Policy Futures in Education

ISSN 1478-2103

Volume 4 Number 2 2006

CONTENTS

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

Theme: Doing Diversity Work
Guest Editors: SARA AHMED & ELAINE SWAN

Sara Ahmed & Elaine Swan. Introduction. Doing Diversity, pages 96‑100
DOI: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.2.96 VIEW FULL TEXT
Heidi Safia Mirza. Transcendence over Diversity: black women and the academy, pages 101‑113
Shona Hunter. Working for Equality and Diversity in Adult and Community Learning: leadership, representation and racialised ‘outsiders’ within, pages 114‑127
Audrey Osler. Changing Leadership in Contexts of Diversity: visibility, invisibility and democratic ideals, pages 128‑144
Cecily Jones. Falling between the Cracks: what diversity means for black women in higher education, pages 145‑159
Lewis Turner. Face Values: visible/invisible governors on the board and organisational responses to the race equality agenda, pages 160‑171
Rosemary Crawley. Diversity and the Marginalisation of Black Women’s Issues, pages 172‑184
Rosemary Deem & Louise Morley. Diversity in the Academy? Staff Perceptions of Equality Policies in Six Contemporary Higher Education Institutions, pages 185‑202
Sanjay Sharma. Teaching Diversity: im/possible pedagogy, pages 203‑216

Transcendence over Diversity: black women in the academy

HEIDI SAFIA MIRZA Middlesex University, Enfield, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.2.101

Universities, like many major public institutions, have embraced the notion of ‘diversity’ virtually uncritically – it is seen as a moral good in itself. But what happens to those who come to represent ‘diversity’ – the black and minority ethnic groups targeted to increase the institutions’ thirst for global markets and aversion to accusations of institutional racism? Drawing on existing literature which analyses the process of marginalisation in higher education, this article explores the individual costs to black and female academic staff regardless of the discourse on diversity. However, despite the exclusion of staff, black and minority ethnic women are also entering higher education in relatively large numbers as students. Such grass-roots educational urgency transcends the dominant discourse on diversity and challenges presumptions inherent in top-down initiatives such as widening participation. Such a collective movement from the bottom up shows the importance of understanding black female agency when unpacking the complex dynamics of gendered and racialised exclusion. Black women’s desire for education and learning makes possible a reclaiming of higher education from creeping instrumentalism and reinstates it as a radical site of resistance and refutation.

Working for Equality and Diversity in Adult and Community Learning: leadership, representation and racialised ‘outsiders within’

SHONA HUNTER Lancaster University, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.2.114

This article uses empirical material from a qualitative study of adult and community learning (ACL) to explore issues around leading for equality and diversity in educational organisations. What the author is interested in is the way that the commitment to a ‘community’ context in ACL opens up (or keeps open) certain possibilities for ‘diverse’ educational leaders because of the connection it draws between pedagogic practice and the politics of equality. By calling for a mainstreaming of political knowledge around unequal social relations, participants problematise notions of leadership currently circulating in education. Whilst homogenising tendencies in their accounts may be read as going against the very grain of contemporary debates around the recognition of ‘difference’ and diversity, they also pose significant challenges to neo-liberal imaginings of diversity.

Changing Leadership in Contexts of Diversity: visibility, invisibility and democratic ideals

AUDREY OSLER University of Leeds, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.2.128

This article considers the degree to which recent changes in school leadership discourse, to incorporate diversity, reflect a changing professional culture among school leadership trainers and researchers in England. It examines the extent to which equalities legislation has had an impact on school leadership agendas and considers what can be learned from school leaders, including those from visible minorities, to inform policy in this field. The national culture is shaped by patterns of forgetting, so that diversity is represented as something new, and potentially disintegrative. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century leaders of colour, who were once highly visible, are made invisible through the processes of history. Parallels are drawn with today’s school leaders and current educational leadership research agendas. Research commissioned by the National College for School Leadership adopts a cross-cultural paradigm. Cross-cultural approaches which do not engage fully with the legal imperative to promote race equality and which overlook deep-seated patterns of inequality are unlikely to meet the needs of a multicultural democracy. Many school leaders are concerned with racial justice and recognise their responsibility as citizens to address racism and inequality. Racism is an anti-democratic force, serving to undermine the full and equal participation of citizens. Anti-racism is thus an essential element of democratic practice within a multicultural nation state. The article concludes by arguing that school leadership researchers, trainers and head teachers need to adopt new patterns of remembering which build on the experience and wisdom of head teachers from all sectors of society who are engaged in the practical citizenship task of creating equitable schools and building an effective multicultural democracy.

Falling between the Cracks: what diversity means for black women in higher education

CECILY JONES University of Warwick, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.2.145

The concepts of social justice and diversity have attained currency in political discourse and in organisational policy. Since the 1960s, the concept of social justice has been at the forefront of governmental drives to eradicate social inequalities, delivered through a framework of equality of opportunity. Recent years have, however, witnessed a shift away from the ‘traditional’ equal opportunity model of achieving equality towards the adoption of diversity management as a strategy of organisational policy. This shift comes in the wake of the increasing recognition of the diverse nature of employees in the workplace. A cornerstone of diversity management is its stress on the recognition and valuing of individual rather than social-group difference. An emphasis on individual difference may, however, carry profound consequences for the achievement of equality, for it may in fact serve to obscure and exacerbate the structural causes of inequality and, moreover, it may be an inadequate approach to countering the racialised discrimination and disadvantage encountered by black female academics. This article therefore asks: what are the implications of this shift for black and minority ethnic women academics in higher education in the United Kingdom today? Is it possible for higher education institutions and other employers to initiate a diversity policy that not only recognises differences, but at the same time ensures the delivery of policies and practices that challenge inequality?

Face Values: visible/invisible governors on the board and organisational responses to the race equality agenda

LEWIS TURNER University of Lancaster, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.2.160

This article explores institutional responses to the race equality agenda in the context of further education (FE) and sixth form colleges. More specifically, it examines the experiences of black and minority ethnic governors within the environment of recent legislative changes to improve the representation of black and minority ethnic people in governing bodies and senior management within the sector. Using data from interviews with black and minority ethnic governors and diversity managers, the article explores the negotiations that participants made within these institutions as black and minority ethnic people. This exploration is framed by a problematic of visibility and invisibility – a ‘double bind’ which can restrict the role that black and minority ethnic governors are able to undertake within some college environments. The author claims that the modalities of these informal dynamics inform and affirm a conceptualisation of colleges as the ‘proper’ location of white male subjectivity.

Diversity and the Marginalisation of Black Women’s Issues

ROSEMARY CRAWLEY

DOI: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.2.172

This article describes and evaluates information gained from a programme of workshops that took place during the late 1990s for approximately one hundred black women who originated from the African diaspora and worked in the social housing sector. The programme was designed to utilise group working in order to promote feminist thinking and self-actualisation from a black female perspective. Most of the participants saw it as a means of personal and career development. In the event it also provided valuable research information. Stories were told and feelings explored about the effect on black women of living and working in a predominantly white society that publicly acknowledges itself as diverse but holds on to its economic privileges and notions of its innate superiority. The participants focused on the impact on black women of diversity as it is practised in employer organisations, diversity training, ascribed images and roles and interactions with family and community.

Diversity in the Academy? Staff Perceptions of Equality Policies in Six Contemporary Higher Education Institutions

ROSEMARY DEEM University of Bristol, United Kingdom
LOUISE MORLEY University of Sussex, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.2.185

The article is based on recent research involving qualitative case studies of staff experiences of equality policies in six English, Scottish and Welsh higher education institutions (HEIs). Recent changes to UK legislation (e.g. on ‘race’ and disability) and a series of European Union employment directives (including on religion and sexual orientation) have caused more attention to be paid to equality policies and their implementation in higher education. The wider context for equality policies has also changed, from a predominant focus on individuals and redistributive equality policies to viewing inequality as a generic and relative concept which can be policy-mainstreamed, with greater concentration on organisational cultures and diversity and a focus on recognitional rather than redistributive approaches to inequality. The article uses the authors’ recent research findings to consider how higher education institution employees who participated in the study understood notions of equality and diversity. There is a particular focus on whether different forms of inequality are seen to be interconnected, whether diversity is seen as desirable by most employees interviewed, the potential tensions and conflicts between equality policies applying to students and those concerned with staff and the visions of equitable HEIs of the future held by senior managers. It is suggested that whilst all HEIs studied had equality policies and senior managers who have benefited from equality training, nevertheless the shift away from redistributional notions of inequality (except in respect of occupational inequality) towards greater emphasis on recognitional forms, the tensions between student and staff equality issues, and the pursuit of organisational diversity may reflect a relative depoliticisation of the staff equality agenda in higher education.

Teaching Diversity – im/possible pedagogy

SANJAY SHARMA Brunel University, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.2.203

A turn to ‘cultural diversity’ in the curriculum offers a multitude of opportunities for educational practitioners: questioning Eurocentric knowledge; deconstructing ‘marginality’; recognising the ensuing hybridities, intercultural dialogues and encounters in a globalizing world. However, this article questions the current representational pedagogies of cultural and media studies in relation to how they address the epistemic and political grounds upon which the antagonisms of multiculture are played out. It argues that a point of departure for teaching diversity needs to acknowledge the contestations of racialized difference, and the pedagogic im/possibility of encountering otherness outside of domination. A key aim of the article is to explore the entangled politics and practice of teaching diversity, through scrutinizing the challenges of using a ‘multicultural’ film such as Bend it Like Beckham (dir. Gurinder Chadha, 2002). It has become increasingly common in cultural and media studies to use ‘ethnically marked’ texts to examine and deconstruct the dynamics of cultural-racial identity formation and representations of otherness. The article interrogates the productive possibilities and limits of such approaches.

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