Alternative Education and Community Engagement

Making Education a Priority

O. Clennon

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137415400
• eBook ISBN: 9781137415417
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

This book explores the ethical and philosophical issues behind the provision of market-led alternative education. The volume examines the models of Free, Studio, Supplementary and Co-operative school provisions, asking whether a market-based approach to delivering higher standards of education actually works.

1

Making Education a Priority: An Overview

Ornette D. Clennon

Abstract: Clennon provides an overview of some of the issues Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities can face in the UK education sector. He explores the concepts of “Culture of Low Expectations” and “Changing the Ideological landscapes in our Schools and Classrooms”. Clennon looks at how these concepts can be used to counter institutional stereotyping and racism in education. The chapter also outlines the rise of the market in education and its exacerbating impact on existing structural inequalities within the sector. Clennon also draws attention to some of the theoretical discourse around Power and how it is mediated, using Foucault, Bourdieu, Althusser and others as a means of underpinning his summary of some of the ideological and philosophical challenges BAME communities can encounter while trying to navigate the UK’s education system.

Clennon, Ornette D. Alternative Education and Community Engagement: Making Education a Priority. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137415417.0005.

Community reflections on education

In our Public engagement work, we find that members of our local communities seem to be keen to highlight issues around BAME representation in Education. Culture and identity are recurring themes in our community meetings with frequent suggestions for improving BAME attainment such as looking at the “African heritage contribution to history, science and medicine” in curriculum teaching. Many members of our local communities tell us that for them, “culture and identity” are key points in examining the “long term effects of bad education or mis-education of African Caribbean children” and as a Higher Education sector, we need to look at “how many nursery teachers, teachers and lecturers are prepared to be able to teach in a multicultural society”. Since Manchester Metropolitan University is a teacher training university, the curricula implications of this question seem for us rather apposite. In terms of another institutional link to a perceived “mis-education of African Caribbean children”, the larger question about what “actions the government will take to secure/effect improved outcomes for BAME groups in education” is also often asked. This question leads us to ask ourselves if communities think that we, as a university have (or indeed want to have) influence over these bigger political questions? These thoughts are really quite provocative from an institutional perspective, as they encourage us, Manchester Metropolitan University, to look inwards to contemplate our ethos and our pedagogic infrastructures and whether they truly allow us to honestly reflect on the ways we prepare our teachers to “teach in a multicultural society” and whether we are prepared to actively campaign and challenge the government in terms of its “actions [it] will take to secure/effect improved outcomes for BAME groups in education” (Manchester Metropolitan University, 2013, para. 2). Indeed, if we have already mounted such campaigns, are we prepared to review our strategies on how we can effectively coordinate our campaigns with our local communities and organisations?

Our Public Engagement work in Education points towards the need for communities to be supported in organising themselves so that they can employ “strategies for helping parents to improve their children’s attainment” (Manchester Metropolitan University, 2013, para. 3) and develop “approaches for getting parents more actively involved and influencing their child’s school provision” (para. 3). Our work in engaging with our communities needs to actively look at ways we can facilitate the building of their social and economic capital. The communities have been very clear about the help and support they need from us as a university. The challenge remains, as ever, how we can best meet those needs within the inevitable restrictions we ourselves have to work within. This chapter will unpack some of these common concerns voiced by many of our community partners.

Culture of low expectations

Abbott (2013a, p. 4) suggests that BAME and (white) working-class children suffer from the same

Narrative and analysis about black and minority children in education which would suggest or would infer that the failure is with them¹ ... [with] their youth culture ... their community; which is not interested in education, the failure lies with them, it is personal and cultural failure.

This narrative also seems to be echoed policymakers

Children living in deprived communities face a cultural barrier which is in many ways a bigger barrier than material poverty. It is the cultural barrier of low aspirations and scepticism about education, the feeling that education is by and for other people, and likely to let one down. (DCSF, 2009, p. 2)

This is a very interesting use of language from the DCSF (Department for Children School and Families) because it reveals a hidden narrative where Culture is indeed a site of contestation and Power. Questions around; to whose culture does the barrier belong? Are we talking about immigrant cultures? Are we talking about institutional cultures? How are these cultures mediated in their respective locations? How is Power (control) mediated through these cultures? These provocative questions seem to lie at the heart of the mainstream discourse about education but they remain unaddressed because there seems to be a focus on the superficial signifiers of cultural heritage that belies a tokenistic view of “multiculturalism”.² Abbott (2013a, p. 8) recognises an institutionalised exploration of cultural heritage (tokenistic multiculturalism) that takes BAME students “ultimately ... no-where”. In this mainstream cultural narrative, students are allowed to revel in their “steel bands” and “samosas” but they do not seem to be encouraged to explore some of the more authentic (and life changing) aspects of their cultural heritage that value education and high academic aspirations. To give a background to these deeper aspects of Afro-Caribbean cultural heritage, Abbott (2013a, p. 2) outlined the educational aspirations of the first Caribbean immigrants to the United Kingdom, where they “believed as an article of faith that for their children and for their grandchildren [life] would be better” with a good education and where many Caribbean immigrants who were educated in rudimentary rural facilities, upon leaving school at 14 years, could nevertheless read and write and even recite the romance poetry of Keats (as opposed to some British 11-year-old BAME children, many of whom are unable to read and write).

Abbott (2013a) intimates that in relation to the institutional academic expectations of BAME students, a collective amnesia of their Colonial educational heritage seems to have been enacted by large sections of the education profession, as characterised by Abbott’s observation of, “an underestimate of where they [in terms of their cultural heritage] come from” (p. 6). This is significant as multiculturalism (seemingly the only generic conceptual framework available within which to discuss alternative cultural narratives and their manifest signifiers³) in education seems only to want to cherry pick the superficial aspects of culture as signified by the “steel bands” and “samosas” without trying to understand the deeper, underlying and inherent cultural frameworks from which these elements come (which especially include complex Colonial narratives around education⁴). Abbott (2013a) notes that although the celebration of cultural signifiers have their place in a curriculum, undue focus on them does not empower subjects (students, in this case) because schools, as Abbott (2013a, p. 8) says “cannot tell me the GCSE levels of those children and how many of them go onto Higher Education”. So this institutional acknowledgement of culture actually serves to “[take] our children into a wholly separate track, which ultimately takes them no-where” (p. 8). It is this “normalisation”⁵ effect of Power that needs to be challenged because, if left unchecked, it will remain freely able to attest its acknowledgement of cultural heritage in the curriculum, without actually doing so in a way that empowers (in fact, it actively disempowers certain cohorts of it subjects), it will remain able to ask why there is a lack of engagement in education by the communities, then it will remain able to hold communities responsible by ascribing to them to the erection of “cultural barriers”. When the discourse is re-positioned in this context, Abbott’s (2013a, p. 4) contestation that “the education system has failed our children” begins to have a deeper resonance, where she implicitly locates the “cultural barrier” as having been erected by the institution itself, as it appears to excise any complexity and acknowledgement of (academic) aspiration from the notion of BAME cultural heritage.⁶ This will tend to result in communities indeed not wanting to engage with this disempowering form of multiculturalism that takes their children “ultimately nowhere”,⁷ as mentioned earlier in Community Reflections.

However, when disaggregating analyses of “cultural barriers” for BAME and white working-class children, interestingly, Demie and Lewis (2010) imply that the latter group suffers from low achievement because of a loss of “white culture” in comparison to other ethnic groups, although Nayak (2001) challenges the homogenous concept of “white culture”, as ethnicity and culture are malleable discursive articulations⁸ that are prone to fluctuation and nuance,Demie and Lewis (2010) do point towards an acknowledgement of the need for the building of cultural resilience and a knowledge of cultural heritage in order to improve white working-class students’ academic achievement, curiously, in a way that does not necessarily seem to be recognised for those with BAME heritages (unless “steel bands” and “samosas” are deemed sufficient for building cultural resilience and improving academic standards!).⁹ Abbott (2013a) agrees with other researchers who say that issues around structural and institutional inequalities are more significant than so-called community-erected “cultural barriers” (Rose, 1999; Gerwitz, 2001; Francis & Hey, 2009; Reay, 2009).¹⁰ Bauman (2005) goes further to suggest that within a neoliberal society individuals are positioned within economic frameworks that require them to display entrepreneurial citizenship (as defined by a “cultural norm”). This means that if individuals do not seem to fit into an institutional and meritocratic¹¹ “work ethic” consisting of “talent combined with hard work”, then they are automatically seen as being undeserving or as having a cultural deficit.¹²

So, if this “normalisation” of Power, as described earlier, is left unchecked for everyone who is disadvantaged by this “culture of low expectations”, then schools will continue to fall short of their 2006 statutory duty to promote community cohesion which requires them to “consider how wider links with the community contribute to pupils’ development in these areas” (GOV.UK, 2011), which means that Abbott’s (2013a, p. 7) characterisation of the institutional position, “how can we as teachers and higher education institutions be expected to counteract all the [social and community] problems ... .?” is all the more worrying because schools (and to a lesser extent higher education institutions through their widening participation agenda¹³) have a specific statutory duty to consider just that: how education can indeed “counteract all the [social and community] problems” by effectively connecting with their communities. This issue of agency¹⁴ is discussed below.

Community action

But I also have a message for the community and the message is this; that no-one in society is going to give you anything. You have to come together to take it and as you come together to take it, the point is not that you are begging charity. The point is not that you are begging people to be kind and Christian to you. The point is that you are asking for justice. (Abbott, 2013a, p. 9)

Abbott’s point, above, is intriguing in the context of programmes run by the government and charities to address this issue of “low expectation”. In Perry and Francis’s (2010) review, they found that the interventions that they studied were built on the “deficit” model where it was implicit that the individual lacked high aspirations and ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Making Education a Priority: An Overview
• 2  Alternative Education as Protest
• 3  Do Supplementary Schools Provide Holistic Learning That Is Able to Promote Cultural Identity?
• 4  Shoe Horning the Arts into Education; for Whose Benefit? Arts-Led Special Schools
• 5  The Great Debate? Free, Studio and Co-operative Schools
• 6  Where Do We Go from Here? Towards a Community-Led Approach to Education
• Index