Joan Forbes

Under-stated powerhouses: Scottish independent schools, their characteristics and their capitals

This paper presents a study from the Scottish Independent School Project (SISP). The first part of the paper provides an overview of the characteristics of Scottish independent schools (e.g. location, structure, fees) with the aim of distinguishing the different orientations of schools in the sector. The second and main part of the paper is a discourse-based analysis of the website texts of three case-study schools to show how schools discursively construct themselves and their ‘assumptive worlds’ (Ball, 2001). We explore what these schools take for granted by their use of language, and the nature of their communication with potential parents and pupils. The analytic of social capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 2000) and following Bourdieu, other capitals (e.g. cultural, national, emotional) are used to examine the discourses accepted, appropriated and deployed by the schools and the extent to which they advance the interests of specific social groups.

Assured Optimism in a Scottish Girls' School: Habitus and the (Re)production of Global Privilege.

This paper examines how high levels of social–cultural connectedness and academic excellence, inflected by gender and social class, constitute a particular school habitus of ‘assured optimism’ at an elite Scottish girls’ school. In Bourdieuian terms, Dalrymple is a ‘forcing ground’ for the ‘intense cultivation’ of a particular privileging habitus. The paper analyses the ‘institutional’ habitus of this particular private girls’ school, drawing on headteacher interviews and student survey and focus group data, and relevant documents. The school is currently re-positioning itself to educate girls for global professional futures through the production of a desired habitus and certain spatio-temporalities.

Reflexivity in professional doctoral research

A wide number of doctoral programmes are now available to students in education and each of these programmes is underpinned by particular pedagogical norms and particular assumptions in relation to knowledge and learning. Using post‐structuralist thinking, this paper explores the effects of the specific doctoral technologies of decision‐making, participative learning and reflexivity in shifting previous identities. Introducing and re‐examining reflexive data which was initially gathered and analysed within professional doctorate research the paper illustrates how reflexivity in writing might be used as an active attempt to think differently and make permeable hitherto taken for granted conceptualizations. It is suggested that doctoral learning of this kind provides new tools for thinking and new discursive resources for both thinking about and living out identities.

‘Capitalizing on sport’: sport, physical education and multiple capitals in Scottish independent schools

This paper draws on a research study into the existence and use of different forms of capital – including social, cultural and physical capital – in three independent schools in Scotland. We were interested in understanding how these forms of capital work to produce and reproduce advantage and privilege. Analysis is framed by a multiple capitals approach drawing on and developing the work of Putnam and especially Bourdieu. We suggest that sport plays a role with important effects for strong bonding and for the production of symbolic capital in the form of branding by each school.

Slippage and/or symbolism: gender, policy and educational governance in Scotland and Sweden

This article provides an overview and analysis of the relationship between gender, educational policy, and governance in Scotland and Sweden and the two countries’ response to European Union and global legislative and policy change. In Scotland, gender is mainly invisible in recent policies on inclusion, achievement beyond academic attainment, and the idealisation of the child. Gender is thus marginalised within a range of factors contributing to social in/equality. In Sweden, in contrast, gender has higher visibility in policy and governance as both an indicator of democracy and a means of preserving social democratic consensus and prosperity. However, recently its privileged position has come under attack. We draw on social capital, gender, and policy theory to analyse the range of influences on gender and educational governance in the two countries including that of the social capital of organised feminism.

Social Capital Theory: A Cross-Cutting Analytic for Teacher/Therapist Work in Integrating Children's Services?.

Reviewing relevant policy, this article argues that the current ‘integration interlude’ is concerned with reformation of work relations to create new forms of ‘social capital’. The conceptual framework of social capital has been used by government policy-makers and academic researchers to examine different types, configurations and qualities of relationships, including professional relations, and how these may function as resources. Focusing on the co-work of teachers and speech and language therapists, this analysis introduces social capital as a means of understanding the impact of integrating children’s services on professional practitioner groups and across agencies. Social capital theory is compared to alternative theoretical perspectives such as systems and discourse theories and explored as an analytic offering a multi-level typology and conceptual framework for understanding the effects of policy and governance on interprofessional working and relationships. A previous application of social capital theory in a literature review is introduced and analysed, and instances of the additionality provided by a social capital analysis is offered. The article concludes that amongst the effects of current policy to redesign children’s services are the reconstruction of professionals’ knowledge/s and practices, so it is essential that such policy processes that have complex and far-reaching effects are transparent and coherent. It is also important that new social capital relations in children’s services are produced by groups representative of all involved, importantly including those practitioner groups charged in policy to work differently together in future integrated services.

Teacher/therapist collaboration policy: an analysis

This paper addresses and analyses changing notions of professionalism arising from recent Scottish policy documents. Attention is given to the concepts of ‘policy’ and ‘professional’. It is argued that the effects of statements in the documents are differentiated and should be set within a complex model of the interplay of the individual professional’s responses with government policy. It is suggested that individual practitioners should seek to make personal sense of policy.

Types of social capital: tools to explore service integration?

This paper opens with an introduction to the current Scottish legislation and policy context relating to the integration of children’s services. It offers the view that integrated service policy is framed by the concept of social capital and the notion of social capital building and goes on to introduce the concepts of types of social capital as tools with which to examine professional networks and identities. The article sets policy documentation concerning the specific teacher and speech and language therapist working relation within wider Scottish policy that seeks better integrated children’s services through the roll‐out of the Integrated Community Schools (ICS) programme. Finally, the paper identifies some of the difficulties inherent in ICS transformations, and suggests that practitioners and their leaders and managers need new conceptual tools such as types of social capital with which to examine professional connections if they are to change children’s services and achieve the policy goals of social justice and inclusion.

Grappling with collaboration: would opening up the research ‘base’ help?

Richard Rose, writing in this journal in his role as Research Section Editor (BJSE, Volume 29, Number 1), argued that teachers should learn to do research in collaboration with other professionals, as part of a drive to make teaching a ‘research-based profession’. In this article, Joan Forbes, Senior Lecturer in Educational Studies in the Faculty of Education at the University of Aberdeen, explores this idea in greater depth from her perspective as course leader for an MEd module on inter-agency collaboration. She proposes that recommendations for collaboration to support children with language and communication disorders do not attend to the difficulties involved between professionals from different backgrounds who use different discourses and draw upon different research evidence as a basis for practice. Her paper draws on ‘postmodern’ research approaches and Michael Foucaults views of ‘discourse’ to examine a variety of theoretical perspectives previously applied to collaboration. It argues for the value of further theoretical diversity and methodological plurality and introduces discourse analysis as a tool for helping to understand the notion of collaboration. At the end of her challenging and intriguing paper, Joan Forbes offers some suggestions concerning the value of ‘new’ questioning kinds of analysis.

Elite School Capitals and Girls’ Schooling: Understanding the (Re)production of Privilege through a Habitus of ‘Assuredness’

This chapter examines the (re)production of privilege at Marischal (a pseudonym), an elite school for the education of girls in Scotland. Of specific interest are the socio-material effects of relations in this school that enable particular possibilities for the individual agency of its girls. We uncover and explore the specific socio-material conditions of possibility that flow from schooling circumstances which create a particular set of physical—corporeal, social and intellectual school socio-spatial relations that are for most girls at Marischal underpinned by prior home conditions of economic and social surety (Forbes & Weiner, 2012, 2013b).