Identity and Resistance in Further Education

Pete Bennett, Rob Smith, Pete Bennett, Rob Smith

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351232937
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Didattica
• Sous-sujet: Formazione professionale

In recent years, Further Education has reached a crossroads, with questions being asked about its function, aims and focus, as well as querying the role of the FE teacher, the key aspects of the curriculum and which values should inform FE pedagogy. Identity and Resistance in Further Education explores these questions and effectively conveys the sense of uncertainty that those in the field are experiencing today.

Connecting Higher Education and FE practitioners and researchers, the book gathers a collection of essays covering a range of topics, including: the journey from student to teacher, critical reflective practice as a way of organising identity, values-based teacher education and policy critique. In keeping with the themes of resistance and creativity, the chapters draw on a wide range of theoretical, as well as literary, perspectives to offer answers. Problematising relationships between the teacher and the institution and the teacher and government, the book argues that the profound challenge to teachers' values and identities finds its response in a critical collegiality.

This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of further education, educational policy and teacher education. It should also be essential reading for practitioners and policymakers.

Chapter 1
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” – identity and resistance in further education

Pete Bennett and Rob Smith

In his seminal text, The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills declared that “‘Man’s chief danger’ today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political domination” (C. Wright Mills 1959: 13). More than fifty years on the “unruly forces” show little sign of abating and education remains particularly susceptible to all manner of ‘methods’ and ‘techniques’.

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 ‘further education’ 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 O’Leary 2013). By ‘neoliberal’, we mean the policy paradigm traceable to Hayekian economic doctrine that seeks “to replace political judgement with economic evaluation” (Davies 2014: 4). Peck (2010) suggests that thinking about neoliberalism in “regime-like” terms renders it too “static” a concept and that a “processual definition”, 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 ‘skills’ 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 – driven increasingly by an instrumentalist agenda – cast further education in the role of “hand maiden to British industry” (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 ‘productivity’. 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 ‘precarious contracts’ (UCU 2016: 3) – 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 ‘austerity’. Ironically, rather than challenge the ‘neoliberal restructuring’ (“Epistemology, economic strategy, and moral code rolled into one” [Tuck 2013: 326]), which has so changed social attitudes to education and almost every other public sphere, this ‘catastrophe of capital’ seems rather to have given what Fisher has labelled ‘capitalist realism’ a second wind. This, for Fisher is “the 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 it” (Fisher 2009: 2). Neoliberalisation, to use Davies’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 “pervasive 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 action” (Fisher 2009: 16) provides a frame for the contributions in this collection. In the so-called ‘age of austerity’, 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 ‘the market’. More recently, colleges have been subjected to further ‘rationalisation’ 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 Shakespeare’s 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: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

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 “to 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 relationships” (Taylor 2016: 1), this volume’s 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, “emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency” (Fisher 2009: 17).

Propositions and contexts

The mythic ‘Age of Austerity’ is in truth a consciously precipitated ‘age of anxiety’ 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: “Today, the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation” (Baudrillard 1994: 2). Baudrillard’s notion of ‘simulations’ 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 ‘crafted’, data is a necessary feature of accountability in marketised settings and consequently takes priority in teachers’ 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 teachers’ 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 one’s 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: “a sense of insecurity has invaded all of our minds” (Lipovetsky 2005: 13). Writing and thinking about further education is in short supply. It’s interesting that while educational research in the academy operates under the (market-led) restriction of the need to publish ‘new knowledge’, 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 haven’t stopped just because educational researchers have identified them. They haven’t stopped because educational researchers have generated positive and radical versions of professional identity from outside, either. Just because they have been researched doesn’t mean that people are not continuing to endure their effects.

One attritional consequence of these seemingly inevitable (and ‘natural’) 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 “as informed, committed action which embodies certain ethical qualities oriented to improving the relations of those involved” (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 ‘timescales’ 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 ‘transplanted’ 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 ‘learning careers’ 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 ‘basics’ 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 ‘fix’ 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 ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB) riff, though many of these ‘learners’ know only that they have been effectively left behind, detained at her majesty’s pleasure. This gives a new take also on the proud tradition within further education in particular of being the ‘home of the second chance’ 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 ‘learners’ included/processed/managed. And ‘included’ here is more likely to be ‘accounted for’ than ‘educated’.

While the time-space compression enacted in what in England used to be (prior to Daley, Orr and Petrie 2015) dubbed the ‘Cinderella sector’ (and she was a character bound to a tight schedule) is not exactly Virilio’s ‘speed space’ with its hyper-modernist conception of an accelerated reality, there is much there that resonates with contemporary further education experience. Virilio developed the term ‘dromology’, the “science (or logic) of speed”, 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 ‘the race’ (Obama’s educational initiative was entitled Race to the Top!) and accelerated/decelerated ‘progress’ 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 ‘difficulty’ with ‘the basics’ might be remedied in one. This is decisively a law of diminishing returns, predicated on the vanishing point that occurs somewhere between ‘being educated’ and ‘passing the test’. Making the tests apparently more difficult adds more friction, but the more important decision is to make the tests essential because as ‘turnstiles’ they control the circulation of human resources. With echoes of Tuck’s notions of settler colonialism, even ‘manifest destiny’, 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 Virilio’s work “from topology to dromology”, 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: “Dromology (from Gr. dromos: race course) is this government of differential motility, of harnessing and mobilizing, incarcerating and accelerating things and people” (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...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” – identity and resistance in further education
• SECTION I Setting the scene
• SECTION II Policy and pain
• SECTION III Creativity and resistance
• List of contributors
• Index