99. Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)
Paper
Disorder As a Power Relation in Schooling and Education
Veera Tervo
University of Helsinki, Finland
Presenting Author: Tervo, Veera
Order and disorder have both been essential concepts of schooling throughout history (e.g. Biesta, 2021; Lanas & Brunila, 2019, Price, 2011). Order remains an underlying objective in both formal and informal schooling practices: students are arranged and expected to behave orderly, schooldays and facilities of school create particular order, the aim of schooling is to create some order in the society. Order is visible through acts, national and transnational documents, rooted practices (such as waiting for a turn, queuing and following a class schedule) and architectural solutions of physical school building.
In this paper, I focus on my PhD study’s first research question, how order and disorder are understood in school institutions. I approach order and disorder as counterparts that together exist in the everyday practices of schooling and education. I understand practices to be built on institutional, political, physical but also cultural and social conventions rooted in schooling (e.g. Biesta, 2021; Petersen & Millei, 2016). Everyday life of a school composes of informal and formal school culture where different power relations and ways of knowing are constructed. In formal school, knowledge is percieved to be teacher-led, based on guidelines (national curriculum, law, international guidelines) and often more restrained than the intense and fast-paced nature of informal schools (Lanas & Brunila, 2019; McLaren, 1993). The formal side of school culture and pedagogical thinking have been studied extensively in the educational sciences, yet there is a gap in the international and Finnish research literature on the informal side of school and its social orders in educational context (e.g. Kiilakoski & Lanas, 2022; Juva, 2019; Paju, 2011). To address this gap, I will focus on both the formal and informal side of primary school in analysing the existing ethnographic data.
In educational practices and implementations, there is a significant interest on developing models, interventions and programs (e.g. Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development register) on how to dismantle the so-called problem behaviour of students. To continue, these interventions are used to create and maintain a particular type of order in classrooms as well as in individual students (see for example Mertanen, Vainio, Brunila, 2021; Petersen & Millei, 2016). Yet, analyses on disorder have remained ambiguous. Hence, since the dominant discourse and gaze on disorder are mainly focused on how to diminish disorder instead of conceptualising what it comprehends, it is relevant to view the counterarguments and ask for a wider perspective on order and disorder (see for example Lanas & Brunila, 2019; MacLure, Jones, Holmes & McRae, 2011). As students, teachers and other everyday actors of school do not exist in a vacuum but are surrounded by school institutions and society that also create the idea of order and disorder (Dewey, 1957).
By looking at disorder in school institutions and society, we can see hierarchical power relations that stem from the idea of ideal order of schooling and education (Foucault, 1984). This is important because only after acknowledging schooling practices to be entangled in and stemming from surrounding society, it becomes possible to challenge the individual-oriented idea of order and rethink it as something wider (see for example Mertanen et al. 2021; Wright & McLeod, 2015).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis study is the first part of my PhD study and is based on my master’s thesis. In this paper, I combine theoretical, philosophical and empirical work to provide a wider understanding on disorder and order in school institutions. The existing research data consists of 188 pages of ethnographic field notes and open conversations produced in 8/2020-10/2020 in a primary school in the Helsinki area, Finland. The informants were primary school students aged 7-10 years, classroom teachers and school assistants. Additionally, I will produce another setting of ethnographic data during the spring 2023.
Theoretically this paper stems from Foucauldian (1984) theories on power, Biesta’s (2021) understanding of the self-value of education and school and Lanas’ et al (2020; 2019) theorising of the discursive structures of so-called problem behaviour and the critical gaze towards the problem-centered view on childhood and adolescence. The methodological background of the study lies in discursive approach and Smith’s (2005; 1990) institutional ethnography. Smith’s institutional ethnography (IE) expands from everyday and local to wider temporal and spatial phenomena. I will utilize Smith’s ideas on knowledge and knowing as a political event.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsBased on my preliminary findings and previous research on order, I expect to demonstrate that order and disorder are a power relation related to differences, such as power to act as a primary subject, to demonstrate and designate order, and classify into different hierarchical categories (gender, body orders, social class, origin). In the analysis of my data, I expect to overcome the practices and implementations that target and focus mainly on the individual. Furthermore, I will examine the questions of what the value of order is, what is the purpose of maintaining order, and what is beyond order. Additionally, I propose that dominant power relations in primary school renew the position of order that maintains the hierarchical idea of formal school’s order as primary and informal school’s order as secondary.
These expected results have a notable novelty value to international scientific discussion in the field of education by increasing the theoretical understanding between power relations and disorder in primary school. Also, the aim is to raise interest and critical discussion on how the self-evident position of order could be viewed in education.
ReferencesBiesta, G. (2021). Reclaiming a future that has not yet been: The Faure report, UNESCO’s humanism and the need for the emancipation of education. International Review of Education.
Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books.
Foucault, M. & Rabinow, P. (1984). The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.
Lanas, M. & Brunila, K. (2019). Bad behaviour in school: a discursive approach. British Journal of Sociology of Education.
Lanas, M., Petersen, E. & Brunila, K. (2020). The discursive production of misbehaviour in professional literature. Critical Studies in Education.
MacLure, M., Jones, L., Holmes, R. & MacRae, C. (2011). 'Becoming a problem: behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom'. British Educational Research Journal.
Mertanen, K., Mäkelä, K. P., & Brunila, K. (2020). What’s the problem (represented to be) in Finnish youth policies and youth support systems? International Studies in Sociology of Education.
Mertanen, K., Vainio, S. E., & Brunila, K. (2021). Educating for the Future? Mapping the Emerging Lines of Precision Education Governance. Policy Futures in Education.
Paju, P. (2011). Koulua on käytävä. Etnografinen tutkimus koululuokasta sosiaalisena tilana. Nuorisotutkimusseura. Helsinki: Nuorisotutkimusverkosto.
Petersen, E. B., & Millei, Z. (Eds.) (2016). Interrupting the Psy-Disciplines in Education. (1 ed.) Palgrave Macmillan.
Price, M. (2011). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Rankin, J. (2017). Conducting Analysis in Institutional Ethnography: Analytical Work Prior to Commencing Data Collection. International Journal of Qualitative Methods.
Skeggs, B. (2001). Feminist Ethnography. Teoksessa P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland & L. Lofland (toim.), Handbook of Ethnography (s. 426–442). London: Sage.
Smith, D. E. (1990). The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Wright, K. & McLeod, J. (Eds.) (2015). Rethinking Youth Wellbeing: Critical Perspectives. Singapore: Springer.
99. Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)
Paper
Working-class Students` Right to Education and Social Justice: Educational and Social Challenges
Júlia Rodrigues, Fátima Antunes
Research center on education, University of Minho, Portugal
Presenting Author: Rodrigues, Júlia
In Portugal, as in other European countries, the universalisation of the right to education through equal opportunities of access to public school did not guarantee, however, effective equality of opportunities for success and school became, for a large part of the students, mainly from disadvantaged groups, a challenge to their right to education.
In the ‘60s, Bourdieu and Passeron (1970), draw attention to the importance of social class in education. The cultural (capital) differences between the students from the dominant classes and the ones from the working classes are the main drivers for the school’s failure of the latter and, in this sense, for cultural and social reproduction. Even nowadays, social class is a factor of social and educational inequalities both in Portugal and at a European level (Abrantes, 2022; Costa & Mauritti, 2018; Melo & Lopes, 2021; Ball, 2019; Reay, 2021).
The debate on students´ social and cultural diversities and how the school should relate to them has been a central concern in the pursuit of the democratisation of the education system and to assure student´s right to education. The school has been trying to accommodate these social and cultural diversities through the diversification in policies and practices: different educational routes, autonomy and curricular flexibility, tutorial support, and many others.
One important topic in several national and European policy documents is the broadening of higher education to other publics, namely VET graduates that are mostly from the working classes. Since 2020, there are special calls for their admission to higher education[1].
In Portugal, the number of graduates from scientific-humanistic courses (“regular school”) going to higher education is around 85%. However, although in 2021 vocational courses represented the largest educational and training offer in secondary education[2], only around 38% of graduates from vocational courses go to higher education[3], and this proportion is even more reduced when we refer to the graduates from apprenticeship courses. Hence, the VET students that go to higher education are sociological and statistical exceptions.
Attuned to this, our study is about working-class students, specifically graduates from vocational courses (VC) and apprenticeship courses (AC), who perform academic success pathways. Our main research question is: which dimensions and factors contribute to an academic success pathway of VET graduates who are attending or have attended higher education? However, to achieve academic success, these young people had to overcome numerous inequalities and barriers.
Considering studies and policy documents on the theme and the analysis of 8 in-depth interviews with VET graduates, in this presentation, we find it relevant to reflect on how these subjects live and narrate their school pathways in relation to two specific diversities:
i) social class, i.e., their experience as working-class students: e.g. which meanings do they assign to school? Which institutional, situational, and dispositional barriers do they face and must overcome? (Ekstrom, 1979)
ii) attending vocational education and training, an alternative educational route in upper secondary education, less prestigious academically and socially
Underpinned on Bourdieu´s concepts of class, "habitus" and "cultural capital" (1964, 1970, 1999, 2003), Ekstrom “barriers to education” (1979) and Fraser´s concept of “social justice” (2002, 2006), we aim to comprehend if and how these two specific diversities have influenced students´ right to education and social justice.
[1] . See Decree Law nº 11/2020 (https://dre.pt/dre/en/detail/decree-law/11-2020-131016733) and https://www.poch.portugal2020.pt/pt-pt/Noticias/Paginas/noticia.aspx?nid=1152&ano=2017&pag=2&nr=9
[2] . See https://www.cnedu.pt/pt/noticias/cne/1874-estado-da-educacao-2021
[3] . See https://www.dgeec.mec.pt/np4/47/%7B$clientServletPath%7D/?newsId=256&fileName=DGEEC_Estudantes_a_saida_do_secundario_2.pdf
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedWe chose a fundamentally qualitative approach since we privilege the young people´s perspectives and intend to understand the meanings that the subjects assign to their discourses and practices. In addition, the study also has a participatory research approach (Gaventa & Cornwall, 2001) to promote the development of the participants' reflection about the object of study.
The chosen method is the multiple case study (Amado, 2014) that allows us to study young people from vocational courses and apprenticeship courses who attend (or have attended) higher education and present unlikely school pathways.
To understand the young people´s perspectives, we are analysing their biographical pathways through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 10 graduates from vocational courses and 10 graduates from apprenticeship courses, and, subsequently, we will draw “sociological portraits” (Lahire, 2004).
“Sociological portraits” are an innovative methodology or tool designed by Bernard Lahire to “capture the complexity of the plural actor”. According to the author, it´s the core tool of a “sociology at the individual scale” since it makes it possible to apprehend the multiple, heterogeneous, and even contradictory dispositions that characterise individuals.
From our point of view, “sociological portraits” are the one that best responds to the object of study since they: allow us to capture the complexity of individual singularity, based on heterogeneity and dispositional and contextual plurality; for the heuristic value of the concept of “plural actor”; for the role assigned to the interconnection between structure and agency in the interpretation of the social.
Until now, we have carried out 8 in-depth semi-structured interviews with graduates from apprenticeship courses and 4 with graduates from vocational courses. In this presentation, as said before, we will present and discuss the results of the analysis of the interviews with 8 vocational education graduates.
The content analysis of the in-depth interviews and field notes is based on authors such as Bardin (1995) and Vala (2005). The analysis is organized around the simultaneous consideration of theoretical issues and empirical data. In a first analysis, we have performed successive readings of the transcription of the interviews. Then, we have analysed the interviews using a priori categories to streamline the analysis process, as well as emerging categories. Finally, it was important to re-analyse the data as a whole.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsFrom the interviews´ analysis, we can argue that, as working-class students, they had to face and overcome numerous barriers to assure their right to education: i) institutional barriers (e.g. high tuition fees in higher education; the university not offering the course in an after-labour regime); ii) situational barriers (e.g. low socioeconomic situation; being of a family with “ low cultural capital”) and iii) dispositional barriers (low academic aspirations and expectations; not having an ”academic habitus”; low self-esteem as a student) (Ekstrom, 1979).
Attending VET - and although these courses are mostly aimed at the transition to the labour market - paradoxically, turned out to be an “institutional detour” (Charlot, 2009) for these young people i) to complete secondary education and ii) was in many cases central for them to continue to higher education through their "re-mobilisation for school and study" (Charlot, 2009; Almeida & Rocha, 2010). Nevertheless, this comes with numerous constraints and inequalities that might challenge students´ right to education and social justice: through the analysis of the interviews, there is some evidence that these courses may put at risk, to some extent, their right to what Young (2010) calls “powerful knowledge”. For instance, most of them have difficulty in the national exams to enter higher education, and, for that reason, they have to apply through a specific call for VET students. However, not all higher education institutions open this call, so VET graduates are constrained in their choices and, most of them, do not attend the most academic and socially privileged institutions and courses. Hence, if VET may assure their access to higher education and in some cases their educational success, it also contributes, in a certain manner, to social reproduction and, for that reason, we question wether it guarantees social justice.
ReferencesAbrantes, P. (2022). Educação e classes sociais em Portugal: continuidades e mutações no século XXI. Sociologia, problemas e práticas, 99, 9-27. DOI: 10.7458/SPP20229924309
Almeida, S. & Rocha. (2010). O sistema de aprendizagem e as transições de jovens da escola ao mundo do trabalho: a relação com o saber: formas e temporalidades identitárias. Educação, Sociedade & Culturas, 31, 83-103
Ball, S. (2019). Meritocracy, social mobility and a new form of class domination.
British Journal of Sociology of Education. September, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2019.1665496
Bardin, L. (1995). Análise de conteúdo. Lisboa: Edições 70
Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. P. (2009 [1964]). Los herederos: los estudiantes y la cultura. (2ª ed.). Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina
Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. P. (s.d. [1970]). A reprodução: elementos para uma teoria do sistema de ensino. Lisboa: Editorial Vega
Bourdieu, P. (1992). Reprodução cultural e reprodução social. In S. Grácio, S. Stoer & Miranda, S. (Orgs.) Sociologia da Educação: antologia. (pp. 327-368). Lisboa: Livros Horizonte
Bourdieu (2003). A escola conservadora: as desigualdades frente à escola e à cultura. Escritos de educação. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes
Charlot, B. (2009 [1999]). A Relação com o saber nos meios populares. Porto: CIIE/Livpsic
Costa A. F. & R. Mauritti (2018). Classes sociais e interseções de desigualdades: Portugal e a Europa. Desigualdades Sociais. Portugal e a Europa. Porto: Mundos sociais
Ekstrom, R. B. (1972). Barriers to Women's Participation in Post-Secondary Education. A Review of the Literature, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED072368
Fraser, N. (2002). A justiça social na globalização: redistribuição, reconhecimento e participação. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais [Online], 63
http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/1250
Fraser, N. (2006). Da redistribuição ao reconhecimento? Dilemas da justiça numa era pós-socialista. Cadernos de campo, São Paulo, 14/15, 1-382
Melo, B. P. & Lopes, J. T. (2021). Metamorfoses de A Reprodução: um olhar atualizado a partir da realidade portuguesa. Sociologia, problemas e práticas, 97, 87-105. DOI: 10.7458/SPP20219724911
Lahire, B. (2004). Retratos sociológicos: disposições e variações individuais. Porto Alegre: Artmed
Reay, D. (2021). The working classes and higher education: Meritocratic fallacies of upward mobility in the United Kingdom. European Journal of Education 56(5)
Vala, J. (2005). A análise de conteúdo. In A. S. Silva e J. M. Pinto. Metodologia das ciências sociais. (pp. 101-128). Porto: Edições Afrontamento
Young, M. (2010). Conhecimento e Currículo: do socioconstrutivismo ao realismo social na sociologia da educação. Porto: Porto editora
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