The Promotion of Education introduces critical cultural social marketing, an approach that builds on the discipline of social marketing, adapting these techniques for use in the promotion of educational futures in communities and places where there is educational disadvantage. Taking a critical cultural social marketing approach to promoting education involves bringing an engaged attitude of critique together with engaged respect and awareness of the cultural. Practically, this means looking at education and learning in ways that privileges the cultural. To do this brings a heightened awareness of the cultural and of diverse knowledges, experiences and practices of learning.
A generative way to think about critique can be drawn from the point made by Foucault, that critique is “the art of not being governed like that and at that cost” (1997, p. 29). Working with critique is beneficial as this provides a way to critically think through the complexity of processes that impact how people relate to contemporary institutional education (Harwood & Rasmussen, 2013). We refer to institutional and non-institutional learning (as opposed to formal and informal). This emphasises the institutional nature of schooling and calls our attention to institutional practices. At the heart of this approach, then, is a commitment to careful and sustained attention that involves a critical view and an emphasis on the cultural.
As we will outline, activity that engages with critique and the cultural are crucial when we turn to the challenge of promoting education. The promotion of education is an important practice to engage in, yet is usually confused with the efforts to market education. Marketing brings to mind glossy images and advertising that compete in the education marketplace to sell schools or universities to consumers. Throughout this book we are not referring to this type of selling of educational institutions or of education.
When we are talking about the promotion of education, we are referring to the efforts to promote the ideas and the cultural practices of learning and education. Turning to a dictionary definition, we use the word ‘promotion’ in the sense of “The action of helping forward; the fact or state of being helped forward; furtherance, advancement, encouragement” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2018). At the same time, by drawing on social marketing, we bring this ‘action of helping education forward’ together with a second meaning for promotion, “The publicizing of a product, organization, or venture so as to increase sales or public awareness” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2018), with our focus on public awareness (as opposed to ‘sales’).
In this book the promotion of education is based on the premise that education requires ‘the action of helping forward’. This way of thinking contrasts with beliefs that cast certain groups of people as either not involved in education or learning, and as in need of remedial help. Differing from such beliefs, this starting point makes the case that it is education that needs promotion. Motivated by the action of ‘helping forward’, is not to imply that, overarchingly education helps others forward—but rather that education too needs assistance in the form of promotion for it to be helped forward. Relying on the assumption that always or intrinsically education ‘helps others forward’, cajoles us to overlook that education requires significant assistance to actually engage and involve; it is not a static magnet that enigmatically draws those who value it into its fold. Indeed, as we will outline, in the case of institutionally based education such as schools, there are many who value education. At the same time, some of these people are hesitant and wary of the very institutions that are charged with the provision of educational training and qualifications in contemporary society.
Widening Participation in Higher Education
Considerable effort continues to be made in many countries across the world to widen participation in university education for those who are described as ‘non-traditional students’ (Shah, Bennett, & Southgate, 2016; Shah & Whiteford, 2017). ‘Non-traditional students’ is a term used to describe those who are under-represented in higher education, which in a world perspective is inclusive of people from low socio-economic status (LSES) backgrounds, first in family students, Indigenous people , people with disabilities and people from ethnic minorities (Shah et al., 2016; Shah & Whiteford, 2017). Socio-economic status has been shown to be one of the strongest predictors of educational outcomes (Bradley, Noonan, Nugent, & Scales, 2008; Currie, 2009), and poor university attendance by people from low socio-economic status backgrounds from a range of cultural backgrounds is a problem faced by numerous countries worldwide (Lehmann, 2009; Shavitt & Blossfield, 1993).
People who ‘fail’ in educational terms often do so for practical reasons: reasons that relate to relationships between class, gender, ethnicity, geography, material needs and experience. There are also dimensions of this experience of ‘failure’, cultural disengagement and educational disadvantage that can be read as resistance to governmental imperatives. Yet there is much more to disenfranchisement from education.
Those who are disconnected, marginalised or disenfranchised from education are all too frequently believed to not ‘value’ education. Nothing however, can be further from the truth. Simply not attending institutional education does not equate to not valuing education . The very idea that some people don’t value education means that systems of institutional education are, whether it be early childhood, primary school, secondary school or higher education , literally missing the point. Reasons for not attending, or not participating, are, as numerous studies in the sociology of education demonstrate, complex (Ball, Davies, David, & Reay, 2002; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Reay, 1995; Slee, 1994; Smyth, 2004).
Promoting Education?
Little is known about how to promote education, and even less about how to promote it to those who are not involved in higher education. Examples of work in this space includes the projects on educational success and poverty alleviation supported by the Lucie and André Chagnon Foundation, Quebec, Canada (https://fondationchagnon.org/en/index.aspx). Another example is the Australian research commissioned to develop a social marketing strategy targeting universities to address participation in higher education by low socio-economic students (12–18 years), families and communities (Russell-Bennet, Drenan, & Raciti, 2016). The project website (https://research.qut.edu.au/servicesocialmarketing/research-projects/widening-participation-in-the-tertiary-education-sector/) includes reports on this work as well as hyperlinks to educator, parent and student persona quizzes.
Yet it seems to be the case that, despite proposals to create new ways to promote higher education , contemporary institutional education makes an extraordinary assumption; that education itself is not in need of promotion. When we look at lessons from relatively recent Western history, we can see that it was readily recognised that something had to be done to encourage people to get involved in schooling. In the nineteenth century for example, effort was made to promote the education of the poor. See for instance the work in the early 1800s for promoting the education of the poor in Ireland (Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland, 1820). This serves as a reminder that it wasn’t always assumed that education didn’t require consideration of its promotion.
Many people ‘sit outside’ the current reaches of widening participation initiatives, which tend to be la...