Confronting ‘failure’: towards a pedagogy of recognition

Abstract

This paper is based on an in‐depth study of nine secondary schools situated in contexts of disadvantage across the national regions of the UK. First, we examine the construction of educational ‘failure’ by exploring the impact of disadvantage on the quality of learning and the identity of learners in one of the case‐study schools which (like several others) is situated within a large postwar housing development. We then analyse various kinds of institutional response to ‘failure’: central to our argument is the idea that institutional restructuring relates to wider structures of power through shifts of ‘regime’; shifts, that is, in the arrangements between formal and informal organizations, alliances and groupings, and involving both public and professional interests. The notion of ‘regime’, in other words, ensures that issues relating to cultural formation are drawn into our analysis of institutional restructuring. The typology developed through this analysis is applied, as a third step in our argument, to an examination of the pressures and tensions operating upon what we characterize as the ‘new’ (i.e. ‘newly’ dominant) professionalism. We draw a distinction between what we consider to be two very different ways forward for teacher professionalism within the new management of education, the crucial question being whether the ‘new’ professionalism will value divergence, while continuing to retain its own professional hegemony, or whether it will empower difference by recognizing it as a ‘presence’ to be morally and politically reckoned with. In drawing this distinction, we highlight three ‘presenting’ issues by way of relating this question to the particular circumstances of the schools we have studied. Finally, we trace the outlines of ‘a pedagogy of recognition’ capable of confronting the full implications of educational ‘failure’, and begin to define (by way of a brief coda) the conditions of learning within the wider polity.