Beyond Binaries in Education Research

Warren Midgley, Mark A. Tyler, Patrick Alan Danaher, Alison Mander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136723315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Beyond Binaries in Education Research explores the ethical, methodological, and social justice issues relating to conceptualizations of binary opposites in education research, particularly where one side of the dualism is perceived to be positive and the other negative. In education research these may include ability-disability, academic-vocational, adult-child, formal-informal learning, male-female, research-practice, researcher-participant, sedentary-mobile, and West-East. Chapters in this book explore the resilience of binary constructions and present conceptual models for moving beyond them and/or reconceptualizing them to facilitate more productive approaches to education provision. With contributors from authors working in a multitude of educational fields and countries, this book provides a significant contribution to the ongoing challenge to seek new ways to move beyond binaries in education research.

1 Constructing and Deconstructing Binaries in Education Research

Alison Mander, Patrick Alan Danaher, Mark A. Tyler and Warren Midgley

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the concept of the binary—a representation based on an either/or logic—in relation to contemporary education research. Discussion focuses on multiple definitions and conceptualizations of binaries and diverse examples of their role in constructing educational experiences and outcomes. That diversity is matched by heterogeneous positions about what deconstructing and moving beyond binaries might entail. From this discussion the authors elicit a list of questions that helps to frame the succeeding chapters’ constructions and deconstructions of binaries and to highlight their contributions to helping to move beyond those binaries.

Introduction

This chapter and the book that it introduces are founded on the proposition that binaries are alive and well in contemporary social life and hence in education research in the early 21st century. This is because we see education research as inextricably linked with that social life and therefore centrally positioned to replicate and/or to transform it. This proposition is outlined in this chapter and demonstrated in successive chapters from a diversity of theoretically framed and empirically grounded perspectives.

The corollary of this proposition that we also articulate here is both the possibility and the desirability of moving beyond binaries in educational policymaking and provision. We acknowledge that binary relations are not always and automatically destructive and negative, and that they can lead to effective and productive relationships. At the same time, there is considerable historical and current evidence that many binaries generate situations in which one member of the binary pair is positioned as being more appropriate, normal, and powerful than the other, which by contrast is constructed as being deficient, disadvantaged, and even deviant (see also Danaher, Coombes, & Kiddle, 2007). In such situations, “‘the other’ ends up being designated as the one who is non-normative in a given context, non-predominant, different, and outside” (Cyss-Wittenstein, 2003, n.p.).

Our focus in this chapter is therefore on the constructions and deconstructions of binaries in education research—on what they are, how they are constituted, and the diverse ways in which we can engage with them. The chapter consists of the following three sections:

• Defining, conceptualizing, and constructing binaries
• Deconstructing and moving beyond binaries
• Outlining the book’s organizing questions, structure, and intended contributions to moving beyond binaries in education research.

Defining, Conceptualizing, and Constructing Binaries

Binaries are a complex phenomenon that continues to be defined, conceptualized, and constructed from multiple and heterogeneous perspectives. Terms such as dichotomy (Chen, 2010, p. 15) and dualism are sometimes deployed to help in explaining the meaning of binary, with Stephens (2004) employing the even more overtly value-laden word schism (p. 88), and Chen and Derewianka (2009) referring to “entrenched polarisations” (p. 223) and to “stark oppositions” (p. 242), although these words are not necessarily synonymous with one another and display different nuances of understanding. According to Coe, Domke, Graham, Lockett John, and Pickard (2004), “Binary communications represent the world as a place of polar opposites” (p. 234). Chen (2010) observed how in a binary one part of the pair “gets an upper hand in a hierarchical relationship” (p. v). Gibson-Graham (2002) noted that, in “any such binary formulation within Western knowledge systems, superior power is already distributed to the primary or master term” (p. 29), a point that was illustrated with regard to the global/local binary:

[W]e find ‘global’ and ‘local’ positioned in a familiar hierarchy wherein each derives meaning from the other. The global is represented as sufficient, whole, powerful, and transformative in relation to which the local is deficient, fragmented, weak, and acted upon. (p. 30)

Binaries have been closely associated with structuralism (Rogers, Malancharuvil-Berkes, Mosley, Hui, & O’Garro Joseph, 2005), “in which society is recast as a language or linguistic process” (Elliott, 2009, p. 5) that has a profound and continuing impact on the ways that individuals perceive the world and their relations with it. In particular, human relationships that are commonly identified as binaries in structuralist theory and that exhibit multiple contemporary and popular manifestations range from gender (Graham Davies, 2010; Haynes & McKenna, 2001; Nestle, Howell, & Wilchins, 2002) to multiculturalism (Powell, 1999a) to relations between Europe and/or the West on the one hand and Asia and/or the East on the other (Lieberman, 1999).

A wide array of binaries has been identified in addition to the sociocultural dichotomies identified above. These have included “Global vs. Local” (Gibson-Graham, 2002, p. 25) and “oppositional and zero-sum relationships between areas of knowledge, such as the distinction between policy and practice, which are better represented by a continuous or holistic relationship” (Sands & Nuccio, 2008, p. 467). Chen (2010) noted how in travel literature often “peoples and cultures are defined within conveniently maintained boundaries between home and abroad, West and non-West” (p. v), and furthermore how “the binary oppositions of the traveller and the traveled, mobility and stasis, the native and the diasporic, home and abroad” (p. v) are constructed. Del Casino and Hanna (2006) drew on their cartographic interests in seeking to “interrogate the binaries of representation/practice, production/consumption, conceptualization/interpretation, and corporeality/sociality upon which so much analysis is based” (p. 35). Stephens (2004) named several variations on the same fundamental binary forestalling conceptual and policy advances in relation to motherhood research: “the work/home split” (p. 88), “between public and private” (p. 88), “in the notion of the ‘good mother’ and that of the ‘working mother’” (p. 88), and “work/family” (p. 90). In discussing current approaches to literacy education in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Chen and Derewianka (2009) referred to “the traditional/progressive pendulum” (p. 242), and to distinctions between:

the horizontal discourse of children’s personal experience and the more vertical discourse of educational knowledge, between the strong framing of direct teacher input when appropriate to the weaker framing of [student] group activity, between the formative evaluation of learner competence during the unit to a summative assessment of performance at the end. (p. 242)

Debate continues about whether binaries are inherently marginalizing. Wetherell and Potter (1998) thought not, contending that “binaries are made sexist or progressive in the context of specific ideological practices” (p. 377). By contrast, Lorber (1996) appeared to regard sociological categories as at least implicitly complicit with sociocultural marginalization: “Data that undermine the supposed natural dichotomies on which the social orders of most modern societies are still based could radically alter political discourses that valorize biological causes, essential heterosexuality, and traditional gender roles in families and workplaces” (p. 143).

A crucial element of binaries—and hence of the potential for disrupting them—is their integral connection with constructions of the other and of otherness. For example, Chen (2010) referred explicitly to “the binary logic of self and other” (p. 9), and contended that “encoded dichotomies” position “the traveller as” separate from and immune to “the influence of the other” (p. 21), even though such a separation and immunity are subverted by constructions of “the transcultural subject” (p. 21). Chen also acknowledged “the static, binary representation of [the] self–other relationship predicated on racial category” (p. 168). Likewise, Powell (1999b) decried the “binary form of analysis that collapses a myriad of distinct culture voices into the overly simplistic category of ‘Other’ defined in relation to a European ‘Self’ [as being] theoretically problematic” (p. 1).

Given our proposition of the integral connections between education and other dimensions of contemporary social life, it is inevitable that the complexity and diversity attending definitions, conceptualizations, and constructions of binaries are reflected in the educational manifestations and effects of such binaries. Broader binaries such as those related to gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status are clearly represented in education research (Asher, 2007; Kitching, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2005; Martino, Lingard, & Mills, 2004). More specific binaries that take up the particularities of educational practice are also evident. For example, the experiential learning approach that underpins much contemporary outdoor adventure education has been critiqued for constructing binaries between experience and reflection and between learners and situations (Brown, 2009). Similarly, the distinctions between developed and underdeveloped countries and between the North and the South have been linked with certain educational practices that in turn have been posited as helping to create new socioeconomic inequities (Tikly, 2004). Likewise, educational binaries often take on additional power when they are appropriated by political leaders and deployed in media discourses for particular purposes (Coe et al., 2004).

This section of the chapter has noted the difficulty of providing universally accepted and clear-cut definitions of binaries, while also recording something of the complexity of their contemporary conceptualizations and constructions. We have also explored some of the educational manifestations of current binaries. We turn now to identify a number of strategies that have been elicited for deconstructing such binaries, and associated efforts to move beyond them to more enabling understandings and enactments of sociocultural relations.

Deconstructing and Moving Beyond Binaries

Several scholars have sought to identify ways in which binaries can be deconstructed, disrupted, and even transformed. For example, Morehead (2001, as cited in Stephens, 2004) contended that homes and workplaces are not necessarily “temporally bounded” (p. 91), and that working mothers are often able to complete several tasks simultaneously, thereby enacting a kind of synchronous time. In other words, for Morehead, contesting the supposed fixity of space and time can be effective in challenging the foundation of the work/home and worker/mother binaries. Gibson-Graham (2002) also identified “two strategies for challenging the power” (p. 30) of binaries:

The first involves the tools of deconstruction, the theoretical intervention that has been so effective in shaking loose static identities that constrain thought and politics. … The other involves practices of resubjectivation, a set of embodied interventions that attempt to confront and reshape the ways in which we live and enact the power of the [binary]. (p. 30)

Similarly, Chen and Derewianka (2009) highlighted the necessity of contextually nuanced and fluid approaches to literacy education by all groups of stakeholders to challenge the binaries that they identified as suffusing that field:

This requires teachers with high levels of specialist knowledge to inform their decision-making, policy-makers who are open to intricacy rather than the simple quick fixes required by political expediency, and researchers who are able to provide useful evidence not only of ‘what works’ but [also] why and under what conditions and in which contexts for which students. (p. 242)

Likewise, Chen (2010) eschewed “those postcolonialist readings that render these [binary] hierarchies hopelessly pervasive and inviolate” (p. 28), and also rejected “the same binary logic … which simply reverses the oppositions” (p. 28). Instead, she argued that “the binaries such as self and other, home and abroad, should be conceived on a relational rather than hierarchical plane where the power relations can never remain stable” (p. 16). Indeed, Chen insisted that embracing otherness, whose construction was identified above as crucial to the creation of binaries, is equally vital to moving beyond such binaries: in the case of a traveler’s engaging with a new country, for instance, it is important to establish a

contact zone as an in-between space where the self–other binary can seldom hold stable, a space where the old, coherent sense of self is disrupted and a new self emerges with an ‘enlarged’ understanding of self and other, and home and away. (p. 22)

For Chen (2010), this contact zone functioned as an evocative metaphor for transcultural understanding, which “brings to light the complexity and contingency of the self–other relationship, showing that the two entities are more interdependent and mutually influential than oppositional and antithetical” (p. 24). Elsewhere, this understanding was expressed in terms of “detecting similarities underneath striking differences between cultures, and … a nuanced vision of both home and the visited place that rejects a binary and categorical way of thinking which forecloses understanding of the foreign” (p. 106). Transcultural understanding was also held to “[open] up space for the traveller’s sustained interest to understand and translate otherness, which in turn catalyzes the constant rediscovery and translation of the travelling self” (p. 146).

Chen (2010) elaborated this sophisticated theoretical development explicitly in terms of being “an answer to the call of the critical debate within the field of travel literature studies” (p. 231):

This debate revolves around different approaches to the self–other binary in travel writing. On the one hand, it highlights and critiques the hierarchical power relations between the traveller and the native. And, on the other hand, it counteracts this very hierarchy by illustrating how the power relations can only be symbolic and never remain stable. To enter into this scholarly conversation, my thesis acknowledges the contribution of both sides of the debate; while the first approach enhances our critical consciousness of the imperialist ideology of the genre, the second one reminds us of the complexity of the representation of the self–other interaction in the contact zone. The critical approach I propose is to attend to the contact zone as the zone of interculturality; instead of reading the travelling self and the native as two different, unrelated entities trapped within a powerbased relationship, I examine the dynamics of their communication and the consequences of their cross-cultural contact. … So, it is the process of cultural translation and the trans...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword: Renewing the Critical Function of Education Research
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Constructing and Deconstructing Binaries in Education Research
• Part I: Researching Researchers
• Part II: Privileging Participants
• Part III: Considering Contexts
• Respondent’s Text
• Contributors
• Index