Education

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 Arun Verma’s Anti-Racism in Higher Education, 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 dialogue includes an engagement between the author and two of the case contributors, both of whom are operating at the boundaries of policy sociology. Whilst this has perhaps underrepresented those working in other spheres of knowledge co-production – research, art, behaviour – it has allowed a focus on the kinds of knowledge that find their ways into the process of policy development and, more generally, what knowledge is valued in the public sphere.

The section starts with Jan Law’s case study of a particular practice of sociology, driven by the needs of policy. Policy formation and implementation, with its associated discourses of politics, influence, interests and media narrative, constitutes an important public sphere in which public sociology might occur, as well as a branch of sociology with the particular combination (according to Burawoy’s (2005) categorisation) of instrumental knowledge aimed at an extra-academic audience. Jan’s experience of the challenge to the academic integrity of the sociologist in this context, especially from sponsor capture, leads her to ‘cross the quadrant’ towards public sociology. The key issue that this policy-to-public sociology raises is not so much sociological practice as knowledge – who is able to control the knowledge generated by sociological practices. By contrast, Laura Lovin’s experience of policy sociology accounts for a context in which that challenge has been met, relatively successfully, by the integration of the knowledge contribution of refugee and asylum-seeking women into a gendered and racialised policy discourse which otherwise seeks to devalue that knowledge.

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The explorations in this chapter are guided by shared affinities between public sociology and feminist theory. Whereas public sociology is committed to dialogic knowledge production, bringing sociological theory into conversation with the voices of marginalised groups, feminist examinations of social, political, economic and cultural practices that produce racialised, gendered and sexualised subject positions have produced analytical categories that enhance understandings of relations of domination and subordination as well as subsequent policy making and service delivery. Together, public sociology and feminist theory share a commitment to unveiling power structures through knowledge that is collaborative, inclusive and relevant to individual and collective efforts to create social change. In my explorations, I use textual data gathered from project reports produced by the Scottish Refugee Council (SRC) and the Refugee Women’s Strategic Group (RWSG) between 2011 and 2016 to analyse their efforts toward refugee and asylum seeker integration in Scotland. The SRC’s commitment to grounding their services and policies in participatory knowledge production is visible throughout their projects. This methodological orientation has enabled the SRC to capture the links between sociocultural and economic structures and the personal problems experienced by refugees and asylum seekers in their everyday lives and, most importantly, it has foregrounded the intersectional analytics articulated by the refugee and asylum-seeking women participating in SRC programmes. The RWSG was thus formed by the SRC in 2015 following the realisation of the significance of the inquiries, concepts and visions for social change put forth by refugee and asylum-seeking women.

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In 2013 we ran a small but successful service learning pilot in the department of sociology at Nottingham Trent University (NTU). Immediately following the pilot, service learning was added to our BA Sociology, BA Criminology and MA Public Sociology provision as core modules. In brief, we argue our version of service learning sits within a social justice orientation, often referred to as critical service learning. Simply put, this involves students working in partnership with our not-for-profit community on social justice issues for the purpose of social change and mutual benefit for community partners and students. These are big claims. Whether the service learning we do at NTU genuinely extends beyond the dream of social justice is at the heart of this chapter.

The chapter begins by defining service learning followed by an exploration of the traditional versus critical service learning debate, an overview of our practices and values and why and how we do it. To illustrate and interrogate our practices we introduce three projects to highlight the traditional-critical learning debate and, finally, offer ideas for discussion on how to build sustainable and critical service learning. In presenting these reflections we hope to re-energise our social justice aspirations, share our practices and extend opportunities for critical dialogue with those engaged in public sociology education.

There are many schools, colleges and universities delivering many versions of service learning. Students provide a ‘service’ to the community for a specific purpose or goal and, in return, learn through the experience. Service learning can be embedded within the curriculum for disciplinary connections, with or without academic credit and/or part of volunteering strategies.

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This chapter is rooted in the reflexive experience of feminists in Scotland struggling for gender justice – particularly the movement to resist and end men’s violence against women (VAW). Our case study focuses on a course ‘Gender Justice and Violence: Feminist Approaches’ (GJV), the fruit of an ongoing partnership between Scottish Women’s Aid (SWA) and Queen Margaret University (QMU). Offered every year since 2007, the course engages with debates concerning public policy, professional practice and political activism – particularly in relation to gender-based violence and abuse. The module teaching sessions bring together practitioners and activists (who register as associate students at QMU) alongside full-time sociology students. This enables a challenging process of mutual learning which highlights both the tensions and the transformative potential of grounding social theory in the sometimes divergent standpoints of these overlapping groups. The course is delivered by, and open to, both women and men. The curriculum draws on the struggles of the women’s movement and of pro-feminist men, and utilises the work of engaged feminist scholars across a range of academic disciplines, including history, philosophy, criminology and gender studies, as well as sociology. Its presence demands that the practice of activists and the movements which have driven social change are taken seriously within this higher education institution, and that the rigorous analysis of feminist scholars and their methodological approaches becomes a resource for those working in the field. As such, the provision of this course and its impact is, we argue, a counter-hegemonic contribution to gender justice in neoliberal higher education.

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By some measurements, I should not be in a position where I can contribute a chapter to an academic text. I entered university as a mature, working class, first generation student from a rural background, with less than impressive school attainment and a menial employment history. Here, as an early career lecturer experiencing culture shock, imposter syndrome and struggling with my mental health at time of writing, I reflect on the impact of dialogue on the Scottish widening access agenda and of students as arguably our first and most important public.

If Burawoy’s address acts as a foundation of discussion here then let us consider his thesis on ‘The multiplicity of public sociologies’ – where perhaps lost among assertions of traditional and organic public sociology, Burawoy (2005: 9) describes students as ‘carriers of a rich lived experience’ and of ‘ambassadors of sociology’. Back (2016: 46) is more straightforward, identifying students as ‘our first public and often our most important audience and some of them are also our future colleagues’. Rather than simply a homogeneous mass, students experience their degree careers in the public sphere as a collective of diverse backgrounds and private issues.

The UK widening access agenda seeks to move beyond the traditional white middle class student population, and the Scottish approach has been to reduce financial and attainment barriers to entering higher education (HE), to instil a greater sense of meritocracy and social equality in society (Iannelli, 2011; Tigh, 2012; Lasselle, 2016; Rainford, 2016; Sosu et al, 2016).

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The dialogue around publics took the form of an invitation to the contributors to respond to a narrative around generative themes emerging from the cases in this section, and the extent to which the problematics posed in the provocation were responded to. Whilst all contributors were invited to participate, this dialogue took the form of an extended email correspondence between Paul Gilfillan, author of Case I.4, and Eurig Scandrett, editor and author of Case I.5, which is itself a response to an earlier version of Paul’s case study. Whilst this inevitably puts a restriction on the diversity of voices in the section (not least because the only voices are those of the two male contributors), the correspondence between Paul and Eurig has provided the opportunity to examine, test and interrogate in some depth, the proposition of public sociology engagement with subaltern counterpublics.

In the provocation for this section, it is proposed that the publics with whom public sociologists should be engaging are best understood through Nancy Fraser’s (1990) formulation of the subaltern counter-public. The public sociologist therefore has a role in contributing to the analysis of subalternity in terms of understanding social axes of oppression, exploitation and injustice, and contributing to the strategies of countering these. The means of analysis and strategy development is through dialogue between the resources of sociology (and other academic disciplines) and the praxis of publics engaged in struggle, and this dialogue is a pedagogical task. This argument builds on Burawoy’s ‘Between the organic public sociologist and a public is a dialogue, a process of mutual education’ (Burawoy, 2005: 7) and, more politically, Gramsci’s ‘every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship’ (Hoare and Smith, 1971: 350).

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The marketisation of higher education in the UK has brought not only job insecurity, increased workloads, and an increase in tuition fees alongside a student-as-consumer or ‘customer service approach’ to education, but a number of individualised performativity measures that monitor the productivity (in a narrow sense of the word) of individual staff members (Brown and Carasso, 2013). While trade unions primarily aim to improve representation and gain fairer working conditions for its members, trade union work can simultaneously be considered as part of public sociology education. As Scandrett (2017) notes, education not only concerns the production of knowledge but it is also a social relation: ‘knowledge continues to be created both in collectively challenging … social relations and in experimenting with alternatives’ (Scandrett, 2017: 81). Trade union work becomes an educational project first and foremost through students or union members learning about their rights as workers through training and campaigns, in which a kind of ‘learning by doing’ or embodied knowledge spur members to analyse the social and political power dynamics of work: making clear the relation between ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’ (Mills, 2000), such work shifts the understanding of workplace struggles from one of individual failure to one bound up in structural contexts. However, trade union work becomes an educational project also through a fostering of collective action and a sense of community; a way of being and doing that counteracts the individualising culture of marketised academia. As the above-quoted ‘strike poem’ asserts, trade union work allows us to imagine a better world, the world of collective agency ‘seen on picket lines’ (Krause, 2018b).

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This chapter enquires into possibilities for young children’s active citizenship as provoked through their involvement in participative research enquiry. It is the main crux of this chapter that learning that happens though experiencing authentic participation, for example participative research, creates possibilities for young children’s active citizenship. My interest in these possibilities is based on my work and interaction with children both in my capacity as a researcher and paediatric practitioner throughout my professional life. The potential that participative research enquiries hold is based on my observation and interaction with children around their perceptions of their rights (for example, children understand their rights to protection and to provision; although they emphasise their participation rights, they find that these are not always respected); agency (children find that their moral status is often questionable in the eyes of adults; they are often not believed, or are wrongly blamed); self-realisation and adult dominance (constant negotiation with adults in order to have time for oneself and to resist adult demands, at home and at school; pursuing own interest against arguing against control and supervision).

Active citizenship refers to being a social agent expressing opinions, and initiating social actions. The concept of agency is central to active citizenship. Hannah Arendt (1998) argued that to be agentic one must initiate action with other people, that emerges from new ideas from our interactions with other people. The intention of this chapter is to provide discussion and understandings about theories and pedagogies that are applicable to research that is democratic in its process, relevant to its young participants, and one that grants their authentic voice, recognises their agency, and can bring about action and change.

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This chapter introduces a model of critical dialogue designed to create a brave space in which previously ignored, silent or marginalised young people can together develop a critical awareness of potentially harmful attitudes and behaviours (often accepted as normal within their social group or national culture) and be inspired to act in solidarity as allies to bring about positive social change. It focuses on a study of the AlcoLOLs project. One headteacher in this study described her typical Monday mornings as ‘picking up the pieces of family or pupil relationships’ damaged by alcohol-fuelled behaviour over weekends. The risks incurred by adolescent drinking make a significant topic on which to focus – not only because of its impact on young people’s social context, but also because alcohol use is the leading risk factor for premature death and disability worldwide for people aged 15–49 years old (Griswold et al, 2018; WHO, 2018). In addition, there is increasing evidence that alcohol may have acute and prolonged neurobiological effects on developing adolescent brains (Clark, 2008; Squeglia, 2009 in Cukier et al, 2018) and alcohol use is linked to over 200 health conditions, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and seven types of cancer (Morey et al, 2017).

The AlcoLOLs approach was premised on views that resonate with those of the lobby group Alcohol Focus Scotland:

Young people are under a lot of pressure to start drinking at a young age. Alcohol today is cheap, readily available and heavily marketed. As a result, young people are growing up in a pro-alcohol society where drinking is seen as the norm.

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