Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education Also by Rachel Brooks (*published by Palgrave) CHANGING SPACES OF EDUCATION: New Perspectives on the Nature of Learning (co-edited with Alison Fuller and Johanna Waters) FRIENDSHIP AND EDUCATIONAL CHOICE*

NEGOTIATING ETHICAL CHALLENGES IN YOUTH RESEARCH (co-edited with Kitty te Riele) RESEARCHING YOUNG PEOPLE’S LIVES (with Sue Heath, Elizabeth Cleaver and Eleanor Ireland) STUDENT MOBILITIES, MIGRATION AND THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION* (with Johanna Waters) TRANSITIONS FROM EDUCATION TO WORK: New Perspectives from Europe and Beyond*

Also by Mark McCormack THE DECLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF HOMOPHOBIA: How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality

Also by Kalwant Bhopal IDENTITY AND PEDAGOGY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: International Comparisons (with Patrick Alan Danaher) ASIAN WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION: Shared Communities

INSIDERS, OUTSIDERS AND OTHERS: Gypsies and Identity (with Martin Myers) CONNECTING CHILDREN: Care and Family Life in Later Childhood (with Julia Brannen and Ellen Heptinstall) GENDER, ‘RACE’ AND PATRIARCHY: A Study of South Asian Women EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITIES: Difference and Diversity in Schools and Higher Education (with Uvanney Maylor) INTERSECTIONALITY AND ‘RACE’ IN EDUCATION (with John Preston) Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education

Edited by

Rachel Brooks University of Surrey, UK Mark McCormack Durham University, UK and Kalwant Bhopal University of Southampton, UK Selection and editorial matter © Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal 2013 Individual chapters © Respective authors 2013

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-26987-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-44415-1 ISBN 978-1-137-26988-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137269881 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Contents

List of Tables and Figures vii Notes on Contributors ix

1 Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education: An Introduction 1 Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal 2 Globalisation and Sociology of Education Policy: The Case of PISA 19 Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar 3 Education Policy, Human Rights, Citizenship and Cohesion 39 Audrey Osler 4 School Type and Inequality 57 Rita Nikolai and Anne West 5 We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? A Critique of Lifelong Learning through the Lens of Workplace Learning at the Bottom of the Service Sector 76 Steven Roberts 6 In a Class of Their Own: How Working-Class Students Experience University 93 Wolfgang Lehmann 7 Examining the (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms 112 Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson 8 Adolescent and Disabled or Adolescence Disabled? Education and the Construction of Gendered Identities among Adolescents with Intellectual Disability 131 Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols 9 It’s How You Look or What You Like: Gender Harassment at School and Its Association with Student Adjustment 149 Elisabeth Morgan Thompson, Katerina O. Sinclair, Riki Wilchins and Stephen T. Russell

vv vi Contents

10 What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? Schooling, Law and Limitations of Race-Neutral Reforms 168 Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran 11 Fear In and About Education 185 Carolyn Jackson 12 Choosing Subjects: Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices 202 Heather Mendick 13 Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology 218 Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn

Index 237 List of Tables and Figures

Tables

4.1 Percentage of pupils in different school types using Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero’s class categorisation (EPG classes), PISA 2009 63 4.2 Achievements of candidates by school type in England 2010/11 68 4.3 Variance in reading literacy and socio-economic status between and within schools, 2009 69 6.1 Short- and long-term adjustment to university life, by type of attendance decision 104 8.1 Participants 138 9.1 Rotated factor loadings, communalities, item means and standard deviations, and frequency of endorsement for peers’ motivations for gender harassment (PMGH) scale 156 9.2 Bivariate correlations between motivations for gender harassment subscales, experiences of harassment and school-related adjustment 157 9.3 T-tests comparing mean differences by gender and sexual orientation in motivations for gender harassment, experiences of harassment and school-related adjustment 157 9.4 Final regression model betas and standard errors for interactions between PMGH, gender, experiences of harassment and school safety 158

Figures

3.1 Indicators for citizenship and political learning to promote social cohesion 52 4.1 Mechanism affecting educational decisions (from Boudon, 1974) 59 4.2 Percentage of pupils at different levels of competence in reading by school type, PISA 2009 64 9.1 Plot of predicted values for the appearance × gender × sexual orientation interaction on experiences of gender nonconformity harassment 159

viivii viii List of Tables and Figures

9.2 Plot of predicted values for the interests × gender × sexual orientation interaction on experiences of gender nonconformity harassment 159 9.3 Plot of predicted values for the appearance × sexual orientation interaction on experiences of sexual orientation harassment 160 9.4 Plot of predicted values for the gender × sexual orientation interaction on experiences of sexual orientation harassment 160 9.5 Plot of predicted values for the appearance × interests × gender interaction on feelings of safety at school 161 Notes on Contributors

Editors

Rachel Brooks is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Sociology Department at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses primarily on young people’s experiences of post-compulsory education, and she has recently completed projects on student migration and higher education students with parental responsibilities. Her most recent books are Student Mobilities, Migration and the Internationalization of Higher Education (2011, with Johanna Waters), Changing Spaces of Education: New Perspectives on the Nature of Learning (2012, with Johanna Waters and Alison Fuller) and Negotiating Ethical Challenges in Youth Research (2012,with Kitty te Riele). Mark McCormack is Lecturer in Sociology at Durham University. His research explores the changing nature of gendered and sexual identities in cultures of decreased homophobia. Documenting the erosion of homo- phobia in educational and sport settings, his research demonstrates how this has led to an expansion of acceptable gendered behaviours for heterosexual male youth and a more inclusive environment for bisexual men. His book The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality was published in 2012. Kalwant Bhopal is Reader in Education at the University of Southampton. Her research examines aspects of social exclusion for marginalised minority ethnic groups. She has conducted research on the experiences of Asian women in higher education and gypsy, Roma and traveller groups in primary and secondary schools. Her recent publications include Asian Women in Higher Education: Shared Communities (2010) and Intersectionality and ‘Race’ in Education (2011 with John Preston). She has been an elected member of BERA Council since 2009.

Contributing authors

Michael Atkinson is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology Physical Education at the University of Toronto, where he teaches physical cultural studies, policy, bioethics and research methods. His central areas of teaching and research interests pertain to the experiences of human suffering in/as physical cultures, the cross-national study of bio-pedagogical practices, issues in bioethics within global and local physical cultures, the emerging cultural neuroscience paradigm and ethnographic research methods. He is author/ editor of eight books, and his research has appeared in diverse academic ixix x Notes on Contributors journals including International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Body & Society, Sex Roles, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Qualitative Research on Sport, Exercise and Health, Field Methods, Youth & Society, Third World Quarterly, The Sociology of Sport Journal, The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, and Health.

Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol and Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow for Connected Communities. Her work is particularly concerned with the changing role of formal educational institutions in a context of social, tech- nological and environmental change. Her latest book is Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change (2011).

Carolyn Jackson is Professor in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University. She has published extensively on gender issues in education. Her books include Lads and Ladettes in School: Gender and a Fear of Failure (2006), and as co-editor (with Carrie Paechter and Emma Renold) of Girls and Education 3–16: Continuing Concerns, New Agendas (2010).

Michael Kehler is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at The University of Western Ontario. His research interests include gender, literacies, masculinities and the counter-hegemonic practices of adolescent men. He is conducting a three-year SSHRC-funded national study in Canada examining adolescent male reluctance to participate in grade nine Health and Physical Education classes. He is a CIHR grant recipient for several projects, including an international symposium, ‘Speaking the Unspoken: Masculinities, Bodies and Body Image’ as well as a Café Scientifique (Spring 2012). He is co-editor (with Michael Atkinson) of Boys’ Bodies; Speaking the Unspoken, and co-editor of The Problem with Boys’ Education: Beyond the Backlash with Wayne Martino and Marcus Weaver-Hightower, in addition to being published in such journals as the McGill Journal of Education, Canadian Journal of Education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing.

Wolfgang Lehmann is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario. He specialises in the areas of education, work and social inequality. His main research focus is on the interplay between structural factors and individual agency in school–work transitions. He recently completed a study of the experiences of working-class, first-gen- eration university students, supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant. He also publishes on young people’s school–work transitions and vocational education. His recent book is Choosing to Labour? School–Work Transitions and Social Class (2007).

Zeus Leonardo is Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy, Society and Culture, University of California, Berkeley. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on critical social thought in education. Leonardo’s current research interests involve the study of Notes on Contributors xi ideologies and discourses in education with respect to change. Much of his work is interdisciplinary and draws insights from sociology, contemporary philosophy and cultural studies. In particular, he engages critical theories to inform his analysis of the relationship between schooling and social relations, such as race, class, culture and gender. His research builds on the premise that educational knowledge should promote the democratisation of schools and society. He is an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis at UC-Berkeley. Bob Lingard is currently a professorial research fellow in the School of Educa- tion at the University of Queensland and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. He has also been Professor at the University of Edinburgh (2006–2008), where he held the Andrew Bell Chair of Education, and the University of Sheffield (2003–2006) in the UK. His most recent books include Globalizing Education Policy (2010), co-authored with Fazal Rizvi, Changing Schools (2012), co-edited with Pat Thomson and Terry Wrigley and Educating Boys: Beyond Structural Reform (2009), co-authored with Wayne Martino and Martin Mills. Lingard has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters and was co-director of government research in Australia which devel- oped the influential concept of ‘productive pedagogies’, which has had policy and practice impact around the globe. He is also the co-editor of the journal Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education and editor of the book series, Keys Ideas and Education with Greg Dimitriadis. Heather Mendick works as Reader in Education at Brunel University, UK. Before becoming an academic she worked as a mathematics teacher for seven years. She is the author of Masculinities in Mathematics (2006), the co-author of Urban Youth and Schooling (2010) and the co-editor of Mathematical Relationships in Education (2009) and of Debates in Mathematics Education (forthcoming). You can read more about her work at http://brunel.academia. edu/HeatherMendick; she irregularly blogs for the Gender and Education Association website and the CelebYouth website (which is the website for her main current project on the role of celebrity in young people’s classed and gendered aspirations). Kagendo Mutua is Associate Professor of Special Education at the University of Alabama, USA. Her scholarly interests centre around cross-cultural studies of access and participation in education by children and youth with significantly disabling conditions using postcolonial/decolonising research and disability studies perspectives. Her research examines how marginality constitutes itself at the intersections of dis/ability, race, class and gender. Her published work that draws upon research projects conducted in Kenya and the USA appears in both national and international journals, books and book chapters. Sandra Cooley Nichols is an Associate Professor and Department Head at the University of Alabama. Her scholarly interests focus on teacher preparation xii Notes on Contributors and practice with an emphasis on special education. Her research explores the intersection of teacher knowledge and skills, practice in authentic educa- tion settings and the impact of culture and sub-cultures on student outcomes. Her work has been published in national and international journals as well as books and book chapters. Rita Nikolai is currently working as Assistant Professor for System-related School Research at the Institute for Education Studies at the Humboldt- University Berlin. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her thesis was titled ‘Educational expenditure in Switzerland in international comparison’. She has published various arti- cles in journals such as Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, Zeitschrift für Sozialreform and the Swiss Political Science Review and chapters in edited volumes on the topics of education policy and welfare policy. Her research interests include comparative education especially school policy and vocational education and training policy. Audrey Osler is Professor of Education at Buskerud University College, Norway and Emeritus Professor at University of Leeds, UK, where she was a research professor and the founding director of the Centre for Citizenship and Human Rights Education (CCHRE). She has also held visiting posts at universities worldwide including University of Washington, Seattle; Utah State University; Hong Kong Institute of Education; and Beijing Normal University. Her research is transdisciplinary, addressing questions of social justice, citizenship and human rights. Her publications include over 100 arti- cles and 18 books, including Students’ Perspectives on Schooling (2010) and Teachers and Human Rights Education (2010, with H. Starkey). Steven Roberts is Lecturer in Social Policy and Sociology at the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent. His research interests are quite diverse, but centre around the youth stage of the life course. Within this, his work has focused on how issues of social class and gender shape, influence and constrain young people’s transitions to adulthood independence and their experiences of education, employ- ment, consumption and the domestic sphere. He has also lectured in post- compulsory education and training at the University of Southampton and is currently head of not-for-profit Continuing Professional Development project working with primary and secondary school teachers based in rural parts of south China. Stephen T. Russell is Distinguished Professor and Fitch Nesbitt Endowed Chair in Family and Consumer Sciences in the John and Doris Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Arizona, and Director of the Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth, and Families. Russell conducts research on adolescent health and sexuality, cultural influences on parent-adolescent relationships, and the health and development of lesbian, Notes on Contributors xiii gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth. He is President of the Society for Research on Adolescence.

Sam Sellar is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, University of South Australia. Sellar's research is located in cultural studies of educa- tion, sociology of education and education policy studies. He is currently working on Australian Research Council funded projects examining audit and accountabilities in schools, the effects of national/international testing and comparative performance data, and the discourse of aspiration in educa- tion policy. He has recently published in the journals Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Critical Studies in Education and Cambridge Journal of Education. He is also co-author of a recent report on university outreach programs commissioned by the Australian Government: ‘Interventions early in school as a means to improve higher education outcomes for disadvan- taged (particularly low SES) students’.

Neil Selwyn is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University. His research and teaching focuses on the place of digital media in everyday life, and the sociology of technology (non)use in educational settings. Selwyn has written on a number of issues, including digital exclusion, education technology policymaking and the student experience of technology-based learning. Recent books include Education in a Digital World: Global Perspectives on Technology and Education (2013) and Schools and Schooling in a Digital Age: a Critical Analysis (2011).

Katerina O. Sinclair is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Arizona. She earned a concurrent doctoral degree in Human Development and Family Studies and a master’s in Applied Statistics from Penn State. She studies factors affecting the development of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) youth, including sexual attraction and identity, relationships with family members and peers, victimization on the basis of sexual orientation, and mental health and suicide risk.

Elisabeth Morgan Thompson received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and completed her postdoctoral work at the Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth, and Families at the University of Arizona. Her research program focuses on the social influences of popular culture, peers and schools on gender and sexuality; young women’s sexual identity development; and adolescent sexual health, rights and education. Elisabeth is currently an Associate Consultant at LFA Group: Learning for Action in San Francisco, CA.

Hoang Tran is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Tran’s current research interests involve xiv Notes on Contributors the study of neo-liberalism and race in educational inequality. Specifically, he engages the trajectory of neo-liberal ideology (i.e. Smith, Hayek, Friedman) to investigate its material history. Utilising this approach will help to inform his analysis of contemporaneous neo-liberal movements and its vitality in educational discourses. Much of his work is intended to explore the thesis that a contemporary undertaking of neo-liberalism without a careful mate- rial and historical analysis of its genesis does nothing but further reproduce and disguise racial inequality in education. Anne West is Professor of Education Policy in the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also Director of the Education Research Group. Her research focuses on education policy, in particular market-oriented reforms in schools and their impact on equity, financing education and accountability. She also has an interest in educa- tion policy in comparative perspective. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in the field of education policy. Riki Wilchins is the author of three books on gender theory, and has been published in anthologies such as Feminist Frontiers, Language Awareness, and The Encyclopedia of Identity and publications such as The Village Voice and Social Text. Time magazine selected her as one of 100 Civic Innovators for the 21st Century. 1 Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education: An Introduction Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal

Introduction

Education currently assumes a central role in the politics and policies of many countries across the world. Indeed, despite the recent global economic crisis, it is significant that the latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) annual report indicates that, of 31 industrialised countries with comparable data, only seven reduced spending on education as a response to the onset of recession (OECD, 2012). Moreover, in all but one of these seven countries, the actual share of national income spent on education grew – as a result of gross domestic product falling faster than educational spending (ibid.). In part, this can be explained by the assumptions made by policymakers – within govern- ments of various different political persuasions – that education plays a critical role in preparing citizens for participation in the ‘knowledge economy’ and thus investment in education is essential for ensuring national competitiveness in an increasingly globalised market. The soci- ology of education offers an important critical lens through which to view such developments, allowing scholars to relate them to wider proc- esses of social change beyond a narrow politics of economics. The aim of Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education is to bring together contributions from researchers across the world to demonstrate how such a critical lens can be applied to different stages of education: from compulsory schooling through to higher education and learning within the workplace, and to various cross-cutting themes, such as the use of new technologies in education and the role of international organisations in policymaking. Consonant with current scholarship, it emphasises the differential impact of educational policies and practices on specific social groups, paying attention, in particular, to differences by ethnicity, social class, gender and disability.

1 2 Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal

Although this book focuses very much on contemporary debates in the sociology of education, this introductory chapter considers the history of the sub-discipline since the middle of the twentieth century. In doing so, we argue that the focus and orientation of the sociology of education has been influenced by a variety of inter-related factors including theoretical developments in the social sciences generally; the political relationship between policymakers and sociologists of education; and the institutional context in which much sociology of education has been produced. In the three sections that follow, we discuss each of these in turn. After exploring this broad context, we then introduce the 12 further chapters that consti- tute Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education. We outline the main arguments that are made, and their importance in advancing sociological understanding of education.

Theoretical context

The nature and focus of the sociology of education has been profoundly influenced by the theoretical assumptions that have underpinned it; assump- tions which have, themselves, changed significantly since the middle of the twentieth century. In what he calls his ‘disputational account’ of the soci- ology of education, Ball (2004) identifies three key ‘turning points’ or ‘dispu- tational moments’ which have reoriented scholarship in the sub-discipline: the rise of interpretivism in the 1970s; the emergence of feminism and anti- essentialism in the 1980s; and the increasing dominance of post-modernism in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on this typology, we briefly discuss each of these three turning points and explore their significance for the place of sociology of education within society. Prior to the 1970s, naturalism provided the theoretical underpinning for most of the research in the sociology of education. This approach views the social world as broadly equivalent to the natural world and aims to apply the same methods of enquiry. In the UK, naturalism characterised what is often called the ‘political arithmetic’ tradition and, in the USA, its coun- terpart, ‘educational sociology’ – both of which focus(ed) primarily on the ‘inputs’ to education (such as social class) and the ‘outputs’ which result (such as qualifications and employment) (Ball, 2004; Lauder et al., 2009). As discussed in more detail below, those working within the political arith- metic tradition (such as A.H. Hasley and his colleagues (1980)) enjoyed a particularly close relationship with politicians and policymakers, specifically in relation to their work on education and social mobility and the struc- ture of the school system. Both groups – scholars and policymakers – shared common assumptions, based on naturalist premises, that ‘research-driven adjustments would produce desirable outcomes in terms of overall perform- ance and social justice’ (Shain and Ozga, 2001, p. 113) and that the primary purpose of research was to change practice within the nation-state. Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education 3

In the 1970s, this approach came under attack from three directions, all of which focussed sociologists’ attention on social processes within classrooms, rather than merely the inputs and outputs of educational systems (Yates, 2009). Firstly, neo-Marxists argued that through the actions of teachers (as well as the structure of the education system), class relations were being reproduced within schools (e.g. Anyon, 1981; Willis, 1977). Secondly, social interactionists focussed on the ways in which pupils’ and teachers’ identi- ties were constructed through processes of social control and social selection within classrooms (e.g. Pollard, 1990). And finally, Michael Young (1971), Michael Apple (1979) and other contributors to what became known as the ‘New Sociology of Education’ emphasised the socially constructed nature of the curriculum and pedagogic practice, arguing that school knowledge should be seen primarily as the product of power relations (Bourdieu, 1971; Bernstein, 1971). (See Ball, 2004 and Lauder et al., 2009 for a fuller discus- sion of these influences.) Taken together, these new theoretical approaches had the effect of under- mining the positivist framework that had underpinned sociology of education until this point (Hartley, 2007). Moreover, they suggested that quantitative analysis, which had been used extensively in sociology of education research and, notably, within the political arithmetic tradition, was problematic, and had the effect of reifying social phenomena ‘by treating them as more clearly defined and distinct than they are, and by neglecting the processes by which they develop and change’ (Ball, 2004, p. 5). In contrast, and in an attempt to understand what was going on in classrooms more fully, anti-naturalism researchers shifted away from quantitative analysis and moved towards qual- itative methods of enquiry. This shift was characterised by ‘a dual commit- ment to realism (the discovery and representation of respondents’ meanings) and constructivism (the idea that social actors are active interpreters of the social world)’ (ibid.). This new theoretical orientation had implications for researchers’ relationships with both policymakers and teachers, as Shain and Ozga (2001) note:

The emergent new sociology of education carried with it, along with a commitment to social change, a degree of pessimism about its possibility through education. That theoretical turn produced a degree of alienation between sociologists of education and educational practitioners. (p. 114)

This alienation was exacerbated by concurrent political developments in the UK and other Anglophone nations of the Global North, which are discussed in more detail below. By the 1980s, however, various assumptions made by those working within the New Sociology of Education were themselves coming to be questioned by feminist scholars and other researchers who adopted an anti-essentialist theo- retical position. In this second ‘disputational moment’, the ‘academic mode 4 Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal of production’ was subjected to significant critique for adopting a funda- mentally competitive and masculinist stance, and simple gender binaries were problematised by black and lesbian feminists (Ball, 2004). As a result of this particular turning point, increased emphasis came to be placed by many sociologists of education on diversity and, in particular, the complex inter- play between different inequalities and oppressions, thus articulating ‘the gendered, sexualised, racialised and biographical contexts of teaching and learning’ (Coffey, 2001, p. 4). Qualitative research methods (such as in-depth interviews) were thought by many working within this perspective to be of particular value in giving voice to previously marginalised groups, and for exploring the different experiences of specific groups of pupils, students and teachers. The third and final turning point identified by Ball (2004) is that of the shift brought about by the ascendancy of post-modernism, most evident in sociology of education from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Central to the sub-discipline until this point had been an assumption (sometimes explicit, at other times implicit) about the essentially redemptive purpose of education. Indeed, Dale (2001) maintains that education has frequently been under- stood by sociologists of education (as well as teachers and policymakers) as ‘both the dominant symbol and the dominant strategy for [the] mastery of nature and of society through rationality that has characterised the project of modernity from its origins in the Enlightenment’ (p. 8). Post-modernism raised fundamental questions about such redemptive assumptions. Indeed, as part of their challenge to the ‘deployment of totalising grand narratives’ (Ball, 2004, p. 8), post-modern scholars argued that all ontologies and epis- temologies should be seen as historically contingent and, moreover, that educational processes should be researched as if they are a text or series of signs (ibid.). Methodologically, such scholars placed emphasis on analysing discourse and narratives, based on the assumption that language brings objects into being which have no prior essence. While some sociologists of education have argued that this particular theoretical shift has brought about an unhelpful relativism that further distances researchers from those for whom their work should have relevance (Shain and Ozga, 2001), others have welcomed the new possibilities it offers for both academic critique and political struggle (Griffiths, 1995; Kenway, 1997). It is important to recognise that these theoretical shifts have not been linear: although post-modern approaches are now common within the soci- ology of education, positivist approaches continue to inform some research, and interpretivism remains popular with many scholars. Indeed, it could be argued that we are now in a fourth stage of pluralism (or perhaps even segmentation). A vivid illustration of this scenario is provided in Luke’s (2012) account of current debates taking place in the sociology of educa- tion. He argues that two eminent sociologists (Michael Young and Raewyn Connell) present very different perspectives on the direction they believe the Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education 5 sub-discipline should take. While Young (2008) provides a strong critique of constructivist and standpoint epistemology, and argues that the sociology of education needs to return to epistemological realism, Connell (2007) (who has been influential across the globe, but particularly among sociologists of education in Australia) highlights the limits of traditional Eurocentric theory and the epistemological challenges that are raised by the knowledge of indigenous groups. Similarly, while some high-profile educational journals that publish sociological research take a broadly post-structural approach (such as Gender and Education), others include a relatively small number of articles that adopt this theoretical perspective (e.g. Sociology of Education). This diversity in epistemological positioning is reflected in the contributions to this book. The 12 chapters that follow draw on a variety of different theo- retical approaches and methodologies. This selection is not intended to be representative of the approaches that are currently dominant but, instead, give a flavour of the theoretical and empirical richness of the sub-discipline. We thus acknowledge that, as ‘the sociology of education is made up of a set of dynamic and located constructions ... any attempt to sum it up in a single framework is fraught with difficulties’ (Ball, 2004, p. 1).

Political context

In addition to changing theoretical paradigms, research in sociology of educa- tion has been strongly influenced by the political context within which it has been conducted (although here there are important inter-relationships with the various theoretical orientations outlined above). The first part of our discussion below is informed by Dale’s (2001) work, which has identified three distinct political periods that have led to profound shifts in the soci- ology of education. We then consider the political environment in the first decade of the twenty-first century and its impact on the intellectual agenda of the sub-discipline in this period. During the 1950s and 1960s, in the UK, sociology of education assumed an important place both within academic institutions and public life more generally. In part, this is explained by the close political alignment of the Fabian reformers of the 1950s and prominent sociologists of education (e.g. Halsey et al. (1980), Goldthorpe et al. (1980) and others associated with the political arithmetic tradition). Both groups were concerned with addressing the social inequalities of the pre-war period through the developing welfare state, and education was assumed to play a key role in facilitating social mobility (Dale, 2001; Lauder et al., 2009). Both sociologists of education and policymakers were engaged in a common endeavour to map social inequali- ties within education – often placing emphasis on the selective nature of the school system (Whitty, 2012). Assumptions were made that research- driven changes to education policy would produce desirable outcomes in terms of both overall academic attainment and social justice (Shain and 6 Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal

Ozga, 2001). Moreover, in this period, politicians and policymakers made significant changes to the way in which teachers were trained, and here too sociologists of education played an important role. In the 1960s, the number of teacher training courses grew considerably, and links between teacher training colleges and universities were strengthened with the aim of moving teaching towards a graduate profession. The academic focus and rigour of teacher training were increased – and the sociology of education assumed an important place within this new curriculum (Hammersley, 1996). The rise of the New Right in many Anglophone countries in the 1980s and 1990s had a profound influence of the position of sociology of educa- tion, and brought to an end the close relationship between academics and policymakers that had characterised the preceding years. Radical reforms were made to the way teachers were trained, and optimism about educa- tion’s ability to bring about social change declined significantly. In the UK, specifically, the Conservative government of this period reversed many of the changes made to teacher training in previous decades, on the grounds that the curriculum was too theoretical and some of the content was too progres- sive (Hammersley, 1996). Moreover, severing the link between teachers and sociology of education research became a specific political aim of educa- tion ministers (Lauder et al., 2009). As a result, sociology of education was squeezed out of teacher training programmes and much greater emphasis came to be placed, instead, on practice within schools (Deem, 2004). Indeed, Shain and Ozga (2001) argue that the national curriculum for teacher education that was introduced at this time represented a ‘regime of surveil- lance and discipline that is not experienced elsewhere in higher education’ (p. 110). The theoretical developments within sociology of education during this period, which were discussed in the earlier section, also contributed to the weakening of links between researchers and policymakers in the 1980s. Within the New Sociology of Education, educational institutions came to be understood as vehicles for the reproduction of structural inequalities, rather than agents in charge of achieving social justice – and this more determinist emphasis, and its pessimism about the possibility of achieving social change through education – contributed to the growing disconnec- tion between scholars and policymakers (Shain and Ozga, 2001). In response to this shifting political context, sociology of education found a new home within other courses such as professional doctorates and master’s degrees and, increasingly, broader-based ‘educational studies’ courses which do not lead directly to a teaching qualification (Deem, 2004). However, the political attack on sociology of education in the 1980s and 1990s was significant, in severing the previously close ties between policymakers and scholars, and no longer requiring those teaching within schools to have any knowledge or understanding of sociological analyses of educational processes. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the political context had changed again, with further implications for the sociology of education. This Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education 7 related, however, more to the substantive focus of educational research, rather than its contribution to teacher training (which was the primary casualty of change in the previous two decades). In the USA, UK, Australia and other Anglophone nations of the Global North, politicians embraced ‘evidence- based policy’ within education as well as other areas of social policy. As Luke (2010) notes, this had the effect of constructing a binary distinction:

Between qualitative ‘critical work’ which has been portrayed as scientifi- cally ‘soft’, politically correct and ideological by the press, politicians and educational bureaucrats – and empirical, quantitative scientific research, which is presented as unbiased, truthful and the sole grounds for rational policy formation. (p. 178)

In the USA, this distinction was brought into sharp relief by debates over the educational reform programme ‘No Child Left Behind’, and the shift towards a positivist ‘scientifically proven’ curriculum (Luke, 2012). Politicians and educationalists became involved in heated debates about what counts as evidence. On the one hand, academics criticised policymakers for insisting on an evidence base that draws on only narrow measures of educational achievement, while, on the other hand, two leading government officials were widely reported as having said that they would ‘burn down facul- ties of education’ because of the nature of educational research in which they were engaged (Luke, 2010). Luke (2010) is highly critical of the lack of engagement, on the part of politicians and policymakers, with actual class- room practices, claiming that any properly governed process of reform must play close attention to what happens in classrooms; moreover, he suggests that the qualitative data often scorned by government officials can provide important evidence of such classroom practices. Similar shifts in the use of evidence have been seen in the UK and Australia. In the UK, government funding for educational research increasingly focussed on the evaluation – rather than the interpretation – of national initiatives (Coffey, 2001). Furthermore, the broad political consensus that has been evident over the past couple of decades with respect to neo-liberal inflected policies such as ‘educational choice’ and ‘institutional diversity’ has, Coffey (2001) argues, contributed to the ‘de-theorizing’ of much educa- tional research. This has been played out quite clearly in the ‘school effec- tiveness’ movement, which became dominant in Anglophone nations of the Global North in the late 1990s. School effectiveness researchers argued that the effect of schools per se on pupil performance had been neglected and attempted to show that, even when social and other factors were taken into account, there remained differences among schools, which could be ascribed to the quality of schooling itself. As Goldstein and Woodhouse (2000) contend, this approach appealed to governments of various political persuasions ‘at least partly because it implied that changing schools could 8 Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal affect performance and hence that educational policy was relevant to educa- tional “standards”’ (p. 353). This new focus of educational research served to obscure or deny many of the key concerns of sociology of education (Shain and Ozga, 2001). In common with the No Child Left Behind programme of educational reform in the USA, it focussed primarily on the analysis of quan- titative indicators and, it is argued, failed to engage with more critical and sociological approaches to classroom practices and policy formation (Shain and Ozga, 2001; Slee et al., 1999; Thrupp, 1999). Yates (2009) contends that this policy emphasis had important repercussions within universities (in Australia and elsewhere), and further marginalised those who adopted a sociological approach to the study of education:

‘School effectiveness’ has become the issue of the day. Driven by politi- cians and policy-makers and their endless critiques of teacher education, faculties of education did not want to employ people who seemed only to have something critical to say, or who wanted to raise bigger questions about what schools were doing. They wanted to leave debates about what particular constructions of curriculum represented out of the discussion, and instead to see schooling and teaching as a technical activity with straightforward aims, and as an activity that could be improved if only it were studied more carefully (that is, in more systematic and controlled ways). (p. 18)

While such policy imperatives have, as Yates suggests, had the effect of excluding sociologists of education from many education departments, policy itself has become an important focus of enquiry of those who have been able to sustain a sociological focus – whether in departments of educa- tion or sociology. Indeed, despite the dominance of the school effectiveness movement within educational research, the sociology of education policy has grown significantly. Across the Global North, sociologists of education have developed sophisticated critiques of the neo-liberal orientation of education policy (e.g. Apple, 2004; Levine-Rasky, 2009; Marginson, 1997). In the UK, sociology research has also focussed on understanding why neo- liberal education policy, whatever its claims, has ended up favouring middle class children (Whitty, 2012). The first decade of the twentieth century has also seen a growth in two other areas of sociological enquiry, which can be seen as closely related to the wider political context. Firstly, the sociology of higher education has gained increasing prominence. Although, for much of the twentieth century, sociol- ogists had tended to ignore the university sector as a site of enquiry (Naidoo, 2003), this had changed by the early twenty-first century. Indeed, David (2007) notes that about half the articles published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education in the first six months of 2007 (the period she reviewed) focussed on higher education compared with a much smaller proportion Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education 9 only a few years earlier. Naidoo (2003) contends that this shifting focus in the sociology of education is closely related to the increased political impor- tance that has been placed on higher education, and the significant change that has been wrought in the sector, as a result of changing political impera- tives. These include: the new funding and regulatory frameworks that have been introduced in many countries worldwide, which are underpinned by neo-liberal and market mechanisms; an emphasis on widening participation in higher education – often seen as a means of ensuring national competi- tiveness in the ‘knowledge economy’; increasing state and market control over what is taught in universities; and the commodification of knowledge production (Naidoo, 2003). While Deem (2004) argues that the sociology of higher education is still at an early stage of development – ‘a fretful toddler rather than a mature adult’ (p. 33) – it has provided a new point of contact for those who define themselves primarily as sociologists of education and their colleagues in other areas of sociology who have become interested in the conditions of their own work within higher education (e.g. John Urry and Steve Fuller). Secondly, sociologists of education have become increasingly interested in processes of globalisation. Although education is still often seen as the preserve of the nation-state, and empirical research usually takes the form of local or national case studies or cross-national comparisons, a growing body of work is now exploring transnational education spaces at both regional and international levels (Engel, 2012; Keating, 2006, Waters and Brooks, 2011). Over recent years, researchers have examined the way in which education policy is increasingly formulated at a supranational level (Robertson, 2007); the nature of transnational mobility in pursuit of a higher education (Brooks and Waters, 2009); and the growth of international markets for both compul- sory schooling and lifelong learning (e.g. Hayden, 2011; Hall and Appleyard, 2011). These broad trends in the evolving focus of the sociology of education can be seen across many parts of the world. Nevertheless, some geographical disparities do remain: in North America, Australia and New Zealand there is a strong emphasis on the educational experiences and outcomes of indig- enous populations (e.g. Connell, 2007; Kidman et al., 2011), while a focus on social class is more pronounced in the UK than in other nations (Whitty, 2012). And, despite the discussion above with respect to the methodology of researching the ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy in the USA, American sociology of education is typically more quantitative in nature than that emanating from other Anglophone nations in the Global North. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, sociology of education rarely exerts the direct influence on policymakers that was evident in the middle of the previous century. Nevertheless, it continues to offer a valuable perspective on the political process and a constructive contribution to public debate: for example, Whitty (2012) has argued that it serves a useful func- tion in helping to ‘inoculate’ the public mind against inappropriate policies. 10 Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal

Moreover, as education has come to assume an increasingly important place in the political programmes of many administrations worldwide – enjoying ‘a resurrection as a vital agent of social change and cultural reproduction (or interruption)’ (Coffey, 2001, p. 4) – sociology of education provides a useful lens through which to view contemporary educational transforma- tions and link them to wider processes of social change (Coffey, 2001). It has also been argued that, through its engagement with current policy and prac- tice, sociology of education offers the wider discipline of sociology a means of re-articulating with current political debate (Deem, 2004).

Institutional context

The nature of debates within the sociology of education has also been influ- enced by the institutional context in which much of the research in this area has been conducted. In the UK, and in many other countries across the world, sociologists of education have more commonly been employed in departments of education rather than those of sociology. Although soci- ology of education has also been taught in undergraduate programmes in sociology departments, its place on such courses is often quite marginal and, as some scholars have argued, has suffered as a result of changes to the disci- pline of sociology, as a whole, over recent decades. Shain and Ozga (2001), for example, suggest that the shift in focus within sociology – away from the study of institutions and policy and towards increasingly specialised sub- fields and a more cultural approach – has been particularly disadvantageous for sociology of education with its historical emphasis on institutions and social structures. Moreover, the marginal status of sociology of education within sociology departments can also be linked, Delamont (2000) contends, to its construction as a low status area of academic enquiry – as a result of its emphasis on the experiences of women and children and its strong empirical (rather than theoretical) focus. The location of the majority of research within the sociology of educa- tion within departments of education rather than sociology has affected the sub-discipline in a number of ways. Firstly, this institutional location has had a bearing on the nature of sociology of education research that has been produced. Dale (2001) has argued convincingly that the strongly ‘redemp- tive’ emphasis of much sociology of education has affected the type of anal- yses that have been pursued. By this, he means that assumptions about the emancipatory purpose of education, linked closely to the modernist project of the Enlightenment, have effectively foreclosed particular areas of enquiry and treated education as an essentially unproblematic concept. Indeed, he argues that, ‘[t]he failure to question the fundamental nature and claims of the education system [has led] to an almost total neglect of any alter- native to the official conception of what education systems are for’ (p. 9). This particular institutional context, Dale suggests, also made it difficult Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education 11 for sociologists of education to critique the work of classroom teachers (as they were often their colleagues, working side-by-side within departments of education), and isolated sociologists of education from scholars pursuing other lines of sociological enquiry. This has had the effect that ideas from the sociology of education have not entered into the mainstream (Delamont, 2000), and that sociologists of education have not always kept themselves abreast of key contemporary sociological debates and leading-edge theoret- ical developments (Deem, 2004). Indeed, Deem (2004) argues – with respect to research in the sociology of higher education in particular – that ‘much of what passes for sociology of higher education ... does not engage with core aspects of the discipline’ (p. 22). This has been articulated most explicitly in relation to the use and development of theory. She contends that the tendency to apply theory, rather than develop it, may constitute ‘the crucial aspect of differentiating sociology of education (and other areas of sociology which were once core to the discipline, such as the sociology of families or health and illness) from contemporary mainstream sociology’ (p. 29). Nevertheless, Deem suggests that this more practical focus offers an impor- tant opportunity for re-engagement, particularly in times when sociologists are frequently being asked to demonstrate the relevance of their work and its application beyond academia. Secondly, the institutional location of sociology of education (in depart- ments of education rather than those of sociology) has also increased the vulnerability of the sub-discipline to political criticism. Delamont (2000) provides a detailed account of the ways in which the sociology of education in the UK has come under attack – for example, when it was removed from the teacher training curriculum, as discussed above, and when it bore the brunt of the criticisms about the quality of educational research that were made in the second half of the 1990s (the reports by Hargreaves (1996) and Tooley and Darby (1998) ridiculed a number of the technical terms used by sociologists of education). She goes on to argue that the British Sociological Association (BSA) remained silent in the face of these attacks, and did nothing to defend the sub-discipline or the individual sociologists of education, whose work was criticised. Moreover, she suggests that the political vulner- ability of the sub-discipline was exacerbated by the BSA’s failure to provide a public platform for sociology of education. This analysis seems less relevant, however, in the second decade of the twenty-first century: the BSA now runs a vibrant Sociology of Education ‘Study Group’ and, over recent years, has dedicated one stream of its large annual conference to papers focussing on different aspects of the sociology of education. Education-focussed networks also constitute important parts of the International Sociological Association, the European Sociological Association, the American Sociological Association and the Australian Sociological Association, amongst others. Despite the largely pessimistic accounts about the institutional location of the sociology of education, outlined above, some scholars have contended 12 Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal that the influence of the sub-discipline has spread much more widely – well beyond departments of education and of sociology. Indeed, Hammersley (1996) has argued that if a broad definition of sociology is adopted, then more sociology of education research was being conducted at the end of the twentieth century than ever before – for example, in departments of management, social work and youth studies, as well as education and soci- ology. A similar argument is pursued by Lauder et al. (2009) who maintain that key questions that have, historically, underpinned sociology of educa- tion (such as those relating to young people’s origins and destinations and the nature and determinants of school outcomes) are now of interest to a wider range of scholars, including those within the disciplines of social policy and economics.

An introduction to the chapters

Despite the varying political backdrops of the past century, and notwith- standing the changing fashions of theoretical frameworks, the sociology of education has remained concentrated on issues of inequality and social justice. Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education remains faithful to this rationale, but ensures a diverse range of topics are included for consider- ation. So while the reproduction of class inequalities remains a key focus, as does social policy analysis, the authors of various chapters also debate issues that have received academic scrutiny more recently, including the signifi- cance of gender nonconformity and the role of education technology. In Chapter 2, Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar explore the influence of globali- sation on education policy. Long recognised as a significant issue in the soci- ology of education, they draw on an extensive case study of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment to argue that schooling has become truly transnational in the way that student assessment is meas- ured between nation-states. Adopting a Bourdieuian perspective to under- stand these developments, Lingard and Sellar conceptualise the globe as a field in which a global educational policy is created and they examine the effects this has on policymaking for education at the national level. In so doing, they cause us to question how these macro level changes influence individual school cultures. Also focussing on the effects of education policy in Chapter 3, Audrey Osler examines the rise of citizenship education within British schools and calls for an understanding of universal human rights to be threaded through this subject in both practice and policy documents. Providing a genealogy of citizenship education, Osler highlights that while the particular ration- ales for citizenship education in its various forms have evolved in relation to the social and historical context of the time, the subject has always been about promoting a particular version of nationhood and national identity. Critiquing particular policy initiatives in the UK context, Osler demonstrates Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education 13 various exclusions that have occurred as a result of citizenship education, and she argues that in order to promote social cohesion within the UK, there must be a broader, more cosmopolitan conception of the citizen which respects the differences and contexts of contemporary society. In Chapter 4, Rita Nikolai and Anne West continue the focus on secondary schooling, but provide a comparative analysis of the institutional contexts of schooling in the UK and Germany to examine the ways in which inequali- ties are reproduced in the two countries. These countries offer an inter- esting comparison because of the different school selection procedures: in Germany, selection is according to academic ability (called explicit tracking) while this is not the case in the UK. Drawing on large-scale quantitative data also from the Programme for International Student Assessment, Nikolai and West demonstrate that while the differences in academic selection between the two countries mean that there are differences in the reproduction of class-based inequality, these are not as substantial as might be assumed. By focussing on implicit tracking in the UK, where students are selected by other factors (such as local area and parental preferences), Nikolai and West argue that in both countries, the ways in which students are assigned to secondary school lead to the reproduction of class-based inequalities. Also adopting a class lens in his analysis of lifelong learning in Chapter 5, Steven Roberts offers a qualitative empirical study of the professional learning opportunities available to young ‘moderately qualified’ retail workers in the UK. After providing a critical review of the term ‘lifelong learning’, Roberts shows how low-paid, service sector employees are failed by the forms of lifelong learning currently available to them. He shows how these forms of learning have little value for his participants, and the related qualifica- tions are consequently held in low esteem by them. Roberts highlights the challenge for policymakers in that his participants are the very people who should most benefit from lifelong learning schemes, yet they find them both frustrating and of little utility. Indeed, Roberts argues that lifelong learning in its current form serves a neo-liberal agenda of shifting responsibility of improving one’s education from the state to the individual. The focus on class continues into Chapter 6, where Wolfgang Lehmann examines working-class students’ experiences of university in Canada. The chapter takes as its starting point the fact that despite various widening participation programmes across Anglophone countries, the gap between working-class and middle-class students in higher education remains. Highlighting the significance of the Canadian context, Lehman analyses the experiences of 36 working-class undergraduates at a research-intensive university in Ontario, describing different pathways of experience for their time at university. Importantly, he shows that working-class students who have carefully planned their time at university and have been supported by the administration can be extremely successful. However, others were less able to cope with the language of the university because of their class 14 Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal background, and many suffered accordingly. Lehman also focuses, though, on the students who succeeded despite not having the vocabulary to imme- diately fit in the university setting. By developing a typology of these diverse experiences, this chapter offers new ways of understanding working class students’ experiences. Remaining in the Canadian context, Chapter 7 examines body image issues for adolescent boys. Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson explore the inter- section of body image, masculinity and education for young men. Focussing on the experiences of ‘reluctant’ participants in compulsory physical educa- tion lessons, Kehler and Atkinson demonstrate the emotional trauma expe- rienced by this sample of boys as they navigate their perceptions of their bodies and the expectations of masculinity in the locker room context. Centring on these ‘voices from the margins’, Kehler and Atkinson call for a more enlightened debate about masculinity and health in schools in order to improve the body image of future generations of adolescent males. In Chapter 8, Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols provide a socio- logical account of the educational experiences of young people with intel- lectual disabilities in the United States. Examining how their gendered and sexual identities are circumscribed by a range of influences outside their control, Mutua and Nichols document that these youth are essentially denied entry into adulthood because of people’s conceptions about their gender and sexuality. Yet Mutua and Nichols also show the ways in which these disabled adolescents contest this, although they also highlight that because of their disabilities, they are not always successful in demonstrating their rejection of their characterisation. Chapter 9 maintains the focus on the regulation of identities of young people in the United States. Elisabeth Thompson, Katerina Sinclair, Riki Wilchins and Stephen Russell examine the regulation of gender in schools and how this is related to student adjustment. Drawing on a quantitative study of Californian students, the authors focus on peers’ motivations for gender harassment. By doing this, they highlight the centrality of appear- ance and social interests in harassment and the effects this has on school adjustment. Nonetheless, they demonstrate the persistence of negative effects for gender non-conforming and sexual minority youth in their study. Thompson et al. argue that gender regulation is a structural issue in schools, and that teachers and administrators need to implement policies and proce- dures that recognise this in order to protect all students from harassment in school settings. In Chapter 10, Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran explore the history of race relations and education in the United States by providing a critical analysis of the role of the law in reproducing racism and race inequalities in the American education system. Situating the chapter in the context of soci- ologists of education who saw education as key a mechanism by which the state reproduced racism, Leonardo and Tran use case law and Supreme Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education 15

Court decisions to argue that the neo-liberal nature of educational reforms regarding race have resulted in new structures of racism under the language of ‘colour blindness’. Significantly, the authors argue that the colour blind legal rationale was in fact a precursor to and pre-requisite for economic neo- liberalism and the recent economic crisis. Doubting the effect of anti-racist initiatives under the colour blind regime, Leonardo and Tran call for new Supreme Court legislation to effect change in the education system in the future. Returning to more traditional forms of the sociology of education in Chapter 11, Carolyn Jackson argues that there needs to be much greater attention paid to the role that fear and anxiety play in school settings. Drawing on a large, qualitative data set of over 180 interviews with students in British secondary schools, Jackson first provides a history of fear as a concept and how it has been applied to other contexts, before demon- strating the damaging operations of fear both within and about education. Highlighting the political nature of education, Jackson argues that there have been great fears about education in the UK, particularly from the powerful who fear inequalities may be overturned. Yet Jackson focuses on how fear operates within schools, arguing that both academic and social fears may have worrying effects on student well-being. She also uses the concept to question the focus on grades and ability, where (fear of) failure is often conflated with lack of ability. In Chapter 12, Heather Mendick examines different sociological approaches to understanding young women’s subject choices. Demonstrating the breadth and diversity of sociology of education, a number of sociological theoretical frameworks have been applied in this book, yet Mendick argues for a post- structural approach to understanding gendered differences in subject choice at schools. Offering a personal account of her route to studying this subject, Mendick argues that we problematically associate women doing ‘masculine’ subjects through the perspective of how they do them as women. Delving into the fine grain of one female student’s experiences, she argues that we need new spaces to understand these issues, and that masculinity should not be the terrain solely of men. The final chapter of Contemporary Debates in the Sociology of Education serves as a call to extend the sub-discipline to understand new develop- ments within the educational sphere. Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn powerfully argue that there is a vital need for sociology to address the rise of technology in educational institutions. They stress that technology use is inevitably political not only because of its cost but also for the democratic potential it possesses to contest dominant power regimes. They also highlight that the inconsistencies between the rhetoric and reality of how education tech- nology is used in schools demands critical sociological attention. In recog- nising the speed of technological innovation, Facer and Selwyn also caution about the dangers of sociologists not engaging with contemporary issues, 16 Rachel Brooks, Mark McCormack and Kalwant Bhopal and argue for the need to look toward the near future and not just the recent past. They emphasise that technological developments will likely be one of the key drivers of the twenty-first century and sociologists of education need to recognise this and engage with these issues. In arguing for a sociology of education that engages with contemporary issues as they arise, and even attempt to anticipate certain trends, Facer and Selywn’s call for a sociology of education technology mirrors, we hope, what has been achieved by this book. Chapters have included social policy analysis and critical argumentation to qualitative and quantitative empirical studies of particular social issues. Theoretical approaches have ranged from social constructionist and other similar frameworks to post-structural theories of knowledge. Yet the chapters have remained focussed on social justice, educa- tional opportunities and the role that sociology has to play in understanding these complex and important social issues. With this book, we hope to have advanced both debates within the sociology of education but also raised its importance as a sub-discipline of sociology.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Kitty te Riele and Wolfgang Lehmann for their contributions to this chapter.

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Introduction

Over the last couple of decades globalisation has become a central focus of much theorising and empirical work in sociology. The same is the case in the sociology of education and policy sociology in education (e.g. Spring, 1998; Stromquist, 2002; Rizvi and Lingard, 2010; Sahlberg, 2011; Ball, 2008a, 2012). This work extends to considerations of the impact of globalisation, and responses to it, in all sectors of education: schooling, technical and further education and higher education. In the context of globalisation, international organisations have also assumed enhanced significance in national policy focus and production. We see this as constituting an emer- gent post-national world (Appadurai, 1996) and a global education policy field (Lingard and Rawolle, 2011). We are thinking here of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in relation to the rich nations of the world, and UNESCO and the World Bank in relation to devel- oping nations. In this chapter we consider the impact of globalisation on meta policy frames in education. Our specific focus will be on schooling; however, where relevant we will allude to other sectors. In particular, we discuss the rise of new international comparative assessments and national testing: instantia- tions of new forms of accountability in schooling that have become perva- sive and now constitute a central element of what Sahlberg (2011) has called the global education reform movement (GERM). Sahlberg argues that GERM is the dominant mode of education reform in Anglo-American nations and the major response to the perceived policy pressures of globalisation. This is a neo-liberal framework of education policy with the following features: prescribed curriculum, focus on literacy and numeracy, test-based account- ability, standardised teaching and learning and market-oriented reforms (e.g. private sector management models, school and parental choice discourses, privatisation of some educational functions) (Sahlberg, 2011, p. 103). Our specific focus is on the rise and rise of the OECD’s Programme for International

19 20 Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar

Student Assessment (PISA) as part of what we see as the creation of the globe as a commensurate space of measurement, contributing to an emergent global education policy field. This is a global aspect of GERM, which we would note is always manifest in a particular or vernacular way in specific nations and sometimes only includes certain elements of the features listed above, sutured together in particular national policy assemblages. The chapter is structured as follows. In the next section we consider the broadest impact of globalisation on education policy. We also consider the impacts of the flows of policymakers, politicians and university students globally, as well as refugees and migrants, leading to increased national diversity (ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious). This makes reform demands upon national schooling systems in terms of how best to deal with diversity, to encourage social cohesion and to open up opportunities. We also deal with what Bourdieu (2003) has called the performative construc- tion of globalisation; that is, an explication of globalisation as simply neo- liberalism, bracketing out all other meanings, including those derived from critical social science. In the subsequent section, we attempt to theorise how global education policy is imagined and enacted. We make use of Bourdieu’s thinking tools of field, habitus and capitals to understand the emergent global education policy field (see Rawolle and Lingard, 2008). Bourdieu sees society as consisting of multiple, relatively autonomous fields, each with its own logics of practice, but overarched by a field of power. For Bourdieu, habitus is the embodiment or inscription in individuals of past experiences in various fields producing dispositions that generate certain practices. Capitals of various kinds (e.g. cultural, social) are stakes in fields, but also manifest in the habitus and practices of individuals, whom Bourdieu refers to as agents. We also draw on Strathern (1997) and Wiseman (2010) to help us understand the alignment between the habitus of global policy elites in international organisations (and their epistemic communities) and their equivalents in nations. The main focus of the chapter is then one particular example of globalisa- tion in education. We provide a case study of the work of the OECD’s PISA and its role in helping to constitute a global education policy field with cross-field effects into national education policy fields.

Education policy and globalisation

Since the end of the Cold War and the related rise of a global economy, educa- tion has become a central element of economic policy for most nations. This has led to an emphasis in education policy on human capital production across all sectors, with the quality and quantity of human capital seen as central for the global competitiveness of the national economy. The way this pressure has manifest as education policy in particular nations reflects specificities of national history, culture and politics, but at a meta level at Globalisation and Sociology of Education Policy 21 least there has been something of a convergence globally around policy settings and the economisation of education policy. This economisation has seen educators become less influential in the production and framing of education policy, which is often set a long way from their interests. In the process, educators have become the objects of policy and sometimes subject to mistrust implicit in new accountability regimes. In a critique of this approach, Stronach (2010, p. 1) speaks of a ‘mythic economic instru- mentalism’ framing contemporary education policy. Some early accounts of globalisation (e.g. Appadurai, 1996), set against the euphoria at the end of the Cold War and prior to September 11, probably overstated the extent of the emergence of a post-national world, the decline of the nation-state and the degree of porousness of national borders. We note that the nation-state remains significant, but now works in different ways in the context of neo-liberal globalisation, seeking to strengthen the economic position of the nation globally. While our argument is about the rise of a global education policy field, we also acknowledge the continuing importance of bilateral and multilateral relationships between nations, and the ongoing importance of policy borrowing between nations in terms of educational policy (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). Bourdieu (2003) has described how globalisation has become almost a ‘performative’ concept, helping to create that of which it speaks and refer- ring only to neo-liberal policy manifestations, in a process that brackets out any other possible meanings, including critical social science accounts. Rizvi and Lingard (2010) have also argued that, despite the global financial crisis, this neo-liberal construction remains dominant. Indeed, there are few alternative social imaginaries for the global on the political horizon, apart from anti-globalisation movements like Occupy Wall Street. This neo-liberal policy framework grants priority to the individuals pursuing their self-interest, in a self-responsibilising way (Rose, 1999), over the common good. It also gives priority to markets over the state and encour- ages the privatisation of many state functions (Harvey, 2005). A related organisational change has been the instantiation of new public management to restructure the state away from old rational-legal, hierar- chical bureaucratic frameworks. These policy and structural developments have been imported into education from the private sector – a form of organ- isational ecumenicalism, but also indicative of the valorising of the private over the public. In that restructured context, Ball (2008a) sees three new policy technologies framing education policy today: markets, new manage- rialism and performativity. The last of these, performativity, is linked to the new hollowed-out state structures that set targets for front-line or ‘street- level’ bureaucrats to achieve, steering practice at a distance through this culture of performativity. This is linked to new forms of accountability as part of the broader audit society (Power, 1997). The OECD ‘s ‘policy as numbers’ (Lingard, 2011) work that we deal with later in this chapter helps constitute 22 Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar this culture of performativity on a global scale, but also nationally through complementary national testing of various kinds. As Stobart (2008) suggests, national standardised testing has become almost a hegemonic global policy discourse in education and is thought necessary to drive up standards and to produce the quality human capital that national economic competitiveness is believed to require. We would note here as well that comparison has become a central element of governance, and this is especially so in education policy (Novoa and Yariv-Mashal, 2003). These comparisons work globally and nationally with a certain complementarity, part of what Novoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003) have referred to as the ‘global eye’ governing in conjunction with the ‘national eye’. Following Rose (1999, p. 197), we note how ‘Numbers have achieved an unmistakeable political power within technologies of government’. We also note the move from government to governance (Rhodes, 1997), with new managerialism and privatisations of various kinds, and also the rescaling of governance, with governance through comparison now functioning at national and global scales. One significant additional effect of globalisation has been the growth of inequality between and within nations (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010), with consequent impact upon the issues of educational opportunities and equality within nations. Furthermore, what has been called the ‘global war for talent’ (Tannock and Brown, 2009) has witnessed changes in national migration policies in rich nations favouring highly educated, entrepreneurial migrants and marginalising unskilled migrants, with a related challenge to national equity agendas in education. It is interesting in this context that the OECD’s PISA measures both the quality and equity of national schooling systems, but in the numerical construction of both redefines equity in a quite reduc- tive way. Social justice reframed by national accountability testing often works in similar ways. We do not want to discount, though, the significance of the equity element of PISA. We would point out that the inclusion of both quality and equity in the descriptions of PISA results also facilitates acceptance and use of the test and its comparative results across the political spectrum. It is also important that the OECD PISA data demonstrate that schooling systems can be both high quality and equitable, rather than the two being disjunctive with each other. We have already noted the rise of GERM, especially in the Anglo-American countries. There are similar neo-liberal pressures, including privatisations of various kinds (Ball, 2007), affecting education policy in most nations of the globe. Yet, there have also been different (and more effective) educa- tion policy responses to globalisation. We could compare here the national responses of the East Asian nations (e.g. Singapore and Korea) with strong state direction and huge investment in education, and also the approaches of the Scandinavian countries with strong commitments to equity (e.g. Finland). We also note, though, that these policies are still aimed at enhancing Globalisation and Sociology of Education Policy 23 international competitiveness of national economies and subject to neo-lib- eral policy pressures. We also need to recognise that part of the neo-liberal dominance has been a privatisation agenda, which has potentially opened up markets in education to a variety of private interests (Ball, 2007, 2012). For example, the accountability and testing agendas have thrown open potential markets to the private sector and we discuss Pearson’s involvement in the testing industry below (see also Ball, 2012, pp. 124–128). Another element of globalisation casting its effects on education has been the enhanced flows, or ‘scapes’ as Appadurai (1996) calls them, of ideas, finance, capital, politicians, policymakers, tourists, refugees, migrants, researchers, academics and students (especially higher educa- tion students) across the globe. In the case of university students, this is most often from the Global South to universities in the Global North and is associated with pressures on universities to become more self-sufficient in funding terms. These transnational realities indicate the enhanced transnational mobilities associated with globalisation. However, we also recognise how, according to Bauman (1998), mobility and immobility have become new dimensions of advantage and disadvantage. Elites of all kinds now enjoy mobility across the globe, while some of the most disadvantaged are ‘forced’ to be mobile (e.g. refugees of various kinds) or to remain immobile, locked into one place and existing outside the flows of globalisation, yet still subject to their adverse effects. And of course, the flows of refugees and migrants enhance the diversity of national popula- tions with resultant pressures on education policy and schooling systems to promote social cohesion. Furthermore, the flows of people and ideas across the globe spawn the growth of global policy networks in education of various kinds, including in relation to the privatisation agenda (Ball, 2012; Ball and Junemann, 2012). In this context, we might follow Ball (2008b) by talking about ‘policy- scapes’: the flows and effects of policy ideas associated with what we see as new globalised education policy discourses (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010) and an emergent global education policy field (Lingard and Rawolle, 2011), which create pressures towards policy convergence, at least at the meta-discursive level. Ball (2008b) speaks of big ideas in a small world to encapsulate the ways this globalised education policy discourse across all sectors of educa- tion has precipitated global policy convergence. International organisations such as the OECD have become an important source of policy ideas and meta policy convergence for the rich nations of the globe, as have UNESCO, the World Bank and other international organisations for the nations of the Global South. Of course, the latter organisations have more direct impact on educational policy terms on the nations of the Global South because of ‘conditionalities’ attached to loan agreements and the weaker positioning of these nations within the global economic field, indicative of their weaker national capital. 24 Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar

Policy as numbers is one important element of globalised policy discourses, which helps to create the emergent global education policy field (Lingard and Rawolle, 2011) and constitutes the global infrastructure that Sassen (2007) sees as helping to facilitate globalisation. We also note that our focus up to this point, and also in what follows, has been on globalisation from above, rather than globalisation from below. We have stressed the degree of convergence at the meta policy level in education in the context of globalisa- tion. We simultaneously acknowledge that there are always infidelities and refractions in the implementation or enactment of education policy (Honig, 2006; Ball et al., 2012), and there remain distinctive national cultures that encourage framing of hybrid policy forms and vernacular manifestations of these meta policy frames (Lingard, 2001).

Imagining and enacting a global education policy field

Sassen (2007) thinks of globalisation as the emergence of a global infrastruc- ture that facilitates transnational communications and ‘scapes’ of various kinds. Here we follow Vertovec’s (2009, p. 3) definition of transnationalism:

Transnationalism describes a condition in which, despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place para- doxically in a planet-spanning yet common – however virtual – arena of activity.

One manifestation of this transnationalism, according to Vertovec (2009, pp. 4–5), is a new ‘social morphology’. This concept refers to a new ‘social formation spanning borders’ (p. 4), somewhat akin to Sassen’s notion of global infrastructure. In Bourdieu’s terms, we might think of transnational or global social fields, remembering that Bourdieu, in seeking to work across Weber and Marx, represents the social as consisting of various fields framed by overarching fields of power and intersected by gender. Furthermore, fields are structured social spaces, consisting of dominant and dominated agents, with their peculiar logics of practice, and as such the concept does not assume that such social spaces are necessarily located within national spaces and that society is homologous with nation. We will use these conceptual resources to argue the case for an emergent global education policy field being constructed around policy as numbers writ global, specifically through the constitution of the globe as a commen- surate space of measurement. As we show in the subsequent sections of our chapter, the OECD’s numbers work (including PISA and newer developments such as the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies Globalisation and Sociology of Education Policy 25

(PIAAC) and the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO), along with annual data reporting in Education at a Glance), together with the numbers work of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) (i.e. the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS)), are helping create this commensurate space. This in turn facilitates comparison as a mode of governance on a global scale. Here we take the position proposed by Rose (1999, p. 198) that numbers in poli- tics and policy are ‘inscription devices’ and ‘actually constitute the domains they appear to represent’. Global comparative measures of school systems provide a new global infrastructure that Sassen speaks of, a manifestation of Vertovec’s new social morphology, an emergent global education policy field. Numbers work to constitute this emergent global education policy field in the way that national statistical collections helped constitute nations, as argued in various social histories of statistics and in research on the political work of numbers (e.g. Porter, 1995; Desroisseres, 1998; Rose, 1999). On this point, Porter (1995, p. 37) argues that ‘the concept of society was itself in part a statistical construct’. We are arguing similarly that the emergent global education policy field is in part a statistical and numerical construction and in so doing acknowledge Porter’s (1995, p. 86) comments on the ‘remarkable ability of numbers and calculations to defy disciplinary and even national boundaries’. This global education policy field also operates as a global network of epis- temic communities (Kallo, 2009). Here, using Bourdieu’s thinking tools, we can see the alignment of the habitus (i.e. the inscription on the body of past experiences producing a particular disposition) of policymakers in interna- tional organisations such as the OECD and UNESCO with the policy habitus of the major policy actors within nations. These policy players, globally and nationally, are members of what Apple (2001) sees as a fraction of a new technical middle class that benefits from the neo-liberal policy settle- ment. In Bourdieu’s terms, their capitals are those associated with technical knowledges of various kinds, which assume global application. We see these policymakers as central to the creation of the global education policy field. Wiseman (2010), in writing about the rise of evidence-based (or informed) policy, a development linked to the new technologies of governance and the audit culture of new managerialism, has encapsulated well this new global policy space:

But what widely available international data on education has done is create an intellectual space where educational policymaking is not geographically or politically bounded but is instead bounded by the extent of the legitimated evidence used to support one decision or policy versus another. (p. 18) 26 Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar

This intellectual space is linked to policy habitus and is global in orienta- tion. A further aspect of this policy habitus is picked up in Strathern’s (1995) discussion of the capacity of policymakers to imagine a global space or field. In reflecting on the imbrications of the local and the global, and seeking to capture what is actually meant by the global for habitus, she observes:

From this point of view it makes no sense to go along with the literalism, that ‘global’ is bigger than ‘local’. It is simply where one is at. But if one never leaves the local, where is the global? It has to be the infinitely recur- ring possibility of measurement – not the scales but the capacity to imagine them. (Strathern, 1995, p. 179; original emphasis)

This capacity to imagine global scales of measurement is central to the policy habitus associated with the emergent global education policy field and its effects within national education policy fields. Additionally, this capacity is catalysed through the habitus of leading national policymakers and its align- ment with the habitus of policymakers in international organisations, with both evoked and demanded by the global field. There is a paradox, perhaps, in the emergence of the global education policy field as a manifestation of policy as numbers writ global. Some time ago now, and quite presciently, Lyotard (1984) wrote about the death of meta narratives as the central trope of postmodernity. Furthermore, the rise of feminist and postcolonial epistemologies, for example, and resultant epistemological challenges to Enlightenment assumptions, has seriously challenged universalism and the epistemological innocence associated with modernist frameworks. We would also argue that the fractured poli- tics associated with postmodernity and diversity has been a feature of the contemporary structure of feeling that has spawned the rise of policy as numbers (Lingard, 2011). Yet, as Stronach (2010, p. 1) acerbically observes, policy as numbers writ global works as a new meta narrative, or what he calls a ‘hypernarrative’: that is, ‘international test-based comparative accounts of outcomes’. This echoes Porter’s point about numbers as a tech- nology of distance and we would aver, universal application. Stronach suggests then that the collapse of meta narratives associated with post- modernity has not been met by new localised narratives (petit recite), but by new hypernarratives in education policy. He also sees these hypernar- ratives as paralleling the rise of the global neo-liberal capitalist economy. Apropos our argument here about a global education policy field, Stronach observes that these hypernarratives ‘constitute the first global language of Education and enable politicians the world over to talk the same nonsense about educational outcomes, while all singing from the same hymn sheet’ (p. 1). Our argument is that policymakers at global and national levels have constituted the global education policy field, in turn evincing this political (politician) habitus. Globalisation and Sociology of Education Policy 27

The OECD and PISA: a case study

In this section of the chapter we present a case study of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We focus on the increased influence of PISA in the work of the OECD and the related enhancement of the OECD’s influence on education policymaking within nations and globally. PISA has grown significantly since its inception in the mid-1990s and the initial assessment round in 2000. During this same period the OECD’s positions on knowledge-based economies (OECD, 1996a) and lifelong learning (OECD, 1996b) emerged, and the view that investment in human capital is a prerequisite for economic growth and productivity was moving closer towards the commonplace of education and economic policy that it has become today (Lauder et al., 2006). In this context, the measure- ment and analysis of human capital provided by PISA has become increas- ingly important in the policy work of the OECD and national policymakers, and it is now frequently referenced by politicians, commentators and the media. This case study briefly reviews the evolution of the OECD and its governance role in the global education policy field, before examining how the success of PISA has (a) made education more central in the organisa- tion’s broader remit and (b) underpinned the organisation’s role in helping both to constitute and influence the global education policy field. Finally, some effects of PISA and the OECD’s education policy work at the level of national policymaking are discussed. The case study draws on 31 semi-structured interviews, conducted in 2011 and 2012, with personnel from the OECD and other international organisations such as the the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), as well as with education policymakers, bureaucrats and academics in the UK and Australia. A range of documents has also been analysed, including relevant OECD publications; reports on education reform published by organisations such as the National Centre for Education and Economy (NCEE) in the USA and the Grattan Institute in Australia; as well as policy speeches and newspaper reports from the USA, UK and Australia.1 This research is concerned with the reconstitution of nations and national schooling systems set against the effects of globalisation. In this chapter, we are drawing on that part of the research that has been looking at the emergence of a global education policy field, the effects of which are felt in the national systems. Specifically, we are concerned with ways in which international comparative testing such as PISA has been complemented in the Australian context by the introduction of national testing of literacy and numeracy (the National Assessment Plan – Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN) at Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 for all students in all Australian schools. We also allude to the effects of these developments on national policy, the state schooling systems and in schools (see Lingard et al., 2012; Lingard and Sellar, forthcoming). The OECD aspect of this study builds out of earlier research 28 Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar that looked more generally at the changing nature of the education work of the OECD (see Henry et al., 2001; Rizvi and Lingard, 2006).

The OECD and the rise of education and PISA

While the OECD now exercises considerable soft power within the global education policy field, this has not always been the case and has occurred as a result of the organisation redefining its mission in the context of globali- sation. The OECD was established in 1961 to succeed the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which was created in 1948 to oversee the economic rebuilding of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan after the Second World War. In the context of intensifying Cold War tensions, the OECD (and the OEEC before it) was intended to provide a bulwark against communism and a showpiece for capitalism and liberal democracy. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Cold War chal- lenged this rationale for the organisation and forced a re-evaluation of its function:

The disintegration of authoritarianism and central planning in Eastern Europe was a victory for the OECD convictions about the superiority of capitalism and democracy as organizing principles for global governance, but bereft of plausible ideological adversaries the OECD looked anach- ronistic. ... [E]ven the organization’s sympathizers had misgivings about its suitability as a backdrop for fabricating the post-Cold War order. (Woodward, 2009, pp. 32–33)

Economic globalisation and the spread of both liberal democracy and commitment to human rights meant that more nations were eligible for accession to the OECD. Further, globalisation ‘trussed the affluence of OECD countries to that of non-member states, injecting urgency to the organization’s ... injunction to uphold principles, values and policies to promote economic growth in non-member countries’ (Woodward, 2009, p. 35). Six nations have joined the OECD since the end of the Cold War, expanding its membership to 34, and five more are currently in the process of accession. The OECD is also increasing, through its ‘enhanced engage- ment’ programme, the involvement of major economies in transition such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. The OECD now constructs itself as a centre of policy expertise and comparative interna- tional data, based on its programmes of measurement, comparison and analysis, to support the functioning and growth of market economies and liberal democracies in the context of globalisation. The organisation has become a significant policy actor in its own right (Henry et al., 2001), as well as performing an important secretariat role in support of the G8 and G20 (Woodward, 2009). Globalisation and Sociology of Education Policy 29

The place of education work within the OECD has changed dramatically since its establishment, when there was an ‘inferred role’ for education and no independent structural location (Papadopoulos, 1994). This changed in 1975 when education was incorporated into the remit of the Directorate for Social Affairs, Manpower and Education, which was renamed as the Directorate for Education, Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (DEELSA) in 1991. However, the ascendency of education in the OECD began in earnest during the mid-1990s through a combination of developments, including: the ratification of new policy positions on education (e.g. lifelong learning, knowledge-based economies); the creation of the Indicators of Education Systems (INES) programme and the publication of Education at a Glance; the alignment of statistical data sets held by the OECD, UNESCO and Eurostat (Grek et al., 2009); and the emergence of PISA. At this time, member coun- tries, particularly the USA in the long aftermath of the Nation at Risk report, were demanding regular and reliable data on the comparative performance of their education systems and the education work of the OECD evolved in response. In 1997 PISA was officially launched and an assessment has taken place every three years since 2000. In 2002 education became a separate and autonomous directorate. Two interrelated developments have contributed to this rise of educa- tion in the OECD, and of the OECD as an influential soft power in global education policy. First, the influence of human capital theory on the broad economic policy positions adopted and promoted by the OECD has led to education becoming a central concern in their work. Second, there has been an increasing demand for, and corresponding increase in the influence of, OECD metrics that enable assessment of the quantity and quality of national human capital, most notably PISA. The relationship between these two developments is clearly expressed in contemporary OECD skills policy. The OECD (2012, p. 10) considers that ‘skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies’. This conception of skills draws theories of human capital, lifelong learning and knowledge-based economies into an overarching narrative that presents education and training as a primary site of policy intervention to improve, simultaneously, the well-being of individuals and the economic strength of nations. There are forceful critiques of this narrative, which argue that the promise of more earning – both individual and national – through more learning cannot be kept, given the complex empirical reality of contempo- rary global markets and changing modes of production (Brown et al., 2010). However, here we are primarily concerned with how the OECD’s skills agenda has, over the past decade or so, drawn education into the heart of its post-Cold War remit. The recent publication of the cross-directorate OECD Skills Strategy (OECD, 2012) demonstrates the work being done on skills across the organi- sation. One of our interviewees in the Directorate for Employment, Labour 30 Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar and Social Affairs observed that the Skills Strategy is an attempt to federate or ‘bring together and leverage these different [skills] initiatives and pool together some common lessons coming out of all of these’. An interviewee in the Directorate for Education described how the cross-directorate focus on skills has made their work increasingly central to the organisation: ‘[F]or these past four or five years we have increasingly been working with the Economics Directorate, also with Employment, with Science and Technology ... So it is now one big OECD family and we have conquered a major pillar in it’. This mediating role of education was recognised by another interviewee in the Economics Directorate, who explained that education provides ‘one of the best examples where [inter-directorate] communication is very good’. Here we can see how the Skills Strategy constitutes an important point of convergence around education across the organisation’s different domains of policy expertise. The current secretary-general of the OECD, Angel Gurria, assumed office in 2006 and has taken a particular interest in skills and education. He has appointed the Deputy Director for Education and manager of PISA to the position of Special Advisor on Education Policy. An interviewee in the Directorate of Education observed that PISA has ‘had a big influence inside the OECD and I think it has contributed to much more of a focus on the issue of skills’. Another interviewee in Education observed that ‘the Secretary-General’s office lives and breathes PISA. He won’t go anywhere without having his PISA stats in his back pocket, so it’s crucial to them’. This usage of PISA data by the most senior levels of the OECD reflects the recent organisation-wide prioritising of education work and also demonstrates how PISA is being promoted globally as an important OECD product. One inter- viewee in the Education Directorate explained that ‘[o]ur Secretary’s very interested in having a greater impact on education ... he’s a great supporter for PISA all over the world’. The data provided by PISA are essential for the OECD, given its position that ‘[g]etting the best returns on skills requires the ability to assess the quality and quantity of the skills available in the population’ (OECD, 2012, p. 10). It is important to note here that the growing emphasis on skills is being reciprocally reinforced by the OECD’s capacity to measure them through programmes such as PISA and the more recent Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The flagship national Economic Surveys produced by the Economics Directorate have been central to the work of the OECD since its inception and PISA data are now always used in this work. Further, PISA data are now included in the Going for Growth reports that contribute to the work of the G20. An interviewee from the Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs explained that PISA is now used ‘in all of our reviews’, while another observed that it has become, in terms of measuring skills, one ‘incredibly important piece of the puzzle’. Further, the Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs successfully lobbied to have Globalisation and Sociology of Education Policy 31 financial literacy assessed as part of the 2012 PISA survey, which will further strengthen the cross-directorate usage of PISA. While PISA is currently being championed within the OECD, this has been made possible, at least in part, by demands from member countries for the educational data it provides. The increasing value placed on measure- ment, comparison and quantitative data as an evidence base for national policymaking has driven interest in programmes such as PISA from member countries, which set the priorities for the OECD’s Programme of Work and Budget.2 As Brown et al. (1997, p. 8) observe, now ‘the competitive advan- tage of nations is frequently redefined in terms of the quality of national education and training systems judged according to international standards’. In this context, members have been increasingly prioritising the indicators work done by the Directorate of Education and, importantly, this could eventually come at the expense of qualitative policy analysis programmes, such as the thematic reviews of education. Countries opt into PISA, rather than the OECD holding expectations that they participate. However, it is important to note that, in practice, there is encouragement from the OECD for countries to participate in PISA and to use it to drive policy reform. An interviewee in Education explained: ‘[PISA is] an offer and I think there is clearly, in many countries, the sense that we need to see ourselves in a global picture. So I expect take up to increase further but it sometimes has to be pushed’. There is a self-perpetuating dynamic here, whereby demand for and participation in PISA strengthens its influence and drives further expansion and promotion of the programme. The economi- sation of education policy through human capital logics created demand for metrics that the OECD was well-positioned to provide, and which Education has done successfully with PISA. This has increased the influence of Education, with PISA now considered to be ‘among the most influential of the OECD’s outputs’ (Woodward, 2009, p. 39). This success is also evident in the expansion into new forms of global testing such as PIAAC, and the planned introduction of AHELO by 2016.

The effects of PISA within nations and the global policy field

In this section we shift the focus from the place of Education and PISA within the OECD to the effects of PISA on national policymaking in a global context. There has been a substantial increase of participation in PISA since the first round in 2000, particularly among non-member countries and economies.3 In 2000, 28 member countries and 4 non-member countries participated in PISA. By 2012, this had expanded to all 34 member coun- tries and 31 non-member countries and economies. PISA is now playing a role in the OECD’s efforts to establish relationships with major non-member economies, supporting the aims of its enhanced engagement programme with ‘non-members which are unwilling or ill equipped to assume the 32 Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar rigours of accession but without whose participation the OECD could not deliver its global mandate’ (Woodward, 2009, p. 109). The participation and top performance of Shanghai, China, in PISA 2009 is a primary example of the OECD’s successful efforts to expand PISA. An interviewee from the Directorate for Education observed: ‘We aim to have the broadest possible picture of the global talent pool and I think China has greatly enriched the PISA programme’. Since the first PISA in 2000, Finland has performed very well and has been positioned as a high-quality, high-equity schooling system (Sahlberg, 2011). It has become an important reference society for many education systems across the globe, with one result being an significant increase in educational policy tourism to Helsinki. There have also been significant PISA ‘shocks’ for some countries who have performed worse than expected in PISA, for example Germany in 2000 (Ertl, 2006) and Japan in 2003 (Takayama, 2008). These shocks have provided an external justification (‘externalisation’) for significant educational reform within these countries (Grek, 2009) and have been showcased by the OECD as examples of the potential policy impact of PISA (OECD, 2011). In contrast, other systems that expected and received ‘poor’ results have subsequently used PISA benchmarking to drive systemic improvement (e.g. Brazil). More recently, the participation of Shanghai, China, in 2009 has been notable for its effects on education reform agendas in other nations. This participation has been carefully nurtured. China began discussions with the OECD in 2000 and the public participation of Shanghai in 2009 has been coupled with the extension of a more discreet entrée into the programme for other Chinese provinces, which have participated in PISA on a trial basis and on condition that their results are not included for public release. India has also taken a tentative step towards participation with the states of Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh being assessed as part of PISA 2009+, while Brazil and the Russian Federation have always participated.4 Thus, each of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies is now involved to some extent and the picture of the ‘global talent pool’ provided by PISA, as well as its legitimacy as an evidence base for global education policy has grown as a result. The top performance of Shanghai in PISA 2009, as well as the participation and success of Singapore and the ongoing strong performance of other East Asian economies, has encouraged policymakers in countries such as the USA, the UK and Australia to ‘look East’ for education reform ideas (Sellar and Lingard, 2012). At the request of US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, the NCEE collaborated with the OECD to identify policy lessons that the USA could learn from other systems in order to ‘surpass Shanghai’ (Tucker, 2011). Similarly, in Australia the Grattan Institute recently published a report designed to help Australian policymakers learn from the top performing East Asian systems, led by a former OECD analyst (Jensen et al., 2012). In this way, Globalisation and Sociology of Education Policy 33 the OECD has presence within national processes as part of global epistemic communities of policymakers (Kallo, 2009), while at the same time encour- aging policy borrowing between countries through the meta policy fram- ings it generates. An interviewee in the Directorate of Education emphasised the impact of PISA on bilateral and multilateral policy borrowing: ‘I think it’s not just necessarily global, it may also be multilateral ... I think one of the biggest things that PISA has sparked is the interest of countries in other countries’. This is strongly encouraged by the OECD and, as Takayama (2007, 2008) has argued, often serves processes of externalisation (Schriewer, 1990), whereby national governments use the performance and policy settings of other systems to win legitimacy for their own vernacular reform agendas. Another notable effect of the success of PISA has been the interest gener- ated among edu-business, most notably from Pearson. As the largest educa- tion company globally, Pearson’s reach across a range of education and publication interests is extensive. Ball (2012) argues that:

[E]du-businesses like Pearson, in their advertising and promotion, posi- tion themselves as offering ‘solutions’ to the national policy problems of raising standards and achieving educational improvements linked both to individual opportunity and national competitiveness. Such promotion also extends to active participation in policy influence relationships and policy networks ... as a means to agitate for policies which offer further opportunities for profit. (p. 126)

The growing involvement of Pearson in PISA and the education policy work of the OECD provide an exemplary case of this strategy in action. The phil- anthropic arm of Pearson, the Pearson Foundation, has sponsored a series of videos promoting policy learning from systems that have performed well in PISA or have improved their performance (Strong Reformers and Successful Performers in Education: http://pearsonfoundation.org/oecd/). At the same time, Pearson has been selected to develop the assessment framework for PISA 2015, and will work with the OECD and academic experts to deliver this framework. The self-serving logic of promoting the value of policy learning from PISA, while profiting from the development of the testing framework, is clear. Here we can see how the increasing influence of educational testing presents a profitable opportunity for edu-business, which leverages new ‘hypernarratives’ in education policy to promote its services. At the same time, private interests gain greater influence within policy networks that span intergovernmental organiaations and national policymaking processes. Finally, the focus on PISA as the global benchmark of education system performance has resulted in some countries concentrating effort on improving test performance. For example, in the lead up to PISA 2012 Mexico imple- mented a programme of systematic preparation of students for their possible participation in the assessment. This included setting national targets for 34 Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar improved performance on reading and mathematics and the distribution of teacher and student manuals designed to assist in developing students’ test literacy, including strategies to improve test scores and practice items (see http://www.pisa.sep.gob.mx/). Teachers were encouraged to enrol parents and communities to help prepare students, and student performance was framed as a matter of national pride. In this example, PISA performance was framed as representative of the quality of the national education system, leading to goal displacement and performative fabrication (Ball, 2003), whereby PISA performance was promoted as an end in itself, collapsing distinctions between test performance and the performance of the educa- tion system it is designed to measure. These brief examples demonstrate how the increased attention of nations to PISA results, particularly to national rankings (Breakspear, 2012), has concomitantly increased the influence of the OECD in education policy forums and education reform processes; the value of PISA and subsequent commercial interest in the programme from major education companies such as Pearson; and the concentrated efforts of some nations on improving PISA performance, with potentially perverse effects.

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that the OECD has become an important global policy actor in education. While its priorities and agendas are set by the demands of member countries, its technical expertise and the data and anal- yses have provided the OECD with a degree of autonomy in the global policy field. As such, the OECD now exerts a steering capacity in national policy- making and through global comparisons of performance (soft power), thus establishing a complex and discontinuous set of relays between the OECD and national education policy agendas. Throughout the chapter we have documented the rise and rise of OECD’s PISA in helping to constitute a global education policy field. This has been put into effect through the creation of the globe (or large parts of it) as a commensurate space of measurement. This global space is created as a virtual imagined space, linked to the alignment of the habitus of policymakers in international organisations and within nations, and functions through comparison as a new mode of global and national governance. We have stressed the convergence of policy in education at the meta-discursive levels across the nations of the globe. This is a globalisation from above perspec- tive. Set against this, we still want to acknowledge the ongoing significance of national education policy fields and the residual, dominant and emergent effects of any given nation’s history, culture and politics on national policy production in education. Furthermore, as a plethora of policy implementa- tion or enactment literature has so clearly demonstrated, there are always refractions in the implementation of top-down policy processes (e.g. Honig, Globalisation and Sociology of Education Policy 35

2006; Ball et al., 2012; Heimans, 2012), or disjunctions between the logics of practice of the field of policy text production and the logics of practice in classrooms within the school field. The nation-state remains important in education policymaking, but now works in different ways through the econ- omisation of education policy to ensure the putative global competitiveness of the national economy into the future. The latter has, of course, become an almost unassailable ‘hypernarrative’ framing contemporary education policy across the globe.

Notes

1. The research upon which this paper is based has been developed from an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Discovery Project (DP1094850), Schooling the Nation in an Age of Globalisation: National Curriculum, Accountabilities and their Effects. This research extends earlier research on the OECD that Lingard conducted (see Henry et al., 2001; Rizvi and Lingard, 2006). 2. Notably, PISA is funded by supplementary, voluntary contributions, which Woodward (2009, p. 99) argues implies that ‘it is not yet deemed a core OECD activity’. An alternative reading, and one we are attracted to, is to suggest that PISA is significantly influential and valued by nations, given their voluntary financial contributions to support the programme. 3. We note here the synonymous usage by the OECD of ‘countries’ and ‘economies’, indicating the economic framing of all of the OECD’s work. 4. PISA 2009+ assessed ten economies that were unable to meet the timelines for participation in PISA 2009.

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Suggestions for further reading

Ball, S.J. (2012) Global education INC: new policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary (London: Routledge). Brown, P., Lauder, H. and Ashton, D. (2010) The global auction: the broken promises of education, jobs and incomes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Olssen, M., Codd, J. and Neil, A. (2004) Education policy: globalisation, citizenship and democracy (London: Sage). 3 Education Policy, Human Rights, Citizenship and Cohesion Audrey Osler

Across the globe there has been, since the early 1990s, increased interest in the role of citizenship education in creating cohesive societies, by both national policymakers and international organisations (Reid et al., 2009). This chapter explores the tensions within national education policies and specifically citi- zenship education policies between promoting identity, belonging and social cohesion at the national level and realising a sense of cosmopolitan citizen- ship which might support global cooperation, recognising our sense of inter- dependence. One aim is to make explicit some assumptions about learners which underpin policies and explore the meanings of terms such as diversity, citizenship and community cohesion within education policy. The chapter focuses on the example of the UK, and specifically England, since the British government introduced a new policy to promote citizen- ship through schooling at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which not only attracted international attention but which also made explicit a link between citizenship education, social cohesion and concern about the apparent lack of integration of specific visible minorities, a concern which has been echoed in political rhetoric and policy developments in a range of other nations in Europe and beyond (Osler, 2009; Osler and Lybaek, in press). A key assumption of this chapter is that education policy and practice and wider social policy agendas need to be underpinned by a commitment to universal human rights which fosters solidarities between those struggling for social justice in different contexts.

Citizenship and belonging: nationalism and cosmopolitanism

From the introduction of mass schooling in the late nineteenth century, governments have seen education as a means of promoting national identity and national pride (Green, 1990). In this sense traditional civic education, promoted in Britain for example largely through the teaching of national history and through special celebrations such as Empire Day, might be said to have been about promoting national cohesion. The philosopher John

39 40 Audrey Osler

Dewey observed how this nationalism, mediated through state education, replaced the cosmopolitan traditions of the Enlightenment:

So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the move- ment for a state-supported education with the nationalist movement in political life ... Under the influence of German thought in particular, education became a civic function and the civic function was identified with the realization of the ideal of the national state. The ‘state’ was substi- tuted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. (Dewey, [1916] 2002, p. 108)

According to Dewey, mass education provided by the nation-state and intro- duced at a time when nationalism was at its zenith not only replaced in large part an older tradition of education as a charitable function, but also contributed to the demise of an older cosmopolitan tradition of loyalty to fellow humanity. As cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism, so schooling became part of a nationalist project. Following the First World War, the nationalist project of education was challenged in a number of European nations by pacifists. For example, in 1918, a group of French primary school teachers, influenced by the femi- nist and pacifist movements of the time, sought to challenge the milita- ristic messages of textbooks developed during the war (Siegel, 1999, 2005). Pacifist beliefs were not presented as a counter to nationalism. In fact, the teachers were calling for a return to cosmopolitan values, where loyalty to fellow humanity was promoted as part of the French republican tradition of patriotism, rather than something in opposition to it. Education was central to this cosmopolitan and pacifist project, since these teacher activists, who were also concerned with women’s rights, were convinced that

no amount of international arbitration or economic cooperation would effectively prevent return of war unless the peoples of the world first aban- doned their chauvinistic impulses and embraced cross-national under- standing as the keystone of global stability. (Siegel, 2005, p. 3)

In England, alternative beliefs about the role of education in promoting either nationalist or broader cosmopolitan visions of society were played out in debates among professional historians and teachers about the role school history might play in shaping the attitudes of young people. On one side were those who wished to continue to promote pride in the military and the Empire. On the other were those who believed nationalism was the major cause of war and that a programme of world history should be devel- oped which emphasised international cooperation and social progress, and who felt supported by the claim of the League of Nations, which argued that ‘history syllabuses must also be purged of war if they were to become an effective instrument of peace’ (Elliott, 1980, p. 40). A small group of Education Policy, Human Rights, Citizenship and Cohesion 41 progressive educationists and liberal thinkers founded what was to become the UNESCO-affiliated World Education Fellowship, committed to democ- racy, world citizenship, international understanding and world peace. In the second half of the twentieth century, national history and national pride continued to be promoted through schooling in England, but such civic education that existed in this period was less explicit. In any case, as Elliott (1980) notes, history, seen as the main means of promoting civic attitudes, failed to secure a strong role in the school curriculum in the post-war period. What is remarkable is the lack of focus in England on education for democratic participation until the last decade of the twentieth century. An elitist, knowledge-based form of civic education, usually entitled British Constitution, was offered to privately educated students and those judged to be academically able, but Conservative thinkers were suspicious of all forms of political education, associating it with indoctrination (Heater, 1990). Conservatives were, no doubt, challenging those, largely urban, local author- ities that were promoting multicultural education, which was generally under- stood to be about expanding the curriculum to reflect the cultures of students of Caribbean, Indian and Pakistani heritage, and which in a few authorities included an explicit antiracist element. There was also pressure for change from the Politics Association, established in 1969, and particularly the Programme for Political Education (PPE), championed and led by Bernard Crick, which emphasised the concept of ‘political literacy’ (Crick and Lister, 1978). Following the successes of the US civil rights struggles which gave confidence and hope to liberation struggles internationally, and particu- larly after the 1968 student revolutions in Europe and the USA, there was growing interest in the political education of children and young people. The lowering of the voting age in Britain to 18 years contributed to a sense of need for such education. Another impetus for change in Britain can be linked to growing concerns within black communities about the failure of the education system to meet the needs of black students. This led eventu- ally to an independent committee of inquiry, chaired by Lord Swann, which sought to address differentials in academic performance between ethnic groups. The Swann report (DES, 1985) made direct reference to work of the PPE in its report, Education for All. It drew attention to racism in schools and society, concluding that in all schools, regardless of ethnic make-up, political education can ‘play a part in countering racism at both institutional and individual levels’ (DES, 1985, p. 336). This marked a change of emphasis in multicultural education in some urban local authorities from an exclusive focus on minority ethnic communities as problems to one in which struc- tural inequalities and racism were on the agenda. Other local authorities with low-density minority ethnic populations began to develop curricula which aimed to address racism within mainstream populations. Nevertheless, there was no uniform country-wide policy of multiculturalism in education. Those local authorities that began in the late 1980s to develop policies to challenge racism as a barrier to full participation were stopped by the 42 Audrey Osler pressures of national education reforms introduced by the Conservative government. From 1990, the Education Reform Act 1988 introduced a highly prescriptive national curriculum, ensuring that students in publicly funded schools experienced a traditionally focused common curriculum. The new national curriculum removed responsibility of curriculum devel- opment from local authorities and schools, effectively limiting teacher autonomy. It also undermined policies and practices in multicultural educa- tion (Figueroa, 2004; Tomlinson, 2009) and curtailed efforts to introduce curricula which aimed to counter racism through political education, as advocated by Swann. The Speaker’s Commission on Citizenship (SCC) (1990) recommended that active citizenship be promoted, in schools and in the wider society. The commission’s focus on active citizenship complemented the Conservative government’s neo-liberal agenda, which identified social services not primarily as a state responsibility, but one which citizens might elect to meet through voluntary and charitable initiatives. Citizenship became a cross-curricular theme within the new national curriculum, but guidance on citizenship education (NCC, 1990) had minimal impact on schools, which were preoccupied with implementing the new subject-focussed national curriculum. Although efforts to promote PPE were curtailed, the SCC did open up ‘discussion of what should be of value in a democracy, and whether, in any case, we value democracy’ (Murdoch, 1991, p. 441). At an international level, the Council of Europe sought to place human rights education on the agenda of member-states across Western Europe with the 1985 Recommendation R (85) on Teaching and Learning about Human Rights in Schools. Although the impact of this initiative was mixed, it marked an important re-emphasis on human rights as part of a cosmopolitan educa- tion project. This project was developed and extended after 1989 with the end of the Cold War and subsequent growth in member-states. Among the current 47 member-states of the Council of Europe, it was eastern and central European nations which became the focus of a renewed effort to promote both human rights and human rights education in Europe.

Citizenship and citizenship education

Despite the work of T.H. Marshall (1950), who importantly extended the concept of citizenship beyond political and civic matters to encompass social rights, the concept of citizenship did not begin to be part of main- stream political discourse in the UK until the late 1980s. Later scholars have built on and extended Marshall’s concept of citizenship to consider alterna- tive meanings in a ‘postnational Europe’ (Soysal, 1995) and in the context of mass international migration (Benhabib, 2002; Isin, 2002). Scholars are also challenging the somewhat narrow concept of citizen- ship portrayed in some political science writings, where it is linked to either nation and nationality (national citizenship status) or ‘postnational’ Education Policy, Human Rights, Citizenship and Cohesion 43 developments (e.g. European citizenship status), to propose a more socio- logically and historically grounded understanding. Osler and Starkey (2005) contend that citizenship is a status, a feeling and a practice, with each of these elements standing alone, but also inter-linked. The practice of citizen- ship may encompass a series of ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Neilsen, 2008). The practice of citizenship is not dependent on national status, so that nationals and non-nationals alike may engage in everyday acts of citizen- ship, such as serving on a school board or organising a sports club. However, nationality (status) may affect the degree to which the wider society supports or denies an individual the opportunities to practice citizenship and to enjoy economic and social inclusion and access to social security. The ability to engage in acts of citizenship or practice citizenship in everyday life is in turn strengthened or undermined by the degree of inclusivity and belonging offered by the wider society (Osler and Starkey, 1996). A sense of societal inclusivity or an individual’s feeling of citizenship and belonging does not depend entirely on whether a person holds citizenship status but also on the degree to which the wider society gives them due recognition and puts in place measures to outlaw discrimination (Osler and Starkey, 2005). These points are well illustrated by the novelist E.H. Braithwaite who wrote in 1967 that despite his long-standing residence in Britain, any service to the community in wartime or peace (he was a Royal Air Force pilot in the Second World War) or his feelings for Britain and the British:

I – like all other coloured persons in Britain – am considered an ‘immi- grant’. Although the term indicates we have secured entry into Britain, it describes a continuing condition in which we have no real hope of ever enjoying the desired transition to full responsible citizenship. (quoted in Fryer, 1984, p. 382)

Regretfully, the term ‘immigrant’ is still commonly applied across Europe to citizens who can trace their ancestry from outside the continent, with the descriptor ‘second and third generation’ regularly added. Unfortunately, barriers to full citizenship on the basis of ethnicity, gender or other social factors remain in many nation-states, with important implications for citi- zenship learning, as observed by James A. Banks:

Becoming a legal citizen of a nation-state does not necessarily mean that an individual will attain structural inclusion ... [or] be perceived as a citizen by most members of the dominant group ... A citizen’s racial, cultural, language, and religious characteristics often significantly influ- ence whether she is viewed as a citizen within her society. (1997, p. xi)

The specific use of the term ‘citizenship’ in the UK in the context of immigra- tion control means that it has become associated with who does and, more particularly, who does not belong. Various Nationality and Immigration Acts 44 Audrey Osler sought to limit immigration from former colonies in Africa and Asia and to ensure that Commonwealth citizens, who had the right to enter Britain freely until the 1960s, were divested of such rights of residence. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act identified different categories of citizen- ship; distinctions between these categories were further sharpened by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. The British Nationality Act 1981 created further categories of citizenship without right of abode. Effectively, ‘citizenship’ focused on processes of exclusion, rather than inclusion and was linked to a racialised debate about desirable and undesirable immigration. This usage has now largely been eclipsed by newer debates about ‘active citi- zenship’ or citizen participation, in conformity with the neo-liberal agenda of the Conservative government of the 1980s and introduced into education policy from the 1990s, remaining part of the discourse of subsequent New Labour and Conservative governments for the remainder of the twentieth century and into the first two decades of the twenty-first. Although the concept of political literacy was debated by some teacher educators from the 1970s (Harber, 1992; Meighan and Harber, 1986), it was not until the beginning of the twenty-first century and the development of citizenship as a national curriculum subject that any form of explicit educa- tion for democracy was widely introduced into English schools. In many ways the lack of emphasis on education for democracy reflects a peculiarly British antipathy for studying politics at school. Fogelman (1991) observed how school principals, invited to comment on the type of citizenship educa- tion taking place in their schools, suggested citizenship studies contained either little or no political matter. Among possible causes of such depoliti- cised citizenship education are: no widely agreed narrative of the distribu- tion of political power; an uncodified constitution coupled with a political culture ‘with only the vaguest ideas about constitutionality’; hostility to Europe, often expressed in simplistic constitutional terms; and right-wing anxiety about left-wing propaganda (Frazer, 1999, pp. 17–18). Additionally, teachers may lack confidence in addressing political matters in a political climate in which there is a less clearly articulated set of agreed democratic and human rights principles than can be found in other European and inter- national contexts (Hahn, 1999; Osler and Starkey, 1999, 2010). The first successful initiative for introducing citizenship education into English schools was made by Labour Education Secretary David Blunkett, in 1997. He appointed Bernard Crick to chair an advisory group on citizen- ship and democracy in schools in 1997/98. The resulting Crick Report (QCA, 1998) achieved cross-party consensus and was the foundational document of the new citizenship curriculum, statutory in secondary schools from 2002. Political literacy, social and moral responsibility and community involve- ment were identified as the three main elements. The Crick Report acknowledged the long-standing diversity of the UK in terms of its constituent nations, but avoided debate about other forms of Education Policy, Human Rights, Citizenship and Cohesion 45 diversity, with only a passing reference to the multicultural nature of Britain. It failed to recognise gender differences or discuss the relationship between unity and diversity in a multicultural democracy. Crick stressed unity or cohe- sion (Osler, 2005). Citizenship, in the civic republican tradition from which Crick came, was presented as a project which is complete. There was no recog- nition or reference to struggles to claim equal citizenship rights or of contin- uing barriers to citizenship (Osler, 2000b; Olssen, 2004). Partly as the result of Crick’s own commitment to the project and his readiness to speak about it in different international contexts, and perhaps also as a consequence of the project’s genuine attempt to achieve cross-party consensus in the UK (Crick, 2000), permitting a variety of interpretations in different social and cultural contexts, the English citizenship education project has attracted international attention with discussion, and possible influence, beyond England. The advisory group’s draft report made no reference to human rights, but following lobbying from the Education in Human Rights Network (EIHRN) in 1998 and efforts by EIHRN members to engage with Crick (Crick, 2000; Osler, 2000a, 2009), the final report, while not placing human rights at its heart, acknowledges that students should learn about key international human rights documents. In this sense, the English citizenship education project has set itself apart from the European mainstream international policy, as championed by the Council of Europe, which explicitly links education for democratic citizenship (EDC) with human rights education (HRE) (Council of Europe, 2010). On the other hand, a number of European nation-states, including for example, the Netherlands, which, like the UK, stresses human rights in foreign policy and international aid initiatives, fail to have an explicit human rights curriculum or strong human rights foundation to EDC. However, education policy can be understood as much more than formal policy documents, for as Ball (2006) observes, it also include processes of policy implementation in which teachers can support, subvert or transform the original intentions of policymakers. At school level, human rights, and specifically child rights education, has proved a strand of citizenship educa- tion which has since been embedded into the practices of many English schools (Osler and Starkey, 2010; Jerome, 2012) partly because of its appeal to teachers and also as a result of efforts by non-governmental organisa- tions such as UNICEF UK and Amnesty International, which have developed materials and national and international projects to support child rights education and human rights education in schools (Mejias, 2012; Sebba and Robinson, 2010). In this respect it may be argued that despite national citi- zenship education policies which remain focussed broadly on the nation, teachers have encouraged a more cosmopolitan vision: international human rights standards and recognition and commitment to fellow humanity in distant places are on the agenda of many teachers. In England, as elsewhere, this is reflected in an interest in ‘global citizenship’ as well as local or national citizenship within the curriculum (Davies, 2006; Ibrahim, 2005). 46 Audrey Osler

Pykett (2007) interviewed members of the Crick advisory group. She notes how many members tried to play down the political significance of citizen- ship education and the controversial nature of the exercise in which they were engaged. Interestingly an area of tension she identifies is the question of multiculturalism in education. Pykett notes criticisms of the report (Osler and Starkey, 2000), namely, that in referring to ‘the homelands of our minority communities’ (QCA, 1998: 17 my emphasis) it had ‘a colonial flavour’ and that it implied minorities must change their behaviour to become more British. According to Pykett, a number of members of the committee were extremely uneasy in speaking about the political implications of their work. One interviewee repeatedly denied the report’s reference to ‘the homelands of our minority communities’. As Pykett (2007, p. 306) suggests, the Crick Report’s discourse of tolerance masks ‘an erasure of difference’. It was not until after the 2005 London bombings that there was any signif- icant political leadership in favour of teaching about diversity as an aspect of citizenship in schools. The resultant government-commissioned Ajegbo Report (DfES, 2007), proposed that the citizenship curriculum for students in England should include a strand on ‘identity and diversity; living together in the UK’. This development came directly from official concerns about terrorism and a desire to promote Britishness, shared values and patriotism, through the teaching of citizenship and history (Osler, 2008, 2009). Interest in ‘diversity’ was from this point associated with visible minorities. In turn, these minorities were linked to social instability, separation and, in the case of British Muslims, to the threat of international terrorism. The Ajegbo report, while advocating critical thinking on race, does not itself achieve this. For example, it fails to offer any explanation of why significant numbers of schools are half-hearted or worse in their compli- ance with race relations legislation. There is no proper acknowledgement of the structural disadvantage which students from particular ethnic groups encounter, expressed, for example, in differential examination outcomes and exclusion rates (Gillborn and Mirza 2000; Osler and Hill 1999; Tikly et al., 2006). Relatively weak messages about an inclusive British identity, promoted through the official school citizenship curriculum from 2008, contrast with negative portrayals of migrants by both media and government relating to immigration, naturalisation and asylum (Finney and Simpson, 2009). The Ajegbo report has led to a change in the second version of the citizen- ship curriculum for England, enacted from 2009, which re-asserts the role of history in promoting national identity and nation cohesion. The report is concerned with enabling learners to be familiar with British values and culture. In this respect it draws directly from the Crick Report, assuming that minorities need to learn how ‘we’ behave and about ’our’ way doing things. Integration is shown as a one-way process, similar to that advocated by the Commission on Integration and Cohesion (COIC) (2007). It also builds on an approach advocated by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, empha- sising Britishness and British history. Brown refers to a loss of confidence in Education Policy, Human Rights, Citizenship and Cohesion 47 the post-1945 period, coinciding with the end of the Empire and economic decline. He argues it is of critical importance to encourage patriotism and to consider the meaning of Britishness in a post-imperial world:

To address almost every one of the major challenges facing our country – our relationships with Europe, America and the rest of the world; how we equip ourselves for globalisation; ... [including] of course, our community relations and multiculturalism and, since July 7th, the balance between diversity and integration; even the shape of our public services – you must have a clear view of what being British means, what you value about being British and what gives us purpose as a nation. (Brown,2006)

Although Brown presents a largely cosmopolitan vision of the nation, not presenting cosmopolitanism and patriotism as mutually incompatible, he echoes others’ concerns about ‘diversity and integration’, linking these directly to the London 2005 bombings. Yet when he addresses education and specifically the potential role of history in schools, his global vision largely disappears. According to Brown, British history should be given much greater emphasis and be part of the citizenship curriculum. This British history forms is a grand narrative of progress towards greater liberty and, eventually, to democracy. It is a long way from the twenty-first century history curriculum model which encourages critical thinking and analysis. In fact it is in many ways similar an early twentieth-century model of school history, promoting national cohesion and unquestioning loyalty (Osler, 2009). Following Brown’s intervention, the 2008 version of the citizenship curriculum emphasises history and adds a new strand: ‘identity and diversity: living together in the UK’. At the time of writing (late 2012) political debate continues about the relationship between history and citizenship education, with suggestions that history can replace citizenship in schools and that British children (particularly those from minority communities?) need to learn more British history in order to have a clear British identity. Advocates of this approach are not advocating multiple ways of being British, nor are they advocating a critical examination of Britain’s imperial past. Their vision is that school history should return to the early twentieth-century grand narrative, which glorifies the nation and focusses unquestioningly on its achievements and successes, overlooking any critical analysis of the past.

Educational legal and policy frameworks

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, instigated in 1997, not only highlighted institutional racism in the police force, but also across the full range of public services in the UK, including education (Macpherson, 1999). It proposed the school curriculum be reformed to promote racial justice and diversity. The government response (Home Office, 1999) highlighted the new school subject of citizenship education as the main vehicle by which young people 48 Audrey Osler in England should learn to value diversity and challenge racism. This govern- ment expectation was something of an afterthought, since there was only passing reference in the Crick Report to multiculturalism and no mention of racism in British institutions or society (Osler, 2000b). The initial positive Home Office response to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry was not matched by any commitment by education ministers to ensure that schools address racism as a barrier to full citizenship though the curric- ulum. In fact, ministers avoided any use of the word racism, even when discussing significant differentials in educational outcomes between different ethnic groups (Osler, 2002). Nevertheless, the subsequent Race Relations [Amendment] Act 2000 required schools to develop race equality policies, a process monitored by Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), the school inspection body. Ofsted, whose leadership had already shown itself reluctant to address questions of racial justice, according to research carried out on behalf of the Commission for Racial Equality (Osler and Morrison, 2000), was singularly ill-equipped to take on this role. Following the 9/11 attacks on the USA, which sparked official concerns about international terrorism, and the prior publication in 2001 of two UK reports that addressed schooling (Cantle, 2001; Ouseley, 2001), the role of education policy in strengthening or undermining societal cohesion became subject to greater public scrutiny. In particular, there has been debate about the degree to which such policies enable or undermine the government’s policy of community cohesion. Herman Ouseley (2001) identified a ‘virtual apartheid’ and schooling’s failure to address how we might live together in a multicultural society in his review of Bradford schools. The Cantle review (2001), on behalf of the Home Office, which examined violent disturbances in a number of northern towns, claimed that distinct religious and ethnic communities were living in geographical proximity without developing cultural or social bonds. It suggested schools have a key role to play in chal- lenging these apparent ‘parallel lives’. Faith schools, which have been part of UK publicly funded schooling since its beginnings, have been subject to particular scrutiny. From 2001, faith organisations generally were encouraged by government to play a larger part in public education and independent minority faith schools encouraged to seek public funding by adopting ‘voluntary-aided’ status, allowing them to receive local authority funding while maintaining control over their student admissions and the content of religious education. Research carried out by the Runnymede Trust on schooling and community cohesion (Osler, 2007) revealed how many schools (both faith and non-faith) were struggling to fulfil their duty to promote community cohesion, under the 2006 Education and Inspections Act. In response to the Runnymede project’s findings on difficulties relating to community cohesion encountered by faith schools, then Education Secretary Ed Balls suggested a possible change in emphasis in government support for such schools, stating: ‘It is up to the local commu- nity to decide what it wants ... We want to support those communities to Education Policy, Human Rights, Citizenship and Cohesion 49 make their own decisions, but we are not leading a drive for more faith schools’ (House of Commons Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families, 2008). The subsequent Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government has praised faith schools, emphasising their academic achieve- ments (which in any case are not consistent in all localities), while over- looking the differentials in access which disadvantage students from working class and minority communities localities (West, 2006). Where faith schools serve specific faith communities, rather than offer a service to students of all faiths or none, students are denied opportunities to learn to live together, an essential element of citizenship education. Where they perpetuate inequali- ties in accessing high-quality schooling, they serve to undermine democratic citizenship, founded on the basis of equality of rights. After the 2005 London bombings, education policy agendas on commu- nity cohesion and citizenship became more closely intertwined. Here the emphasis was on disaffected youth, with certain young people, namely those from minority ethnic communities, seen as having a double deficit, following the model presented in the Crick report (Osler, 2000b). Yet neither the citizen- ship agenda nor that of promoting social cohesion has been closely linked, in official terms, to a parallel educational policy goal, that of improving the average educational outcomes of students in general and of those ethnic groups for which schools have been underachieving. Disaffection and vulnerability to extremism were regularly linked to minority ethnic status, and specifically, in the eyes of those setting policy agendas, to radical Islam. Home Office funding, set aside to tackle extremism, was not generally avail- able to projects designed to confront racism or Islamophobia. Gillborn (2006) argues that citizenship education has served as a placebo. By presenting citizenship education as the sole means by which race equality in schools might be promoted, he suggests that in 1999 the government avoided making concrete policy to address racial justice in schools. While this analysis underplays role of teacher agency in policy implementation, it is certainly the case that political leaders continued to see racism in educa- tion as an inter-personal issue and avoid discussion of institutional racism (Blair, 2006; Osler, 2009). The Labour government’s policies on community cohesion in education existed in parallel, and without reference, to efforts to ongoing inequali- ties in educational outcomes between different ethnic groups. Neglect of academic outcomes in official statements on community cohesion and schooling mean that community cohesion is seen by school leaders as an additional legal requirement amongst others, separate from the central focus of government policy and schools’ work, namely to raise academic standards. Despite the introduction of the Equality Act 2010, legislation passed in the final weeks of a Labour administration and designed to strengthen previous anti-discrimination legislation, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government which came to power in 2010 has taken a largely colour-blind approach in its efforts to improve school standards and given minimal 50 Audrey Osler support to schools in enabling them to meet their legal obligations relating to equality, human rights and social justice, key elements of citizenship.

Islam and attacks on multiculturalism

In the recently published report of the Group of Eminent Persons of the Council of Europe, ‘Living together – Combining diversity and freedom in the 21st-century Europe’ (Council of Europe, 2011) xenophobia and intolerance are portrayed as the major threats for peace and sustainable democracy in Europe. At the same time, the report outlines the resources which can be mobilized in order to overcome these threats. Education aiming at the strengthening of human rights cultures and intercultural understanding is presented as a central resource in this work. Significantly, the report takes the unusual step, for a work published by an international organisation, of criticising political leadership in this field, singling out British, French and German leaders (Cameron, Sarkozy, Merkel) for attacks on multiculturalism, taken in the expectation of short-term electoral advantage. The report is hard-hitting precisely because it sees a link between this kind of political rhetoric, heightened levels of intolerance, and the undermining of human rights and equal citizenship. Feteke (2012), in a paper contextualising the July 2011 massacre in Norway by ethno-nationalist Anders Behring Breivik within a broader European context of Islamophobia and far-right extremism, points out that while Breivik’s actions were abhorrent and aberrant, many of his arguments about conspiracy to Islamicise Europe are circulated widely, and not just by counter-jihadist activists and neo-Nazis using the Internet. Also contributing to a general climate of suspicion and intolerance are neoconservative and cultural conservative commentators, as well as politicians from mainstream parties accessing mainstream media. While these intellectual and political sources do not support the notion of a conspiracy to Islamicise Europe, their arguments are used by conspiracy theorists to justify violence. Feteke (2012: 32) cites the movements ‘Stop Islamisation of Europe’ (SIOE) and ‘Stop Islamization of America’ (SIOA), which bear the motto: ‘Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense’. As the Council of Europe report makes clear, failure to address all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, creates barriers to realising a Europe where diversity and freedom are guaranteed to all citi- zens, regardless of their identities. Education for democratic citizenship and human rights education must necessarily address barriers to citizenship. Such education is only likely to be effective when political leaders show resilience to all forms of hate speech and violence.

Looking to the future

Much of what was proposed as part of the official community cohesion policy agenda within education under the previous Labour government was Education Policy, Human Rights, Citizenship and Cohesion 51 concerned with promoting a sense of national cohesion or national loyalty, using both the citizenship curriculum and history education to this end. Although the subsequent Conservative– Liberal Democrat coalition has dropped the term community cohesion, the same goal of creating national cohesion continues to be echoed. In this respect, curriculum policy reiter- ates the concerns articulated over a century ago and, as Reid and colleagues (2009) remind us, reflect similar concerns in a range of national contexts across the globe. The focus today differs in one significant respect: today’s polices are justified by government by reference to public concerns about terrorism, and portrayed as necessary to discipline minorities in schools. Integration continues as a one-way process, explicitly or implicitly focused on both newcomers and established visible minorities. There has been little, if any, official recognition by recent and current UK governments that a sustainable and cohesive society is directly related to a sense of belonging predicated on equal access to educational goods. Efforts to promote community or social cohesion which ignore the material disadvantages of specific groups of learners, deep institutional inequalities between learners, and a continuing and in some cases widening attainment gap between different ethnic groups are at best compromised. At worst, they breed cynicism and disengagement amongst those they purport to include. Failure to discuss endemic racism and disadvantage within schooling compounds these problems. Focusing on the school curriculum, Figure 3.1 presents a tentative set of indicators for evaluating citizenship education which recognises young people as agents in their own learning, rather than passive receivers of educa- tional goods. It is adapted from an analysis of education projects (formal and non-formal), funded by the European Commission (Osler and Starkey, 1999), to ascertain ways in which they might contribute to the political education of young people. It is informed by Delanty’s (2003) study of citizenship as a learning process. Citizenship education needs to be perceived a dynamic and developmental process where students have an opportunity to create their own narratives and critically examine multiple perspectives, drawing on biographical and family experiences as well as written texts, rather than be disciplined into conformity with so-called British values and a grand narrative of British history. Societal cohesion depends on inclusion and this inclusion implies reflexive, creative and constructive processes of learning and exploring multiple identities, rather than the categorisation of others as conforming to essentialised and pre-existing identities. So, for example, faith schools, which currently privilege students’ (presumed) faith identities, need to recognise that young people’s identities are multiple, situated and often flex- ible (Mitchell and Parker, 2008: Osler and Starkey, 2003), and may or may not privilege belief. Equally, schools with a secular foundation need to take concrete steps to guarantee to all students freedom of thought, conscience and religion. 52 Audrey Osler

Effective learning for citizenship might be expected to include:

M information about and experience of democracy and human rights in theory and in practice; M a focus on key skills for social and economic inclusion; M a focus on equality of outcomes, addressing the specific needs of minorities, women and other groups which experience material disadvantage in the wider community; M a specifically anti-racist focus and examination of the barriers to full citizenship encountered by minority groups; M opportunities to explore and reflect upon various identities and cultural attributes; M opportunities to create personal narratives and develop processes of self- learning; M cooperative practice and group or team work; M the development of collective narratives and study of cognitive models which enable learners as a group to make sense of the world; M experiential learning; M democratic decision-making, including participation in the management of the project and, where appropriate, of the learning institution in which they are situated; M independent reasoning and critical awareness; M development of effective communication skills including those required for transnational and intercultural communication; M community engagement; M negotiation and participation skills; M skills for critical participation; M development of the capabilities to support learners in transformative actions as citizens.

Figure 3.1 Indicators for citizenship and political learning to promote social cohesion

Education policy is not merely a one-way process by which government dictates to teachers and educational administrators but involves the applica- tion, interpretation and sometimes subversion of the original policy goals. For this reason, processes of evaluation need to be built upon the interpreta- tion and analysis of those initiatives that are based on shared human rights standards and principles. An overriding principle for effective citizenship education is that it is situated in a context in which equality of educational outcomes is an over-riding and prioritised aim. The learner needs to be recognised as a holder of human rights and citi- zenship education based on the learner’s status as a holder of human rights, rather than a member of a particular polity. Not all learners in a school community will necessarily be citizens of the nation-state, but all are holders of human rights: political, social and cultural. The challenge is to transform policies of national cohesion in education to support, in this global age, the development of cosmopolitan citizens with a sense of solidarity to fellow human beings (in their neighbourhood, nation Education Policy, Human Rights, Citizenship and Cohesion 53 and globally), regardless of nationality or ethnic group, rather than a narrow national objective of an inward-looking disciplinary citizenship training which is effectively assimilationist and thus disrespectful of learners’ dignity. As Spencer (2000, p. 22) and others have argued ‘[h]uman rights principles are the essence of social and moral responsibility, and thus should lie at the heart of citizenship education, and not be peripheral to it’ (Spencer, 2000, p. 22). International human rights principles provide a framework in which conflicting interests and moral dilemmas might be discussed and debated in the classroom and beyond. This approach to citizenship education implies citizenship education as political education in the Freirian (1996) sense, rather than the narrower notion of political literacy advocated by Crick and his colleagues from the 1970s. It is more than the sum of knowledge, skills and attitudes. It implies a critical understanding of the individual’s expe- rience and position in society, in social structures and processes of social change. Equally, it implies collaboration between learners so as to enable genuine transformation and a realisation of human rights for all. Only when learners are equipped to transform society can it be asserted that this process of political education has the potential to support social cohesion, predi- cated on recognition of the equal human rights of all.

References

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Osler, A. and Starkey, H. (2005) Changing citizenship: democracy and inclusion in educa- tion, (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill). Osler, A. and Starkey, H. (2010) Teachers and human rights education (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham). Ouseley, H. (2001) Community pride not prejudice: making diversity work in Bradford (The Ouseley Report) (Bradford: Bradford Council). Pykett, J. (2007) ‘Making citizens governable? The Crick Report as governmental tech- nology’, Journal of Education Policy, 22(3), 301–319. Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) (1998) Citizenship and democracy in schools. The Crick report (London: QCA). Reid, A., Gill, J. and Sears, A. (2009) (eds.) Globalisation, the nation-state and the citizen: dilemmas and directions for civics and citizenship education (London: Routledge). Sebba, J., and Robinson, C. (2010). Evaluation of UNICEF UK’s Rights Respecting Schools Award. Final Report. (London: UNICEF UK). Siegel, M. (1999) ‘“To the unknown mother of the unknown soldier”: pacifism, femi- nism, and the politics of sexual difference among French institutrices between the wars’, French Historical Studies, 22(3), 421–451. Siegel, M.L. (2005) The moral disarmament of France: education, pacifism and patriotism 1914–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press). Soysal, Y.N. (1995). Limits of citizenship: migrants and postnational membership in Europe. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Speaker’s Commission on Citizenship (SCC) (1990) Encouraging citizenship (London: HMSO). Spencer, S. (2000) ‘The implications of the human rights act for citizenship educa- tion’, in A. Osler (ed.) Citizenship and democracy in schools: diversity, identity, equality (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham), pp. 19–32. Tikly, L., Osler, A. and Hill, J. (2006) ‘The ethnic minority achievement grant: a critical analysis’, Journal of Education Policy, 20(3), 283–312. Tomlinson, S. (2009) ‘Multicultural education in the United Kingdom’, in J.A. Banks (ed.) The Routledge international companion to multicultural education (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 121–133. West, A. (2006) ‘School choice, equity and social justice: the case for more control’, Journal of Educational Studies, 51(1), 15–33.

Suggestions for further reading

Invernizzi, A. and Williams, J. (2008) (eds.) Children and citizenship (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage). Isin, E.F. (2012) Citizens without frontiers (London: Bloomsbury Academic). Lister, R. (2003) Citizenship: feminist perspectives, 2nd edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). 4 School Type and Inequality Rita Nikolai and Anne West

Introduction

Educational outcomes are strongly associated with family background, with children from higher socio-economic backgrounds being more likely to be academically successful than those from lower socio-economic backgrounds (Breen and Jonsson, 2005; OECD, 2012; Pfeffer, 2008). However, since the Second World War, in the majority of developed states, attention has been focused on increasing educational opportunities between different socio- economic groups; girls and boys; those from different migrant, ethnic or racial groups; and those with and without special educational needs. Nevertheless, the question as to whether educational reforms have reduced educational inequality remains controversial. Thus, Shavit and Blossfeld (1993) found that in 11 out of 13 industrialised countries, inequalities in educational attainment between people from different socio-economic backgrounds had been remarkably stable since the early twentieth century. Depending on the data sets used and the methods adopted, some studies support this ‘persistent inequality’ thesis (Shavit et al., 2007; Pfeffer, 2008). However, Breen et al. (2009) found a decline in class and gender inequalities in educational attainment and called for a revision of this thesis. Despite these differences, there is agreement that countries differ widely in the extent to which parental background influences children’s educational attainment. Cross-national variation in the extent of influence of parental background on attainment has been attributed to institutional features of different school systems (Kerckhoff, 1995; Pfeffer, 2008). However, the mechanisms by which these features exacerbate or reduce educational inequality remains unclear. This chapter seeks to contribute to research on school systems and educa- tional inequality1 in two ways. First, we investigate how different forms of school tracking, explicit and implicit (Maaz et al., 2008), influence educa- tional inequality. We focus on two countries, Germany and the UK. In both countries, following the Second World War, selective systems of secondary

5757 58 Rita Nikolai and Anne West education were introduced with explicit school-level tracking and different school types for children of different abilities: Gymnasium, Realschule and Hauptschule in Germany and grammar, technical and secondary modern in the UK. In Germany, an almost fully selective system has been retained; explicit school-level tracking thus remains. In the UK, a complex system has evolved, with a comprehensive system in Scotland and Wales, a partially comprehen- sive system in England and a selective system in Northern Ireland. In the UK, there is no system-wide explicit school-level tracking but, as we shall see, there is what can be termed implicit school-level tracking. Second, we explore different types of inequality: school access, school processes and educational outcomes. The role played by socio-economic background is particularly significant in relation to educational achieve- ment (e.g., DfES, 2007) and this dimension is our main focus in this chapter. There are, of course, also inequalities associated with gender, race, ethnicity, migrant status and special educational needs, but due to space limitations we focus, in the main, on socio-economic background. Our analysis is underpinned by Boudon’s (1974) theoretical model of educa- tional transitions and utilises recent empirical research along with data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and national statistics. In terms of equality of access, we analyse the socio-demographic characteristics of pupils in different school types. In relation to equality of school processes, we differentiate between programmes available in different school types, and in relation to educational outcomes, we focus on pupils’ achievement levels in tests and examinations during or at the end of compul- sory secondary education. The following section outlines previous research concerned with the institutional structure of school systems and educational inequality. This is followed by case studies of school systems and inequality in Germany and the UK and a comparison between the two countries. The final section concludes with a discussion of the relationship between school type and inequalities and how the institutional framework is associated with these inequalities.

Institutional structure of school systems and educational inequality

A wide range of theoretical explanations has been used to explore the rela- tionship between social background and educational inequality. A common feature of much of the research is the assumption that social inequalities in educational opportunities are the result of socialisation and educational decisions taken at various stages (Becker, 2003; Breen and Golthorpe, 1997; Breen and Jonsson, 2000; Erikson and Jonsson, 1996; Müller and Karle, 1993). Social origin is more strongly associated with educational attainment School Type and Inequality 59 at younger ages implying that ‘comprehensive school reform in which the earliest decision point is postponed reduces inequality of educational oppor- tunity’ (Breen and Jonsson, 2005, p. 228). Educational inequalities tend to emerge or to become amplified at points of transition. Moreover, early education decisions tend to predict educational pathways and later educa- tional achievement. How can social inequalities in access to education and educational success be explained? In seeking answers to this question, the distinction made by Boudon (1974) between primary and secondary effects of origin is relevant (see Figure 4.1). Primary effects of social origin describe class-specific differences in rela- tion to children’s performance that are affected by parental education levels, resources and learning opportunities within the family. In short, children from higher socio-economic backgrounds are likely to perform at higher levels in school as a result of the favourable economic, social and cultural conditions in the parental home. Secondary effects are related to the disparities that may arise when families from different backgrounds make educational choices (see Maaz et al., 2008). According to sociological expect- ancy-value theories (Becker, 2003) parents consider the costs of education, investment and opportunity in accordance with their social origin. For those from higher socio-economic groups, the estimated costs of higher levels of

Socialisation in the Parental Home, Primary Effect of Cognitive Abilities, Background Social Skills, Probability of Academic Success Influenced Achievement By Social Status

Social Social Costs of Education, Inequality of Background Investment Costs, Educational Opportunity Costs Opportunities

Returns to Secondary Effect of Education, Background Expected Upward Educational Social Mobility, Decisions Influenced Maintaining Status by Social Status

Figure 4.1 Mechanism affecting educational decisions (from Boudon, 1974) Source: Adapted from Maaz et al. (2008), p. 101. 60 Rita Nikolai and Anne West education are lower, the probability of success is higher, the expected benefit of education is greater and the costs of loss of status are higher than for those from lower social groups (Becker, 2003; Boudon, 1974; Breen and Golthorpe, 1997; Erikson and Jonsson, 1996). For Breen and Goldthorpe (1997, p. 292) ‘educational decisions are driven by a desire of families to ensure that their children do not experience down- ward mobility’. In a similar vein Glaesser and Cooper (2011, p. 572) have argued that ‘parents will consider not only the child’s ability and institu- tional arrangements, but also their own experience and aspirations when taking decisions regarding their child’s educational career’. The use of rational choice theory has however been challenged by some sociologists in favour of approaches structured with reference to Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, cultural and social capital (e.g., Gewirtz et al., 1995). Both approaches have been subjected to critique (see Hatcher, 1998). Thus, it is not the case that all parents within a particular socio-economic group make similar choices (cf., David et al., 1994; Hatcher, 1998) suggesting that a more nuanced approach is needed. Nevertheless, there is empirical evidence suggesting that, in general, parents from different social classes express different preferences in circumstances where there is, in theory, an element of choice (as in England; see Flatley et al., 2001). Decisions about a child’s educational career are dependent on the insti- tutional context, and different school systems may attenuate or intensify the influence of social background (Kerckhoff, 1995). When making educa- tional decisions – to the extent that choices are allowed – parents are faced with the institutional set-up of a school system which is an integral part of their ‘opportunity structure’ (Pfeffer, 2008, p. 546). Regulations and restric- tions influence the framework in which parents operate and may affect equality of access. A significant factor for the reproduction of educational inequalities is the degree of stratification (or differentiation) of educational opportunities (Allmendinger, 1989; Hopper, 1968). Stratification is generally understood as the extent to which ‘educational opportunities are differentiated between and within educational levels’ (Pfeffer, 2008, p. 546). It primarily refers to the timing and rigidity of pupil selection at the secondary level: unlike other institutional features of education systems, the selection process has conse- quences for other levels of education. To understand how primary and secondary effects of social origin influ- ence educational inequality we differentiate between two alternative forms of school-level tracking, explicit and implicit (see Maaz et al., 2008). Tracking policies in school systems vary. We focus here on school-level tracking (not e.g. ability grouping within schools). With explicit school-level tracking, pupils are assigned to different school types on the basis of their achievement in primary school. For instance, in a hierarchically tiered school system as exists in Germany, tracking of pupils into academic and non-academic tracks takes place at the age of ten. The tracks have different teaching approaches, the School Type and Inequality 61 teacher training programmes differ, and they lead to different destinations for pupils on completion. Implicit school-level tracking, on the other hand, can occur on the basis of factors such as area of residence (Maaz et al., 2008). It can also arise in the context of systems with a significant proportion of private schools, especially if they charge high tuition fees, or in a system where parents are able to make preferences for particular types of schools (e.g. those with more advantaged intakes) in systems that are predominantly comprehensive. With regard to these different forms of tracking, how might we under- stand the primary and secondary effects of social origin? The following sections focus on Germany and the UK. Each examines the school systems and inequalities in terms of school access, school processes and educational outcomes.

Germany

In comparative social stratification research, Germany is considered a proto- type of a stratified school system and is also characterised by early academic selection (Schneider and Thieben, 2011). Pupils are generally selected at the age of ten on the basis of teachers’ recommendations to different types of school or tracks. Different qualifications are associated with different tracks. The academic track (Gymnasium) prepares pupils for the university-entrance qualification (Abitur). There are two other types of school that prepare pupils for vocational training: the Hauptschule (for the lowest ranking pupils) and the Realschule (for middle ranking pupils). Typically, there is little perme- ability between these school types. A small proportion of pupils attend the comprehensive Gesamtschule, catering for all ability levels (Schneider and Thieben, 2011).

Inequality of access Over the past half century the higher tracks of lower secondary educa- tion (Gymnasium and Realschule) have expanded considerably, leading to substantial changes in the distribution of pupils in Germany’s secondary school system. Thus, between 1955 and 1995, the proportion of pupils in the Hauptschule fell by nearly 50 percentage points (from 74 to 25 per cent). In the same period, the proportion of pupils attending the Gymnasium increased by 15 percentage points (from 16 to 31 per cent) and the propor- tion attending the Realschule increased by 18 percentage points (from 9 to 27 per cent) (BMBF, 2010; StBA, 2011). The Gesamtschule was introduced in the 1970s in some Laender; this is a comprehensive secondary school which prepares pupils for the leaving certificates of the other three main school types within one institutional setting. In 2010, 10 per cent of pupils attended the Gesamtschule (BMBF, 2010; StBA, 2011). After decades of stability, structural change followed German reunifica- tion in the early 1990s: the federal states of the former German Democratic Republic adopted the basic logic of the tracking system, but not the West 62 Rita Nikolai and Anne West

German tripartite model. Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, for example, introduced two-tiered models consisting of an academic and a combined vocational track (Schularten mit mehreren Bildungsgängen). Further struc- tural change has taken place in a number of West German Laender (e.g. Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, Saarland), which are implementing reforms to abolish the Hauptschule. This amounts to the adoption of a two-tiered model consisting of an academic and an integrated vocational track. Given the structural changes that have taken place, the chance of attending the Gymnasium or the Realschule has risen since the 1950s. However, since 1995, the distribution of pupils between the school types has remained stable (see BMBF, 2010; StBA, 2011). Given these structural changes it is reason- able to argue that educational inequalities in terms of access have reduced. Research studies analysing participation by social class confirm that this is the case (Klein et al., 2009; Müller and Karle, 1993; Schimpl-Neimanns, 2000), but considerable structural differences remain. Table 4.1 shows the extent of social disparities with respect to different school types within the German secondary education system. There is marked variation in terms of the participation in different school types by pupils from different social classes (Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero’s (EPG) social class groups). This is particularly marked in the case of the Gymnasium with 55 per cent of pupils from families of the upper service class attending this type of school and only 15 per cent from fami- lies of unskilled workers and farm labourers. The situation is reversed in the Hauptschule. Children with parents in EPG class VII are most likely to attend the Hauptschule and Realschule (30 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively). The empirical sociological and economic literature strongly suggests that the transition from primary school to different types of secondary school is a key area at which social inequalities in the German education system emerge (Maaz et al., 2008; Maaz and Nagy, 2009; Neugebauer, 2010; Gresch 2012). At the end of primary school, teachers make a recommendation as to which type of secondary school pupils should attend. Depending on the Land, the primary school recommendation is more or less binding on parents: in some Laender parents are not entitled to choose a track other than that recom- mended whilst in others the track selected by the teachers may be changed following a meeting with parents (Gresch, 2012). However, the influence of parents’ socio-economic status remains, as teachers take parents’ educational aspirations into account when formu- lating their school recommendations. And even in Laender without binding school recommendations, parents who have graduated from a Gymnasium tend to opt for their child to attend a Gymnasium rather than another type of secondary school. Moreover, parents who attended the Hauptschule or who left school without qualifications tend not to send their child to the Gymnasium, even if teachers recommend the academic track (Ditton and Krüsken, 2006; Maaz and Nagy, 2009). In short, the transition from primary to secondary school is not primarily a function of pupils’ attainment in School Type and Inequality 63

Table 4.1 Percentage of pupils in different school types using Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero’s class categorisation (EPG classes), PISA 2009

Integrierte EPG classes Hauptschule Realschule Gymnasium Gesamtschule Othersa

Higher-grade 92655 7 2 service class (I) Lower-grade 12 29 43 11 5 Service class (II) Routine non- 17 35 31 8 8 manual (III) Self-employed 22 30 32 8 7 (IV) Manual 25 35 20 9 11 supervisors/ lower grade technicians and skilled workers (V, VI) Unskilled workers 30 33 15 9 13 and farm labourers (VII) Total 19 31 33 9 8 a ‘Others’ includes special schools for pupils with special educational needs/disabilities and vocational schools. Source: Klieme et al. (2010), p. 248. primary school, but of families’ social background as this influences teachers’ recommendations and parents’ educational decisions. In short, secondary effects are the most significant source of educational inequality in the German school system: Neugebauer (2010), using nationwide panel data, found that secondary effects account for 59 per cent of social background differences in transition rates to the Gymnasium. Thus, the school system, together with family influences, structures the education decision via school recommendations.

Inequality of processes and educational outcomes The hierarchically tiered school system in Germany has had a significant impact on the learning environments in different school types (Maaz et al., 2008; Solga and Wagner, 2007) and as a result the German teacher training system is highly stratified (Blömeke, 2006). The specific teacher training programmes have in turn led to particular didactic traditions and specific curricula in different school tracks. In addition to these institutional effects, compositional effects are also important. In the Hauptschule, the lowest educational track, there is a high concentration of pupils from educationally disadvantaged families, 64 Rita Nikolai and Anne West those repeating years, those with low achievement levels and those from dysfunctional families (Klieme et al., 2010).2 There is also an above average number of pupils with migrant backgrounds and with parents who have not completed tertiary education (see Solga and Wagner, 2007). Pupils in the Hauptschule are therefore at a disadvantage compared with those in the Realschule and Gymnasium in terms of the pupil mix. In short, different school types offer different learning programmes and different learning environments. The different learning environments in the tiered German system are also associated with different levels of competence. Figure 4.2 shows the reading proficiency levels by school type from the 2009 PISA. Overall, the propor- tion of pupils performing below level 2 is 18.5 per cent, whereas the propor- tion of top-level performers in reading literacy accounts for only 7.6 per cent (competence level 5 and 6). However, there is considerable variation between the different secondary school types: the Hauptschule includes an above-average proportion of poorly performing pupils (around 50 per cent), whereas in the Gymnasium nearly a fifth of pupils perform at levels 5 or 6 (compared with less than 3 per cent in all other school types). As shown in Table 4.1, a disproportionate number of children from the lower social classes attend the Hauptschule, where the reading competence levels are particularly low. Given that children from migrant backgrounds are also more likely to be from families that rank as lower social classes, children with a migrant background face particular disadvantages. They are likely to have poor language skills and are then confronted with a homoge- neous social mix in the Hauptschule, offering a suboptimal learning envi- ronment (Stanat, 2006).

Below Level 2 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5 and 6

Gymnasium 0.5 6.2 28.5 45 19.9

Integrierte 17.7 31.2 34.3 15.3 1.4 Gesamtschule

Realschule 9.3 29.4 39.8 2.719

Hauptschule 49.4 31.9 16.1 2.4

Germany 18.5 22.2 28.8 22.8 7.6

Figure 4.2 Percentage of pupils at different levels of competence in reading by school type, PISA 2009 Source: Klieme et al. (2010), p. 58. School Type and Inequality 65

UK

The four countries comprising the UK, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have different education systems, a result of both their historical lega- cies and devolution (Adams and Schmuecker, 2006). The variation in the structure of the secondary school system dates back to the shift from selective to comprehensive schooling in the 1960s and 1970s. In Scotland and Wales, this change was system-wide and all publicly funded schools became compre- hensive. In England, the change was not system-wide, and some grammar schools remain, whilst in Northern Ireland a selective system has been largely retained. There are also differences in terms of who is responsible for the provision of education: a significant minority of publicly funded schools are provided by the churches in England; and Scotland and Northern Ireland have significant numbers of Roman Catholic schools (Croxford, 2011). In England, education reforms in the 1980s resulted in the introduction of quasi-markets, with parental choice of school, school diversity, greater school autonomy, funding following pupils and publication of examination ‘league tables’ being significant features. In Scotland and Wales parents also have a right to express preferences for a school of their choice, but catch- ment areas have been retained with local pupils being prioritised (Croxford, 2011; West et al., 2010). In all four countries, external examinations towards the end of compul- sory schooling and at the end of upper secondary education exist, and are published in the form of ‘league tables’ in England. These qualifications, awarded at appropriate grades, are generally required for admission to university.

Inequality of access Access to different types of schools varies across the UK. In all countries, a small proportion of pupils attend independent fee-charging schools, which not only charge fees thus restricting access, but are also, in the main, academically selective. In the publicly funded sector, there are no academi- cally selective (grammar) schools in Scotland or Wales, whilst in Northern Ireland nearly a third of schools are grammar schools with the remainder taking ‘unselected’ pupils (Croxford, 2011). England, the largest country in the UK, also has the most complex school system. Overall, 93 per cent of the pupils of compulsory school age attend publicly funded schools with 7 per cent attending independent, fee-charging schools. The publicly funded secondary school system comprises academi- cally selective and comprehensive schools. These can be further differenti- ated in terms of their administration into schools whose admissions are the prime responsibility of the local authority; foundation schools, whose admis- sions are the school’s responsibility; voluntary-aided schools, most of which are church schools and whose admissions are also the school’s responsibility; 66 Rita Nikolai and Anne West and academies which are run by private, non-profit making companies, but are predominantly or entirely publicly funded;3 they, too, are responsible for their own admissions (West and Bailey, 2013). Around 5 per cent of secondary schools are grammar schools, which require pupils to pass a test called the ‘eleven-plus’ in their last year of primary education and 5 per cent are secondary modern schools which take those not selected in areas where there are grammar schools. The remainder are nominally comprehensive. In terms of equality of access, grammar schools have a far lower proportion of pupils known to be eligible for free school meals, an indicator of poverty, than do comprehensive schools: only 2 per cent of pupils in grammar schools are eligible for free school meals compared with 15 per cent in comprehensive schools (DCSF, 2008). Whilst overt academic selection does occur to a limited extent, there are also other forms of selection. First, a significant minority of schools have a religious character and these prioritise children of a particular faith (in the main Christian) or denomination (predominantly Roman Catholic or Church of England). Second, particular admissions criteria or practices can result in pupils being segmented; for example, a small proportion of schools select pupils on the basis of aptitude/ability in a subject area (West et al., 2011). Secondary schools thus have varied and complex admissions arrangements.4 Voluntary-aided schools with a religious character tend to have a lower proportion of children known to be eligible for free school meals (an indicator of poverty) than other schools (DCSF, 2008). Research focusing on selectivity in secondary schools with a religious character in London found that these schools tend to cater predominantly to pupils from particular religions and/ or denominations and ethnic groups, thus fostering segregation. In addition, they educate, primarily, pupils who are from more affluent backgrounds and with higher levels of prior attainment than pupils in non-religious schools (Allen and West, 2009). The likely reasons for secondary schools in England with a religious character admitting pupils of a higher social background and ability than their secular counterparts are complex: in one study, parents reporting a religious affiliation were more likely to be better educated, have a higher occupational class and a higher household income. Higher-income religious families were also more likely to have a child at a faith school than lower-income religious families (Allen and West, 2011). Church schools are likely to be sought for a variety of reasons: parents may want their child to be educated in a school with a religious ethos, they may apply because of the school’s good examination results, or they may apply because the schools educate children ‘like theirs’. There is also evidence in some areas of white families wanting their children to be educated in church schools that have fewer children from particular ethnic/religious groups (see Walford, 2008). In terms of expressed choices, in England, since the education reforms of the 1980s, parents make preferences for schools of their choice. Flatley et al. (2001) found that where the mother was in a manual social class, parents School Type and Inequality 67 were less likely to cite academic factors as amongst the reasons for wanting a place at their favourite school. Noden et al. (1998) in a smaller study found that parents of children from working-class families were less likely to apply to, and their children less likely to go on to attend, higher performing secondary schools. This may arise from self-selection by parents/carers (e.g., choosing a school for ‘people like us’), differences in resources to pay for transport, and differences between the capacities of different parents/carers to negotiate successfully school admissions administrative systems, as well as schools’ admissions criteria and practices. Equality of access is thus hindered by institutional rules. These rules, together with other factors, including parents’ preferences, awareness of the school system and ability to navigate the admissions process also affect school composition.

Inequality of school processes and educational outcomes Publicly funded secondary schools in the UK follow different curricula depending on the country and to some extent the type of school, but in all countries, the secondary curriculum is dominated by the public examination system with examinations being taken at or around the end of compulsory education and at the end of upper secondary education. We focus here on the achievements of pupils in England, which has a mix of school types, enabling inequalities in educational outcomes to be observed. There are clear differences in terms of the achievement between schools of different types in England. Pupils typically take General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations in separate subjects just prior to the end of compulsory education (age 16). Pupils who obtain five or more high grade GCSE passes (grades A* to C) are normally able to progress to study General Certificate of Education Advanced (GCE A) levels (in a smaller number of subjects). GCE A levels, normally taken at the age of 18, are gener- ally required for admission to higher education institutions. In terms of educational outcomes, in 2011 virtually all pupils in grammar schools obtained five or more GCSE passes at grades A* to C (or equivalent) including English and mathematics, as did over eight out of ten pupils in independent, fee-charging schools. Nearly six out of ten pupils at compre- hensive schools and half of those at modern schools achieved this level (see Table 4.2). The data reported in Table 4.2 conceal some important differences. First, there are vocational qualifications deemed to be equivalent to GCSEs and GCE A levels. Thus, at the end of compulsory education, pupils may study for vocational qualifications that are counted for the purposes of schools’ exam- ination results (and league tables) as being equivalent to GCSEs. The precise nature of these examinations has varied over time; however, in one research study, more pupils were found to have taken vocational examinations in the 68 Rita Nikolai and Anne West most deprived schools than in more advantaged schools. Whilst it is possible that this reflects different preferences of parents and pupils, the highest ability pupils were also entered for these examinations, suggesting that this explanation is unlikely as parents might have been expected to choose academic courses for their children. Rather, schools appeared to encouraging the uptake of vocational courses, which might have been related to ‘league table’ positioning (Sutton Trust, 2009), so adding support to the view that secondary transition effects are particularly important in reinforcing educa- tional inequalities. Second, that not all comprehensive schools have similar compositions and ‘social selection’ is evident in the highest performing, nominally comprehensive schools. The overall proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals at the 200 highest performing comprehensives in 2005 was 6 per cent, compared with 12 per cent in the postcode sectors of the schools, and 14 per cent in secondary schools nationally (Sutton Trust, 2006). Significantly, nominally comprehensive schools, responsible for adminis- tering their own admissions, were more likely to feature in the ‘top 200’ than those which were not. These schools accounted for 31 per cent of state secondary schools, but 70 per cent of the top 200; they were found to be unrepresentative of their local areas, with fewer pupils being eligible for free school meals (an indicator of poverty). Schools with a religious character accounted for a disproportionately high number of the ‘top 200’ comprehensives.

Germany and the UK

In the previous sections, we have provided case studies of Germany and the UK which focus on the school systems in each country and inequali- ties with reference to access, school processes and outcomes. Due to the different systems and different data sources, we were not able to make

Table 4.2 Achievements of candidates by school type in England 2010/11

% of pupils aged 15–16 achieving % of pupils aged 16–18 5 or more GCSE passes grades achieving AAB or more A*–C or equivalent including passes at GCE/Applied School type (N) English and mathematics GCE A levels

Comprehensive 57.8 14.8 Grammar 98.7 40.9 Modern 50.8 5.4 Independent (fee 82.8 46.0 charging)

Source: DfE (2012a, 2012b). School Type and Inequality 69 direct comparisons between the two countries. However, data from the PISA survey, which assesses pupils’ achievement at the age of 15 in reading, science and mathematics (OECD, 2010a) are available for Germany and the UK. These reveal that pupils in both countries perform at broadly similar levels. It is also possible to explore the total variance that is attributed to between school and within school differences in achievement (Table 4.3). Both indica- tors can be interpreted as a measure of academic inclusion (OECD 2010b). In school systems with substantial variation in performance between schools, but less variation among pupils within schools, pupils tend to be grouped in schools in which most pupils perform at similar levels. This could be due to how pupils are assigned different curricula in the form of tracking, or to the choices made by families, or according to where pupils live. Thus, in Germany the proportion of the total variance that is attributed to between- school differences is higher than the OECD average, but the within-school variance is lower. In Germany the explicit school tracking results in consider- able differences in achievement across the different school types. In contrast, in the UK the above-average total variation is driven by large performance differences within schools. Table 4.3 also presents data for the variance in reading literacy explained by socio-economic background within and between schools. This indi- cator relates to the social composition of schools. Across OECD countries, 55 per cent of the between-school variance in performance is explained by socio-economic background. In Germany this figure is 67 per cent whilst in the UK it is 77 per cent. This finding is underlined by analyses of PISA data indicating that the UK has high levels of segregation in terms of poor and migrant families being clustered in the same schools (OECD, 2012: 99). Thus, social inequalities emerge in school systems with both explicit and implicit school-level tracking.

Table 4.3 Variance in reading literacy and socio-economic status between and within schools, 2009

Germany United Kingdom OECD average

Reading literacy Within schools 44.9 77.2 64.5 Between schools 68.0 32.0 41.7 Socioeconomic background Within schools 0.1 6.0 4.3 Between schools 67.2 77.1 55.1

Source: OECD (2010b), pp. 185–187. 70 Rita Nikolai and Anne West

Conclusion

This chapter set out to explore the relationship between inequalities and school type. Adopting Boudon’s (1974) distinction between the primary and secondary effects of social background, we have analysed social selection in the German and English school systems. It is clear that the school systems in both Germany and the UK vary and are associated with a range of institutionally bound inequalities. In both countries secondary effects are significant sources of educational inequality. However, the sorting strategies differ at the institutional level. Thus, in Germany there is explicit school-level tracking, involving different school types, characterised by specific curricula, teaching methods, teacher training and different levels of educational attainment. Children are selected for academic or vocational secondary education at the age of ten years, with those from higher socio-economic backgrounds being more likely than those from lower social classes to enrol in the academic track. In England, there is no overt academic selection for the majority of publicly funded schools, but there is implicit school-level tracking. Pupils tend to attend schools that are in the local vicinity, with the result that in some localities schools are more disadvantaged than others, and in some, more advantaged than others. There is also selection of different types: for example, selecting pupils on the basis of their religion or selecting a proportion on the basis of their aptitude/ability in a subject area. There is also a significant proportion of independent schools, generally charging high fees. Interestingly, the extent of educational inequality is not dissimilar between the UK and Germany, even bearing in mind the different insti- tutional arrangements. In short, both explicit and implicit school tracking affect pupils’ educational trajectories. In both countries the composition of the pupil population is important. In England the composition of schools is determined by a variety of different factors, including school admissions policies and parents’ preferences and attitudes. In Germany pupils from higher social classes are over-represented in the academic track, which is associated with parents’ own prior experi- ences, preferences and attitudes. We have thus demonstrated that institutional and school composition effects contribute to the association between socio-economic background and the achievement of pupils (Baumert et al., 2009). Given the evidence relating socio-economic background to achievement, it is important to understand how this interacts with policies that are pursued. In England, the introduction of a quasi-market with parents being able to express preferences for schools of their choice, schools being funded on the basis of the number of pupils enrolled, and ‘high stakes’ being attached to public examination results has led to increasing pressure for schools to obtain higher examination results. Significantly, for those schools that have School Type and Inequality 71 autonomy over admissions there are possibilities for various selective prac- tices to be adopted, albeit within the framework of legislation and associ- ated guidance (West et al., 2011; Allen et al., 2012). For schools with high numbers of pupils from more disadvantaged backgrounds, more vocational courses may be offered which can limit the opportunities available for educa- tional progression. In Germany, various reforms in recent years have lead to different struc- tural arrangements of the school systems. The newly established two-tiered school system, consisting of an academic and a combined vocational track, is becoming increasingly popular. By 2012, 11 of the 16 Laender had abol- ished the Hauptschule, replacing it with a two-tier school model. In certain Laender (e.g. Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin) the combined vocational track also gives pupils the possibility of obtaining the Abitur, the key qualification needed for admission to universities. It remains to be seen to what extent, if any, this new school form influences the association between socio-economic background and pupils’ achievement levels. In conclusion, our findings underline the fact that institutional rules influ- ence educational inequality. Transitions to secondary school are dependent not only on pupils’ socio-economic background (primary effects) but also on decisions relating to transitions that are affected by parental background (secondary effects); these in turn are affected by the specific institutional arrangements in a given context. Institutional arrangements are thus of fundamental importance. The precise implications for policy will vary according to the systems in place. There is evidence to suggest that pre-primary education can mitigate the primary effects of social background for children from lower socio-economic groups (see Heckman, 2006). Secondary effects are more difficult to influence. However, the institutional arrangements matter: thus tracking – explicit school-based or implicit school-based – is likely to increase rather than decrease educational inequalities. The interac- tion between secondary effects and policies implemented thus needs to be considered in order to provide further insights into the possible consequences of institutional reforms and how such reforms might be optimised.

Notes

1. We use the concept of educational inequality instead of educational equality. According to Coleman (1975), the term ‘educational inequality’ is misleading as it implies that equal educational opportunity is an achievable policy goal, which it is not: reductions in inequality are all that can reasonably be expected (see also West and Nikolai, 2013). 2. Pupils in the Gymnasium and the Realschule who have failed the same grade twice or who have failed two consecutive grades must leave the school and are obliged to attend a lower school track, ultimately the Hauptschule. 72 Rita Nikolai and Anne West

3. Major changes have taken place in terms of the administration and governance of schools since 2010, with a high proportion of secondary schools converting to become publicly funded academies, outside the control of local authorities, which have a contract (funding agreement) with the Secretary of State for Education (DfE, 2012c; West and Bailey, 2013). 4. Amongst comprehensive schools, the most commonly used admissions criteria involve prioritising children in public care and pupils with high level special educational needs, distance between the home and school and siblings attending the school (West et al., 2011).

References

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Suggestions for further reading

Ahier, J., Cosin, B. and Hales, M. (1996) Diversity and change: education, policy and selec- tion (London: Routledge). Archer, M.S. (1979) Social origins of educational systems (London: Sage). Arum, R., Beattie, I. and Ford, K. (2011) The structure of schooling. Readings in the soci- ology of education (second edition) (London: Sage). 5 We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? A Critique of Lifelong Learning through the Lens of Workplace Learning at the Bottom of the Service Sector Steven Roberts

Introduction

In the context of an ongoing turbulent economic climate, skills develop- ment, qualification enhancement and ‘lifelong learning’ figure high on poli- cymakers’ lists of potential remedies to the UK’s competitive malaise. With large numbers already ‘beyond the reach’ of educational institutions, the workplace is regularly highlighted as an important site where people can learn new skills, reach their potential and ultimately help ensure that the UK enhances its productivity. The UK is not alone in espousing this approach; indeed, across the European Union (EU) the transition from a manufacturing base to a ‘knowledge economy’ has seen much of the continent’s political elite, across the political spectrum, espouse the need for a ‘learning society’. But what do such concepts even mean? And what do they mean in relation to people’s real lives? My aim in this chapter is to, in part, provide answers to these questions. First, I sketch out a definition of lifelong learning, but also consider how its meaning has developed and evolved. I then go on to criti- cally explore how the concept of lifelong learning is used by policymakers and academics, and, consequently, chart the key debates about the concept’s relevance. Building on this wider context, I consider specific issues about the role of workplace learning. While the sociologies of education and work have a rich tradition of both uncovering which groups get access to the opportunities for workplace training and also considering the concomitant consequences for those who do not, the quality and utility of learning oppor- tunities for young people has lacked similar scrutiny. To contribute to this gap in literature, in the second section of the chapter I draw on qualitative

7676 We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? 77 research with young ‘moderately qualified’ retail workers to critically scru- tinise the accredited, formal in-house and informal learning opportunities afforded to ‘ordinary’ young people who appear to remain off the policy radar, safely assumed to be employed and, therefore, engaging in some kind of learning and development, fit for the learning society.

Lifelong learning: elusive, illusory or inescapable reality?

A fixed, singular definition of lifelong learning is highly elusive; this is in part due to the inter-related but quite variable ways in which the term is used and the diversity of what is being conveyed through its deployment (Evans, 2006). Accordingly, under the banner of lifelong learning we find consideration given to, among other things, the openness and flexibility of the higher education system (Osborne et al., 2004), the impact of higher education drop-out (Quinn et al., 2006), the role of the vocational education and training (Dehmel, 2005) and the development of knowledge and skills at work (Eraut et al., 2001). These different directions of focus lead Field (2006) to suggest that the concept of lifelong learning is often used in ways that highlight the significance of learning in adult life. However, beyond the formal educa- tional and economic arenas, lifelong learning should be understood more broadly as ‘all learning activity undertaken throughout life, with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and competencies within a personal, civic, social and/or employment-related perspective’ (CEC, 2001, p. 9). Indeed, this rather mammoth idea encapsulates formal learning and training in the regular systems of schools, universities and colleges; non-formal education characterised by learning activities which are not part of a formal educa- tion programme; and informal learning, which, distinct from formal or non-formal education, corresponds to self-learning through reading books, using computers, attending learning centres and even by ‘talking to others, watching television and playing games and virtually every other form of human activity’ (OECD, 1996, p. 89). Lifelong learning has been embedded as a distinctive feature of EU educa- tion policy (Roosmaa and Saar, 2012, p. 477). The EU position on lifelong learning builds on a long history of thought, reaching as far back as 1919 when the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction (1919, p. 5) spoke of the ‘permanent national necessity’ for universal and lifelong adult education. The emergence of more recent interest is often accredited to UNESCO’s 1972 report Learning to Be, in which Faure (1972, p. 182) identified ‘lifelong education as the master concept for educational policies in the years to come’. However, where Faure was widely celebrated for the explicitly democratic and even emancipatory ambitions for the role of lifelong learning for all, the concept’s utilisation as a central plank of EU education policy has attracted considerable critical attention. 78 Steven Roberts

On the surface, the rhetoric emerging from the EU surrounding lifelong learning has always espoused a social dimension; indeed, this has continued to be the case with a recent policy document expressing that EU states should aim to ensure ‘equitable education and training systems that are aimed at providing opportunities, access, treatment and outcomes that are independent of socio-economic background and other factors which may lead to educational disadvantage’ (CEC 2010, cited by Roosmaa and Sarr, 2012, p. 477). This egalitarian ideal, however, appears to be overshadowed by an economic imperative. This is because the EU’s inclination towards a policy of lifelong learning was first and foremost clearly motivated by issues to do with competitiveness. This is made obvious in the 1994 white paper ‘Growth, Competitiveness, Employment’:

Preparation for life in tomorrow’s world cannot be satisfied by a once and for all acquisition of knowledge and know how ... All measures must therefore necessarily be based on the concept of developing, generalising and systematising lifelong learning and continuing training. (CEC, 1994, p. 16, cited by Field, 2006, p. 16)

‘Tomorrow’s world’ refers to changes in the global economy, the pres- sures and adaption required as a result of globalisation and concomitant outsourcing of production, and the growing importance of science and new technologies. In this ‘world’, knowledge – or human capital – was held up as the key advantage that firms, and indeed nations, might exploit in the pursuit of a competitive edge. This discourse was strengthened in the 1995 white paper ‘Education and Training’, which suggested that ‘“building blocks” of knowledge acquired at different times and in various situations’ mean that ‘the society of the future will therefore be a learning society’ (p. 2). As such, learning ‘must go beyond the framework of initial education and develop an on-going capacity for the renewal of the technical and voca- tional skills of workers’ (p. 4) because ‘the crucial problem of employment in a permanently changing economy compels the education and training system to change’ (p. 23). Field (2006) notes that both the OECD (1996) and UNESCO (1996) followed a similar line of reasoning. Each suggested that an emphasis on lifelong learning was justified primarily because of global competitive pressures, and only secondarily paying attention to issues of social cohesion.1 The need for a ‘learning society’ to fit the needs of the much heralded, new ‘knowledge economy’ was embraced across the EU. In the UK, New Labour’s rise to power in 1997 saw a first term in office underpinned by commitment to ‘education, education, education’; in turn, this helped establish lifelong learning as a policy priority, with the first Minister for Lifelong Learning suggesting that: We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? 79

If we do not create a learning society – if we do not find the means of generating the appropriate skills and craft and expertise, then we will fail to develop our most important resource – our people – and we will fail as an economy in this increasingly globalised market. (Howells, 1997, original emphasis)

A de-industrialised economy, it was argued, needed a highly skilled, flexible workforce to serve the requirements of technology and service-based employ- ment. However, over recent years, and despite becoming an embedded notion in education and economic policy – perhaps even considered to be an incontestable fact in the wider public consciousness – this notion of the knowledge economy has been heavily criticised. A principal critique centres upon issues of supply and demand of the highly skilled ‘knowledge worker’. Education policy is adept at, charged with, and indeed almost entirely focussed upon, enhancing the numbers of people with improved skills and qualifications. This is a central compo- nent in the human capital thesis – i.e. that increasing credentials and devel- oping knowledge will equate to greater economic performance. However, this is highly contested. Keep and Mayhew (2010), for example, outline that investment in human capital (or skill development) cannot change the structure of the labour market. Coffield (1999, p. 83) neatly explains that ‘at its most obvious, highly educated and trained personnel need jobs commen- surate with their abilities if they are to boost productivity’. The rhetoric of governments in espousing the idea of the learning society and the high- skills knowledge economy indicates that this is the case. Yet, the reality of the contemporary economy is that technology has replaced many tasks of mid-level jobs. This has led to an expansion in jobs requiring high-level skills in highly technological industries and financial services, but there has also been commensurate expansion in low-level, low-pay, low-skilled jobs in the service sector such as stacking shelves, checkout roles, waiting tables and cleaning. The result of this process of job polarisation is complicated further by the fact that within knowledge-intensive industries, just 42 per cent of EU employees could be classified as ‘high-knowledge skilled’ (jobs requiring graduate or post-graduated level skills). The remaining 58 per cent are employed as porters, cleaners, secretaries and gardeners; the Labour Force Surveys, from which such data are derived, count all those who work in these industries, regardless of distinctions in occupations, hierarchical posi- tions or knowledge-skill levels (Brine, 2006, p. 660). The implications of this are quite stark. As education policy has facili- tated the ‘massification’ of the higher education system, job polarisation has forced more graduates to seek jobs for which they are ‘over-qualified’, and accept lower wages than their qualifications might expect to garner (Green and Zhu, 2010). This influx of ‘over-qualified’ workers into low-skilled jobs 80 Steven Roberts has blunted wage growth at the bottom of the earnings distribution, despite the growth in demand for workers in these jobs (Goos and Manning, 2007). Another effect is the downward pressure exerted onto those with no or few qualifications who would have traditionally occupied these labour market positions now being filled by graduates. Lifelong learning should, according to earlier formulations, also be concerned with ‘life-wide’ learning2 (Field, 2006), but both policy discussion and the academic debates that follow rarely deviate from issues concerning economic competitiveness and the prioritising of the relationship between lifelong learning and employability. While the social dimension of the life- long learning agenda is present in much EU communication, this, too, is highlighted as a contentious issue. Conducting a rigorous discourse analysis of EU policy documents from the 1990s to mid-2000s, Brine (2006, p. 650) draws attention to the way that the lifelong learning rhetoric ‘constructs two distinct lifelong learners: those with high knowledge-skills (graduate/postgraduate) and those without, those with low knowledge-skills’. Brine explains that these constructs stem from the use of concepts that seem interchangeable – that is, ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge society’. Across almost a decade of policy docu- ments, every reference to knowledge economy is in fact reference to those identified as having high knowledge-skills, and conversely knowledge society is a reference to those with low knowledge-skills. This distinction matters because it reveals the lack of a unified egalitarian, democratic goal. Put simply, where the offer to engage with and reap the rewards of the knowledge economy is extended to one proportion of the population – largely middle class and well educated – the policy discourse highlights that the other half of society represents the threat to a cohesive well-functioning, fully employed society. Indeed, the ‘individualised and pathologised learner [is] thus simultaneously constructed as “at risk” and “the risk”’ (Brine, 2006, p. 656). The employability of the low-knowledge skilled individual presents the social dimension, and this is especially the case given that this ‘half’ of society is disproportionately comprised of working class, ethnic minority and older workers. The binary uncovered in Brine’s analysis, while helpful, is, however, also a little simplistic. Even if the ideal is for graduates to be both the stimulus and the beneficiaries of the knowledge economy, the reality is more nuanced. It is important to remember that ‘the value of educational credentials begins to fall as a higher percentage of each generation achieves graduate status, when there is no corresponding expansion of elite jobs’ (Coffield, 1999, p. 485). This is complicated further by the steep hierarchy of prestige by degree classification, subject and higher education institution (Reay et al., 2005), despite potential students often being advised that the rewards are the same as under the old elite system. Critically, access to and completion of a university degree does not make one immune to unemployment or We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? 81

underemployment, and this is borne out in the details above in relation to stifled graduate earnings (Green and Zhu, 2010). Brine’s critique is valuable in demonstrating how lifelong learning is offered as the solution to unemployment, social exclusion and marginalisa- tion and, importantly, that the notion is couched in terms that highlight it as an individualised responsibility for healing social troubles despite struc- tural causes. This echoes an earlier critique by Coffield (1999, p. 482) who explains that focussing on the cumulative nature of learning as an essential activity has been ‘used to explain that individuals, communities and whole nations were poor because their human capital had not been developed, [and has] diverted attention away from structural failures and injustices and blamed victims for their poverty’. One crucial revelation that such critiques offer is that ‘beneath a cloak of “inherent goodness”, lifelong learning is a discourse of competition, of personal striving, of constant becoming’ (Brine, 2006, p. 663). Rather than readying people for the needs of the knowledge economy, this discourse instead prioritises the need for them to work constantly on their own employability in direct competition with the next person. This is perhaps an acknowledgement that a policy of full employment is no longer the responsibility nor the aim of governments – certainly this falls in line with neo-liberal thinking which, since the late 1970s, has seen successive UK governments facilitate a retrenchment of the welfare state alongside a concomitant lowering and alteration of individuals’ expectations of entitle- ment and their relationship with the state more broadly (Roberts and Evans, 2013). More implicitly, the rhetoric of lifelong learning espouses that indi- viduals should be prepared for the reality of the flexible global economy and the risks, insecurities, precariousness and uncertainties that come with it – that is, to meet the needs of business. Failure to continue to learn and to remain employable is then an individual failing. As such, the rhetoric of lifelong learning is one in which personal development is compelled, and could even be argued to be a form of social control (Coffield, 1999).

What and how to learn as a typical low knowledge-skilled individual

Field (2006), among others, has argued that a narrow economistic view of lifelong learning is an unhelpful preoccupation. However, as illustrated in the preceding discussion, the economistic view of lifelong learning is a central preoccupation and is vital in as much as it can have a long lasting impact on people’s lives. Indeed, while a modicum of interest is given to all types of learning in academic and political discourse ‘an unofficial hier- archy of types of learning is being created with “learning for earning” at its apex’ (Coffield,1999, p. 493, original emphasis). Accordingly, I now turn to qualitative research evidence to consider learning opportunities to which 82 Steven Roberts those who essentially fit the mould of the low knowledge-skill individual (see above) have access to. The research described here was a qualitative exploration of the lives of a purposive sample of young men, all aged between 18 and 24, who occupied low-level, front line roles in the high-street retail sector. Using store-approved access and then ‘snowballing’, 24 young men were recruited to participate in the project. Current students were filtered from the research sample. This made obtaining an appropriately sized sample difficult, partly due to the large numbers of students employed in high-street retail jobs and partly due to potential respondents’ unwillingness to participate. The 24 young men who met the criteria (i.e. (i) employed in low-level retail jobs and (ii) having no prior experience or immediate intention of going to university), and who fully participated in the research, were equally divided between full- and part- time employees. The respondents were almost all working class by virtue of their family origins, and certainly might all be thought of as such given their own position in the labour market was not envisaged as transitory. The sample was drawn from a range of established and well-known ‘brand’ high-street retail stores in three medium-sized towns in southeast Kent, in the south of England. These towns share distinct similarities with a number of other high streets in towns and cities across the UK, where shopping is a key feature of the town both as a visitor attraction and also a centre of local employment opportunities (e.g. Bristol, Swindon, Cambridge, Loughborough, Colchester, among others). These respondents fell into a category that I describe elsewhere as the ‘missing middle’ of youth studies (Roberts, 2011). In combination with a positive employment status, they also held a range of qualifications at levels 2 and 3 on the UK Qualification Credit Framework (QCF),3 but none had attended higher education, or ever imagined doing so. Subsequently, they remain partially overlooked by policy which is often focussed on those most significantly marginalised or at risk of social exclusion (such as NEETs – those not in education, employment or training), or those who will attend higher education or take up apprenticeships. Specifically, the research considered the young men’s transition to adulthood and, through in-depth, loosely struc- tured, one-on-one interviews, drew out detailed accounts of their school- to-work transition and also their experiences of learning opportunities in their workplace since leaving education. While ultimately gendered (given the sample was exclusively male), the narratives presented here detail what learning opportunities are available in a variety of formal and non-formal settings, and demonstrate how these are perceived, how they are experienced and the potential consequences that such opportunities have. Pseudonyms are used throughout and actual places of work remain anonymous. With no intention or self-perceived capability of engaging with tertiary education, what opportunities to learn are available for those outside of the formal education sector? The most obvious answer appears to be the workplace, and this is in keeping with the projections of the National We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? 83

Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning, which, in 1997, recognised that much learning does and should occur in the work- place. Accordingly, workplace learning should include a variety of learning, including that for specific skills, transferable skills and personal develop- ment (NAGCELL, 1997). Of concern for the present respondents, previous studies show participa- tion in further education and training depends on the level of education people have already attained (Jones, 2010). However, training (accredited and otherwise) is often a general feature of retail employment, especially among large, nationally present organisations (Skillsmart Retail, 2010). It is, therefore, unsurprising that each individual suggested they received at least some kind of training. These opportunities are now critically exam- ined under the headings of formal, non-formal and informal learning. To make sense of respondents’ access to, and experience of, learning opportu- nities, the concepts of ‘restrictive’ and ‘expansive’ learning environments (Fuller and Unwin, 2004) are useful. These concepts represent either end of a continuum that encompasses three key aspects of workplace learning envi- ronments: engagement in multiple and overlapping communities of practice (where learning takes place in situations of co-participation) at and beyond the workplace; access to multidimensional approaches to the acquisition of expertise through the organisation of work and job design; and opportunities to pursue knowledge-based courses and qualifications relating to work. An expansive learning environment is one where these three areas are fully real- ised, whereas restrictive learning environments limit such opportunities.

Formal learning While not within formal education settings, most participants had under- taken formal National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) in Retail – indus- try-level formal accreditation recognised by employers and government as a legitimate part of the UK qualifications framework. Despite all respond- ents already being qualified to at least level 2 by virtue of their General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) qualifications, the only voca- tional qualification they had undertaken at work was the NVQ level 2. Opportunities to undertake this qualification suggest conditions supportive of an expansive learning environment. However, the quality, content and subsequent value attached to the qualification by the candidates is of substantial importance. In this respect, these qualifications were perceived very negatively, as is made abundantly clear here:

Pat: You have to show someone (the assessor) that you know how to stack a shelf, or, you know, move some stock, or be nice to a customer. Do you really need a certificate for that? It doesn’t make any sense ...

The understanding that one is not taught and does not learn anything was also regularly mentioned. This is in line with critiques of competency-based 84 Steven Roberts qualifications that identify them as ‘mechanism[s] for validating what employees already know’ (Fuller and Unwin, 2004, p. 141). This raises ques- tions about the purpose of the qualification, especially in the context of the lifelong learning agenda. While officially a measure of competence, the recollections of the way it was assessed were not congruent with what the respondents identified as training. Moreover, at times answers were given to the respondents, which in Luke’s mind further undermined an already valueless exercise:

Luke: If anyone knew what they involved, they would not value the qualification ... basically I could have passed it unconscious. I had to sign bits of paper, I had to write down what the woman told me to write down ... They wasn’t actually giving us any training. It’s like a box it would have taken a retard not to tick. If I could turn up to work, and could physically get through a day working, [then] I was gonna pass that course. If I fucked anything up they’d just give it back to me tell me what I did wrong and tell me to do it again. It was a total waste of time. It’s like, if the government really wants everyone to have qualifica- tions by their name, yeah sure it’ll work, but it’s not gonna achieve anything. (Researcher’s emphasis)

Here, Luke clearly perceives a lack of genuine training taking place. Of further note, in addition to being a waste of time and money (for employers) and effort (for individuals), increasing credentials is not considered a means to increase productivity, or even improve skill levels. These perceptions seri- ously undermine the aims of the lifelong learning rhetoric, even the narrowly viewed economic imperative. It is also important to ask whether this qualification is perceived to indi- cate a measure of skill and competence that other employers recognise and desire. For these respondents, this was unlikely. Several respondents were very dismissive, with their comments at times suggesting the NVQ repre- sented inconvertible cultural capital, and, worse still, a negative stigma:

Luke: I wouldn’t put that qualification on my CV because no one knows what the hell it is for a start. I think anyone that does know is gonna think I am quite an incapable person to find myself in a position where that is gonna help me out. Simon: It might be great for some people, they might need it but I just don’t feel I would, I don’t feel there’s anything I could learn from doing it. I can’t think of any aspect of where I’d need that qualification.

The reasons for Simon’s declaration that he would not ‘need’ the qualifica- tion might be partly explained by other formal and informal opportunities to learn how to do the job (see below). Ultimately, however, it seems we We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? 85 are left with something of a paradox regarding accredited industry-level training. The qualification is developed in consultation with industry- level employers’ bodies (i.e. the British Retail Consortium and Skillsmart Retail) and is acknowledged as an essential ingredient for skill acquisi- tion. Yet, simultaneously, across industries, some organisations indicate that they would avoid recruiting potential employees with NVQs (Pring et al., 2009). Further, and despite large numbers undertaking the qualifica- tion, the data here raise significant questions regarding the qualification’s efficacy in actually ‘upskilling’ individuals and subsequently fulfilling any policy goal aimed at increasing the national skills base or facilitating the achievement of either social or economic goals of the lifelong learning agenda. Concerns have also been raised about the fit between employers’ needs and the adoption of NVQ level 2 qualifications. One example is Payne’s (2008) detailing of the ways in which senior Sector Skills Council4 staff query the relevance of NVQs; in particular he notes that respondents were keen to point out that ‘the company already has the skills so the company won’t see any big change except now the employee has got a bit of paper’ (Payne, 2008, p. 106). Identifying the genuine utility of the qualification is, then, far from straightforward.

Non-formal in-house training While ‘the most common measures of skills are qualifications’ (Leitch, 2006, p. 11), it seems pertinent to consider all workplace learning opportunities the respondents had experienced, especially because ‘government databases do not represent fully the quality of non-accredited informal training, such as in-house training offered by large corporate and retail organisations’ (Quinn et al., 2008, p. 13). Does non-formal in-house company training, then, give employees the opportunity to develop, a platform to progress, and the potential to ‘self-actualise’? Most respondents indicated that they received work-related training. However, upon probing, the majority of training seemed to be of only two particular types: initial induction training and training related to legal obligations. Induction provided a broad overview, including the company history, aims and values and some limited customer service training. The legal aspects were included in the induction by way of an introduction to fire safety (e.g. how to locate fire exits) and an explanation of manual handling techniques (to prevent personal injury) and safe working practices to ensure the health and safety of colleagues and customers. Following legal guide- lines, the latter was also provided in periodic refresher courses. The expecta- tion among the participants was that this would be the main pattern during their working lives. While far from demonstrating absolute disdain for such learning opportunities, the inadequacies of this type of training were duly recognised: 86 Steven Roberts

Mark: You’re never gonna become a manager if that’s the sort of training they wheel out [laughs] ... It’s important have, like, health and safety training and to know stuff about food, if you work with it, and if any changes are made in law. You’d never call it challenging though. Johnny: It’s important at the start. I guess this kinda stuff is shown to us all the time we work there. I realise they got to do that, but if you’re asking if I actually learn anything, I’d say no.

Most participants indicated that their induction included some customer service training, usually in the form of watching a DVD. However, respond- ents were generally ambivalent about the role customer service training played, sometimes suggesting it was worthless. Instead, consistent with similar learning-related research (e.g. Sharma et al., 2000), experiential learning was positioned as being critical in developing customer service skills:

Mike: I didn’t really take anything from the DVD. I watched it and thought ‘that’s how they say’ but until you get your first customer that is throwing a bike at you, which I have had, then you are really shoved in the deep end and you learn from each experience you have and how you deal with it.

In addition to feeling customer service situations could not be replicated in a training environment, many respondents suggested that post-induction training was very limited, and usually not what they expected or needed:

Dave: The training in our place is just so vague; a bloke reading a bit of paper to you for an hour, watch a few bits on the screen, and every time he says customer, or something, you have to go ‘yeah’, and make a noise, so mostly we weren’t listening to him, we were looking for the word customer to come on the screen so we repeat or whatever ... The only training there really is, is when the managers go to it, they’re meant to pick it all up and come back and tell you what they’ve learnt and that’s about it, but our manager ... tells you what it was about and then moves on so you don’t get any training. (Respondent’s emphasis)

Even when respondents were not entirely negative about their opportuni- ties, their experiences were still often indicative of restrictive learning envi- ronments. As this example shows, training can be perceived to occur, even if it does not:

Researcher: How do they teach you about the product? Tim: It’s all about honesty really, they tell you to try the food yourself and shop there yourself. We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? 87

While formal, non-accredited, in-house training is available, the approaches outlined here do not necessarily provide genuine opportunities for learning or development. In conjunction with ad-hoc methods of delivery, a lack of practical utility problematises the advantages we might perceive in the simple availability of training.

Informal learning opportunities Thus far, these respondents appear to occupy restrictive learning environ- ments; however, even in the above examples, learning is not entirely absent. Individuals are, for example, able to familiarise themselves with products and absorb knowledge in this way. Despite the negative perceptions of both the delivery and content of formal training opportunities, it was clear that learning occurs as part of a wider range of everyday work activity (Felstead et al., 2009). For instance, it was in the performance of their role that they were able to develop the essential elements of their job:

Johnny: You learn to deal with the different moods of people. Like, someone will come in and be really arrogant, they think they know everything so you learn to deal with them in the way they want to be dealt with. And someone can come in who is angry so you have to deal with them and diffuse their anger. You need to do it to learn it.

For the majority of the sample, learning in this way was an essential part of their development at work, and not just for customer service skills:

Jez: You kind of just learn as you go with most of the job. It’s the best way. Mike: You get a lot of on the job training, obviously, from your co-workers. You watch them and see how they do it. That’s probably the main way you learn to do the job.

Other than training and development opportunities the employer provides, the general message in much research about work seems to be that individuals learn through experiences that are ‘mediated by both the contributions of workplaces and individuals’ agency’ (Billett, 2004, p. 110). Here, however, beyond the fundamentals of specific instruction on exactly how to perform certain tasks, the situation seems to be that most effective development activity is led by the employee’s own initia- tive and their interactions with fellow workmates. Though seemingly an unlikely collective, such training seems to represent a ‘community of prac- tice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991). This is consistent with other research that indicates that the most common form of learning from other people takes the form of consultation and collaboration within the immediate working group (Eraut, 2004). 88 Steven Roberts

The respondents also often talked about aspects of personal development deriving from their jobs. Thus, despite suggesting that good communica- tion skills were a pre-requisite to do the job, many respondents revealed that their experience of dealing with different customers in various situa- tions enhanced their wider social and communication skills:

Mike: I became more confident cos of learning how to speak to people, like, by speaking to people. I’m a different person now, in the way I speak to people and that, because of my jobs. Billy: You learn how to communicate with people on the job, and that helps with your confidence outside of work. It helps when you meet people, like friends and that, or even just talking to other people serving you in their shop. And even when you go for interviews for other jobs.

Similarly, in general discussions about learning that occurred outside of the workplace, it was often described as having direct relevance for the work- place. Whilst employment helped develop interactive skills that were useful in their wider social lives, several respondents also pointed to the ways in which social interactions helped them learn skills fit for the service-based workplace:

Adam: I think it works both ways though, doesn’t it. Like in some ways I have also got some of my jobs, or even got better at being able to talk to customers because of growing up and just socialising with different people. So, yeah, I can bring how I have learned, and how much I have become more confident to talk to people, into my job (Researcher’s emphasis) Danny: For me it was the other way round, a little bit. ‘Cos I have always been good with people, so I didn’t need to learn that part from anyone here, I learnt it before. (Researcher’s emphasis)

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have provided a critical introduction to the notion of lifelong learning. The concept has been demonstrated to have multiple meanings and usages. The basic idea, that people should continue to learn ‘life wide’ and throughout their working lives to better equip them for the challenges of the contemporary economy, may initially seem little more than espousing good practice. However, by offering a series of critiques, I have demonstrated that, first, economic competitiveness has remained the paramount concern across the EU. Second, I have suggested that by promulgating this economically driven discourse, European governments We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? 89 have followed over three decades of neo-liberal thought, ensuring that learning becomes part of the wider set of responsibilities being transferred from the state to the individual. Third, as benign as the language of EU policy documents might seem, careful analysis reveals two types of learner: a high knowledge-skilled learner who will compete in and help develop the knowledge economy, and a low knowledge-skilled person who becomes recognised as both at-risk and the risk of the conditions of the knowledge society. Lifelong learning, then, is a double-edged sword that addresses different parts of society in unequal and different ways, especially as this binary appears to clearly reflect different social groups. That said, I have also pointed to the ways in which this duality does little to fully reveal the complexity of the contemporary economy. Instead of all high knowl- edge-skilled workers being employed in knowledge-intensive employment, many work in jobs for which they are ‘over qualified’. This mismatch exerts downward pressure, because an expanded number of well-qualified people reduces the range of labour market opportunities and incentives available to low knowledge-skilled individuals. Turning to the qualitative research findings, I have shown how service sector employees, regardless of whether they have embraced the idea that lifelong learning is their own responsibility, might find that such learning opportunities provide little practical utility and run contrary to the prom- ises of the learning society. The data here indicate that formal accredited learning and what might be described as non-formal, employer-provided learning have little impact on the lives of these young people. Instead, it is informal learning opportunities that appear to be those which are most valued. Indeed, while such employment could often be described as jobs without (accredited) training, they are not necessarily ‘jobs without learning’ (Quinn et al., 2008, p. 43). While the focus in much lifelong learning policy, especially that which targets enhancing employability, either explicitly or implicitly extols the significance of formal credentials, a great deal of work-based learning occurs outside formal parameters. Instead, as in many workplaces, learning arises ‘naturally out of the demands and challenges of work – solving problems, improving quality, and/or productivity, or coping with change – and out of social interactions in the workplace with colleagues, customers or clients’ (Eraut et al., 1998, p. 1). Nonetheless, we should remain cognisant of the implications of overval- uing informal learning opportunities, such as a concomitant lack of provi- sion of high quality formal training for those who might most benefit from the opportunities (Fuller et al., 2003). The learning opportunities outlined above do not always provide prospects for genuine work-related skill develop- ment – especially when compared with the opportunities often given to more senior staff. Customer-facing, front line employees have low levels of discre- tion in the conception, execution and evaluation of their work and are likely 90 Steven Roberts to be seen as easily replaceable. Consequently, formal learning at this level is largely task-focussed and situated in restrictive learning environments. The young men here find themselves in something of a conundrum. Arguably they represent the very type of person that the rhetoric of life- long learning is targeting. But their learning opportunities at work to date do not appear to be preparing them for much beyond what they currently do, if anything at all. In this sense, we might argue that where the lifelong learning agenda succeeds in shifting personal responsibility onto individuals for readying themselves for the challenges of both the knowledge economy and the knowledge society, it simultaneously presents a fiction that addi- tional qualifications and/or learning more broadly will remedy a whole range of social ills. However, as Keep (2012) has recently noted, whilst in theory we can train away low (qualified) workers through a process of credentialism, we cannot necessarily train away the jobs they occupy.

Notes

1. Rather than being specific to that time, the social agenda of lifelong learning has continued to be subordinate to or a side effect of a dominant focus on economic and vocational priorities (see Aynsley and Crossouard, 2010). 2. Life wide learning refers to the broader range of learning that might occur outside of the classroom setting, focusing on holistic personal development and social, spiritual and psychological well-being. 3. QCF levels broadly correspond with UNESCO’s International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) levels. In the UK, level 2 represents grades A–C at GCSE – the qualifications entered for at the end of compulsory schooling at age 16 (at time of writing) – or equivalent. Level 3 represents advanced level qualifications undertaken in post-compulsory education. In the UK, these include, but are not restricted to A-levels and level 3 diplomas. 4. Sector Skills Councils are independent, employer-led, UK–wide organisations, and are key strategic partners in creating the conditions for increased investment in skills.

References

Aynsley, S. and Crossouard, B. (2010) ‘Imagined futures: why are vocational learners choosing not to progress to HE?’ Journal of Education and Work, 23(2), 129–143. Billett, S. (2004) ‘Learning through work: workplace participatory practices’. In H. Rainbird, A. Fuller and A. Munro (eds.), Workplace learning in context (London: Routledge), pp. 109–125. Brine, J. (2006) ‘Lifelong learning and the knowledge economy: those that know and those that do not – the discourse of the European Union’. British Educational Research Journal, 32(5), 649–665. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2001) Communication from the Commission: making a European area of lifelong learning a reality (Brussels: European Commission). Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (1994) White paper: growth, competitiveness,employment: the challenges and ways forward into the 21st century (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities). We Know What They Earn, But What Do They Learn? 91

Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (1995) White paper: education and training: teaching and learning: towards the learning society (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities). Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2010) Council conclusions on the social dimension of education and training (Brussels: European Commission). Coffield, F. (1999) ‘Breaking the consensus: lifelong learning as social control’, British Educational Research Journal, 25(4), 479–499. Dehmel, A. (ed.) (2005) The role of vocational education and training in promoting lifelong learning in Germany and England (Oxford: Symposium). Eraut, M. (2004) ‘Informal learning in the workplace’, Studies in Continuing Education, 26(2), 247–273. Eraut, M., Alderton J., Cole, G. and Senker, P. (1998) Development of knowledge and skills in employment (Brighton: University of Sussex, Institute of Education, Research Report No. 5). Eraut, M., Alderton, J., Cole, G. and Senker, P. (2001) ‘Development of knowledge and skills at work’. In F. Coffield (ed.), Differing visions of a learning society (Bristol: Policy Press), pp. 231–262. Evans, K. (2006) ‘The rainbow concept of lifelong learning’. British Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 527–534. Faure, E. (1972) Learning to be (Paris, UNESCO). Felstead, A., Fuller, A., Jewson, N. and Unwin, L. (2009) Improving working as learning (New York, Routledge). Field, J. (2006) Lifelong learning and the new educational order (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham books). Fuller, A., Ashton, D., Felstead, A., Unwin, L., Walters, S. and Quinn, M. (2003) The impact of informal learning at work on business productivity (London, UK, Department of Trade and Industry), 8pp. Fuller, A. and Unwin, L. (2004). ‘Expansive learning environments: integrating organi- sational and personal development’. In H. Rainbird, A. Fuller and A. Munro (eds.), Workplace learning in context (London, Routledge), pp. 126–141. Goos, M. and Manning, A. (2007) ‘Lousy and lovely jobs: the rising polarization of work in Britain’. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 89, 118–133. Green, F and Zhu, Y. (2010 ) ‘ Overqualification , job dissatisfaction and ,increasing dispersion in the returns to graduate education’ . Oxford Economic Papers, 62, 740–763. Howells, K. (1997) ‘Howells welcomes Kennedy Report to the further education debate’, Department for Education and Employment Press Release, 1 July. Jones, P. (2010) The EU–Central Asia education initiative (Brussels, EUCAM). Keep, E. (2012) ‘What are the incentives to learn?’ Paper presented at Lifelong and Work Related Learning Research Centre Seminar Series, University of Southampton April 2012. Keep, E. and Mayhew, K. (2010) ‘Some comments on Skills for Growth’, SKOPE issues paper 21, Universities of Oxford and Cardiff. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Leitch, S. (2006) Leitch review of skills prosperity for all in the global economy – world class skills (London: HMSO). Ministry of Reconstruction, Adult Education Committee (1919) Final Report, Cmnd 321 (London: HMSO). NAGCELL (1997) Learning for the twenty-first century. First Report of the National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning. OECD (1996) Lifelong learning for all (Paris, OECD). 92 Steven Roberts

Osborne, M. Gallacher, J. and Crossan, B. (eds.) (2004) Researching widening access to lifelong learning (London: RoutledgeFalmer). Payne, J. (2008) ‘Sector skills councils and employer engagement – delivering the ‘employer led’ skills agenda in England’. Journal of Education and Work 21(2), 93–113. Pring, R., Hayward, G., Hodgson, A., Johnson, J., Keep, E., Oancea, A., Rees, G., Spours, K. and Wilde, S. (2009). Education for all – the future of education and training for 14–19 year olds (Abingdon: Routledge). Quinn, J., Thomas, L. Slack, K. Casey, L. Thexton, W. and Noble, J. (2006). ‘Lifting the hood: lifelong learning and young, white, provincial working-class masculinities’. British Educational Research Journal, 32(5), 735–750. Quinn, J., Lawy, R. and Diment, K. (2008) ‘Young people in jobs without training: not just dead end kids in dead end jobs’. Final Report (South West Observatory for Skills and Learning, University of Exeter). Reay, Diane, David, M., Ball, S. (2005) Degrees of choice: social class, race and gender in higher education (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books). Roberts, S. (2011) ‘Beyond NEET and tidy pathways: considering the missing middle of youth studies’. Journal of Youth Studies, 14 (1), 21–39. Roberts, S. and Evans, E. (2013) ‘“Aspirations” and imagined futures: the im/possi- bilities for Britain’s young working class’. In W. Atkinson, S. Roberts and M. Savage (eds.), Class inequality in austerity Britain (London: Palgrave), pp. 70–89. Roosmaa, E.L. and Saar, E. (2012) ‘Participation in non-formal learning in EU-15 and EU-8 countries: demand and supply side factors’. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 31(4), 477–501. Sharma, A., Levy, M. and Kumar, A. (2000) ‘Knowledge structures and retail sales performance: an empirical examination’. Journal of Retailing, 76(1), 53–69. Skillsmart Retail (2010) Skills priorities for the retail sector in the UK and its four nations, Skillsmart Retail. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (1996) Learning: the treasure within (London: UNESCO/HMSO).

Suggestions for further reading

Eraut, M. and Hirsh, W. (2007) The significance of workplace learning for individuals, groups and organisations (London: SKOPE). Felstead, A., Fuller, A., Jewson, N. and Unwin, L. (2009) Improving working as learning (New York: Routledge). Field, J. (2006) Lifelong learning and the new educational order (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books). 6 In a Class of Their Own: How Working-Class Students Experience University Wolfgang Lehmann

Introduction

Widening participation in higher education has been an enduring key policy concern in most Western countries. As Britain, the USA, Canada and other formerly industrial nations are transforming into post-industrial service economies, high levels of formal education are seen as essential to achieving equity and individual success (Canadian Council on Learning, 2006; Browne Review, 2010). As a consequence, universities have expanded and opened their doors to a new generation of non-traditional students. Young men and women from social backgrounds with no or little history of participation in higher education are called upon to change their educational behaviours and achieve mobility through attending university or other forms of higher education. Young people today are inundated with messages that equate success, both in work and life more generally, with high levels of formal education. Failure, in contrast, is generally associated with an inability to become educated and formally skilled (for critiques of these positions, see Brown et al., 2011; Gillies, 2005). Whether they are in higher education or not, most young people have accepted this pervasive public discourse of success through formal education. Yet, the educational achievement gap between the working- and middle- class has remained. If anything, we may have actually witnessed an increase in class-based inequality in higher education (for Canada, see Drolet, 2005). The recent move to allow tuition fees in the UK to increase as much as three- fold has only served to heighten public concerns about educational equality. As a consequence, class has returned to the agenda of educational sociolo- gists. Traditionally, writers and researchers in sociology of higher education have been concerned with access barriers for non-traditional students. These continue to be valid concerns for those aiming to understand and reduce educational inequalities. As the number of young people from non-traditional backgrounds at university has increased in the past decades, however, so has research and scholarship that looks at the unique experiences of students

93 94 Wolfgang Lehmann who enter university with working-class backgrounds and for whom univer- sity may be an alien institution. In this contribution, I will discuss findings from a qualitative longitudinal study of working-class students at a large, public and research-intensive university in Canada, where policymakers have shared UK concerns about widening participation. Following a group of working-class students over their four years of undergraduate studies, I will show that despite similar initial concerns, which need to be understood as situated in their shared working-class backgrounds, their decisions to enter and adaptations to university life were remarkably different. The contribution concludes with a discussion of the study’s implications for scholarship and policy in the study of classed experiences in higher education.

Social class in the sociology of education

While early functionalist statements about education (Parson, 1959) were mostly concerned with the roles of schools in socialising young people into adult norms and establishing social solidarity through a system of merito- cratic rewards, a body of scholarship emerged in the 1970s that critically examined the role of educational systems and institutions in perpetuating social hierarchies and class inequalities. In this research, working-class status is seen as a barrier to educational attainment, either because of working-class students’ counter-cultural tendencies (Willis, 1977), their linguistic disadvan- tages vis-à-vis a school system that rewards middle-class patterns of speech and thought (Bernstein, 1975), or their knowledge and dispositions, which have been formed in working-class families and communities and clash with the middle-class expectations of teachers or the middle-class biases in curric- ulum (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). Structural disadvantages are explained by hostile school structures in which working-class students are labelled and streamed into non-academic programmes that offer poor pedagogical strat- egies thus placing working-class students in a position in the educational hierarchy that corresponds to their future oppressed status in the labour force (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Rist, 1977; Anyon, 1980). Alternatively, the maintenance of status hierarchies is seen as the outcome of inflated creden- tial requirements in academia and the labour market (Collins, 1979). Somewhat in-between these structural and cultural factors, Goldthorpe (1996) has argued that working-class families make rational choices against participation in higher education due to the relatively high costs associated with higher education and the relatively uncertain outcomes, especially if other, more certain and less costly alternatives exist, which still contain potential for social mobility and career success. While Goldthorpe’s ‘weak’ notion of rational choice still recognises the role of social class in these choices, others have argued that social class has lost its determining influ- ence over young people’s lives and that life chances are increasingly the How Working-Class Students Experience University 95 outcome of individualised forms of agency and one’s ability to take strategic risks (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990). Most problematically, this shifts the blame for lack of educational attainment squarely to young people and their fami- lies (Gillies, 2005), despite evidence of continued structural barriers, such as rising tuition fees and stagnating working-class incomes. Yet, the number of university students from working-class backgrounds has grown in past decades. This, in turn, has created scholarly interest in the study of their experiences at university. Researchers have investigated young people’s perspectives on the value of higher education (Archer et al., 2003; Brooks, 2003; Lehmann 2007a) and their choice of institution (Reay et al., 2005). Moreover, research has shown that a working-class background forces students into a cultural outsider position, which leads to problems connecting with their more privileged peers and integrating into univer- sity life (Lehmann, 2007b, 2009b; Quinn, 2004). Aries and Seider’s (2005) study of lower-income students in a prestigious, private US university found that these students are especially vulnerable to integration problems as they often feel as if they lack cultural capital or that they are academically infe- rior. Other research in the UK and Canada has shown working-class students to adopt varying strategies to negotiate their outsider status at university, although some never feel like they fit in (see e.g., Reay, 2001; Reay et al., 2009, 2010; Lehmann, 2009a, 2012a). Working-class university students also appear to face unique challenges of reconciling the conflict between social mobility, class loyalty and class ‘betrayal’, a problem to which Sennett and Cobb (1972) have referred as ‘hidden injuries of class’ and which others have described as ‘habitus dislo- cation’ (Baxter and Britton, 2001; Lehmann, 2012a). Put simply, Bourdieu (1977, 1990) defined habitus as a set of acquired patterns of thought, behav- iour and taste, informed by one’s social milieu (mostly class), that constitutes the individual’s sense of self within the social structure. In addition, habitus creates dispositions to understand the world, and hence to behave, in certain ways. This means, for instance, that one’s own dispositions towards attending higher education are fundamentally informed by whether one’s parents (or other close family members) have been educated at university. Habitus dislo- cation, then, occurs when young people from a working-class background attend university and their working-class habitus comes in conflict with the middle-class norms of educational institutions. Responses to this habitus dislocation have been shown to range from mimicking middle-class peers’ dress, manners of speech and career ambitions, while downplaying working- class backgrounds (Granfield, 1991) to dropping out of university despite good academic standing (Lehmann, 2007b), and as a form of loyalty to working-class culture (Quinn, 2004). The notion that working-class students enter and continue to experience university as cultural outsiders rests on the assumption that they are largely unaware of the structures and cultures of university life. As a consequence, 96 Wolfgang Lehmann they are more likely to enter university with higher levels of anxiety and uncertainty and may have trouble adjusting to university life, both cultur- ally, but also ‘technically’ (e.g. around issues of course selection, registration and general ease with university expectations). Yet, this is not necessarily the case, as many working-class students become well-integrated and/or perform exceptionally well academically (Lehmann 2009a, 2009c, 2012a).

Social class and higher education in the Canadian context

Social class plays an under-acknowledged, contradictory and yet important role in education in Canada. Although public debates about class are conspic- uously absent in Canada and Canadians generally subscribe to the ideal of individual effort and mobility, class has remained a powerful predictor of educational outcomes. Canada’s educational landscape is relatively non- stratified, both at the secondary and post-secondary level. Moreover, partici- pation in higher post-secondary education has increased amongst all social groups, such that in 2005, 40 percent of Canadians between the ages of 24 and 26 had attended or were currently attending university (Shaienks and Gluszynski, 2007). Yet, educational and occupational attainment continue to be significantly influenced by the educational and occupational status of one’s parents (Anisef et al., 2000; Krahn, 2004; Wanner, 2004). In fact, young people with university-educated parents are more than three times as likely to attend university as are young people whose parents did not participate in post-secondary education (Drolet, 2005). Other measures of social class, such as income, have been shown to have similar effects (Junor and Usher, 2002), as tuition increases have outpaced inflation, but the earn- ings of low-income Canadians have not (Lehmann, 2012b). Concerns about access to higher post-secondary education for working-class young people have assumed greater urgency in recent years, as there are few alternatives into good career pathways in Canada and as employers increasingly hire applicants with higher education credentials, even if these are not necessary for the job. Given these various and at times conflicting prior findings of disadvantage, success and working-class student heterogeneity, I address in this chapter the following four research questions: (1) What are working-class students’ reasons for attending university? (2) What are their levels of preparedness and expectations for university? (3) What are their actual experiences? And finally, (4) How do they interpret their experiences and to what degree does their working-class background inform these interpretations? The answers to these questions are based on data collected in a four-year longitudinal study of working-class students at a large, research-intensive university in Ontario, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The study consisted of three interview phases, which took place in the first, second and final year of the students’ How Working-Class Students Experience University 97 undergraduate studies. The focus of this chapter is on the 36 students who remained in the study throughout its four-year duration. All of them were from working-class backgrounds and the first in their extended families to attend university. Ten of the 36 participants were men, and 14 were from visible minority backgrounds (mostly Southeast Asian and Indian). With very few exceptions, participants’ parents were employed in manual jobs (construction, factory work, lorry drivers) or lower-level service work (e.g. supermarket cashiers or retail workers). Furthermore, nearly all participants ranked the incomes of their families as below that of their peers at university, although this is an admittedly subjective and unreliable measure. Interviews were audio-taped, transcribed and analysed using NVivo soft- ware. Analysis followed guidelines set out by Strauss and Corbin (1990), beginning with initial coding of the interview and focus group data into relatively open categories to establishing more specific coding hierarchies and ultimately developing more selective empirical and theoretical catego- ries (such as the transition pathways described below). The interview quota- tions in the following analysis reflect the actual transcripts as closely as possible, although I allowed for a few minor editorial changes to make them more readable. Pseudonyms are used throughout to protect the confidenti- ality and anonymity of the research participants.

Findings

Borrowing from recent work by Bradley and Ingram (2012), university entrance decisions can usefully be divided into three types: (1) those for whom university is an uncontested, normal but also not fully researched and planned destination; (2) those who carefully planned university attendance, using a variety of resources (teachers, acquaintances and print and online materials provided by universities and other media sources) and examining different university and programmes; and (3) those who drifted into univer- sity without plans or any strong desire to be there. Obviously, these three categories are not restricted to describing the decision-making processes of working-class students. They equally apply to students from more tradi- tional backgrounds. Yet, given their potential lack of cultural capital and role models, it could be argued that working class students who are ‘planners’ might fare best, as they come to university better prepared, with a keener sense of purpose and might therefore be less overwhelmed by their outsider status and the unknown/uncertain demands of university.

Predictable transitions: successful planners and struggling drifters Surprisingly, only nine of the 37 participants can be clearly identified as ‘planners’. For the majority (21), the decision to attend university was normative and six participants drifted into university. As might be expected, those who carefully planned university attendance, be that through online 98 Wolfgang Lehmann research, visits to open houses or investigating career patterns, were most likely to adapt well to university life early on. Monica, for instance, spoke at length in her first interview about researching career options in law, medi- cine and teaching before applying to university. This somewhat more voca- tional approach to deciding about university was also coupled with a love for learning for its own sake, as the following quotation illustrates:

Monica: It was never really a question if I was going to go to university, because all the careers that I was looking at were all requiring a degree and I can’t imagine not being in school right now. I can see myself as one of those people who’ll get a degree and work and then be bored so I’ll go back to university to get another degree. (Interview 1)

Her transition to university went quite smoothly, by taking advantage of university induction events and speaking to senior-year students, despite initially experiencing pre-university anxiety about the potential disadvan- tage associated with being the first in her family to attend university:

Monica: [I was] terrified. I questioned myself all the time; definitely nervous all summer. [ ... ] If my parents could sit down and be like ‘this is what happened to me, this is, this is my advice because I’ve been in this situation’, that would be nice. And that’s why I really enjoy talking to people that are in second and third year because I love to hear like ‘how was your first year’ and like ‘what do you wish you would have known in you first year that you can tell me now’. Like just I’d rather get all the advice I could. (Interview 1)

Although by her third interview in her fourth year at university, Monica was well aware of real and potential disadvantages associated with her working- class status, she also immersed herself fully in the university experience by taking a job as residence advisor in her second year. This turned out to be an essential aspect of her integration and success:

Monica: Second year university, first year as a resident advisor, I remember just feeling like ‘wow, we’re really valued.’ I didn’t expect the extent of appreciation and just opportunities that residence staff had opened up for me, so that was great. I’ve learned about other cultures and diversity, and religions. My eyes have been opened to so much, and it makes me wonder how much more is out there. Culturally I think I’ve grown. (Interview 3)

In contrast, those who drifted into university were most likely to experience their early transition to university with a sense of worry or unease. None of this (admittedly small) group of students discussed experiences of easy How Working-Class Students Experience University 99 adaptation. Instead, their interviews were characterised by a sense of unease and uncertainty. Nora explains her concerns:

Nora: I guess since I was younger, everyone always would talk about going to university and like ... so I decided to, I don’t know, I guess go. ‘Cause my friend would always talk to me about it and her parents went to university. [ ... ] Up to Grade 11, I took a lot of easy courses. I didn’t take high school serious at all. [ ... ] I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I thought [university] would be a bit, kind of like, high school, like, in the fact that I wouldn’t have so much work, I didn’t think it was that much work. There’s a lot of, like, reading. [ ... ].Now that I’m here, it’s like ‘Holy Crap, that’s a lot of work’ and ... I don’t know, I think, in college, it would have been an easier thing for me. (Interview 1)

Nora’s shock about the workload and intellectual demands of university does reflect her relatively uninformed decision to attend university. In the absence of role models at home, Nora’s above-mentioned friend, who is from a middle-class family with university-educated parents, became a quasi and late catalyst to convince her to go to university, even though she herself already raises the issue of being out of place by referring to herself as a college girl. College in Canada offers applied and vocational post-secondary educa- tion, which could be considered a more normative and habitus-conforming choice given Nora’s working-class background. Despite evoking a switch to college in her first interview, Nora stayed at university but continued to drift through her four years of studies, with very modest academic success and without finding an academic area that truly interested her and compelled her to do well:

Nora: I always aimed to just get by you know, just pass, just do what is required, you know? [ ... ] I don’t do my best because I don’t have that look on school where I want to do great, I don’t want to excel. Right now my view is I want my B.A. and I’m going to work from there, you know; ‘cause you don’t see your marks usually on your B.A. when you’re applying to jobs. (Interview 3)

Normative decisions and diverse transitions Those for whom university represented a ‘normal’ unquestioned but also under-researched choice spoke less about preparing and investigating university, but about always having known or always having been expected to attend, as the following quotations from Kristen and Ed show:

Kristen: I don’t remember ever thinking not going to university. I’d never even thought about it, it was just a given. I’ve never considered anything else. (Interview 1) 100 Wolfgang Lehmann

Ed: I planned on [going to university] as far as I can remember. I always wanted one of the prestigious jobs. (Interview 1)

There is, however, an important caveat: these normative decisions are for most rooted in a context of their working-class backgrounds. Important here is the realisation, either of their own or their parents, that higher education is the pathway to a successful life. Successful here is usually defined in terms of non-manual, professional employment. This is perhaps best illustrated in how both Kristen and Ed continued the narratives begun in the above quota- tions (my emphasis added):

Kristen: My dad always wanted me to have what he didn’t have so he’s always encouraged me to do well and to pursue what I wanna do and, I don’t know it’s just always been university. Maybe my parents have that view that university’s better or something. (Interview 1) Ed: I guess it was because of my family; I just wanted a little contrast. Something more intellectual than just general labour, because I got to see them working and it’s not something that they love to do. (Ed, first wave)

This decision is thus not normative in the sense of a taken-for-granted educational pathway, but rather as an always expected and hoped-for depar- ture from it. The above-quoted Ed, for instance, was always an exceptional high-school student and his attendance at university was never in question. His transition to and experiences at university, as the following quotations show, also went remarkably well:

Ed: It’s been an amazing experience just being away from home and doing something that no-one else in my family had done before. [ ... ] I guess [there is] a stereotype that there were a lot of spoiled kids here and that you would be made fun of for being lower class, but I haven’t expe- rienced any of that at all. It seems like everyone’s on equal footing, everybody’s living the student lifestyle, you’re not going to be any different from anybody else. (Interview 3)

Others, like Kristen (quoted above), were more cognisant of class differences, but also talked about having changed and grown personally and intellec- tually, especially once she started to become involved on campus, having initially lived at home and commuted to university:

Kristen: I didn’t even think about being from a working class family until I came to [university]. All of my friends had similar backgrounds, like, everyone’s Dad worked at a factory, and everyone’s Mom was, like a secretary or something like that. And then coming here, like, every- one’s parents are doctors or lawyers. [ ... ] [Initially], I thought it was going to be all about academics, maybe because I didn’t really know How Working-Class Students Experience University 101

anyone who had been to university before. But I feel like I’ve grown as an individual because of my work experiences and volunteering and meeting people, and being more confident with myself, that’s all come from outside the classroom. And I wasn’t thinking about that at all when I came to university. (Interview 3)

For Hilary, the transformative experiences were mostly centred on gaining confidence in herself and her ‘right’ to be at university by being academi- cally successful:

Hilary: First year I did feel [intimidated]; ... it took me a while to tell my roommates what my parents did. [ ... ] But now, I don’t give a shit, because I think last year it would have mattered more, especially because of the fact that I was struggling in school and I didn’t want people to think ‘Well, your parents are a truck driver, and uh ... work at the salad bar at [supermarket]’, you know? I didn’t want people to think that of me. But now, I’m here second year, I’m still here, I’m doing really well. I’m getting much better marks, so ask me what my parents do I’ll tell you. Now that’s how I feel. (Interview 2)

Given the study’s focus on persistence at university, the number of students experiencing relatively strong forms of habitus dislocation is obviously low. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that five students in this study discussed such concerns in their first interview and yet remained at university. Although elsewhere (Lehmann, 2007b) I have argued that a working-class habitus makes leaving university ‘easier’ (i.e. an acceptable, habitus-reaffirming deci- sion), the key reason why resisting students persisted in this study was also related to their working-class backgrounds, as Brenda explains:

Brenda: Yeah, I think that the first time I really felt like [dropping out] was this year when I just did not want to do it anymore, I just was fed up with it. But I think a lot of it has to do with not wanting to go home failing; there’s a lot of that at home, like, people who don’t go away to school, or they do the same thing they did in high school for their whole lives, and I didn’t want to do that, and I especially didn’t want to go away trying to do something else, and have to come home. (Interview 3)

The most dramatic example of resistance to university was represented in the case of Sally, who came to university with high expectations for intel- lectual stimulation, but was thoroughly disappointed early on:

Sally: I expected probably a more academic environment than probably at high school. A lot of high school is just drama between people and you know party to party to party which I found that university kind 102 Wolfgang Lehmann

of is as well. But I expected a lot more work and a level of intelligence in people I guess. [ ... ]I don’t know it’s very lonely walking around on campus because I don’t know anybody and there’s nobody that, I mean I look at the people here and I’m kind of like these are the people that I tried to get away from. You can tell, just looking at a lot of them that they’re not here for the academics. So it’s frustrating for me because I came here because I wanted to get away from that. (Interview 1)

For Sally, then, the conflict is not related to the academic or institutional demands of university, but reflects an almost immediate experience of severe habitus dislocation. Sally’s early resistance continued to intensify throughout university, such that in her fourth year, she not only resented her peers, but also saw no academic value in being at university.

Sally: [I hate] being on campus and being surrounded by the people here. I still don’t like anybody here. I still don’t associate with anybody while I’m here really. Part of it maybe is that I’m not being challenged in my classes, that I’m bored most of the time. (Interview 3)

Unpredictable transitions: unsuccessful planners and successful drifters Although the trajectories described above suggest a certain level of predict- ability (success for those who planned university or always knew they would attend and struggle for those who drifted into higher education), there were still a sizeable number of students whose four-year journey through univer- sity was anything but predictable. Having planned university attendance was not a safeguard to eventually develop a feeling of resistance to university or become less certain about the role of university in one’s life; just as for some students who drifted into university, transformation was possible. An example of a student drifting reluctantly into university and even- tually becoming fully immersed and engaged is Anna. Originally from a rural region in northern Ontario, Anna admitted that she would not have attended university if she felt it was possible to get a well-paying job without it. Consequently, she struggled to become socially and academically inte- grated in her first year. For her, integration was related to becoming more specialised in her studies and thus making friends with similar interests. Importantly, these shared interests were around outdoor pursuits and phys- ical activity (Anna studied human kinetics), which helped her retain some of her rural and working-class interests:

Anna: I was having a hard time making friends, especially in residence. ... I think [class] background has a lot to do with it as well. I felt I didn’t really fit in with a lot of the crowds. [ ... ]I’m very nature oriented; I love anything to do with the outdoors. I’m really proud to come from How Working-Class Students Experience University 103

Northern Ontario. [ ... ] Second semester of third year I went on a ski trip which is part of our curriculum. And this year at the beginning we went on a canoe trip, which was fabulous. You really get to know your peers that way. (Interview 3)

More commonly, however, those who drifted into university tended to be stifled in their transformative potential, often because they struggled academically. For instance, Kate entered university with no clear goals or academic interests and floundered in her first two years. She eventually did experience a turnaround moment in a class that sparked her interest and a professor who made an effort to engage her academically:

Kate: It’s been more on the difficult side than anything – one huge percep- tion when coming into university is you feel that you’re just a number, and to a certain extent that’s very much true. Into my third year I never had a professor learn my name, and that’s a bit discouraging. And when you go in and you go to their office hours, or you go to see a Teaching Assistant and you’re asking for help, you don’t want to be put in a vulnerable position. And professors are very intimidating, they’re smarter than you are, they have the authority there; well, it’s intimidating to, you know, come at them at a personable level. But in my third year I had one of my professors take me aside and he learned my name and so it was kind of a give/take relationship, like, the fact that he took interest in me, I took interest in his class and it was the first class that I really actively participated. (Interview 3)

Despite the turnaround in Kate’s attitudes about higher education, her marks unfortunately remained below her peers’ average. In contrast, some students entered university with well-laid plans, but ended up losing interest or experiencing higher education as alienating. For instance, Lesley performed well academically, but remained socially rather distant from the university experience and reaffirmed in her last interview her desire for a more traditional lifestyle, involving marriage and children and returning to her community roots:

Lesley: I feel like I’m kind of the odd duck who actually wants that kind of thing [get married and have children soon]. I want to get my life started now ‘cause that’s what I want from my life, more so than anything else. [ ... ] I feel like a lot of it comes from my parents ‘cause they’re very traditional. (Interview 3)

As a final example, Maggie entered university with strong pressures from her parents to eventually study medicine and become a doctor. In that respect, her entry into university was normative, although she had also spent 104 Wolfgang Lehmann considerable research on finding out about medical school programmes at different universities. As early as in her first interview, Maggie admitted that she had little interest in medical studies and was drawn to courses in the social sciences, arts and humanities. This discrepancy between her inter- ests and her parents’ desires left her adrift and rather disappointed in her educational experience. The following quotation also shows that at least to her mind, her parents’ push for medical school is rooted in their desire for mobility and status for Maggie:

Maggie: I always felt empty while I was in Health Science. I find that I really enjoy Sociology, but I’ve never gotten the chance to really explore it more because of my parents saying ‘Oh, you should go into the medical field, they make a lot of money.’ [ ... ] I think it’s a lot about status. I think parents like boasting about their children to other friends sayings ‘Oh, my ... my child is a doctor, my child is a dentist’, but I’d rather do something that I would actually enjoy for the rest of my life. I always felt that there was a void. (Interview 3)

Transition patterns It is not my intention to quantify or generalise from these qualitative data. Nonetheless, it might be instructive to identify a few patterns in the data regarding decisions to enter university and adjustment processes whilst at university. As the data shown above illustrate, early experiences and adjust- ments followed relatively predictable patterns. Overall, planners such as Monica adapted well early on, whereas drifters such as Nora experienced university as a struggle from the start. As Table 6.1 shows, most of those whose decision to attend university can be categorised as normative also adapted well. Nonetheless, a substantial number of students both in the normative and the planned categories expressed significant worry about being university students. These findings should not be entirely surprising, as they reflect a Bourdieusian conflict between habitus and field (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990). Other research has also shown that working-class students

Table 6.1 Short- and long-term adjustment to university life, by type of attendance decision

First Year Fourth Year

Early Early Early Habitus Habitus Habitus adapt worry resist transformation dislocation confusion

Normative 10 8 3 9 3 9 Planned 5 4 0 4 2 3 Drifting 0 4 2 2 0 4 Total 15 16 5 15 5 16 How Working-Class Students Experience University 105 are at a greater risk of experiencing university as cultural outsiders with a heightened sense of uncertainty (Aries and Seider, 2005; Lehmann, 2007b). Long-term adjustment patterns over their four years at university showed similar tendencies, although they were far less predictable. To make sense of long-term adjustments, but still applying a habitus-field perspective, I iden- tified patterns of habitus transformation, habitus dislocation and habitus confusion. It is important to note that I do not suggest that ‘overcoming’ one’s working-class origin, that is habitus transformation, is a better outcome. Yet, given the participants’ desire to achieve social mobility through higher education, these are useful categories to analyse the often conflicted rela- tionships between origin and destination. Participants like Monica had engaged in a form of habitus transformation away from their working-class origins toward a middle-class destination, as they talked about fully embracing university life, both socially and academi- cally and having developed over time middle-class perspectives about the value of education, their educational and occupational goals, and, more generally, lifestyle choices. In contrast, habitus dislocation was evident for students like Sally, who ended up fully rejecting the value of university, and discussed their experiences in exclusively negative terms and as indicative of a profound clash between their working-class habitus and the middle- class culture that, at least to their mind, characterises university and other students. In between these extreme positions were located students whose experiences are perhaps best defined as habitus-confusing. This category included students who were only modestly successful academically and had, in their final interview in their last year of studies, not yet fully decided on the value of their education and their future educational and occupational path- ways. To me, this suggested a form of habitus confusion in as far as students appeared caught between two worlds (their working-class origins and the middle-class destinations for which they attended university) and had not resolved this conflict. It also meant that at least some of them expressed either indifference or conflicting opinions about the value of their univer- sity education, academically, occupationally, as well as personally. This is a relatively broad category that reflects students like Nora who moved through university without ever developing a serious interest in academic study and who only evoked her working-class origins to explain her academic strug- gles (i.e. not understanding the ‘technical’ demands of university, such as registration and course selection). More common, however, were students such as Kate, Leslie and Maggie, who actively reflected on their working-class origins and came to question their academic decisions and occupational destinations. Table 6.1 provides an overview of the distribution of participants into the various first- and fourth-year categories, depending on their university deci- sion strategy. 106 Wolfgang Lehmann

Although the sample size is too small to identify generalizable patterns, Table 6.1 nonetheless shows some tendencies in the data. For the majority of study participants, attending university was a normative choice. This seems surprising, as it can be argued that university is not a taken-for- granted, normative pathway for working-class youths (Goldthorpe, 1996). Yet, pervasive public discourses about the importance of higher education in a knowledge economy and the relative lack of post-secondary alterna- tives may make university a normative choice for an increasing number of young people. The majority of participants who carefully planned their decision to enter university adapted early; but the data also show that having planned well did not guarantee long-term transformative experiences. Similarly, although those who drifted into university were most likely to experience university as habitus-confusing, transformation was still possible and none felt profound dislocation. Perhaps having no strong opinions about attending university does protect from dislocation, although the low numbers of participants in this category makes such interpretations unreliable at best. The trajectories of those whose entry into university can be considered normative seem more difficult to predict, as they were equally likely to experience habitus transformation or confusion. This diversity and unpredictability of longer-term trajectories may call to mind notions of reflexivity and strategic risk taking in late modernity (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990), yet the findings of this study lead me to caution against interpretations that are too individualistic. In all instances, class remained an important aspect of the university experience, albeit in different and unpredictable ways.

Discussion and conclusions

In this chapter, I have attempted to provide largely descriptive information about the different pathways into and through university of working-class students. The most important outcome of this analysis is that these pathways are altogether unpredictable. Without a doubt, certain tentative patterns can be discerned. For instance, students in the present study whose attendance at university is the outcome of careful planning and research were more likely to experience adaptation, transformation and ultimately academic success. This is the hoped-for outcome as far as school counsellors, university admis- sion departments and policymakers are concerned. It suggests that students from non-traditional backgrounds, such as working-class and low-income students, can succeed at university if we provide them with the proper tools, such as counselling during secondary schooling, university guides, open houses and so forth. Once at university, transformation can be accom- plished by offering multiple opportunities for extra-curricular involvement and interactions with professors. How Working-Class Students Experience University 107

This finding can also be supported by prior scholarship on working-class students’ educational experiences. Goldthorpe (1996), for instance, has argued that families of different class positions make different ‘rational’ choices at important branching-off points in the school system about their children’s educational future. For working-class children to continue along an academic pathway therefore requires more careful (and less normative) planning. The findings further can be explained through a Bourdieusian lens. Bourdieu (1977, 1990) often used the analogy of a game to describe one’s position in a specific field. As I have argued elsewhere (Lehmann, 2012a), working-class students can be described as players in a game of which they do not fully understand the rules, although they understand the ultimate purpose of the game (to gain an education and credential) and the importance of playing (to become generally educated and more specifically be competitive for jobs in a knowledge economy). Their ability to play the game successfully can obviously be considerably improved by enhancing their understanding of its rules and cultural norms, which is precisely what happens when working-class students enter university with well-researched plans and expectations. Conversely, working-class students who drifted into university with little planning and no good reason for being there were more likely to be disadvantaged by their lack of understanding of the game, to stick with Bourdieu’s analogy. Yet, many of the trajectories fell outside these predictable patterns. Students who were well prepared when entering university became disinter- ested, disenchanted or simply struggled with social and academic demands. Other students drifted into university or entered with largely uncontested but also uninformed normative intentions, and yet managed to become academically and socially integrated. And even in these cases, the disen- chantment or integration respectively did not necessarily follow early experi- ences, but could happen later in the students’ time at university. These types of trajectories are far more difficult to explain for sociologists. Yet, despite the lack of discernible patterns, the students’ working-class background nonetheless informed their various educational experiences, but in notably different ways. For instance, all students in one way or another drew on their working-class backgrounds to make sense of their experiences. While the planners explained their research and information-seeking behaviour as a strategy to manage their lack of knowledge of the field of higher education, the drifters felt that their drifting was in large parts because they did not understand or were unaware of rules, norms and expectations. For those I labelled normative, their own or their parents’ hope for social mobility was the key underlying factor for never questioning their decisions to attend university. Similarly, although transformation or dislocation could be the outcome of chance encounters with peers or professors, how the students responded to these encounters was also reflective of classed-adaptive strat- egies. For some, taking up on-campus employment made it possible to 108 Wolfgang Lehmann combine a need to make money with a need to become better integrated in the university community. For others, resistance to integration into the university community was explained by either holding on to traditional life- styles or not finding like-minded peers, both of which can be linked to a fundamental clash between the middle-class nature of the academic field and the working-class habitus of these students. Given these findings, policy aimed at widening participation and improving retention of non-traditional students has to consider their diverse needs for support, from offering induction and transition support, to better needs-based financial aid, providing on-campus, academically focused employment and career-relevant extra-curricular opportunities and mentoring (see Lehmann, 2011). Similarly, future research on working-class and low-income students would be well advised not to treat this group as homogenous, but recog- nise its heterogeneity and diverse needs. Furthermore, this research suggests that we also need to investigate antecedents to entering university, such as experiences and support related to secondary education, families and peers (see e.g. Brooks, 2003). For instance, Finnie et al. (2010) have documented that, in Canada, most young people and their families engage in educational decisions that put them on a pathway towards or away from university long before children even enter high school. More precisely, young people from families in which parents have not been university-educated are likely to make decisions to attend university late during secondary education (if they make them at all), which the authors have further linked to a range of disad- vantages at university, such as problems becoming integrated and dropping out. The formation of educational dispositions and decisions, it appears, remains structurally bound (Evans, 2002). Obviously, positive schooling experiences, family and peer support, and access to various resources can help working-class children actively develop realistic dispositions about their educational futures. Lack thereof creates conditions in which the possi- bility of agency is restricted. As I have shown in this chapter, this type of agency can have a profound impact on students’ experiences at university. Researching these early conditions and experiences will be an important step in helping us make sense of how young people negotiate access barriers and eventually life at university. In the meantime, I hope that this research demonstrates that widening access is only one aspect associated with the improvement of educational opportunities and attainment for social groups traditionally excluded from higher education. Equally important, for policy and scholarship, is a better understanding of how class affects the experiences of those who make it to university. This kind of knowledge becomes even more important if we succeed in widening participation efforts and the number of non-traditional students at university continues to rise. How Working-Class Students Experience University 109

References

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Suggestions for further reading

Lareau, A. (2003) Unequal childhoods: class, race and family life (Berkeley: University of California Press). Reay, D, David, M.E. and Ball, S. (2005) Degrees of choice: social class, race and gender in higher education (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books). Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. (1972) The hidden injuries of class (New York: Knopf). 7 Examining the (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson

This chapter examines the intersections of masculinity, health and phys- ical education and, in doing so, questions the impact that being a ‘boy’ – particularly one reluctant to participate in physical health education – can have on culturally embodied life practices. The relative absence of discussion acknowledging youth masculinities and health, particularly the normative expectations of boys communicated through health education, remains one of those ‘social categories [that] find expression as independent research vari- ables, merely to be acknowledged as relevant, before being ignored’ (Evans et al., 2008, p. 120). Rather than ignoring growing concerns amongst adoles- cent boys who silently and secretively struggle with body image issues, this chapter aims to unsettle the silence and pervasive sense of denial (or at best, benign neglect) in schools surrounding the issues and realities of adolescent male body image(s). Our research includes the voices of adolescent boys for whom the masculine body is often seen but not heard. While the larger visual landscape focuses on idealised, muscular and privileged bodies which are afforded a voice by virtue of their embodiment of heteronormative masculinity, our focus is on bodies without voices. In short, we foreground the voices of adolescent boys whose bodies are perceived as not like the rest of the boys and who struggle to navigate masculinised spaces of locker rooms and physical education (PE) classes. In this chapter, we integrate research from the areas of sociology of the body, masculinities and (physical) education. We draw on data generated from a field study conducted across Canada (2008–2011) that examined why some young men are reluctant to participate in compulsory grade nine PE classes. Of particular theoretical and practical significance is the intersec- tion between masculinities and health, and the impact the former may have on the latter. We begin by discussing how broader, more public concerns for obesity and inactivity among youth are positioned and named through media accounts, namely, news dailies. We then survey the theoretical

112 (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms 113 landscape connecting masculinities, body image and health with data drawn from a three-year study conducted in Canada. We conclude by arguing for further research to examine how youth masculinities intersect with and underscore adolescent boys’ reluctance to participate in PE classes in Canada and elsewhere.

Widening concerns for youth obesity: headlines and realities

Growing public concerns for youth obesity in Canada have been met by relatively fast policy responses to address findings reported by Statistics Canada (2003) that 26 per cent of youth under the age of 18 are consid- ered obese. Further, according to the Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids report (H of C, 2007), a document prepared by the Canadian federal government to better define and understand its role in addressing childhood obesity in Canada, obesity rates among youth have reached a level of unprecedented urgency: ‘for the first time, today’s children will be the first generation for some time to have poorer health outcomes and shorter life expectancy than their parents’ (H of C, 2007, p. 1) due to obesity. Underscored by a discourse of alarm, the current initiatives by the government are captured by the Standing Committee’s statement that it ‘shares the fears of many experts’ (ibid). The response that mobilises such government committees and drives media reports can be traced to an obvious and public discourse of fear or what Evans et al. (2008) argue is ‘a contemporary health discourse that has been storied into existence’ (p. 119). Whether it is fear or not that is driving public concerns, it is increasingly evident that the storied existence of a manufactured panic has prompted both public and political responses. The headlines in local and national newspapers as well as weekly maga- zines are indicative not only of the state of the concern about inactivity among youth, but also of the ways in which obesity and health among youth is defined and who is blamed. National news headlines reflect an array of ways for talking about youth and childhood obesity. Particularly striking headlines include: ‘Obese Kids Raising Alarms’, ‘Health Crisis is Here’, ‘Teen Obesity’, ‘Canada Losing Childhood Obesity Battle’ and ‘Obesity, Chronic Illnesses a Growing Threat to Children’. These headlines reflect the seriousness of the issue and focus predominantly on children and youth. Amidst the concern, it has not gone unnoticed that the media is partially responsible for the ‘spin’ they provide on such issues. One reporter critiques the media for its part in perverting the scientific find- ings. He notes that:

The spin is politically correct but medically perverted. The study’s find- ings tell exactly the opposite story: Obesity spreads culturally, individual decisions are crucial, and responsibility and stigma are part of the solu- tion. (Saletan, 2007) 114 Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson

In report after report, the Canadian public is inundated with a barrage of images which contribute to how obesity and youth inactivity is defined. In addition, headlines such as these repeatedly reference the supposed source of this ‘crisis’. The source of obesity and inactivity among youth is often situated in the microcosm of family life, where, according to this headline, ‘Parents of Overweight Canadian Children Are Living in Denial’. Evans et al. (2008) argue that this type of media-manufactured crisis is evident in such a contemporary discourse which strategically positions and represents parents and children as the source of the issue (p. 126). Obesity is thus often times framed as a social class issue related to the lack of financial resources that may support involvement in sport or healthy eating habits. The complexity of health, fitness and factors locating youth as raced, class, gendered identi- ties remains unexplored.

The (un)making of boys in locker room spaces

While research has shown that younger women and girls are not as physically fit (along standardised biometric lines) as boys, it remains no less significant that, among boys, assumptions about masculinity and health are intimately related in a problematic and troubling way that affects male adolescent long- term health practices (see Atkinson and Kehler, 2012). The long-standing belief that men naturally play sports and engage in physical activity because they are young men is not only misguided, but detrimental to the long- term health of boys and men (see Atkinson and Kehler, 2010; Evans et al., 2008; Hickey, 2008; Norman, 2011). Hickey and Fitzclarence (1999) describe a growing need, particularly within education and sport, to re-examine the emergence and proliferation of hegemonic forms of masculinity and their ostensible links to ‘boyhood health’. They argue, that

it is through their [boys’] exposure to sporting cultures that many boys develop and hone their understandings of masculinity. The cultural messages that emerge from such arenas typically valorize versions of masculinity forged on strength, aggression, mateship (solidarity), courage, independence and commitment. As celebrated virtues of maleness, these qualities form the dominant narrative (story) about successful mascu- linity. (Hickey and Fitzclarence, 1999, p. 55)

The prevalence and pervasiveness of these messages of ‘healthy’ embodied masculinity are evident in the everyday rituals boys participate in during physical health education class. In their study examining the way in which body shape and size feed into the process of socially constructing feminini- ties and masculinities, Gorely et al. (2003) explain that there are enduring cultural associations between muscularity, heterosexual masculinity and heteronormativity (i.e. boys are assumed to do body-building to be sexually (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms 115 attractive to girls). Research challenges this assumption indicating that in fact gay men are often the most appreciative audience of muscularity (see Gorely et al., 2003). Interestingly, as the current study also reveals, associations made by young people between forms of femininity and masculinity on the one hand, and body shapes and sizes on the other hand, are routinely linked to transgressions of heterosexuality through the use and display of the body in discussions of gender-appropriate physical activities (Gorely et al., 2003). In short, the embodiment and performative display of masculinities and femi- ninities are directly linked to what is perceived to be appropriately masculine or feminine in sport and physical education cultures. Our study corroborates the findings of Gorely et al. (2003), in that while the adolescents who were reluctant to participate in PE class saw the value of physical activity, they did not see the meaning or value of specific sport activities and the gender-appropriate embodiment of masculinity and muscularity in health and PE classes (see Kehler, 2010). Additionally, our Canadian study attends to similar concerns that Norman (2011) addresses regarding discourses of masculinity, dominant ideas about health and bodies, and consumer discourses. Although there is a recent shift in related research towards conceptualising masculinity as a plural, fluid and contra- dictory concept, in which there reside many different ways of embodying masculinity, rather than a singular, static and predominantly heterosexual masculinity, Norman (2011) usefully reminds us of how a ubiquitous culture of mass commodification conflates ‘doing’ and ‘being’ healthy with a manufactured and ideally ‘stylised body’, a heteronormative mascu- linised body. In the particular milieu of PE classes, we are interested in the locker room as a space for embodying and policing ideological codes of muscularity, masculinity and health. Changing rooms are troubling and disturbing places for many adolescent boys. Atkinson and Kehler (2012) explain that places such as locker rooms can be spaces of ‘doubt, existential confusion and in some instances, resistance; where boys’ masculine identities are enforced and monitored among themselves in largely hidden, anxiety-producing, ritual[ized] ways’ (p. 170). O’Donovan and Kirk (2007) equally highlight the impact that ‘changing room’ interactions have on student experiences in physical health education. Their study draws attention to the negotiation of school physical health education uniforms and the associated participation or lack thereof by students. Changing rooms are a ‘key site for the habitual negotiation between the teachers and pupils in relation to the regulation of their bodies’ (O’Donovan and Kirk, 2007, p. 411). For many young men and women, this is a transition zone and institutionally unregulated space wherein boys are sequestered from social control agents which thus allow the routine policing and surveillance of boys’ bodies by more dominant boys who assert and demarcate zones of power and dominance through bodily privilege (see Atkinson and Kehler, 2012). 116 Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson

Attempting to transform changing rooms into accepting and transitional spaces without better understanding the interchanges therein will likely reproduce the very problematic climate, culture and focus of student phys- ical health education and student safety that need to be changed (see, e.g. Sykes, 2011). As O’Donovan and Kirk (2007) argue, we need to examine what aspects of physical/health education are displacing and alienating students. In doing so, researchers can better see, hear and understand how students are influenced by the experiences and exchanges that occur in these spaces. This research can contribute significantly to moving the discussion forward through its focus on intersecting masculinities, body image, health and education. This research is not intended to suggest boys are the newly disadvantaged or victims nor is it intended to claim that adolescent boys and men operate with similar circumstances and histories to those of women and girls. This research is, however, intended to problematise the regulation and surveillance of adolescent boys’ bodies, specifically in school locker rooms. In these spaces, boys regularly monitor, survey and navigate body practices and school norms in the service of enforcing and maintaining normative understandings of masculinity in a physical health education context. Sykes (2011) raises important questions about associations between heter- osexism and physical education. Her research provides a powerful dynamic for opening locker room doors as sites of inquiry. While she examines specifically ‘how athletic spaces repeatedly and actively contribute to the marginalization of queer, lesbian, bi and gay sexualities’ (p. 22), her research pushes us to consider more broadly the ‘visual economy that enables some bodies to be seen and recognized as an athletic, muscular, heteronormative body ... [while] depriv[ing] many students of even the most basic level of bodily recognition, confidence and comfort’ (p. 23). It is this tension between the privileged heteronormative body and those bodies and voices of young men who do not comply that is at the centre of our research. In the context of obesity crisis discourses and institutional manoeu- vrings which aim to educate young people about bodies, the targets of such discourses and policies are seldom asked about their subjective experiences of their bodies. Boys’ decisions to engage or disengage with physical educa- tion within secondary schools, for instance, are underscored by the socio- cultural understandings they have of their bodies and specifically, how these understandings relate to masculine identities (see Connell, 2008; Hickey, 2008). Schools are not neutral sites of cultural production, but are actively involved in a process that either perpetuates or challenges the reproduc- tion of mainstream masculinities. Muscularity ideologies and practices of sculpting the body through PE operate as a means by which young men negotiate expected masculine traits and the realities of their lives. Connell (1995) explains that through bodily reflexive practice, ideas of masculinity shape and inform how boys use their bodies. This is connected to the expec- tations among boys for what it means to be a ‘real man’. Seidler (1997) (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms 117 explains that, ‘our bodies are things that we do things with in order to prove both to ourselves and to others that our masculinity is intact’ (p. 187). And while recent research has pointed to steroids and protein supplement use among adolescent boys as an area for concern (see Eisenberget al., 2012), we argue that adolescent masculinity identities constructed through the mascu- line body require considerable attention and careful research, starting with the voices of adolescent boys.

The study

The current culture of masculinity in mainstream Canadian public schools contributes to the suppression and silencing of anxieties about body image among men and boys (Kehler and Atkinson, 2010). At the same time, school sport has historically exemplified the exaltation and elevation of a particular masculinity, namely one of muscularity and competitiveness. Ironically, as Norman (2011) points out, sport, exercise and physical activity are instru- mental for ‘provid[ing] men with masculine appropriate discursive resources to talk about and experience their bodies’ (p. 434). More often than not, adolescent boys routinely publicly disavow themselves of any investment in the production and reproduction of gender-based body projects (see Gill et al., 2005). Appearing to be aloof about the symbolic significance and privi- lege associated with bodies, adolescent boys instead emphasise size, domi- nance and competition among and across bodies to position themselves discursively in a performance-oriented context rather than an aesthetic or appearance-oriented one (Norman, 2011). The discussion that follows extends some of the theoretical arguments put forth above. We have stepped purposefully into the fringes, sidelines and spaces in between PE classes to better understand how boys come to know and understand the masculine body. While PE spaces such as locker rooms are often mired in methodological challenges in terms of accessing both the participants and the spaces themselves (see Fusco, 2008; Paechter, 2011), we felt compelled to disrupt what has largely been unchartered, or at least taken-for-granted, ‘educational’ territory. Our research makes adolescent boys’ bodies and bodily practices within schools visible and ‘not strange or out of place’ (Paechter, 2011, p. 311) as has been the case in efforts to research children’s bodies in school settings (see Paechter, 2011). Our research probes the troubled spaces of locker room and PE classes because it is here, among their male peers, that boys perform, enact and embrace particular versions of masculinity free from the gaze of adult authorities. A field study was conducted (2008–2011) across three Canadian provinces: British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia. We asked a sub-population of 14- to 15-year-old boys who self-identified as reluctant participants in the first year of secondary school mandatory PE classes to describe and explain their experiences of physical education. Drawing from a purposeful sample 118 Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson of 77 boys, we asked them specifically to describe the reasons and experi- ences that made them reluctant to participate in the provincially required physical health and education course. We asked them to comment on their own bodies as well as the observations they made of other boys’ bodies in the class. Our aim was to understand better how adolescent boys interpreted their own bodily self in relation to other boys. With an obesity discourse as the backdrop and an increased marketisation of the male body, the inter- pretations and understandings boys have of embodied masculinities are significant. Interviews were conducted at locations chosen by the participants and included coffee shops, restaurants, school classrooms and guidance counsel- lors’ offices. It is worth acknowledging that while the initial proposal for this study faced some scepticism from ethical review committees at two universi- ties about the willingness of adolescent boys to speak willingly about issues of body image, we were moved by the outpouring and freedom with which the participants spoke to us. Participants were asked to select a pseudonym which would maintain the confidentiality of their contributions; these pseudonyms are used throughout this chapter. We also used a snowball technique in which some participants shared the information sheets and consent forms with peers as a means of recruiting additional volunteers. In addition to one-hour semi-structured interviews, the participants agreed to allow the researchers to observe them during five consecutive classes of PE. Field notes were taken to complement and verify the experiences described during the interviews. They provided further ‘rich description’ of the school culture and specifically the context in which the boys participated in PE class (see Geertz, 1973). Finally, each of the boys was invited and agreed to participate in a blog that was created specifically so they could enter daily accounts from PE class. The descriptions and reflections of daily experiences contributed to the overall picture and accounts each boy gave of his partici- pation in the course. Nevertheless, we found that weblogging as a form of data collection was less effective than anticipated. While there was a willing- ness to be interviewed and be observed, these young men were less likely to provide regularly weblog entries. The accounts we provide in this chapter draw on data from only a small number of the overall sample. However, the themes discussed were common across the majority of the participants. Due to the limitations of space we have highlighted two central themes in the remaining sections of this chapter. Firstly and repeatedly echoed by these young men was a sense that sports were not a primary interest. A second theme commonly reported by these boys was the ‘popular, cool, muscular boys’ refrain that allowed boys to distance and remove themselves from a specific normative version of mascu- linity that is both limiting and delimiting in locker rooms and health educa- tion spaces. We address both themes as a way of interrogating masculinising (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms 119 practices that denigrate and marginalise some adolescent boys on the basis of body privilege.

‘Sports aren’t really my interest’

The boys in this study described a noticeable shift in the experiences they recalled from grade 8 (elementary school; age 13) PE when they consistently described it as ‘fun’ whereas in grade 9 (secondary school; age 14) PE they noticed a distinct shift to a more competitive focus. Many of the participants noticed that while grade 8 allowed greater participation in different sports, grade 9 PE was characterised by ‘a lot more people that are more buff or more fit than you are’ (Zack). Here, Zack remarks on the physicality and muscu- larity of his classmates as a changing feature of PE classes while, like many of the other participants, also acknowledging the move away from whole class participation to more individualised and team performance-based competi- tion in PE (see Connell, 2008). The change in tone and curricular focus was evident across the sample. Ricky observes:

Nobody sort of has to tell you about what being a guy is like, like not directly. The boys who are the best at like sports [in gym], they kinda are like the ones I think who are the example, though, like the ideal.

A young boy participating in grade nine gym stated:

When you get older, the guys who are the best in gym and at like foot- ball, become sort of known as the top guys in the school. They are the ones who like tease a lot of the time, because I guess everyone looks up to them. (Raj)

Repeatedly these boys described the struggles for membership on teams in class and the growing significance and attention directed at strength and physical prowess among boys. The merging of health education and sport as synonymous terms are problematic. The sense of isolation, marginalisation and often intimidation within the context of locker rooms and physical health education classes more broadly is disturbingly evident across the participants in this national study. This intimidation in particular was experienced not only by those who were less active, but it also became a means by which other boys were controlled and managed in the locker room. Sport and being one of the boys meant unquestioningly engaging in sporty behaviour as well as the actual ‘sport’ activities. In other words, adolescent masculinity became a salient feature connected to natural inclinations in which boys were expected to participate and display a natural sport confidence or ability (see also, Hickey, 120 Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson

2008). Wellard (2009) similarly found that ‘it is through the body that young people are primarily able to distinguish and categorise themselves and others’ and it is here, in the bodily expressions of masculinity, that ‘they learn what is expected from them’ (p. 72). A tension for many of these boys was the struggle between being physically active and healthy and a limited approach or PE framework available to them to display a commitment to being active in PE class. Monaghan (2008) astutely describes the current school climate as one characterised by a discourse ‘touting physical activity as a means of achieving a so-called healthy weight and the implicit, if not explicit, message that some bodies matter more than others’ (p. 99). One student, Mythic Artist, explained that ‘I want to be in good shape, it’s just a lot of the ways people stay in good shape doesn’t really appeal to me, like team sports and competitiveness. I’m not really into that’. Mythic sees the value of physical activity, but his reluctance to participate is in response to a traditional PE framework that revolves around a high degree of physical prowess and a competitive team model of PE that valorises some bodies while marginalising others. Mainstream sport activities, as Wellard (2009) found, ‘continue to exclude alternative practices or inappropriate bodies’ (p. 77) and in doing so, PE experiences become exclusionary and limiting rather than inclusionary and supportive, especially for those who want to be there but struggle with skill level development. This is not to suggest, as Wellard (2007) argues, that simply fitting these boys into the current dominant sport structure in PE solves the problem. The practices are indeed problematic and related to the cultural promotion of a narrow and limited version of bodily performance through sport and PE. In addition to negotiating the competitive nature and hierarchical struc- ture of body privilege evident in PE classrooms, many boys expressed feel- ings of exclusion and ridicule. Mythic recalled the ‘disses’ (i.e. insults) he got from his peers. His comments reflect the routine policing of normative masculinity captured in the way he engages in the sport. In this case the way he throws the ball differently from the rest of the boys became a point of ridi- cule. The polarising effect of boys regulating normative sporty masculinity and marginalising other less sporty, less athletically skilled boys is significant. Mythic explains, ‘I don’t always throw the ball the same way as them ... they just kind of notice ... they think it’s funny’. He adds ‘I get some disses and stuff like that, not really nasty, just kind of annoying’. He then describes his experiences in health and physical education as ‘tedious, tedious and kind of there to bug you. Like just physical, you know. Sports aren’t really my interest and stuff, and I’m just not really enthusiastic about it’. Mythic, like many of the other adolescent boys in this study, struggled with what were the expected and appropriate publicly displays of masculine behaviours and the attitudes with which those displays are accompanied. A disinterest in gym class or a lack of enthusiasm leaves young men like Mythic feeling unsettled, trying to navigate different ways of being a boy. He explains, ‘It’s (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms 121 not like I don’t want to be one of them ... It’s not that I don’t like being the way I am. I just wish that there were more people who had some of the same qualities as me’. For Mythic and others, the ability to participate in PE class is underwritten by issues of peer membership among boys. So-called unpopular boys, and boys with parents who do not place heavy scholastic emphasis on gym, are especially vulnerable. ‘I didn’t make a lot of friends through sport, so I never really thought I wanted to continue with it’, says Jesse. He adds, ‘It would be sort of stupid to keep coming back just so I could be picked on by the kids in there who think they are kings of the world’. The desire to be one of the boys and have the same privilege and level of acceptance without the insults reflects masculinised practices and demarcations that are all too familiar to these adolescent boys. The next section extends the discussion examining how body capital is employed among boys to locate and further marginalise boys who are less body privileged.

‘Popular and cool and muscular’

The struggle for many adolescent boys is locating oneself safely between the dominant norms of masculinity that are so highly valued in schools and those ways of being men that are often under-valued within the same insti- tution. Prain (2000) describes the contradictions and negotiations for young men whose masculinity is defined though a ‘sense of their bodies, where images of physical strength and toughness are seen as imperative if they are to have an acceptable body image’ (p. 55). Bodies and the maintenance of them in relation to developing positive body images remain unspoken and unacknowledged among adolescent boys (Atkinson and Kehler, 2012). Particularly salient is the degree to which bodily practices are encumbered with gendered knowledge related to masculine identities. The attention to physicality and muscularity, and the participants’ awareness of the value of these attributes among adolescent boys is striking. In the following inter- view AC explains how body privilege is mobilised as cultural capital: boys with a privileged bodily status (namely ‘boys who work out and train their bodies’) are able to ‘use’ their bodies ‘to make themselves look good’ and belittle other boys.

Like, they won’t take gym through high school because the kids who do work out and train their bodies, they will use the other kids to belittle them to make themselves look good and then they’ll use that to make them look small so they look big ... it causes the kids who are down at the bottom of the ladder that they won’t take gym because they’re sick and tired of being treated like that and it all comes back to bullying I guess. (AC)

An interesting and troubling relationship evolves among these young men. The power differential among them stems from the purposeful training 122 Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson of boys’ bodies as a tool of oppression and domination. This context says nothing of health or fitness but rather, as AC points out, reflects how the body is employed and ‘used’ to bully other boys. Hickey (2008) similarly found that ‘boys regularly drew on hyper-masculine sporting discourses to distinguish between what was tough and manly and feminine and weak’ (p. 156) and organised ‘sporting cliques to engage in practices of bullying, shaming, violating and excluding’ (pp. 155–156). AC explains that some boys ‘train their bodies’ to ‘use’ as a means for belittling other kids and to ‘look good’ in the eyes of other boys. Rod explains:

In the change room, like they would say, ‘well you’re not like me’, and say ‘you’re not cool enough’. And I didn’t like how they would say, ‘well I’m bigger than you so I have more authority, so you should listen to me’.

To young boys like Rod, masculinity becomes a world of black and white, right and wrong, and of inclusion and exclusion. Troubling for us is how physical activity too often is associated with the ‘right’ kind of masculinity and its life-long embodiment. Health and the goal of healthy life practices appears removed from what motivates some of these boys. The connection between dominant masculinities and performative practices in terms of muscularity is not surprising given past research (see e.g. McCaughtry and Tischler, 2010; Millington and Wilson, 2010). In the context of PE class- rooms, physical size and strength are contrasted and polarised as opposite ends on a spectrum of healthy and unhealthy bodies. More importantly, this context creates, promotes and reflects a hierarchical structure of masculini- ties which serves to produce and maintain one dominant embodiment of heteronormative masculinity. The participants in this study have consistently referred to popularity and the brokering of power among boys in locker room spaces (see Kehler, 2010). Tim, another participant, describes the people who are intimidating in the locker room. He explains, they are ‘the most fit people, the active people who always get on the teacher’s good side’. The significance of being fit and healthy was understood in terms of social currency and exchange value among friends. AC explains that

in high school, you get judged, like if you’re bigger or un-athletic, then they’ll get labelled a certain way, like you’ll be an unpopular, uncool kid, so the kids who go into high school that are popular and cool and muscular and athletic, then they’ll have a lot more friends.

As Millington and Wilson (2010) found in their study in a Vancouver school, ‘strength, toughness, and the ability to intimidate were in fact valorised in PE, permitting students who most obviously embodied and displayed these traits significant cultural power’ (p. 101). ShunOne says: (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms 123

I’m still in gym now, and I dunno, because I like sport and that, and like running, but some days I hate it because I know one of the other guys will call me loser or homo or something. I think it’s just because I’m thin and that, and like, I don’t have muscles like them.

There is a pervasive and constant threat that many boys understand and associate with high school locker room spaces. Regular bodily surveillance and the performance of a hyper-masculine dominance and aggression were typical in most of the boys’ accounts of changing in the locker room. At the hands of the more popular boys or ‘cool boy’ the participants retold stories or scenarios in which, as Dave explains, ‘some of the skinny small guys ... all the big guys kind of pick on them for not being as good and they don’t like going in the locker room because they might get bullied or stuffed in a locker’. There was an active construction of bodies as emblematic representa- tions of hyper-masculinity. The following accounts reveal a troubling connection between the body and the context in which it is shown and understood; however, this connec- tion remains problematically unspoken or misunderstood by those involved in PE contexts, especially among adolescent boys. In short, while the body is used, expressed and performed as a masculine structure, it is never open to interrogation. It is left intact, whole, and unproblematic. The participants nonetheless have a growing awareness about the body as evidence of a partic- ularly dominant and aggressive version of masculinity. Brandon describes the utility of gym class for some boys, saying, ‘I think they want to get the most out of the gym class and want to look cool and be buff and just be like, oh ya, let’s go, you know’. In another school, Carlos explains the power of the body as a visual signifier. The appearance and use of toughness and its significance as an acceptable identity formation practice for masculinity among boys contributes to a culture of bullying. Carlos positions himself as well as the ‘bullies’ who ‘work out’.

... ‘look at me, look at me, I’m so jacked’. So like, those are the bullies, I would actually say the people that think they’re so, they’re so airheads, they don’t even know anything. They’re just like, ‘look at my muscles’. They go home, work out, and come back and work out and it’s just, it’s just the only thing they have in mind and then go and bully some kids. It’s like trying to make themselves feel even better even more. (Carlos)

Carlos develops a disdain for the dominance and aggression he associates with these boys. He accounts for their investment in the body as a compen- satory practice for their own vulnerabilities as a way to ‘make themselves feel even better’. In the following excerpt Brandon describes the visual culture, the body as practice and the locker room space that allows for outward expressions of masculinity. 124 Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson

Well, they’re the guys who are like, you know, they’ve got the chest and the abs and stuff. You know, they’ll walk around the change room and stuff and then there are the people who don’t care. They just sit there changing normally. (Brandon)

Not unlike many of the other boys in this study, Brandon describes the ways some boys ‘walk around the change room’ while others ‘sit there, changing normally’. The physical spaces of boys’ change rooms were delineated and territorially mapped by how boys engaged in this space. These divisions empower the boys who are seen as caring about and outwardly displaying their bodies. In the earlier excerpt above Brandon described these same boys as ‘want[ing] to look cool’ while expressing an attitude of aggression conveyed in ‘oh yeah, let’s go’. This taunting and baiting of less body privi- leged boys goes unchecked in many boys’ locker rooms. As a result, stories like John’s emerge:

I have not brought my gym uniform, my gym clothes to school on so many occasions that if I don’t pass the exam, I’m not going to get the credit for gym. That was a conscious choice on my part, because I did not want to participate, because I brought [gym clothes] a few times but I would wear it underneath my other clothes, and I would just take those off in the change room and have my gym uniform on, because I was uncomfortable with my body and I was afraid of what other kids would say to me. In Grade Eight, I got made fun of a lot. When I would take my shirt off to change into my other shirt, and people would scream and look away and stuff just to make fun of me. Some times the other guys might slap me around a bit and call me a little bitch. So I had had enough of that, and I decided that I was either not going to bring my uniform or just not go at all ... and no, nobody really ever asked me why or like wanted to do anything about it. I thought the teacher might ask me why, but he never did. No one seemed to care. (John, age 15)

Across the three provinces and 12 schools it was striking how common and taken for granted this culture of violence appeared in each school. Perhaps more disturbing is that this conduct, the intimidation and bullying occur uninterrupted in many school locker rooms.

Lines of intervention

Despite some common public perceptions, prevailing cultural norms cleaving people into powerful or ruled groups are not immutable. Rather, the roots of status hierarchies and the institutions, practices and beliefs that support them are reversible systems of domination. Norms and cultural ways of life promoting certain young boys as dominantly masculine in any social (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms 125 context can be destabilised, challenged and dissected as exploitive tech- niques of power. In the terms of our analysis, the fear-inducing nature of the locker room can be destabilised. Several lines of intervention are possible. One, privatising showers and changing spaces, for instance, are but small and seemingly logical transformations in reconstructing the geography of the locker room. Constructing the space in a less open fashion was advo- cated by many of the young boys in our interviews.

So, it [would be] better if there were stalls where people can just have their own shower. I’d put up with that. So I usually take my shower at home, but if I was really running or doing stuff, then I would take it at the gym. (Bob)

It seems that granting the boys a simple degree of corporeal dignity would go a long way to ease the dehumanising nature of the context, and potentially provide one fewer opportunity for the boys to be bullied. More broadly, the boys we interviewed almost universally cited three main problems with what ‘counts’ as physical education. A second inter- vention would involve revisiting what is considered, valued and promoted in physical education. While most desired more in-class health education, they detested physical education which is based on power and perform- ance team-based sports; occurs in a context in which the teacher is also a sports coach; and allocates grades ‘meritocratically’ through sports performance. Team-based sports tend to become gang-bullying contexts of dominance bonding in which the boys’ heteronormative masculine body is affirmed and reaffirmed by, with and against others. Popular, muscular boys are positioned as team captains, fill their teams with their friends and leave the least physically dominant boys to be selected last. In competi- tion, physical performances serve only to heighten codes about dominant masculinity enforced in the locker rooms. It is no surprise, then, that the boys learn to fear and loathe collective participation in physical education. Surprising to us is how many boys indicated that the teacher/coach played a pivotal role in this masculinity confirmation process. Several of the boys narrate how coaches laugh at or mock the boys’ physical problems with a particular gym task; or, how the teacher serves to legitimate a masculine hierarchy in the class.

The teacher plays a major role ... they try to follow the curriculum pretty well, probably, and he’s the one who will, maybe if it gets out of hand, like give them heck and chastise them for it. [He] will tell them to set a good example and represent [school] well when we go out on field trips and stuff. In the gym class the teacher mainly plays the role of the coach, and he’s not really trying to gear it towards everybody. He’s just trying to go, okay this is what we’re doing, this is the sport, I’m going to blow the whistle and you go out there and block. (Rod) 126 Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson

Rod finds little cultural or structural justice in the current system of physical education. Because the teacher may actually coach and befriend the domi- nant boys in a team setting, there is systematic bias and structural inequality in the grading system. Thus, the boys become punished academically for not living up to dominant gender performance standards. Boys who are on the margins are, then, presented with a doubly layered problem in the class, as they are deemed sub-culturally, and then academically, inferior. Finally, one of the most powerful and seemingly obvious lines of interven- tion would be to better listen to and support the boys who remain in the shadows and on the sidelines. Few seem to listen to these boys describe how they would relish a different ethos and praxis of physical education. These are not ‘naturally lazy’ or unmotivated boys as popular cultural discourse often positions them. They are interested in different sorts of physical activi- ties, leisure pursuits and even sports that do not find a way onto the physical education curriculum. Programs of physical education which are co-educa- tional, multi-sport and activity-based, balanced between physical activity and health education, and not overseen by hegemonic male authority figures in the school might go a long way towards encouraging different perspectives about the place of masculinity in PE. Our research highlights the importance of listening to these young people. In doing so we provide sustained comments that they made about their experiences in PE. Lucas says:

I might have stayed in if the classes were mixed [gender] all the way through, and if we did like recreational stuff rather than sports. As long as you have team sports in gym, the strong guys will always gang up on the other guys.

Mythic Artist adds:

Put something like that in [alternative sports] just because it’s interesting or just do other interesting things like archery, just other physical stuff that isn’t aggressive. Or maybe just put more stuff like skiing or walking or running. They have a little bit of running at my school but you know, not too much. I’m good at running and maybe if they’re more enthusi- astic about that.

Providing a passionate commentary on PE, Spikeshade (age 15) says:

Other ways you could improve gym class would probably be they could make it instead of being geared just towards the jocks of the athletic kids, they could make it maybe even 50/50 time in the gym and the classroom so it’s geared towards everybody ... the academically driven and the athlet- ically driven, and I think that would be better because then nobody feels (Em)Bodied Boundaries of High School Locker Rooms 127

like, ‘man I can’t do this’ ... Nobody would feel like that because it focuses on both interests equally, and I think that would really help because then you eliminate these feelings of, ‘I hate gym class’. ... So just about as much time as we’re in the gym, so I can still pass this for my classroom but the thing here is no matter how much they don’t judge based on skill and it’s just participation, even if it’s that, if you’re not academically driven you’re not going to want to participate in the gym part and you can’t pass for just the classwork. But I think it would be better if you could, because then you’d feel better about participating in gym no matter how badly you get because you think, ‘hey, even if I do badly here, my classwork can save my mark’, and I think that would be better for the whole image thing ... Also, having enforcement in the locker room [would help]. I don’t know how they’d be able to do that but maybe having just one person who’s either a teacher or maybe a student in the class who’s to report to the teacher, with like maybe ‘so and so was being bullied in the changing room by whoever and whoever’. I think that would help a lot with the acceptance aspect of it and that’s basically all I have to say about that.

Shifting the practices and implementation of physical education might help in the process of de-coupling ideal-type masculinities from the performance of gym as Mythic Artist or Spikeshade suggest. If the spaces, ideologies and practices which place some boys at risk of marginalisation are interrupted and replaced, the gender production of physical education might very well be transformed.

Concluding remarks: voices from the margins

The social construction of masculinity and its representational forms in physical health education classes are visible in the daily interactions and exchanges of adolescent boys. Feelings of ridicule and inadequacies in health and physical education emerge for adolescent young men such as those whose voices and experiences are captured in this study. The perform- ance and embodiment of masculinity is conveyed in the ways boys pose and represent themselves as ‘real boys’ in public places and private spaces (see Wellard, 2009). The active performance of masculinity to show domi- nance and control through bodily practices in these spaces, for example, reflects an understanding about normative codes of masculinity. Our study draws attention to heteronormative masculinity as well as an individual- ised masculinity. The former is a performance for ‘girls that they have feel- ings for’ and the other is a deeper personal individualised masculinity that reflects how boys see the self as boys. Drummond (2001) explains that sensationalised accounts from media reports continue to see male body image issues as unusual occurrences. With a growing number of studies suggesting that there is a strong connection 128 Michael Kehler and Michael Atkinson between body image, health and masculinity, it is striking that initiatives to encourage physical activity remain silent on such deep and disturbing trends that will potentially impact the health of children and boys in particular. The centrality of the male body and ongoing negotiation of masculine iden- tities among youth can no longer remain unacknowledged. As Drummond (2001) has argued ‘the development of poor body image and self identity may occur due to increasing despondence towards the non-physical body’ (p. 62). And as Frost (2003) contends, boys are increasingly seen as part of a visual landscape characterised by a growing consumer capitalism that has quickly embraced them as a new market. Boys, similarly to girls, are constructed by and through their bodies. Our study has looked specifically at the ways the adolescent male body has manifested itself in school locker rooms. Masculinities and the overlapping and competing constructs that struggle for dominance are carefully managed in school spaces. Our study points to the troubling ways some boys manage and mis-manage their bodies as tools of bullying and taking up a heteronormative masculine project that silences and marginalises other boys. It is the responsibility of teachers and teacher educators as well as health care professionals to begin a discussion about male body image concerns. We agree with Markey (2010) that such concerns should be addressed, and research that delves more deeply into the impact these concerns can have on lifelong health practices is imperative in order to better understand how and why adolescent bodies are negotiated through masculinising practices commonly found in PE classes. Only by initiating a dialogue among boys and addressing their fears and body perceptions not as something unusual or rare, can we begin to address what we have long known. We need to alleviate, eradicate and eliminate the feelings of intimidation and inad- equacy often heard from young men reluctant to participate in PE so that their high school experiences are not allowed to contribute in damaging and enduring ways to poor self-concepts and body image issues among adolescent males.

Acknowledgements

The research conducted for the national study (2008–11) was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This study was a collaborative study conducted by M. Kehler (University of Western Ontario), M. Atkinson (University of Toronto) and K. Wamsley (University of Western Ontario).

References

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O’ Donovan, T. M. and Kirk, D. (2007). ‘Managing classroom entry: an ecological analysis of ritual interaction and negotiation in the changing room’. Sport, Education and Society, 12, 399–413. Paechter, C. (2011). ‘Gender visible bodies and schooling: cultural pathologies of childhood’. Sport, Education and Society, 16(3), 309–322. Prain, V. (2000). ‘Playing the man and changing masculinities.’ In C. Hickey, L. Fitzclarence and R. Matthews (eds.), Where the boys are: masculinity, sport and education (pp. 55–66) (Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press). Saletan, W. (2007). ‘Obesity, laxity and political correctness’. Slate Magazine. http: //www.slate.com/id/2171214/nav/tap3/ Seidler, V. (1997). ‘Sexualities’. In V. Seidler (ed.), Man enough: embodying masculinities (pp.185–195) (London: Sage). Statistics Canada (2003, November 3). ‘Parent and child factors associated with youth obesity’. The Daily. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/031103 /dq031103a-eng.htm Sykes, H. (2011). Queer bodies, sexualities, gender and fatness in physical education (New York: Peter Lang). Wellard, I. (2007). Re-thinking gender and youth sport (London: Routledge). Wellard, I. (2009). Sport, masculinities and the body (London: Routledge).

Suggestions for further reading

Rasmussen, M. (2006) Becoming subjects: sexualities and secondary schooling (New York: Routledge). Sykes, H. (2011) Queer bodies, sexualities, gender and fatness in physical education (New York: Peter Lang). Wellard, I. (2009) Sport, masculinities and the body (New York: Routledge). 8 Adolescent and Disabled or Adolescence Disabled? Education and the Construction of Gendered Identities among Adolescents with Intellectual Disability Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols

Being neither childhood nor quite adulthood, adolescence occupies a liminal space that is fraught with confusion and complexity of an in-between period. Within this context of social and psychological flux, gendered iden- tity becomes more clearly (re)constituted (Kaplan et al., 2004). For adoles- cents with intellectual disability, education plays a pivotal role in developing their ability to successfully negotiate this transitional period. Schools serving adolescents with disabilities in the USA are legally mandated to implement transition planning. According to Public Law (P.L.) 108–446, Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, transition is a results- oriented plan for students aged 16 years and older geared towards facili- tating movement from school to post-school/adult activities. Thus, within special education the period of adolescence ushers in transition planning. Research shows that although transition planning has improved over time, the achievement of desired personal, social and psycho-emotional outcomes still remains an area of continued and significant need for adolescents with intellectual disability (Rusch and Wolfe, 2008; USDOE, 2003). This chapter raises a number of critical questions about the social construction of disa- bled adolescence from a disability studies perspective. We explore the social construction of gendered childhood from the standpoint of adolescents with intellectual disability. Thomson (1997, p. 6) questioned ‘accepted notions of physical [and mental] disability as an absolute inferior state and a personal misfortune’ arguing instead that the disabled body is ‘a site of historical inscription rather than physical deviance ... [thereby repudiating] such cultural master narratives as normalcy, wholeness ... ’ (p. 105). Within this context, the role of education in developing the ability of adolescents with

131 132 Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols disabilities to embrace their entitlement to a gendered sexual subjectivity is indisputable. By drawing upon a case study involving in-depth interviews of families and adolescents with intellectual disability attending secondary school in the southern region of the USA, we highlight the ways in which adolescents with intellectual disability are disrupting and subverting master discourses of normalcy that limit their lives by re-articulating their gendered and sexual selves.

Background

In the USA, typical adolescence spans the temporal period of 10–25 years (Kaplan et al., 2004). During this period, the teenager undergoes physi- ological, cognitive and social-emotional development that comprises the transition from childhood to adulthood. A plethora of research has been conducted that has increased our understanding of this period ranging from works of developmental psychologists such as Erikson (1968) to studies that have focused on gender differences between males (e.g. Levinson et al., 1976) and females (such as Gilligan and Attanucci, 1988). Writing about adolescent girls, Butler (1993) argued that for girls, the process of ‘girling’ brings them into the domain of language and the complex matrix of social relations that gender brings into being. On the other hand, Asher (1998) described adolescents as being ‘in a transitional state of their gender roles’ (p. 23). More recently, scholars have argued that ‘sweeping demographic shifts have taken place over the past half century that have made the late teens and early twenties not simply a brief period of transition into adult roles but a distinct period of the life course’ (Arnett, 2000, p. 469). Arnett proposed the label ‘emerging adulthood’ as a distinct period character- ised by change and exploration of possible life directions that are socially constructed and culturally mediated. He argues that the period of the late teens to mid-twenties, rather than being a period of settling into adult roles, is a volitional period, that is, a period when the person makes life deci- sions by choice. It is a time characterised by independent decision making, when ‘adult commitments and responsibilities are delayed while the role experimentation that began in adolescence continues and in fact intensi- fies’ (p. 470). However, even this new understanding of adolescence side- steps disabled adolescence. While adolescence has been theorised and re-theorised, for teenagers with disabilities, adolescence continues to be a confusing and complex space of development where one is not quite a child or an adult (Erevelles and Mutua, 2005). Indeed, for many adolescents with disabilities, particularly those with more significantly disabling conditions, adulthood remains a distant dream that they never fully achieve. For them, adolescence is a context of socio-cultural flux where gendered identity often is socially stifled and collectively negated, particularly for those adolescents whose conditions are more significantly disabling. Adolescent and Disabled or Adolescence Disabled? 133

Colluding in silence: special education and the silence on disabled adolescence

The need to provide adolescents and youth with disabilities access to engaging educational experiences and high-quality services became a priority of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services (OSERS) in 1984 (Will, 1984). However, despite concerted efforts to make transition to adult- hood a priority for secondary students with disabilities, evidence continues to show that two decades after initial attention was brought to the area, there remains a critical need for improved services (Rusch and Wolfe, 2008; USDOE, 2003). Special education literature has documented the low or poor post-school outcomes experienced by youth graduating from special education secondary programmes. Early studies found that many graduates of special education had no friends outside their home or residential programmes (Bercovici, 1981; Gollay et al., 1978) and no non-disabled friends (Gollay et al., 1978; Reiter and Levi, 1980), no intimate relationships (Gollay et al., 1978), partici- pated only in passive leisure activities (Gollay et al., 1978; Kregel, 1985), and many had little to no autonomy in making lifestyle choices (Baker et al., 1977; Gollay et al., 1978). Regarding employment outcomes, early studies had reported up to 60–80 per cent unemployment (Harris and Associates, 1986; Hasazi et al., 1989; Wagner, 1989) or underemployment (Harris and Associates, 1986; Bellamy and Horner, 1987). In addition, adolescents and adults with disabilities who were employed typically were paid wages below the poverty line (United States Department of Labor, 1979). While the dismal outlook for adolescents and adults with disabilities has improved, they continue to lag behind in the achievement of the tangible markers of adulthood: intimate relationships, gainful employment, community access and participation, and the general social construction as valued members of society. Since 1990 when IDEA mandated that secondary special education programmes focus on transition to adulthood, practitioners and researchers alike increased their efforts not only in developing model transition programmes but also in identifying the salient characteristics of ‘successful’ transition programmes. Consequently, a plethora of studies on best practices in transition emerged as a strand in special education research (Halpern et al., 1991; Kohler et al., 1994; Patton and Dunn, 1999; Rusch and DeStefano, 1989). Some transition researchers observed that much of the information regarding best practices was not well-substantiated with empirical evidence of improved outcomes (Greene and Albright, 1995; Johnson and Rusch, 1993). However, what remains undis- puted in both theory and practice is the fact that adolescents with disabilities need educational experiences that promote their achievement of successful socially valued adult outcomes. Transition follow-up studies, such as Blackorby and Wagner (1996) and other literature since the mid-1980s, have consistently documented poor 134 Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols adult outcomes for adolescents with disabilities (Halpern and Benz, 1987; Rusch et al., 1992). However, despite recent promising initiatives, research on post-school status of adolescents with disabilities reveals a continued and urgent need for engaging transition services that enable adolescents with disabilities to pursue desired employment, community and broader social experiences (De Fur and Patton, 1999 Wehmeyer and Schwartz, 1997, 1998). A limitation to current transition research in special education is its sole emphasis on quantifiable outcomes of transition without examining the temporal dimension of transition within adolescence. A specific concern is the fact that transition in special education begins and ends during a young person’s adolescence period (mandated by IDEA at age 16 or younger and ending at age 21). Beyond the temporal intersectionality of transition plan- ning and adolescence, transition research almost never engages the question of what it means to be a disabled adolescent in society. In the USA, only a few transition scholars (see, e.g. Flexer et al., 2004; Rusch and Wolfe, 2008) acknowledge the undeniable tumultuousness of the period of adolescence for any youth, and in particular youth with significant intellectual disabilities. Outside special education, however, research points to the critical issues of the adolescent period including the development of a keen sense of self-aware- ness and self-definition that incorporates aspects of both personal and social identity (Reid and Deaux, 1996). This development of self-concept reflects the broader community and cultural contexts within which the adolescent is inextricably embedded (Markus and Kitayama, 1994). Adolescence is also a period of increasing pressure to conform to gender role prescriptions with the pressures for gendered conformity increasing as internal and external demands require adjustments to changing physical appearance and/or other socio-cultural circumstances, such as race and class (Wilson et al., 2011). Processes of socio-cultural gendering influence not only the formation of self-esteem and self-competency, but also perceptions of physical, sexual and social self (Lee, 2011).

Lost at the discursive boundary of normative adolescence

Within transition literature, measures of adulthood have tended to focus solely on objective results often ignoring or downplaying the less tangible outcomes that are qualitative in nature and are often conceptualised as wishes, dreams, hopes and aspirations. A strand in transition research that best aligns with those qualitative transition outcomes are studies focusing on quality of life for youth with disabilities. Although there is no single definition of quality of life that completely captures all its dimensions, attempts have been made to define this construct and examine how it relates to service delivery within transition (Dennis et al., 1993) and transition outcomes (Halpern, 1993; Patton and Dunn, 1999; Rusch and Millar, 1998). Adolescent and Disabled or Adolescence Disabled? 135

Halpern (1993) offered a definition of quality of life that emphasised a sense of personal fulfillment (e.g. happiness, satisfaction and a sense of general well-being). His conception of quality of life examined whether relation- ships exist between objective transition outcomes and these more subjective, quality of life domains. From a special education perspective, Halpern’s (1993) conception of quality of life offers a theoretical premise upon which to explore ways in which adolescents with disabilities, along with their parents, define, in their own voice, the experiences they see as leading to achievement of desired adult outcomes and aspirations. A limitation in existing transition research is the absence of studies examining the sociological processes involved or invoked in the development of gendered identities (or lack thereof) for girls and boys with disabilities during the transition period. Adolescence is the in-between/liminal developmental stage characterised by physical and psychological maturation that separates childhood from adulthood. It is a stage rife with changes of a psychosocial as well as a physiological nature. Although there is great variability among scholars (see, e.g., McAnarney, 1985; Arnett, 1998, 2000) regarding the timeframe of adolescence itself, the general agreement is that it is the period spanning the ages of 10–25 years. What is uncontested, however, is the heterogeneity of personal development within this period that is often played out on a specific socio-cultural stage. Arnett (2000) theorises that:

Emerging adulthood is distinguished by relative independence from social roles and from normative expectations. Having left the depend- ency of childhood and adolescence, and having not yet entered the enduring responsibilities that are normative in adulthood, emerging adults often explore a variety of possible life directions in love, work, and world-views ... For most people, the late teens through the mid-twenties are the most volitional years of life. However, cultural influences structure and sometimes limit the extent to which emerging adults are able to use their late teens and twenties in this way, and not all young people in this age period are able to use these years for independent exploration. Like adolescence, emerging adulthood is a period of the life course that is culturally constructed, not universal and immutable. (pp. 1–2)

Arnett highlights the role of culture in our understanding of the differing experiences of youth during this stage thereby debunking the presump- tion of cultural uniformity and universality. This understanding of adoles- cence and of the challenges young people confront raises critical questions vis-à-vis adolescents with disabilities, particularly those with significantly disabling intellectual disabilities. How does their identity of disability influ- ence their experience and ability to effectively and responsibly claim their space as emerging adults? How do teens with disabilities face the challenges 136 Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols of this transitional period? To what extent do they explore, establish and utilise their gendered voice to claim their adulthood? As an examination of gendered identity for youth with disabilities, this chapter departs from traditional transition research in specific ways in order to broaden our understanding of the process of becoming an adult for adoles- cents with intellectual disabilities. The first point of departure is a methodo- logical one. Historically and in general, special education research in the USA has tended to be quantitative in nature with only a few studies utilising qualitative approaches, in particular those published in mainstream special education journals. Believing that a qualitative approach is better suited for an initial study of socio-cultural influences on adolescents’ dreams and desired adult outcomes, this chapter explores ways by which seven adoles- cents with significant intellectual disabilities constructed their emerging gendered selves during the transition years through in-depth interviews. This chapter raises questions that highlight critical issues related to growing up with a disability. First, in this chapter we demonstrate ways in which several normative issues affecting adolescents in general are at play with regard to adolescents with disabilities. For instance, the physiolog- ical changes experienced by typically developing adolescents are common regardless of the presence or absence of disability. However, we propose that the articulation of normative girl/womanhood or boy/manhood is often oppressed by social and cultural limitations in ways that are very different from typical peers. Second, we show how the ‘disabled girl or boy’ remains an invisible presence that struggles to claim recognition and a viable voice at the crevices of adolescence. Third, we argue that to be marked as disabled in society suggests that one may never really experience and enjoy a gendered identity in normative terms. This appears to be most apparent for girls who live within the often anxious and fortified protection of their parents. Fourth, we illustrate that because the adult who has a disability is often socially constructed as an asexual non-gendered perpetual child, the interpellation of disabled ‘girl/boyhood’ is seldom recognised or it is ignored until ‘girl- hood’ or ‘boyhood’ forces itself into recognition within the temporal space of adolescence when physiological transformations (e.g. breasts, menstrual periods, facial hair, erections, etc.) occur (Erevelles and Mutua, 2005).

Going to the source: interviewing adolescents with intellectual disabilities

In this section we briefly describe the study that informed this chapter. We draw upon data from a larger study whose participants comprised parents and transition-age youth with a wide range of significant disabilities (i.e. 14–21 years old enrolled in secondary special education programmes in the southern USA). Participants were purposefully selected (Bogdan and Biklen, 1992) on the basis of critical demographic variables including gender, race, family socio-economic Adolescent and Disabled or Adolescence Disabled? 137 status, type and severity of disability and the type of transition programme in which they participated. A total of 20 participants comprising 10 adoles- cents with disabilities and 10 parents were selected to participate in the larger study. This chapter draws upon the narratives of seven of those participants who were classified as having significant intellectual disabilities. As a vulner- able population in the research process, Institutional Review Board (IRB) regu- lations required that participants for this study be interviewed in the presence of a parent/guardian. The function of the IRB is to ensure that individuals are treated safely and ethically throughout research and training programmes. Interviews were expected to last between 45 and 60 minutes each. However, each interview session of the participant pair (i.e. the parent and adolescent interviewed) was typically three to four hours long with five-and-a-half hours being the lengthiest. All interviews were audio-recorded and later transcribed verbatim by a trained graduate assistant. Transcripts were returned to each participant pair for member checks (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). The interview protocol was designed to gather data simultaneously from each participant pair. Although separate interview questions were prepared for each member of the participant pair, in reality the questions were mirror questions in that they elicited topically similar information of each member of the participant pair. The open-ended, in-depth interview questions (Taylor and Bogdan, 1984) that were used covered a variety of topics including perceptions of the utility of transition programmes in steering them towards desired adult outcomes, friends in school and community, leisure/recreation activities in school and community, plans for the future regarding independent living, commu- nity participation and employment. Through these questions we hoped to get an understanding of the young person’s roles, possibilities and desired life outcomes. We also attempted to identify if and how any of the factors highlighted in previous transition research (see, e.g. Halpern, 1993; Masino and Hodapp, 1996; McNair and Rusch, 1991; Mutua, 2001), including type/ severity of disability, socio-cultural variables and gender, mediated the expressed desired outcomes. Table 8.1 summarises the critical variables that differentiated the participants by race/gender (coded as White Male [WM], Black Male [BM], White Female [WF]), type of programme attended (coded as secondary or transition programme), age, severity of intellectual disability (or ID), social economic background (coded as SES) and the type of neighbor- hood of their home community (cautiously coded as either rural, semi-urban, or suburb). To protect the confidentiality of the participants pseudonyms are used to identify them in this chapter. Since the interview questions drew upon already established categories known to be important in transition (i.e. independent living, employment/ or post-secondary education, access to and participation in leisure-recreation and community participation), axial coding (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) was used. Axial coding was preferred over open coding (Strauss, 1987) since in 138 Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols

Table 8.1 Participants

Adolescent Severity of Type of participant intellectual programme Type of code Race Age disability enrolled SES neighbourhood

Jamaal BM 20 Moderate MR Model Low Rural/poor transition Ty BM 19 Moderate-Severe Model Low Semi-urban/ MR transition poor Dan WM 18 Severe MR Secondary Middle Suburban/ middle class Frank WM 20 Moderate MR/TBI Secondary High Suburban/ affluent Elizabeth WF 21 Moderate MR Model Low Rural/ transition working class Harper WF 14 Severe MR/autism Secondary Middle Suburban/ middle class Dakota WF 20 Severe-profound Secondary Middle Rural/ MR middle class this study the task was to relate those ‘categories to their subcategories along their properties and dimensions’ (Strauss and Corbin, 1998. p. 124).

Adolescence is adolescence with some exceptions

This study revealed that indeed the physical and psychological struggles of adolescence exist regardless of the presence or absence of a disability. On several levels, the participants in this study had experiences that were very similar to their typically developing peers. From a physiological standpoint, these adolescents were undergoing changes in their appearance and experi- encing hormonal and other somatic changes typical of adolescence. All the young men interviewed were undergoing or had undergone the pubertal change involving body hair, voice and other physical transformations. The girls were having menstrual periods, breast development and other changes affecting their external appearance that were simultaneously exciting and confounding. Although the youth in this study were experiencing physical changes similar to their typically developing counterparts, what set them apart was not how they dealt with those changes and the meanings they assigned and associated with those gender-specific changes, but how others dealt with them. From a socio-cultural perspective there appeared to be consid- erable limits imposed upon them by schools, parents and society that decreased the possible spaces and contexts upon which to express their emerging adulthood. The manner in which adolescents with significant intellectual disabilities understood and negotiated the physiological and Adolescent and Disabled or Adolescence Disabled? 139 psychological transformations appeared to have been shaped and compli- cated by the contexts available to them. The mere fact that their parents served as facilitators during the interview, and were required to be present per IRB regulations, created a very different, albeit necessary, context in which to engage in a dialogue with an adolescent about their emerging selves, often their emerging sexual selves. This context served to identify the youth in this study in vastly different ways from the traditional under- standing of youth, striving for independence, autonomy and voice. The interface between social-communicative in/competence, intellectual (dis) ability and socio-cultural boundaries grossly limited their opportunities for volitional exploration of their emerging adulthood.

Desire for independence

Findings indicated that similar to typically developing adolescents, partici- pants in the study looked forward to adulthood but with more caution and apprehension. Interviews with Jamaal, Frank and Elizabeth aptly illus- trated that cautiousness in their desire to move away from home and live on their own. In the case of Frank, he wanted to live away from home, but close enough so his mum could check on him especially with his seizures. Likewise, Jamaal hoped to have his own house ‘one day’ when he was ready ‘to take responsibility’. In the case of Elizabeth, there was a stronger resist- ance to the idea of living on her own, and when probed further, she reluc- tantly expressed that she might like to live on her own, but even then, she found this difficult to articulate. Her mother and father (both present at the interview) had to coax her into even agreeing to that being a possibility. Although the prospect of independent living was a possibility (though in Elizabeth’s case a distant and a little distasteful one), they all expressed a desire to live on their own, away from their parents. Findings revealed a gendered difference in that in general, the boys were much more open to the idea of living on their own than the female participants. However, they all had a common desire to live within their parents’ vicinity. This desire for proximity to parents marks a point of departure between them and their typically developing adolescent peers. The idea of being independent was only appealing if it did not involve moving too far from home. However, although these young men and women were labeled as having severe to profound intellectual disabilities, they demonstrated a sophisticated level of cognitive awareness in both their ability to anticipate the restricted choices they were allowed to make by caregivers and parents, and/or were capable of making given their adaptive behaviours, as well as the likely incredulity in society’s reactions to their normative desires. The tenuous boundary between relationship development and independ- ence was intertwined with the issue of independent living and shaped by traditional socio-cultural norms for at least one participant in this study: 140 Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols

Dakota. Notwithstanding her enthusiasm for entering into independent adulthood, one sensed that Dakota was at the same time aware that inde- pendence would require that she leave home and live alone – an idea that she seemed unprepared to embrace wholly at the time. Later developments in the interview offered some clues regarding what she perceived as the appropriate pre-conditions for leaving home: getting engaged (‘ring’), getting married and having a baby. Not only are these pre-conditions socio-culturally appro- priate for her departure from home, they were completely normative for a Southern girl. However, Dakota’s pronouncement was greeted by incredulity from her mother.

Claiming voice: affirming autonomy and identity

While the participating adolescents’ verbal articulations were largely brief, it was in the amount time that they took to respond to a question and in the frequency of repetition that made interview sessions so much longer than we had originally anticipated. In general, it was difficult to understand the participants’ speech due to challenges in articulation and in some cases extreme brevity of verbal responses. Thus, having parents present to provide a context and explanation to the interviewer was initially appreciated. However, quite often the parent took liberties when explaining or clarifying the response of the adolescent participant by editorialising and interjecting personal commentary and viewpoints that often altered the intended message the participant wished to relay. For example, in one instance Dakota referred to a certain boy as her ‘boyfriend’, but her mother ‘explained’ that he was ‘just a friend’ and that the class generally ‘hangs out together’. After a long silence, Dakota restated and repeated several times that he was ‘my boyfriend’. While this was in itself a problem with respect to authenticity of responses, a greater problem existed pertaining to frequent silencing prima- rily of the girls. It marked another genderised difference in what was deemed appropriate expression by disabled girls. This was more evident in exploring questions related to how adolescents with intellectual disabilities formed their identity. It became clear that the earlier developmental issues of attach- ment were ever present. Girls especially were apt to apologising for desiring their independence. For instance, Dakota wanted to talk about a boy in her class with whom she clearly fancied. Her mother cut her off and restated Dakota’s words for the audiotape and proceeded to convince her that this was not what she really meant to say. In this study, the general response of girls in this kind of situation was to acquiesce. In the case of Dakota, she completely shut down and refused to respond to questions for a while until the conversation reverted to her interest in the boy. Even then, she conversed in one-word mumbled responses. The silencing also took other forms as well. In the case of Harper, another female participant, her mother interjected several times throughout the Adolescent and Disabled or Adolescence Disabled? 141 interview that Harper was lying. Also, the interviewer’s enthusiasm to encourage Harper to speak or to clarify unintentionally crowded out her voice and Harper’s own expressions. For instance, at one point during the data collection, Harper decided that she did not want to continue the inter- view. However, due to her limited expressive language ability, she said ‘going’ several times but we failed to ‘hear’ her. She even offered options of where else she wanted to go. When her efforts went largely unnoticed, she started pinching. All the while, we failed to read the communicative intent of those behaviours and verbalisations in our attempts to focus her attention on the task at hand (the interview). Harper was autistic and the most challenging of all the participants when it came to understanding her verbal communication. She primarily used telegraphic speech (mainly single words or direct short phrases) and one had to rely heavily on reading her non-verbal communicative behaviours. However, whenever her mother or the interviewer incorrectly re-stated her intent, she would repeat the words over and over again regardless of the question, until someone acknowledged her words by repeating them back to her or asking her a question about what she was saying. In one instance, Harper was asked what she liked about school, but instead she wanted to talk about someone named Barry. Her mother later clarified that Barry was ‘a friend’ of Harper’s with whom she enjoyed spending time. When her repeated mention of Barry was acknowledged, Harper volunteered informa- tion on what she liked to do with him, including dancing, eating popcorn and swimming. However, she was unwilling to disclose his nickname for her (Sug=Sugar). Her agitation and annoyance at having her private life explored was illustrated when Harper left the interview as the interviewer pursued the topic of Barry, choosing instead to go and play with a favorite video, which her mother described as a sign that Harper was displeased. Harper’s unwillingness to disclose certain details about her life was not unique only to her. All the participants interviewed had certain topics, events and people they did not want to share, or at least did not want to share in the presence of the parent. The question of participants’ friends in the school and community yielded a number of stock responses from the male participants. Often after the parents’ prompting, other details would be revealed about the participants’ ‘special friends’. Interestingly, though the male participants were often unwilling to talk about their ‘special friends’ in the presence of the parents, parents did encourage them to do so. For instance in the interview with Ty, he disclosed that there was a girl in his neighbourhood who he liked very much (Jessica). Yet he intentionally omitted her when enumerating his community friends. His mother ‘reminded’ him of this particular friend; yet when asked to talk about her, he quickly declined, though his mother seemed more than eager to provide information. Clearly, the fragile boundary between parent and child was somewhat different than that expected or experienced between typically developing adolescents and their parents. For 142 Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols the most part typically developing teens possess the skill to establish and control this interpersonal boundary in ways the youths in this study did not demonstrate. However, what was most interesting was that like typically developing peers the desire for privacy was very much an operative theme for the teens we interviewed.

Struggle for identity, independence and privacy

During the course of the interviews, it was clearly evident that many of the adolescents struggled with articulating their identity, asserting their inde- pendence, but were mostly stifled by a lack of privacy. For instance, in the interview with Ty, he gave all the ‘right’ answers to the question about Jessica, volunteering precious little else. Interestingly though, later in the interview, Ty’s mother left the room and permitted the interviewer to continue inter- viewing Ty while she was gone from the room. No sooner had she left than Ty went back to the question of Jessica, though by that point the interview had shifted to other issues. He spoke at great length, providing unprompted details about Jessica’s beautiful green eyes and how much he hoped ‘to have a relationship with her’. In a similar move, Frank had a lot to say about how he was going to be transformed into ‘a man’ on the occasion of his 21st birthday. While Frank and Ty waited until their parents exited the interview setting to begin talking about their secret hopes and desires, Dakota’s revela- tion of her wishes and desire to marry and ultimately have a child with her ‘boyfriend’ Cade was a shock to her mother. Appearing to enjoy the incred- ulous shock she gave her mother, Dakota emphasised her assertion using sound effects like ‘hubba! hubba!’ much to her mother’s consternation.

Perception of self as sexual beings

Like most adolescents, the participants in the study did not readily disclose details of their private lives and were reluctant to talk much about their interest in the opposite sex in the presence of the parent. For instance, when asked in the presence of his mother, whether some of his friends were girls, Frank went into fairly lengthy details about a girlfriend that he had, with whom he broke up. He appeared saddened about the break-up as evidenced by his subdued tone of voice. However as soon as his mother walked away, he proceeded to talk about the fact that some ‘buddies at the club’ were planning to take him to Johnny’s (A Gentleman’s Club). He noted that when he returned from Johny’s, ‘I will be a man’. On probing further about what he meant by becoming a man, he kept repeating: ‘You know, a man’. His non-verbal behaviours indicated that he was well aware of the sexual nature of his statement and that he saw sex as an experience with transformative powers that would usher him into manhood. Similar to non-disabled adoles- cents, data from this study seem to suggest that for these adolescents, the Adolescent and Disabled or Adolescence Disabled? 143 process of maturation was not one that was quantifiable by numbers of years lived, but rather by the ‘adult’ experiences they underwent. At age of 18, Dakota had declared to her mother that ‘I am a woman now’. During the interview, we had probed for what she meant by that statement and her response suggested that what turned her into a woman was the fact that she had ‘Juliet’-like feelings: feelings of being in love with her Romeo, Cade. In the same interview, Frank stated that he and some of his friends (specifi- cally Ty) get together to watch car racing and movies from his extensive video collection. Frank was an avid collector of car racing memorabilia, which naturally led to the assumption that the videos he spoke about were also related to this hobby. However, when asked about the videos, he stated that he did not think it was a good idea because they were ‘girl’ videos, simultaneously (and paradoxically), inviting the interviewer to his room to look at his videos. His statement reflected an awareness of gender identity, a respect for what can and cannot be shared with individuals of the opposite sex and different generations, as well as a mechanism for giving voice to his own growing identify of self as a man with all of its desires.

Limited spaces for the articulation of their gendered identities

This study revealed significant socio-cultural limitations imposed upon disa- bled adolescents’ exploration of their emerging gendered identities. Further, this study showed that those adolescents occupy very few spaces that nurture the sense of independence where the formation of gendered roles can occur. Although the participants in this study attempted to articulate many themes characteristic of the adolescent process, there were external limitations on how they could express, claim and actualise these processes. For example, research in adolescence indicates that mid-adolescence is characterised by strong bonding between peers (McAnarney, 1985). Frequently, leisure activi- ties, hobbies and extra-curricular activities provide the space in which these relationships develop. The present study suggests that this may not be so for youths with disabilities. Indeed, within the group of youths studied, ties between peers were not strong or primary. Additionally, peers did not possess a shared understanding of the hobbies they each or jointly enjoyed. For example, Jamaal described that he liked to play basketball with his friend Ty. However, Ty stated that he absolutely hated basketball and never wanted to play it. Most striking was the limited knowledge participants had of their own leisure preferences. During all the interviews, the participants had to think hard about what they liked to do, with an exception of Frank who loved racing cars and golf. For girls with intellectual disabilities, the tendency towards over- protection further disengaged those girls from the opportunities for ‘girling’, and frequently silenced their attempts at defining themselves as gendered beings. Within contemporary culture, the typical female teen spends a great deal of time on ‘girling’ activities (Butler, 1993) focused on 144 Kagendo Mutua and Sandra Cooley Nichols appearance and experimenting with hair, nails and clothing. It is plausible that parental fears informed by their conceptualisation of their child’s skill capacity results in restricted exploration of this aspect of gender iden- tity. Further, for typical female adolescents, this exploration is conducted with same age/gender peers in various socially mediated contexts such as group outings, sleep-overs, school dances, movies, etc. However, such opportunities were not readily available to those who participated in this study, and even when they were, they were tempered by adult supervision. Although the context that supports gender identity and adaptive gender developing behaviours was not readily available, it is interesting that the female participants in this study attempted to voice desires associated with traditional female roles.

Conclusions and significance

Based upon these findings, the centrality of the role of education in providing opportunities for the exploration of personal interests and the expression of those interests is deplorably absent. What these findings underscore is that for these youth, learning to be a man or woman and learning to express their desires to parents and to adults in authority – a skill that typically developing emerging adults learn through daily interactions with peers and adults – must be explicitly taught with practice opportuni- ties provided both in school and at home. The role of education, therefore, for this sub-population of emerging adults, has to go beyond academics. It must include life skills because in their case, sociology and biology jointly conspire to cast this population in roles that foster dependency: even in areas of their life where others with no or fewer disabilities view as their autonomous/basic human rights. Further, this study shows that these emerging adults are much more intel- lectually sophisticated than might be assumed. Thus, as part of their transi- tion education, schools need to address what it means to be in the liminal space of disabled adolescence where experiences are provided and mediated by adults. If disabled young adults are to develop a sense of competence not only in articulating but also in exploring their emerging gender and sexual identities, their transition education must not only acknowledge the need but also provide opportunities for developing needed culturally mediated skills to successfully navigate the tumultuous period that is adolescence. Additionally, findings of this study suggest that carrying an identity of disability has an adverse effect on the attempts by adolescents with intel- lectual disabilities to claim an emerging adulthood that is gendered and sexual. These findings illustrate gender differences in favour of males in their attempts at claiming their emerging sexual selves. Overall this study and these finding are a point of departure from transition research in special education that has largely remained silent about the qualitative elements Adolescent and Disabled or Adolescence Disabled? 145 of what it means to plan and implement transition plans for individuals with disabilities who are in the temporal space of adolescence. Additionally, the fact that the adolescent participants steered the interviews to the issues presented in this chapter indicates their innate desire to be openly acknowl- edged not as non-gendered perpetual children, but rather as adolescents with emerging gendered and sexual identities. This, therefore, is the chal- lenge facing transition education for youth with intellectual disabilities.

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Suggestions for further reading

Fine, M. (1988) Women with disabilities: essays in psychology, culture, and politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press). Davis, L.J. (1995) Enforcing normalcy: disability, deafness, and the body (London: Verso). Thomas, C. (1999) Female forms: experiencing and understanding disability (Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press). 9 It’s How You Look or What You Like: Gender Harassment at School and Its Association with Student Adjustment Elisabeth Morgan Thompson, Katerina O. Sinclair, Riki Wilchins and Stephen T. Russell

Several highly publicised murders and suicides of youth in the USA have been attributed to bullying at school, and have prompted unprecedented national and international attention to the issue of school bullying and harassment (Katz, 2010; Russell, 2008). In spite of public attention, it is only recently that researchers have begun to examine the motivations behind bullying. Some work shows that youth often attribute bullying to discrimination or prejudice based on perceived or actual sexual orientation (Russell et al., 2012; Sinclair et al., 2012) or gender nonconformity (Toomey et al., 2011). Some have argued that gender regulation – the enforcement and policing of norms regarding appropriate masculine or feminine behaviour based on birth sex – is at the heart of bullying and harassment based on sexual orien- tation and gender nonconformity (Meyer, 2008; Pascoe, 2007). A number of qualitative and ethnographic studies have described the regulation of gender and sexuality in the peer culture of contemporary schools (e.g. McCormack, 2011, 2012; Pascoe, 2007; Renold, 2001, 2002). However, little quantitative evidence documents how gender is regulated among adolescents and its associations with school experiences. Qualitative researchers have focused on schools as a place where gender and sexuality are regulated through harassment, at times with severe consequences (Chesir-Teran, 2003; Pascoe, 2007).1 The shootings at Columbine in 1999 (Kimmel and Mahler, 2003), the murder of Lawrence King in California in 2008 (Russell, 2008) and the surge of suicides of gay youth in 2010 (Katz, 2010) all implicate anti-gay and homophobic bullying at school as the key precipi- tating factor. Yet in each case, youths’ actual sexual identities (i.e. whether or not they actually were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender [LGBT]) were less relevant than peers’ motives for bullying them (Greytak et al., 2009; Kimmel and Mahler, 2003; Russell, 2008). Further evidence of gender regulation in

149 150 Elisabeth Morgan Thompson et al. contemporary schools can be seen in recent lawsuits and media controversies in the USA about whom one can take to the prom or what one can wear to school or in high school graduation photos. These controversies fundamen- tally hinge on the regulation of gender expression. Adolescence is a critical time when conformity to gender norms and peer acceptance is important to youth (Hill and Lynch, 1983). Conforming to traditional gender norms – learning to be and be recognised as a masculine boy or a feminine girl – is a major rite of passage for adolescents. Schools provide a context where gender and sexual norms and expectations are learned and emphasised (Chesir-Teran, 2003), not only by peers but also by the schools as well. For example, many schools assign different dress codes and different gym classes and sports based on gender; especially in early grades, it is common for students to be divided into two groups based on gender for activities or contests (Thorne, 1993). In spite of rich qualitative accounts of gender cultures of schools, little is known about the forms that gender regula- tion may take, or the dimensions that characterise gender regulation. In this chapter we consider the form or dimensions of peer gender regula- tion in schools and how it is connected to individual student adjustment. First we discuss how gender is regulated in adolescence, with a focus on gender harassment. We then consider prior studies of the role of school harass- ment on student well-being. Drawing from a study of over 1,300 students in California schools, we present an empirical example of adolescents’ percep- tions of their peers’ motivations for gender harassment at school. We assess the link between motivations for harassment and students’ experiences with harassment, perceptions of safety and academic achievement.

Understanding sexuality and gender in school

The ‘doing’ and policing of gender Gender socialisation begins early and continues throughout the life span; however, the most intense period of gender socialisation takes place during puberty. Although infants show little recognition of gender differences, by age three or four, children can tell the sexes apart based on gender significa- tions like clothing or hairstyle. Because these are fungible, children often consider sex to be too. By age five or six children recognise ‘gender constancy’ that sex cannot change, and that specific colours, hair styles and clothing (particularly dresses) are reserved for one sex or the other. Very young chil- dren are aware of appropriate dress, interests and actions for boys compared to girls (Thorne, 1993), either through modelling or through punishment and reward. In this way, gender is not simply something one has or is (an identity), it is an expression or something one does (West and Zimmerman, 1987). Boys and girls ‘do’ different gender-typed activities or have different gender-typed appearances, and are rewarded for gender-consistent behav- iour and punished for gender-inconsistent behaviour. Through this socialisa- tion process, an understanding of gender norms is developed and reinforced. Gender Harassment at School 151

Thus, before adolescence, children recognise masculinity and femininity, cultural gender roles and how these roles align with biological sex (Russell et al., 2012). In adolescence, the pressure to conform to prescribed gender norms is especially heightened (Hill and Lynch, 1983); during the ‘gender intensifica- tion’ period interest in traditional gender norms intensifies, and the belief in them starts to solidify. Complex physiological, cognitive and social changes of puberty produce new motivations for understanding, enacting and regu- lating gender and sexuality norms (Russell et al., 2012). Pressures come from a variety of sources but school is a major context where adolescents experience pressures to conform (e.g., Horn, 2007; Meyer, 2008). Much of the empirical work in this area has been based on qualitative ethnographic descriptions of the peer/school context (Duncan, 1999; Lyng, 2009; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Pascoe, 2007; Renold, 2002; Way, 2011). The regulation of gender norms and expectations in school occurs through the policing of the boundaries of femininity and masculinity, which involves monitoring whether gender expression matches perceived biological sex (Kimmel and Mahler, 2003; Pascoe, 2007). Indeed, one might hypothesise that gender policing is one of the primary mechanisms by which young people internalise traditional gender norms and boundaries. These boundaries frequently have to do with looks or physical appear- ance (e.g. de Bruyn and Cillessen, 2006; Lyng, 2009) or hobbies or inter- ests (e.g. Griffin, 1993; Lyng, 2009). The regulation of gender through the policing of appearances or interests may take on distinct forms for boys and girls, and yet the results are complementary for producing hegemonic masculinity and femininity (Tolman et al., 2003) or heteromasculinity and heterofemininity (Pronger, 1990), a gender norming system that is crit- ical to the conflation of sexuality and gender and to the perpetuation of heteronormativity. Much of the work in this area has been based on qualitative, ethnographic descriptions of peer contexts (Duncan, 1999; Lyng, 2009; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Pascoe, 2007). In a number of studies girls have described how they are expected to focus primarily on their physical appearance and ability to attract the opposite sex (Renold, 2001) and avoid interest in things that might detract from that goal such as sports or school (Renold, 2001, 2002). In contrast, boys describe being expected to show interest in both sports (Griffin, 1993; Nayak and Kehily, 1996) and girls as potential romantic or sexual partners (Mac an Ghaill, 1994) and should avoid appearances or activ- ities that might solicit any question of their masculinity such as drama, art and academic achievement (Way, 2011).

The conflation of sexuality and gender Due to the binds of heteromasculinity in which anything that is not ‘mascu- line’ is by definition ‘feminine’, gender nonconformity means acting ‘femi- nine’ in any way for boys. For girls, however, more flexibility is allowed in 152 Elisabeth Morgan Thompson et al. gender expression (Carr, 2007). Because femininity as a whole is degraded, masculinity is valued (within limits) for girls. Yet in adolescence girls are expected to curtail tomboy ways, primarilyw with the hopes of attracting a suitable heterosexual relationship. In the accounts of the girls and boys who participated in these studies, it is evident that the regulation of their gender expression is inextricably linked to the regulation of their (hetero) sexuality. Gender regulation has to be understood in the context of heteronorma- tivity. A ubiquitous component of gender conformity is expressing interest in the opposite sex (Renold, 2002). The heterosexual imperative for mascu- linity and femininity frequently results in presumptions of non-heterosex- uality for those who do not conform (Pronger, 1990). A ‘homohysteria’ has emerged as gender nonconformity and same-sex sexual interest are conflated (Anderson, 2011); that is, boys who are perceived as un-masculine and girls who are un-feminine in appearances or in interests are commonly perceived as ‘gay’, at least in US culture.

Homophobic harassment: the means of gender regulation Gender norms are frequently regulated through homophobic harassment (D’Augelli et al., 2006) and this kind of harassment is common in schools. Gender harassment has been defined as ‘any behavior, verbal, physical, or psychological, that polices the boundaries of traditional heterosexual gender norms’ (Meyer, 2008, p. 556), including sexual harassment, homophobic harassment and harassment for gender nonconformity. For those who do not conform to gender expectations, the consequences may be serious. Gender nonconforming youth have described beatings, fights and sexual assaults at school as a result of their appearance, actions or interests (Kosciw et al., 2008). Others have described name-calling, jokes, obscene gestures (Renold, 2002), or anti-gay epithets such as ‘dyke’ and ‘fag’ (Kimmel and Mahler, 2003; Pascoe, 2007). Research has shown that popularity in secondary schools comes for girls who are interested in boys and their appearance, and for boys who are interested in girls and competent at sports; those who do not fit these standards are commonly socially excluded (de Bruyn and Cillessen, 2006). While McCormack’s (2012) studies point to a shift in gender regulation in some schools along with new forms of ‘popularity without oppression’ (p. 97) among youth, even in these schools some traditionally dominant dimensions of masculinity remain in place. Across all of these studies, gender regulation occurs through the social reward of popularity for gender conformity. By Meyer’s definition, gender harassment becomes the primary vehicle for imposing gender regulation on all youth. Pascoe (2007) discussed the frequent use of the term ‘fag’ among high school boys as a tool to sanc- tion one another for not performing proper masculinity (which included but was not limited to heterosexuality). Gender nonconformity, then, does not Gender Harassment at School 153 necessarily imply an LGBT identity. Rather, anyone is subject to being called ‘gay’, ‘fag’ or ‘dyke’ when not conforming to appropriate gender norms (Meyer, 2008; Pascoe, 2007), and it is understandable that there is confusion among young people and adults about whether the use of ‘fag’ is a form of gender or sexual orientation harassment, or simply a catch-all put-down that has lost its sexualised meaning (McCormack, 2012).

School harassment and student well-being

Harassment can have dire consequences for youth, and experiences of bias- motivated harassment have proven particularly problematic for student well-being (D’Augelli et al., 2006; Russell et al., 2012; Sinclair et al., 2012). A small body of research has examined the consequences of gender harass- ment specifically, but little attention has focused on the direct relationship between a gender regulating culture and psychological or academic adjust- ment for students. A number of studies, however, have shown that students who face gender-based harassment at school exhibit a number of school- related difficulties, including school avoidance and absence (Lee et al., 1996; Russell et al., 2012) and lower academic performance (Hand and Sanchez, 2000; Russell et al., 2012). Some research has shown that these difficulties are especially pronounced for LGBT or gender nonconforming youth. For example, higher levels of psychological distress have been documented in gender nonconforming sexual-minority men (Skidmore et al., 2006); in both studies, the authors suggest that homophobia and homophobic harass- ment are culprits in students’ distress. Consistent with these findings, one recent study showed that the strong association between childhood gender nonconformity and psychological distress in young adulthood could be fully explained by elevated LGBT-based harassment at school among gender nonconforming student during adolescence (Toomey et al., 2010). Thus, it appears that harassment, rather than gender nonconformity, explained elevated distress. Other studies have shown gender differences in both harassment and school-related adjustment. Specifically, boys report more gender-based harassment (D’Augelli et al., 2006; Kosciw et al., 2008) while girls report more sexual harassment (Lee et al., 1996); girls who exhibit gender noncon- formity, however, may face more harassment from peers (Carr, 2007). In studies of sexual harassment in US schools, the only harassment experience boys reported more frequently compared to girls was being called a ‘fag’ (Hand and Sanchez, 2000; Lee et al., 1996). Furthermore, another study showed that youth report hearing more negative gender-based remarks directed at boys (54 per cent) compared to girls (39 per cent) (Kosciw et al., 2008). Clearly boys and girls experience different levels of gender harass- ment, and these experiences have different implications. Specifically, girls are more likely than boys to avoid school and experience psychological distress 154 Elisabeth Morgan Thompson et al. due to sexual harassment (Lee et al., 1996). Compared to boys, girls’ expe- riences with sexual harassment have especially negative associations with educational outcomes (Hand and Sanchez, 2000). Yet, other research has shown that schools are perceived to be less safe for gender-nonconforming boys than girls (O’Shaughnessy et al., 2004).

Gender regulation: an empirical example

To date, most research on the motivations for school harassment has focused on students’ experiences of sexual orientation harassment and, in doing so, has largely ignored the gendered underpinnings of such harassment. We know little about how gender regulation works among youth, or about the relationships between gender regulation and students’ experiences of harass- ment in schools. Although there have been a number of ethnographic studies of schools as contexts for gender regulation, there have been few large-scale investigations of gender regulation in schools (for studies of the gender climate of schools, see Hand and Sanchez, 2000; Lee et al., 1996); we know of only one study of students’ perceptions of school safety for students who are gender-nonconforming (Toomey et al., 2011). Most accounts describe students’ experiences and focus on how they navigate gender-regulating contexts; less work has examined youths’ understandings of the motives behind gender harassment. We know that there are gender differences in gender regulation, harassment and student well-being. We know little, however, about whether boys and girls differ in their perceptions of gender harassment and how gender harassment predicts school-related adjustment for boys and girls. We draw from a state-wide, school-based survey from California to study the form peer gender harassment takes in schools as well as its association with school-related adjustment. Our first aim was to conduct a large-scale quantitative investigation of students’ perceptions of peers’ motivations for gender harassment. Ethnographic research suggests appearances and inter- ests as the bases for gender harassment of boys and girls. Thus, we intro- duced a measure of students’ perceptions of peers’ motivations for gender harassment (PMGH). Harassment may be driven by the way one looks or acts versus one’s activities or interests. Alternatively, harassment may be gendered, taking forms specific to the target’s gender. An additional possi- bility is that male and female youth may perceive PMGH differently, under- standing and interpreting harassment from gendered vantage points. We start by examining motivations for harassment and then examine its association with personal experiences of harassment due to gender noncon- formity and sexual orientation, safety and achievement. Specifically, we sought to understand whether youth perceive the motivations for harass- ment of their peers as distinct from their own gender nonconformity harass- ment. Finally, we examined differences between boys and girls, and between Gender Harassment at School 155

LGBT and heterosexual youth in their perceptions of PMGH and gender and sexual orientation differences in both harassment experiences and school- related outcomes. The survey included 1,311 middle- and high-school students (ages 12–18; M = 15.74, SD = 1.23) who participated in the 2008 Preventing School Harassment (PSH) survey.2 Participants completed demographic informa- tion, a 14-item scale examining motivations for gender harassment, and several single-item school-related adjustment measures, including experi- ences of harassment based on gender nonconformity and actual or perceived sexual orientation; perceptions of safety at school; and students’ grade-point average (GPA). Details regarding the methods and measures are provided in Appendix A, and additional information is available in other published reports (see Russell et al., 2008).

The form and function of motivations for gender regulation

Drawing from the review of prior in-depth studies in this area and in consul- tation with experts in the field, 14 items were generated to assess students’ perceptions of PMGH. The assessment began with two prompts (one in refer- ence to girls, and one to ‘guys’3): ‘When girls/guys are harassed because they aren’t as feminine/masculine as other girls/guys, it is because ... ’. There were seven items each for male and female gender nonconformity (see Table 9.1). Response options for this scale ranged from 0 (never) to 3 (often). Higher scores indicate perceptions of greater PMGH at school. Factor analyses of the 14 items4 resulted in two distinct components of PMGH–one based on appearances and another based on interests. Appearances included three items: how guys dressed; how guys talked or acted; and how girls dress/wear make-up. Interests also included three items: guys’ concern with grades and studying; girls’ lack of interest in children/families; and girls’ concerns with grades and studying.5 These two dimensions of PMGH are notably resonant with some of the qualitative research regarding daily experiences of gender regulation among youth. Approximately, 60 per cent of students in the study reported frequent appearance-based PMGH in their schools, but only one-third reported frequent interests-based PMGH. Each factor included at least one item pertaining to gender regulation for girls and for boys, implying that gender harassment exists in domains that supersede gender. To verify this we conducted separate tests of the PMGH items for male and female targets and male and female respondents. Appearances and interests consistently emerged as the factors of PMGH. We next assessed the associations between PMGH and students’ personal reports of harassment, safety and achievement at school. PMGH based on appearances and interests are significantly associated with each other and with personal experiences of gender-nonconformity and sexual orientation 156 Elisabeth Morgan Thompson et al.

Table 9.1 Rotated factor loadings, communalities, item means and standard devia- tions, and frequency of endorsement for peers’ motivations for gender harassment (PMGH) scale

When girls/guys are harassed because they aren’t as feminine/masculine as other Appearance Interests girls/guys, it is because ... (α = .80) (α = .80) η2 M SD %

(guys) ... of how they dress .82 .09 .68 1.56 1.04 59.3 (guys) ... of how they talk or act .85 .10 .74 1.93 1.07 72.5 (girls) ... of how they dress, wear .69 .29 .57 1.63 1.09 59.7 make-up, or have really short hair (guys) ... they are too concerned .16 .74 .57 .98 1.00 34.1 with grades and studying (girls) ... they aren’t interested in .25 .76 .65 .91 1.00 29.9 families and children (girls) ... they are too concerned .07 .86 .75 .94 1.03 32.3 with grades and studying (guys) ... they aren’t interested .51 .54 .55 1.12 1.01 37.9 enough in sports (guys) ... they aren’t very .68 .32 .56 1.55 1.07 57.6 interested in girls (guys) ... they are interested in .63 .36 .53 1.33 1.10 47.5 dance, art, and drama (guys) ... they are too small .35 .64 .53 1.26 1.07 45.5 or too short; too fat or too skinny (girls) ... of how they talk or act .69 .39 .63 1.59 1.10 58.9 (girls) ... they aren’t interested .60 .51 .62 1.40 1.09 50.0 enough in boys (girls) ... they are too interested .32 .68 .57 1.06 1.03 37.7 in sports (girls) ... they are too tall or too .36 .68 .59 1.39 1.13 50.0 strong; too fat or too skinny Note: Boldface factor loadings represent the retained items for each respective factor. Response scale ranged from 0 = never to 3 = often. harassment (see Table 9.2). These correlations are small, indicating that PMGH and each form of harassment are distinct constructs. This is not surprising given that PMGH is a report of perceptions of peers’ motives, but harass- ment pertains to personal experience. Yet the results indicate that students who experience more harassment are somewhat more likely to report PMGH based on both appearances and interests. In terms of the other key indicators, experiences of gender nonconformity harassment and sexual orientation harassment were strongly correlated with one another.6 For school safety, perceptions of PMGH based on both appear- ances and interests were significantly associated with lower feelings of safety. Gender Harassment at School 157

Neither PMGH nor personal harassment experiences were associated with students’ reports of their GPA (no further analyses were conducted for GPA). We found strong gender and sexual orientation differences in the associa- tions between PMGH and harassment and safety (see Table 9.3). Girls were more likely to perceive PMGH based on appearance than boys, whereas boys were marginally more likely to perceive PMGH based on interests than girls. Girls’ reports suggest they fared better than boys on harassment and safety, reporting less harassment and feeling safer at school. Across all measures, sexual-minority youth perceived more gender regulation based on appear- ances and interests, reported more harassment due to gender nonconformity and sexual orientation, and reported feeling less safe compared to hetero- sexual youth.

Table 9.2 Bivariate correlations between motivations for gender harassment subscales, experiences of harassment and school-related adjustment

Gender Sexual Interests nonconformity orientation PMGH harassment harassment Safety

Appearances PMGH .39*** .20*** .25*** –.07** Interests PMGH – .20*** .21*** –.21*** Gender nonconformity – .56*** –.12*** harassment Sexual orientation – –.18*** harassment Safety –

** p ≤ .01, *** p ≤ .001.

Table 9.3 T-tests comparing mean differences by gender and sexual orientation in motivations for gender harassment, experiences of harassment and school-related adjustment

Sexual Male Female Heterosexual Minority

M (SD) M (SD) t M (SD) M (SD)

Appearances PMGH 1.57 (.96) 1.80 (.85) –4.56*** 1.60 (.90) 1.96 (.83) Interests PMGH 1.00 (.87) .91 (.84) 1.72† .90 (.84) 1.07 (.89) Gender .54 (.95) .25 (.70) 6.31*** .19 (.63) .78 (1.05) nonconformity harassment Sexual orientation .61 (1.03) .39 (.88) 4.05*** .18 (.64) 1.22 (1.16) harassment Safety 2.69 (.89) 2.86 (.87) –3.46*** 2.87 (.86) 2.61 (.90)

Note: Males n = 512; females n = 799. † p ≤ .10, *** p ≤ .001. 158 Elisabeth Morgan Thompson et al.

Table 9.4 Final regression model betas and standard errors for interactions between PMGH, gender, experiences of harassment and school safety

Gender Sexual nonconformity orientation School Predictors harassment harassment safety

Appearances PMGH .06 (.04) .01 (.03) .04 (.04) Interests PMGH .14*** (.05) .08** (.03) –.10* (.05) Gender –.21*** (.05) –.05 (.04) .16** (.05) Sexual orientation .24*** (.07) .84*** (.07) –.14* (.06) Appearances × interests – – .01 (.04) Appearances × gender –.02 (.06) – –.10† (.06) Appearances × sexual orientation .32*** (.08) .27*** (.05) – Interests × gender –.18* (.06) – –.06 (.06) Interests × sexual orientation .03 (.08) – – Gender × sexual orientation –.02 (.09) –.26*** (.09) – Appearances × interests × gender – – –.14* (.06) Appearances × interests × sexual ––– orientation Appearances × gender × sexual –.37*** (.11) – – orientation Interests × gender × sexual .21* (.11) – – orientation Appearances × interests × gender × ––– sexual orientation Gender nonconformity harassment – .73*** (.05) –.02 (.07) Sexual orientation harassment .64*** (.05) – –.20** (.07) Safety –.01 (.02) –.08 (.02) – AIC 2798.6 2890.2 3310.1 BIC 2801.3 2892.9 3312.8

Note: Unstandardised b (SE) are presented after controlling for race/ethnicity, response pattern, and format of survey; models predicting school safety also controlled for experiences of gender nonconformity and sexual orientation harassment. Only the highest significant order interaction effects are shown. * p ≤ .05, ** p ≤ .01, *** p ≤ .001.

Our final step tested the joint influence of PMGH on school harassment and safety, while taking into consideration that these associations might be dependent on students’ gender and sexual orientation (as well as the intersections of gender and sexual orientation, because the link between PMGH and harassment and safety might differ, e.g. for sexual minority boys compared to sexual minority girls).7 Results are shown in Table 9.4. Sexual minority boys who indicated that both appearances and interests are strong motivations for gender harassment among peers at their school also reported experiencing the most harassment for gender nonconformity (see Figures 9.1 and 9.2). Further, sexual-minority girls and heterosexual boys who perceived interests as frequent motives for gender harassment Gender Harassment at School 159

3

2.5

2 Heterosexual Boys

1.5 Sexual Minority Boys Heterosexual Girls 1 Sexual Minority Girls

0.5 Gender Nonconformity Harassment Gender Nonconformity 0 Low Appearance High Appearance

Figure 9.1 Plot of predicted values for the appearance × gender × sexual orientation interaction on experiences of gender nonconformity harassment

3

2.5

2 Heterosexual Boys

1.5 Sexual Minority Boys Heterosexual Girls 1 Sexual Minority Girls

0.5 Gender Nonconformity Harassment Gender Nonconformity 0 Low Interests High Interests

Figure 9.2 Plot of predicted values for the interests × gender × sexual orientation interaction on experiences of gender nonconformity harassment also reported experienced experiencing heightened gender nonconformity harassment (see Figure 9.2). Not surprisingly, sexual minorities reported more sexual orientation harassment than heterosexuals (see Figure 9.3), and this was particularly true for sexual minorities who perceived frequent appearance-related gender regulation at their schools. Sexual-minority boys 160 Elisabeth Morgan Thompson et al.

3

2.5

2

Heterosexuals 1.5 Sexual Minorities

1

0.5 Sexual Orientation Harassment Sexual

0 Low Appearance High Appearance

Figure 9.3 Plot of predicted values for the appearance × sexual orientation interaction on experiences of sexual orientation harassment

3

2.5

2

Heterosexuals 1.5 Sexual Minority

1

0.5 Sexual Orientation Harassment Sexual

0 Males Females

Figure 9.4 Plot of predicted values for the gender × sexual orientation interaction on experiences of sexual orientation harassment also reported the most sexual orientation harassment (see Figure 9.4). Not surprisingly, sexual minorities felt less safe at school compared to heterosex- uals overall. There was an additional complex interaction between gender and PMGH based on both appearances and interests. Specifically, girls who perceived greater appearance-based and interests-based gender regulation felt the least safe (see Figure 9.5). Further, girls’ feelings of safety seemed Gender Harassment at School 161

4

3.5

3 Boys, Low Interests

2.5 Boys, High Interests Girls, Low Interests 2

Feelings of Safety Feelings Girls, High Interests

1.5

1 Low Appearance High Appearance

Figure 9.5 Plot of predicted values for the appearance × interests × gender interaction on feelings of safety at school

protected when they perceived appearances or interests as less frequent motivators for gender harassment. For boys, PMGH based on appearances made little difference, but those who perceived high gender harassment based on interests reported feeling less safe in school.8

Reflections and discussion

Prior studies have suggested a number of possibilities for the form gender harassment might take. On one hand, it could be organised by gender; on the other hand, domains of gender harassment could operate regardless of gender (de Bruyn and Cillessen, 2006; Griffin, 1993; Renold, 2002). We found two perceived motives behind peer gender harassment that were consistent across the gender of participants, one based on appearances and the other on interests. It could be that these perceptions of peers’ motivations for gender harassment are simply indicators of personal expe- rience, yet we found that perceptions of PMGH were distinct from reports of personal harassment experiences. PMGH was associated with different outcomes by both gender and sexual orientation. Harassment and lack of safety were higher for youth who perceived high gender harassment based on both appearances and interests; this was especially true for sexual minority boys. These findings are consistent with prior findings that boys experience more gender nonconformity harassment than girls (Kosciw et al., 2008; Lee et al., 1996), often related to their academic inter- ests (Hand and Sanchez, 2000; Lyng, 2009), and that there are negative 162 Elisabeth Morgan Thompson et al. consequences (O’Shaughnessy et al., 2004; Swearer et al., 2008). We did not, however, measure participants’ perceptions of their own gender nonconformity, and these findings may be different for youth who actu- ally identify themselves as gender nonconforming (e.g., Toomey et al., 2010). Further research should examine the relationship between one’s gender nonconformity, perceptions of PMGH and school-related adjust- ment in order to better understand if and how gender nonconforming youth experience gender regulation. Sexual minority youth who perceived high appearances-based PMGH reported more experiences of sexual orientation harassment, and sexual minority boys were most likely to report experiencing this type of harass- ment. A number of studies support the finding that males report more sexual orientation-based harassment at school than females (D’Augelli et al., 2006; O’Shaughnessy et al., 2004; Toomey et al., 2010), and several studies have shown that both boys and girls who do not conform to gender norms in appearance are more subject to homophobic harassment (Pascoe, 2007). It may be that appearances (rather than interests) are the primary factor for others’ presumptions regarding sexual orientation; future research could explore this possibility. Girls reported lowered feelings of safety at school when they perceived both high appearances- and interests-based gender regulation. Boys, on the other hand, reported the lowest feelings of safety when they perceived high interests-based gender regulation. While research has shown that gender nonconforming boys feel less safe in school than gender nonconforming girls (O’Shaughnessy et al., 2004), some research has shown that gender nonconforming girls experience a shaming process among their peers, which can erode girls’ sense of self-worth and confidence (Carr, 2007; Renold, 2001). Girls who are subjected to harassment are more likely to experience psychological and other academic-related distress compared to boys (Hand and Sanchez, 2000; Lee et al., 1996). Given these findings, future research should assess multiple forms of safety, including psycho- logical, emotional and physical safety, in association with forms of gender regulation. Perceptions of gender harassment were unrelated to academic achievement in this study, though some research has established a connection between harassment and student grades (O’Shaughnessy et al., 2004). Because PMGH was distinct from gender and sexual orientation harassment, future research should probe the indirect associations between PMGH and academic achieve- ment, perhaps through feelings of safety, experiences of harassment or other school-related adjustment variables. Finally, more research is needed to repli- cate these results, and future work could examine whether the two PMGH factors appear across different populations, in different contexts or at distinct developmental stages. Gender Harassment at School 163

Conclusions

Adolescence is a critical period and school is a critical context where gender regulation is especially pronounced (Hill and Lynch, 1983; Kimmel and Mahler, 1983; Pascoe, 2007). Failure to conform to gender norms in this time/context can result in multiple negative consequences for youth. Even youth who are gender conforming may experience or fear some degree of gender policing and/or harassment by peers. Studies continue to show that the vast majority of students are subject to some form of gender harass- ment at some time (sexual harassment, homophobic epithets, etc.), that the vast majority of such attacks are witnessed by other students and that they are a regular school occurrence. Thus, gender harassment is not a series of isolated occurrences, but rather part of the fabric of adolescent school experience: the way students learn to be boys and girls, or the meaning of being hetero- or homo-sexual. For boys harassing other boys is an important sign of manliness and (for those at the top) dominating other boys, particularly weaker ones, is part of establishing public masculinity. As in other confined environments (like the military or prison), harass- ment becomes an ongoing, daily presence that can determines friendships, dress, behaviour, interests, play activities, unsafe areas to avoid and so forth. Until we address gender regulation as a structural issue rather than a social aberration, we will fail to appreciate its ubiquity or to remediate it. Ultimately, scholarship in this area has implications for school and district policies, as well as educators, administrators and students. This body of work highlights the need to address gender regulation through education and awareness in schools. Without such efforts, the implications for nega- tive school-related adjustment are apparent, both for individual students but also the schools and districts that are charged with serving them and keeping them safe and in school.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge support for this research from a grant to Russell from the Ford Foundation, and from the Fitch Nesbitt Endowment of the Norton School.

Appendix A: Methods, Measures and Analyses

PSH sampling was designed to reach sexual-minority youth (27%) and their heterosexual allies. Approximately equal numbers of sexual-minority youth identified as bisexual (11.4%) or gay/lesbian (10.7%); 5% identified as queer, questioning or had multiple/write-in responses. Female participants were slightly overrepresented (61%). The sample was racially/ethnically diverse: 164 Elisabeth Morgan Thompson et al.

13% Asian/Pacific Islander, 10% black/African American, 26% Hispanic or Latina/o, 35% white/Caucasian and 17% multi-racial. Participants reported the number of times in the past year on school property that they were harassed or bullied because they weren’t ‘as “mascu- line” as other guys or “feminine” as other girls’ (gender nonconformity) and because they were ‘gay, lesbian, or bisexual or someone thought [they] were’ (actual or perceived sexual orientation) on a scale from 0 (never) to 3 (four or more times). Participants responded to the item ‘I feel safe at school’ on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree) and reported their academic achievement on a scale from 4.0 (mostly A’s) to 0.0 (mostly F’s). A missing value analysis in SPSS indicated significant missing data at random (67%). Multiple imputation based on an expectation maximisation algorithm was used to impute missing values using the R package Amelia II (King et al., 2001). Final analyses were a series of regressions using SAS proc mixed to control for school-level effects with gender and sexual orientation as moderators between PMGH and other constructs. After examining the results of each fully specified model, we refined each model to retain only the highest order signifi- cant interaction(s), and assessed model fit using Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) where smaller numbers indi- cate better fit (Hu and Bentler, 1995). Continuous predictors were centred in each model and predicted values were graphed to illustrate statistically signifi- cant interaction effects. In the figures, low and high values of predictors repre- sent one standard deviation above and below the mean, and the range on the outcome variable (y-axis) is truncated for easier visual interpretation.

Notes

1. In several studies McCormack (2011, 2012) has argued that in some contemporary schools masculinity is no longer regulated specifically in terms of homophobia, misogyny and aggressiveness: boys retain hierarchies of status related to mascu- linity, but subordination and marginalisation of others are not always primary factors in masculinity status. 2. This study recruited students through high school GSAs, and thus the participants may be more sensitive to recognising or reporting gender-based harassment in their school and may be more attuned to students’ motivations for such harass- ment. However, not all who participated were GSA members. 3. The survey items were pilot-tested with high school students, who preferred the language of ‘guys’ to ‘boys’ or ‘males.’ 4. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to identify conceptually meaningful categories. Factorability of the correlation matrices was assessed using Bartlett’s (1954) test of sphericity (χ2(91) = 10872.68, p < .001), as well as the Kaiser- Meyer-Olkin (Kaiser, 1974) measure of sampling adequacy (.92). Since the sample size permitted, a principal components factor analysis with Varimax rotation was conducted. Both the Kaiser-Guttman retention criteria of eigenvalues greater than 1.0 and the scree plot (Catell, 1966) suggested a two-factor solution, which closely Gender Harassment at School 165

corresponded to theory and provided the best simple structure with the fewest cross-loadings. An iterative process of removing the highest cross-loaded items and re-rotating yielded a final solution that retained six items with factor loadings greater than .70 and cross-loadings less than .30. Communalities for the 6-item scale ranged from .57 to .81. The appearances factor accounted for 49.63% of the variance (α = .80) and interests accounted for 22.31% of the variance (α = .80). Students were more likely to perceive motivations for gender regulation based on appearances (M = 1.71, SD = .90) than interests (M = .94, SD = .86, t(1310) = 28.40, p < .001. We conducted EFAs to examine the seven boy and seven girl items sepa- rately and examined the whole scale separately for male and female participants: Two factors consistently emerged and were conceptually equivalent to the appear- ances and interests factors. 5. Several items were dropped because they overlapped with both the appearances and interests subscales. 6. Gender nonconformity and sexual orientation harassment were more strongly correlated with each other than PMGH was with either type of harassment

(Zdiffs > –9.64, ps < .001). 7. We tested fully specified regression models that included the centered appear- ances and interests subscales of the PMGHS, gender, and all possible 2-way, 3-way, and 4-way interactions (appearance × interests × gender × sexual orienta- tion, Table 9.4). 8. Harassment at school was a strong predictor of safety, yet the interaction patterns for the two forms of PMGH with gender and sexual orientation were present even after controlling for personal experiences of harassment. We view this as additional evidence that the forms of PMGH are important constructs for understanding gender regulation in schools above and beyond harassment and bullying.

References

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Suggestions for further reading

Meyer, E.J. (2009) Gender, bullying, and harassment: strategies to end sexism and homo- phobia in schools (New York, N.Y.: Teachers College Press). Rivers, I. (2011) Homophobic bullying: research and theoretical perspectives (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press). Savin-Williams, R.C. (2005) The new gay teenager (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 10 What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? Schooling, Law and Limitations of Race-Neutral Reforms Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran

Education has entered a new era of race relations under the conditions of neo-liberalism. Particularly within a US race discourse, promoting critical race understanding is challenged by the dominant view that race problems are not only symptoms of market, or capitalist, relations, but are equally solvable by the very same market mechanism through increased deregula- tion and choices. This chapter examines the detours around confronting race when personal choice and market efficiency are the ruling ideology for social maladies, such as racism in schools. We present the uptake of race within a neo-liberal worldview, its understanding of collective responsibil- ities for social inequality and the contradictions that are produced when racio-political problems are defined through race-neutral justifications. Sociologically speaking, the role of the law has been central in under- standing social relations. Within Durkheimian functionalism, the law repre- sents the kind of organising principle that produces an order where citizens understand what is expected of them. Where the division of labour slots people into their respective functions, the law becomes critical in enforcing an organic solidarity based on clear expectations and consensus, thus coun- tering the effects of social alienation, or anomie. In Marxist conflict theory, the law is not autonomous from relations of production and often serves the imperatives of capitalism to extract surplus value from workers, protected by the legal apparatus, thus making exploitation ‘lawful’. Here alienation takes on a different meaning, as in capitalism’s ability to alienate people from their labour process, product, self and others. Last, Weberian sociol- ogy’s focus on legal-technical rationale represents the latest development of legitimate forms of social domination wherein charisma and birthright give way to the race for credentials as a way to control the means of bureaucracy, and therefore power. Weber was not quite as sanguinary as Durkheim and the German predicted alienation in the form of increasing social disenchant- ment through the hyper-bureaucratization of society, captured by the phrase

168 What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? 169

‘iron cages’. Clearly, education is implicated in each of these sociological theories. We need only the example of the ‘hidden curriculum’ to suggest the importance of social integration for the first, the problem of students’ tacit acceptance of competition and individualism for the second, and the seemingly endless contest for credentials beyond academic skills for the third. The law arguably facilitates these orientations, at least procedurally and maximally through enforcement. More recently, the sociology of education has gained appreciation of the way that the law not only creates but also reproduces race relations. To signal one but obvious example, slavery was a legally protected racialised institu- tion. Schooling was prohibited for slaves, who often conducted their studies underground or in secrecy: Frederick Douglass was one such example, a literate and learned slave. Currently, blacks and other minorities are incor- porated into the educational apparatus, or what Althusser (1971) famously called an ‘ideological state apparatus’ (ISA). That is, as opposed to the ‘repres- sive state apparatus’ (RSA), such as the military or police, schools function through ideology, or the process of inculcating values necessary for the repro- duction of capitalist social relations. Although Althusser focused his analysis on class relations (see also Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Lareau, 2000, 2003; Willis, 1977), he is instructive for a critical soci- ology of education and race insofar as he provides a language of reproduc- tion, or, in our analysis, the school’s ability to create racialised subjects (see Leonardo, 2005, 2007, 2009). With respect to this chapter, the following list is a summary of the prerequisite cases that we explicate below.

M Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): ‘separate but equal’; legal creation of black and white schools.
M Brown v. Board of Education (1954): outlawed de jure segregation, overturned Plessy; ‘separate inherently unequal’; begins era of school integration.
M Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978): racial quota systems to ensure student body diversity deemed unconstitutional, such as those used by the University of California.
M Grutter (2003): critical mass of diversity constitutional, but only within a specific case by case context; must be narrowly tailored and of last resort to satisfy strict scrutiny; race may be considered as one factor in a multitude of factors.
M Parents Involved (2007): race as a tiebreaker in school assignment policy is unconstitutional; Chief Justice Roberts famously writes, ‘The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race’ (p. 41).

In this chapter, we trace the precursor of economic neo-liberalism through colourblind legal rationale, or its political cognate. This innovation was made possible by and large by the arrival of critical race theory, or the analysis of 170 Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran law as a racialised text (see Bell, 1992; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Lopez, 2006a). In landmark cases, such as Plessy v. Ferguson and later Brown v. Board of Education, we find the prerequisites of race-neutral policy, which support or shore up its current economic form. We argue that neo-liberalism creates structures for new forms of racial discrimination through its emphasis on personal choice, downplaying of state intervention, and discrediting of the social, rather than individual, basis of racial inequality. In the end, rather than confronting racism, neo-liberalism further disguises and reinforces it. In the USA, with the end of the transparency of racial power under enslave- ment and the Jim Crow, or legalized segregation, that followed it, sociolo- gists have called the period of post-Civil Rights race relations as the era of colourblindness (Bonilla-Silva, 2003) or laissez-faire racism (Bobo and Smith, 1998), where racism becomes harder to detect under the assumption that the nation functions under a post-racial regime. Its economic form goes by the name of neo-liberalism, which downplays structural inequalities, such as racism. Its remedy for unequal life chances is deregulation, emphasis on individual choice and expansion of market mechanisms. But as we argue below, neo-liberal economics owes some debt to decades of race-neutral legal precedents and cannot be understood without them. In law, the seeds of economic neo-liberalism in the USA were planted, later to be sowed when globalisation became the favoured solution to national recession. Valuable lessons about colourblind policy from landmark legal cases signal the coming of economic neo-liberalism and its deracialisation of race contestation. As with the focus on economic choice, colourblind legal rationale opens the door to addressing racism by downplaying the struc- turing effects of race. Ironic as it may sound, colourblind jurisprudence’s answer to racism is not anti-racist policy but rather, individualism and race neutrality. Subjecting race-based cases to ‘strict scrutiny’, the US Supreme Court uses a mélange of arguments, from common sense racial understand- ings to scientific standards of racial classification, to discredit racial claims about discrimination. These legal sleights-of-hand are most obvious in the Thind and Ozawa cases, about which we have more to say below. In the field of education, Plessy v. Ferguson establishes the ‘separate but equal’ ruling, a metaphor of its time when de jure segregation was the law of the land and education did not escape its long arms. Here, racial power was transparent and justifications for its upkeep were equally overt. However, even when its opposite arrived in Brown v. Board of Education, which made separate inher- ently unequal and made school integration a priority in educational policy, we see that the Court could not simply institute race-conscious correctives because of its colourblind tendencies. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) offered the USA, via the institution of public education, an opportunity to address its racial history of white supremacy. The numerous acts of white domination (see Leonardo, 2004) throughout US history are too great to be undone by one judicial manoeuver What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? 171 concerning public education; nevertheless, an opportunity to end immedi- ately de jure segregation in public schools undoubtedly represented a water- shed opportunity to address one specific act of white domination. However, as Bell (2004) has observed, the legacy of Brown some half-century later has represented little more than an empty symbolic gesture. That is, revered as a landmark case ending Plessy v. Ferguson’s ‘separate but equal’, Brown did little in the way of actually ending segregation and providing quality education to children of colour, two apparently fundamental goals of Brown. Today, teachers, administrators and school districts continue to strive for desegrega- tion and quality education in US public schools, a campaign aligned with Brown’s promise. Unfortunately, the battle to end segregation and ensure a quality education for disadvantaged students is resisted by an opposition that all but dismisses the significance of racial subjugation and its centu- ries-old effect on educational chances and outcomes. To be clear, opposing racially conscious school policies should by defi- nition dismiss the significance of race. However, the political struggle for the implementation of race-conscious school policies becomes compli- cated when those who deny the significance of race enjoy the backing of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court (see Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978; Grutter, 2003; Parents Involved, 2007). Countering race-based discrimination with non-structural understandings and solutions comes with its own difficulties, enforcement of the law being one of them. As a result, although administrators, districts and universities continue to tailor school policies designed to ameliorate the historical effects of racism in society, the most important struggle is not how schools can go about ameliorating the material consequences of race, but more fundamentally, whether considerations of race have any place in educational policy at all. This is the sticking point of Brown within a decidedly colourblind era. It came with the unfortunate consequence of not only discrediting racism but the structuring principle of race as well. Educators do not have to look too far to discover how politico-legal prec- edents affect economic developments. Enter the opposition and its market fundamentalist solutions. As the evangelical version of legal doctrine, neo- liberal economics strike a chord with the public imagination. Especially during times of financial crisis, the economics of daily life, at once divorced from a deeper engagement with legal development in everyday conscious- ness yet, as we argue, fundamentally implicated by it, is subject to the basest of a ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality. It deals a blow to race-consciousness, perceived not only as an inefficient obsession but a distraction to national well-being. Only decades after attempts to build affirmative action social policies, race-based institutional analyses and confronting centuries of legally sanctioned white domination, the USA begins dismantling the victo- ries gained in the Civil Rights Movement and its precursors. The contem- porary impasse over race-conscious school policies mirrors the struggle for 172 Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran enforcement of school desegregation immediately after Brown. The similari- ties are not insignificant. Furthermore, the modus operandi of both oppo- sitions, i.e. against Brown’s enforcement and today’s race-conscious school policies, are strikingly similar. Neither one addresses directly the problem at hand. Rather, both oppositions advocate for policies that result in a racial- ised construction of society while denying that race has any meaningful significance in producing racialised outcomes. Brown’s opposition and today’s market-based school reformers offer a sobering glimpse that reveals exactly the ‘appropriate’ schooling arrange- ment when it comes to eradicating de facto segregation and ensuring equi- table educational opportunities. Brown’s detractors deployed various tactics and arguments to resist desegregating schools (Bell, 2004). The cumulative goal was to continue preventing children of colour from attending tradi- tionally white-only schools, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling. Similarly, market fundamentalists opposed to race-conscious school policies argue that considerations of race have no place in a post-Brown, colourblind society. This argument sidesteps the very impetus that leads scholars, policymakers and educators to implement race-conscious school policies: a racialised society that produces segregated schools and unequal educational outcomes is still in effect. There is something awry here. Although both sides of the issue fight the same battle, albeit for completely different reasons, market- based approaches attempt to remedy race-related issues such as segregation and inequitable schools by ironically dismissing the significance of race. Yet, as Gotanda (1995) observes with respect to law, it only accomplishes this move by recognising the significance of race to begin with. In other words, neo-liberal policy and colourblind legal doctrine may only abandon race on the dance floor by first dancing with it.

The continuing significance of Brown

The fundamental issue in Brown was whether or not ‘segregation of chil- dren in public schools [is justified] solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group equal educational opportunities’ (Bell, 2004). The then director of the NAACP’s legal staff, Thurgood Marshall, had forced the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren to answer to the consti- tutionality of public school segregation against the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, Brown was not the first case dealing with public education and segregation that came before the Supreme Court. The NAACP brought several cases to the Supreme Court petitioning for the admissions of black plaintiffs into all-white, state-run graduate schools. Instead of directly addressing the constitutionality of ‘separate but equal’ established under Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the court in these earlier cases took a minimalist approach. In Sweatt v. Painter (1950), Sweatt was a black What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? 173 law student who was denied admission into the white-only University of Texas Law School pursuant to the state’s policy on racial segregation. Sweatt petitioned the court invoking Plessy’s ‘separate but equal’ doctrine because at the time of his application, 1946, the state of Texas did not have a black law school. As a response, the University of Texas established a black-only law school in Houston, for which not a single black applicant applied. The state Regents then created a four-room temporary School of Law of the Texas State University for Negroes in Austin for Mr. Sweatt, again without a single applicant. However, the Supreme Court ruled that a quantitative and quali- tative difference existed between the white-only law school and the newly established black law school. On characteristics such as student population, number of faculty, size of library and access to facilities, the Court held that although black and white students were separate, the law schools were clearly not equal. In these earlier cases such as that of Mr. Sweatt, the Court never directly addressed the constitutionality of ‘separate but equal’. Therefore, in the case of Mr. Sweatt where there was clearly not an ‘equal’ alternative to the white- only University of Texas Law school, the Court ordered the University of Texas to admit him into its ranks. Thus, ‘separate but equal’ was upheld because the Court routinely skirted the constitutional question and instead narrowly granted relief of admissions to black plaintiffs. The result of this minimalist judicial approach allowed racial segregation to continue under Plessy’s ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, meaning that state officials had to provide separate accommodations for blacks at best, and accept individual black plaintiffs into its all white institutions at worst. However, these small isolated concessions meant that racial segregation across all spheres of US society was still legal and accepted. The four desegregation cases consolidated under Brown were carefully orchestrated as a direct result of the Supreme Court skirting the constitu- tionality of segregation in previous cases. Finally with a resounding opinion in the affirmative, Chief Justice Warren delivered the majority opinion of the court in Brown, stating that to segregate children ‘from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone’ (Brown, 1954, p. 494; italics added). Therefore, ‘in the field of public education, the doctrine of sepa- rate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal’ (p. 495). With this unequivocal opinion that segregation violated non-white students’ constitutional rights under the equal protection clause, segregation was thus outlawed. In declaring segregation unconstitutional, the concept of freedom via the equal protection clause had finally moved from the confines of the political sphere into the organisation of society, allowing children equal educational opportunities. As we now know, it was not as simple as that. 174 Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran

Understandably, lawyers and activists at the NAACP were overjoyed by the Court’s opinion in Brown. However, one of the chief architects of Brown, Thurgood Marshall, ominously told his staff, ‘you fools go ahead and have your fun, but we ain’t begun to work yet’ (cited in Bell, 2004, p. 14). With clear hindsight of history, Marshall’s prophetic words to his staff were more than a warning of the arduous road ahead, but instead an accurate commentary on the historical black experience. An often-overlooked fact of Brown, perhaps because of its hallowed place in civil rights history, is that although the Court ruled segregation unconstitutional, it refused to offer immediate remedy despite earlier precedents when the courts found viola- tions of individual constitutional rights. The remedy of desegregation, the Court believed, was too complicated and dependent on local conditions. Therefore recognising the wide sweeping nature of its opinion, the Court postponed its decree of the issue of relief to further hear arguments from attorney generals and state officials to the manner of implementation. Bell (1987) argues that the Supreme Court’s second decision on the issue of relief known as Brown II (see Brown, 1955) essentially made its first decision more symbolic than real. Although the Court had answered the constitutionality of segregation, it did not know how to undo the current institutional arrangement protected by ‘separate but equal.’ The Court rejected the NAACP’s request immediately to order schools to desegregate. Instead, the Court relegated the manner and process of desegregation to lower district courts and municipalities at the request of attorney generals and state governments. These were the very same district courts, municipalities, attorney generals and state governments who, only a year before, had vehemently defended the constitutionality of segregation. Now, the Court was leaving the burden of desegregation in the hands of those who, from the beginning, were in favour of separate schools. Even more disheartening to desegregationists, the language of compliance to the desegregation mandate issued in Brown II was frustratingly ambiguous and never concretely defined. The Court allowed local school districts and municipalities to ‘request additional time’, exercise ‘good faith compliance’ and begin the process of desegregation ‘at the earliest practicable date’ (1955, p. 300). Furthermore, all processes and manners related to the admission of non-white children into formerly segregated schools were to proceed ‘with all deliberate speed.’ By allowing people who were always committed to segregation first, to dictate the terms of relief, then second, to oversee imple- mentation of relief, segregationists were given complete liberty to interpret ‘all deliberate speed’ as never. Brown II was a disaster for the dream of desegregation and equal educa- tional opportunity, thereby making the first Brown more symbolic than real. The ‘work left to do’ that Justice Marshall had predicted was in fact a forecast for the necessary advocacy required to counter the work by segregationists intended to undermine drastically the potential of Brown to end segregation What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? 175 and provide equal education. The advocacy work of committed segregation- ists to postpone relief and turn what was potentially an end to desegrega- tion into an opportunity to further segregation is what Polanyi (1954) calls the exercise of ‘bad freedom’. Collectively, for desegregationists Brown and Brown II are examples of what Polanyi (1954) describes as mere pittance of liberty for people who ultimately use their democratic rights in vain in an attempt to wrestle the fullness of freedom from ‘those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing’ (p. 258). As a result of Brown II, which on the one hand clearly allowed for additional time while failing to provide a concrete definition for the legal requirement of ‘all deliberate speed’, the freedom of equal educational opportunities became, in Polanyi’s words, ‘appurtenance of privilege, tainted at the source’ (1954, p. 257).

The birth of neo-liberal markets

The downfall of Brown has coincided with the rise of a political ideology: neo- liberalism and market based advocacy. According to David Harvey (2005),

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an insti- tutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade (p. 2).

Taking ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental and central to values of civilisation, Harvey (2005) argues the founding figures of neo-liberalism, such as Hayek and Friedman, appealed ‘to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit’ (p.5). Furthermore, these values gain increasing acceptance when individuals or dissident groups are threatened by state violence. Here, the political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom attain common sense uptake in society. No longer are dignity and freedom mere concepts, they become political weapons of advocacy and resistance. Therefore, as Harvey reminds us, when the ideals come down to earth in relation to some social process, for example, economic downturns, they find social meaning. The neo-liberal movement’s ability to establish freedom as fundamental to its advocacy is a major reason for its hegemonic ascendance. Our argument is that neo-liberal economic policies have to be taken as a package with the courts’ colourblind rationale. In other words, the first finds its technical legitimacy in the latter. Symbiotically, the second finds its popular acceptance in the first. A major avenue of political advocacy is when conservative and right- leaning privately funded think tanks, foundations and research institutes engage the Supreme Court via amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs in support and continuance of a colourblind jurisprudence. Although 176 Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran progressive foundations and think tanks engage the Supreme Court in cases on race and education, their methodological approaches are in stark contrast from one another. It is this difference, discussed further below, that result in what Dimitriadis (2010) calls the disconnectedness of market approaches from the lives, concerns and needs of the people who inhabit the educa- tional system.

Multiple advocates of freedom

Harvey (2005) reminds educators about the difficulty of idealist conceptions of rights and justice, which hide their connection to social processes that make them intelligible. In highlighting the connection of idealist concep- tions and their social processes, Harvey points to the importance of polit- ical advocacy and its influence on the civil process that converts idealism into institutional action. Harvey utilises Polanyi’s discussion of multiple freedoms to describe this process further. The political process advocating for competing ideals of freedom inherently creates tension, what Polanyi (1954) calls a contradiction in the meaning of freedom, one bad and the other good. In the former, Polanyi describes ‘the freedom to exploit one’s fellow’, ‘freedom to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit’ or worse, the freedom to profit from public disasters secretly engi- neered for private profit (1954, p. 256). However, Polanyi also describes what he calls a highly prized freedom, a freedom ‘not only for the few, but for all ... extending far beyond the narrow confines of the political sphere into the intimate organization of society itself’ (p. 256). As the Supreme Court’s judicial history shows (e.g., Brown, Parents Involved, Grutter), the Court has been an influential civic institution regulating which competing expressions of freedom are accepted and practiced in civil society. The Brown case is a quintessential example of an attempt on the part of desegregationists to extend freedom beyond the confines of the political sphere into the daily organisation of society, such as public education. However, market-based approaches to school policy have impeded the full promise of Polanyi’s highly prized freedom to reach public educa- tion. Many authors have written about the emergence of market ideology (Harvey, 2003; Stiglitz, 2006 ; Giroux, 2003; Klein, 2007). Beyond Harvey’s theoretical definition discussed earlier, market-based policies have produced ‘wide scale profiteering in key industries’, coupled with ‘massive concentra- tions of wealth and growing economic inequalities, prompting many to call this the new “gilded age”’ (Dimitriadis, 2010, p. 77). Furthermore, when criticisms are levied against the economic and political shifts associated with market ideology, neo-liberalism has attained such a hegemonic status that its defence against sharp criticism is to shift dialogue further towards a more fundamental application of market systems as a form of evange- lism. Within the ‘theater of cruelty’ known as neo-liberalism, ‘everything is What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? 177 either for sale or is plundered for profit’ (Giroux, 2010, p. 54). At the same time that it reminds citizens to consume reality, it encourages consumers to forget history and relations of power. Here, market economics emerges and is elevated as a completely autonomous discipline, free from other disciplines, sciences and social concern. In referencing the Chicago School of Economics that Milton Friedman led for more than three decades, Klein (2007) argues that market ideology was as idealistic as any meta-narrative. Additionally, Klein observes:

Like all fundamental faiths, Chicago school economics is, for its true believers, a closed loop. The starting premise is that the free market is a perfect scientific system, one in which individuals, acting on their own self interested desires, create the maximum benefits for all. It follows ineluctably that if something is wrong within a free-market economy – high inflation or soaring unemployment – it has to be that the market is not truly free. There must be some interference, some distortion in the system. The Chicago solution is always the same: a stricter and more complete application of the fundamentals. (p. 51)

The conservative Court’s judicial colourblindness has an uncanny resem- blance to how Klein, Dimitriadis, Harvey, and others (Stiglitz, 2006; Giroux, 2003) have described the characteristics and nature of market ideology. From the perspective of a colourblind jurisprudence, the Constitution is blind to social and material history produced by racial stratification. Judicial colour- blindness signalled a paradigmatic shift where the Court would approach race as an issue of declining significance at best and one whose material consequence is a product of ‘personal choices’ at worst. This sounds uncan- nily similar to neo-liberal economics where individual choice becomes the gospel. One could hardly reject the wisdom in the ethos of individual choice but US capitalism, backed by legal protection of the wealthy, fails to promote it. Instead, the myth of ‘survival of the fittest’ transforms into the preroga- tive, ‘choice of the richest.’ As Bonilla-Silva tirelessly reminds us, US racial politics has entered a ‘colourblind era’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2003), the genesis of which can be traced directly to the passage of Brown. However, the concept of a colourblind constitution did not originate from Brown; in fact, the idea of a colourblind constitution was birthed by Justice Harlan in Plessy almost 60 years earlier. In Plessy (1896), Justice Harlan famously wrote, ‘Our constitution is colour- blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens’ (dissenting opinion, p. 559). Although Justice Harlan believed in the colourblindness of the Constitution, he did not believe in the equality of races – a tricky proposition. Justice Harlan also wrote of what he called the ‘Chinese race’, which he labelled as ‘so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States’ (p. 561). In effect, 178 Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran

Justice Harlan confirms Gotanda’s (1995) contention that for all their appeal to the race-neutrality of the Constitution, one imbued with the assump- tion of pure races (particularly the purity of whiteness) conservative judges reveal the untenable belief that it is colourblind. Its opposite, of being racially motivated, is more likely the case. Unfortunately for Homer Plessy, Justice Harlan’s belief in a colourblind constitution came from a dissenting opinion that contained only one signatory: Justice Harlan. The other seven Justices (one Justice did not participate) rejected the concept of a colourblind constitution and agreed to use the ‘societal practices’, ‘local expectations’ and ‘established usages, customs and traditions of the people’ in ruling that ‘separate but equal’ was both constitutional and reasonable. It should be noted, the Court in Brown used these exact justifications to argue why it could not immediately order the desegregation of schools since ‘local expec- tation’, ‘societal practices’ and ‘established usages, customs and traditions of the people’ varied greatly across different school districts. In this language, we can see the coding of racial concerns within ostensibly non-racial termi- nology. Colourblindness exposes its inability to make race insignificant by simply failing to signify it. It does not discredit race as a way to make legal decisions as much as it removes direct referents to it. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of deferring to ‘customs and traditions of the people’ in its decisions on issues related to race, rights and equality continued in the Ozawa (1922) and Thind (1923) cases. In Ozawa, the Court denied the petitioner the right to US citizenship using both an anthropo- logical and ‘common practice’ definition of ‘white’ that excluded peoples of Asian descent. Based on the Court’s use of ‘popularly known as the Caucasian race’ to deny Ozawa citizenship, Lopez (2006a) argues the court invoked both common knowledge (‘popularly known’) and science (‘the Caucasian race’) to define white. The Court ruled that, though Takeo Ozawa may think he is white via his immersion in American culture, he is not Caucasian, which is a scientific category defined by geographical ties to the Caucasus region of Indo-Asia. Only a few months after, in US v Thind, the Court essentially overruled the part of its scientific anthropological definition of white used in Ozawa by elevating the ‘popularly known’ definition of white. As a result, though Thind had origins in the Caucasus region, the Court ruled he was not white because white common sense says so. With these perplexing rulings, opinions authored by the same Justice only months apart, the Court deter- mined that although all whites are Caucasian, not all Caucasians are white. Obviously, this opinion was neither based on constitutional law nor science. Rather, Leonardo (2010) argues that these cases show that whiteness has no essence and shape shifts according to the whims of whiteness as long as its overall interests remain intact (http://www.niusileadscape.org/bl/?cat=57). Leonardo concludes that white is then whatever whiteness and whites say it is, so long as it continues the reinforcement of racial hierarchies. The Court’s mental gymnastics on the issue of race leads Lopez to conclude that ‘science What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? 179 had failed as an arbiter of human difference, and common knowledge was made into the touchstone of racial division’ (Lopez, 2006a, p. 6). In rejecting the arguments of segregationists to favour ‘common prac- tices,’ which would have supported school segregation, the Court’s defer- ence to ‘social practice’ and ‘established usages’ ended with Brown. However, in keeping with its perplexing nature, the Court immediately reversed course in Brown II by allowing local conditions to dictate the manner and speed of desegregation. Therefore the Court stylistically ended the usage of ‘common practices’ in declaring separate was inherently unequal, but substantively continued to use ‘common practices’ to delay desegregation. By failing to order the immediate desegregation of schools and instead allowing for ‘established customs and traditions’ to drive the process of desegregation, the Brown ruling did little more than rework the rhetoric of equality and freedom. Bell (2004) argues ‘the edifice of segregation was built not simply on a troubling judicial precedent, but on an unspoken covenant committing the nation to guaranteeing whites a superior status to blacks’ (p. 20). The Court’s inability to recognize this covenant, what Mills (1997) has famously called a racial contract, in effect ‘forecloses the possibility of recognizing racism as a broadly shared cultural condition’ (Bell, 2004, p. 27).

Theatre of whiteness

As applied, however much some people genuinely believe that the best way to get beyond racism is to get beyond race, colourblindness continues to retard racial progress (Lopez, 2006b, p. 6):

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimi- nating on the basis of race – Chief Justice John Roberts. (Parents Involved, 2007, p. 41)

Judicial colourblindness allows contemporary Justices to view uses of race in de jure segregation, such as Jim Crow laws, as one and the same as invoca- tions of race in affirmative action policies intended to redress racism. Within colourblindness, Jim Crow laws and affirmative action are cut from the same cloth. By positioning its jurisprudence at what can be called ‘year zero’, judi- cial colourblindness wipes the slate of racial history completely clean, a sort of racial tabula rasa (tabula race?). As described previously, Justice Harlan’s belief in a colourblind constitution did little to end ‘separate but equal’ in Plessy, but continued it in new forms. The Supreme Court, committed as ever in its covenant to a racially stratified society, sacrificed its own judicial consistency and integrity in Ozawa and Thind to reproduce a structure of white racial domination (Lopez, 2006a). By doing so, the Court discarded scientific knowledge when it serves white interests in order to favour popular and accepted practices of race; in other times, it enforced the opposite. The 180 Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran

Court’s vacillation neither completely rejects nor accepts common sense or scientific basis of race. What it achieves is the continuation of white domi- nation via the maintenance of a racial hierarchy as an accepted practice. It shows little fidelity to common sense or science and its main source of loyalty is white domination. Even with the passage of Brown, the Court dragged its foot in issuing the legal mandates for school desegregation, surrendering the process to those who were at liberty to move like molasses in the unforced mandate of ‘all deliberate speed’. Although Justice Harlan himself did not believe in racial equality, his minority view of a colourblind constitution must have been a nightmare to whites after Plessy’s decision. Ironically, what was once a nightmare became a dream come true for whites and the continu- ation of white domination after the Civil Rights era. It confirms Bell’s (1995) concept of ‘interest convergence’, whereby black freedom is advanced only when it coincides with sustaining white interests. Rather than recognize that Brown was the ‘first’ official state response recog- nising America’s long history of white privilege, colourblind jurisprudence allowed the court to view the Brown decision as the ‘final’ state recognition of its racial history. In so doing, where colourblindness in the law could have been a radical judicial weapon to undermine white supremacy, colour- blindness became a reactionary judicial shield that protects and furthers white domination. In absolving itself of its racial sins, the colourblind Court approached issues of race with ambivalence at best and downright hostility at worst. It comes as little surprise that in Bakke (1978), colourblindness produced a narrative that suggested racial subordination has ended and there was no longer a dominant white race in the USA. Rather, Justice Powell believed the white category was a compilation of many European ethnici- ties (Bakke, 1978; see Lopez, 2007). This move to frame race as ethnicity, as Omi and Winant (1994) remind us, is one of the favoured rationales used to obscure racial stratification. Unfortunately, Justice Powell’s discursive with- ering away of the white race is not the same form of race treason to whiteness that Roediger and Ignatiev champion (see Roediger, 1994; Ignatiev, 1997). Instead, Justice Powell’s assessment removes the concept of race from its sociological and historical manifestations so typical of whiteness. Indeed it is whiteness par excellence (Leonardo, 2009). As a result, any and all members of the ‘white’ group are potential victims of ‘racism’ like any persons of colour since racism is reduced to acts of individual prejudice, attitude and discrimination. Its structural roots are severed from its phenomenal forms. In following the format used by McIntosh’s list of ‘white privileges,’ Leonardo (2004) provides a list of acts, laws and decisions that have histori- cally contributed to maintaining the always-reliable return in investment of ‘white privilege’ via societal structures of white domination. In providing examples, such as exclusionary laws, segregation hypodescent1 rule, and forced sterilisation of women of colour, Leonardo shows that US racial history is filled with examples of violence and terror committed by whites What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? 181 against minorities. We argue that the Supreme Court’s colourblind jurispru- dence should be added to Leonardo’s earlier list of acts of white supremacy. However, we also want to proceed with a careful distinction in offering judicial colourblindness to the list. Whereas exclusionary laws and forced sterilisation are obvious and overt forms of racial violence, colourblind juris- prudence is more accurately a form of what McLaren et al. (2000) have else- where called ‘cool violence’. In its trajectory of destroying Brown’s promise, the Court has acted as a regime of ‘cool violence’, positioning itself as a space of race neutrality, colourblindness and nonviolence. Therefore, any viola- tion of this space in terms of affirmative mentions of race or accusations of a white racial order are met with immediate dismissal sanctioned by the epistemology of the racial contract (Mills, 1997). Beyond the near impos- sible difficulty of satisfying ‘strict scrutiny’, proving ‘compelling interest’ or ‘narrowly tailored’, judicial colourblindness treats issues of race before the court as convenient opportunities to dismiss further any arguments that race and racism matter. But the Court does so in a manner that mistakes style for substance. For instance, as quoted above, Chief Justice Roberts’ (2007) famous ending to Parents Involved equates a corrective measure with any and all forms of historical racial discrimination. Also Justice Clarence Thomas has emphatically stated:

There is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality ... In my mind, govern- ment-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice. (Adarand, 1995, Thomas, J., concurring, p. 1)

Therefore, when members of the Court issue opinions on racial issues, its colourblind jurisprudence inhibits any possibility of making social and historical connections to racial ideology. In this regard, neo-Nazi appeals are the same species as pro-affirmative action arguments since both genres end up with specious rationales guided by racial logic. To the Court, race is ideological and getting beyond it means not talking about it. In Justice Thomas’ view, himself a staunch defender of a colourblind constitution, housing, education and employment, disparities are results of benign prejudice, rather than products of structural racism. But to social and political activists petitioning the Court in ongoing attempts to ameliorate racial disparities, the Court’s exercise in word play and semantics come with little assurance against the structural violence of white domination. These material casualties are rarely ever recognised as worthwhile for the Court’s consideration. Worse yet, if racial consequences, such as housing and school segregation, are ever addressed by the Court, these differences are attributed as a product of what Chief Justice Roberts calls ‘personal choice’. 182 Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran

In the theatre of the Supreme Court, the 500-year project of white domi- nation is either advanced or impeded by every judicial opinion on race and society. Contrary to the dogma of colourblind jurisprudence, there are no neutral decisions when it comes to white domination. The seriousness of racial issues that come before the Court, coupled with the Court’s far reaching power as a branch of the government either to legalise or reject sweeping policy, a judicial approach that all but dismisses the salience of race is an act of whiteness. Since Brown, the Court’s clockwork efficiency in eliminating any and all possibilities of racial redress via its colourblind judicial approach has been calculated under the larger umbrella of race neutrality and the consequential continuation of white domination is far from accidental. Decades later, the USA confronts the excesses of neo-liberal economics, itself falling within the same species of race neutrality found in colourblind jurisprudence. Like lemmings off the cliff, finance follows the law. Most critical scholars admit that schools cannot fix the problems they did not cause. With colourblind legal philosophy and laissez-faire racism leading the way, schools will find it difficult to change the nation’s racial trajectory. Perhaps education is primed for the coming of Brown III.

Note

1. The rule of hypodescent, or the ‘one drop rule’, in the USA turned any person with any traceable black ancestor as effectively black. Although arbitrary, it came with certain consequences, including legally creating more blacks and hence more slaves, increasing the scarcity of white identity, and provided white rapists of black women a justification to deny responsibility for their children.

References

Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena (1995), 515 U.S. 200. Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and philosophy, B. Brewster (trans.) (New York: Monthly Review Press). Bell, D. (1987) And we are not saved: the elusive quest for racial justice (New York: Basic Books). Bell, D. (1992) Faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism (New York: Basic Books). Bell, D. (1995) ‘Brown v. Board of Education and the interest convergence dilemma’ in K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller and K. Thomas (eds.) Critical race theory (New York: The New Press). Bell, D. (2004) Silent covenants (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Bobo, L. and Smith, R. (1998) ‘From Jim Crow racism to laissez-faire racism: the trans- formation of racial attitudes’ in W. Katkin, N. Landsman, and A. Tyree (eds.), Beyond pluralism: the conception of groups and group identities in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). Bonilla-Silva, E. (2003) Racism without racists (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in capitalist America (New York: Basic Books). What Is So Liberal about Neo-Liberalism? 183

Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J. (1990) Reproduction in education, society, and culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE). First published in 1977. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), 347 U.S. 483. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1955), 349 U.S. 294. Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G. and Thomas, K. (eds.) (1995) Critical race theory (New York: The New Press). Dimitriadis, G. (2010) ‘Lessons learned from Enron: what the business world really has to teach us’, in Z. Leonardo (ed.), Handbook of cultural politics and education (Dordrecht: SensePublishers). Giroux, H. (2003) The terror of neoliberalism (New York: Routledge). Giroux, H. (2010) ‘Neoliberalism, pedagogy, and cultural politics: beyond the theater of cruelty’ in Z. Leonardo (ed.), Handbook of cultural politics and education (Dordrecht: SensePublishers). Gotanda, N. (1995) ‘A critique of “our Constitution” is color-blind’, in K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller and K. Thomas (eds.), Critical race theory (New York: The New Press). Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), 539 U.S. 306. Harvey, D. (2003) The new imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press). Harvey, D. (2005) A brief history of neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ignatiev, N. (1997) ‘The point is not to interpret whiteness but to abolish it’. Talk given at Making and Unmaking of Whiteness Conference, University of California, Berkeley. Available online at: www.postfun.com/racetraitor. Klein, N. (2007) The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism (New York: Henry Holt). Lareau, A. (2000) Home advantage (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Lareau, A. (2003) Unequal childhoods (Berkeley: University of California Press). Leonardo, Z. (2004) ‘The color of supremacy: beyond the discourse of “white privi- lege”,’ Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(2), 137–152. Leonardo, Z. (2005) ‘Through the multicultural glass: Althusser, ideology, and race relations in post-Civil Rights America’, Policy Futures in Education, 3(4), 400–412. Leonardo, Z. (2007) ‘The war on schools: NCLB, nation creation, and the educational construction of whiteness’, Race Ethnicity & Education, 10(3), 261–278. Leonardo, Z. (2009) Race, whiteness, and education (New York: Routledge). Leonardo, Z. (2010) Whiteness studies and education: making the familiar strange, http://www.niusileadscape.org/bl/?cat=57 Lopez, I. H. (2006a) White by law (New York: New York University Press). Lopez, I. H. (2006b) ‘Colorblind to the reality of race in America’, The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review, 3 November 2006. Lopez, I. H. (2007) ‘“A nation of minorities”: race, ethnicity, and reactionary color- blindness’, Stanford Law Review, 59(4), 985–1063. McLaren, P., Leonardo, Z. and Allen, R.L. (2000) ‘Rated “CV” for cool violence’ in S. Spina (ed.), Smoke & mirrors: the hidden context of violence in schools and society (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield). Mills, C. (1997) The racial contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Omi, M. and Winant, H. (1994) Racial formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge). Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1 (2007), 551 U.S. 701. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 163 U.S. 537. Polanyi, K. (1954) The great transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press). Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), 438 U.S. 265. 184 Zeus Leonardo and Hoang Tran

Roediger, D. R. (1994) Towards the abolition of whiteness: essays on race, politics, and working class history (New York: Verso). Stiglitz, J. (2006) Making globalization work (New York: W. W. Norton). Sweatt v. Painter (1950), 339 U.S. 629. Takao Ozawa v. U.S. (1922), 260 U.S. 178. U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), 261 U.S. 204. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to labour (New York: Columbia University Press).

Suggestions for further reading

Gillborn, D. (2008) Racism and education: coincidence or conspiracy? (London: Routledge). Prendergast, C. (2003) Literacy and racial justice: the politics of learning after Brown v. Board of Education, 3rd edition (Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press). Taylor, E., Gillborn, D. and Ladson-Billings, G. (2008) Foundations of critical race theory in education (London: Routledge). 11 Fear In and About Education Carolyn Jackson

Fear and anxiety are pervasive in schools. Indeed, research by psychologists reveals that anxiety is the emotion reported most often by students (see, e.g. Pekrun et al.’s 2002 discussion of their numerous studies in Germany). It is surprising then that in spite of its prevalence in schools, and despite the fact that fear has received increased attention within sociology generally, fear and anxiety have been relatively neglected by sociologists of education (Jackson, 2010a; Zembylas, 2009). Yet, it behoves us as sociologists of educa- tion to seek to understand fear. As the Mental Health Foundation (2009, p. 13) points out: ‘understanding how fear works, and how we can better relate to it could make an enormous difference to health and well-being in our society, not to mention enlarging individuals’ potential for living, learning and growing’. Relatedly, understanding how fears operate is impor- tant for developing theories and practices to promote social justice: fear is used to sustain hierarchies (Robin, 2004), so we need to understand how fear operates in this way if we are to challenge it. With the above points in mind, in this chapter I begin to explore how fears operate about and in education. In so doing, I delve into some of the effects of fears both for individuals and for society. I begin by exploring definitions of fear.

What is fear?

Fear is an ill-defined and slippery concept. As frequently occurs with everyday terms, definitions of fear are often absent in social science research, perhaps because of assumptions that everyone knows what it is, and/or because it is difficult to define fear precisely. Issues of definition are complicated further by key terms – most notably fear and anxiety – being used interchangeably by some writers (e.g. Bourke, 2005; Bauman, 2006; Gill, 2007) but not others (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Salecl, 2004). Rachman (1998, pp. 25–26) attempts to draw the following, and perhaps most common, distinction between fear and anxiety:

185 186 Carolyn Jackson

Anxiety is one of the most prominent and pervasive emotions. It is a feeling of uneasy suspense, the tense anticipation of a threatening but vague event. Fear and anxiety share some common features, but fears tend to have a specific, usually identifiable focus, and to be more intense and episodic.

In other words, as Ahmed (2004, p. 64) points out, in this model ‘fear has an object’ (original emphasis) whereas anxiety does not. By contrast, Bauman (2006, p. 2) argues that fear is most intense when it has no object:

Fear is at its most fearsome when it is diffuse, scattered, unclear, unat- tached, unanchored, free floating, with no clear address or cause, when the menace we should be afraid of can be glimpsed everywhere but is nowhere to be seen. ‘Fear’ is the name we give to our uncertainty: to our ignorance of the threat and of what is to be done ... (original emphasis)

So conceptualisations of fear are by no means consistent, and even many of the researchers who attempt to distinguish between fear and anxiety (e.g. Rachman, 1998) recognise that the distinction is blurred, and as a result the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. In this chapter I use the terms fear and anxiety interchangeably for two main reasons. First, although conceptually fear and anxiety may be regarded by some (but not all) as distinct, it is difficult to disentangle them empirically. Second, the frequency with which the two terms are used interchangeably in the literature makes attempting to separate them very difficult, and somewhat arbitrary.

Scales of fear: from the individual to the global

Shirlow and Pain (2003, p. 23) argue that we need to consider different scales of fear:

Fear is constructed in different spaces at different scales – from the body (the focus of much crime), the household (where most violence takes place), the locality and the nation state, to global processes such as migra- tion and conflict which give ‘fear’ new forms.

How researchers conceptualise fear, and the scale of fear that constitutes the focus of their studies, tend to be influenced by their disciplinary background. For example, in psychology, where research in educational contexts has focussed predominantly on exam anxiety, there are attempts to measure fear levels and to explore the bio-psychological effects on indi- viduals (Putwain, 2007). Such studies, which are typically quantitative, usually focus on individuals, exploring, for example, why some pupils regard exams as a challenge, while others see them as a threat (Putwain Fear In and About Education 187 et al., 2012). This work is important, but tends to ignore the ways in which fears may be constructed and used for political purposes. Hence, Zembylas (2009, p. 191) argues that:

No longer do fears need to be viewed through the narrow prism of indi- vidual psychology; rather, they can be theorized in the light of sets of beliefs, judgments and practices in their political, social, and cultural context. This process makes visible the symbolic violence that is exercised upon individuals and communities as a result of hegemonic discourses of fear.

Thus, those interested in the politics of fear adopt a very different approach from psychologists, and generally explore the social construction and opera- tion of fear by focussing on macro-level, rather than micro-level, processes. They argue that ‘fear does not just happen; it is socially constructed and then manipulated by those who seek to benefit’ (Altheide, 2002, p. 24), which, as Zembylas (2009) highlights, denaturalises fear, emphasising that it is socially constructed. For example, Robin (2004) argues that political fear can work in two ways. First, leaders and militants can define what is or ought to be the public’s chief object of fear. He argues that these are seldom borne out of nothing, but that leaders have a great deal of leeway in determining which threats are worthy of political attention and which are not. He is not suggesting that each member of the public necessarily fears the chosen object, but that it dominates the political agenda, crowding out others (2004, p. 16). Robin’s second kind of fear arises from the social, political and economic hierarchies that divide a society. It stems from the vertical conflicts and cleavages endemic to a society, namely, inequalities of wealth, status and power. This kind of political fear grows out of, and helps perpetuate, inequalities which are helpful to their beneficiaries and detri- mental to their victims (pp. 18–19). Robin’s framework provides a way of considering how fears operate in education. As we will see later, his points about fears being related to the control of agendas and maintenance of power hierarchies are readily applicable to schooling. However, Robin works only at the macro level; it is important also to consider the micro and meso levels. Arguably, our best chance of developing the fullest possible understanding of how fear operates in education will be produced by considering the different scales of fear – from the individual to the global – and working across disciplines. After all, as Bourke (2005, p. 354) argues, ‘emotions such as fear do not belong only to individuals or social groups: they mediate between the individual and the social. They are about power relations’. In the remainder of this chapter I illustrate, by using examples, some of the ways in which fears operate about and in education, and also the impacts of them. 188 Carolyn Jackson

Fears about education

According to some writers, fear underpins decisions – in the past and today – about whether or not to provide state education and, where there is state provision, to what level. For example, according to Jenny Shaw (1995) and others (e.g. Harber, 2004), it was fear that motivated the Education Act of 1870, which established a universal system of education in England and Wales. Two fears are thought to have been key drivers. First, following the Franchise Act of 1867, there were fears among the landed aristocracy that they would be overthrown unless they educated recently enfranchised citizens to vote ‘wisely’ (see also Harber, 2004). Shaw argues that the phrase ‘we must educate our masters’ is one of the most quoted remarks of the nineteenth century and reflects fears of what might have happened once the labouring classes were enfranchised. She argues that ‘The establishment of education for the poor was thus as much a measure to assuage a bourgeoisie frightened of revolution as it was a benefit for the poor themselves’ (p. 32). Second, it was also a response to demands for reform from industrialists, who feared Britain’s status in world trade was being threatened by the lack of an effec- tive education system. However, fear also prompted opposition, with detractors arguing, for example, that education would make the working classes think, see their lives as dissatisfactory and thus increase the chances of revolt. Such fears, according to Harber (2004, p. 60), meant that state schooling was organised to ‘prepare future workers with the subordinate values and behaviours neces- sary for the modern bureaucratic, mass production workplace and the existing social order – regularity, routine, monotonous work and strict discipline’. In other words, schooling provided a means of social and political control. One does not have to go back to the 1800s to find examples of fears about providing education, in particular, concerns that teaching the working classes to think will encourage them to want more. Judith Tendler (2002) demonstrates through her contemporary research in Brazil that there is fear of education among business elites in certain developing regions which, she argues, helps to explain persistent low literacy and poor schooling in these areas. Tendler argues that, despite calls for a better educated workforce being common in public discourse, business elites interviewed in her study were worried about employees – who typically worked in unskilled, low-paid jobs in footwear or textile factories – having too much education rather than too little: ‘Give them a little schooling and they’ll get uppity and make trouble – and the next thing you know, they’ll be migrating to São Paulo in search of [better paid] construction work’ (p. 25). Business elites were fearful that such an exodus would de-populate the region of a cheap labour force, pulling up wages. These are not only concerns for business elites, but also for local and state government officials who, Tendler notes, market to outside investors their comparative advantage in cheap and docile labour, which is the hall- mark of illiterate and unskilled workforces. She sums up (p. 1): Fear In and About Education 189

These actors often construe their region’s ‘only’ comparative advantage in economic development as one of cheap labor; they worry that a more educated labor force may diminish that advantage by leading to a general increase in the region’s relative wage, and by reducing the prized ‘docility’ and ‘gratefulness’ of the region’s labor force; they also expect to lose the returns to their investment in better education, because of the fabled outmigration of the best workers.

The fears about education, discussed briefly here, illustrate Robin’s (2004, p. 20) argument that:

It is not only the powerful who wield fear and the powerless who are afraid. People with power are themselves often seized by a fear of those without it, either the fear aroused by guilt for having committed injustice, or, more commonly, the fear that the powerless will one day rise up and dispossess them.

It would be overly simplistic, of course, to suggest that education for control and compliance is uncontested. As Harber (2004, p. 59) argues, there has always ‘been a conflict between education for control in order to produce citizens and workers who were conformist, passive and politically docile on the one hand and those who wanted to educate for critical consciousness, individual libera- tion and participatory democracy on the other’. However, he suggests that the former has dominated the real world of schooling partly because it was the main reason that formal, mass schooling was established and subsequently expanded. Furthermore, Harber and others (e.g. Shaw, 1995; Davies, 2004) argue that fear is utilised in schooling to (attempt to) establish and maintain control and compliance, and thus is a deeply embedded feature of schooling in many countries. While fear may be utilised in this way, I argue and illustrate in this chapter that fears in schools – fears of pupils and teachers – are multi- layered and intersect in complex ways. Furthermore, I argue that we are still a long way from knowing and understanding the ways in which fears operate in schools, and the effects of them; we need to develop further our understanding in this sphere. It is to fear in school that I now turn in order to demonstrate: (a) the pervasiveness of fear; (b) the complex and often ambivalent relationships that teachers have with fear (in inciting and also experiencing it) and (c) how attempts to lessen some fears exacerbate others.

Fears in school

Academic fears Imagine how we would go about designing an educational program if our purpose were to make students hate to learn. We would not involve them 190 Carolyn Jackson

[students] in establishing the purpose of their class. We would require them to perform some impossible tasks – for example, to be perfect in everything they do. Further, when we discovered that the students were failing to master the impossible tasks, we would ridicule them and report their mistakes, failures and shortcomings to their friends and relatives. (Krumboltz cited in Covington, 1998: 104)

The scenario outlined above describes how many school systems operate. My discussion in this section relates specifically to, and draws on data from, England, but much of what I discuss is applicable to other national contexts. Schooling in England operates as a competitive system in which there must be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’; the stakes are high so there is consid- erable pressure to be a winner, and possibly even more not to be a ‘loser’. ‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ are paraded, on the specious assumption that the threat of being publically denounced as a ‘loser’ will motivate students to try harder. Unsurprisingly then, fears of academic failure are common in many schools; particularly as there is a requirement in contemporary society for girls and boys to acquire ‘good’ academic credentials to enhance their chances in the competition for a ‘good’ career. This requirement is now well documented and is a product of the broader ‘neoliberal ethos of individualization, competition and marketization’ (Ringrose, 2007, p. 484). I use data from my own research to illustrate pupils’ fears, and the ways in which they are reinforced and exacerbated by certain classroom practices. My project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), explored, among other issues, fears about failure in secondary schools. Data generated during this project include questionnaire data from approxi- mately 800 pupils and interview data from 153 pupils and 30 teachers. Six secondary schools located in the north of England were involved: four co-educational (Beechwood, Elmwood, Firtrees, Oakfield), one girls’ (Hollydale) and one boys’ (Ashgrove) (pseudonyms are used for schools and individual pupils). Based initially on data from the Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) reports, and supplemented by information from the schools, schools were selected to ensure a mix of pupils in terms of social class, ‘race’ and ethnicity, and a mix of schools in terms of overall examina- tion results, and gender of intake (single-sex and co-educational). For more details see Jackson (2006). My research revealed that the vast majority of pupils – girls and boys – are anxious about academic ‘failure’ (amongst other things), and these fears are particularly pronounced in relation to exams, and especially those that are used to rank schools publicly, for example, Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs).1 Shareen (Oakfield), for example, told me that: ‘I don’t pray a lot ... but before the SATs I just started to pray and I used to, you know, ask God to help me and stuff like that’. Overall, 68 per cent of interviewees reported being Fear In and About Education 191 anxious about SATs. Many of these explained their anxieties in terms of fears about failing. Many approaches employed by teachers, which appear to be based on attempts to motivate through fear or shame, exacerbated pupils’ fears about academic failure. Teachers incited such fears in a variety of ways, including emphasising the dire consequences of academic ‘failure’ for pupils’ future careers and life chances, as well as spelling out the negative implications for the school if results were not ‘up to standard’. There is space here to illustrate and discuss only one example of the ways in which teachers attempted to motivate through fear or shame. As such, I have chosen to focus on a relatively common tactic, namely, making pupils’ marks known to the whole class by, for example, reading them out. In all of the schools in my research there were instances of this practice, although it was more prevalent in some schools than in others. It was a practice identified by pupils across the schools to be a significant pressure that provoked anxiety. Clare at Firtrees, for example, suggested that the public reporting of scores made tests much more stressful.

Clare: It doesn’t bother me doing tests, but it’s just that she shouts them out – your score. If she just like gave them you then that would be alright. But your mind’s like, when you’re doing a test, that she’s going to shout it out – the score that you’ve got – and then you just try and do your best to get a higher mark. CJ: So why is it particularly important that she calls them out, is it about being so public, can you say a bit more about why it matters so much? Clare: ‘Cause if she shouts them out and you’ve got a low mark everyone looks at you and your friends are like ‘are you alright, you’ve got a low mark but you’ll be better next time’ and you’re a bit embarrassed.

Richard at Elmwood also disliked the public announcement of results. He, like Clare, was anxious not to appear ‘stupid’ and feel embarrassed if he got a low mark, and suggested that people get laughed at for poor performances.

CJ: Some people have told me that teachers actually read out the results in some classes. Richard: Yeah, I don’t really like it ‘cos if you get a rubbish score ... some people laugh at you sometimes. CJ: So do they [teachers] do that very often? Richard: Yeah, they do it near enough all the time. Some teachers don’t [read out the scores] ‘cos they know some people get embarrassed and get upset when they read the answers out. CJ: Why do you think teachers do that? Richard: To see if, you know, that if you do get embarrassed, you know you have to try harder so that you won’t get embarrassed. 192 Carolyn Jackson

Richard’s analysis of why teachers announce test results to the class is insightful; it is likely these teachers do believe that such practices will moti- vate pupils and that they will shame them into working harder so that they are not bottom of the class (although someone always has to be bottom). However, what is missing from this lay theory of motivation is how pres- sures to demonstrate success (or to not demonstrate failure) can encourage amongst some students a range of defensive behaviours that ultimately are more likely to reduce rather than improve attainment levels. These will be discussed later. There were even more remarkable examples, in my research, of the ways teachers would attempt to highlight and shame (relatively) low attainers. Lawrence (Ashgrove) explained that in his top set maths class pupils are seated according to relative ability: ‘clever ones’ at the back of the class, ‘not as clever’ ones at the front.

Lawrence: There’s a bit of rivalry in the classroom ... ‘cause part of the system is if you’re not as clever then you sit at the front in the middle, which is better because it’s easier to hear. Then the clever ones sit towards the back ... CJ: So it’s quite an explicit way of ranking people in the class then? Lawrence: Well, in my first lesson in maths I was sat right at the front after a bit, which I wasn’t too worried about because it was the first time I’d been in set one. But it helped me because the very next test I was sat quite a bit further back and it wasn’t, well it wasn’t because of the extra pressure, it was more because I was at the front and I could see every- thing she was doing and I couldn’t miss a word and you don’t lose your attention as easily when you’re sat towards the front. And I think that was the main aim of it rather than just to embarrass us.

The teacher’s method of seating pupils according to ability is striking for its emphasis on making performance visible; it is difficult to imagine a more overt and visual way of ranking a class according to individual (grade) performance. Lawrence attempts to find positive aspects of this method of spatial organisation: ‘less clever’ ones can see and hear the teacher and are less likely to get distracted. However, underlying his response is also recog- nition that some students are explicitly positioned as bottom of the class, and that this is embarrassing. Wilkins (2012) provides a similar example, in his case with Year 8 pupils, of how a teacher visibly highlighted success and failure by getting all students to stand in class, and then to sit down in order according to their test scores, with the last pupil standing declared the winner. Such strategies strongly emphasise relative ability comparisons, and promote classroom climates that emphasise performance (demonstrating competence) rather than learning (developing competence), and are likely to foster fears of academic failure. Fear In and About Education 193

I am not suggesting, however, that teachers use or relate to fear in a straight- forward way; in general, teachers seem to have an ambivalent relationship with it. On the one hand, many teachers express genuine concern for pupils about the increasing pressures and anxieties created by frequent high-stakes tests and the need for them to get good qualifications. This is conveyed by Ms Holtby at Hollydale girls’ school:

[Increased testing has] had an impact from junior school onwards ... several of my colleagues have got children at junior schools who are just doing their SATS and they are saying that their children are showing signs of anxiety ... I am absolutely dead against the testing that there is. That’s my personal opinion ... Because of the way society does focus them so much on ... their SATS, GCSEs, AS levels, A levels, university ... it’s almost like you’ve got to sprint on this race ... I know there’s a lot of pressure on them ... you know it’s exams every year now for probably ten, well between eight to ten years, you know, for the bright ability kids, and you think well, you know, that is tough.

Teachers also express concern about fears generated for pupils by other pupils, for example, through bullying. On the other hand, as I illustrated earlier, and as I demonstrate and discuss more fully elsewhere (Jackson, 2006), many teachers use fear and shame in their attempts to get pupils to perform (and also to behave well in class). The ambivalence about pressure, and the fears pressure creates, is discernible in the comments of Ms Walters, also at Hollydale Girls’ School:

There’s never a break; it’s continuous testing. They are put under pres- sure and they are put under pressure to achieve and perhaps our expecta- tions of them are very high. That’s perhaps one of the reasons why I like teaching here ... because to me this is a very good school and it has high expectations of the pupils who come through the door. And sometimes it is very difficult for girls to live up to that.

The ambivalence is not surprising. Like Ms Holtby, many teachers are opposed to the frequent high-stakes testing in schools, and the related anxi- eties caused by it. They sympathise with the pupils, and witness first-hand the anxieties that many students experience as a result of the testing. However, in many ways schooling is built upon, and sustained by, fear. According to Shaw (1995), and as illustrated earlier, schools and teachers rely on fear and attempt to use it as a motivating force (see also Davies, 2004; Harber, 2004; Francis and Mills, 2012). They attempt to scare children into working by highlighting how hard they must work, and outlining the consequences of ‘failure’. Shaw argues that fear keeps the educational system working, it relies upon fear, it is built into the organisational structure of secondary schools, it 194 Carolyn Jackson is their ‘social technology’; schools could not function without reports, tests, exams and selection. High levels of anxiety are important for maintaining discipline according to Shaw. Of course, teachers have their own fears, which impact on their behaviours and approaches to pupils and teaching. Teachers, like their pupils, are under tremendous pressure to perform, and their own successes and failures are scrutinised and made public. Teachers and schools are judged on, amongst other things, the exam results of their pupils. So, in a system where results are publicised through league tables, and league table positions influence parents’ choices of schools for their children (which in turn has implications for a school’s funding), and where ‘failing’ schools are closed, the stakes for teachers are very high. Indeed, it is for these and related reasons that Francis and Mills (2012, p. 261) argue that ‘teachers often experi- ence schooling as oppressive’, and that for many teachers, as well as pupils, schools can be damaging organisations. Thus, the fears of teachers and pupils are multi-layered and intersect in complex ways. Teachers are generally posi- tioned such that they must both reassure students and attempt to reduce students’ anxieties, while at the same time teachers rely on fear’s presence. In Bourke’s (2005, p. 5) terms, they both counsel students ‘to “fear not” while simultaneously inciting anxiety and terror’. The picture gets more complex when we begin to consider other in-school fears. Fear of academic failure, although substantial, is one of many fears that pupils experience. Fear of ‘social failure’ (being unpopular) is also central to the lives of many students and co-exists in an uneasy relationship with fear of academic failure.

Social fears Social relationships constitute a crucial component of school life; it is diffi- cult to overestimate their importance in terms of experience and enjoyment of school, and in terms of academic outcomes. A Girlguiding UK and Mental Health Foundation (2008, p. 8) report noted that ‘feeling excluded, unloved, ignored or left out – particularly by peers at school – were amongst the most difficult emotions for girls to manage’. Fears about doing and saying the ‘right’ things are prevalent among girls and boys in schools, and constitute what Kenway and Willis (1998, p. 139) refer to as ‘toxic emotions’:

Students of all ages speak most frequently of ‘toxic emotions’ (Goleman, 1996): nervousness, worry, anxiety, fear and even dread. They fear ‘being laughed at’, ‘making a fool of myself’, ‘being made to look stupid’, being teased and hurt, being alone and isolated and being betrayed by their friends or their teachers.

Given that the consequences of being unpopular or not ‘fitting in’ are frequently marginalisation or bullying (Francis, 2005), most pupils attempt to construct identities that enable them to ‘fit in’. Fear In and About Education 195

The performances required to ‘fit in’ are gendered. Much has been written about the ways that performances of gender are ‘policed’ by pupils within schools, and those who do not conform to dominant versions of masculinity or femininity are marginalised and bullied. As Kenway and Willis (1998, pp. 137–138) argue

Fear of others’ opinions and of isolation and the need for a secure identity are primary motivating forces leading many to adopt safe behaviours and to make safe choices well within gender conventions. While girls’ and boys’ behaviours may be different, their driving force is similar – gender anxiety and the need to be accepted and to belong.

Hence, fear of not fitting in frequently leads to the reinforcement of norma- tive gendered ways of being, thereby reinforcing inequalities of power and status (Robin, 2004). For example, Carrie Paechter (2007) demonstrates how ‘popular’ Year 6 girls performed a physically inactive, passive femininity in the playground. By contrast ‘popular’ boys were physically active and strong and dominated playground space playing football (see also Renold, 2005; Swain, 2000). Conformity to such gendered ways of being mean that gendered hierarchies are reinforced: boys and masculinity are associated with physical strength and assertiveness; conversely, girls and femininity are associated with weakness and passivity, and thereby girls are positioned as vulnerable and requiring male protection. In some cases, sets of fears compete with each other. By this I mean that the ways in which pupils would typically to respond to mollify one set of fears can exacerbate other fears. A good example relates to fears about academic and social ‘failure’. At present, there is a dominant pupil discourse within many secondary schools that it is uncool to work hard, although (apparent) effortless achieve- ment is valued (Epstein, 1998; Frosh et al., 2002; Jackson, 2006; Jackson and Dempster, 2009). Those who work hard overtly are frequently labelled as ‘boffins’, ‘geeks’, ‘uncool’, ‘unpopular’ and may be marginalised or bullied, particularly if they do not offset their hard work by being ‘cool’ in other ways (which are gendered, see Jackson, 2006; Francis et al., 2010, 2012). Thus, given pressures on students to work for and attain good academic creden- tials, the ‘uncool to work’ discourse can create a dilemma for them: how can they be ‘cool’ and ‘popular’, but also academically successful? The costs of ‘failure’ in either sphere are high. Steph (Hollydale) outlines the dilemma:

People are always like, they think it’s cool to like just sit back and do nothing and be cheeky to the teachers ... I just try and work hard but then you try and fit in at the same time. But people who work hard, even though they come out with the grades, they don’t have as many friends and they’re not as popular within the year so it’s not very good. 196 Carolyn Jackson

As discussed in more detail elsewhere (Jackson, 2006, 2010b), most students attempt to do what Steph does: they attempt to balance the demands of school work and ‘cool work’. Furthermore, they frequently employ a range of complex strategies in order to manage and balance the two sets of competing demands and fears; but it is a difficult process and students must tread a careful line if they want to avoid ‘failure’ in either sphere. The two sets of in-school fears I have focussed upon in this chapter – fears of academic and social failure – provide a flavour of some of the fears that students encounter in schools. They also illustrate how working to counter the effects of some fears may exacerbate others – avoiding academic ‘failure’ usually involves undertaking academic work, but too much overt academic work often leads to social ‘failure’. This means that students often have to adopt complex strategies if they are to succeed academically and socially, and to perform a balancing act that itself can create tensions and anxieties.

What are the impacts of fears?

In general, fear has a host of negative effects. At the level of the individual, there are reasons to be concerned about the effects of fear on pupils’ well- being and achievement. The stress, anxiety and fear of failure experi- enced by some pupils represent significant threats to personal well-being (King et al., 2000). Unfortunately, the implications for mental health are often overlooked (Denscombe, 2000), in part, because there is a relatively widespread assumption that aspects of schooling, particularly exams, should be stressful and should ‘weed out’ less resilient pupils. People who advocate this view are generally those who have successfully navigated schooling and the examination systems, and are therefore unaware of, or unconcerned about, the threats to well-being faced by some individ- uals (Denscombe, 2000). Researchers need to explore such threats much more fully and, importantly, consider the roles that schools could play in helping to ameliorate them (Spratt et al., 2006), particularly as schools have a duty to promote the well-being of pupils (Coleman, 2009; Kidger et al., 2010). There are also reasons to be concerned about the effects of fear and pres- sure on attainment and learning: overall, pressure is inversely associated with attainment (Samdall et al., 2004). Contrary to commonly held beliefs that pressure or fear can help to motivate pupils, a pretty robust pattern in the literature is that high levels of examination-related stress and anxiety generally have a debilitating effect on attainment (Zeidner, 2007), and can lead to disengagement. There are a number of reasons for this. For example, a short-term effect of anxiety can be interference with the cognitive proc- esses required to interpret and respond to the demands of an examination (Derekshan et al., 2009). The longer-term effects of anxiety and fear of failure can include development of a range of defensive strategies that are likely Fear In and About Education 197 to lead to failure or disengagement from classroom learning (Martin and Marsh, 2003). These defensive strategies are prompted largely by the convergence of two sets of factors. First, in a society where academic credentials are heralded as key indicators of ability and worth, demonstrations of academic ‘inability’ are very problematic. Second, schools are places where, as we have seen, ability is frequently tested and exposed. In such contexts there are two key ways to avoid being regarded as lacking ability and, therefore, worth. One is to avoid failure, which is not always possible as schooling operates as a competitive system in which not everyone can be a ‘winner’. The second is to avoid the negative implications of failure (i.e. a lack of ability). Defensive strategies are linked to the latter; they enable students to create generally false, but plau- sible, explanations to justify or excuse (potential or actual) poor academic performance (Covington, 1998). In general, such excuses allow individuals to blame factors other than a lack of ability for academic ‘failure’, and so act to protect them from the damning implication that they lack ability and, therefore, worth. Defensive strategies are varied; one example is disruptive behaviour. Such behaviour in the classroom provides a method of blurring the relationship between ‘failure’ and lack of ability. Where pupils exhibit disruptive behaviours, failures may be attributed to being inattentive in class rather than to a lack of ability per se, and the behaviour may act to deflect attention away from poor academic performance and onto their behaviour instead (Gilbert and Gilbert, 1998; Khoo and Oakes, 2003). However, while defensive strategies may feel like friends in the short term, in the long term they are likely to increase the chances of failure (see Jackson (2006) for a full discussion of defensive strategies). Thus, individuals’ fears may prompt them to respond in ways that enhance the chances that their fears turn into reality. This is summed up neatly by McGregor and Elliot (2005, p. 229):

it is not surprising that individuals high in fear of failure orient to and seek to avoid failure in achievement situations. Indeed, when possible, such individuals seek to select themselves out of achievement situations in the first place. Ironically, and poignantly, in so doing, those high in fear of failure keep themselves from the mistakes and failures that many achievement motivation theorists view as the grist for the mill of compe- tence development ... In essence, the avoidance of mistakes and failures stunts the growth and maturation of persons high in fear of failure, which, over time, merely leads to more mistakes and failures. As such, the avoidance of failure is likely to be a self-perpetuating process in that the very process of avoiding failure is likely to serve a role in maintaining and exacerbating the tendency to avoid failure.

So fear as a motivator is unlikely to be successful long term. As Covington and Manheim Teel (1996, p. 6) argue, learning is the first casualty in highly 198 Carolyn Jackson competitive school environments and ‘when fear is the stimulus, there are few winners in the learning game. And even the winners may pay a heavy price’. As the final sentence of this quote indicates, fear can make the experience of schooling problematic even for those students who get good results and are therefore considered successful (see also Walkerdine et al., 2001). As well as impacting negatively upon individuals in school contexts, as flagged and illustrated earlier in this chapter, fear can also work to maintain inequalities and hierarchies. It is not difficult to find examples in schools of fears working to the advantage of the most powerful groups in society. As we saw, social fears about being ‘othered’ for example, encourage students to construct identities to enable then to ‘fit in’ with dominant ways of being, and thereby work to constrain and contain particular versions of (hetero) femininity and (hetero)masculinity, and simultaneously reinforce estab- lished power relations pertaining to gender and sexuality. Even the ‘uncool to work’ discourse – which has been associated in popular discourse mainly with working-class white boys, but is feared by middle-class parents (Williams et al., 2008) – is less likely to have detrimental effects on middle-class pupils than it is on their working-class counterparts. This is because well-resourced pupils are more likely to be able to balance the demands of school work and ‘cool work’ (see Jackson, 2006, 2010b). As sociologists of education, we need to work to understand more fully the ways that fears work in education, and to explore the implications of these fears. Evans et al. (2005, p. 131) argue that ‘Research has tended to shy away not only from exploring more negative emotions in schooling ... but also the potential negative uses of emotion in sustaining social hierarchies and effecting social control’. It is time we stopped shying away from such explorations because as Zembylas (2009, p. 191, original emphasis) argues ‘all fears need to be carefully analyzed and mobilized for democracy and social justice’.

Note

1. SATs are assessments of pupils in England at ages 7, 11 and 14. They were intro- duced for 7-year-old pupils in 1991 and those aged 11 in 1995. SATs were intro- duced in 1993 for pupils aged 14, but in October 2008 the then School Secretary Ed Balls announced that he was ending the requirement for schools to run national tests for 14-year-olds with immediate effect. Currently, at ages 7 and 14 assessment is principally by teacher assessment (sometimes using informal tests); at age 11 assessment is by national tests in English, maths and science.

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Suggestions for further reading

Bourke, J. (2005) Fear: a cultural history (London: Virago). Robin, C. (2004) Fear: the history of a political idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Svendsen, L. (2008) A philosophy of fear (London: Reaktion Books). 12 Choosing Subjects: Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices Heather Mendick

Both academic and vocational subject choices are gendered. For example, in most countries, young women are more likely than young men to opt out of studying physics, mathematics and technology; courses in care and beauty work are female-dominated while those in construction and manual trades are male-dominated. Since the 1970s second wave feminist movement this has become a focus with national governments and inter- national organisations, including the European Union and the United Nations, establishing initiatives, with both economic and equity agendas, to promote women’s participation in a range of fields, particularly science- related. Feminist activists have worked as part of these agendas and inde- pendently to open up access to all fields of study and employment to women. However, as Alison Phipps’ (2008) survey of this work in the UK shows, despite decades of activism and policy interventions, the gendering of subject choice remains a persistent feature of the global educational landscape. In this chapter I explore how the sociology of education can help to understand this. There is an intertwining of the personal and the political in my interest in subject choice. I chose to study mathematics in higher education and that decision was marked by a move from an all-girls school to a male-dominated environment in my university lectures and seminars. On becoming a teacher, I saw my students falling into gendered patterns of subject choice year-after- year in the schools and colleges in which I worked. Eventually, about 12 years after I first entered university, I started a doctorate to look for answers. Partly because of this personal biography, I focus on mathematics (and science and technology) in this chapter. But this focus is also political: subjects are not viewed equally. Science and mathematics occupy the top of our hierarchies of knowledge, ‘hard’ not ‘soft’, ‘real’ subjects not ‘Mickey Mouse’ ones. It is these subjects that, according to policyspeak, individuals and nations need to be successful in our contemporary ‘knowledge economy’:

202 Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices 203

Continuous innovation is key to the future survival and growth of busi- nesses operating in what are increasingly competitive global markets. ... the need for human ingenuity in making discoveries and creating new prod- ucts, services or processes means that the success of R&D [Research and Development] is critically dependent upon the availability and talent of scientists and engineers. (Roberts, 2002, p. 1)

These subjects even have their own internationally recognised acronym: STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). While claims to the UK becoming a knowledge economy of high-skill, high-tech jobs are over-stated (Allen and Ainley, 2011), looking at who chooses to continue and who to abandon these subjects raises questions of power and participa- tion and offers a way to explore the relationship between social structures and human agency that is at the heart of the sociological endeavour. I begin by briefly presenting biological and psychological explanations for gender differences in subject choice to show what is distinctive about sociological accounts.

It’s in your genes: biological accounts of gendered subject choice

Not one girl in a hundred would be able to work up the subjects required for an Indian Civil Service examination in the ways which boys do. Her health would break down under the effort ... if she is allowed to run the risks which to the boys are a matter of indifference, she will probably develop some disease which if not fatal, will at any rate be an injury to her for life. The question of health must be a primary consideration with all persons who undertake to educate girls. (Sewell, 1865/1987, p. 144–5)

I’m focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of ... why is the representation [of women] even lower and more problem- atic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes – height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scien- tific ability – there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the differ- ence in means [averages] – which can be debated – there is a difference in ... variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. (Summers, 2005, online)

Biology has a long history of being used to exclude women from educa- tion. Here, separated by 140 years, by gender and by nation, British Elizabeth Sewell and North American Lawrence Summers draw on biology 204 Heather Mendick to explain gender differences in educational achievement. Sewell argues that the exertion involved in study will, at best, damage girls’ health and, at worst, kill them. Summers suggests that the distribution of abilities that ‘are not plausibly, culturally determined’ and so, presumably, are innate and biologically determined, can explain the lack of women at the top of STEM fields. Biological explanations for gender differences have ranged from early discussions of the differences in sizes and shapes of men’s and women’s brains, to explanations based on women and men’s physicality, particu- larly women’s ‘weakness’ and their reproductive organs, and on the effects of hormones on the brain (see Fausto-Sterling, 1985 for a critical account). In the twenty-first century, biological explanations are generally allied to evolutionary psychology and/or neuroscience. Evolutionary psychology argues that since, as humans, we have spent over 99 per cent of our evolu- tionary time as hunter-gatherers, so our minds have evolved adaptations in response to the selection pressures of that environment. Neuroscience uses brain scans to explore patterns of brain activity (see Boaler, 2009 for an application of this to mathematics). Usually these operate together so that average differences in the parts of the brain activated in women and men in response to particular stimuli are read as hard-wired into our genes through evolutionary time. However, while genes are hard-wired, gene activity is not, so even Richard Dawkins (1982, p.13), a prominent evolutionary biologist, called genetic deter- minism ‘pernicious rubbish’. We now find Sewell’s quotation above ridiculous for the idea that examination study may be fatal to young women, but will people, in a century’s time, find the all-too-recent words of Lawrence Summers (spoken as head of Harvard University) any less ridiculous? We may be reluctant to see similarities between nineteenth-century scientists dissecting, weighing and measuring brains and contemporary scientists scanning and analysing the same organs. Yet Stephen Jay Gould’s (1996) book traces clear links between brain measurement and IQ measurement in the history of constructing ‘race’ and, in so doing, suggests similar links for gender. What arguments that reduce gender differences to biology omit is the significant geographical and historical variation in these. Gender differ- ences in all variables, including those measuring spatial awareness vary both between countries and between groups within countries: ‘in each cognitive domain, there were countries in which females’ scores were more variable than males’ (Fine, 2011, p.180). When new STEM fields emerge they are often more open to women than later, such as, radioac- tivity in the early twentieth century (Götschel, 2010) and the first decades of computing (Spender, 1985), suggesting the importance of power in constructing gendered possibilities. Evolutionary timescales work across millions of years, yet in less than a hundred we have seen massive changes in who studies what. Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices 205

We habitually think of the social as less real than the biological, what changes as less real than what stays the same. But there is a colossal reality to history. It is the modality of human life, precisely what defines us as human. No other species produces and lives in history, replacing organic evolution with radically new determinants of change. (Connell, 1987, p. 81)

It’s in your head: psychological accounts of gendered subject choice

When I first planned this chapter I imagined a structure moving smoothly from biological to psychological to sociological approaches with clear distinc- tions between them. When I started writing it got messier. I find it difficult to separate the biological and the psychological. Evolutionary psychology clearly cuts across these two fields but more generally, psychological expla- nations, in looking to the mind, often explicitly or implicitly evoke ideas of the ‘natural’ and of human biological make-up. However, social psychology which seeks to understand the development of individuals in interaction with society, at least initially, looks to move beyond biological reductionism to begin to take account of the ‘colossal reality to history’. Social psychology looks to ‘variables’ such as confidence, self-esteem, self-concept, anxiety, risk-aversion to understand why women choose not to pursue scientific and mathematical pathways. I will use one influential example from Carol Dweck’s work to identify problems with how psychology understands the relationship between the individual and the social. In her work with Barbara Licht (1983), Dweck found that girls have what she labelled ‘maladaptive’ patterns of attribution. That is, when they succeed at mathematics problems they tend to see this as due to luck, task ease, effort on their part or other external and/or unstable factors; conversely, when they fail they explain this in terms of their own inability or of the problem’s diffi- culty, which is, to internal and/or stable factors. This pattern is ‘maladaptive’ because it makes future successes less likely; it produces ‘learned helpless- ness’. Boys, generally, have the opposite patterns of attribution of success and failure. Dweck (1986) developed this work using goal orientations. She found that boys are more likely to be oriented towards learning goals seeking ‘to increase their competence, to understand or master something new’ while girls generally orient towards performance goals seeking ‘to gain favourable judgements of their competence or avoid negative judgements’ (p. 1040). She argued that the female pattern of goal orientation leads to challenge avoidance and low self-esteem. Moreover, since it is found disproportion- ately among high-achieving girls, Dweck concluded that her work explains why many of the highest performing girls opt out of mathematics. Dweck’s work can be seen as supportive of girls in that it does not say they cannot do maths; motivations and attitudes ‘feel’ like they can be worked 206 Heather Mendick on in a way that abilities like spatial awareness do not. But her work locates the problem of STEM and gender in individual girls rather than the social context in which their attitudes arise. As Sue Willis (1995, p.189) identified, Dweck ‘had “no idea” how this might arise – these characteristics [low self- esteem etc.] were, it seems, a corollary to being born female’. This returns us to biology. So, while it may be rare to hear talk of ‘hard-wired low self- esteem’, this is what Dweck’s work implies. From a sociological perspective, attitudes, motivations and emotions are not in the individual person but are social; it is impossible to separate the individual and the social or to sepa- rate what we call biological or psychological from what we call social and cultural. Although work like Dweck’s remains popular in relation to gender and STEM, many contemporary ‘psychological’ accounts of gender, now acknowledge this complexity:

it’s easy to underestimate the impact of what is outside the mind on what takes place inside ... As Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji puts it, there is no ‘bright line separating self from culture’, and the culture in which we develop and function enjoys a ‘deep reach’ into our minds. (Fine, 2011, p. xxvi, original emphasis)

Looking outside: feminist sociological accounts of gendered subject choice

Second wave feminists distinguished between sex (biological differences between women and men) and gender (social differences). This was impor- tant because it initiated a field of research into the sociology of gender that looked to what is ‘outside the mind’ to explain ‘what takes place inside’. While liberal feminism maintained a distinction between the public and the private, most feminists critiqued this; they argued that ‘the personal is political’ and explored how, what appear to be (private) individual choices relate to wider (public) social forces. Importantly patriarchy, ‘the combina- tion of social, economic and cultural systems which ensures male supremacy’ (Coote and Campbell, 1982, p. 32) was introduced as an explanatory vari- able. In relation to this chapter, this work opens up a space for looking at the mutual construction of science, mathematics, technology and gender. However, before I do this, I focus on the relationship between the inside and the outside, the individual and the social, within feminist approaches. In particular, I argue that sociology disrupts this distinction between inside and outside that psychology, even at its most social (as in the last quotation), maintains. Although separating gender from sex remains a powerful theoretical move, it still assumes a ‘biological basis of sexual difference ... and the “roles” that children are taught by adults are a superficial social dressing laid over the “real” biological difference’ (Davies, 1989, p. 5). Thus there is an assumed Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices 207 pre-existing individual essence on which the social makes its mark. To avoid this, I work with a different understanding of ‘biology’, one which we can trace through early feminist writings. As Simone de Beauvoir (1949/1988) famously said: ‘One is not born but one becomes a woman’, simultaneously challenging ideas of a biological basis for sex and an asocial individual. Shulamith Firestone (1970/1979, p.18) in the Dialectic of Sex did see a biolog- ical basis for women’s oppression within their reproductive capacity but cited de Beauvoir in arguing that ‘the “natural” is not necessarily a “human” value. Humanity has begun to transcend Nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature’. As part of challenging the biological basis of gender, feminists have unpicked the category of ‘woman’. Notably, bell hooks (1982, p. 160) chal- lenged the racism in the mainstream feminist movement by quoting the words of former slave Sojourner Truth from 1852:

Well children, whar dar is so much racket dar must be something out o’ kilter. I tink dat ’twixt de niggers of de Sout and de women at de Norf all a talking ’bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all dis here talking ’bout? Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to have de best places ... and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! ... I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me – and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much as any man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well – and ain’t I a woman?

Working-class and lesbian feminists also found ways to ask ‘ain’t I a woman?’ More recently, trans and intersex people have questioned this category further. Arguments about gender and STEM have traditionally focused on the majority of women who opt out of these areas; those who work in STEM could ask ‘ain’t I a woman?’ (albeit from more privileged positions than Sojourner Truth). Lynda Stepulevage (1994) discussed why lesbians are disproportionately attracted to careers in computing. She argues that the social construction of computing as masculine together with associations of lesbianism with masculinity support such choices and that straight women’s investment in heterosexuality can lead them to collude in an idea of computing as masculine that excludes them. Women of colour find it more difficult than white women in the USA to feel at home in science (Ong, 2005) and have different reasons for leaving the subject (Varma, 2007). To understand subject choice, we need an approach that can encom- pass these differences. I suggest that we see gender as constructed within social practices (including those of science, technology and mathematics) rather than within individuals. I take this approach from the work of Judith 208 Heather Mendick

Butler (1990) and her troubling of the sex/gender distinction. Her argument develops earlier feminist ideas by pointing out that if sex and gender are seen as independent then, even if a binary form of sex is assumed, there is no necessary reason why there should be only two genders nor why male bodies should become gendered as masculine and female bodies as feminine.

Can we refer to a ‘given’ sex or a ‘given’ gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is ‘sex’ anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such ‘facts’ for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? (Butler, 1990/1999, pp. 10–11)

In this passage Butler’s questioning shows that sex itself is gendered; the supposed pre-social category of sex is produced as an effect of the systems of sociocultural construction that we call gender. Returning to the earlier quotations from Sewell and Summers, we can see how the lines between sex and gender have moved through history and remain contested. The idea that something lies within the realm of biology is thoroughly social; biological and psychological processes are ‘produced in relation to different ways of understanding what it means to be human, across a range of practices which “make up” the social’ (Blackman, 2001, p. 226). It is to these ‘practices which make-up the social’, or discourses, that we should look to understand how gender, choices and STEM disciplines become mutually implicated within the reproduction of inequality through what we think of as ‘individual actions’. In contrast to the dialectical rela- tionship between the social and the individual within social psychology, within this sociological approach ‘the discursive practice is the place in which the subject is produced’ (Walkerdine, 1997, p. 63).

Discourses of gender, STEM and subject choice

There are no absolute truths outside discourse. However it is not possible for any-one to know any-thing. Knowledge is regulated by the practices which simultaneously construct it, and so discourses are ‘regimes of truth’ which authorise themselves ... One of the ways that this discursive stability happens is that discourses position individuals – knowing subjects – in certain ways, which in turn affects their power to know any differently – or to be known differently. (Smith, 2012, p. 12, original emphasis) Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices 209

In brief, discourses of choice demand that the subjects we choose are parts of our identities and that they are written into a coherent narrative of who we are and who we want to be. These discourses transform socially shaped choices into acts of individual agency. Discourses of gender demand that one be either male or female, recognisably so, and preferably matching the gender assigned at birth. Being female excludes being male and vice versa so that these two are defined oppositionally making it difficult or impossible to see differences within males and within females and overlaps between them. Discourses of STEM vary greatly by the field, but as we saw earlier they position STEM as ‘hard’ subjects in opposition to ‘soft’ arts and humanities subjects, as vital for individual and national progress and prosperity and as areas in which not enough people choose to work, with girls and women figuring as a particular problem. Many researchers have traced the interweaving of these discourses (e.g. Chronaki, 2011; Danielsson, 2009). Judy Wajcman (1991) looked at how gender relations shape technology. She tracked this through examples, including the stalled development of the self-cleaning house, and Cynthia Enloe’s (1983, p. 123) discussion of women’s involvement in the British armed forces:

During the Second World War Winston Churchill encouraged ... anti- aircraft batteries composed of men and women. The general was advised ... that women could operate the guns’ fire control instruments and so ‘free’ male soldiers to actually fire the guns. Thus, in the new mixed artillery crews women were assigned to fire control, searchlight operations, targeting and hit confirmation. ... [The] British government defined these artillery women as ‘non-combat’ personnel. Men standing next to them, but assigned to firing the guns, were designated as ‘combat’ personnel.

Technologies do not determine social change: existing power relations, including gendered power relations, shape which technologies are developed and whether and how they are taken up. Gender and technology are mutu- ally constitutive practices which ‘position individuals – knowing subjects – in certain ways’. Turning to gender and mathematics, most academic research has tended to find that girls and women do maths differently from boys and men. For example, Jo Boaler (1997) found that while boys are happy to follow rules in mathematics, girls have a ‘quest for understanding’ and want to know why the rules work. Joanne Rossi Becker (1995) argued that girls and women have a connected way of knowing as opposed to the separate way of knowing pursued by boys and men. Connected reasoning starts from the relation- ships between people, in contrast to separated reasoning that treats ethical dilemmas as ‘sort of like a math problem with humans’ (Gilligan, 1982/1993, 210 Heather Mendick p. 26). When extended to ways of knowing, separate approaches favour abstract, detached knowledge taught individualistically, while connected approaches favour concrete, relational knowledge taught interactively. In a third example, Melissa Rodd and Hannah Bartholomew (2006, p. 36, orig- inal emphasis) considered ‘some of the ways in which the young women we studied negotiate a path through undergraduate mathematics as women’. They argued that women’s relationships with mathematics are marked by invisibility and specialness and that this produces feminine ways of being in mathematics. However, reproduction of gender difference is happening not only in the actions of the female research participants but also in how these actions are read and inscribed by Boaler, Becker, Rodd and Bartholomew. Interventions in research (like those into policy and practice) on gender and STEM are not outside of ‘the problem’ dispassionately and objectively describing it, they contribute to constructing it: ‘how things are represented and the “machineries” and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event role’ (Hall, 1992, p. 254, original emphasis). In my own research, in contrast to Boaler, I found boys with a ‘quest for understanding’ (Mendick, 2006) and, in contrast to Rodd and Bartholomew, young men whose experiences of being mathematical were marked by ‘specialness’ (Mendick et al., 2009). My aim here is not to suggest that there are no gender differences in mathematics nor to argue against these writers in trying to open up mathematics to a wider range of ways of being, but it is to question the way in which, when they look to gender and mathematics, they ‘discover’, as do neuroscientists, stereotypical ways of being feminine in girls/women and stereotypical ways of being masculine in boys/men. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that Boaler (2009) has recently turned to neuroscience to make sense of her earlier findings. Looking at how math- ematics is done differently by men and women (or simply finding that it is) shows a focus on the individual rather than the practice since it is the individual and their gender who controls whether the researcher views their practice as masculine or feminine. We need to see gender as more than a matter of girls and boys, men and women. As Wajcman (1991, p. 25) argued in relation to technology, women can become more represented in organizations ‘without transforming the direction of technological development’. This has indeed happened with the American space defence programme ‘but we do not hear their voices protesting about its preoccupations. Nevertheless, gender relations are an integral constituent of the social organization of these institutions and their projects’. Questions of gender and STEM, while often starting from male/ female differences in participation, should look more widely to gendered practices and how these are engaged by men and women. To do this, following Butler, we need to break with the inevitability of finding that male bodies become gendered as masculine and female bodies as feminine, Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices 211 that female bodies do science, technology and mathematics as women and male bodies as men. This could be viewed as moving away from poststruc- turalism towards essentialising masculinity and femininity. However, taking a poststructural approach does not mean denying the existence of gender but simply understanding this existence as not implying that it describes an external reality but that it has effects in the world. We need to find ways to engage with gender that disrupt its iterative reproduction. My claim is that one way to do this is to ask: What happens if we explore the possibility that girls and women, in doing mathematics, science, technology, and so on, are doing masculinity? This is a question I have been exploring for some time (see Mendick, 2006) and it is one that I return to in the next section through analysing one woman’s account of her experiences doing mathematics.

Alice: doing mathematics is doing masculinity

I interviewed Cypriot-born Alice twice in 2007, once as part of a group of three mathematics undergraduates in their final year at a London University, and once individually shortly after she had graduated. Here I focus my anal- ysis on her individual interview, but informed by the group interview. These interviews were carried out as part of a larger project on the role of popular cultural representations of mathematics in learners’ identities, carried out jointly with Debbie Epstein and Marie-Pierre Moreau and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (http://sites.brunel.ac.uk /mathsimages). I asked Alice about: the place of mathematics in two imag- ined worlds: a world one hundred years into the future and a world where mathematicians appear regularly on television; her relationship with math- ematics, any changes in this and associated memories; the reasons for her educational and employment choices; and whether anyone can do math- ematics and if there are differences related to gender, social class or ethnicity. I also asked her to arrange a series of images of mathematical people in order of likeability and a series of images of mathematical artefacts in order of maths-ness. The practice which recurred through Alice’s interview was order and disci- pline. I carried out the interview at Alice’s home. Although I found her flat lovely, she frequently apologised for its disorganised state. This suggests not only her desire for order but also to avoid the judgements that may follow from being otherwise. Order was important to her relationship with math- ematics. This is apparent in her account of a class she took whilst studying for an earlier master’s degree in history of art:

The class was, half was coming from history of art background, and the other half was coming engineering background, and we were all studying English together ... The teacher told us ... ‘All engineers, ... they are tidy and 212 Heather Mendick

they do use rulers, different coloured pens ... And history of art students, they start beautifully writing and then, you know, towards the end of class it goes; they lost the subject and they are in their dream world.

Alice’s talk is produced by and reproduces oppositions between STEM subjects and arts and humanities subjects: engineers are ‘tidy’ and, while art students may initially work ‘beautifully’, this lacks the structure (‘rulers, different coloured pens’) and discipline (‘they lost the subject’) of the engineers. This opposition is something which Alice maintained despite evidence to the contrary: ‘I wish I had done more maths to become more organized in my life. I don’t know if it’s the case, because I’ve seen my lecturers and they’re so untidy sometimes, maybe’. She acknowledges here that there is no clear match between mathematics and order among the people she knows but the association is too dominant for this evidence to impact and recurs through her interview. For example, the intertwining of mathematics and organisa- tion came out in the two worlds I asked her to imagine: one a hundred years into the future and one with mathematicians featuring often on television. In the first case she said, ‘maths is still going to have a big importance to any job in future life because I think it’s like, life is coming more organized, you know, which maths is a bit like that, isn’t it? Like ... sorting out the things’. In the second she suggested that TV ‘mathematicians can do like ... helping people with the organization of their lives and ... maybe managing skill of their money or managing skill of their life. It’s a thinking ahead’. Here math- ematics is produced as enabling ‘thinking ahead’, so controlling not simply the present but to some degree, the future. This is part of a wider discourse of mathematics’ power to predict everything from weather to crime (as in US TV series Numb3rs and UK TV miniseries The Bletchley Circle). The quotations above indicate that Alice wants to be(come) ordered and disciplined through mathematics. The subject represents for her old-fash- ioned values of hard work and learning for its own sake rather than being motivated by money: ‘I quite enjoy the old fashioned way. I like ... hard work ... I don’t do any hard work now, when I don’t do that, I don’t feel happy’. Thus, she sees discipline (through mathematics) as holding out the possibility to ‘feel happy’ and, in this next extract, to have ‘peace in my mind’:

I’m not good mathematician so I don’t do sudokus very much either. And I believe that they’re related to maths. And I bought myself a book for that, so my next project is that. ... [Okay, so why do you want to have a go at those?] Cos I want to find out more. If I enjoy, if it’s going to give me peace in my mind.

Perhaps by ‘find[ing] out more’, she sees a possibility for control and this control will be the source of her ‘peace’. Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices 213

In general, as Jenny Shaw (1995, p. 117) noted, ‘scientific pursuits are associated with individuals who feel detached from the world’ and ‘value in science the opportunities it presents for controlling the world (i.e. orderly arrangement and meticulous accuracy of models)’. Shaw drew on psycho- analytic theory to explain the trend whereby men invest in detachment and control more than women in terms of their need to defend against feelings of emptiness associated with the narcissistic or male wound arising from boys’ resolution of the oedipal complex. Relatedly, Valerie Walkerdine (1990, p. 143) wrote:

Mathematical reasoning presumes mastery of a discourse in which the universe is knowable and manipulable according to particular mathemat- ical algorithms. This, along with the production of ‘hard facts’, is usually understood as the very basis of certainty. However, conversely we might understand it as the fear, the necessity of proof against the terror of its Other, that is, loss of certainty, control and attempted control of loss. We might understand it as the impossibility of the object of desire, ‘woman’, and elaborate fantasies to control consequent desire and avoid depend- ency or powerlessness.

Sociologically I view these psychoanalytic accounts as ‘thought experi- ments’, rather than as speaking to inner truths of the psyche. However, for our purposes, what is important is that Walkerdine and Shaw’s work makes clear that desires for control, order and certainty are culturally inscribed as masculine. So Alice’s way of approaching mathematics is masculine. However, as we saw earlier, she also said: ‘I’m not good mathematician’. Research shows that while there are now few gender differences in mathematical performance, males are far more likely to be positioned as ‘good at mathematics’ (Mendick, 2006). We can understand this difference as resulting from the tensions involved in doing masculinity while being invested in producing yourself as recognisably female. Alice must achieve ordinariness/normality in her positionings within practices of gender and of mathematics. Alice described mathematics as ‘my second language rather than first language’ and so as not natural to her way of being. When tracking back her son’s mathematical ability she sees it as ‘part of genetic’ and then quickly qualifies this: ‘I don’t mean to myself. My dad ... loves maths and his dad’. So it is not what is natural that matters here, but how natural is inscribed and with what effects for Alice. Mathematical ability for her, follows the male family line and she, as woman, is outside of this. Alice made a distinction between how an ‘average woman’ and an ‘extraor- dinary woman’ relate to mathematics and locates herself as average:

Usually when I see a woman [who] is so good at maths, in a way they are different to, you know, average woman, whatever. ... I don’t say that I’m an 214 Heather Mendick

extraordinary woman, I’m average. And I saw some average woman who was doing maths as well, ... they can want to be in different areas, maybe, not producing any more ideas ... , maybe helping some other areas.

Alice relegates all but extraordinary women to a different position in math- ematics: having a role in helping with but not producing knowledge, for example, through her planned career in teaching. She continued: ‘I do believe that women are, quite, um, quite um, clever. I think, unfortunately I think boys are a bit more keen on to maths, in general. Talking about, I believe a woman has more to offer because they have a different ability ... in terms of commu- nication’. That Alice began here by saying she believes women are ‘quite um, clever’ indicates her awareness that what she said next could undermine this. As here, women feature in the history of knowledge and in contemporary representations as handmaidens to and inspiration for creativity but not as creative agents in their own right (Mendick, 2006; Walkerdine, 1990). Here difference is lesser with women supporting the original, creativity of men. For Alice, being a mathematician is synonymous with that creative produc- tive role: ‘A mathematician, I told before, like is producing something. So in terms of producing new ideas, I’m not good. So I’m only good to learn what is there. So I enjoy learning, and I enjoy teaching as well, whatever I learnt’. If we read Alice’s approach to mathematics as feminine then we lose the full force of the discursive tensions within which she is caught.

Conclusions

Sociology demands that we explore the social construction of the things that we think of as most personal and individual to us, including our hopes and dreams. In this chapter, I have attempted to show what this can offer to the study of the gendering of subject choice. Subject choice despite showing patterns by gender, ethnicity and social class, has not attracted as much work within the sociology of education as other choices, such as, of school, university or pathway. However, our feelings about different disciplines, whether positive or negative, are often very powerful and, as Shaw (1995, p. 113) notes, subjects function like people, ‘they have to be related to and identified with ... one has to “get on” with’ them. They are thus an important space for the construction of identity and engaging with subject choice helps us to see how the politics of knowledge are lived. I have suggested that by moving from individuals to the practices in which they engage we can open up different ways of understanding the relation- ship between gender and choice. I have worked with a single case study in the hope of showing the potential of this approach. However, I have also applied it to a study of 43 young people taking mathematics aged 16 to 18 in Mendick (2006) and, although Alice remained in my memory because of her focus on order, my choice of her to ‘think differently’ is largely arbitrary. Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices 215

Thinking differently is not only theoretical, it changes what we do. A recent European Union campaign ‘It’s A Girl Thing’ (http://science-girl-thing.eu/), to encourage girls into science, featured a video advert where young women with model good looks, wearing high heels and designer shades, play with test tubes and other scientific equipment and scribble complicated looking formulas on transparent boards. This was widely attacked by women scien- tists as reproducing traditional feminine stereotypes and not presenting real- istic images of women scientists (Mattel’s Computer Engineer Barbie doll attracted similar critiques). The advert was rapidly removed from the Web and the branding of the campaign changed from pink to blue and otherwise made considerably less ‘girlie’. I was more ambivalent than most about the campaign, I do think that breaking the discursive association of science with masculinity is important. However, writing this chapter, has made me think that the campaign reinforced a newer, but increasingly powerful, discourse that girls and women do science as girls and women, and that we need space for other stories. Ong, in an insightful investigation of women of colour studying physics in US universities, speaks about how many of them take on aspects of mascu- linity as a survival strategy. She reads this ‘gender passing’ negatively as fragmentation, whereby they split parts of themselves, and feels that a poten- tially more successful but also more risky strategy for women is multiplicity, simultaneously embracing all aspects of their-selves: their gender, ethnic and physicist identities. I have no doubt that the women to whom Ong talked did experience ‘fragmentation’ in hiding parts of themselves, but I wonder if that was all they experienced. Could taking on aspects of masculinity also have been positive? And if not, could it become so? In asking these questions I join with Judith Halberstam (1998, p. 241) in suggesting that ‘Masculinity does not belong to men, has not been produced only by men, and does not properly express male heterosexuality’. Although Halberstam’s work is based entirely on lesbian examples of female masculinities, female mascu- linities, like male femininities, are neither rare nor freakish but are part of the landscape of everyday gender relations. This suggests that, in exploring the accounts of women in masculine fields (and elsewhere), we suspend our commitment to finding them feminine and ask: What are the tensions between engaging in masculinity while also achieving ‘normal’ femininity?

References

Allen, M. and Ainley, P. (2011) ‘Why young people can’t get the jobs they want and what can be done about it’, http://radicaled.wordpress.com/, date accessed 4 August 2011. Becker, J.R. (1995) ‘Women’s ways of knowing in mathematics’, in G. Kaiser and P. Rogers (eds.), Equity in mathematics education: influences of feminism and culture (London: Falmer). Blackman, L. (2001) Hearing voices: embodiment and experience (London: Free Association Books). 216 Heather Mendick

Boaler, J. (1997) Experiencing school mathematics: teaching styles, sex and setting (Buckingham: Open University Press). Boaler, J. (2009) The elephant in the classroom: helping children learn and love maths (London: Souvenir Press). Butler, J. (1990/1999) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (London: Routledge). Chronaki, A. (2011) ‘Disrupting “development” as the quality/equity discourse: cyborgs and subalterns in school technoscience’, in B. Atweh, M. Graven, W. Secada and P. Valero (eds.), Mapping equity and quality in mathematics education (Dordrecht: Springer). Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and power (Cambridge: Polity Press). Coote, A. and Campbell, B. (1982) Sweet freedom: the struggle for women’s liberation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Danielsson, A. T. (2009) Doing physics – doing gender: an exploration of physics students’ identity constitution in the context of laboratory work (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet). Davies, B. (1989) Frogs and snails and feminist tales: preschool children and gender (Sydney: Allen & Unwin). Dawkins, R. (1982) The extended phenotype (Oxford: Oxford University Press). de Beauvoir, S. (1949/1988) The second sex (London: Pan Books). Dweck, C. (1986) ‘Motivational processes affecting learning’, American Psychologist, 41(10), 1040–1048. Enloe, C. (1983). Does khaki become you? The militarisation of women’s lives. London: Pluto Press. Fausto-Sterling, A. (1985) Myths of gender: biological theories about women and men (New York: Basic Books Inc). Fine, C. (2011) Delusions of gender: the real science behind sex differences (London: Icon Books Ltd). Firestone, S. (1970/1979) The dialectic of sex: the case for feminist revolution (London: The Women’s Press). Gilligan, C. (1982/1993) In a different voice: psychological theory and women’s develop- ment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Götschel, H. (2010) ‘The entanglement of gender and physics: beings, knowledges and practices’, in M. Blomqvist and E. Ehnsmyr (eds), Never mind the gap! Gendering science in transgressive encounters (Uppsala: Centre for Gender Research). Gould, S. (1996) The mismeasure of man (revised edition) (London: Penguin). Halberstam, J. (1998) Female masculinity (Durham and London: Duke University Press). Hall, S. (1992) ‘New ethnicities’, in J. Donald and A. Rattansi (eds) 'Race', culture and difference (London: Sage), pp. 252–259. hooks, b. (1982) Ain’t I a woman: black women and feminism (London: Pluto Press). Licht, B.G. and Dweck, C.S. (1983) ‘Sex differentiation in achievement orientations: consequences for academic choices and attainments’, in M. Marland (ed.), Sex differ- entiation and schooling (London: Heineman). Mendick, H. (2006) Masculinities in mathematics (Maidenhead: Open University Press). Mendick, H., Moreau, M.-P. and Epstein, D. (2009) ‘Special cases: neoliberalism, choice and mathematics education’, in L. Black, H. Mendick and Y. Solomon (eds), Mathematical relationships in education: identities & participation (New York: Routledge). Ong, M. (2005) ‘Body projects of young women of color in physics: intersections of gender, race, and science’, Social Problems, 52(4), 593–617. Sociological Approaches to Young Women’s Subject Choices 217

Phipps, A. (2008) Women in science, engineering and technology: three decades of UK initia- tives (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham). Roberts, G. (2002) SET for success: the supply of people with science, technology, engineering and mathematical skills (London: DfES). Rodd, M. and Bartholomew, H. (2006) ‘Invisible and special: young women’s experi- ences as undergraduate mathematics students’, Gender and Education, 18(1), 35–50. Sewell, E. (1987) ‘Principles of education (1865)’, in D. Spender (ed.) The education papers: women’s quest for equality in Britain 1850–1912 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Shaw, J. (1995) Education, gender and anxiety (London: Taylor & Francis). Smith, C. (2012) Choosing more mathematics: an exploration of participation and learning in the Further Mathematics Network, PhD, London Metropolitan University, London. Spender, D. (1985) Nattering on the net: women, power and cyberspace (North Melbourne: Spinifex Press). Stepulevage, L. (1994) ‘Sexuality and computing: transparent relations’, in G. Griffin and S. Andermahr (eds), Straight studies modified: lesbian interventions in the academy (London: Cassell). Summers, L. (2005) Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce, http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005 /nber.php, date accessed 17th September 2012. Varma, R. (2007) ‘Women in computing: the role of geek culture’, Science as Culture, 16(4), 359–376. Wajcman, J. (1991) Feminism confronts technology (Cambridge: Polity Press). Walkerdine, V. (1990) Schoolgirl fictions (London: Verso). Walkerdine, V. (1997) ‘Redefining the subject in situated cognition theory’, in D. Kirshner and J.A. Whitson (eds), Situated cognition: social, semiotic and psycho- logical perspectives (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Willis, S. (1995) ‘Gender reform through school mathematics’, in G. Kaiser and P. Rogers (eds), Equity in mathematics education: influences of feminism and culture (London: Falmer).

Suggestions for further reading

Halberstam, J. (1998) Female masculinity (Durham and London: Duke University Press). Thomas, K. (1990) Gender and subject in higher education (Buckingham: Open University Press). Wajcman, J. (1991) Feminism confronts technology (Cambridge: Polity Press). 13 Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn

Introduction

Without doubt, one of the defining features of the past 30 years has been the ongoing development of digital technology. The scale and pace of innovation in technologies such as computing and mobile telephony has prompted many commentators to portray societal development (at least in the overdeveloped regions of North America, East Asia and Europe) as being more technologically driven than ever before. Manuel Castells (2006, p. 3), for example, puts it as follows: ‘we know that technology does not determine society: it is society’. While a good case can be made for approaching such statements with some scepticism, it is nonetheless undeniable that digital technologies are deeply implicated in contempo- rary social life. In this context, then, it is hardly surprising that digital technologies of all shapes and sizes are becoming embedded into the everyday fabric of contemporary education. Digital technologies now play an integral role in many aspects of teaching and learning across the life course (Melhuish and Falloon, 2009; Allen and Seaman, 2011; Cook and Pachler, 2009). Digital technologies have also come to underpin professional work practices and effectiveness indicators in education (Facer, 2012; Grek, 2009), while images of students learning happily with the latest laptop or smartphone continue to play an important discursive role as a symbol of modernity in the marketing brochures of institutions. Indeed, despite its complexity, digital technology use is now an expected but largely unremarkable feature of the educational landscape. In this chapter we argue that the increasing normalisation of digital tech- nology within the mainstream of contemporary education urgently requires sociology of education to pay close attention to the technological. Indeed, as the 2010s creep ever closer to the 2020s, one could argue that it is increas- ingly difficult to lay claim to understand any aspect of education without giving serious consideration to the technological.

218218 Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology 219

The need for a deliberate ‘sociology of education and technology’

Given the ways in which digital technologies are implicated in the day-to-day practices and structures of education, the fact that the topic of technology continues to be a relatively marginalised feature of the sociology of education is perhaps surprising. Of course, there have long been small pockets of authors producing critical sociological analyses of digital technologies in education. In North America, for example, a modest lineage can be traced from the work of David Noble (1984), Stephen Kerr (1996) and Steven Hodas (1993) through to Hank Bromley and Michael Apple (1998), Gary Natriello (1995) and Torin Monahan (2005) in the 1990s and 2000s. It must also be noted that tech- nology has occasionally captured the attention of a few relatively ‘big names’ within the sociology and philosophy of education such as Michael Apple, Joel Spring, Michael Peters, Douglas Kellner, Andrew Feenberg, Jane Kenway, Roger Dale and others. Yet few of these critical scholars have maintained a focus on the topic of education and technology for more than a small propor- tion of their careers. At the same time, the well-established fields of ‘sociology of technology’ and ‘science and technology studies’ have directed their atten- tion towards the spectacular epistemological and ethical debates promoted by nuclear, genomic and fertility technologies, or the day-to-day use of tech- nologies in workplaces (Heath et al., 2000). Very rarely have scholars working in these areas turned their attention towards the complexities of the educa- tion arena. We still, therefore, remain a long way from being able to point towards a deliberate and sustained ‘sociology of education and technology’.1 This low profile is disappointing on a number of levels. In particular, it is problematic because the analysis of technology in education continues to be dominated by psychological processes concerned primarily with under- standing the relative merits of different uses of technology for learning (see, e.g. the contents pages of highly ranked journals such as Computers and Education). The notable exception to this emerges from the media and cultural studies perspective, which, while giving greater recognition to the complexities of context, is often occupied disproportionately with discerning practices of empowerment through informal participation in digital cultures outside the school (see, e.g. the field-shaping concerns of the Macarthur Foundation Series on ‘Digital Media and Learning’ (2007)). Indeed, despite long-standing acknowledgement of the need for theoretical expansion and sophistication (e.g. Hlynka and Belland, 1991; Oliver, 2011), research into education and technology as a whole is too often characterised by techno- cratic discourses of ‘effectiveness’ or captured by the search for emerging practices beyond formal educational settings. It is our contention in this chapter, therefore, that a deliberate sociology of education and technology is critical for two reasons. First, it is essential for the continued capacity of sociology of education itself to contribute to 220 Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn contemporary educational debates; and second, it is an important means of developing the complexity and insights of analysis in the educational tech- nology research field. This deliberate sociology of education and technology would proceed from the insights borne out of sociology of technology. It would work from the position that technologies are not neutral but political; that they are carriers for assumptions and ideas about the future of society; that their design, promotion and use are all sites in which struggles over power are conducted. It would also draw on the traditions of critical sociology to focus explicitly on the fact that technologies are deeply implicated within unequal relations of power elsewhere in education and society, within the lived realities of dominance and subordination that are currently ongoing, and within the conflicts that are generated by these relations (see Apple, 2010). One of the key strengths of a sustained and deliberate sociology of educa- tion and technology therefore would be its willingness to approach the understanding of technological change in education as a contested political project rather than as a matter for technocratic debate over efficiency. Such a perspective would remind us that the use of digital technology in education should be understood in long-standing and entrenched terms of struggle over the distribution of power. As the wider sociology of education reminds us, these are struggles that take place across a number of fronts – from the allocation of resources to the design of curricula, from the maximising of profit and political gain, to attempts to mitigate patterns of exclusion. Thus, sociology of education and technology would draw attention to linkages between technology use in classrooms and ‘macro’ elements of the social structure of society such as global economics, labour markets and political and cultural institutions. Similarly, at the ‘micro’ level of the individual, it would remind us that education and technology also needs to be understood as being entwined with the ‘micro-politics’ of social life. In approaching education and technology as a site of intense social conflict, a deliberate sociology of education and technology therefore moves beyond the search for novel forms of teaching and learning to also interrogate broader ques- tions of how digital technologies (re)produce social relations and in whose interests they serve.

Matters of concern for the sociologist of education and technology

We hope that we have already impressed upon the reader a need for greater numbers of sociologists of education – regardless of specialisation – to engage with digital technology as a serious and significant element of their study. However, we are under no illusions that this will be a straightforward task. One of the main challenges in applying these sociological concerns to educa- tion and technology is to work within the fast-moving, rapidly changing and Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology 221 often ephemeral nature of the topic. The new media landscapes of Facebook, Twitter and ‘cloud computing’ are deceptive in their ability to appear too shallow and fast moving to merit serious sociological scrutiny. Jodi Dean, for one, has bemoaned the intellectual ‘challenge’ faced by any academic who attempts to think critically and politically ‘about media practices in a setting where they are fast, fun and ubiquitous’ (Dean, 2010, p. 1). As a result, this is an area of educational research that has tended traditionally to attract researchers who are personally as well as professionally enchanted by digital technology and a digital way of living. Certainly, it is understandable that researchers and writers who are less personally interested in the digital might perceive these technologies as too slippery a target to merit the analysis that one would afford to, say, seemingly more straightforward and stable issues such as class differences in educational outcomes or the gendered nature of the curriculum. Yet if one looks beyond the seemingly shallow and ephemeral nature of the surface features of digital culture, then a number of entrenched issues of central importance to the contemporary sociology of education are soon apparent. Given the endurance of these issues, the case can therefore be made for sociologists of education adopting a more de-accelerated, detached and disinterested perspective on education and technology than is usually the case in popular discourses of digital technology. Indeed, we would contend that one of the first steps when taking a sociological approach to technology and new media is being able to move beyond the never-ending ‘noise’ of technical upgrades and product re-versioning, and instead iden- tify the often obscured but nevertheless substantive social issues that persist beneath (Wessels, 2010). Viewed in this manner, then, we would suggest that there are a number of key issues and debates that will continue to be asso- ciated with the ongoing mobilisation of digital technologies in education over the next two decades or so, and therefore merit particular sociological attention. In order to advance our argument for a deliberate sociology of education and technology, we can now spend a little time considering four of these issues in turn.

Virtualising education and personalising learning The first issue that merits attention is the way in which digital technologies are being mobilised as a ready rationale for – and ultimate means of achieving – the disaggregation of the education institution. In other words, for the break up of education institutions into multiple functions where students ‘access’ teaching, learning, peer support and accreditation from multiple sites and sources distributed between different social settings. This can be seen in stark terms, for example, in the ways in which the individual and their ‘personal learning networks’ rather than the school, the university or the locality, is being promoted as the pre-eminent site of education. Of course, these shifts are not driven wholly by digital technology. The sociology of education has 222 Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn a long and distinguished track record in documenting and analysing the wider ways in which the neo-liberal market reforms in education serve to construct students and parents as consumers and to construct education as a positional rather than a public good (Brown, 1997; Holmwood, 2011). It has also documented how the rhetoric of the ‘unfinished cosmopolitan’ (Popkewitz et al., 2006; Popkewitz, 2008), constantly adapting herself to the changing demands of liquid modernity has become a dominating metaphor for education in contemporary conditions. What has gone relatively unre- marked within these broader sociological analyses, however, is the way in which the libertarian traditions of computing and the democratic narratives of co-production via digital networks are potentially enabling and fuelling these trajectories of hyper-individualisation and de-institutionalisation. The last decade, for example, has seen a massive growth in online and informal learning environments that seek to cut the umbilical cord between educational practice and institution, and to put ‘into the hands of learners’ the means to construct their own ‘learning journeys’. These developments are driven by multiple and often conflicting agendas, which include, for example, those who are fundamentally concerned with disrupting existing concentrations of educational and economic power. Some supporters of such agendas, for example, draw on traditions ranging from Frierean demo- cratic education, to the Open Source movements, to community develop- ment and civil society analyses of Putnam and McKnight, not to mention those who are simply trying to make education more financially affordable. For many of these groups, virtualising and personalising learning is under- stood as potentially challenging existing inequalities and opening up educa- tional practices to the distinctive needs and resources of much more diverse student groups. In many of these accounts, digital technology use is generally celebrated for what Ruckenstein (2010, p.7) describes as its ‘individualistic ethos ... char- acterised by a firm belief in the emancipatory potential of new information technologies, free-wheeling bohemian creativity, and goal orientated entre- preneurship’. Crucially, digital technologies are seen as liberating the indi- vidual from the traditional formal institutions that would previously have structured their education, and recasting educational arrangements and rela- tions along more informal, open and, in the eyes of their advocates, more democratic and ultimately empowering lines. This potential is understandably appealing to educationalists concerned with the welfare and development of the individual learner and equally alluring to those who have long desired to counter the long-standing inequalities reproduced by traditional education. Nonetheless, the hyper-individualised rhetoric of transformation that often dominates analyses of these develop- ments urgently needs to be scrutinised by the traditions of critical sociology. In particular, there is a need to unpick the uneasy and often unconvincing amalgam of theoretical agendas that currently propel much educational Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology 223 thinking towards an unwarranted valorisation of the individual ‘rational’ learner operating within an efficient technological network. One obvious challenge that sociology presents to this rhetoric is the extent to which the promise of online connectivity to (m)any place(s) and people obscures the continued importance of immediate ‘local’ contexts in framing learning processes and practices. In this sense, sociology reminds us that it is perhaps erroneous to perceive technology-based learning as somehow ‘detached from the spatial condition of common locality’ (Thompson, 1995, p. 32). Furthermore, the idea of the self-responsibilised, self-determining learner also places an obvious focus on the capabilities of individuals to act in an agentic, empowered fashion – in Bauman’s (2000) terms to act as empowered individuals de facto rather than individuals de jure who have individualism ‘done to’ them. Of course, as the past 30 years of late/liquid modern social theory reminds us, this positioning of technology-supported individualisation as a biographical solution to systemic contradictions is not without its potential problems (see Beck, 1992; Popkewitz et al., 2006). These contextualised perspectives therefore raise important questions addressed too rarely in the public and policy education debate on the role of digital technologies and education. For instance, just how equal are the networks between individuals that digital technologies actually support? How/are individuals’ educational freedoms resulting in enhanced ‘unfreedoms’ (such as the intensification and extension of educational ‘work’ into domestic settings)? To what extent is there evidence that ‘personalised’ technology systems is in fact conservative, simply facilitating the ‘mass customisation’ of homogenous educational services and content? How/do digital technologies structure ‘commodification’ of educational action rather than diversity of practice? Are digital technologies undermining or even eroding notions of education as a public good? Which of the many new configurations of people, technologies, information resources and institu- tions can be understood to really offer new forms of agency and new chal- lenges to inequalities?

The growth of institutional technologies and data-driven accountability Many instances of technology use in education are perhaps understood more accurately in terms of organisationally centred ‘institutional tech- nologies’ rather than individually centred ‘instructional technologies’. We are now seen to be living in an era of ‘big data’ where computerised systems are making available ‘massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions’ (Boyd and Crawford, 2012). As such, organisations in many areas of society are developing institutional applications of such ‘naturally occurring’ big data. Outside education, for example, big data is understood as a potential driver for radical democ- ratisation of local governance and accountability (Davies and Edwards, 224 Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn

2012). It is being mobilised by socially engaged academics and activists to track the impact of policies on traditionally excluded groups (Bates, 2012). Combined with new visualisation technologies, big data is also being lauded as a potential resource for engaging citizens in the redesign of cities and social practices. In education – the trend towards the use of big data (if not its democratising tendencies) is exemplified in educational management and administration by the growing use of data-driven ‘learning analytics’. These technology-based shifts also have clear linkages with the increasing importance of data production and management within education – not least the move towards what Jenny Ozga (2009, p. 149) terms ‘governing education through data’ and the shift from central regulation to individual self-evaluation. Further attention therefore needs to be paid to the technological systems that are used to support the ‘formalised, technically developed, and ration- alised procedures that regulate the everyday operations of institutions’ (Griffith and André-Bechley, 2008, p. 43). Indeed, there is ample evidence of the role of digital technologies in supporting and strengthening schools, colleges and universities in fulfilling their role of ‘core institutions of capi- talism’ (Garnham, 2000, p. 142) – a trend exacerbated by recent increases in the availability and accessibility of computer-based data. Of key interest for sociology of education, then, is the role of digital tech- nology as an underlying intellectual and material system in this data-work. We therefore need to pay close attention to the apparently rational digitally enabled techniques and processes that support these new forms of govern- ance, and question their underlying values and assumptions. Of particular interest are the likely links between digital technology and the ongoing ‘reformation’ and re-casting of educational institutions along neo-liberal lines of ‘new managerialism’ and ‘new public management’; we need to understand how these systems render social power and control through a succession of highly symbolic data-driven processes. One particular point of interest is the ‘new’ intensifications of inequali- ties of power and control that may well be associated with these potential institutional technology systems. Take, for instance, these systems’ intensi- fication of an unequal and often undemocratic ‘politics of representation’ in many educational contexts – not least in terms of the consequences of how individuals (re)present themselves online, coupled with what is also recorded about that individual by others online (Facer, 2012; Fuery, 2009). One of the main functions of digital technologies in this guise is to collate and intensify personal data into publicly accessible profiles. These profiles can have the disempowering effect of displacing learners and teachers as knowing subjects, and reducing education to a set of digitally based ‘textu- ally-mediated work processes’ (Griffith and André-Bechely, 2008, p. 43). Research shows, for example, how institutional technology systems allow for the implicit (if not explicit) forms of ‘predictive surveillance’ where teachers Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology 225 and school managers use data relating to past performance and behaviour to inform expectations of future behaviours (see Knox, 2010). A number of critical questions therefore present themselves from these particular forms of educational technology. How, then, do these digital tech- nologies support the connection, aggregation and use of these data in ways not before possible? What are the social practices required to render the use of such technologies democratic and humane? In compulsory education, for example, how/do these systems support an intensification and exten- sification of school-work and school practices of surveillance beyond the temporal, spatial and organisational boundaries of the school building and the school day, and into the domestic settings of teachers, students, managers and parents (c.f. Gregg, 2011)? How/does institutional ‘dataveil- lance’ function to decrease the influence of ‘human’ experience and judge- ment in the face of an individual learners’ ‘administrative identity’ and ‘data profile’? Conversely, to what extent are these institutional technologies being resisted or subverted at the individual level? Indeed, the prevalence of student and teacher ‘sousveillance’ within educational settings has begun to be noted by some authors, where individuals make subversive use of moni- toring tools and techniques to surveillance the organisation themselves (e.g. Hope, 2010). In this sense, there is clearly a need for further sustained socio- logical work that begins to explore what it means to live and work within the technology-supported conditions just described.

Increased forms of commercialisation and privatisation associated with education and technology This focus on institutional as well as instructional technology highlights the need to approach the use of technologies in education from the perspective of a range of actors and interests – not just individual learners and educa- tors. As such, it is also important to recognise the role of commercial and private actors in the social construction of digital technology in education. In particular, digital technologies should be seen as lying at the heart of contemporary privatisations of education – i.e. what Ball (2007, p. 13) terms ‘the fundamental re-design of the public sector [where] the state is increas- ingly re-positioned as the guarantor, not necessarily the provider ... the state is very much a market-maker or broker’. The technology-based privatisations of education are certainly varied – implicated in the selling of education as well as selling to education (Molnar, 2005). For example, in terms of technology’s role in the selling of educa- tion it is estimated that the education/technology market is worth upwards of $7 trillion, with multinational commercial interests such as Pearson, Cengage and McGraw-Hill involved in the lucrative business of e-learning and online provision of teaching and training. In terms of technology’s role in the selling to education, private sector interests are already responsible for providing a range of digitally based or digitally enhanced products to 226 Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn education systems and schools. As well as the usual digital hardware and software, private interests also sell a range of technology-based services to educational institutions – from the management of individual institutional IT infrastructures, information management and payroll systems to a range of monitoring and surveillance technologies. Attention should also be paid to the increasing role of private interests in the governance of educational technology use. Take, for instance, the role of multinational interests such as Microsoft, Apple and Google in the global policy networks pushing concepts such as ‘twenty-first century skills’ and ‘innovative teaching and learning’. Indeed, many national education technology policy programmes are decid- edly ‘public–private’ affairs, with multinational corporations such as Cisco, Microsoft, Apple and Sun involved heavily in the educational technology agendas and plans of countries around the world – from China to Chile. From all these perspectives, then, digital technology appears to be involved in altering relationships between education and private sectors. In this sense, digital technology can be argued to be centrally implicated in the movement of public/private partnerships beyond notions of the state entering into a ‘purchaser–provider’ relationship with the IT industry. Indeed, the past 20 years have borne out the predictions of Kenway et al. (1994) of the emer- gence of a markets–education–technology triad. Here, these authors foresaw digital technology allowing private interests to be involved in the initial formulations and reconfigurations of policy ideas and imperatives, and then playing a key guiding role in their eventual promotion and implementation. Seen in this light, educational use of digital technology during the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s has been informed overtly both by educational and market values, thereby encapsulating the growing influence of market and techno- logical forces in education over the last 30 years. Thus any beneficial issues notwithstanding, there are a number of reasons to question and challenge the growing influence of private interests in shaping the schools technology agenda in these ways. For example, how does the ‘realpolitik’ of business influence the commitment of IT producers and vendors to the public good of educational technology above and beyond matters of profit and market share? What are the practical outcomes of private interests being allowed to ‘manage’ and ‘maintain’ technology serv- ices within educational institutions? How are digital technologies reshaping education along the lines of market-forces and commercial values, as well as the perceived needs of the digital economy?

The persistence of digital inequalities One of the perennial issues that should underpin any sociological considera- tion of education and technology is the continuing inequalities and injus- tices associated with the use of technology in education. Indeed, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that educational uses of digital tech- nology are differentiated along a number of lines that reflects a process of Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology 227 cumulative advantage by which socio-economic status and class hierarchies are reproduced. For example, according to survey data across the world, people’s engage- ments with digital technologies such as computers and the Internet have remained significantly differentiated over time, even in high-tech regions such as North America and Europe. These digital inequalities are especially pronounced in terms of socio-economic status, social class, race, gender, geography, age and educational background – divisions that hold as true for younger generations of learners as they do for older generations of educa- tors (Helsper and Eynon, 2009; White and Selwyn, 2012). While no longer a popular term, the spectre of the ‘digital divide’ in terms of access to tech- nologies still looms large over any discussion of the potential benefits of digital technology in education. Aside from inequalities of access, the types of social media tools that an individual uses, the ways in which they are used and the outcomes that result are all compromised by sets of ‘second order’ digital divides (echoing the distinction between engaging meaningfully as opposed merely to ‘func- tioning’ with technology). There is considerable evidence that these ‘second order’ inequalities are found to persist along familiar lines. For example, a recent survey of over 6400 Australian high schools portrayed a highly divided picture of students from higher-status independent and faith-based selec- tive schools being more inclined than state school students to be making better ‘academic’ use of the Internet – therefore leaving academic use of digital technologies ‘a function of broader processes of social reproduction’ (Smith et al., 2013, p. 115). In a less formal context, clear socio-economic differences have been found in individuals’ propensity to produce (rather than consume) online content, be it posting to blogs, sharing resources or creating profiles (see Schradie, 2009). Other studies of US college students have reported that social media environments are no more socially inte- grated than offline contexts. For example, race has been found to remain the over-riding predictor of whether college students are Facebook ‘friends’ or not (Mayer and Puller, 2008). Similarly, social media do not necessarily over- come issues of offline disabilities but instead often exacerbate the bounda- ries of disability (Lewthwaite, 2011). Thus it is clear that despite substantial efforts to overcome ‘digital divides’ it appears that there are still some people who are ‘superserved’ and many others who are ‘underserved’ by the technological environment. It appears that tech- nologies often seem to fit around (and be shaped by) the existing patterns of people’s lives. From this perspective, a number of questions remain. For example, how are people’s technological access, engagement and outcomes patterned according to individual factors such as age, gender, class, geography, ethnicity and disability? Under what circumstances does meaningful engage- ment with digital technologies in education arise? To what extent are the new mobile platforms and hacker culture being celebrated in the Global South 228 Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn creating a new disruptive paradigm for technology appropriation or simply mitigating existing infrastructural inequalities between North and South? What factors contribute to people to becoming substantial users of digital technologies and others to revert to becoming peripheral users? What types of social, economic, cultural and technological capital are people able to draw upon when using technology in education? What are the short- and long- term consequences of engagement with technology in terms of individuals’ participation in education and society? What other mitigating factors and circumstances can be identified as having an impact on different social groups’ propensity and motivations to engage with technology and education?

Towards an engaged sociology of education and technology

We hope that these four brief examples and the questions they raise begin to suggest the many ways in which technology use in education is associ- ated with a range of wider sociological concerns over social relations, social control, inequality, identity, power and so on. As such it would seem clear that sociologists of education are in a strong position to explore a range of important questions about education and technology. All of these questions therefore point to the over-arching need for digital technologies and educa- tion to be approached in a problematic light. Indeed, many of the discom- forting questions raised so far in this chapter are the fundamental questions faced by all aspects of education and society, i.e. questions of what education is and, it follows, questions of what education should be. As this last point implies, however, we should not forget that the ultimate purpose of problematising what is being presented currently to us as ‘educa- tional technology’ is not simply to point out problems from the sidelines but is, instead, to give serious thought to alternative, fairer ways of making future use of digital technologies in education. Indeed, without this constructive orientation it is likely that Michael Young’s concern, voiced in 1984, that sociology might become associated ‘[with] an anti-technology argument, which would offer nothing to teachers or anyone else’ (Young, 1984, p.207), will be realised. And indeed, in a context in which educational change is being driven primarily by design disciplines (in other words by those who are actively engaged in experimenting and constructing alternatives), socio- logical analyses that have limited themselves to critique alone (including our own) have had only limited purchase in constructing more equitable alternatives. Equally, in a context in which many advocates of technological change in education are inspired by aspirations towards more equitable and democratic education practices, a sociology that has been characterised by disengaged critique rather than committed collaboration to build alterna- tives has often been met with suspicion and scepticism. Any new sociology of education and technology, therefore, needs to bring its sociological imagination to the service of ongoing and extensive Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology 229 dialogue with learners, educators, developers and civil society groups in order to identify, imagine and to explore how things might be ‘otherwise’. This implies a sociology of education and technology that builds upon Ann Oakley’s (2000) notion of social science research that is democratic, inter- ventionist and emancipatory. It implies, in Burawoy’s (2005, p. 324) terms, an avowedly public sociology of education and technology, committed to the defence of the social and of humanity, which moves ‘from interpretation to engagement, from theory to practice, from the academy to its publics’. It implies, after Erik Olin Wright (2010), the need to imagine and build ‘real utopias’ to counter the hegemonic futures constructed by the marketeers of the education technology industries. These calls for a more engaged and interventionist sociology of education and technology are certainly in tune with wider shifts in academic sociology as a whole. As is being argued with increasing frequency and force, one of the core strengths of academic soci- ology is its ability to express a ‘defiant’ rather than ‘compliant’ imagination, and therefore engage in the production of ‘really useful’ knowledge that is capable of enabling radical social change (Kenway and Fahey, 2008; Boden and Epstein, 2011). How then might the sociology of education and technology build such ‘really useful knowledge’ and begin to make a difference to the nature of education in the digital age? As is often the case with book chapters such as this, the brief space that we have remaining makes it possible only to allude to some of the areas that could well be worth pursuing further. At its heart, though, we would propose that an engaged sociology of education and tech- nology would take advantage of its understanding of the inherently political and social processes of technology production and use. It would detail and then test the opportunities available to educators, learners and other inter- ested parties to intervene in the processes of commissioning, developing, design and appropriation of technologies to tip the balance of these proc- esses towards more equitable and democratic outcomes. We can therefore conclude this chapter with a number of suggestions along these lines:

M Firstly, understanding the processes of driving technological change in education as political, as subject to processes of contestation and debate, and as discursive, would seem to suggest a number of potential sites of resistance for the publicly engaged sociologist. One line of inspiration can be taken from the last three decades of computer ‘counterculture’ and ‘hacking’ – not least the activities of games enthusiasts, amateur software modifiers and the rise of open-source software and hardware production (Kirkpatrick, 2004). How might the engaged sociologist ‘hack’ the proc- esses of policy design and deliberation? How might he or she mobilise digital technologies to enable writing and research in education and tech- nology to span the boundaries between academic work and public engage- ment, and therefore become more publically facing and ‘deliberative’ 230 Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn

in character (see Evans and Kotchetkova, 2009). What scope is there for academics working in the area of education and technology to engage in critical forms of public scholarship that provide ‘a disruptive but neces- sary voice in democratic debate’ (Lauder et al., 2009, p. 580)? How can a critical ‘public understanding of education and technology’ be stimulated and supported?
M Secondly, understanding the appropriation of technologies in education as a process of contestation, practice and resistance also opens up potential sites for action by the engaged sociologist. In this spirit there is certainly room for sociological analyses that address the tensions that exist between the rhetoric and reality of technologies in education, and thereby look for opportunities to force difference where there is homogeneity, force unity where there is fragmentation and division, and encourage equality where there is hierarchy (Lefebvre, 1981). In this process, it is therefore impor- tant that sociologists do not focus solely on the deep-rooted continuities of education in a ‘digital age’, but also take time to consider the poten- tial discontinuities of digital technology use in education. For instance, how can uses of digital technologies be encouraged within educational settings that challenge or disrupt existing social relations and inequalities? Where do opportunities exist for learners and educators to make concrete the otherwise abstract rhetorics of democratisation and empowerment that surround digital technology? What digital spaces exist where resist- ance and degrees of freedom for otherwise marginalised groups might be achieved?
M Thirdly, understanding the design and development of technologies to be a process of social construction also opens up potential points for the engaged sociologist to intervene in the design process. Critical partici- patory design – where usually excluded ‘end users’ are involved in the development and production of technological artefacts and practices in ways that better reflect their interests, needs and values (Iversen et al., 2012; Eubanks, 2011) – is providing a clearly articulated set of methods that demonstrate how design processes can be challenged and reoriented towards the interests of students and communities.

These three sites – in the design, the public debate and in the appropria- tion and use of technologies – offer important points of intervention for the engaged sociologist in which the tools of sociology can clearly make critical interventions. There is clearly much work that we can be getting on with. However, it is worth not being too self-congratulatory and over-confident of having the means to develop a critical understanding of the technological well within our grasp. One of the perennial caveats to any claim of current technosocial understanding is that new domains of technological devel- opment are always emerging in areas that non-technological experts find it difficult to respond quickly to. In developing a contemporary sociology Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology 231 of education and technology, we therefore need to maintain at least half an eye on the (near)future. Indeed, one of the main reasons that sociology was relatively slow to respond to the ‘digital revolution’ of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s undoubtedly stemmed from the discipline’s reluctance to move on from confronting the major ‘political technologies’ of class struggle throughout the first half of the century, i.e. what Rainie and Wellman (2012) call the ‘big machines’ of the industrial era such as factories, mills and mili- tary machinery. It has taken sociology perhaps 30 years to recognise fully the political, social, cultural and economic significance of the small devices of the post-industrial ‘technosphere’, i.e. the digital devices and gadgets that now permeate our everyday lives. Most of this chapter has therefore made a case for sociology of education ‘catching up’ with these technologies and the issues associated with them – as these are the socio-technical conditions of contemporary education. However, there is a corresponding need to begin to also consider what the next wave of technological change may mean for sociology of education. If we can be sure of one thing, then the education of the twenty-first century will not be influenced and shaped only by our present technologies and practices. As such, if we wish to develop useful knowledge in respect of the four substantive issues that we have raised in this chapter then an engaged sociology of education and technology will also need to address socio- technical practices that are only now in the earliest phases of development (Facer, 2011). For example, debates on the disaggregation of the institu- tion and the learning networks of the individual will need to grapple with the issues of power and equity raised by networks that will soon include the pharmaceutical companies selling cognitive enhancement, the tech- nologies that offer collaboration with non-human-like intelligence, and the increasing interpellation of the individual within large-scale complex ‘systems of systems’ (Facer and Sandford, 2010). What issues of fairness and social justice are raised, for example, by the routine use of drugs to enhance concentration in revision and exams? What issues of identity and belonging are raised by unthinking dependence on search engine algorithms that return different results based on the individual who has submitted the search query? What ideas of agency, autonomy and citizen- ship are adequate to our growing dependence for infrastructure security on the underwater cables, circulating satellites and servers of the Internet that are owned and controlled by countries yet located beyond national boundaries? Similarly, debates on the data infrastructures that increasingly underpin education will need to engage with the proliferation of bio data and the designation by the World Economic Forum (2011) of personal data as a ‘new economic asset class’ with its corresponding proliferation of intelli- gent data-mining tools. What issues of identity and privacy, for example, are raised by students and teachers having access to real-time brain scans 232 Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn combined with location information combined with social media updates? What issues of power and equity are raised by the use of predictive data analysis based on neurological scans, genomic indicators and aggregations of ‘typical’ student performance to forecast student attainment in test scores or in different forms of employment? Equally, debates on the relationship between private benefit and public goods will need to confront the growing involvement of the biosciences and pharmaceutical industries in education. As neuroscience and genomics increasingly seek to present explanatory frameworks for educational attainment, what sorts of ethical frameworks and what sorts of student involvement in decision-making will be required? Finally, and over the longer term, any attempt to address issues of equity, fairness and access to education will need to address the challenges to the idea of the ‘human being’ posed by the intersection of radical economic inequalities with the capacity for the substantial bio-technical and prosthetic augmentation of the body (Facer, 2012). The capacity to ‘upgrade’ the individual, not only through the currently (semi)detachable tools of mobile technologies, but through embedded digital and biological enhancement, for example, raises fundamental questions about the person at the heart of the educa- tion process and the values that should drive their development. It is perhaps in this area that the need for an engaged sociology that promotes education as a resource for humanity, democracy and equity rather than a competitive race for positional goods will play its most urgent role over the coming decades.

Conclusion

These questions raise important challenges for academic sociologists. Not least, they suggest that sociologists of education seeking to provide a critical analysis of these developments will need to develop at least a passing familiarity with the intricacies and practices of biological sciences, quantitative as well as qualitative methodologies and the ethical, environ- mental, economic and political dimensions of ongoing globalisations of contemporary society. Above all, however, we would argue that the impli- cations of our analysis here are fundamentally concerned with the iden- tity and role of the academic sociologists of education and technology. If the sociology of education is to play a role in shaping these debates rather than commenting from the side-lines, academic sociologists will need to relocate themselves away from the familiar and comfortable positions of critique and analysis, towards less familiar roles of being co-producers, developers and designers of educational technologies. In other words, a sociology of education and technology needs to be developed that acts not only against but also in and beyond the dominant field of education technology. Our future starts here. Towards a Sociology of Education and Technology 233

Note

1. It should be noted that much of the sociological critique of education and technology over the past 30 years has come from authors working outside of the sociology of education. These include historians such as Larry Cuban and Neil Postman, as well as scholars working with the media education and new literacy traditions such as David Buckingham, Bill Green, Colin Lankshear, Mark Warschauer and others.

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Suggestions for further reading

Bromley, H. and Apple, M. (eds) (1998) Education/technology/power: educational computing as a social practice (New York: SUNY Press). Orton-Johnson, K. and Prior, N. (eds) (2013) Digital sociology: critical perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Spring, J. (2012) Education networks: power, wealth, cyberspace and the digital mind (London: Routledge). Index

A-Levels, 67–8 GCSE, 67–8, 83 gender body image, 113–14, 116–18 femininity, 114–15, 122, 149–52, 155, Bourdieu, Pierre, 20–1, 24–5, 60, 95, 164, 194–5, 198, 208, 210–11, 104, 107 214–15 capital, 20, 22, 25, 27, 29, 60, 78–9, masculinity, 112–28, 149–63, 195, 81, 84, 95, 97, 121 198, 207–8, 210–15 habitus, 20, 25–6, 34, 95, 101–2, 104–6 non-conformity, 149, 151–64 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), regulation of, 149–53, 155–67, 193–5 170–82 sexuality conflation, 151–3 Brown II (1955), 174–5, 179 and subject choice, 202–15 bullying, 121–28, 149, 164, 193–5 biological perspective, 203–5 discourses of, 208–15 Canada, 93–9, 108, 112–14 feminist perspectives, 206–8 capital, see Bourdieu psychological perspective, 205–6 citizenship, 39–53 Germany, 32, 57–8, 61–4, 68–71, 185 class Global Education Reform Movement middle, 8–9, 25, 57–60, 62–3, 70, (GERM), 19–20 80–2, 198 globalisation, 9, 19–35, 78 working, 49, 57–60, 62–3, 64, 66–7, grammar school, 65–7 70, 80–2, 93–108, 188, 198 Connell, Raewyn, 4–5, 116, 205 habitus, see Bourdieu cosmopolitan, see multiculturalism higher education, 8–11, 77, 79–80, Crick Report (1998), 44–9 93–108 human rights, 28, 39–53, 144 Dale, Roger, 4–5, 10, 219 disability, 131–45 inequality and autonomy, 140–2 class, 8–9, 11–14, 25, 49, 57–60, 62–3, and gender, 143–5 65–7, 70, 80–2, 93–108, 188, 198 and sexuality, 142–3, 145 race/ethnicity, 41–3, 46–51, 53, 66–7, 168–82 educational outcomes, 57–71 social mobility, 42–71, 94–5, Education Reform Act (1988), 42 105, 107 Islamophobia, 49–50 faith school, 48–51, 66–7, 227 fear LGBT, see sexuality in education, 188–9 lifelong learning, 76–90 impacts of, 196–8 measurement of, 186–8 multiculturalism, 41–2, 46–52 in schools, 189–94 social, 194–6 national identity, 39–40, 41–6 feminism, 2, 206 neo-liberalism, 168–70, 175–6 free-market, see neo-liberalism; No Child Left Behind, 7–9 privatisation non-formal education, 77

237 238 Index

NVQ, 83–5 matters of concern, 220–8 need for, 219–220 obesity, 113–14, 116–18 theoretical approaches OECD, 1, 12, 19–35 naturalism, 2, 94 neo-Marxism, 3 parental choice, 19, 65 new sociology of education, 3–4 physical education (PE), 112–28 positivism, 2, 4,7–9 privatisation, 21–23, 225–6 postmodern, 4 Programme of International Assessment social interactionism, 3–4, 94 (PISA) sport, see physical education participation, 31–2 Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (1997), 47–8 success, 32–4 Swann Report (1985), 41–2 sexuality, 115, 142–3, 145, 149–53, teacher 207, 215 educators, 44, 128 gender conflation, 151–3 training, 6–8, 11, 61, 63 social mobility, 42–71, 94–5, 105, 107 transitions sociology of education to adulthood, 82, 115–16, 131–45 history to secondary school, 62–3, institutional, 10–12 68, 71 political, 5–10 to university, 93–108 pre-1970, 2 transnationalism, 24 1970 s, 3 post-1980, 3–4 UNESCO, 19, 23, 25, 29, theoretical, 2–5 41, 77–8 importance of university, see higher education in academia, 5–12 USA, 2, 7–9, 27, 29, 32, 41, 48, 93, in economics, 20–1, 29 131–7, 149–50, 170–1, 182, 207 in politics, 5–10, 20–1 no child left behind, 7–9 in society, 5–10 and technologyy2 218–32 welfare state, 5, 81 development of, 228–32 World Bank, the, 19, 23