Alternative Educational Programmes, Schools and Social Justice

Glenda McGregor, Martin Mills, Pat Thomson, Jodie Pennacchia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351211864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Alternative education caters and cares for students whose regular schools have failed and excluded them. Fifty years of international research reports that alternative settings are characterised by close and powerful staff–student relationships, a curriculum which is relevant, engaging and meaningful, and the strong sense of agency afforded young people by the opportunity to make decisions. Together, these three practices produce increased life chances for alternative education participants.

However, despite these apparent successes, alternative education seems to have had little impact on mainstream schools. This collection of papers addresses the important question – what might regular schools and teachers learn about socially just pedagogies from alternative education practices? In providing answers to this question, authors interrogate the taken-for-granted wisdom about alternative education while also taking account of ongoing policy shifts, differing locations and populations, and persistent and intersecting patterns of raced, classed and gendered inequalities. They draw on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to interrogate the ways in which alternative schools and alternative education both challenge and legitimate the kinds of schooling most of us expect for our own and other people's children.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.

Cracking with affect: relationality in young people’s movements in and out of mainstream schooling

Jennifer Skattebol and Debra Hayes

This paper focusses on the schooling stories of two young women who moved from mainstream schooling into alternative learning program set up for Indigenous students and back into mainstream schooling to complete their Year 12 education. The manner in which these young women narrated their stories is understood through the prism of Indigenous notions of relatedness and affect theory and is as revealing as the actual reporting of the events and rationales in these young women’s schooling trajectories. Young people’s insights into the challenges of mainstream pedagogies and promises of relational pedagogies invite us to consider what could be different in structures and processes which aim to deliver educational equity. We argue there is a need for more research which offers rich accounts of the emotional and relational fields which underpin student subjectivities and engagement.

Introduction

In the 2012 Australian census, the number of Indigenous students staying on to Year 12 exceeded 50 per cent for the first time (ABS, 2014; Dreise & Thomson, 2014). While clearly an improvement on past figures, many schools continue to serve Indigenous students poorly. They are not enabling Indigenous students to perform alongside their non-Indigenous peers on most measures of educational participation and achievement. Successive national governments have attempted to address the issue through educational policies, the most potent of which are those that aim to improve school attendance (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2014). A recent strategy, the Compact for Young Australians, received bipartisan political support to potentially penalise families whose children have poor attendance by having their parenting payments suspended (Te Riele, 2011). This constructs the problem as one within families and works to reinforce implicit race-based assumptions that low levels of educational attainment are a result of incompetent child rearing (Beresford, 2003). This kind of policy emphasis on measurable and incremental improvements in attendance and retention displaces efforts to understand why many Indigenous students disengage from schooling institutions and how policies and institutional practices might converge to alienate young people from learning in the institutional contexts available to them. Smyth and Hattam (2001) argue that research and policy that engage a ‘sociological imagination’ might redress the issue through offering deeper understandings of young people’s lives and experiences: ‘it is not sufficient to merely research the reasons young people give for deciding to leave school, but we also need to understand something about how they construct their subjectivity or lived experience, sociologically speaking’ (p.402).

Our purpose in this paper is twofold: to use a sociological lens to better understand how young people who are excluded from school construct their subjectivities; and to consider how these experiences might be accessed and interpreted, sociologically speaking. Drawing upon a larger study of a community-based alternative learning program, which catered mainly to Indigenous students (see Hayes, 2012, 2013), we share the schooling stories told to us by two young women. These two were significant because they were the only students in the program to opt to return to mainstream schooling to complete year 12. Over time, the way these young women constructed their schooling subjectivities changed. These shifts illuminated some of the barriers to and facilitators of schooling engagement and completion. We put to work storying devices (such as photo elicitation techniques) to facilitate access to these young peoples’ stories; and tracked the affect and relational dynamics that flowed around their stories. We argue that attention to the contexts and processes of storytelling is integral to understanding how these young people constructed and reconstructed their schooling subjectivities, and subsequently navigated the system.

The affective dimensions of the interviews were striking and they repeatedly drew our attention to the social relations between the research participants as a group, between them and other members of the school community, and between ourselves as researchers and the students as research participants. Aboriginal scholar Karen Martin’s (2008) generous and detailed work on indigenous methodologies offers a roadmap for engaging relational epistemologies in order to understand such relations and their place in indigenous ontologies. While there are many dimensions and layers to her work, Martin reminds us that accessing what was important to these students was only visible with an understanding of the complex and multifaceted social relations that shaped their subjectivities.

The question of how social relations shape schooling subjectivities has been explored in several studies with Indigenous students who find school difficult to engage. Research focussed on an earlier version of the alternative program attended by students in our study offers a platform for considering this question. The coordinator of the program, Dorothy Bottrell (2007) drew upon her established relationships with her participants to understand their perspectives on schooling and truancy. She showed how these perspectives were shaped by their experiences within and outside school. Through interviews with 12 girls, aged 13–24 years, she came to understand their resistance to school as resilience to the exclusionary social relations in their school in the face of ‘pressures, expectations of failure and inability to change’ (p. 604).

Elsewhere, the significance of social fields beyond the school on student’s participation in schooling has been highlighted. In a study of non-formal place-based learning, Tracy Friedel (2009) warns of a tendency to misunderstand Indigenous young people’s refusal to participate in formal learning programs as rebelliousness or apathy. She argues that they are often enacting subjectivities and relationship responsibilities that are invisible or inadequately recognised in schools. Findings from her research illustrate how students were ‘regularly and actively affiliate[d] with ancestrally important places and with relatives near and far. Moving within and across geographical boundaries, youth consider themselves counter to the way they were perceived by … educators’ (p. 536).

These studies underscore the importance of adopting a sociological imagination that places the notion of relationality at the centre of research design. We ask what this lens can contribute to discussions about alternative and mainstream schooling, and to research at these sites. In the next section we consider Martin’s call for relational epistemologies and how affect theory can be put to use analytically in such an endeavour. We then assemble a narrative that addresses the affective content of the interviews as well as the salient events that underpinned young people’s disengagement and reengagement with school. We conclude by arguing that schooling and research processes are profoundly relational and argue the need for more research explicitly framed by attention to relationality.

Relational epistemologies

Indigenous scholars have identified a plethora of injuries and injustices that result from Western research practices and epistemologies (Nakata, 2007; Smith, 2012). The enduring legacy is distrust about research and towards researchers. Martin and Mirraboopa (2003) contend that epistemologies respectful of Indigenous ways of being insist on a ‘truly relational’ approach where ‘all things are recognised and respected for their place in the overall system’, including the reasons Indigenous people have to distrust research.

For Martin (2008), indigenist research is based on an ontological premise of relatedness and composed of three components – Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing. Ways of Knowing are about one’s stories of relatedness – of who one is and where one comes from; Ways of Being require that one is respectful, responsible and accountable to one’s stories of knowing; and Ways of Doing require that one’s processes and practices of daily living serve and are served by relatedness. Martin (2008) developed this framework by paying close attention to how an Aboriginal community regulated outsiders and argues these processes are informed by and congruent with Aboriginal ontologies. She describes how she was engaged in a series of ‘enfoldments and evolvements’, which regulated and mediated her deepening engagement. From this she identified a number of relational subject positions for researchers: stranger/unknown outsider, whiteman/known outsider, and friend/known outsider. She argues these positions are regarded as temporary states and that through respectful interactions that fulfil conditions of ‘honesty, co-operation and respect’ (Martin, 2008, p. 10) outsiders are able to move and ‘come amongst’ or ‘come alongside’ to understand issues of importance to the community.

As researchers, understanding the worldviews of Indigenous young people requires attention to one’s own place, one’s own accountabilities and ensuring one’s processes serve relatedness. Martin (2008, p. 1) lucidly argues, researchers should not act as though we are ‘entering a frontier’ where people have no understanding of research practice or histories. This view works to ‘perpetuate fictions of ideological, physical or intellectual terra nullius’. Instead, we should tread with awareness of the legacies of our trade, knowing and accounting for ourselves. Research about schooling can be of particular concern because of its role as a key mechanism of colonisation and the dehumanisation of Aboriginal people.

These insights are both ontological and epistemological. They offer a way into the field as well as a way of understanding what happens there. Martin’s insights supported us – as non-Indigenous researchers – to think about our own social positioning and how it might impact on what the Indigenous students in the alternative learning program might share about themselves, how they were responsible and accountable for themselves, and how relationality might underpin their processes and practices of daily life, including engagement in research. We entered the field slowly and negotiated extensively with community elders and stakeholders in order to accumulate enough community trust to ‘come alongside’ young people. These processes required reflexive tools that supported us to work through distrust and divergent worldviews towards encounters where we could check our understandings. Paying attention to affective signals allowed us to read our own place in the relational field as well as how the students were placed in their own fields of relationships.

Affect as a ‘relational’ epistemological tool

Affect is ‘principally elided with the concept of emotion where emotions are understood as profoundly social’ (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2013, p. 5). As an epistemological tool that signals important social relations, affect is powerful because it can be both blinding and illuminating. Wetherell (2013) notes ‘an intriguing feature of affect is its spectacular demonstration of the limits of human agency … it arrives unbidden and we find ourselves in a state of grief, anxiety, rage or euphoria’ (p. 221). Affect is a powerful lens for thinking about social relations and participation because affect ‘accumulates across both relatedness and interruptions to relatedness’ (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 2). It marks both belonging and non-belonging. While hugely variable in its intensities, affect is a marker of relatedness, desire and agency.

Affect theory and attention to emotional landscapes have gained some traction in educational research where, historically, emphasis has been on rationality, reason and cognition. Psycho-social or psychoanalytic concepts have been employed to better understand gendered, classed and racialised power in education and how affect patterns are socialised according to historical collective experiences (Boler, 1999; Britzman, 1998; Skattebol, 2010; Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody, 2002). It informs socio-cultural–spatial analyses that map the emotional geographies of education to better account for student agency (Kenway & Youdell, 2011). This work encourages us to look closely at joy, shame, anger, fear, excitement and other emotions as central rather than peripheral to the stories being told. Furthermore, it demonstrates how educational experiences and affective states of individual students are underpinned by a myriad of collective legacies and social relations.

The legacy of widespread education system failures in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities means that researchers need to be sensitive to collective and intergenerational experiences of schooling. Students do not simply have their own experience of school but are affectively enmeshed in the experiences of those closest to them. Affect is thus a powerful epistemological lens that sensitises researchers to historical and collective experiences, and signals how and when we might ‘come alongside’ our research participants.

Affective storytelling

In the evaluation of the alternative learning program, we found students were wary of school and of outsiders. As a consequence, they were somewhat reluctant research participants. At the time of writing, interviews have been conducted with seven students, with three of the students doing multiple interviews over an 18-month period. Young people were invited in person, and via Facebook and individual phone calls by friends (both known outsiders and insiders) to participate in the research. It took months to actually come face to face with students and even longer to persuade them to talk to us formally. Our key supporter was Gareth – a friend/known outsider (Martin, 2008). He worked with young people in the community and in the education program. He supported us in many ways – offering perspectives on the community, introducing us to everyone including young people, being a trusted physical presence in interviews and selecting photographs from the learning program to jog young people’s memories and stimulate conversation. These photographs proved critical to enable ‘easy’ and ‘light’ interactions with young people. They captured work in the classroom, process work on projects with community artists, outings to corporate venues, camps and events showcasing their work to their families and local community. The initial research encounters crackled with affect. We often felt like we were being circled by a cautious flock of birds – landing tentatively, quick to sense any danger and remaining only as long as there were no sudden moves, by us or by the flock.

We eventually settled down to work with small groups of ex-students. These encounters inevitably began in awkward clipped and minimalist ways, but usually transformed and built in affect as students reminisced and reworked narratives with each other, and relentlessly teased Gareth whenever he appeared in photographs. The images of their time in the program transported participants back into shared pleasurable experiences and turned around what might otherwise have been experienced as a stressful performance-based schooling activity. The insights signalled by these shifts in tenor of hot and cold emotions have informed our analysis; and we have attended to the flows of affect in both conducting and analysing interviews. Tuning in to these flows of intensity has been instrumental in recognising the importance of incidents which were often obfuscated by young people’s storytelling styles and devices. Young people frequently used fooling around and competitive displays of bravado to disarm injustices within the institutional cultures of mainstream schooling. These devices often acted as signals that anecdotes contained reference to potent forms of symbolic violence.

Analysis of the sequencing of when and how events were told has revealed important insights. These young people did not appear to want their worlds to be immediately knowable. In early interviews, young people typically flagged most of the issues that we have come to see as important over time. Insights were offered in a scattergun fashion, and painful incidents tended to be hinted at but understated. Mazzei and Jackson (2012) describe discursive currents from history, policy, practice and people’s varied lifeworlds as ‘noise’ which shapes what can and cannot be spoken in any given situation. The multiple encounters required by indigenist methods (Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003) build understandings of the complex discursive landscapes that shape the meanings of research participants. Obfuscated stories sharpened our awareness of surveillance, intrusions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Alternative programmes, alternative schools and social justice
• 1 Cracking with affect: relationality in young people’s movements in and out of mainstream schooling
• 2 Young black males: resilience and the use of capital to transform school ‘failure’
• 3 Caught between a rock and a hard place: disruptive boys’ views on mainstream and special schools in New South Wales, Australia
• 4 ‘It’s the best thing I’ve done in a long while’: teenage mothers’ experiences of educational alternatives
• 5 Meaningful education for returning-to-school students in a comprehensive upper secondary school in Iceland
• 6 Disciplinary regimes of ‘care’ and complementary alternative education
• 7 Alternative education and social justice: considering issues of affective and contributive justice
• 8 The force of habit: channelling young bodies at alternative education spaces
• 9 Teachers’ work and innovation in alternative schools
• Index