Abstract
This article proposes a series of ideas to guide future education research and thinking about education, formulated as the 5Rs: remembering, regression, reconceptualisation, reflection, and renewal. Together they can provide at least a partial antidote to the dubious and damaging educational rhetoric associated with the promotion and normalisation of the neoliberal order. Identifying them, and acting on them, represents a useful step towards the 6thR: resistance.
Introduction
In England there has been a long tradition that the three Rs is a sensible mantra for developing a basic curriculum for all – Reading (W)Riting and (A)Rithmatic. Given that actually only one of the words begins with ‘R’ you can see that actually the specification might be seen more as an exhortation to illiteracy, but so much for tradition!
In this article I want to cover five of the Rs of educational research. I tentatively suggest this mantra as an antidote to some of the fashionable educational rhetoric that has accompanied the promotion of the neoliberal economic order. While no new order is ever monolithic or totally wrong-headed, it is important to acknowledge the rapacious and iniquitous character of some of the new initiatives. This is nowhere clearer than in the arena of schooling – growing patterns of inequality are spreading and patterns of social mobility are being systematically reconstructed and obstructed. Alongside this, the debasement of our knowledge base can be all too clearly seen by a cursory examination of our television and newspapers. Facile ‘reality’ shows predominate and the serious coverage and analysis of real news has been significantly debased.
Into this world of unequal schooling and debased knowledge the intellectual fellow-traveller of neoliberalism provides a set of educational cover-stories. In a world of debased knowledge they pronounce the birth of a knowledge society; in a world where schools are often changing for the worse, and are palpably overseeing and reproducing inequality, they exhort us to believe in ‘school improvement’ and ‘educational change’. Yet most schools are not improving, and what we see behind the promotion of change rhetoric is a vicious pattern of continuity in terms of which groups succeed and which fail.
The field of education is as confused as any other field by the fast-moving transformations of globalisation and technology. In this moment of course it is hard to find our bearings; seismic change shatters our sense of time and space, our very location in the world. It is inevitable that some commentators will ally themselves to the changes and promote the optimistic visions that can be promulgated. Thus the problem that we begin with may be stated as: ‘How do we find our bearings in this blizzard of change? How can we get a sense of where we have come from and where we might be going?’ It must be noted that while it is the 5Rs which are formally covered in the article, the motivation and underpinning rationale for writing this piece is the facilitation and encouragement of a sixth R: the comprehensive and much needed overarching concept of resistance. In developing the 5Rs I am trying to feel a way towards answers to these pertinent yet perplexing questions.
1. Remembering
One way to assess our position and direction is to analyse our historical context. Curriculum history as a field, for instance, allows us to assess the ongoing continuities of curriculum (which are massive and preponderant) as well as the occasional episodes of change and transformation. In our PROFKNOW proposal conducted for the European Union between 2003 and 2009 we set out to try to understand the historical trajectory of the seven countries whose educational systems we were covering (PROFKNOW, 2003–2009). Similarly, in the Spencer Project (Spencer Foundation, 1998–2003), which studied historical patterns of school change in the US and Canada, we tried to locate our studies and resulting accounts in their political context (Goodson, 2005).
2. Regression
One of the features of much of our politics in the second half of the twentieth century was belief in ‘change’, in an ongoing ‘progress narrative’. With the onset and consolidation of the new economic order this has been reversed. The new age of austerity inaugurates the primacy of ‘regress narrative’ where younger generations face a future world that is more difficult and less affluent than being experienced currently, or was experienced by older generations.
The dawn of a ‘regress narrative’ transforms the political landscape and the positionality of ‘change forces’. If things are getting worse change may not be progressive, as was once the case, but regressive. In fact, in such a case, the progressive position may be to ‘conserve’ the current situation rather than embrace changes towards a worse situation. I have argued at length that, in a regress narrative, progressive social reforms face a classic ‘crisis of positionality’ (Goodson, 2003).
3. Reconceptualisation
Living in a globalised world following the dominant ideology of neoliberalism requires a thorough reconceptualisation, not just of the meaning of politics but the nature of social inquiry. As Graeber (2013) points out, much of the impetus of neoliberalism, beyond its pervasive dumbing down of the media and knowledge nexus, is towards an attack on the social imagination. Any thought and inquiry which prefigures alternative worlds is discouraged and deconstructed. Our reconceptualisation of social inquiry has to develop and be sustained alongside the global movement to de/disvalue imagination and critique.
While historical remembering is one strategy to support redeveloping the social imagination, there are many current possibilities. For while neoliberalism seeks a uniform social and economic order, such universalising tendencies have been far from successful. Any social inquiry that is seriously pursued will uncover considerable variety in the social and political responses to global movements. Our reconceptualisation needs to move beyond the dominant narratives in education such as: ‘school improvement’, ‘key competencies’, ‘change forces’, ‘restructuring initiatives’, ‘knowledge societies’, and ‘economic competitiveness’ to explore the variegations and alternative conceptualisations which co-exist with these totalising impulses. Reconceptualisation leads on to analyses of re-contextualisation, and from there to the detailed study of refraction.
This reconceptualisation aims then to recover and analyse the variety of responses to the promotion of ‘world movements’ of change restructuring. Behind the triumphalist tone of the ‘end of history’ narrative lies a wealth of complexity, which generates an ongoing social imagination of alternatives.
4. Refraction
As an emerging concept, ‘refraction’ draws on a range of existing traditions and approaches in the social sciences, with several key areas for exploration and investigation. Broadly, however, refraction in education may be seen as a change in direction arising from individuals’ and groups’ own beliefs, practices, and trajectories that are at odds with dominant waves of reform and policies introduced into the field.
This type of ‘bending’ or mediation occurs in various ways and for numerous reasons, and must be viewed as crucial elements for analysis, as not only do these highlight alternative and pre-figurative antecedents, forms, and models of practice, they also illustrate the interaction between ideology and structures and individual and collective practice and action.
First, from this perspective, it is suggested that research in the field should be contextualised and analysed in relation to historical periodisation and the broader movements, cycles, and waves of reform. Second, in researching current practice within a broader social-historical context, we can better understand and illuminate the effects of ideology and power, and how these are exerted through policies. However, such analyses alone would imply a sense of determinism, with power and ideology as totalising and as actors as merely passive and subject to its effects. Analyses therefore, need to account for and examine alternative discourse, movements, and practice, and the conditions under which they occur. Moreover, in attempting to address the dichotomy of structure and agency, there is a need to provide qualitative accounts of practitioners in order to explore how, and to what extent, their own trajectories, life histories and professional identities influence their practice, mediate policies, and negate the effects of ideology and power.
Furthermore, these approaches elucidate pre-figurative practice, politics, discourse, and language through narrative inquiry, and the ways in which actors make meaning of their own lives and professional practice. The benefit of this is that it offers us detailed pictures of subjective realities, and also allows us to highlight alternative practices and oppositional discourses that are often overlooked, or brushed aside, in official discourse.
5. Renewal
The process outlined above is a staged trajectory for the renewal of our social future. Far from being an act of golden age nostalgia, acts of remembering will highlight the many reversals of common rights that have accumulated since the neoliberal movement gathered real momentum around 1980. Historical memory can thus be an important repository of alternative imagined futures as well as pasts. In a regress narrative the past may be looked at better than the future; but crucially this must include reconceptualisation.
Refraction shows how in fact the neoliberal insurgency is actually mediated and repositioned in a variety of contemporary societies; often these are societies with a history of occupation and colonialisation, countries that have learnt how to resist, and preposition hegemonic initiatives. As Jane Jacobs argues in her prophetic last book Dark Age Ahead (2004), there is a paradox here. The societies least able to refract and renew are those at the centre of the new economic order, such as England and the USA. She says: ‘ironically societies that were great cultural winners in the past are in special peril of failing to adapt successfully in the face of new realities’ (Jacobs, 2004: 175).
Hence renewal may well come from the periphery, so to speak, not the hegemonic centre. Certainly working in Estonia and Finland as I do, I see remarkable counter-insurgence initiatives that would be currently unthinkable here. They follow the 5Rs of education and the results are already visible in any indexes of educational success, are already challenging the narrative of the dominant market fundamentalists of education. In Finland, which of course comes top in the PISA ratings for educational standards, successive governments have followed a policy of trusting and supporting the teaching profession. As we know, in England the opposite process has been underway, with constant ministerial denigration of the educational ‘blob’. In terms of educational standards, the PISA ratings show the effect of such an approach has been disastrous and that, most importantly, the long-term effect on schools and on the social fabric has been calamitous.
It is time, among other things, to review the 5Rs of education, and to link the educational and research endeavour to more hopeful and inclusive objectives than those currently being pursued. This will be a valuable element in supporting the sixth R, resistance.