Power and Education
ISSN 1757-7438

Volume 1 Number 1 2009

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

Introduction, page 1

John Schostak. Researching and Representing Wrongs, Injuries and Disagreements: exploring strategies for radical research, pages 2‑14
Shante’ S. Holley & Maja Miskovic. Barack Obama and the Power of Critical Personal Narrative, pages 15‑29
Roy Goddard. Not Fit for Purpose: the national strategies for literacy considered as an endeavour of government, pages 30‑41
Linda Dunne. Discourses of Inclusion: a critique, pages 42‑56
David R. Cole. The Power of Emotional Factors in English Teaching, pages 57‑70
Richard Taylor. Lifelong Learning under New Labour: an Orwellian dystopia?, pages 71‑82
Bas Levering, Stefan Ramaekers & Paul Smeyers. The Narrative of a Happy Childhood: on the presumption of parents’ power and the demand for integrity, pages 83‑93
James Haywood Rolling Jr. Invisibility and In/di/visuality: the relevance of art education in curriculum theorizing, pages 94‑110
Mike Cole. The Color-line and the Class Struggle: a Marxist response to critical race theory in education as it arrives in the United Kingdom, pages 111‑124
David Gillborn. Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory in Education?
A Reply to Mike Cole’s ‘The Color-Line and the Class Struggle’, pages 125‑131
Jean J. Ryoo, Jenifer Crawford, Dianna Moreno & Peter McLaren. Critical Spiritual Pedagogy: reclaiming humanity through a pedagogy of integrity, community and love, pages 132‑146

BOOK REVIEWS doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.147 VIEW FULL TEXT
Justice and Equality in Education: a capability perspective on disability and special educational needs (Lorella Terzi), Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach and Social Justice in Education (Melanie Walker & Elaine Unterhalter, Eds), The Capability Approach: concepts, measures and applications (Flavio Comim, Mozaffar Qizilbash & Sabina Alkire, Eds), and Capabilities and Happiness (Luigino Bruni, Flavio Comim & Maurizio Pugno, Eds), reviewed by Michael Watts, pages 147‑151
The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (Kathryn Ecclestone & Dennis Hayes), reviewed by Heather Piper, pages 151‑154
Minority Status, Oppositional Culture and Schooling (John U. Ogbu, Ed.), reviewed by Renée DePalma, pages 154‑156

Introduction

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.1

Power – whether enacted by governments or exerted in classrooms – saturates educational practice, research and theory. Education can enable empowerment but it is also implicit in the reproduction of social inequalities. Those who are disempowered may be complicit in their circumstances because they see no alternative or because they subscribe to a different value system that does not recognise dominant conceptions of educational worth. How, then, should the relationships between power and education be addressed?

In Disturbing the Peace, Vàclav Havel suggested that truth ‘is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said’ (1990, p. 67). Educational policies and policy-making shifts are liable to be shaped by contingencies and expediencies that do not always prioritise education. Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, (in)famously made ‘Education, education, education’ the watchword of New Labour but his neo-liberal Third Way vision of public and private partnerships failed to address the educational inequalities that persistently resisted the appeal of his rhetoric. Nonetheless, national governments increasingly seek to demarcate the epistemological bases of educational research as they continue to search for ‘what works’ in the headlong rush to demonstrate improved educational standards. However, whilst successful educational interventions are to be welcomed, what works for some does not work for others. Research and theory, if they are to be utilised as a force for social justice, need to constantly question the on-going disempowerment of the educationally disenfranchised.

Until now, though, there has not been a single educational journal dedicated to engaging with the relationship between power and education. Put another way, if there is strength in unity, it could be argued that there has been a de facto ‘divide and rule’ situation in which there is no ‘first choice’ journal for scholars seeking to share work addressing these concepts. Power and Education seeks to generate a distinctive and comprehensive body of knowledge focusing on the relationships between the concepts of power and education by promoting critical studies of contemporary educational practice and challenging the complicit routines of mainstream educational research. The journal considers education in its broadest sense, providing a strategic forum for work addressing primary and secondary schooling, further and higher education, lifelong learning, work-based learning and adult education from around the world and across all educational disciplines. The concepts of power in and as a challenge to educational practices, theories and research draw this diversity together to give the journal its distinctive mark and make it an authoritative source for those engaging with these concepts. There is a clear need for publications that tackle the hegemonies of education and Power and Education seeks to answer that call.

Michael Watts

Reference
Havel, V. (1990) Disturbing the Peace: a conversation with Karel Hvizdala, trans. and ed. P. Wilson. London: Faber & Faber.

Researching and Representing Wrongs, Injuries and Disagreements: exploring strategies for radical research

JOHN SCHOSTAK Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.2

It is argued that research involves the constant search for truth and that, in the context of aspiring towards social justice, this search is not merely a technical problem. Freedom as a member of a social group is essentially paradoxical: individuals want to express themselves but living with others requires the subsumption of at least some of these desires for self-expression. This is illustrated in this article with reference to several educational research projects exploring experiences of empowerment and disempowerment. The representation of people’s circumstances – and the wrongs, injuries and disagreements that permeate them – requires radical research that foregrounds the paradoxical nature of group membership. However, it should reveal more than the inevitable heterogeneity of the world. Radical research, it is argued, sees methodology itself as being founded upon irresolvable disagreements about the nature of truth.

Barack Obama and the Power of Critical Personal Narrative

SHANTE’ S. HOLLEY Department of Academic Enrichment and Language Studies, Harper College, Palatine, USA
MAJA MISKOVIC Department of Educational Foundations & Inquiry, National-Louis University, Chicago, USA

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.15

This article contextualizes the narrative of the US President Barack Obama to provide an understanding of critical personal narrative (CPN) and its use in mainstream curricula. The authors contend that Barack Obama’s narrative serves as a means to understand racial hegemony and the politics of representation in a curricular setting. Through providing an understanding of CPN it is suggested that educational opportunities exist for African American students to rewrite their own educational narratives and for educational practitioners to facilitate this process. In so doing, they are documenting the unfolding present, looking onward to the future yet to be realized.

Not Fit for Purpose: the national strategies for literacy considered as an endeavour of government

ROY GODDARD School of Education, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.30

Since 1998 there has been an ambitious attempt to raise standards of literacy in English schools through national strategies targeted at primary schools and at Key Stage 3 in secondary schools. This article views this initiative as a governmental enterprise aimed at forming the capacities and reshaping the understandings of teachers and their pupils in order to produce the citizenry required by a modern nation-state. It is argued that this endeavour has been vitiated by a guiding rationality that is undemocratic and impatient of scholarly process. The national strategies are ill fitted to the task of forming individuals capable of sustaining and enhancing democratic society in a period of cultural and communal plurality. This article attempts to clear some of the ground for considering how such an educational and governmental task might be more appropriately addressed.

Discourses of Inclusion: a critique

LINDA DUNNE Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.42

This article presents aspects of a study that drew on Foucault’s notion of discourse as practice to critically consider prevailing discourses of inclusion in education. An aim was to take the seemingly self-evident object of inclusion and to interrogate and question it as a potentially normalising, hegemonic discourse and as a universalising concept. The study considered how the contemporary discourse(s) of inclusion is constructed and constituted in education, and critically explored its potential effects. A multi-method research approach was adopted to address the question: whose interests are served by the way that inclusion is spoken about and (re)presented in schools? A range of educationalists, including teachers, teaching assistants and lecturers engaged in professional development programmes, were invited to give their views and interpretation of ‘inclusion’ in written form, via an online discussion board facility or as a visual representation in the form of a drawing that was then discussed. The multi-textual responses were analysed and a critical reading of the data revealed various discourses that interacted and reverberated around the themes of ‘policy’, ‘othering’ and ‘self’. The ramifications of these are discussed and it is suggested that newly emergent (entrepreneurial) discourses of ‘self’ are compatible with neo-liberal forms of governance.

The Power of Emotional Factors in English Teaching

DAVID R. COLE University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.57

One of the most prevalent ways in which power works in education is by separating out and segmenting knowledge areas so that their corresponding synergies and connective augmentations are nullified. This article takes secondary English teaching as an example of these complex social processes, and presents research that brings disparate fields of investigation together. On the one hand, teachers may be polarised and challenged by curriculum changes and governmental mandates that could infringe upon their everyday practice. On the other, every teacher in the profession will bring their interior and emotional life to bear on their ways of working, and this aspect of teaching has not been connected to curriculum change. This research proposes a conjunction of educational emotion and discursive identities, through an analysis of the ways in which teachers perceive curriculum change and their personal teaching and learning realities. This investigation has also been worked into the teacher training of pre-service (or trainee) secondary English teachers, so that they may realise how such concerns may be understood conjointly.

Lifelong Learning under New Labour: an Orwellian dystopia?

RICHARD TAYLOR Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.71

Lifelong learning is now seen, universally, as a key component of both a dynamic and efficient economy, and a participatory, democratic society. This article analyses New Labour’s lifelong learning policy in the decade 1997 to 2007 in Britain and discusses some of the themes and perspectives of George Orwell in this policy context. The argument of this article can be stated briefly: that both the detailed record and the ideology underlying New Labour’s policy formulation for lifelong learning have proved to be fundamentally flawed – politically, intellectually and morally; that a part of the reason for this inadequacy lies in New Labour’s dismissive attitude to history in general and the history and ideology of the Labour movement and socialism more particularly; and that this approach, deriving intellectually in part from the postmodern climate of the times, has resulted amongst other things in the reconceptualisation ideologically of several important policy areas, and the deliberate distortion of ideas and terminology. The connection between the second and third points above, and the critiques offered by Orwell in some of his essays, is clear, as is illustrated later in the article.

The Narrative of a Happy Childhood: on the presumption of parents’ power and the demand for integrity

BAS LEVERING Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
STEFAN RAMAEKERS Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
PAUL SMEYERS Ghent University and Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.83

Educational situations, in the context of the family as well as in the context of the school, can be conceived in terms of power relations. Often the focus of interest is the outcome of the educator’s involvement with the child. Though in general the instrumental way of thinking, in which a certain state of human well-being is an end to be reached, has been criticised, it seems to be presupposed by parents who express that what they want is that their children are happy. This may either refer to well-being later on in life or to the earlier period of childhood itself. The article questions the assumptions that lie behind both narratives of happiness. By using examples from literature it is made clear that much more than control, the person of the educator him or herself and what they stand for is at stake. Thus the concept of integrity and what this amounts to in the context of child-rearing are highlighted.

Invisibility and In/di/visuality: the relevance of art education in curriculum theorizing

JAMES HAYWOOD ROLLING Jr College of Visual and Performing Arts/ School of Education, Syracuse University, USA

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.94

This article investigates how representation attaches meaning to bodies, how certain bodies are categorically misrepresented and masked from normativity, and proposes a curriculum theory affording the agency of the misrepresented to de-mask invisibility. Brief historical narratives of three kinds of invisibility are presented as they are manifested in educational practice and visual culture – masking those deemed to occupy lesser physical bodies, lesser bodies of knowledge, and bodies lesser-than-normal. The author argues the relevance of art education as a transformative pedagogical practice that can inform and promote social significance, or what the author terms as in/di/visuality, the agency to reinterpret misrepresented physical or conceptual bodies. In the face of masking practices that unleash the squalls of invisibility and inequity throughout sites of curriculum practice and contemporary visual culture, the exercise of in/di/visuality acts as a watershed, displacing invisibility and affording a greater breadth of inclusion in educational concerns.

The Color-Line and the Class Struggle: a Marxist response to critical race theory in education as it arrives in the United Kingdom

MIKE COLE Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.111

In this article the author begins by noting that the arrival of critical race theory (CRT) in education in the United Kingdom is fairly recent. Next, with respect to racist inequalities in the UK education system, and concentrating on some of the arguments of a leading UK critical race theorist in education, he argues against two of the central tenets of CRT, the primacy of ‘race’ over class and ‘white supremacy’ respectively. In their place, he posits the Marxist concept of (xeno-)racialized capitalism which he argues has more explanatory purchase in understanding racism, both historically and contemporaneously. The author then addresses social class in both its Marxist and sociological modes, arguing that, in addition to ‘race’ in the UK education system, both modes are crucial factors to consider. He concludes that CRT suggestions for human liberation are variable and vague, and suggests that it is Marxism that, as a living philosophy, provides the best possibility of a viable equitable future.

Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory in Education? A Reply to Mike Cole’s ‘The Color-Line and the Class Struggle’

DAVID GILLBORN Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.125

This article replies to Mike Cole’s article, in this issue of the journal, on critical race theory (CRT) in general and my application of the approach in particular. The article briefly outlines the central tenets of CRT and then reflects on the character of some of the exchanges between critical race theorists and Marxists on either side of the Atlantic. Although Marxism is a broad and varied perspective, there is a strand of reductionist Marxist analysis that has generated critiques of CRT characterised by over-simplification, misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the approach.

Critical Spiritual Pedagogy: reclaiming humanity through a pedagogy of integrity, community, and love

JEAN J. RYOO, JENIFER CRAWFORD, DIANNA MORENO & PETER MCLAREN UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, Los Angeles, USA

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.1.132

American public schools today continue to segregate, alienate, and disempower non-dominant students through the use of culturally oppressive curricula and pedagogical practices. Through portraiture, this article illustrates how such educational issues are rooted in the fact that non-dominant students are often denied their humanity in schools. Building on a rich theoretical tradition of critical theory and critical pedagogy, this article challenges the complicit routines of mainstream educational practices by introducing the idea of critical spiritual pedagogy (CSP). Critical spiritual pedagogy is a method of teaching and learning that is rooted in three central concepts: spirituality, humanity, and power. It acknowledges the way students and teachers are exploited, fragmented, and Othered in schools while advocating for curricular and educational practices that are based in love and integrity in an interdependent classroom community. The authors propose that CSP can be used as a tool for teachers and students to reclaim their humanity and briefly discuss the implications this has for teacher practice, national curricula, and educational research and policy.

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