True Fake News: Reshaping educational policies with the #MarchofOurLives

It’s lunchtime on a Tuesday, and the kids are piling into a pizzeria booth in Coral Springs, Fla., to plot a revolution. “The adults know that we’re cleaning up their mess,” says Cameron Kasky, an 11th-grader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who started the #NeverAgain movement to curb gun violence three weeks earlier in his living room. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘I’m sorry I made this mess,’” adds buzzcut senior Emma González, “while continuing to spill soda on the floor.” ( Alter, 2018 )

Educational Policy Debates

The recent educational policy debate on guns in schools was triggered globally by President Trump, as a response to shootings in schools and educational settings in the United States of America. Whatever our political or policy position is, these events have shaken educational truths and priorities to the core. It has driven the kids in the pizzeria to action. Already on 14 March, almost a quarter of a million students joined the National School Walkout to let policy makers know they have had enough and wish an educational change.

The next stage of this revolution goes by the hashtag #MarchofOurLives. On 24 March 2018, tens of thousands of students marched to challenge the policy makers in a cumulation of a recent explosion of students’ voice and power to deal with the ‘mess’. The ‘mess’ these students refer to is the gun-infused mess that has left young people as the ‘mass shooting generation’ in the middle of educational policies debates. Educational policies are undoubtedly complex and diverse, and continue to be designed and implemented in different ways around the globe. Educational policies are critical in developing aid and variously oriented projects, curriculum and thought innovations, and both influence and draw on educational research.

In the mass-shooting environment, foundational educational dignity and professionalism, and the established truths on which they are based, are undermined and sidelined by educational policies. President Trump’s suggestion to arm teachers has torn open debates about educational policies and the future of schooling. In the past, educational debates were focused on educational improvement, achievement, outcomes, and quality, and interested in challenging particular curricula, marginalizations of diverse kinds, specific practices, or teacher qualifications, as some examples. The agenda has turned, to a focus on the Second Amendment, the NRA, and a major concern in educational policy has become pure survival.

As a journal focused on educational policies and their futures, we need to ask the question: what is the role of educational policy in these recent events? And what is the role of policy makers and researchers, in the face of the March of Our Lives, and a mass – and mess – of disenchantment related to the roles we, adults, researchers, policy-makers, represent?

#MarchofOurLives

Figures reveal that more children have been killed in schools since December 2014, than US soldiers have been killed in overseas combat since the ‘war on terror’ began in 2001. The March of Our Lives reveals the extent of a debate that started in the USA but that has clearly become a global concern: 800 demonstrations across 50 states and across six continents join in this revolution to ‘expand voter registration among like-minded members of the school-shooting generation: the kids that grew up post-Columbine, who huddled behind barricades during active-shooter drills and learned to tape construction paper over classroom windows’ (Alter, 2018). These schoolchildren’s revolutions are challenging educational policies and policymakers. Meanwhile, we hear of more shootings. #MarchofOurLives.

According to teacher professional bodies, the role of educational policies is to uphold dignity and truth, as the necessary precondition for education, and for teachers’ professional behaviour. Such practices are espoused by researchers, as Hansen (2017) recently shows in his call for ethical practices by any person who is in the role of the teacher. While the exact nature of what it means to be ethical can be debated, Hansen (2017) uses the notion of ‘bearing witness’ to argue for policy makers, administrators, researchers, and those in educational settings themselves, that is teachers, and teacher educators, to slow down and be really present. He urges teachers to practice what might be seen as a certain kind of exile, as they first remove themselves, in a metaphorical way, from a situation, in order to examine, assess and ‘know’ the situation. In other words, he asks teachers to pay attention to that which is often lost in the pressurized ‘loudness’ or ‘busy-ness’ of environments where routines, assessment demands, enrolments and curriculum requirements are pushed to the fore, with little attention to student voice or interests. #MarchofOurLives.

Bearing witness requires a slowing down, Hansen (2017) says, and a readying, for that which presents itself in the local, current context. In his descriptions he uses bearing witness as a reminder of behaviours that point ‘to aspects of truth, goodness, and beauty in teaching that are not easily discernible, but that help constitute its very being’ (Hansen, 2017: p. 29). An ethics of respect, of care, and of education being fundamentally about influencing students to be and do ‘good’, is at its root. ‘Bearing witness’, Hansen continues, ‘draws out the quiet testimony dedicated teachers and students express through their daily work about what it means to be and to become a person’, and ‘[w]itnessing shines a light on the often subtle drama of their potentially transformative day-by-day interaction in the classroom’ (Hansen, 2017: p. 30). What we are witnessing in the mass-shooting era, however, has become a different version of policy drama and research: bad research, and bad education (Peters and Tesar, 2016). Ethics. Contexts. Local. Global. #MarchofOurLives.

Fake Truths and Policy Monsters

Perhaps what is promoted in policy manifests as a fake truth: something that is stated in the policy, but not performed ‘on the ground’ in educational settings. Or maybe in some instances its very intention is to promote at least a fake sense of security, comfort, knowledge, that will maintain a docile, agreeable educational sector, too busy, too placated to notice or mind, whether the policy itself is ‘real’ or ‘true’. Policy may be not only offering a fake security, but intended also to instil a fake fear, threatening educational consequences that are unthinkable. Alternatively, might the role of policy be to smooth the path, perhaps even in a fake way, where there is otherwise widespread uncertainty? If policy is to take cognisance of contemporary situations and to attempt to reinsert an element of predictability, comfort and known direction, then to what extent can policy-makers be trusted that its directives accord with the desires and aspirations of those who are affected by it? As the March of Our Lives demonstrates, policy must deal with the uncertainties arising out of the divergences in societal and political realms. It must pick up on contemporary shifts and changes, and insert them in meaningful ways into previous habits, thinking, practices and pedagogies, in a mosaic of pasts, presents and futures. Nevertheless, present policy teeters on a dangerous precipice, of distrust, humiliation, and lies, cracking societal trust, as Hansen (2017) warns, and as the youth organizing their own revolution demonstrate.

Tesar and Koro-Ljungberg (2016) concluded in a recent study, that ‘[d]eterritorializing monsters in education might unsettle spaces where children become monsters – monsters become children in their mundane everyday acts of alterity and otherness’ (Tesar and Koro-Ljungberg, 2016: p. 703). Can these ‘monsters’ be seen as a metaphor for policy? What would monstrous educational policies provide, in the way of stability, security, a way of knowing the context, the processes, the governance and the guidance? The mass-shooting generation brings to the fore daily questions of life and death. They emphasize that, for too long, those to whom ostensibly policies should matter the most, have been voiceless. As the so-called ‘voiceless students’ exercise their voice, they prove that they can and should affect educational policy, and ourselves, as those responsible for it. They prove their power in the global gathering of (not only) youth voices, and of more twitter followers than the entire gun lobby has, in just 11 days (Alters, 2018). They draw out and make heard the unheard voices. The strength of this generation is a policy challenge and wake up call. #MarchofOurLives.