One of the greatest enduring challenges facing education internationally is the chronic problem of underachievement linked to child poverty. This is a widespread issue across much of Europe, although the extent of child poverty and the degree to which it impacts on school achievement vary substantially.
The correlation is not disputed but the causes and potential remedies are hotly contested. Historically the most common explanations have been forms of deficit ‘blame the victim’ beliefs - innate in/ability, language deficit, culture of poverty, low aspirations (Valencia 2010; Smyth and Wrigley 2013).
In recent decades, when neoliberal economic and social policy has led to increasing economic polarisation, it has been a convenient move for politicians in various countries to deflect responsibility from macro-level political decisions onto families but also onto schools and teachers. Consequently, in high stakes regimes such as England (as in the US and Australia), we see attempts to blame teachers for the relatively low attainment of disadvantaged young people. Rather than replacing the earlier deficit explanations which targeted families and communities, this attempt to shift the blame to teachers sits alongside them; in the years of Austerity politics, it now operates within wider discourses of derision directed at families reliant on welfare benefits (Jones 2011). In at least some European countries, White indigenous families subsisting in poverty have become subject to a similar stigma as minority ethnic families.
Schools have been left with diminished intellectual and professional resources to deal with this. The impact of the School Effectiveness paradigm and ‘policy by numbers’ (Lingard et al 2012) reduces complex lives and identities to labels such as ‘white British male, free school meals entitlement’. The dominant School Improvement paradigm eschews pedagogical and sociological theory whilst privileging managerial processes, and accepts without question that the aim of educational change is to optimise attainment statistics (Wrigley 2003). The official framing of social justice reduces the complexities of redistribution, recognition and participation (Fraser 2000) to a straightforward demand to ‘narrow the gap’. High stakes assessment and evaluation exaggerate the standisation of a National Curriculum, narrowing the range of classroom practices and formalising pedagogy into a set of instructional techniques (Lingard 2007). Such standardisation combines with established patterns to produce new forms of ‘pedagogies of poverty’ (Haberman 2010) which preclude a pedagogical engagement with young people’s lives. Again, this varies between different European countries – a question which hopefully will be discussed by participants at the symposium.
Nevertheless, within this narrowing policy space, some educators have continued to pursue pedagogies which seek to connect school learning with students’ lifeworlds (eg Wrigley et al eds 2012). In resistance to the mechanisms of selective filtering and mis-recognition associated with ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1997/1979), these teachers tap into the students ‘funds of knowledge’ (Gonzalez et al 2005), activating ‘virtual schoolbags’ (Thomson 2006).
The papers in this symposium will introduce (a) research methods (ethnography and practitioner research) which shed light on assets which often lie hidden from official view in extended families and communities; (b) pedagogical approaches which open up students’ experiences as an object of study, enabling students to reflect, theorise and reconsider future possibilities.
