Greg Vass

Education policy as numbers: Data categories and two Australian cases of misrecognition

While numbers, data and statistics have been part of the bureaucracy since the emergence of the nation state, the paper argues that the governance turn has seen the enhancement of the significance of numbers in policy. The policy as numbers phenomenon is exemplified through two Australian cases in education policy, linked to the national schooling reform agenda. The first case deals with the category of students called Language Backgrounds Other than English (LBOTE) in Australian schooling policy – students with LBOTE. The second deals with the ‘closing the gap’ approach to Indigenous schooling. The LBOTE case demonstrates an attempt at recognition, but one that fails to create a category useful for policy-makers and teachers in relation to the language needs of Australian students. The Indigenous case of policy misrecognition confirms Gillborn’s analysis of gap talk and its effects; a focus on closing the gap, as with the new politics of recognition, elides structural inequalities and the historical effects of colonisation. With this case, there is a misrecognition that denies Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and cultural rights. The contribution of the paper to policy sociology is twofold: first in showing how ostensive politics of recognition can work as misrecognition with the potential to deny redistribution and secondly that we need to be aware of the socially constructed nature of categories that underpin contemporary policy as numbers and evidence-based policy.

Everyday Race-Making Pedagogies in the Classroom.

In this paper I examine the ‘pedagogies of positioning’ performatively played out within the Australian high school classrooms I observed. The study aimed to develop a better understanding of how teachers pedagogically racialise the classroom in and through discursive encounters with students. The social analysis of these data accepts that teachers and students (and the researcher) performatively do race in ways that locate, construct, and negotiate racialised identities and relationships. A collection of ‘chronicles’ are presented that help reveal the ‘everyday’ discursive practices of both teachers and students that continue to rely on racially stereotypical social scripts that sustain discriminatory racialised hierarchies. The article aims to (re)emphasise why the classroom remains a valuable location to interrupt the reiterative power of Whiteness, in addition to gesturing to potential ways forward with opening up alternative ‘lines of flight’ for young learners.

Shunted across the tracks? Autoethnography, education research, and my whiteness

Abstract Likening education to the railway helped reconceptualise my understanding of social justice and contributed to my research on race-making in the classroom. Education and the railway are similar in how they underpin experiences, mobilities, opportunities and limitations in life. For example, boarding a train makes a range of destinations available, but these are limited to where the tracks extend. Similarly, education for many so-called ‘marginalised’ students, is likewise, limiting. Both rail and education require access and mastery of particular knowledges and practices. Then there are costs, with the currency of some students opening up more diverse and far reaching destinations. For people with/out the ‘right’ capital then, train travel – like education – can be limiting or privileging. This paper presents a creative account of the shunting I experienced in coming to (re)locate myself in the education system, an undertaking that was part of a critical race insider autoethnographic study.

Preparing for Culturally Responsive Schooling: Initial Teacher Educators Into the Fray

In Australia, schools are experiencing increasing cultural diversity, alongside of nationalizing assessment and curricular and professional standards. It is raising concerns regarding the pace of systemic reform and sector wide professional renewal. Culturally responsive schooling practices may be helpful at this time because it locates the experiences of learners as powerfully influencing engagement and achievement. This article reports on “The culturally responsive schooling project,” a study focused on postgraduate students as they prepared for, undertook, and reflected on practicum experiences. Participants identified three barriers that impacted on their culturally responsive efforts: mentors encouraging limited and limiting curricula, pedagogic and assessment practices; mentors communicating resistance to doing things differently or valuing cultural responsiveness; and a fearful awareness of being evaluated by their mentors. The ambition of this discussion then is to encourage a rethink of the interconnections between teacher education, school leadership, and inservice professional development.

The relationality of race in education research

This edited collection examines the ways in which the local and global are key to understanding race and racism in the intersectional context of contemporary education. Analysing a broad range of examples, it highlights how race and racism is a relational phenomenon, that interconnects local, national and global contexts and ideas. The current educational climate is subject to global influences and the effects of conservative, hyper-nationalist politics and neoliberal economic rationalising in local settings that are creating new formations of race and racism. While focused predominantly on Australia and southern world or settler colonial contexts, the book aims to constructively contribute to broader emerging research and debates about race and education. Through the adoption of a relational framing, it draws the Australian context into the global conversation about race and racism in education in ways that challenge and test current understandings of the operation of race and racism in contemporary social and educational spaces. Importantly, it also pushes debates about race and racism in education and research to the foreground in Australia where such debates are typically dismissed or cursorily engaged. The book will guide readers as they navigate issues of race in education research and practice, and its chapters will serve as provocations designed to assist in critically understanding this challenging field. It reaches beyond education scholarship, as concerns to do with race remain intertwined with wider social justice issues such as access to housing, health, social/economic mobility, and political representation.

Getting inside the insider researcher: does race-symmetry help or hinder research?

This article engages with methodological concerns connected to insider education research and the ‘race-symmetry’ shared between the researcher and teacher participants. To do this, race critical reflexive strategies are utilized to show how and why this practice productively contributed to the knowledge about race making constructed in my study, a research process I describe as getting inside my insiderness. However, these reflexive practices also helped me to develop a deeper awareness of the potential for what I now describe as White shadows to infiltrate research of this type. The conceptualization of White shadows is a useful tool to describe research practices that silence or deflect attention away from issues connected to race, and hence, White shadows help expose concerns about the potential for Whiteness to remain protected by research. There are two interconnected aims of this paper. First, to illustrate the sort of race reflexive practices called for, and in doing so, to demonstrate why they are valuable and helpful in (educational) research. Second, I hope to encourage a rethink of the insider–outsider relationship that typifies ethnographic research by shifting attention to explore the inside of insider research.

Social justice and race critical education research

‘Consider, for example, educators’ and educational researchers’ concerns with assimilation, civilization, vocational training, IQ, poverty, cultural difference, remedial education, school readiness, achievement gaps, accountability, and standardization – all of these conversations were and still are intimately connected to race and racism regardless of whether we name them as such’ (Brayboy, Castagno, & Maughan, 2007, p. 159).

Reimagining Lines of Flight in Schooling for Indigenous Students in Australia

The challenge for education and educational research to ensure the cultural confidence of peoples and communities who have experienced protracted oppression and marginalization remains to be satisfactorily negotiated. Educational research has traditionally been framed by the ontological and epistemological assumptions of global north theory and theorists (Appadurai 2001), rather than by what might be seen as southern theory (Connell 2008), that is, knowledge produced outside the global north hegemony in what is typically seen as the margins. Indeed, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, a well-known Maori academic, has argued that the word research “is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (1999, 1). As research academics positioned by such northern theory as well as indigenous perceptions of the historical linkages between research and colonization, research and the othering of indigenous peoples, we recognize, the significance of our positionalities to the work we attempt reflexively to do. We return to this matter later in the chapter. While this is dangerous terrain for us, it is a necessary discomfort, a form of intellectual displacement in Edward Said’s (2000) terms, which might assist in contributing to advancing knowledge and debates.

Book review: Educational equality

The new edition of Educational Equality provides a concise and easy-to-read exploration of key concerns linked with the ongoing effects of educational policy and practices that on the one hand aspire to promote socially just outcomes from education, yet concurrently appear to protect and serve the interests of a powerful (White) majority. A revamped essay from Harry Brighouse is the centre-piece of the book, with brief responses from Kenneth Howe and James Tooley offering useful critiques that reveal the complexity of challenges that underpin the philosophical and practical development of genuine equality within education. Graham Haydon, the series editor, provides both an introduction and an afterword that helps with clearly mapping out the central arguments that tie the debates together. Unfortunately, the size and scope of the book do not allow for the responses from Howe or Tooley to elaborate on their own arguments in any depth, with their sections largely confined to drawing attention to what they see as limitations of Brighouse’s line of reasoning. While the authors direct the majority of their attention to considering and comparing the United States with the United Kingdom, in light of the close ties and influence that these settings have within Australia, there is much of interest to be drawn from these essays for those concerned with social justice in education within this or other similar contexts. The recent “Education Revolution” from the Labor government has seen the introduction of the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy, the inauguration of the My School website, the commitment to Closing the Gap (2009), and movement towards a national curriculum (to name just a few). These initiatives can be viewed as associated with broader global shifts towards emphasis on high-stakes testing, accountabilities, and improving equality within education. Drawing on some of the arguments and concerns raised within Educational Equality can help with illuminating critiques that seek to explain why referring to this raft of initiatives as a “revolution” may be somewhat of an overstatement. In this way, one of the primary contributions that this book potentially can make within contemporary educational debates in Australia, for example, is to encourage a greater concern with the effects arising from the so-called “education revolution” and the potentially negative impact that these initiatives may in fact create. With regards to the book itself, as the title suggests, it takes as its focus the philosophical, policy and practical challenges encountered in the pursuit of developing an educational system that fosters, protects and promotes educational equality in some form. All of the authors offer an interpretation of how to approach conceptually unpacking this notion. Of concern to me is the absence of any serious consideration of the notion of equity in education. In this sense, while it is widely acknowledged, for example, that the socio-economic, racial, linguistic or physical background of students impacts on educational engagement and outcomes, the notion of equality as posited in this book is framed in terms of how to “best” approach compensating for the deficit that a student may arrive at the school with. This approach resonates with the recent critique of “inclusion discourse” by Bourke (2009), who worries that these types of intervention International Journal of Disability, Development and Education Vol. 58, No. 4, December 2011, 417–419

Seven seasons in Aurukun: my unforgettable time at a remote Aboriginal school

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