;DR: The avant-garde theory of the creative process can inform educational administration in the change process, as both a critique and an ideal as discussed by the authors, and it is argued that if administration can be conceptualised as an art, then art's critical and creative traditions also speak to those aspects of professional practice that involve creative activity such as organisational design, leadership vision and strategic analysis.
Abstract: This paper addresses theories of the avant-garde, especially but not exclusively in art and as part of a modernist aesthetic. The paper examines the ways in which avant-garde theory of the creative process can inform educational administration in the change process, as both a critique and an ideal. The argument adopted here is that if administration can be conceptualised as an art, then art's critical and creative traditions also speak to those aspects of professional practice that involve creative activity such as organisational design, leadership vision and strategic analysis. This is a possible way towards rethinking schools and educational systems.
TL;DR: The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education, by Diane Ravitch, New York, Basic Books, 2010, 283pp, £11.99, ISBN 978-0-465-01491-0 Re
Abstract: The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education, by Diane Ravitch, New York, Basic Books, 2010, 283pp., £11.99, ISBN 978-0-465-01491-0 Reinv...