Key issues in qualitative
research and enquiry learning
John Schostak , Manchester Metropolitan University, UK – john@schostak.biz
Concha Sánchez Blanco, University of La Coruña, Spain - concha@udc.es
Jill Schostak, University of East Anglia, UK – j.r.schostak@uea.ac.uk
Cathie Pearce, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK – C.Pearce@mmu.ac.uk2006
CESE conference, Granada, July
There is an intimate relationship between education and governance. The forms that education takes is conditioned by the prevailing political orthodoxy in a given state or community. Political orthodoxies are either reinforced or challenged by the processes of education. Where they are reinforced education becomes either schooling in conformity, a training in skills or, at worst, indoctrination. Education as challenge is the very ground of an open world. An open world begins with children’s rights.
Hannah Arendt (1958:1) wrote of the ‘earth-born object made by man’ launched in 1957 as being experienced by people as the first step towards escape from imprisonment on earth. But there is something else too. The world seen from space is a globe, a unity. This privileged view of the earth through human eyes was possible only with the first astronaut. In 1969 it was seen from the moon, a fragile globe in a vast universe. What is not seen from such a vantage point is the everyday conflicts, the struggles, the fighting, the wars. For that you have to get down to street level. Here there is no vantage point. Similarly, there are two ways of looking at the role of education. From above the system is designed to fulfil social, economic, political, religious, cultural needs. It has the appearance of a unity, a National System. At street level, the level of individuals, groups, communities trying to find their way in the world, to assert their identities and achieve some status, skills, knowledge and well-being it looks very different, for some it initiates them into a world of wealth, influence and status they believe is their birth right, for others it is an alien even hostile world. The perfect society, it might be supposed, would require the perfect education system to fit people to that system. Many have been imagined. Perhaps the most influential, showing the appropriate fit between governance and education, is that of Plato’s Republic. This imaginary world of three classes – Guardians (rulers), auxiliaries (Guardians who remain as soldiers protecting society), and workers (the rest of the people, except of course, the slaves) – was to be ruled by the philosopher kings under a principle of specialisation that depended upon the ‘noble lie’ (Strauss 1964) that people were of different qualities like the metals gold, silver and copper. Although it is rationally organised and meritocratic in that people could rise (or fall) from one class to another according to the aptitudes they show, it is fundamentally anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic. Popper condemned it as an enemy of the ‘open society’ (1971). Nevertheless, it has long been argued through social and historical research that schooling according to social status, ‘natural’ ability and occupation has been a feature of schooling (Hargreaves 1967, Lacey 1971,Willis 1977, Ball 1981 Schostak 1983) stemming from the sense of there being ‘two nations’ (Simon 1974). It is now a sociological cliché to say that the social function of schooling is to reproduce society in all its inequalities. On a global scale rather than ‘two nations’ there is the reality of two worlds, that of the rich, that of the poor. However, it is also a revolutionary democratic dream to embed equality into the institutions, cultural practices and personal behaviours of people in society, globally to produce a world open for all. The challenges facing education to realise this dream are no where more evident than in the pervasiveness of violence founded upon the exercise of power in the context of inequalities and the experience of injustice and wrongs. The exercise of such power in a world pervaded by injustice and inequality is to borrow Arendt’s (1994) term, banal, a banality that underpins her exploration of the kind of evil that enables the development and functioning of totalitarian regimes that commit genocides.
The Normality of Violence
Hobbes argued that without a strong central power the state would descend into
a war of all against all where life would be nasty brutish and short, a view
echoed in Freud that man is a wolf to man. It is there also in the popular image
of a Darwinian survival of the fittest. And there too in the Hegelian Master
slave dialectic. Even the strongest, however, can be killed by the weakest.
As often pointed out, there is little difference in physical terms between people.
No one is strong enough or hard enough alone to overcome a surprise attack.
Hence, it is argued politics begins in people agreeing to support each other
and thus compromising on how they behave and limiting their desires and accepting
their social position in return for the security it affords. A contemporary
version of this model is to be seen in Schmidt’s (1996) friend-enemy construction
of politics with its latest and dangerous expression in Bush’s judgement
on those nations he has called the ‘axis of evil’. The argument
is simply that by polarising people into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’
political decision making is made clear as communities are identified as either
‘us’ or ‘them’. This necessitates a continual climate
of fear or terror of what the other may do – hence, in current global
terms, the War on Terror. Drawing on Plato, Straussian political thought (Norton
2004) adds to this mixture the idea of the noble lie, the lie through which
social order is maintained and political will strengthened. The accusation that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction played this role in the war to
depose him. Friends, enemies, accusations and the manipulation of people by
lies are all part of everyday experience. They can be seen at work in the playgrounds,
the streets and between different ‘communities’, reinforcing what
Schostak called the violent imagination (1986). During a recent project in the
UK involving creative practitioners working in schools with teachers, the artists
and the teachers working in one Primary school decided to get the children to
think about their ideal community in relation to their actual community. The
object was to increase awareness of cultural differences as an aid to the appreciation
of difference as an essential component of creativity and cultural richness.
During one interview the children talked about where they lived:
Girl: and then there’s like, near our fields where they ride their motorbikes there’s like these little blue pole, bollards I think, and they’ve like got robbed cars and they’ve like smashed into it so that they can still get (…) And the police are all there and you can hear it like so you wake up in the middle of the night you can hear police sirens all the time. And I don’t know why. We used to live in (another place) and that weren’t even worse, it was a little bit better. But then there was this family who threatened my mum and then they put our windows through so we moved away from there. Then they followed us to (the new place). So we’re going to move again. But it’s just teens and like people that, are like bad influences. We ‘ad a really good school but we had to move about six times just because of people round it. And every time we’re like playin’ outside all happy and then the boys come down the road. It’s just like they rule when they don’t, they don’t live near there. They’re always playing loud music and its just not on, I don’t think anyway.
(CAPE project 2005)
This was just one of the stories, told by one of the children, a girl of ten years old. When they watched the video that had been made during a walk around the neighbourhood of the school they were upset at all the negative images, the run down houses, the dangerous park areas, the rubbish in the streets. Street corners, doorways, narrow alleys all become potential locations of violence, real or imagined. As Tschumi (1996) commented, architecture itself can be violent when for example crowds of people are forced to walk through narrow corridors and doorways – it is a violation of space, intimacy and freedom of movement. Time in schools is architecturally structured with its specified work and play periods. As Jackson (1968) pointed out long ago the hidden functions of schooling are to teach children to accept artificial work and play periods that interrupt their interests, imposing restraints upon their needs, desires, and will and making demands concerning their role, place and function in society that they must learn to accept. The hierarchically organised school with all its members allocated roles according to a Plato-like Principle of Specialisation is fully appropriate to industrial patterns of division of labour, hierarchical forms of control and class divisions based on ‘natural’ merit or ability. As such it is anti-freedom and anti-democratic in its practice if not its rhetoric. In such a context how can one talk of rights?
The Poverty of Rights
Consider a personal experience where, in Spain, – it could be any country
- there are some children like Beatriz, of nearly fours old, who possess meagre
means and whose parents would obtain extra resources by collecting pieces of
scrap iron and other kinds of “merchandise” at an urban rubbish
tip. In spite of feeling a great desire to get her hands on some of the sweets
ostentatiously displayed by some of the other little boys and girls at school,
she prefers to pick them up from the ground rather than having to fight over
them and attack other children in order to lay her hands on some. In this particular
case it was all about some donuts that Lucía had dropped and would not
pick up from the ground. Beatriz nevertheless eagerly picks up one of the sweets
and finishes it off in a flash, even though it had got trodden on. I most vividly
remember my own reasoning, from the point of view of the affluent society, when
trying to make that little girl realise that one cannot eat something which
has been picked up from the ground, because it was full of “filth”.
I told her that the sweet might be covered with “filth” and she,
very seriously and earnestly, asked me what “filth” was. I believe
that my reply was highly nonsensical, because I began to give her some examples
taken from the world of affluence. Telling her about dogs and the “filthy”
mess they leave behind, which people step in, and explaining that eating “filthy”
food may upset peoples’ stomachs I actually missed the point that not
eating at all is even worse. Now, while I was saying all of this to her, I started
to realise how far out of harmony my speech was with all the meanings and the
sense which this little girl had been able to construct during her short experience
in life. Even if they were pieces of food, she, of course, believed that all
things could be picked up from the ground, and all the more so when her family
obtained their additional resources by collecting them at the refuse tip and
considered them all to be valuable, foodstuffs and scrap iron alike.
In becoming public, the personal transforms from the intimate, the private to the political and thus what is representable on a public stage. Most importantly in public terms is the issue of voice. Whose voices do we hear when we read the above textual reflection on a personal observation? The researcher’s voice prevails and speaks to us through her words that constitute the fieldwork data as she saw it and as she reflected back upon it. Since we hear the researcher herself, she always has first-person agency (Steele, 1997) she is doing the telling and we see everything (what happens and what she thought about) through her eyes and her written description of the researched event. She is subject. Beatriz herself, we do not hear. Having the status only of being represented, she is barred from first-person agency in the above account. It is as third-person agency that Beatriz is present inasmuch as she exists through being spoken about. She is thus rendered object here.
This is not to deny that we hear about Beatriz (the researched) by means of a careful and meticulous description of an event and of the researcher’s reflexivity presented as an open and honest account. In fact, deeply reflexive as it is, it could be said that the researcher’s role is one of witness. The research role of the witness has an intimate relation with the political function of ‘theory’ where the early Greek theoria refers to the authority of the witness who was sent to provide assurance that some event actually happened (Godzich, p. xv in: de Man 1986). In contemporary terms, through reflection on a given event the researcher is in a similar position as witness and interpreter, and hence ‘takes the place’ of those who by themselves cannot witness. This very structure means that there is a lack of voice and the subjugation into object is itself a violence to Beatriz which stands in stark contrast to the ethical and empathic stance taken by the researcher. This contrast and the sense of wrong it evokes creates the political realisation that ‘I actually missed the point that not eating at all is even worse’ and thus, ‘I started to realize how far out of harmony my speech was with all the meanings and the sense which this little girl had been able to construct during her short experience of life’. Whilst Beatriz has no voice of her own, she, nevertheless, has a powerful ally (the researcher as ‘friend’ not ‘foe’), to the conditions of alienation of modernity so vividly portrayed in this account. Such an act of witnessing enhances their political relevance and impact as one is forced to get to grips with the processes, structures and strategies of power that close off democratic access to resources and with this example of a public stage of decision and policy making. We want to return to this notion of witnessing after some further analytic considerations with regard to “filth” and the “abject”.
Filth acts in this account to establish borders between self and other (researcher and Beatriz), between “good” food and “bad” food, between “acceptable” social behaviour and “unacceptable” social behaviour, and quite simply but brutally between eating and not eating. Filth is ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas. 1995: 36). Thus boundaries are transgressed, producing fears and obsessions, thereby leading towards bans (or the ban-lieu at the edge or the margins of cities), exclusions, and the creation of taboos. As is clear from the above account – ‘telling her about dogs and the “filthy” mess they leave behind, which people step in, and explaining that eating “filthy” food may upset peoples’ stomachs’ – filth is dirty, contagious and dangerous to the researcher because it has been prohibited by the ordained “system of classification” (Clement & Kristeva. 2001: 92). And again, as here in this example, filth is ‘always related to orifices or boundaries of the body’ (Clement & Kristeva. 2001: 94), such that ‘[t]he abject, then, is always the improperly excluded other, that which is expelled in an attempt to maintain the sanctity and integrity of the subject’ (Chanter. 2005: 158). But this is not so for Beatriz. Her system of classification is different: ‘she, of course, believed that all things could be picked up from the ground’, but, of course, her system of classification is improper since it has not been privileged with national endorsement and therefore is not counted. The abject then is ‘above all, ambiguity’ (Kristeva. 1982: 7), whether that ambiguity operates between self and other, passivity and activity, clean and unclean, proper and improper or whatever, the bottom line is that boundaries that are suddenly permeable and not as boundaries should be are now in operation. This is a life and death struggle Kristeva believes. Hence horror and fear are associated with the abject, whose status is incomplete, being a body in parts, no less, since the system of classification, authorised through what Lacan would call the Name of the Father (Lacan 1977) in order to refer to the unchallengeable ground of a given sense of reality and its underpinning by the symbolic is not in place. “Affluence” is privileged as the alternate principle of completion whilst an Other, such as gypsiness, is spat out with distaste becoming outcast, without voice, without rights in the unified political body.
As in the case of Beatriz, the moments through which a symbolic order is realized are often apparently trivial. For example, another of the authors observed a meeting during a project in Portugal (Schostak 1990-2), in a small remote and rural village school in a very impoverished region where health education was being discussed between the teachers and the welfare workers. What the children really needed, it was said, was not health education but hosing down. This was not said as a joke. It was used to emphasise the boundary between ‘us’/clean and ‘them’/dirty as a pragmatic distinction requiring action. Hosing down, of course, was out of the question. Thus the issue of what to do educationally had to be tackled. Since this was an action research project with democratic principles the professional – teachers and welfare workers – were introduced to alternative ways of working with the children that involved empowering the children to pursue their own interests through reflection upon their everyday life experiences. In another school, in another valley of the region this issue of empowerment had become culturally embedded in the school to such an extent that the children had called a meeting in the community to raise issues regarding the building of a dam nearby. At this meeting, in front of the audience of local people, public officials and representatives from the constructors, a child asked the engineers to explain why they were polluting their rivers with waste. The children had carried out surveys of opinion, local studies on the environment and had given radio broadcasts. Through their voice, their witnessing of effects on the environment, their bringing together the different voices of the community to talk of a sense of wrongs, to ask for explanations. Rather than know their place, they stepped out of their place. Their voices emerge only with the public assertion of rights that are contested through dialogue between individuals who recognize each other in their differences. These differences are contingent, individual, that is to say, there is a process of taking on board the voice of another ‘next to me’, in the search for justice, visibility on the public stage. In the process traditional boundaries dissolve and hierarchies collapse as new associations emerge, new attachments form to produce new alliances, identities and social groups, communities. The sense of a natural order, a unified community or nation is challenged through the admission of new voices, new viewpoints that express differences outside of the prevailing power structures. This suggests a fluidity that power structures, if they are to remain, must resist. If there is no ‘natural’ classification of individuals into social classes and occupations, then there is no natural ‘people’ or ‘nation’ that can be composed. Rights are no longer thought of as natural but have to be struggled for on the public stage where disagreements are heard, demands made. If there is no place for this struggle, there is a poverty of rights as the powerful take measures in relation to the poor.
The violence of poverty
It is a struggle for resources. If there is a difference in the distribution
of resources this may make the needs of some groups appear more legitimate than
those of others, thereby creating a host of hierarchies which are anti-democratic
and therefore anti-open. In a just society, needs ought to be treated and considered
equally. For example, in Spain the least favoured citizens, many of whom have
belonged to the Gypsy ethnic group, one that has traditionally been severely
affected by poverty, have received a diverse range of social aid. Whether the
aid was sufficient or not is not the issue to be dealt with at this point, yet
it remains important. However, it should be stressed that large groups of immigrants
(with or without papers) have come to be added to this particular group, e.g.
war refugees, people trying to escape hunger, who have an equally great need
for resources. Because the resources provided are not sufficiently increased,
the available resources have to be distributed in such a way that there is enough
to go around for all those in need of them. Because resources have not been
increased in the same proportion as the growth of the people who need them,
a highly favourable context for the emergence of xenophobic feelings has been
generated amongst the alienated people who suffer needs and hardships. Not only
does this situation create racism on the part of people already living here,
but it also gives rise to broader wishes to exclude those people who have arrived
in Spain after them, trying to elude misery and find a place in this affluent
society. The former also argue that many of the latter are not even Spanish
citizens. The system itself actually creates fierce competition amongst those
subjects who have substantial needs making them fight over the limited social
aid being provided. This type of structural violence provides the conditions
for conflict to emerge as the people affected by the shortages are placed into
competition with each other leading to the possibility of confrontation and
all sorts of direct physical aggressions in everyday life. By no means can school
environments remain indifferent towards these types of situations.
However, there is a conservative perception, frequently sold through highly diverse mass media which safeguards the consciences of the satisfied majority, as Galbraith (1992) would put it, which speaks from a position of affluence and welfare and which is by no means exempt from helping to construct and reproduce a sort of structural violence which taints us all (Schostak 1986, 1993; Ross Epp and Watkinson, 1996). Yet, what we really want to highlight is the huge responsibility that governments have when it comes to endeavouring to create greater equality by making the right political decisions. Now, citizens, teachers amongst others, also have the responsibility to ensure that such decisions are made and put into practice in the environments where they act. Such concerns, in the UK are often placed under the curriculum in terms of citizenship, PSE (personal and social responsibility) or a broad approach to religious education. It leads to the question of boundaries, communities and racial, ethnic and national identity.
Borders, communities and the subject of violence
Without a politics of borders there is no story of the nation, race or ethnicity
nor any concept of the immigrant. Such identities involve a binding together
of individuals who have no necessary relationship to each other around a sign,
a symbol, a master signifier. Such associations have their beginnings in arbitrary
clusters, composed historically. That is to say, they are essentially metonymic
relations:
[M]etonymy is not just about contiguity between signs but about how that contiguity is affective or even dependent on emotional forms of attachment.
Ahmed. 2005: 100
Ahmed’s conceptualization is informed by Kristeva’s concept of nationhood which associates passionate attachments and emotions with nationhood, along with shame in not living up to the ideal. Ahmed pursues the role emotions play in aligning the individual and the collective. She first traces the etymological origins of the word “emotion”. It derives from the Latin emovere: “to be moved, to be moved out” (Ahmed. 2005: 100). But, as Ahmed points out, emotions are closely intertwined with a notion of attachments. Thus, the word “emotion” comprises a dynamic between movement and attachment: we are moved, we feel, we have [a] place, we have [a] dwelling. Sartre (1969) too writes that emotions may provide a contingent attachment to the world. Significantly, for the purposes of our argument here, the word “contingency” is derived from the Latin contingere: “com-, tangere, to touch” (Ahmed. 2005: 100). Thus contingency is heavily implicated in notions of metonymy and proximity. Through emotions we relate to others and this is quite evident in our suggestion that the researcher is perhaps playing the role of witness for Beatriz as explained above and further elaborated at this point in the paper. Emotions are directed towards something or someone and hence they have an intimacy of the “with” with regard to selves, objects and others. Nevertheless, such emotions construct boundaries – an inside/outside, an individual/a collective and so on. In other words, paradoxically, emotions both make and unmake boundaries and once again we are back with the notion of permeable boundaries which are not what boundaries ought to be. Fears, horror, disgust directed towards the object (Beatriz and gypsiness) are the result, and one responds by pulling away from the object.
It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s own clean self, but scraped and transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents.
Kristeva. 1982: 53
This kind of ‘object’ Kristeva calls the abject. Violence necessarily involves the abject, the rejected part. Hence, conducting research into an issue like the situations of physical violence which emerge amongst peers in the environments of Child Education is by no means a task without its risks, dilemmas and difficulties.
Inquiring into these facts and situations gives rise to not so little resistance,
not only among little boys and girls, but also among adults, as is the case
concerning teachers. On one hand, there is a fear to explore an issue such as
the one suggested, because it involves admitting that very young children assault
each other every day in Child Education environments and that teachers themselves
have often felt the desire to assault the children they are responsible for.
It may even be said that some of those teachers who find themselves pushed to
the limit of what they can bear actually do attack little boys and girls physically
by means of the odd bump on the head or by spanking them. Even though these
sort of situations lead families to feel doubts about the pedagogical quality
of the practices used by Child Education teachers, it is equally true that some
parents and guardians actually encourage the teaching staff to employ such “pedagogical
tools”. Many of the former have even resorted to spanking their children
and to using corporal punishment to “correct” the faults of their
youngest boys and girls, yet they do not consent to the use of such corrective
measures on their offspring in school environments. In this context, it is also
interesting to stress the highly contradictory discourse on the part of some
current and future teachers when they state that, although they themselves would
never assault their pupils they nevertheless believe that such strategies are
useful and efficient as far as bringing up children is concerned and that they
would and/or actually do use them on their own children. In any case, it would
be advisable for us to bear in mind that physical punishment stands in sheer
contradiction to the caring and security-providing functions that teachers on
one hand have assumed; and parents on the other.
From our point of view, an aggressor does not consider a subject who is assaulted
to be a subject enjoying the same rights as the former. At this point, by way
of example, it would be recommendable to remember all the discussions preceding
the banning of corporal punishment in schools in different EEC-countries, because
they were thought to be measures that attacked the fundamental rights of any
individual (Parker-Jenkins: 1998). However, the perception of the other person
as a subject with no rights is, contradictorily, becoming stronger during this
age of economic deregulation that we live in. So it is that precarious working
conditions may very well surreptitiously be contributing to our internalising
the other person as a subject with no rights; or at least only with those rights
which the Market sees fit to give them. Adding on to this, as a factor which
intensifies that perception, is the ever decreasing number of Trade Union members.
As a consequence, Unions have become not so much representatives of unemployed
workers or ones suffering difficult working conditions, but rather representatives
of what Capella (1997: 251) calls the “working class aristocracy”:
mainly Public Administration and Civil Service employees related to healthcare
and education.
Understanding needs and including rights
Rancière (1995), Laclau (1996) and Balibar (1998) amongst others draw
upon a Spinozan tradition of equating rights with powers. That is to say, rights
are only rights if they are effective. To have rights is synonymous with being
visible in the public domain where interests are proclaimed, demands are made
and rights asserted. Those who are excluded, marginalized or rendered invisible
to the system, when they act, the acts appear like a disturbance, or a violent
explosion and are responded to accordingly. A fundamental power involves the
allocation of resources to meet needs, interests, demands, aspirations, expectations
in ways that are considered ‘just’. A failure in any of these is
experienced as powerlessness. The sense of powerlessness appears in many guises:
There was for example recognition of the impact that schools had on parent-child relatinships. “There have been lots of negative and damaging comments said to parents and young people within schools” (AG). “I think a lot of frustration, personally I feel, lies in the damage that has been done in schools, the barriers that have been put up between parents and schools and perhaps, and I don’t put all the blame on schools, I think parents do not always fully understand the constraints the schools are under with time and resources and all that kind of thing but I don’t think schools always value those skills that parents have got. There is a blame culture going on, each blaming the other” (AG). The difficulties of communicating with schools were also echoed in some parents’ comments, “I don’t have a problem communicating with my child. It is when things happen at school that the trouble starts (P). And there was a perception that schools were indifferent to individual problems and obsessed with their ‘attendance figures tallying’. There was also a sense that their child was not understood or rather understood in excluding ways. “Mum’s only contact from school was to tell her how horrible and what a naughty child she had, who was being very cheeky and not allowed to go to his class” (AG).(Guinness project 2005)
They are embedded in a complex of expectations, frustrations, accusations, counter accusations and conflicting agendas. The conflict appears to be structural, not just a matter of dealing with an individual. Barriers are raised between opposing interest groups: parents and teachers; teachers and children. Although this takes place in the cultural contexts of the UK, we are talking here of structurally produced conflicts having local expressions. Close analysis of discourse shows how individuals, communities, cultures and nations can be constructed into positions of good and evil. Indeed, Schmidt (1996) formulated politics around the polarity of friend and enemy, having its contemporary echo in Bush’s labeling some countries as being a part of the axis of evil that the West has to overcome. This is a position much influenced through neo-conservative thinking that draws upon Schmidt and Strauss (Norton 2004). Is there an alternative?
Including Difference
For some, there is no alternative – societies are closed around an ‘Us-Them’
or ‘Friend-Enemy’ or ‘Good-Evil’ structure; for others,
there is always an alternative because no individual, no culture, no society
is essentially ‘this’ or ‘that’ but rather change and
develop as new challenges are met and differences in point of view included.
For Arendt societies are renewed and rendered open by the simple act of birth,
the birth of new eyes upon the world, a new individual whose needs and interests
will help shape the world (1958). The educational challenge is thus to be ever
open to each new viewpoint. If not, we would essentially be placing ourselves
in the realm of schooling conceptions that entirely reproduce the injustices
of our social environment from the very first years of children’s lives
(Sánchez Blanco, 2001, 2006).
Including the different in order to overcome prejudice, injustice and improve people’s quality of life is is often thwarted:
“…but it’s based on that kind of analytical… and that’s what it’s all about…and that’s what I got excited about coming to CAPE because I do a lot of anti-racist work and I thought this would be a good opportunity to delve into that but I can’t ever say we’ve ever got into that at all” (interview with creative practitioner, secondary school)
From both the class teachers and the creative practitioners’ perspectives there seems to be some value in exploring some of the concepts they are using at their own level before or alongside attempts to apply them in a classroom context. Such explorations could strengthen inter-disciplinary working and create possibilities for thinking through connections both in their working partnerships and in curriculum terms.
There were stories of missed opportunities of dealing with race and diversity too. “We’re in the dark. We had another situation with a lad called Said. He was a very switched on mixed race lad. The only mixed race lad in the class. It would have been really interesting to bring back his heritage and all that – he was really switched on. There was a racist incident. He got racially taunted during the break and they took him out [of the class] (creative practitioner). The creative practitioners experienced some frustration as the pupil had been removed from the class when they felt “that’s why we are here. Wouldn’t it be really good to say no, actually, the racist should get the short straw” (creative practitioner). The decision to remove the pupil had been outside of their involvement and control but suggests how the wider school context impinges and affects attempts to work openly with themes of race and diversity.
(Pearce, Schostak, and Piper 2005)
Rather than removing children, educational contexts can be constructed to ensure
inclusion. One project comes to mind. This was the Talking and Listening project
which was developed as a response to worries about violence in a First School
for children aged between 5 and 7 years old in the UK. Here the focus was initially
on angry disagreements, experienced wrongs and injustices. Rather than teachers
solving the problems, the children themselves were asked to ‘talk them
out’ and come up with solutions that each found satisfactory. The effect
was to empower both children and adults to engage with each other differently.
A dispute was analysed into the following:
1. recognition of problem/dispute
2. making the problem/dispute explicit
3. individuals taking responsibility for the solution to their own problems/disputes
- a teacher or some other individual may help to ensure 'turn taking' so that
all views are heard
4. generating possible solutions
5. agreeing a solution
6. ensuring no one is upset by a solution
7. keeping to the solution unless a further problem arises
The principle underlying this process is the generation of feedback cycles which
are under the control of the pupils in community with each other as opposed
to authoritarian surveillance systems. In this way, pupils generate a practical
knowledge of what works and what does not work. Too often children are kept
ignorant of the ways that things are done. Here, they have an experience of
a simple set of democratic procedures which enable them to organise social life
in ways where the needs and interests of the community are made explicit, discussed
and safeguarded. What is clear about this example is that everyone is consulted:
no decision behind closed doors, no imposed authority.
(Schostak 1990)
Differences, disagreements, wrongs and the demands for rights are a part of
everyday life, they are the very stuff of education for freedom and democracy.
If difference is excluded, then disagreements, wrongs and demands for rights
fester into resentments, jealousies erupting as violence producing a world of
friends and enemies.
References.
Ahmed, S. (2005) ‘The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation’
in Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: the Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s
Polis. Tina Chanter & Ewa Plonowska Ziarek(eds). New York: State University
of New York Press.
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, introduction by 0argaret Canovan, Chicago:
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