Chapter 1
âWho is it that can tell me who I am?â â identity and resistance in further education
Pete Bennett and Rob Smith
In his seminal text, The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills declared that ââManâs chief dangerâ today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political dominationâ (C. Wright Mills 1959: 13). More than fifty years on the âunruly forcesâ show little sign of abating and education remains particularly susceptible to all manner of âmethodsâ and âtechniquesâ.
This introductory chapter will set out the argument of this collection by creating a brief history of its conception and development, by making explicit its central propositions and intentions and, then, by providing an overview of the ways in which each chapter contributes to the critical whole.
A brief history
In this book, we use âfurther educationâ as an umbrella term to signify educational courses and experiences that take place in a variety of settings involving young people who have finished attending school, as well as adult returners. Further education includes vocational education and work-based learning but this book focuses mainly on the further education that takes place in colleges across England and the UK.
This project originated from a collective commitment within a community of practice/partnership of teacher educators to exploring reflective practice and teacher-scholarliness in a university in the West Midlands of England. This community of practice, spanning higher and further education settings was formed during a period in which neoliberal values and New Public Management and managerialist approaches to organising public sector education had become hegemonic cultural practice in public educational institutions across large parts of the Western world (see for example Clarke and Newman 1997; Considine and Painter 1997; Smith and OâLeary 2013). By âneoliberalâ, we mean the policy paradigm traceable to Hayekian economic doctrine that seeks âto replace political judgement with economic evaluationâ (Davies 2014: 4). Peck (2010) suggests that thinking about neoliberalism in âregime-likeâ terms renders it too âstaticâ a concept and that a âprocessual definitionâ, i.e. neoliberalisation is preferable (ibid. 19).
In England, this process involved the promotion of competition and international comparison by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and specifically the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in the measurement of educational and âskillsâ attainment as an index of national economic potential.
In the spring of 1993 through incorporation, further education colleges had a business-orientated institutional model imposed on them. Following that, policy â driven increasingly by an instrumentalist agenda â cast further education in the role of âhand maiden to British industryâ (Ainley and Bailey 1997: 14). Colleges had always been positioned as local service providers offering courses to their surrounding communities including businesses. The marketisation of the environment that followed promoted them as entrepreneurial outfits with an eye on ensuring profit came first (Smith 2015). The funding mechanism was a key aspect of this. Funding for colleges in England asserted a brutalist equivalence between different qualifications for the purpose of measuring âproductivityâ. The introduction of managerialist cultures and practices were a response to this. The roll-out of managerialism resulted in dramatic changes to the constitution of the teaching workforce. The number of part-time staff in colleges in 2015 was 60%, compared to the proportion in the general UK workforce of 37% (ETF 2016: 9).1 A third of these part-time jobs were on âprecarious contractsâ (UCU 2016: 3) â suggesting that teaching in further education belongs to the emerging neoliberal phenomenon of the precarious professions. At a fundamental level, this shift constitutes an attack on teachers whose work was often socially situated in settings with strong links to community and locality.
The embedding of managerialism as orthodoxy in college cultures was exacerbated by the Global Economic Crisis of 2008 which ushered in âausterityâ. Ironically, rather than challenge the âneoliberal restructuringâ (âEpistemology, economic strategy, and moral code rolled into oneâ [Tuck 2013: 326]), which has so changed social attitudes to education and almost every other public sphere, this âcatastrophe of capitalâ seems rather to have given what Fisher has labelled âcapitalist realismâ a second wind. This, for Fisher is âthe widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to itâ (Fisher 2009: 2). Neoliberalisation, to use Daviesâs term, is pre-eminently capable of self-reinvention and adaptation.
This book explores some of the pressures militating against any consolidation of a unifying or stable sense of identity amongst further education teachers that intensified in the period after the financial crisis. The title of the book uses a quotation from Act I, Scene IV of Shakespeareâs King Lear. Having given away his title to his daughters, Lear begins a painful journey of understanding into how who we are is as much about how others see us as it is about who we feel ourselves to be. The current neoliberal backdrop with its âpervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and actionâ (Fisher 2009: 16) provides a frame for the contributions in this collection. In the so-called âage of austerityâ, further education in England has been targeted for budgetary cuts more than any other sector of education. In addition, the professional identity of teachers in further education was undermined by the Lingfield Report (BIS 2012) whose key finding threw out the 2007 regulation that teachers in colleges had to acquire a teaching qualification, suggesting instead this could be left to âthe marketâ. More recently, colleges have been subjected to further ârationalisationâ as more efficiencies are sought through a national programme of Area Reviews. This has involved mergers, takeovers and the closing of some colleges (see Smith 2017).
This is the context that, for us, resonates so strongly with Shakespeareâs Lear at the beginning of his journey onto the heath and into madness and that makes his question so startlingly pertinent for many further education teachers: âWho is it that can tell me who I am?â
The contributors to this volume straddle the divide between further and higher education. They have stark and uncomfortable insights but countering these, maintain a commitment to creativity, to practical solutions, to producing resources of hope. Like Carol Taylor in her recent work on HE teacherliness who seeks âto find or, rather, hold onto and cherish, an educative space from which to contest perceptions that the intensification of market conditions in higher education inevitably brings a deformation and derogation of teaching and learning relationshipsâ (Taylor 2016: 1), this volumeâs contributors are determined to offer resistance to these phenomena as they manifest in further education while acknowledging their destructive power. This resistance necessarily seeks to deconstruct the mythic qualities of the neoliberal faux consensus since as Fisher points out, âemancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ânatural orderâ, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingencyâ (Fisher 2009: 17).
Propositions and contexts
The mythic âAge of Austerityâ is in truth a consciously precipitated âage of anxietyâ which has caused teachers in further education to question their selfhood, their values and principles. All this needs to be contextualised within notions of post- and hyper-modernity in order to restore its historical character in the face of claims about its inevitability and necessity. Take Baudrillard: âToday, the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulationâ (Baudrillard 1994: 2). Baudrillardâs notion of âsimulationsâ displacing the real will be meaningful for any reader who, as an aspect of their job, contributes to an institutional corpus of performance data. This, often âcraftedâ, data is a necessary feature of accountability in marketised settings and consequently takes priority in teachersâ work. These simulations are what will be judged, and on them depends market position and, for colleges, funding. This explains why fear has become such a feature of teachersâ working conditions. According to Lipovetsky:
It is fear which triumphs and bestrides the stage in the face of an uncertain future, a logic of globalisation which acts independently of individuals, an exacerbated free market competitiveness, a headlong development in the technologies of information, an increasingly precarious hold on oneâs job and a worrying stagnation in employment figures.
(Lipovetsky 2005: 5)
The contributors to this volume speak from a position that acknowledges that, for teachers in further education a certain precariousness has become the order of the day: âa sense of insecurity has invaded all of our mindsâ (Lipovetsky 2005: 13). Writing and thinking about further education is in short supply. Itâs interesting that while educational research in the academy operates under the (market-led) restriction of the need to publish ânew knowledgeâ, knowledge production under neoliberalisation is prolific and involves the repetition ad nauseum of self-interested and specious knowledge often with a spurious evidence base. How should educational research cope with the requirement to continually find new things to say when so much of what is wrong has roots in policy decisions made a quarter of a century ago and whose effects are still being experienced today? The challenges faced by teachers in further education colleges havenât stopped just because educational researchers have identified them. They havenât stopped because educational researchers have generated positive and radical versions of professional identity from outside, either. Just because they have been researched doesnât mean that people are not continuing to endure their effects.
One attritional consequence of these seemingly inevitable (and ânaturalâ) conditions can be an inability to think through a future. These contributions are all in their own ways attempts to lay the groundwork to make thinking through a future possible. The creativity that drives this thinking constitutes a collaborative praxis âas informed, committed action which embodies certain ethical qualities oriented to improving the relations of those involvedâ (Taylor 2016: 2). Crucially, in this case, it also involves individuals reaching out beyond the confines of the institution to find hope and solidarity in trans-sectoral relationships. It addresses identity as it is and for what it is while understanding that an instability of identity, a sense of enveloping chaos and a testing of values and beliefs are all topographical aspects of the further education sector.
A matter of time (scales)
A central issue in contemporary education is time as a relative concept and particularly of âtimescalesâ which lurk unacknowledged beneath any discussions about education making them superficial or under-informed. Much education policy in the last fifty years has not only been reactive in character but also misguided in its reliance on initiatives âtransplantedâ inappropriately from one context to another, such that it is alarmingly common for policy interventions to be discarded long before they have been properly evaluated. The conundrum is simple: in the UK and the US, where successive governments have taken an active interest in intervening in formal education, the appetites of a political system predicated on a five-year cycle are largely incompatible with âlearning careersâ which last longer, perhaps a lifetime. At the same time the broader debate is also around temporal issues, principally whether we should look progressively to the future or, increasingly, back to âbasicsâ with further education regularly tipped from one side to the other in response to the latest release of longer-term data, as a feather for every wind that blows. Currently that âfixâ is the effective extension of the school leaving age for college students who are unable to prove proficiency in English and maths in a somewhat ironic reworking of the spirit of the American âNo Child Left Behindâ (NCLB) riff, though many of these âlearnersâ know only that they have been effectively left behind, detained at her majestyâs pleasure. This gives a new take also on the proud tradition within further education in particular of being the âhome of the second chanceâ which in a bizarre almost imperceptible shift of emphasis which has suddenly become a second chance chiefly for the governmental imperative to see all so-called âlearnersâ included/processed/managed. And âincludedâ here is more likely to be âaccounted forâ than âeducatedâ.
While the time-space compression enacted in what in England used to be (prior to Daley, Orr and Petrie 2015) dubbed the âCinderella sectorâ (and she was a character bound to a tight schedule) is not exactly Virilioâs âspeed spaceâ with its hyper-modernist conception of an accelerated reality, there is much there that resonates with contemporary further education experience. Virilio developed the term âdromologyâ, the âscience (or logic) of speedâ, which derives from the notion of a race or racetrack, to emphasise the central role of speed/relative time in contemporary life (Virilio 2006). In education, notions of âthe raceâ (Obamaâs educational initiative was entitled Race to the Top!) and accelerated/decelerated âprogressâ are commonplace and not without implication. For a decade, time has been an increasingly negative element in the provision of a feasible second chance and college is currently that place where eleven years of âdifficultyâ with âthe basicsâ might be remedied in one. This is decisively a law of diminishing returns, predicated on the vanishing point that occurs somewhere between âbeing educatedâ and âpassing the testâ. Making the tests apparently more difficult adds more friction, but the more important decision is to make the tests essential because as âturnstilesâ they control the circulation of human resources. With echoes of Tuckâs notions of settler colonialism, even âmanifest destinyâ, Virilio describes the dromological bottom line:
Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.
(Virilio 2000)
This movement in Virilioâs work âfrom topology to dromologyâ, from the features of the contemporary landscape to movement around and through it works for further education also. His general theoretical warning, applies disturbingly to the world addressed by this collection of interpretations: âDromology (from Gr. dromos: race course) is this government of differential motility, of harnessing and mobilizing, incarcerating and accelerating things and peopleâ (Bratton in Virilio 2006: 7). And all this is conducted within a paradigm of surveillance and an assumption of accountability. Nick Peim, whose Education as Mythology does mu...