Studying Education

An introduction to the study and exploration of education

Janet Lord

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526490476, 9781526490483
• eBook ISBN: 9781529723366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Your beginners guide to the study and exploration of education.

Introducing you to what education is, this book helps you explore the different ways of looking at education, the challenges it faces and how to study it at university and beyond. Guiding you through your course it:

·       Shows you what you need to study and how to study and develop your understanding

·       Gets you building your knowledge of essential themes, perspectives and theory from across the education sector

·       Helps you to see the 'bigger picture' of education

·       Includes support on how to write academically, think critically, evaluate evidence and engage with debates.

Part 1 Background and context

1 What is education and what is its purpose? Why study education?

Janet Lord

Key words

• interdisciplinary
• dynamic
• socialisation
• qualification
• subjectification

Key Notes

• Education is a worthwhile and powerful subject to study.
• There is no one ‘correct’ definition of education or view as to what the purposes of education are.
• According to one view, education has particular functions, including getting qualifications, assimilating the values and ideas of society, and developing your own agency as an independent thinker and actor in the world.
• A number of subjects or disciplines have something to say about education; these include sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, economics and politics.

Everyone knows what education is – don’t they?

Everyone thinks they know what education is; after all, we have all been to school, and we are all educated. But trying to define education formally is quite a challenge. There is no real agreement about what education is or about what ‘education studies’ is. And really, there is no agreement either on what education is for. Some books try to define these terms; in this book, we are going to do it differently. In this first chapter, I’m going to introduce some thinking about the nature and function of education and pose some questions. At the end of the book, we will come back to those questions and see what the material we have read leads us to think.

What is the purpose of education?

First of all, what is the purpose of education? It’s important that we start by considering this question, and to have it in mind as we work through the book.

Figure 1.1 Biesta’s three domains of education

Gert Biesta, a well-known, well-respected educationalist, has done some thinking about the purpose of education. He suggests that education tends to function in relation to three domains (see Figure 1.1). By this, he means that education always functions in relation to these three domains, or that education always impacts on these three domains. He calls these domains qualification, socialisation and subjectification (Biesta, 2010).

Qualification

Qualification has to do with the transmission and acquisition of knowledge, skills and dispositions. This is important because it allows children and young people to ‘do’ something – it qualifies them. This might be something such as becoming qualified to perform a certain task or job. Or we can think about qualification more generally, as the idea that education qualifies people to live successfully and purposefully in today’s complex society.

Socialisation

As you will have seen through your experiences in the education system so far, education is not just about knowledge and skills. Through education, children and young people can also learn about and assimilate different cultural, professional, political and religious traditions and ways of being and doing (Biesta, 2010). Partly, this is a stated aim of education, but socialisation also works through what we call the ‘hidden curriculum’, or the ‘[lessons] which are learned but not openly intended’ (Martin, 1976, p136). The hidden curriculum might be about the ways in which existing social structures, divisions and inequalities are transmitted, for example.

Subjectification

According to Biesta (2010), education also impacts on individuals as people, or ‘subjects’. This might be to do with how learners may become empowered as people, perhaps because of the knowledge and ways of thinking that they acquire, and it might also be about how people can become disempowered as they adopt particular ideas and ways of being and doing. So, subjectification is about how education contributes to how we exist as human beings, or as human ‘subjects’. It’s about how we have agency (i.e. the capacity to act independently and to make your own decisions and choices).

Key Information

Biesta, G.J.J. (2010) Good Education in an Age of Measurement. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

In this book, Biesta considers the different purposes and dimensions of education. He also emphasises the importance of teacher judgements, considering the different judgements that are made in education and what it means to judge.

It’s interesting to think about how these ideas of Gert Biesta’s might link to our thinking about our study of education, whether that is as a trainee teacher or as a student of education studies. It’s perhaps easiest to see how ‘qualification’ might be key to our studies, as we get a degree, Access qualification or qualified teaching status.

Our own socialisation, whether that is as a teacher, education professional or student of education, is something that we rarely think about explicitly. We also rarely think about ourselves as someone with agency and as an individual who is empowered and/or disempowered in various ways.

Thinking about socialisation and subjectification

Below, you will find some questions to help you start thinking about socialisation and subjectification. If you haven’t yet been introduced to thinking about your own position in relation to education, as well as how education has affected you, then reading this case study might be a useful way for you to start that thinking.

Case Study

Sarah

Sarah is training to be a teacher. She studied community and informal education at university and is now completing a postgraduate teacher training course. On her teaching course, she’s just been introduced to Biesta’s ideas. Sarah can see that education has given her some qualifications, but more than that she sees that she has learned a lot about the world through her schooling and university education, and through the way that she was educated (more informally) at home by her family, through her friendships, and so on. She comes from a household where her mum and many other members of her family are teachers, and she has been brought up to believe it is important to do a job that is in some way useful to society. Professional behaviour and thinking are also part of her socialisation.

In terms of Sarah’s thinking about herself as an agent or a subject, she thinks that she is perhaps both empowered and disempowered by her education. She has been taught how to think and she has been exposed to the world views of others. She is now a committed feminist and is passionate about social justice. Her educational experiences have involved her being taken seriously, her values have been talked about and discussed both at home and at school, and she has been taught that her values matter, even if they are not the same as those she has been exposed to at home or at school, and even if she has been challenged in them. But she is wondering whether she is also disempowered as a person – are the choices that she has made about ways of being, thinking and doing really ‘free’ choices?

Key Questions

• Of the three domains that Biesta talks about, would you say that any one is more important than the others?
• Are the three domains dependent on each other, as Biesta’s diagram seems to imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the editor and contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Background and context
• 1 What is education and what is its purpose? Why study education?
• 2 How does the study of other subjects expand our understanding of education?
• 3 What are the main factors affecting school organisation and the curriculum in England today?
• 4 How does identity shape young people’s experiences of schooling and education?
• 5 What counts as social justice in education?
• Part 2 Education, learning and teaching
• 6 What makes good teaching and learning?
• 7 What’s so great about Finland? An introduction to comparative and international education
• 8 What are theories of learning, and how can we use them?
• 9 What are schools for?
• 10 What is learning outside the classroom?
• 11 Why do some children in the UK do better at school than others?
• 12 How can we provide children with special educational needs with a quality learning experience?
• 13 Teacher identity, teaching and pedagogical approaches
• 14 What is vocational learning?
• Part 3 Contemporary themes and issues in education: opinion pieces and commentaries
• 15 Social justice in education
• Social justice and adult education: adult education, like education across the lifespan, is never neutral
• A case study on transformative social justice education: St Scholastica’s, Manila, Philippines
• 16 Leadership and management in education
• Ethical versus passionate leadership: ‘Spider-Head’, not ‘Super-Head’
• Leadership strategies
• 17 Early years education and play
• Early years education and play
• Writing back: comparing preschool philosophies – play or academic learning?
• 18 Mental health and well-being
• Mental health and well-being
• Mental health and well-being
• 19 Technology in the classroom
• Why do teachers need to embrace technology in the classroom?
• Technology in the classroom
• 20 Global citizenship education (GCE)
• Neoliberal versus liberal-humanist approaches to Global Citizenship Education: two sides of the same coin?
• Afterword
• Index