Picturing Educational and Future Success
This chapter explicates the ways that written and visual texts are circulating inside and outside the domains of education field to contour the formations of policy, practice and everyday life in shaping the popular construction of educational and future success. Taking a critical perspective to investigate the taken-for-granted construction of success, this chapter highlights and selects educational policies, curriculum and syllabus examples from education department websites from each of the three global cities where the study was conducted. Foregrounding the ways that policy intersects with perceived individual, family and community aspirations on behalf of children, we expand our discussion by bringing in discussion of popular images, advertisements and discourses concerned with education and success. We contend that business and in particular, edu-business, also harness these ideas to promote particular orientations to, and opportunities for, participation in learning experiences designed to maximise selected perceived sociocultural imaginations as the potential for children's successful and promising futures. Additionally, our qualitative data from children's learning dialogues in which they responded with both written comments and illustrations, to four prompts, provides particularly interesting insights into the ways that children themselves make use of the visual modality to construct and express their own versions of what is valued about their everyday learning, and of what goals and visions of future success animate their ideas about school as well as aspirations of their own futures. Together with these examples, we contend, function in the production of policy cultures in which orientations to educational and future success are taken up, re/produced and contested in the everyday lifeworlds of children.
Picturing Policy: Visual Representations of Curriculum Policy in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore
This chapter considers the articulation of education discourse through visual representations of curriculum policies in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore under the umbrella of the Global Childhoods project. We are concerned with the ways that policy and culture are co-implicated in the everyday lives of children in global cities. We explore how, in contexts of high-stakes testing, rankings and intense competition, discourses of education are depicted in officially produced visual texts. Texts selected for analysis here focus on curriculum content, learning, and the imagined skills and characteristics of idealised learner-citizens. Drawing insights from social semiotics and using Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality, we show how these visual policy texts represent education in broadly instrumentalist terms concerned with "what" and "who" is being taught in a nation's schools. In all three study sites, these concerns connect to broader economic and social goals, and tacitly reiterate ideologically inflected narratives concerned with the purposes and potential of education. We highlight distinctions between visual policy texts that acknowledge education as an interconnected human endeavour, and those that rely on imagery and bounded lists. We also argue that such images and lists are largely devoid of reference to the students, teachers and societies.
Un/satisfactory encounters: communication, conflict and parent-school engagement
The policy and educational ideal of parent-school engagement rests on assumptions about effective communication with parents about children's educational progress and well-being. Yet communication between school and home varies, and can be a source of parental satisfaction and frustration. Here we consider perspectives of Australian parents whose encounters with schools – both satisfactory and unsatisfactory – are shaped by the everyday communicative practices and conflict management strategies of teachers and principals. Our findings show that a wide range of parents of children in Australian schools report similar experiences, concerns and frustrations. Informed by cultural and post-structural theory, we consider how approaches to communication and conflict are implicated in disciplining the family and keeping parents 'in their place' outside schooling's structures of power. Participants in our research reveal the intensity of affective investments in education as a 'high stakes' endeavour. We argue that the rationality of education policy that is being embedded in the everyday social configurations of schools and their interaction with parents is predicated on the neoliberal project of producing the autonomous, self-governing individual. The communication practices used in disciplining the family by conscripting parents into this project, we suggest, is a significant contributor to un/satisfactory parent-school encounters.
Factors associated with stunting and wasting in children under 2 years in Bangladesh
Child undernutrition has been a major concern for Bangladesh as it is amongst the highest stunting and wasting prevalent countries in the world. The objective of our study was to explore the socioeconomic determinants of stunting and wasting in children under two years. This study explored nationally representative sample of 7,230 children ranging in age from 0 to <24 months using two separate binary logistic regression models to determine the risk factors associated with child stunting and wasting. Our study estimated approximately 33 percent children to be stunted and 11 percent to be wasted. Our analysis found that, 12 to <24 months old children's height-for-age-z-score and weight-for-height-z-score deteriorated in comparison to those of below 6 months. Female children had significantly lower odds of stunting and wasting compared with male children. Study revealed that children from wealthier families were at lower risk of being stunted and wasted compared to children from poorer households. Parental education was determined as a significant predictor of stunting. Children who lived in Sylhet division were 1.26 times more likely to be stunted than the children of Dhaka division [OR = 1.26; 95% CI: 1.02–1.55].
Our study revealed age, gender, geographic distribution, and household's position in wealth index as common determinants of child stunting and wasting in Bangladesh. While parental education was significant predictor for child stunting, type of toilet facility was found as statistically significant determinant of child wasting in children of less than two years age.
The Global Childhoods Project: Learning and Everyday Life in Three Global Cities
This chapter provides an overview of the conceptual and methodological framework of the Global Childhoods research project. Situated in three global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore, this project explores connections between policy contexts, school experiences and everyday activities of children and the shaping of their orientations to educational success. In order to better understand the intersections of education policy, practice and everyday life for children, we draw on the concept of “lifeworlds”, which has a rich history in social research as a framework for examining how people and groups experience the world. Moreover, instead of focusing on whose education system is more efficient, or better at producing better outcomes, this research seeks to gain deeper understandings about children’s lived experiences, academic performance and orientations to success by investigating children’s everyday lifeworlds (in and out-of-school experiences).
‘I’m trying to tell you this man is dangerous… and no one’s listening’: family violence, parent–school engagement and school complicity
This paper presents a case study of one mother's experience of engaging with her children's schools after leaving a long-term relationship characterised by years of family violence perpetrated by the children's father. We interviewed Bernadette as part of an ongoing study of parents' experiences of school engagement during family separation and divorce. Her family circumstances and the role the children's schools played in that story merit consideration by educators, school leaders and education policy makers. Informed by theories of everyday cultural practices and sociological studies of gendered power relations in education, we argue that gender politics and organisational strategies for keeping parents 'in their place' can signifcantly contribute to systemic failures and school cultures that reinscribe the efects of family violence.
Schools, separating parents and family violence: a case study of the coercion of organisational networks
This paper considers how complex family circumstances such as parental separation, custody disputes and family violence intersect with the organisational cultures and everyday practices of schools. In particular, we are concerned with the ways that coercive control – a strategy used predominantly by men to dominate, control and oppress women in the context of intimate partner relationships – can be deployed to manipulate and coerce the organisational networks of schools into furthering abusive agendas. Informed by cultural theory and research from sociology of education, legal studies, criminology and family violence, we show how what we term the ‘coercion of organisational networks’ (CON) both relies upon and exploits systemic misogyny and gendered unequal relations of power. These issues underpin institutional strategies often used by schools to keep parents – and mothers, in particular – at a distance. When affected by separation, divorce and family violence, being positioned in problematic terms can create additional risks for women and children. We argue that without adequate understandings of coercive control as practices within a broader constellation of systemic misogyny and gender inequalities, and in the absence of organisational cultures committed to addressing these, schools are considered complicit in perpetuating family violence and its effects.
Michel de Certeau, everyday life and policy cultures: the case of parent engagement in education policy
This paper draws on theoretical insights from Michel de Certeau to formulate a response to questions of whether, and in what ways, poststructural policy analysis can 'transcend critique to offer potential grounds for alternative social and political strategies in education'. The paper offers a discussion of how Certeau's concern with how policies 'work on' everyday cultures and everyday cultures 'work on' policies, might speak to education policy analysts in useful ways. Taking the case of parent–school engagement in education policy as an example, I explore how Certeau's commitment to policy work founded on an ethical demand for heterogeneity and a recognition of complicity offers fertile ground for understanding, unsettling and potentially remaking policy agendas, their enactments and lived effects. I argue that in order to move beyond critique we must first accept a position within its gaze, and to ask how policy might be put to use as a means of recognizing rather than regulating the subjects, practices and relations of culture.
Putting “structure within the space”: spatially un/responsive pedagogic practices in open-plan learning environments
Non-traditional open-plan schools and classrooms are currently enjoying a resurgence in Australia, with proponents arguing for the necessity of educational spaces that more readily accommodate the needs of twenty-first century learners. However, these learning environments can pose considerable pedagogic challenges for teachers who must balance the ethos of spaces designed to facilitate autonomous and flexible student learning, while simultaneously managing the complexities of shared space and resources, decreased staff–student ratios, and highly variable student responses to learning in open-plan settings. This paper draws on observational and interview data from an Australian study of three primary schools operating in open-plan spaces. Informed by cultural theories of spatial practice, we argue that the ways in which teachers conceptualize and operationalize notions of "structure" is pivotal to the responsiveness of pedagogic approaches within open-plan spaces.
Learning and exploring teacher identity: Preparing for teaching in the Partners in Literacy and Numeracy (PLaN) programme
Pre-service teachers in Australian Initial Teacher Education programmes gain classroom experience through supervised, formally assessed professional experience placements and internships. This in-situ experience is recognized as important in the development of professional identities, knowledge and skills. However, many pre-service teachers lament the limited amount of classroom time encountered prior to beginning teaching. This paper reports on a university-schools partnership programme that affords pre-service teachers opportunities for non-assessed school-based experience in addition to, but not part of, their formal Initial Teacher Education programme requirements. Preliminary findings from a questionnaire completed by programme participants suggest that participants particularly value in-situ professional experiences unencumbered by time pressures and assessment regimes, and that these experiences are significant to developing notions of self and emerging professional identities in ways that differ from formally assessed classroom placements.