Thinking Comprehensively About Education

Spaces of Educative Possibility and their Implications for Public Policy

Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Edmund W. Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136318474
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

While much is known about the critical importance of educative experiences outside of school, little is known about the social systems, community programs, and everyday practices that can facilitate learning outside of the classroom. Thinking Comprehensively About Education sheds much-needed light on those systems, programs, and practices; conceptualizing education more broadly through a nuanced exploration of:

• the various spaces where education occurs;
• the non-dominant practices and possibilities of those spaces;
• the possibilities of enabling social systems, institutions, and programs of comprehensive education.

This original edited collection identifies and describes the resources that enable optimal human learning and development, and offers a public policy framework that can enable a truly comprehensive educational system. Thinking Comprehensively About Education is a must-read for faculty, students, policy analysts, and policymakers.

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INTRODUCTION

Social Space and the Political Economy of Comprehensively Conceived Education

Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román

The legacy of the factory model of schooling is that tens of billions of dollars are tied up in unproductive use of time and technology, in underused school buildings, in antiquated compensation systems, and in inefficient school-finance systems.

Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, “The New Normal: Doing More With Less”

It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle-class child. These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to vacation travel and a different sense of oneself, and apply, for the child who enjoys them, both in and out of school. So the poorer student will generally fall behind so long as he depends on school for advancement or learning.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

We don’t have after school programs when you don’t want to do football, because that’s pretty much the only thing that you can do in the inner-city … we’re all thought of to be sports players. … Is there something else for us to do?

Dragon, Rize

These three quotes—the first from the leading politician on U.S. education today, the second from a notable intellectual, and the final from a youth in South Central Los Angeles in 2004—bring together the core themes raised in this volume: space, education, and the co-constitutive inequality between the two. On the one hand, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speaks to the historical and ongoing limitations of schooling while implicitly alluding to Capitol Hill’s continued faith in the possibilities of educational excellence and equity in and through school reform. On the other hand, Illich refers to the impossibility of educational equality, even with equal schooling. Moreover, both Illich and Dragon refer to the inequality of educational opportunities outside of schooling, where many out-of-school resources are afforded to the children and youth of affluent communities, and to the lack of opportunities for socially and economically marginalized communities. Dragon expresses not only the dearth of educational opportunities in his social reality but also his desire for something more. The “advantages” that Illich refers to and that Dragon desires are the everyday experiences of a broader understanding of education. This understanding of education posits that the process of education is much more comprehensive than schooling and has been enabled only for those of the socially privileged spaces within society. This broader understanding of education is what the U.S. Secretary of Education seemingly overlooks in his criticisms of the legacy of federal policy on schooling.

The history of federal policy on education in the United States reveals that the nation has invested most of its reform efforts on schooling. Although schooling is important for affirmative and adaptive human development and for building competitive national economies in technologically advanced societies, school reform efforts have seldom addressed the critical social and educative conditions, resources, and possibilities, outside of schooling, in the communities and homes of learners. Current federal policy makes provisions for supplemental educational services for schools identified as “poor performing”—a posture that assumes out-of-school educational opportunities are remedial and therefore unnecessary. This assumption and narrow conceptualization of education overlooks the meaningful complementary, supplementary, and comprehensive education processes that occur outside of schooling. These are the very spaces at which Dragon hinted. Supplementary education refers to all of the learning and developmental experiences that occur outside of schooling, whereas the idea of thinking comprehensively about education is concerned with the deliberate and relational educative experiences in all spaces of society (not just schooling). It is in these underexcavated spaces where rich and overlooked possibilities abound.

In the past five decades there have been gestures in federal policy to the importance of what goes on in complement and supplement to schooling. Some of these gestures include the development and implementation of Head Start, as well as breakfast and free or reduced-price lunch programs. Also, resources have been allocated for supplemental educational services for poor-performing schools under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. More recently, the Obama administration has acknowledged the educative significance of complementary and supplementary education in the development of 21st Century Community Learning Centers and the Promise Neighborhoods initiatives. Although not yet fully embraced in federal policy, each of these gestures has suggested that comprehensive approaches to education are much broader than those that occur within the four walls of schooling. These types of measures remain vital for the national endeavors of educational equity and excellence.

While substantial research exists regarding the critical importance of the educative experiences outside of schooling, the literature is mixed in its findings and not inclusive of the variety of spaces and practices of education beyond schooling. For example, little is known about the social systems that enable more relational and comprehensive processes of education, the various programs and institutions that provide equitable and deliberate pedagogical experiences, and the meaningful educational and developmental processes that are present in the everyday practices of nondominant communities. What are some examples of social systems that enable the spaces of equitable educative possibility? What are the kinds of programs and community institutions that provide the space and opportunity for education conceived comprehensively? What are the processes of comprehensive education that occur within the space and time of nondominant everyday practices, that which de Certeau (1984) suggested are tactics that cleverly maneuver through the utilization of time and heteronomy of place?

This volume seeks to bring forward the meaningful educative experiences of supplementary and comprehensive approaches to education while also offering considerations for how federal policy can enable human possibility through the broader domain of comprehensively conceived education.¹ Moreover, thinking comprehensively about education conceptualizes education as ubiquitous to the social process of thinking, feeling, being, and doing everyday human experiences. The examination and exploration of comprehensively conceived education is critical to enhancing the understanding of educative experiences in spaces beyond schooling and the paramount cost of not targeting the inequality of resources and processes in these spaces. Thus, this volume captures the various manifestations of comprehensively conceived education in various spaces of society while providing considerations for public policy.

Recently these concepts have been given more attention theoretically and in research, beginning with Gordon, Bridglall, and Meroe’s (2005) Supplementary Education; in the extensive works of Heather Weiss, on complementary education; and the recent Perspectives on Comprehensive Education, a three-volume series with Mellen Press, edited by Hervé Varenne and Edmund W. Gordon. To help develop the educational-research and policy worlds’ understanding of these meaningful processes, Thinking Comprehensively About Education seeks to conceptualize and capture education more broadly; capture various spaces where education occurs; feature some of the nondominant practices and possibilities of those spaces; consider the possibilities in and through comprehensively enabling social systems, institutions, and programs of education, identify and describe the resources that enable optimal human learning and development; and consider the implications for public policy that enable education to be understood comprehensively.

In this volume we seek to push the boundaries and broaden the conceptualization of education in order to capture the educative conditions, resources, and processes beyond traditional schooling. Given the social and economic marginality of many communities in the United States, and the large degree of inequality in resources between communities (Massey & Denton, 1993; Quillian, 2007; Rearden & Bischoff, in press; Sampson, Sharkey, & Raudenbush, 2008; Sharkey, 2008; Wilson, 1987), many children and youth grow up in marginalized communities, where they inherit inequitable conditions, thus making equitable education impossible. In fact, Sampson et al. (2008) found that living in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood reduces the later verbal ability of African American children on average by 4 points; the equivalent of missing a year or more of schooling. Hence, we identify and examine the various spaces and nondominant everyday practices that enable educative possibility. It is with these empirical examples in mind that we offer considerations for public policy of comprehensively conceived education.

I will frame each of the contributions to this volume by briefly discussing the idea of thinking comprehensively about education, then critically engage how (social) space complicates and affirms the idea and possibilities of comprehensive education. The theoretical mapping of social space onto the idea of thinking comprehensively about education points toward what I refer to as the “political economy of education conceived comprehensively,” where the social spaces of society are organized by well-to-do and less-well-to-do spaces of social and educational resources. I will then finish this introduction with an advanced organizer of the volume.

Thinking Comprehensively About Education

In Larry Cremin’s address (1975/2007) to the John Dewey Society, he stated,

The important fact is that family life does educate, religious life does educate, and work does educate; and, what is more, the education of all three realms is as intentional as the education of the school, though in different ways and in different measures. (p. 549)

He further set forth three assertions:

First, we have to think comprehensively about education; second, that we have to think relationally about education; and third, that we have to think publicly about education. (p. 550)

Cremin’s observations and analysis challenged the existing theories of education within educational research, policy, and practice. In other words, education has been understood as a dualism between schooling and society, in which schooling has been privileged as the place, space, and time of education. Cremin pointed to this very contention in John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, but Cremin argued that Dewey falls short of his interest of reconciling this dualistic understanding of the process of education. It is via this understanding of thinking comprehensively, relationally, and publicly about education that Cremin attempted to resolve the dualistic understanding of education and society by speaking to how one is co-constitutive of the other, how schools are related to other societal apparatuses, and how each of their relational foci is important in the equitable development of human potential.

This perspective of thinking comprehensively, relationally, and publicly about education recognizes simultaneously the relevance and limitations of schooling. While schools are still acknowledged as relevant institutions of education in society, it also suggests, as Gordon, Heincke, and Rajagopalan describe in Chapter 2, that comprehensive education is the broader domain of education, where schooling is understood as the supplement. This conceptualization has the advantage of affirming and acknowledging both the multiplicity of knowledge and ways of knowing as well as the legitimated knowledge of dominant institutions. This affirmation and acknowledgment is enabled by the understanding that education is ubiquitous in the various spaces and practices in society, not just in schooling.

For these reasons, and building upon Cremin (1975/2007), others (Gordon et al., 2005; Varenne, Gordon, & Lin, 2009) have begun to theorize, examine, and consider the various forms of supplementary and comprehensive education. They suggest that supplementary and comprehensive education might include spaces and practices such as libraries, museums, child-care centers, health education and clinics, martial arts, hip-hop, afterschool programs, athletics, parenting-practice workshops, financial-literacy programs, and prenatal services, among many others. It is via each of these institutions, programs, and practices that we find the various educational processes that Cremin asserted.

Thus, this volume supports Cremin’s (1975/2007) and Varenne’s (2007, 2009) notion of thinking comprehensively about education, where education is understood as ubiquitous to being human. By taking seriously the notion that the structures of education are rather arbitrary (Garfinkel, 2002), Varenne (2007, 2008, 2009) posited that humans are inherently ignorant, and it is the lack of knowledge that produces the desire to seek knowledge. This constant seeking of knowledge, an ongoing process of “becoming,” is how humans make sense of the world in which they are situated—a process of learning how to “be” and “do” in the world as constituted by and constituting social space. In this sense, the subject is both active participator and learner of the structuring social world. As discussed in the next section, it is the social constitution and political economy of space that enables the producing and reproducing of the relations of power, inequality, and inequity. It is for this reason that the authors in this volume pay particular attention to the process of comprehensively conceived education within social space and the spatial and practical affordances for educative possibility.

Space and Educative Possibility: The Political Economy of Comprehensively Conceived Education

Although thinking comprehensively about education challenges the place-based understanding of schooling, it also makes assumptions about space and the affordances within space to enable educative experiences. For instance, how is space socially produced? How does the social production of space provide differential affordances for different spaces and for different bodies within space? In what ways might this have implications for the idea of the process of education as the lived experience? It is the exploration of these questions regarding the intersections of social space and the idea of thinking comprehensively about education that is critical for understanding the reproduction of social and educational inequality.

Space is a concept that has long been theorized and studied in philosophy, the physical sciences, and the social sciences. In fact, the early dominant approaches to the study and practical understanding of space began in the physical sciences, with astronomy and mathematics, particularly with geometry. It is for this reason that many of the social scientific approaches to the study of space have fallen short by appropriating the paradigms of the physical sciences’ scientific study of space (e.g., geography). Although not conceptually agreed upon, space—understood distinctly from place—has become understood as one of the critical dimensions of human existence for the social sciences.

Theoretically, space has been conceptualized and understood in various ways in the social sciences. In Capital, Marx’s conceptualization of space was reduced to the economic determinism of social classes. Pierre Bourdieu (1985) described social space as “a field of forces, i.e., as a set of objective power relations that impose themselves on all who enter the field” (p. 724), yet not reducible to the actions and interactions of agents in space. However, Bourdieu’s conceptualization focused more on the structuring forces of space and the produced social divisions and less on the practices within space and their mediation and constitution of space. Alternatively, Michel de Certeau (1984) explained the distinction between place and space, pointing toward the practices as the primary distinction. He suggested that place is a location, whereas space is a “practiced place,” determined by subjects in the history of place and the users of it. Although de Certeau gives more attention to the mediating processes of practices within space, he does not adequately account for the production and reproduction of space itself whereby we also find social divisions.

In order to account for the political economy in and of space, Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991) drew a distinction...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Social Space and the Political Economy of Comprehensively Conceived Education
• 2 Toward a Reconceptualization of Education
• Social Systems and the Produced Spaces of Comprehensively Conceived Education
• Programmatic and Institutional Production of Spaces of Comprehensively Conceived Education
• Nondominant Everyday-Spatial Practices of Comprehensively Conceived Education
• Toward a Public Policy Agenda on Comprehensively Conceived Education
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index