Democratic Education
Subtitle: Ethnographic Challenges
Contributors: D. Beach (Editor); T. Gordon (Editor); E. Lahelma (Editor)
Publisher: Tufnell Press
Published: August 31, 2003
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 168
ISBN-13: 9781872767420
Copyright date: 2003
Subjects: Ethnography; Educational Policy & Reform; Education; Education / Teaching
Description: The idea of democratic schooling with its emphasis on equality is seriously attacked by the marketisation of education. New policies of educational restructuring emphasise accountability and close links between school and industry, where schools and students become targets of constant evaluation and competition. This book challenges such policies and practices through analyses of their negative consequences for social justice and democracy. It explores the effects of restructuring on everyday life in schools and other educational institutions and presents analyses of how differences based on gender, social class, ethnicity, nationality and embodiment are dealt with in educational settings.  The authors draw on a range of theories, including poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist and Marxist perspectives, and the localised ethnographies are contextualised in changing educational politics. How policies are contradicted by practices is discussed in relation to the classroom, teacher education and issues of inclusion and exclusion. A critical gaze is directed at Nordic countries where restructuring processes contradict a political discourse based on equality and comprehensive education.  It is the immersion in the daily life of institutions and their participants that gives ethnography a particular edge in obtaining insights into what changes and what stays the same. This book provides a looking glass into the tensions and contradictions that New Right policies have introduced in educational institutions. Actors in the field experience frustration in introducing changes and controlling the direction of those changes. It is their voices that ethnographers try to hear and disseminate.
Table of contents: title: Ethnographic insights, Tuula Gordon, Elina Lahelma and Dennis Beach; title: Comparative ethnography: Fabricating the new millennium and its exclusions, Sverker Lindblad and Thomas S. Popkewitz; title: Nation space: The construction of citizenship and difference in schools,Tuula Gordon and Janet Holland; title: ‘Strong Nordic women’ in the making? Gender policies and classroom practices, Elina Lahelma and Elisabet Öhrn; title: Constructions of an ‘outsider’: Contradictions and ambiguities in institutional practices, Anne-Lise Arnesen; title: Representations of ethnicity: How teachers speak about ethnic minority students, Thomas Gitz-Johansen; title: Celebrating internationality: Constructions of nationality at preschool, Sirpa Lappalainen; title: The politics of time in educational restructuring, Daniel Sundberg; title: Becoming a pupil, Ulla-Maija Salo; title: Mathematics goes to market, Dennis Beach; title: Changes in teacher students’ knowledge by changes in technologies of freedom and control, Inger Anne Kvalbein; title: Bibliography