Dominant Educational Discourses Research Articles

Peer Interaction, Exclusion and School Participation: Issues of Schooling in a Tribal Village of Odisha

In India, drop-outs and out-of-school children in school education are dominant educational discourses even after seven decades of independence. No doubt, various policies and programmes were devised to challenge these issues in education, but still the issues of drop-outs are rampant both in rural and urban areas. The inequality in educational attainment between Scheduled Tribes and the rest of the population has widened throughout the years. Various social aspects of why children leave school before they complete the secondary level of school are understudied in India. Aspects of cultural and social practices and patterns of socialization of tribal children have received little attention in the research on tribal children in India. By specially focussing on friendship networks/peer interaction, the article reflects on how it affects educational participation of tribal and non-tribal children in a village located in the tribal areas of Odisha, one of the eastern states of India.

Truth‐Telling and Education‐Making in a Neighborhood in Mexico City

This qualitative study examines educational life in a neighborhood in Mexico City, analyzing how discourses have produced the neighborhood, Tepito, as a place “without education.” Simultaneously, ethnographic research entangles with theories of radical equality and resistance to explore how education emerges and how certain forms of education circulate throughout the neighborhood. Ultimately, everyday life in Tepito reveals rebellious and playful forms of education that challenge dominant educational discourses and open new understandings of educational possibilities.

Decolonising a landscape architecture studio: Spatial modelling of student narratives

This paper problematises the dominance of global north perspectives in landscape architectural education, in South Africa where there are urgent calls to decolonise education and make visible indigenous and vernacular meaning-making practices. In grappling with these concerns, this research finds resonance with a multimodal social semiotic approach that acknowledges the interest, agency and resourcefulness of students as meaning-makers in both accessing and challenging dominant educational discourses. This research involves a case study of a design project in a first-year landscape architectural studio. The project requires students to choose a narrative and to represent it as a spatial model: a scaled, 3D maquette of a spatial experience that could be installed in a public park. This practitioner reflection closely analyses the spatial model of one student, Malibongwe, focusing on his interest in meaning-making; the innovative meaning-making practices and diverse resources he draws on; and his expression of spatial signifiers of the Black experiences portrayed in his narrative. This reflection shows how Malibongwe’s narrative is not only reproduced in the spatial model, it is remade: the transformation of resources into three-dimensional spatial form results in new understandings and the production of new meanings.

Engaging Young Children and Families in Gallery Education at Tate Liverpool

AbstractBeyond Words: Engaging Young Children and Families in Gallery Education at Tate Liverpool, is a three‐year ethnographic case study that explores what happens when preschool children, parents and nursery practitioners from a Sure Start Children’s Centre, visit Tate to participate in an extended series of gallery visits and workshops with artists. This article explores the potential value and tensions of those creative and cultural experiences, particularly for young children and families, by critically examining different perspectives, discourses and possible constructs of effective creative engagement. This research contributes to the debate on ways of engaging children and families from marginalised communities in cultural visits and creative practices by opening up existing discussions on poverty, matters of inclusion, negative stereotypes and dominant educational discourses. Insights from parents are included and their feelings are related to the ‘symbolic violence’ often felt by parents and children throughout their education from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This research explores how Tate Liverpool developed relationships with a diverse family audience, through developing relationships with children and adults over repeated visits, as an important way for offering continuity and a sense of belonging, particularly for families who may not traditionally visit art galleries. In doing so, it makes a case for galleries to be considered as democratic, inclusive and rhizomatic learning environments, where artist educators act as ‘dreamkeepers’. Dreamkeepers can offer the space for extra emotional, social and intellectual support needed for healing from educational injury and for restarting a learning journey.

Dominant narratives, subjugated knowledges, and the righting of the story of disability in K-12 curricula

Dominant stories, as upheld through K-12 curricula, are influential in reproducing systems of power and privilege in schools and society. In this article, we suggest that stories of people with disabilities are either missing in K-12 curricula, or told in ways that are highly ableist. We use discourse theory as a frame for considering the role of curricula in reproducing power/knowledge in schools, and promote critical pedagogy as a tool for teaching students to recognize and disrupt the ableism inherent in dominant educational discourses. We provide concrete strategies for infusing counter-narratives and subjugated knowledges into the curriculum where silences or authoritative presences exist. Overall, this article is a call to educators to tackle, head-on, ableist discourse in the curriculum with a goal of promoting liberatory knowledges about disability in schools.

Feminism and neo/liberalism: contesting education’s possibilities

ABSTRACTFeminist theorists critiqued classical liberalism for the gender binaries embedded in social, political and economic theory and everyday social relations. Neoliberalism economises the social and political based on autonomous individualism, equating equity with choice, naturalising the market as the mechanism to allocate social goods and education while disregarding constraining discursive and material contexts. Neoliberalism also co-opts the feminist desire for agency through notions of choice. The paper tracks the historical conditions in Anglophile states that nurtured neoliberalism’s uptake with its focus on human capital theory, rethinking the dominant educational discourse of twenty-first-century skills using Yeatman’s democratic framing of social liberalism and Nussbaum’s capability approach. Feminists argue for a just and civil democratic society that dissolves binary thinking and focuses on relationality, rights and responsibility.

Nordic discourses on marginalisation through education

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is analysis of discursive marginalisation through education in Nordic welfare states. What knowledge do Nordic research discourses produce about marginalisation through education in Nordic welfare states? What are the Nordic contributions to research discourses on marginalisation through education? We apply a discourse theoretical approach and analyse 109 peer-reviewed publications on marginalisation by the Nordic Centre of Excellence “Justice through education in the Nordic countries” (NCoE JustEd) between 2013 and 2017. The publications are from Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. Four critical Nordic research discourses reconceptualise marginalisation in relation to dominant educational discourses on marketisation, Eurocentrism, gender equity and ableism. These Nordic research discourses document discursive effects of the dominant, normalising discourses in terms of stigma, segregation and exclusion of poor, working-class students, non-white and immigrant students and descendants of immigrants, as well as sexual minorities and disabled students. Based on ethical, epistemological and methodological considerations, the critical Nordic research discourses produce knowledge about marginalisation as a relational, intersectional and interdiscursive phenomenon. The critical Nordic research discourses de- and reconstruct knowledge about marginalisation in Nordic welfare states.

The Dominant Educational Discourses Underlying the Cassells Report

The Cassells report “Investing in National Ambition: a Strategy for Funding Higher Education,” creates an opportunity to explore critical issues in Ireland’s higher education sector. This paper excavates behind the report for discourse, agency, power, influence and environmental factors, to come to understand the assumptions made in the document. A document is always situated within a social setting and context. By considering this setting we attempt to unearth the dominant educational discourses in the document. Some of these discourses are obvious and substantial, others are muted and unrevealed. This paper provides insights to assist educators to develop new understandings of the ways in which policy documents are used in the context of the Cassells report.NOTE: The authors are currently registered on the Doctorate of Education Programme at Maynooth University with the Department of Higher and Adult Education. They would like to acknowledge the support of Professor Anne Ryan and Dr. Bernie Grummell at Maynooth University where the foundations for this paper began.

Race, gender and sexuality in student experiences of violence and resistances on a university campus

With the dismantling of apartheid in 1994, significant changes were made to higher education in South Africa. Access to higher education has expanded and student bodies are now more representative in terms of gender and race. However, demographic change alone is insufficient for higher education transformation. As in other parts of the world, within dominant educational discourses ideal students are still typically represented as white, middle-class, male, cisgender and heterosexual. Furthermore, students who occupy these categories tend to hold symbolic power within these institutions. Recently, student movements, starting with RhodesMustFall (RMF) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), have begun to challenge this and draw attention to these issues of transformation. This study was critically and empathically provoked by engagements around the RMF movement and aimed to examine students’ experiences of transformation in higher education relating to race, gender and sexuality at UCT. Photovoice methods (involving focus groups, personal reflections, photographs and written stories) were used to explore two groups of students’ experiences of non-direct, symbolic violence (i.e. issues of bathrooms, residences and campus art) and direct, physical violence on campus as well as these students’ resistances and disruptions to the violence they encountered.

A Foucauldian perspective on student experiences of family discourses in post-primary schools

This work involves researching normative family discourses which are mediated through post-primary settings. The traditional family, consisting of father, mother and children all living together in one house (nuclear) is no longer reflective of the home situation of many Irish students [Lunn, P., and T. Fahey. 2012. Households and Family Structures in Ireland: A Detailed Statistical Analysis of Census 2006. Dublin: ESRI]. My study problematises micro practices involving families as reported by students in three post-primary schools, to report how family differences are managed and (mis)recognised from their lens. The influence of the dominant educational discourses (contextual and textual), are also considered. A framework using Foucauldian post-structural critical analysis traces family profiling through normalising discourses such as notes home which presume two parents together. Teacher assumptions about heterosexual two-parent families make it difficult for students to be open about a family set-up that is constructed as ‘different’ to the rest of the schools. My findings will be of interest to educational research and policy-makers because they highlight how changing demographics such as family compositions are mis-conceptualised in schools, leading to issues of injustice such as bullying and isolation for the students involved.

Education and pedagogy: A Foucauldian perspective

This article discusses the displacement observed in the Brazilian mainstream pedagogical ideas and how Foucauldian studies play a role in shaping new ways of thinking, thus contributing for a change in such a scenario. In order to do so, a shift in the interpretative dominant educational discourse, mainly in Brazil, is necessary. The main idea is to discuss the points where some Foucauldian tools—such as disciplinary power, norm, device, archive, government, and governmentality, among others—are being intertwined to operate in the way they do. We know that this kind of displacement causes a strong lag in the certainties and hopes held mostly, of those who are more accustomed to a salvationist and promethean vision of the school and, in a broader sense, of education. Nevertheless, the statements in this article do not mean that a Foucauldian perspective is, in itself, pessimistic or nihilistic.

Listenin’ Up: Re-imagining Ourselves through Stories of and from Country

Listenin’ Up: Re-imagining Ourselves through Stories of and from Country

Race, gender and sexuality in student experiences of violence and resistances on a university campus

With the dismantling of apartheid in 1994, significant changes were made to higher education in South Africa. Access to higher education has expanded and student bodies are now more representative in terms of gender and race. However, demographic change alone is insufficient for higher education transformation. As in other parts of the world, within dominant educational discourses ideal students are still typically represented as white, middle-class, male, cisgender and heterosexual. Furthermore, students who occupy these categories tend to hold symbolic power within these institutions. Recently, student movements, starting with RhodesMustFall (RMF) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), have begun to challenge this and draw attention to these issues of transformation. This study was critically and empathically provoked by engagements around the RMF movement and aimed to examine students' experiences of transformation in higher education relating to race, gender and sexuality at UCT. Photovoice methods (involving focus groups, personal reflections, photographs and written stories) were used to explore two groups of students' experiences of non-direct, symbolic violence (i.e. issues of bathrooms, residences and campus art) and direct, physical violence on campus as well as these students' resistances and disruptions to the violence they encountered.

Valuing rural meanings:The work of the parent supervisors challenging dominant educational discourses

This paper explores the idea that rurality is important in children's learning even though it is in conflict with dominant educational discourses. Crucial to identifying this was the use of research methods that focused on rural meanings. In this paper we report on an ethnographic study that explored the experiences of parent supervisors of primary school distance education students. The parent supervisors identified that they chose distance education because it enables them to live their rural lifestyle, which in turn reflects the worldview they aim to bring their children up in. However, the schooling they receive values a different, metropolitan-cosmopolitan worldview (Roberts, 2014). In semi-structured interviews parent supervisors described how they would initially focus on conforming to the expectations of schooling, before then realising this was problematic for their students. They would then instead focus on doing what worked for them, which were actions based on their rural ways of being. Ethnography as an approach enabled this research to focus on rural meanings, which identified that parent supervisors work hard to ensure rural perspectives are included when they teach their children because they know this is necessary to meet their children's learning needs. This leads to an important message for school authorities: rurality does matter in education, and education is not confined to the criteria set by school authorities. Importantly, the situated perspective that is implicit in the actions of parent supervisors indicates that adopting a place-conscious (Gruenewald, 2003) approach to schooling would help to sustain rural lifeworlds.

Working-Class Participation, Middle-Class Aspiration? Value, Upward Mobility and Symbolic Indebtedness in Higher Education

This paper interrogates the relationship between working-class participation in higher education (HE) in England and social and cultural mobility. It argues that embarking on a university education for working-class people has been construed in governmental discourses as an instrumental means of achieving upward mobility, or of aspiring to ‘become middle class’. Education in this sense is thus not only understood as having the potential to confer value on individuals, as they pursue different ‘forms of capital’, or symbolic ‘mastery’ ( Bourdieu, 1986 ), but as incurring a form of debt to society. In this sense, the university can be understood as a type of ‘creditor’ to whom the working-class participants are symbolically indebted, while the middle classes pass through unencumbered. Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working-class backgrounds employed on a university Widening Participation project in England, the article examines resistance to dominant educational discourses, which understand working-class culture as ‘deficient’ and working-class participation in HE as an instrumental means of securing upward mobility. Challenging the problematic notion of ‘escape’ implicit in mobility discourses, this paper concludes by positing the alternative concept of ‘fugitivity’, to contest the accepted relationship in HE between creditor and debtor.

How to Desire Differently: Home Education as a Heterotopia

This article explores the co-existence of, and relationship between, alternative education in the form of home education and mainstream schooling. Home education is conceptually subordinate to schooling, relying on schooling for its status as alternative, but also being tied to schooling through the dominant discourse that forms our understandings of education. Practitioners and other defenders frequently justify home education by running an implicit or explicit comparison with school; a comparison which expresses the desire to do ‘better’ than school whilst simultaneously encompassing the desire to do things differently. These twin aims, however, are not easy to reconcile, meaning that the challenge to schooling and the submission to norms and beliefs that underlie schooling are frequently inseparable. This article explores the trajectories of ‘better than’ and ‘different from’ school as representing ideas of utopia and heterotopia respectively. In particular I consider Foucault's notion of the heterotopia as a means of approaching the relationship between school and other forms of education. Whilst it will be argued that, according to Derrida's ideas of discursive deconstruction, alternative education has to be expressed through (and is therefore limited by) the dominant educational discourse, it will also be suggested that employing the idea of the heterotopia is a strategy which can help us explore the alternative in education.

Competent students and caring teachers: Is a good pedagogy always the best pedagogy?

Teachers’ decisions about pedagogy are informed by a range of educational discourses. These discourses constitute particular kinds of teaching practices and teacher-student relationships in ways that are not immediately obvious. When a particular pedagogy becomes accepted as best practice and it produces desired learning outcomes for the majority of students, it becomes harder to interrogate the underlying assumptions that support it. Even more difficult might be to consider how the practice might disadvantage some students. This article demonstrates the use of a discursive approach to thinking about pedagogy that draws on Foucault’s ideas about critique. An analysis of two teachers’ rationalisation of their practice is offered in order to demonstrate how dominant educational discourses can close down access to thinking about practice outside those discourses in the moments of everyday decision-making. It is claimed that momentarily disturbing taken for granted practices, in the manner Foucault (1981) suggested, can help teachers to consider more broadly the implications of their chosen pedagogy on the development of students’ key competencies.

Teaching and learning in a competence‐based curriculum: the case of four secondary schools in England

This article focuses on four case study schools that have adopted innovative competence‐based curriculum (CBC) projects in Year 7 for a variety of educational and social reasons. The article discusses the issues and challenges posed by the CBC for teachers in the daily life of the classroom. Philosophical ideas about the purpose of education vary because they are driven by ideological positions. Consequently the nature and structure of the curriculum influenced by the stance adopted inevitably affects approaches to teaching and learning. It is contended that changes to the curricula in the case study schools have revealed tensions between traditional approaches to teaching and learning with ‘strong’ classification and framing and the new, more progressive approaches with ‘weak’ classification and framing. These tensions impact on teachers’ identities and this can make effective classroom practice problematic. The article concludes that managing the tensions between traditional and more progressive pedagogies is worthwhile as this will enable students to become more fully integrated, and successful participatory members of twenty‐first‐century society rather than simply reproducing the socio‐economic status quo, or the requirements of current dominant educational discourse in England.

Una pedagogía de la presencia. Crítica filosófica de la impostura pedagógica

El propósito de este artículo es articular una reflexión filosófica en torno a una pedagogía de la presencia. Estar presentes en lo que nos pasa en un escenario educativo, como maestros o aprendices, como profesores o alumnos, supone poner en juego la atención y producir nuestra propia visibilidad en lo que hacemos y en lo que pensamos. Frente a la dominante tradición en filosofía de la educación, que define esta actividad como una mera construcción racional de la realidad educativa, a la que somete a un examen racional a partir del establecimiento de una distancia crítica con su objeto de conocimiento, se sugiere aquí la recuperación de la antigua tradición filosófica que define el trabajo filosófico (sobre la educación) como una forma de vida o como un proceso de transformación del sujeto de la experiencia a partir del establecimiento de una distancia poética o apropiada con la realidad. La noción de «pedagogía de la presencia» pretende dar cuenta del establecimiento de dicha distancia, en la que el sujeto (que aprende) produce su propia presencia en la experiencia de su aprender. El artículo termina con un análisis crítico de la impostura pedagógica de cierto discurso pedagógico dominante en la actualidad, dentro del cual dicha presencia queda anulada.

The ‘burden’ of emotions in language teaching: negotiating a troubled past in ‘other’-language learning classrooms

This paper focuses on language classes where Greek-Cypriot students learn Turkish as their second Modern Foreign Language (MFL). Literature on MFL learning and emotions tends to focus on learners' emotions in relation to the production of the new language; however, MFL learning is also a space that provides the opportunity to language learners to construct different emotional experiences and negotiate different identities and different emotional stances towards their own or the target community and culture. What happens, though, when the language to be learnt is associated with a history of conflict and the dominant educational discourses construct emotional stances that perpetuate animosity towards the target community? And in this context, to what extent can language learning provide an opportunity to renegotiate a troubled past? Approaching emotions as socio-political discursive constructs, this paper examines classroom interaction during 32 h of Turkish language learning. It analyses (1) the students' emotional resistance towards a positive representation of the ‘Others’; (2) the teacher's discomfort in adopting a positive stance towards the Turkish-speaking people; (3) the impact these two had on the lesson and classroom interaction.