Priorities for research in the field of education

In search of the elusive educational subject: Priorities for research in the field of education in South Africa today

Resisting the popular media projection that education is in crisis, I ask instead what kind of research is able to bring the complexity of our current educational experiences into fuller view.

My ethnographic work in a number of township school sites in Cape Town shows that where government policy interacts with impoverished material conditions reform is tenuous, complex and largely ineffectual.

Governmental policy in townships takes on an unintended and unanticipated life, worked over by the survivalist socialites of the township. Policies are “recreated” or “reworked” beyond normative recognition.

The example of school governance policy in a township shows how governance instrumentalities are co-opted by transient social networking activities, procuring jobs, supporting factional politics, and mediating religious, civic and ecumenical battles. Governance does not deliver the citizenship goodies of nation state imaginaries.

As academics and scholars we have to invest in finding alternative languages of descriptions for education – community – citizenship connections which are constituted by a type of global – localist or “glocalist” – imaginaries at work, establishing diverse and heterodox publics.

Calling these languages into being is the job of serious, courageous and imaginative academic work, and could be applied to the study of leadership, governance, teacher identities, professional practices, curriculum and pedagogy, language and literacies, student learning, teacher education, adult literacy, worker education, and institutional cultures.

At the level of the emerging institutional landscape we have to develop a better grip on what has been called the emergence of a “totally pedagogised society” and the “pedagogisation of everyday/everynight life” (see Young 2008).

Furthermore, we have seen struggles around the differentiation and dedifferentiation of educational institutions, which have problematised or enlarged our definitions of what we might see as educational institutions and their attendant curriculum and pedagogical practices (Young 2008).

In reaching for the so-called knowledge society and knowledge economy, learning is everywhere and directed through policies, both direct and indirect, around institutional forms, curriculum and pedagogies.

Research into the variegated institutional forms would allow us to come to grips with where and how education now works, for which purposes and to which ends and to better understand and establish joined up connections between education, economy and society.

Such research might require a strong research for policy orientation which would help to answer questions or generate policy options that are more directly related to optimising institutional differentiation and responsiveness.

It is in such a context that education research, both the “research for” and the “research of” type, has to respond to developing understandings of our changing education landscape.

We have to research the impact of political and policy authority that now works at multiple scales, including national and provincial levels, but also regionally and globally. Here the nation state remains important in policy terms, but it works in different ways.

Processes of governmental values allocation have changed as the state has become restructured under new public management and privatisation of various kinds.

The state now steers education institutional behaviour through target-setting, performance indicators and performance management. We have also seen the emergence of new forms of educational accountability often linked to testing in schooling systems as part of what has been called the “audit culture”. Policy as numbers has been a related development (see Lingard 2014).

Policy convergence has occurred at the level of global meta-discourses, though not so much in the specifics of policy enactment in different nations or even into systems and schools. What is important to consider is how this convergence works into the political body politic and into our policy discourses.

Crucially, the challenge is to locate the analysis of policy and practice at the localising intersection, what has been called the vernacularisation of these global discourses, which refers to the ways the global meta-discourses or hyper-narratives meet the specific cultural, political, structural and historical backdrop of given nations and local systems and thus manifest in context-specific ways (Lingard 2014).

We would then get to see how public policies and those in education framed at one level by concerns about equity, efficiency, security, liberty and community are reworked and vernacularised in local policy-making processes. These processes involve local, interest-bearing policy actors in diverse institutional sites.

It is at the level of policy implementation or enactment that the symbolic, the discursive, the material and subjective dynamics of locales provide the articulating terrain for policy meanings.

Towards an account of the human(ities) in education

This analytical task requires new analytical tools that enable the researcher or analyst to “see” the myriad of complex and contested co-constituting policy processes and meanings.

A recent book, Education Policy and Contemporary Theory (edited by Gulson, Clarke and Petersen, Routledge, June 2015), focuses on how a range of social theories could be applied to these new problematics – it offers theorists such as Bourdieu, De Leuze and Guttari, Derrida, Foucault and Lefebvre, and different types of theoretical perspectives, such as actor network theory, assemblage theory, feminist genealogy, the material turn, and the mobilities paradigm.

My appreciation of this book lies in its privileging the interaction between the contemporary manifestations of educational complexity, the emergence of newer knowledge problematics and application of fecund theoretics that would inform the analytical task.

My own work is hopefully an example of such an approach, especially ways in which I have used the “trialectics of space” and “the spatialisation of learning” as theoretical lenses to catch some understanding of the lived socialities of education in impoverished urban contexts.

An enormous gap in these accounts, useful as they are, is the failure of theoretical indigenisation, operating as they do on a type of blindness to the theoretical generativity of southern and post-colonial, in our case African, epistemological universes.

As Connell explains in his book Southern Theory (2007), these analytical categories are built on Western/Eurocentric conceptual structures worked out in the empirical contexts of the West.

We tend to apply these categories without question, instantiating a limiting set of frames on to what are very diverse publics. The implicit and explicit application of class as an analytical category in South African education is an example of where we miss, almost entirely, local frames that co-construct what is analytically knowable.

We should be searching for theoretical frames that are able to pluralise our social understandings, in an attempt to build out, or “catch” the realities of our complex educational worlds, of bringing in from the margins, via our robust theoretical languages, the complexity of the human or the “human in the educational’.

In this light, my just published book Engaging Educational Subjectivities Across Post-Apartheid Urban Spaces (2015, Sun Media, Stellenbosch), which focuses on educational subjectivity in urban spaces, starts from the view that the sociology of South African education lacks a rigorous account of the educational subject.

I asked the following framing questions: Who are the teachers, students and managers in our schools, universities and colleges? What worlds do they come from? How are they positioned to encounter and engage in the process of education? And how do educational policy and institutions engage with the complex subjects that now come through their gates?

I suggest in the book that responding to these questions requires thinking at the limits of our epistemological frames and our methodological orientations. This is a moment of complex and engaged theorising and responsive methodological orientations that are able to comprehend the complexity and elusiveness of the education subject.

As my research on young school-going people show, the educational subject is on the move and on the make, across the city in search of educational provenance, with their myriad of languages and literacies.

The cultural, curricular and pedagogical registers of their receiving schools, colleges and universities are largely out of sync with, or unable to fully recognise, the complex educational identifications that they are now making while working out their aspirant educational trajectories.

It is my contention that the priorities for research and postgraduate teaching in the field of education policy in South Africa today must contribute to changing the terms of the debate about education in our body politic, in policy outfits, institutional governance structures, our curriculum offerings and pedagogical orientations.

The commitment to disciplinarity and specialisation is extremely important. I entirely oppose epistemological constructivism, which leaves us without a generative picture of the verticality of education. Bringing knowledge back in as the sine quo non of education is entirely the correct position to take.

I am, via my scholarship, committed to what I would describe as sociological analysis that pluralises our understandings of our educational publics, a kind of sociological contextualism or perspectivism that expands the boundaries of our educational knowing, and sets up a more inclusive conversation about the human in education.

I would challenge, gently, the overly cognitivist assumptions that embed our knowledge commitments. I would caution about placing an “agency-less” conception of teachers, students and educational workers as central to our educational endeavours.

Anxiety over getting side-tracked by varieties of knowledge constructivism should not tilt us too far to the other side, so that there is little to no place for the ethical, the political, the redemptive, and the social-transformative.

In other words, I am conceptually and pragmatically committed to a robust and inclusive version of social justice, what I have labelled pedagogical justice, which places knowledge redistribution and specialisation at the centre in full recognition of the deep and complex, even unknowable worth, of the educational subject.

I challenge my students to develop a type of conceptual literacy to work across boundaries in order to engage with the full complexity of the education subject, draw generative knowledge distinctions, and employ languages that are able to accord educational actors, students, teachers, adult learners, principals, and managers full agency in their engagement with their educational becoming in these complex times.

References

Fataar, A. 2015. Engaging schooling subjectivities across post-apartheid urban spaces. Sun Media: Stellenbosch.

Gulson, K, M Clarke and E Petersen. 2015. Education policy and contemporary theory. Implications for Research. Routledge, London.

Lingard, B. 2014. Politics, policies and pedagogies in education: The selected works of Bob Lingard. Routledge, London.

Young, M. 2008. Bringing knowledge back. In From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education. Routledge, London.

• Aslam Fataar is Vice-Dean: Research, Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University. He has just published his second book, Engaging schooling subjectivities across post-apartheid urban spaces, 2015. Sun Media, Stellenbosch.

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