Where's the level playing field? A feminist perspective on educational restructuring Jill Blackmore Deakin Centre for Education and Change Paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Australian Association of Research in Education Hobart, Nov 26-30 1995 Where's the level playing field? A feminist perspective on educational restructuring Jill Blackmore Restructuring is a term which has taken ln on considerable discursive power since the mid 1980s. Key national reports have spoken of the need to restructure the workplace to make it more efficient, effective and competitive. Restructuring is premised upon the view that workers and organisations should be more flexible, consumer and globally oriented. Various government policies since 1987 Australia Reconstructed and more recently the Karpin Report(1995) on management education have focused upon workers ( including managers) as being multiskilled, flexible and adaptable in order to achieve new levels of national productivity. But as Bagguley et al (1990) and Belinda Probert (1993) have suggested, while restructuring has always been both the context for and objective of policy, it has been relatively undertheorised or undefined. Furthermore, I will suggest, current policies draw unproblematically upon particularly optimistic accounts of the nature and needs of post industrial societies. In this paper I want to explore some of the key concepts which are central to the discourse of restructuring - flexibility, skill and performativity- and to consider how policy texts seeking to restructure educational work have, through drawing upon particular discourses and not others, mediate new social and economic relationships in the workplace which have signficant implications for women educators in all education sectors. The discourses which inform these texts, and in turn which are informed by the policy texts, circulate locally and globally. Policy documents are much negotiated texts, the product of discursive formation, which in turn feedback into practice. Polices both produce and reproduce discourses, in ways which privilege particular meanings and not others. The 'fast capitalist' policy texts such asSkilling Australia, and Schools of the Future justify restructuring as necessary for Australia to become competitive internationally and encourage economic growth. In turn, such texts call upon wider global discourses about the role of education which privileges optimistic accounts of the nature of the post modern condition. This paper is also a shift in the theoretical frames I am using. I have found feminist postructuralism useful as a tool of analysis in various studies of gender equity reform, particularly with regard to the 'reception' of policy. Using the notion of policy as text provides an understanding of both how policy is read and rewritten in schools by teachers and by students in unexpected and highly differentiated ways ( Kenway et al 1994). Texts here refer to policy documents as well as a range of gender reform discourses in education. Teachers and students, as policymakers, both produce and consume gender reform texts. Feminist poststructuralism also assists me to understand the types of contradictions women educators confront in their daily practice, contradictions which are not just part of a real world 'out there' but which are part of our inner selves. Feminist post structuralism allows one to understand how individuals make meaning of their material and cultural world. At the same time, the ways in which there are patterned and systematised inequalities based on gender, class, race, ethnicity is undeniable. Postmodernism and post- structuralism confront such metanarratives. Post structuralism has the susceptibility to be read conservatively from a highly individualistic and relativist position. But it also can be read creatively if identified with a strong sense of gender and a politics of difference, in which we place women at the centre of the analysis. This tension between a more universalising feminist politics for change for all women and particularistic politics of practice in specific local sites where gender, race, class work differentially is ongoing and theoretically challenging. I want to take the position here that we need to work strategically, in this instance theoretically as well as in political practice in looking for 'useful' theory epistemologically, politically and ethically. That is, there are instances when we need to universalise the experience of women-cross culturally, cross-race, cross-class, cross-temporally; and other instances where we need to concretise and emphasise specificity and difference amongst women. This does not necessarily reconstruct the local/global divide. Rather we need to consider the processes of the articulation between the macro and the micro; the particular and the universal. 'Useful theory', according to Jean Anyon (1994) (i) does not derive its value merely in reference to other theories but as a result of a dialogue between one's goal and current activities; (ii) 'would be neither total ( and therefore seamless and deterministic) nor completely ad hoc and aplicable only to one locale', but would recognise the complexity of social life and develop middle range theories which would 'connect local activity to widespread social constraints' (iii) 'makes theoretical recommendations which are capable of enactment' (iv) and would 'identify actions to be taken'or, as I would say, useful theory would simultaneously come out of and inform practice for change ( from Anyon 1994, p. 129). Notions of post modernism and post structuralism are also useful because of their focus upon deconstruction, discourses and the constituted subject ( see Anyon, 1994). In particular I find the postmodern /post structural notion of discourse useful because it provides a way of understanding the articulation between the local and global, the personal and the private. Discourses are systematic sets of meanings which circulate, often around practices of particular institutions (teacher profession), but also globally and locally, around particular cultural and social practices ( eg. nationalism). Discourses are both regulating and constraining in that they enable new meanings to be made in specific sites around a specific set of relationships e.g. teacher/ student but are also act as form of regulation in that there are boundaries placed, and particular meanings privileged within these discourses. Lee and Wickert (1995) talk about : how in twentieth century social history, some discourses have taken on a dominating role across a variety of institutions, determining the kinds of meanings and truths that can or cannot be developed. One of the most powerful of these has been psychology, which has so pervaded institutions such as education , law and medicine, that psychological conceptions of social relationships have often been passed in to 'common sense' universal understandings about the way things are, rather han seeing these as discursive construction with particular kinds of effects'. Discourses have particular view of power and social relationships-- in the instance of the above, of power being invested in an individual's psychology, which is to some degree predetermined. Other dominant twentieth century educational discourses are vocationalism and liberal meritocracy ( Blackmore, 1986; 1991). These discourses sometimes overlap, contradict, and sometimes merge because of shared assumptions about the nature of change and the relationship between the individual, education and the state. Whereas post structuralist accounts have tended to focus upon the local, any analyses of the local in the Foucauldian sense is built upon assumptions about systemic relationships or metapolitics. As Jean Anyon argues, about the focus upon the local: analyses of the 'micro' always contain some understanding of the larger, the societal, the enveloping 'macro'. In the case of racism for example, some knowledge of the ways racism is structured by the laws, conventions, and histories of our society, some knowledge of the ways in which the economy, the technologies, and sexism interact with racism-these are always present, even implicitly, in analyses of local power dynamics( Anyon, 1994, p.125). What the notion of a politics of discourse ( see Yeatman 1990) does is provide a way of considering how the global and local interact, of how globalising tendencies such as educational restructuring have particular and significant social and material effects in local sites and on individuals, but in often significantly different and/or highly patterned ways; and in turn how particular local renditions of restructuring are globalised ( through the agencies of the OECD, World Bank, IMF). I use the notion of discourse in a strong materialist sense ( Hennessey 1994, Yeatman 1994). Such a perspective sees some discourses becoming more powerful in particular historical conditions, and having considerable material effects in highly patterned ways, globally and and locally. Particularly instrumental readings of the discourse of vocationalism and the connections between education and the economy, for example, are privileged in times of economic crisis. But in using the concept of discourse I do not, as Jean Anyon argues, wish to 'overtly transfer the agency from persons to language' (Anyon , 1994, p. 128) and thereby undermine the politics of practice which requires an understanding of the material as well as the discursive. This requires more than abtract theorising but actions