Power and Education
ISSN 1757-7438

Volume 1 Number 3 2009

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

Anna Carlile. Finding Space for Agency in Permanent Exclusion from School, pages 259‑269
Anne Pirrie & Gale Macleod. Travels with a Donkey: further adventures in social research, pages 270‑281
Tat-Heung Choi. Power and the Subversion of Stories, pages 282‑294
Paul McIntosh & Paula Sobiechowska. Creative Methods: problematics for inquiry and pedagogy in health and social care, pages 295‑306
Dean Garratt & Linda Hammersley-Fletcher. Academic Identities in Flux: ambivalent articulations in a post-1992 university, pages 307‑318
Alejandra Boni, Jordi Peris, Estela López & Andrés Hueso. Scrutinizing the Process of Adaptation to the European Higher Education Area in a Spanish University Degree Using Power Analysis, pages 319‑332
Barbara Ridley. Articulating the Power of Dance, pages 333‑344
Heather Piper & Debbie Cordingley. The Power and Promulgation of the Claimed Links Between Human and Animal Abuse, pages 345‑355

BOOK REVIEWS doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.3.356 VIEW FULL TEXT
Peter McLaren, Education, and the Struggle for Liberation (Mustafa Yunus Eryaman), reviewed by Richard Kahn, pages 356‑358
The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Lisa Downing), reviewed by Ansgar Allen, pages 358‑360
Globalisation and Europeanisation in Education (Roger Dale & Susan Robertson, Eds), reviewed by Àngels Trias i Valls, pages 360‑362

Finding Space for Agency in Permanent Exclusion from School

ANNA CARLILE Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.3.259

This article aims to examine the experiences of pupils and professionals who are affected by permanent exclusion (what used to be called being expelled) from school. An ethnographic study conducted during the author’s employment as a Pupil Support Officer within secondary schools and the children’s services department of an urban local authority in England explores the idea that professionals may be forced to make inequitable decisions about including or excluding pupils in the face of powerful competition between the politically unchallengeable concepts of tolerance, inclusivity, attainment, and choice. The article argues that the tensions of multi-agency working are focused within what will be described as the contested space of the young person’s ‘extended body’. However, whilst the contested nature of this space renders it vulnerable to negative description and to the biased judgements of authoritarian power, it also offers itself as a space for emancipatory self description by the young person and for the expression of agency on the part of those professionals working for social justice.

Travels with a Donkey: further adventures in social research

ANNE PIRRIE Faculty of Education, Health and Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland, Ayr, United Kingdom
GALE MACLEOD Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.3.270

This article is intended as a contribution to the debate on the epistemology of educational research. The latter is construed as an ethical project that brings with it a distinctive set of power relations, and entails a degree of self-effacement on the part of the researcher, a subordination of the self to the internal logic of the task in hand. The conditions within the academy that inhibit the development of these qualities are briefly outlined, as is the status of the academic as an awkward hybrid between animal laborens and homo faber. The authors build upon earlier work that drew upon ethnographic research on walking and a comparative anthropology of the line in order to develop a new approach to understanding the relation between movement, knowledge, description and measurement in social research. They bring into dialogue the notion of wayfaring elaborated by the anthropologist Tim Ingold and Richard Sennett’s socio-cultural exploration of the realm of the craftsman. By drawing extensively on Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, they begin to open up perspectives for further debate on the literary turn in social research.

Power and the Subversion of Stories

TAT-HEUNG CHOI Department of Education Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.3.282

Language is a multiplicity of meaning-making systems, which are connected with social, cultural and psychological networks. Focusing on issues of power, this article is concerned to explore how the readings of a European folktale triggered attempts among teenage girls in Hong Kong to make their own feminist and subversive interpretations in English. The reconstructed stories are more than a partial reproduction of the conventional text, they are also a useful reflection of the teenage girls’ literacy and gender experience, as well as of their generic and social knowledge. With a resistance to textual conventions, the teenage girls demonstrate their written competence to create alternative subject and reading positions, which are textually motivated by their sense of difference. The material realisation of the stories is also characterised by splits and instabilities, in the negotiation of a new boundary for femininity. This negotiation demonstrates how the teenage girls are on the move, facing and settling contradictory possibilities in acquiring literacy and social roles. Along these lines of observation, the synchronic view of language, characterised by regularity and internal consistency, needs to be challenged in second-language writing instruction.

Creative Methods: problematics for inquiry and pedagogy in health and social care

PAUL McINTOSH Independent Consultant in Practice Development, Creative Encounters, United Kingdom
PAULA SOBIECHOWSKA Faculty of Health and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.3.295

This article provides an overview of initial discussions emerging from the Creative Methods Network, an informal organisation concerned with the use of the creative arts in research, teaching and practice in health and social care. Key issues are presented and contextualised with regard to the current conditions in which health and social care research and education is practised. Our own discussions have come to question the seeming dominance of governance within professional education programmes in which there is a primary focus on developing technical skill and capacity. Such governance often extends itself to the measurement of the implementation of these technical skills and this is set against concerns about the absence of creativity and the humanities in the educational programmes of caring for human beings. Consequently, the article reflects a view that the use of the creative arts and humanities in the education of the human caring professions is being eroded away in favour of technical-rational reasoning. It is argued that this then presents an important problem manifested in an emphasis on established and quantifiable knowledge transfer which inhibits other forms of knowledge generation. For the purposes of this discussion we have viewed this problem through the lenses offered by Foucault and Bourdieu.

Academic Identities in Flux: ambivalent articulations in a post-1992 university

DEAN GARRATT & LINDA HAMMERSLEY-FLETCHER Faculty of Education, Community and Leisure, Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.3.307

The discourse of power and agency in higher education (HE) is strongly linked to political notions of autonomy and ‘academic freedom’. Recently, however, such notions have been impacted by sustained and ongoing sector-wide reform. With various checks and balances of accountability, surveillance and new forms of regulation, this has led to a reformulation of the academic habitus, creating turbulent sites of struggle and contestation. The intrusion of new targets and technologies has in turn challenged the intellectual freedoms of academics, promoting new vistas of empowerment and constraint. Changing academic identities and social and pedagogical relations have produced somewhat ‘ambivalent articulations’, in Morley’s words, around the future relationship of teaching, research and administration in HE. In this article, we draw attention to some of these pressures in a case study of a post-1992 university where, in spite of more recent calls for it to succeed, research has traditionally emerged a poor second to the delivery of taught programmes. The article discusses the attitudes of academics towards the context of changing values and conditions and further considers the contested freedoms that are part of the evolving landscape of contemporary HE.

Scrutinising the Process of Adaptation to the European Higher Education Area in a Spanish University Degree Using Power Analysis

ALEJANDRA BONI, JORDI PERIS, ESTELA LÓPEZ & ANDRÉS HUESO Group of Studies on Development, International Cooperation and Ethics, Department of Project Engineering, Technical University of Valencia, Camino de Vera, Spain

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.3.319

In this article the authors explore power imbalances in a decision-making process to define the contents of a new Spanish degree adapted to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), specifically the industrial design and product development engineering degree which started in the academic year 2009/10 at the Higher Technical School of Design Engineering (ETSID) at the Technical University of Valencia (UPV). They start the article with a description of the tool they used to analyse the power issues: the power cube, developed by John Gaventa. Then, they briefly explain the process of adaptation of the Bologna Process at the UPV in general and at the ETSID in particular. They introduce the methodology used in their research by referring to the type of questions asked and the criteria used to select their informants. Subsequently, they discuss the answers, paying special attention to three aspects: the quality of participation and the quality of the process; the types of power; and the concept of education. Lastly, they propose a series of recommendations intended to improve the quality of participation in deliberative processes at university.

Articulating the Power of Dance

BARBARA RIDLEY School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.3.333

Making some minor changes to the syllabus of a peripheral GCE subject – Advanced Level (A-level) Dance – would hardly seem to be of much importance to anyone except dance students and their teachers. But the loss of dance notation is not as unimportant as it might appear: there are implications for the status of dance in the curriculum, for its ability to attract a range of students and for the development of the subject itself. Whilst being a popular social activity, in UK schools dance is constructed as a physical subject with an aesthetic gloss, languishing at the bottom of the academic hierarchy. Dance as a discipline is marginalised in academic discourse as an ephemeral, performance-focused subject, its power articulated through the body. Yet dance is more than just performance: to dismiss it as purely bodies in action is to ignore not only the language of its own structural conventions but also the language in which it might be recorded. Using the notion of docile bodies, the author considers the centrality of the body as instrument in defining the power of dance and how Foucault’s mechanisms of power and knowledge are exemplified in current conceptions of dance in education.

The Power and Promulgation of the Claimed Links between Human and Animal Abuse

HEATHER PIPER & DEBBIE CORDINGLEY Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.3.345

In this article the authors identify and discuss what they consider to be some of the underlying arguments and approaches currently promulgated in teaching and training in relation to abuse. Their focus is the assumption that all violence is linked, especially the belief that those who harm animals will harm people. This under-theorised but overtly applied phenomenon, referred to as ‘the links’, is increasingly evident on both sides of the Atlantic where it is supported and promoted by powerful non-governmental organisations. The authors draw attention to current teaching (and practice) in this area, which they consider to be flawed as well as unethical and unjust. They critique both the cycles of abuse models of the past and more recent manifestations – for example, retrospective constructions of profiles of ‘abusers’, dubious professional practice, and infringements of human rights purportedly supported by ‘science’. While their argument is initially theoretical, they draw on a focused study of a conference they both attended, which provided the opportunity for a limited linguistic and symbolic analysis. This illustrates the way in which the links idea is spread, supported by the institutional and moral power of significant agencies and organisations that are arguably operating as a ‘community of practice’.

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