Marguerite Anne Fillion Wilson

Radical democratic schooling on the ground: pedagogical ideals and realities in a Sudbury school

Sudbury schools, which originated in the USA in the 1960s, are radical alternatives to traditional public schooling that promote egalitarian relationships between children and adults. Given that the Sudbury model has been largely overlooked in educational anthropology, this paper presents findings from a 1.5-year critical ethnographic study of a Sudbury school in California. In analysing participant interactions within the schools ‘democratic’ decision-making group, the paper presents evidence of an informal power structure that privileged older age, male gender and greater experience over youth, female gender and novicehood in determining whose voices wielded power. In doing so, the article provides an illustrative example of how theoretically democratic settings are edited to meet realities on the ground.

Neoliberal contradictions in two private niches of educational ‘choice’

ABSTRACT This article brings together ethnographies of two privileged educational settings in the United States – a private school in California’s Central Valley following the progressivist Sudbury model, and an affluent New England boarding school’s summer enrichment program. Each of these institutions serves as an alternative to and/or extension of publicly accessible education institutions during a neoliberal era of marketization and growing educational inequality. By comparing findings from ethnographic studies of each institution, we find that both celebrate open access and socially responsible pedagogical values in ways that obscure mechanisms of exclusion and an entrenched individualist ideology. We discuss two particular contradictions that manifest in both settings: first, a discourse of openness and inclusivity that belies the ways in which access is mediated by constructions of who best ‘fits’ the special learning community; and second, an outspoken allegiance to socially engaged values of diversity and democracy that belies the ways in which these values are commodified and appropriated for students’ individual advantage(s). In comparing such sites, we argue for the importance of tracing the mechanisms of advantage in under-researched ‘niches’ of the dynamically shifting and unequally accessed neoliberal marketplace for educational opportunity.

Neoliberal ideology in a private Sudbury school

Educational researchers have called attention to how neoliberal ideology has profoundly and detrimentally influenced public education systems, but less attention has been paid to how neoliberalism influences private educational institutions. This article examines the influence of neoliberal ideology on education in the USA through an ethnographic case study of a private Sudbury school, Central Valley Sudbury School (CVSS), whose radical unschooling philosophy positions itself in an oppositional stance towards public schools, which it perceives to be hopelessly beyond repair. CVSS represents the permeation of neoliberal ideology in education through its very existence as a private school in the growing alternative education industry. While Sudbury practitioners positioned themselves in opposition to the neoliberal policies and practices of public schools, at the micro-level of routine interaction at CVSS, neoliberalism presented itself through discourses of meritocracy and choice, individual autonomy, entrepreneurship, and education as a private good. Such a contradiction reveals that there may be more congruence between radical unschooling philosophies and neoliberal rationality than would first appear. The article contributes additional understanding to how schools—both public and private—reproduce key ideologies of the society in which they are embedded.

A Critical Ethnographic Approach to Transforming Norms of Whiteness in Marginalized Parents’ Engagement and Activism in Schools

Abstract While scholars recognize that parent engagement in children’s education is beneficial, much of the normative parent involvement literature rests on the assumption that marginalized parents of color must be taught white middle-class norms of conduct in order to engage with the school system. In this chapter, we describe the ways our critical ethnographic implementation and analysis of the Parent Mentor Program – a parent engagement project in a small urban school district in Central New York – re-envisions parent engagement in three interrelated ways. First, we argue that the project is race-, class-, gender-, and power-conscious, drawing on the interrelated theoretical frames of Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies. Second, we argue that the program and research are unique in utilizing the toolkit of critical ethnography to not merely describe, but also to intervene in educational inequity. Third, we argue that the program has a more holistic goal than much of the parent engagement literature, as it seeks to connect parent engagement and activism with the larger antiracist goal of using restorative justice strategies to disrupt the disproportionate disciplining of Black students. Focusing on critical ethnographic methods in practice, we analyze the shifting positionalities of a multiracial research team as we grappled with methodological dilemmas in the first three years of the program. We document how we balanced the goals of introducing a race-conscious framework and catalyzing critical consciousness with the realities of constantly renegotiating entry in a school district characterized by colorblindness and colormuteness.

CONSTRUCTING CHILDHOOD AND TEACHER AUTHORITY IN A WALDORF DAYCARE

Waldorf education, an alternative pedagogy imported to the USA from Germany in 1921, is rarely researched yet popularly conceptualized as a space of unusual educational freedom and creativity. However, viewed systematically through the lens of critical ethnography and discourse analysis, the Waldorf approach is quite the opposite, governed by rigid routines and adult control of childrens bodies, activities, and language. Drawing upon the critical sociology of childhood and combining observational and interview data from a nine-month ethnography, I argue that Waldorf educations central tenet of ‘protecting childhood’ is fundamentally about adult control and a deficit notion of young children. Specifically, I use critical discourse analysis to illuminate how pronominal use in the teachers discourse serves to justify her authority and deficit constructions of child development. The article concludes by considering the ways Waldorf education might be made more egalitarian by incorporating multiple conceptions of child development in its pedagogical practice.

Race and the politics of educational exclusion: explaining the persistence of disproportionate disciplinary practices in an urban school district

ABSTRACT Educational research has established a link between zero tolerance disciplinary policies and increases in racial disproportionality in suspensions and expulsions of students of color. This article reports on a critical ethnography of Rivertown, a school district with urban characteristics, where we have been working with parents of color whose children are subjected to exclusionary discipline. Using the framework of Critical Race Theory in education, specifically Derrick Bells interest-convergence principle, we argue that several interrelated barriers prevent movement toward racial equity: a culture of colorblindness and white fragility that silences race talk; contested definitions of the problem that obfuscate its racialized nature; and the persistence of a zero tolerance framework even with the implementation of a restorative justice pilot. We conclude by discussing our ongoing strategies for creating interest-convergence between White power-holders and communities of color in Rivertown.

Keeping Black Children Pushed Into, Not Pushed Out of, Classrooms: Developing a Race-Conscious Parent Engagement Project:

Black students in prekindergarten through Grade 12 (P-12) schools across the United States experience persistent educational disparities involving disproportionate disciplinary practices. This research study, using a qualitative methodological approach, describes and analyzes the impact of the Parent Mentor Program, which brings together Black parents, community members, school district personnel and university researchers working together to implement a race-conscious parent engagement project to transform the experiences of Black parents and Black children in the school district. Themes that emerged from the qualitative narratives include Black parents moving from marginalized outsiders to feeling accepted, teachers’ perspectives on the impact of the program, and the final theme—pushing kids into, not out of the classroom—which delineates the critical role of Black parents in addressing pervasive racialized disciplinary practices within school systems. Findings provide support for this culturally responsive innovative parent engagement program with Black parents based on a model that does not subscribe to a traditional framework of race neutrality and colorblindness situated in educational systems. This program instead proposes a race-conscious parent engagement model.

Public borders, private crossings: Anthropological approaches to neoliberalism in US educational policy and spaces

Educational policies across the globe reflect the ascendancy of neoliberalism. According to neoliberalism, the market represents a superior mechanism to govern (Peters, 2012), and thus, the role of the state is to enable the agency of the market (Rose, 1999). In the United States, the federal report A Nation at Risk (1983) formalized the direct influence of a neoliberal rationality on the formation of educational policies. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2001) and The Race to the Top (2010) represent successive assertions of market values on educational reform. At the same time, there is a fundamental contradiction within neoliberal logic: while the state is to refrain from interfering in the market, it must simultaneously intervene to govern schools (Hursh, 2005). Based on these trends, the articles in this special issue highlight critical tensions between public versus private values, practices, and discourses that emerge from the proliferation of a neoliberal logic into the educational sphere. In different ways, each of these articles map out a unique facet of neoliberalism in education to complicate the often totalizing critiques of market-based logics in order to demonstrate the complex ways that people rearticulate and resist education policy in an era of neoliberal ascendancy.

Problematizing child-centeredness: Discourses of control in Waldorf education

Contributing to recent work in the critical sociology of childhood, this article presents an ethnographic and discursive analysis of the multitude of cultural meanings associated with child-centere...