European Educational Research Journal
ISSN 1474-9041

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

Agency as the Acquisition of Capital: the role of one-on-one tutoring and mentoring in changing a refugee student’s educational trajectory

IRIS E. DUMENDEN School of Education, Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development, Victoria University, Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.472

Current research into the experiences of refugee students in mainstream secondary schools in Australia indicates that for these students, schools are places of social and academic isolation and failure. This article introduces one such student, Lian, who came to Australia as a refugee from Burma, and whom the author tutored and mentored intensively during his final year of schooling. The article provides an empirically derived understanding of how one-on-one tutoring and mentoring became a platform through which this student was able to succeed in a structure which systematically tried to exclude him. Here, agency is conceptualised in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of capital. The analysis highlights the ways in which one-on-one tutoring and mentoring provided the necessary platform by which this refugee student was able to acquire the necessary capital that effected a positive change in his educational trajectory.

The Construction of Performative Identities

BOB JEFFREY The Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter, United Kingdom GEOFF TROMAN Froebel College, Department of Education, Roehampton University, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.484

The influence of policy texts upon learners depends largely on how much influence such texts wield. Policy discourses are one of the main means whereby policy texts, in the settings in which they operate, influence the value, the implementation and the inscribing of those texts on learners. The Economic and Social Research Council-based research project described in this article examines the ways in which Lyotard’s performative practices affect the identities of primary school learners and how they are constructed by Key Stage exam process; it also examines performative progression through a system of learning targets. It uses a Foucauldian approach to show how learners are influenced by performativity discourses and how they take part in constructing these performative identities. Employing an ethnographic approach, it illustrates how Foucault’s social relations characteristic of extra/intra/inter dependencies is explicated through governmentality and the construction of knowledge and subjectivity, which act as major relays through which learners’ performative identities become embedded.

‘Non-servile Virtuosi’ in Insubordinate Spaces: school disaffection, refusal and resistance in a former English coalfield

N. GEOFFREY BRIGHT Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.502

This article reviews excerpts from a body of ethnographic data examining some young people’s disaffection from, and refusal of, the education project as a whole in a UK coalfield area. Key examples are used to illustrate intergenerational continuities and disjunctions in attitudes to formal education in these exceptional and sometimes ‘insubordinate’ localities. It is argued that reviewing such data in the light of concepts emerging from the literature on Italian autonomist politics of the 1970s – particularly Paulo Virno’s work – is potentially fruitful in reclaiming a politics of educational refusal from the dual grip of a middle-class imaginary that abhors it as pathological and dangerous and a body of scholarship that seems incapable of moving beyond either lionising it as heroic or loathing it as nihilistic.

Enacted Agency as the Strategic Making of Selves in Plurilingual Literacy Events: framing agency and children as contributors to their own and others’ learning

DOMINIQUE PORTANTE Research Unit: Language, Culture, Media, Identities (LCMI), University of Luxembourg

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.516

‘This article is about the understanding of how children, using different conceptions of literacy as means to construct their social reality and their social roles in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, are enabled to enact agency in terms of their strategic making and remaking of selves. The research approach is informed by a sociocultural conception of literacy and draws on a conception of agency as multisourced, distributed and mediated through human interaction, mediational means and discourses. The author uses a microethnographic approach combining ethnomethodology and conversational analysis as well as discourse analysis to make visible how the children are reached by more or less distant meanings and conceptions of literacy conveyed and stabilised through the locally acting devices. The analysis also shows how material objects like written texts produced by children mediate the participants’ agency in different ways, constraining or enabling it with respect to how the children contribute to their own and to others’ learning. The article ends with conclusions on perspectives for organising learning with regard to subject formation in terms of empowering participation designs and for designing analytic frames for investigating processes of formation of multisourced agency.

Agency as the Ability and Opportunity to Participate in Evaluation as Knowledge Construction

ASTRID BIRGITTE EGGEN Department of Education, University of Agder, Norway

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.533

School communities find themselves within an overall ideological and epistemological controversy with regard to a drive for goal-oriented and ‘evidence-based’ practices on the one hand and emancipative bottom-up developmental strategies on the other, treating empirical data as information to be analysed according to context, with potential meaning for practice. This raises questions of democratic purposes of education, of leaders’ and teachers’ agency and corresponding accountability. This article is therefore an empirically based discussion of the relationship between multiple understandings of democracy and multiple practices of evaluation. It presents certain results of three ethnographic research projects among school leaders in Norwegian secondary education. Using a critical ethnographic research methodology in order to build agency, the article focuses on dilemmas and paradoxes of evaluation in an era of market-driven accountability. A situated perspective has been applied in order to view evaluation as a joint enterprise dependent upon the shared vocabulary and repertoire of evaluative tools in each community of practice. The fieldwork shows that the factors that are crucial for teachers’ and school leaders’ agency in this professional area concern their awareness of assessment used for evaluative purposes within multiple perspectives of democracy and validity. Most participants look beyond formalised procedures and predefined purposes, focusing instead on knowledge construction. The ultimate objective of the participants seems to be that of agency building, or becoming subjects in these processes rather than objects of instrumental application.

Homework through the Eyes of Children: what does visual ethnography invite us to see?

KIRSTEN HUTCHISON Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.545

Whilst the notion of children’s rights and an entitlement to express their views and participate as global citizens is threaded throughout the international policy field, children’s perspectives on the near ubiquitous practice of homework, and its effects on their daily lives and learner subjectivities, remain under-researched. Drawing on the Bourdieuian concepts of practice, habitus, capital and field, this article develops a cross-cultural analysis of homework practices in Australia, Denmark and Britain to make visible the embodied habitus and agentic possibilities shaping the reproduction of educational advantage and disadvantage for variously located students. Using video data generated by children in primary schools, the article explores children’s visual representations of their compliance and resistance to homework’s regulatory functions. It demonstrates the affordances of visual ethnographic methods as a form of participatory research with children which foregrounds students’ experiences and opinions and makes visible the inclusionary and exclusionary effects of homework on children in diverse socio-cultural settings.

Learner Agency

CAROLA MICK CEPED – Sciences de Langage, Université Paris Descartes, France

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.559

This article presents first results of an ethnographic research project in a Luxembourgish primary school that accompanied the development of a school project by children from the fifth grade. Analysing the data children themselves collected with Kodak Zi8 cameras in order to document their project activities, it investigates their possibilities and constraints to become designers of a ‘third space’ within the educational institution. The author draws on Emile Durkheim’s educational sociology in order to simultaneously analyse the educational processes of socialisation and subjectification that occur when children are legitimated to take part in the design of their own learning processes within school. The analysis focuses on the social languages children are drawing on and creating when shaping their school project in and through the collected data. It succeeds in depicting the interplay of structure and agency in children’s practices and in demonstrating children’s capability to contribute to their subjectification as social beings and to co-design the educational institution they are socialised by. However, it also points to the institution’s mistrust and constant endangering of children’s initiative and constitution as social actors. In this sense, the article deals with the possibilities of and obstacles to transformation of institutions of learning from within and bottom up.

On Structure and Agency in Ethnographies of Education: examples from this special issue and more generally

DENNIS BEACH Department of Education and Behavioural Sciences, University of Borås and Department of Education and Special Education, Gothenburg University, Sweden

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.572

The articles in this collection are about the development, possibility, exercise and possible frustration of human agency within educational exchanges. They are also all based on ethnography, which is now a common approach to educational research. Ethnography is not a seamless, neutral observational practice but is instead variable in relation to theoretical perspectives and methodological application. However, central to all approaches is an emphasis on an active and creative citizen and an assumption that there is a dialectical relationship between human social practices, human consciousness and social structures. The similarities and differences within education ethnography are apparent even in the articles present here and in the ways in which they depict, define and describe agency in this special issue.

Quality Assurance on the Road: Finland and Austria in comparison

ANDREA BERNHARD University of Graz, Austria

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.583

The ongoing necessity for quality and quality assurance in the entire Bologna process remains one of the main issues for European policy makers. The aims of creating comparable systems and of guaranteeing quality within higher education systems are the reasons for national developments and the eagerness to reform. The situation in two relatively small European countries, Austria and Finland, is at the centre of this research and exemplifies different ways of coping with international developments and the need to establish a comprehensive quality assurance system. How do these countries cope with the pressure to compete in the global higher education market? Is their system of quality assurance in line with the European aim to create a European higher education area? The purpose of this study is to provide an overview on two national quality assurance systems and to figure out similarities and differences between these two countries, providing a clear picture of what has been done in the field of quality assurance, where the challenges to transform are and how to improve quality assurance systems.

Educational Organisations as ‘Cultures of Consumption’: cultural contexts of consumer learning in schools

DANIEL FISCHER Institute for Environmental and Sustainability Communication (INFU), Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.595

High levels of consumption in the industrialised parts of the world such as Europe mark a central threat to global sustainable development. In recent years, growing attention has been paid to the contributions of education and educational organisations to the socialisation of youths and young adults into consumer culture. It is the contention of this article that educational responses to the consumption challenge both within the European Union (EU) consumer policy strategy and in current practices in consumer education in European countries build on an understanding of consumer learning in schools that is too narrowly defined and thus insufficient. The aim of this article is therefore to help overcome this shortcoming by unfolding a socio-cultural view on consumption-related formal and informal learning environments in educational organisations. It is assumed that in response to external framings such as curricula or policies and as a result of inner-organisational negotiations, schools bring about distinct ways of relating to consumption and youth consumers that have socialising effects on their students. This article presents a conceptual elaboration of these contexts and processes. It draws on research into the genesis and characteristic fields of school culture and relates this to the domain of consumption. As a result, a detailed framework of organisational ‘cultures of consumption’ in schools with six thematic domains is presented. The article concludes with a discussion of implications and demands for a new research, practice and policy-making agenda that is needed to advance a more holistic promotion of sustainable consumer education in schools in Europe.

Policy as Assemblage

RADHIKA GORUR Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.611

In this article, the author tells the story of her search for appropriate tools to conceptualise policy work. She had set out to explore the relationship between the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Australia’s education policy, but early interview data forced her to reconsider her research question. The plethora of available models of policy did not satisfactorily accommodate her growing understanding of the messiness and complexity of policy work. On the basis of interviews with 18 policy actors, including former OECD officials, PISA analysts and bureaucrats, as well as documentary analysis of government reports and ministerial media releases, she suggests that the concept of ‘assemblage’ provides the tools to better understand the messy processes of policy work. The relationship between PISA and national policy is of interest to many scholars in Europe, making this study widely relevant. An article that argues for the unsettling of tidy accounts of knowledge making in policy can hardly afford to obscure the untidiness of its own assemblage. Accordingly, this article is somewhat unconventional in its presentation, and attempts to take the reader into the messiness of the research world as well as the policy world. Implicit in this presentation is the suggestion that both policy work and research work are ongoing attempts to find order and coherence through the cobbling together of a variety of resources.

Interactions between European Citizenship and Language Learning among Adolescent Europeans

MAIRIN HENNEBRY Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.623

Recent enlargement of the European Union (EU) has created debate as to the suitability of current structures and policies for effectively engaging citizens and developing social cohesion. Education and specifically modern foreign language (MFL) teaching are argued by the literature to play a key role in equipping young people to interact and communicate effectively in the ever-changing European context and to exercise their rights as European citizens. However, much of the empirical research to date has focused on adult understandings of European citizenship. Furthermore, very few studies consider whether current MFL teaching is addressing issues of European citizenship or offer a comparison of provision between one member state and another. This study presents questionnaire data from four European countries to investigate young people’s current understanding and awareness of European citizenship and the perceived contribution of their language learning experience to this awareness. Findings suggest that knowledge about European citizenship is patchy across the four countries. Reports on learning in MFL lessons indicate a mismatch between the role identified for the subject in the development of European citizenship and the situation in the classroom. Data gathered from English pupils suggest that these issues are more acute in England than they are in France, Spain or Ireland.

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