College Student Voices on Educational Reform

Challenging and Changing Conversations

K. Burke, B. Collier, M. McKenna, K. Burke, B. Collier, M. McKenna

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137351845
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Hochschulausbildung

This text critically addresses, through college student voices, the American school reform movement in its rhetoric, policy, and practice. It demonstrates how university courses can be designed to treat students as engaged citizens and contextualizes students' voices in the private university and the public sphere.

1

Introduction: A “Conversation” and the Problem of Positioning

Brian S Collier, Maria K. McKenna, and Kevin J. Burke

Abstract: What follows is a text about the ways in which purported experts come to define the parameters of what counts as a discussion around school reform. In order to fully situate the text that will follow—this book filled with student research and writing about how we might think about schooling in the United States—we will break this introduction chapter into three sections. The first seeks to situate the text in theory that aims to re-allow student voices into the process while also providing some description of the context for the student writing. The second examines the historical strands of our current system, suggesting that what we’ve lost is the public sense that the community is empowered to engage in educational policy debates. The final section will situate the text in the realm of pedagogy as we three seek to seriously think about the role of teaching and teachers in the realm of positing possibilities for education.

Collier, Brian S, McKenna, Maria K. and Burke, Kevin J. College Student Voices on Educational Reform: Challenging and Changing Conversations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137351845.

Etymologically, the term “conversation” has two latinate origins, meaning roughly “with” (com) and “versus” (vertare). This is a bit of a loose and certainly ancient, if not antiquated, version of the word but the point to be carried here is that to converse, as in participating in a conversation, requires the very act of the word: “to turn about with” (Oxford English Dictionary—OED). That is, to be party to a conversation is to be active in putting forth ideas, but more importantly and more prominently as given in the Oxford English Dictionary, it requires an intimacy of engagement that can only come through “the action of living or having one’s being in a place or among persons.” And while we want to be careful to acknowledge the imperialistic history of the OED and its use as a creator and chronicler of certain kinds of histories (Willinsky, 1994), we see the use of definition here as a particularly salient way of suggesting first that language matters immensely in how it’s leveraged for political purposes, but also to invite the reader into a very specific moment where students, as members of a year-long course, were given the chance to, with intimacy of purpose, “engage with things, in the way of business or study” to converse, for the sake of troubling certain waters.

To proceed, then, we must bring context to the conversation. In order to do so, however, another broader definition is necessary. The University of Notre Dame in an attempt to expand its role as a national and global research hub has, since 2006, designed and hosted year-long events structured around specific topics. This nearly annual series of events is meant to, presumably, create an environment of longitudinal study, punctuated with visiting scholars and experts, such that undergraduate and faculty engagement with broader social concerns is fostered, if not excited through various exchanges, events and ideally conversations. Topics tend to center on pressing social issues: in 2006 it was The Global Health Crisis; in 2007 it targeted immigration and after 2008s onus on sustainable energy the Forum, as it’s called, turned to perhaps the most pressing of issues in the American consciousness on the heels of the mortgage-backed financial crisis: The Global Marketplace and the Common Good. This event, headlined by New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman marked a stark shift in the Forum, by our measure, from a broader engagement with ideas toward the promulgation of a very specific model for human possibility as marketized, commodified and reducible to some of the more dismal proclivities of economic scientificity/sophistry. This fed very readily into 2012s Reimagining School, which came to approach the notions of reform in the American context in rather, well, unimaginative ways. But more on that in a moment.

Back to definitions, quickly. A forum, as defined on the most recent iteration of the event’s website, is “an assembly, meeting place for the discussion of questions of public interest” (“ND Forum,” n.d.). This is important exactly because the university, by organizing a forum, is providing a space but not the terms for a genuine conversation. Were the series called the colloquy, literally a “talking together,” then we might expect different things but this subtle move toward an emphasis on the place (as in, the university) rather than the topic itself comes to outline, we think, the kinds of talking that will happen.

It’s important to note that our work in this text is not only about a series of meetings and supposed (or stunted) conversations at the University of Notre Dame. At the same time, it’s not, not about this either as we are laden with a local context in our work. We exist in what Soja (1996) calls a “social space” which can, when conceptualized, “come to be seen entirely as mental space, an ‘encrypted reality’” (p. 63). This is not to suggest that the physical place, this great schoolhouse, of the university doesn’t exist but rather serves to shift the focus from the buildings in our Midwestern city onto the discourses produced by actors present within them, passing through them. Because “humans grow to maturity trained in the ways of such institutions” as our schools and colleges, we need to, in any critical project addressing education, attend to the ways in which this “training invariably depends on language of some sort” (Trites, 2000, p. 22). It is our intention to make claims that are larger than our own parochial situation, to move beyond our localized social space in order to engage in a critical study about how institutions come to position students—and where and how students in turn resist and reinvent such positioning—through official channels and the imposition of what Bakhtin (1994) calls authoritative discourse. Britzman (2003) notes that this discursive construct “demands allegiance” because it is “‘received’ and static knowledge, dispensed in a style that eludes the knower, but dictates, in some ways, the knower’s frames of reference” (p. 42). We dig into, with the students in this text among other things, the limits of allegiance when demanded, implicitly and explicitly.

This book is, then, an examination of what happened when the concept of Education Reform became the topic of what could have been a discussion, a conversation, at our university over the course of a school year. It is about where authoritative discourse came to reign in the form of an indoctrinatory approach to what is/was possible for K-12 schooling; more prominently this text, as produced by our undergraduate students, is an exercise in resistance and reconciliation. The essays included here are, we think, illustrative of the Bakhtinian “internally persuasive discourse” whereby student actors come to interpret and make non/sense of the messages promulgated through official university-sanctioned events around the topic of education reform. This is their work of “pulling . . . away from norms” toward “a variety of contradictory social discourses” (Britzman, 2003, p. 42) in the hopes of finding “newer ways to mean” (Bakhtin 1984, p. 346).

Alastair Pennycook (2001) argues that a critical applied linguistics will of necessity allow for a view of language “as productive and performative . . . as a set of repeated acts within a regulatory frame . . . and as a site of resistance to and appropriation of norms and forms of standardized discourse” (p. 168). What we propose here is a text underlined by these same values. It is our understanding that undergraduate students are often considered incomplete beings. They are good enough to enter our elite universities,¹ but they cannot, in some sense, be trusted with the production of big ideas, or real knowledge, so much as they can be easily positioned as consumers of them. They are not quite tabulae rasae but what they have to say and write is often seen at best as incomplete; at worst naïve and generally aimed at inflecting the expertise of those scholars to whom they are exposed or subjected to.

It is our sense that this explicitly anti-Deweyan (1902) approach to education where students are positioned as mere vessels for the prolixities of, and as parrots for, established “expert” positions is problematic and runs counter to the purpose of the university as a marketplace of ideas. With this assumption in place, we moved to create a dialogic space for student writing and scholarly work, accepting that, as Dejoy (2004) notes, “those who work to create different spaces for student subjectivities are worried about a different set of pedagogical, theoretical, and practical issues” (p. 50). We choose to examine this process (of discursive engagement with, resistance to, recapitulation of and research on writing and new subjectivities) through the latest iteration of the Notre Dame Forum, “Reimagining school: To nurture the soul of a nation”—which began in the spring of 2010 and continued through the spring of 2012—not because the ethos of the event was particularly unique, but specifically because we believe that it is representative of so much that happens on college campuses and particularly, of late, in reference to education policy.

Because we believe that “the strongest form of power may well be the ability to define social reality, to impose visions of the world” (Gal, as cited in Giroux, 2010, p. 59) and because the Forum was unofficially kicked off by an event entitled, “The system: Opportunity, crisis and obligation in K-12 education” and launched with posters and t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase, “we need to talk about this,” it behooves us to think about who gets to talk and just what obligation and crisis mean and for whom. At a later event entitled “The conversation: Developing the schools our children deserve,” a panel of prominent “leaders” in education suggested, once again, that this was something we might intimately share as a community, as we aimed to really “turn about with” the idea of schooling in the United States.

The point, of course, that was missing in the fanfare of these events and others was any public attempt to actually engage students in the kinds of intimate opportunities to really do the work of fostering the business of ideas about schooling. Instead, they were, when attending events, cast as audiences to the largely scripted speeches of prominent national figures who, though perhaps well versed in some aspects of the reform movement or the crisis of public schooling, such as it is or is seen, failed to, in any way, converse with students.

This text, produced in concert with a group of students who felt called not only to the place of the Forum but to the conversational aspect of its higher claims to truth, is meant to allow students to shift from being passive consumers to active producers of educational imaginaries.² It is, concurrently, a study of the processes of how such thinking and writing gets constructed by students as part of “a larger political project in which public intellectuals share a commitment to language as a site of experimentation, power, struggle and hope in the interests of building democratic social movements that are both inspired and informed” (Giroux, 2012, p. 100). The students have, in essence, written about education just as we have, but in different senses and spheres. To do so we will need to establish our frameworks more fully.

Framing

It is no stretch to suggest that our work together began with an aim toward developing the critical capacities of our students. That universities are politically positioned in the world is no surprise, really. When these institutions, however, engage in heavily publicized forays into the public sphere—most particularly private universities—questions of how the town might be helped or harmed by the work of those hiding behind the gown are worth asking. That the conservative or liberal politics of a place might inform the list of guests invited to speak at events is, again, unsurprising. However, when such events which amount to stump speeches for, in this case, narrowly conceived neoliberal marketized “solutions” to a, in large part, invented “crisis” of American education are framed as conversations about topics rather than ideologically motivated screeds for and against certain stances within them, then the purpose of the university as a whole is, largely, compromised. Gone is the notion of the marketplace of ideas, that great agora where students and faculty barter freely amongst shiny new theories supporting and contravening each other but all the time in conversation and tension. And in its place we find the practice of the attempt at an active transfer of ideology under the guise of the more benevolent terminology of discussion. We do, indeed, need to talk about this but with the students, rather than at them.

We were, as faculty and scholars, concerned with the growing sense that students were mere set pieces to the machinations of an ideological (and foregone) set of speeches meant not so much to consider ideas as to impose them fully packaged and underquestioned. We are not entering into this project naively. We firmly believe that all curriculum, null, hidden and otherwise (Longstreet and Shane, 1992; Eisner, 1994), is of necessity ideologically saturated just as any educational project, because it purports to replace one kind of knowledge (or ignorance) with another, is on base, indoctrinatory. Rather, we wish to point to the ways that rhetoric and the framing of officialized events at a university become a generally untroubled part of “curriculum writ large” (Pinar, 2001, p. 32) at the intersections of the “embodied” students.

It was our emerging concern, as we attended the events promulgated under the umbrella of conversations and discussions, that what was occurring was the untroubled attempt at transferring ideology. It was as if the speakers at these events primed to talk with each other on stage, but never genuinely with students, were living “as if we were not there” in the kind of “absurd, paradoxical formula” that created the simulacra of a conversation where one never actually occurred (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 28). Students in the audiences of events were entreated, patronized and frozen, as the hope for the future of education reform but never asked to engage in critical consideration for why reform was needed and whose version was best. Rather the audiences of these events were positioned (conditioned?) to accept what were exclusively “neoliberal policies of privatization and marketization” (Apple, 2012, xii) without question. Most disturbing were the moments when students, given the opportunity to speak with Forum participants in the public eye, were laughed off or evaded particularly when they suggested more nuanced and complex ways to read public education and the role of the public in/and private sectors.³

In answer to these concerns, then, we created a course aimed at fostering conversations that might best fall under the realm of Critical Social Theory (CST), “a multidisciplinary framework with the implicit goal of advancing the emancipatory function of knowledge” (Leonardo as cited in Watkins, 2012, p. 3). This CST approach is largely similar to the Freirean (1974) “critically transitive consciousness” characterized by “depth in the interpretation of problems” and “by the practice of dialogue” (p. 14). In honesty we didn’t know quite what the students would say in answer to the Forum—some were and still are passionate advocates of charters and parental choice—but we wanted them to have the space to say it, to dialogue, to critique and to, ultimately, produce their own answers to the problems presented to them as already solved by the speakers they’d seen.

Contrary to traditional Marxist views of power, however, we don’t see this work as simply that of an underclass of students resisting the strains of an overzealous administration, per say. Rather we wish to play with the nuances of language and the production of possibility and power through discourse(s). As such it will be important to elucidate two fundamental claims: first that we see much of the Forum as an exercise in curriculum where the underlying politics of reform become about “the concentrated expression of economics” (Watkins, 2012, p. 14) and are often obscured by the rhetoric of equal opportunity and individual choice. Further, as this is ultimately a project about the function of language and discourses in creating versions of the world, we note that “any discourse is defined not only by what it says, by the questions it raises, and by the actions it legitimates, but also by what it does not say, by the question...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: A Conversation and the Problem of Positioning
• 2  An Editorial Intervention: Mushfaking
• 3  Literacy: Fostering Lifelong Learning
• 4  Early Childhood Education
• 5  The School Environment: Common Purpose in Separate Spaces
• 6  Pulling Ideas Apart: Complicating the Questions
• Index