Our education list focuses on education policy and politics and the inequalities that are both built into education systems and perpetuated by them. It speaks to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.
Our titles, including Stephen Ball’s The Education Debate, now in its fourth edition, address the challenges in education, including those around technology and the digital divide. The list offers students and researchers internationally sourced evidence-based solutions that challenge traditional neoliberal approaches to learning.
Education
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This chapter examines problematic labels which are placed upon groups of young people, such as ‘at-risk’, NEET, disengaged. It argues that access to arts programmes is socially streamed, using youth work settings as an example. This chapter highlights that the sites in which young people access arts projects often dictate what kind of practices and pedagogies they receive. It raises issues of social justice and explores the conditions of learning that are important for young people under these categorisations.
This book seeks to address the unequal programming and application of youth arts programs, drawing on the dichotomy between ‘high’ arts and ‘low’ culture and the classed-based take-up of youth work. Reporting on international exemplars, attention is drawn to the conditions required for youth arts programs to be successful, while acknowledging the challenges of this work. The discourse of the role of youth work, and specifically how arts-based work can make significant contributions to a more just society, is explored.
The book addresses current policy contexts of ‘austerity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘at-risk’ youth, which are frequently drawn on to justify arts programs for young people and extends the discussion on deficit identities from the field of youth work to arts-based pedagogies. In offering a way forward, by focusing on the practices and pedagogies that ‘work’ in youth arts programs, three key theoretical perspectives are introduced, which engage with a sociological analysis of these programs: common culture, cultural democracy and cultural citizenship.
This book seeks to address the unequal programming and application of youth arts programs, drawing on the dichotomy between ‘high’ arts and ‘low’ culture and the classed-based take-up of youth work. Reporting on international exemplars, attention is drawn to the conditions required for youth arts programs to be successful, while acknowledging the challenges of this work. The discourse of the role of youth work, and specifically how arts-based work can make significant contributions to a more just society, is explored.
The book addresses current policy contexts of ‘austerity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘at-risk’ youth, which are frequently drawn on to justify arts programs for young people and extends the discussion on deficit identities from the field of youth work to arts-based pedagogies. In offering a way forward, by focusing on the practices and pedagogies that ‘work’ in youth arts programs, three key theoretical perspectives are introduced, which engage with a sociological analysis of these programs: common culture, cultural democracy and cultural citizenship.
This book seeks to address the unequal programming and application of youth arts programs, drawing on the dichotomy between ‘high’ arts and ‘low’ culture and the classed-based take-up of youth work. Reporting on international exemplars, attention is drawn to the conditions required for youth arts programs to be successful, while acknowledging the challenges of this work. The discourse of the role of youth work, and specifically how arts-based work can make significant contributions to a more just society, is explored.
The book addresses current policy contexts of ‘austerity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘at-risk’ youth, which are frequently drawn on to justify arts programs for young people and extends the discussion on deficit identities from the field of youth work to arts-based pedagogies. In offering a way forward, by focusing on the practices and pedagogies that ‘work’ in youth arts programs, three key theoretical perspectives are introduced, which engage with a sociological analysis of these programs: common culture, cultural democracy and cultural citizenship.
In this chapter, the Arts Award program, an ethnographic methodology and the three youth work settings are described. Interviews with youth workers are shared as a synopsis of the key findings are given. It argues that despite the award being a ‘good fit’ with the informal education practices of youth work, there was a real danger that this program would instrumentalise the experience of working with the arts. The value of the arts as a ‘tool’ for youth work is highlighted, however the program’s use as a tool for monitoring and controlling behaviour for some young people is also shown. Practices of austerity youth work are presented in order to explore how the arts can be translated into instrumental and measured forms of youth work.
Drawing on the notion of cultural citizenship, this chapter questions what arts programs ‘prepare’ young people for. It argues that youth arts programs have the potential to develop young people as justice-oriented cultural citizens () who feel a civic responsibility to use their artistic practice to actively promote justice and address inequalities in society. The potentially liberating and oppositional affordances of working with the arts are highlighted through the pedagogy of empowerment and transformative potentialities youth arts programs can offer. However, this chapter also explores a counter-argument, which demonstrates that these affordances were not consistent for all young people. While arguing that the potential of the youth arts programs is not being reached, this chapter problematises assumptions made about the power of the arts to ‘transform’ young lives, without recognising the cultural values and interests young people bring with them.
This chapter explores the different arts practices on offer through the youth arts program in my study – Arts Award. Drawing on Paul Willis’ framework of common culture, examples of the artistic practice undertaken by the young people are given as incorporating everyday practice, symbolic resources and bedroom culture. This chapter also explores ‘subcultural’ arts practices and their functioning as realignment for some young people to deviant social groupings by drawing on case studies.
The aim of this chapter is to explore how gender dispositions are mobilised in upper secondary educational transitions and specifically in the making of counter-hegemonic choices in Vocational Education and Training (VET). Based on interviews with girls and boys studying atypical gender VET modalities in Barcelona, the chapter demonstrates remarkable differences between boys and girls in their educational trajectories and in their motivations to choose a non-normative VET programme. While most of the boys were developing lads’ attitudes during their school trajectory, whilst laddettes attitudes were much rarer. Most of the boys explain their non-normative gender choices by alluding to instrumental factors while girls’ choices are mostly expressed in terms of ‘personality’. Furthermore, ‘choosing against gender’ is more traumatic for girls as they are more pressured than their male peers. Overall, the chapter contributes to understanding the relationship between gender, educational transitions and social inequalities.
Educational transitions play a critical role in the (re)production of social inequalities. Transitions to upper secondary education are particularly significant as in most European countries this is when students are separated into different tracks – academic and vocational – and the first time they face a ‘real choice’ over their educational trajectory. Using a qualitative-driven approach that includes multiple research techniques (documentary analysis, questionnaires and interviews), the book offers a detailed account of upper secondary educational choices and transitions in two global European cities: Barcelona and Madrid. Contributors explore the political, institutional and subjective dimensions of these transitions and the multiple mechanisms of inequality that operate. The book examines the structure of the education system, the features of the academic-vocational divide and teachers’, policymakers’ and students’ practices and beliefs to provide a comprehensive understanding of the transition to upper secondary education. The book also shows how young people’s educational choices and opportunities are deeply mediated by the axes of social inequality (social class, gender and migration backgrounds) in multiple ways. Overall, the book provides a sound theoretical perspective and robust empirical evidence of how social inequalities are produced and extended by educational transitions to upper secondary level.
This chapter analyses young people’s upper secondary education transitions as intrinsically related to their previous school trajectories and experiences in lower secondary education. Drawing on quantitative data of students from Barcelona in their first year of upper secondary education, the chapter demonstrates the central role that schools play in the construction of educational opportunities. It specifically shows how certain institutional devices (mostly repetition, suspension and ability grouping), and also the subjective experience of them, facilitate or inhibit different upper secondary educational trajectories for different youth profiles. One of the most important contributions of the chapter is the construction of a typology of school trajectories – the ‘good students’, the ‘hard workers’, the ‘troublemakers’ and the ‘misfits’ – that, through the mediation of structural variables and particularly social class, deeply conditions the choice of upper secondary tracks.
