Showing papers in "Power and Education in 2017"
TL;DR: In an individual, subjectivist view of language, "English" is inextricably linked with context, that is, subject content which symbiotically connects thought and meaning as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Higher education institutions worldwide base international student recruitment on the assumption that their preparedness in ‘English’ is assured if they reach a certain level in tests such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). This assumes an abstract, objectivist view of language that sees the ‘English’ as removable for testing in any context. However, in an individual, subjectivist view of language, ‘English’ is inextricably linked with context – that is, subject content which symbiotically connects thought and meaning. In this article, the authors outline these views of language and consider the ‘English’ of IELTS. They then detail interviews and focus groups which they conducted with lecturers in the subject areas of Design, Nursing, Engineering, Business, Computing and Psychology. These researched the ‘English’ required in subjects and the thinking underpinning it. The authors go on to present and discuss results around three themes of ‘How “English” is specific to the content...
23 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored how too much parental cooperation influences the relationship of teachers to their professional responsibility, using reflexive autoethnographic accounts, participant observation and document analysis during a four-year period in one school and semi-structured interviews with teachers in another school.
Abstract: Parental participation is a fundamental principle of the Danish folkeskole (for children aged 6–16), yet this article explores how too much parental cooperation influences the relationship of teachers to their professional responsibility. The majority of research on parent–teacher cooperation has focused on parents’ opportunities to participate in school life, but little is known about what teachers think about such collaboration, and how imbalances in power and authority in parent–teacher cooperation influence teachers’ professionalism. The use of reflexive autoethnographic accounts, participant observation and document analysis during a four-year period in one school provided emic insight into the, often invisible, social processes of power. Semi-structured interviews with teachers in a second school were also conducted. Drawing on a body of interrelated work focusing on Bourdieu, situated learning theory and literature about professional studies, the findings suggest that parent–teacher communities can...
12 citations
TL;DR: Neo-liberal capitalism is a representation of values that are detrimental to intellectual inquiry as discussed by the authors, and market deregulation and consumer choice are relentless in their erosion of academic autonomy and t...
Abstract: Neo-liberal capitalism is a representation of values that are detrimental to intellectual inquiry. Market deregulation and consumer choice are relentless in their erosion of academic autonomy and t...
9 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe some of the consequences of welfare work in general, particularly in education, by analysing two examples which stem from the Danish educational context: upper secondary schools and vocational educational training.
Abstract: In contemporary western society, welfare work in general, particularly in education, has been struck by an endless series of policy reforms, discourses and technologies. These have consequences not only for the production of professional identity, but also for the way educational tasks are understood and handled. Inspired by the work of post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault, Rose, Ball, Alvesson and Willmott, and the psychoanalytical thinker Žižek, the authors describe some of these consequences by analysing two examples which stem from the Danish educational context: upper secondary schools and vocational educational training. The first example shows how a ‘strong’ state logic results in a focus on numbers, which leads to a form of cynical leadership and an undermining of teachers’ professional judgment. The second example shows how leaders and teachers in a vocational training school, with help from critical utopian action researchers, seek to innovate their practices in accordance with ‘soft’ ma...
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the question of how far critical pedagogy can be institutionalised through a series of historical and contemporary examples is addressed, as well as histories of independent working-class education and the free university movement.
Abstract: This article approaches the question of how far critical pedagogy can be institutionalised through a series of historical and contemporary examples. Current debates concerned with the co-operative university are examined, as well as histories of independent working-class education and the free university movement. Throughout this history, critical pedagogy has occupied a difficult space in relation to higher education institutions, operating simultaneously against and beyond the academy. The Deweyian concept of ‘democratisation’ allows the institutionalisation of critical pedagogy to be considered as a process, which has never been and may never be achieved, but is nevertheless an ‘end-in-view’. The article concludes by offering the Lucas Plan as a model of radical trade unionism that could be applied to the democratisation of existing universities and the institutionalisation of critical pedagogy.
7 citations
TL;DR: The authors revisited research conducted in the 1970s by Paul Corrigan and Paul Will, and found that aspiration has played a central role in the British government's approach to educational underachievement.
Abstract: Aspiration has come to play a central role in the British government’s approach to educational underachievement. This article revisits research conducted in the 1970s by Paul Corrigan and Paul Will...
7 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored how professionals in student welfare teams relate to and use neuropsychiatric diagnoses and found that the professional culture in schools plays a crucial role in the over-diagnosis of children.
Abstract: In society today, there is a tendency towards over-diagnosing. This tendency in society at large seems to reflect the normalization of a diagnostic culture. Some researchers have claimed that this normalization could be defined as the ‘medicalization of childhood’. There would seem to be a need for a sociocultural analysis of this phenomenon in schools – and it is in relation to this background that the present study hopes to generate new knowledge for the research field. This article explores how professionals in student welfare teams relate to and use neuropsychiatric diagnoses. The study draws on interviews with key officials working in student welfare teams in three urban secondary schools in southern Sweden. The main aim has been to investigate how the school officials talk about diagnoses such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder, and what kind of explanatory value is awarded to these diagnoses. The results indicate that the professional culture in schools plays a...
6 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors seek to find societal problems of control deep within the consciousness of humanity, which often surface in schooling as forms of top-down management pedagogies.
Abstract: There exist societal problems of control deep within the consciousness of humanity. These problems often surface in schooling as forms of top-down management pedagogies. This article seeks to bette...
5 citations
TL;DR: In the late 20th century, the Solidarity breakthrough of the Polish social movement has been a huge political success as mentioned in this paper, and Solidarity, as a specific idea, has become not only a social and political...
Abstract: Since the late 20th century, the Solidarity breakthrough of the Polish social movement has been a huge political success. Solidarity, as a specific idea, has become not only a social and political ...
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the knowledge produced by the research produced by researchers will be of greater social use if researchers position themselves as "cognitive activists" in the study of political education, especially learning through social movement activities.
Abstract: This autoethnagraphic article argues that in the study of political education, especially learning through social movement activities, the knowledge produced by the research will be of greater social use if researchers position themselves as ‘cognitive activists’. This is because, the article argues, the researcher needs to work in solidarity with social movements for socially just change in order to reconnect academic knowledge work to the wider struggles for social change. The article thinks through the implications and ideas around this framing of research work and positionality. It then goes on to examine in detail one of the techniques for taking this position – that of the mutually useful conversation frame of the research interview – exploring why this thinking came about and how this framing of the interview is politically necessary for the cognitive activism proposed.
4 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the relationship between capital and education through the experiences of a British secondary school following a grading by the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills that placed the school into special measures.
Abstract: This article explores the relationship between capital and education through the experiences of a British secondary school following a grading by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills that placed the school into special measures, considering the underlying assumptions and inequalities highlighted and obfuscated by the special measures label. The formulaic and ritualistic manner in which operational and ideological methods of reconstruction were presented as the logical (and only) pathway towards improvement is examined in an effort to disentangle the purpose of the ‘means-to-an-end’ approach within prevailing hegemonic structures, requiring a revisit to contemporary positioning of Gramscian concepts of ideology through the work of Gandin. The decontextualisation of schools from their socio-economic environments is probed in order to expose the paradoxes and fluidity of resistant discourse. The ambiguities between a Catholic ethos, neo-liberal restructuring and the socio-eco...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate how members of a research project group describe and interpret the dynamic relations in the group in running the research project investigating the role of the unknown variables.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to get an insight into how members of a research project group describe and interpret the dynamic relations in the group in running a research project investigating improvi
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the impact of a service-learning program based on positive youth development and social and emotional learning principles in two high-poverty urban middle schools, and qualitative data analysis yielded unexpected results associated with the professional development of teachers and social workers involved in the program.
Abstract: This article examines the impact of a service-learning program based on positive youth development and social and emotional learning principles in two high-poverty urban middle schools. A longitudinal mixed-methods design was implemented, and qualitative data analysis yielded unexpected results associated with the professional development of teachers and social workers involved in the program. The data suggests that participation in weekly program sessions for students contributed to positively shifting adults’ perceptions of students, and expanding the repertoire of classroom management strategies, which, in turn, overflowed into other areas of the school culture. This case analysis proposes a theoretical shift to interdisciplinary professional development that incorporates social and emotional learning strategies implemented in the classroom and through service learning as part of a comprehensive program.
TL;DR: The authors suggests that educational encounters of critical theory and pedagogy are today too often hampered by an emerging form of schooled reproduction in which university students are too often schooled to be critical.
Abstract: This essay, a speculative work, suggests that educational encounters of critical theory and pedagogy are today too often hampered by an emerging form of schooled reproduction in which university le...
TL;DR: The authors argued that the real power of capitalism/neoliberalism is not in the structures of its institutions or the agency of certain individuals to discipline others or undertake acts of resistance, but rather in the impersonal, intangible, quasi-objective form of domination that is expressed in the form of value, the substance of which is labour.
Abstract: Discussions of ‘neoliberal education’ tend to focus on concrete expressions of capitalism (e.g. policy, performativity or professionalism) while rarely engaging with its fundamental categories (e.g. labour, value, capital), let alone being grounded in them (Hall and Downs’ chapters are notable exceptions). As Moishe Postone has argued (1993), one of the problems with this approach is that anti-capitalist efforts to resist the concrete features of neoliberalism tend to be both dualistic and one-sided; they identify capital with its manifest expressions (its concrete appearance rather than essence) and in the act of resistance (e.g. violence, refusal) further hypostasize the concrete while overlooking the fundamentally dialectical nature of capitalism’s social forms and therefore allowing its abstract power to persist unchallenged (Postone, 1980). Thus, efforts to assert an identity and ethic of professionalism, the dignity of useful labour, or indeed, create oppositional alternatives, can themselves be seen as a form of reification which tends to lead to “an expression of a deep and fundamental helplessness, conceptually as well as politically.” (Postone, 2006).
This suggests that the real power of capitalism/neoliberalism is not in the structures of its institutions or the agency of certain individuals to discipline others or undertake acts of resistance, but rather in the impersonal, intangible, quasi-objective form of domination that is expressed in the form of value, the substance of which is labour. What distinguishes this approach from debates that dissolve into metaphysics and morality is that Marx’s category of value refers to a historically specific (i.e. contingent) form of social wealth. As today’s dominant form of social wealth, the form of value as elucidated by Marx (1978) offers the ability to render any aspect of the social and natural world as commensurate with another to devastating effect. The urgent project for education is therefore to support the creation of a new form of social wealth, one that is not based on the commensurability of everything, nor the values of a dominant class, but on the basis of mutuality and love: ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.’