Session Information
05 SES 06 A, Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education
Paper Session
Contribution
In Denmark public schools are comprehensive and most schools have had the children for ten years and kept them in the same class with the same teachers in the main subjects through primary and lower secondary school. This structure has been very significant in the dominant understanding of the Danish comprehensive school as a place where children of all social classes meet. During the last few years, several municipalities have restructured their public schools by merging schools into one large school with subdivisions. This is typically done with economic arguments. Some of these large schools are then divided so that the lower secondary pupils are moved to a department of their own, often done with arguments of large-scale advantages and their possibilities of choice for pupils in regard to subjects and ways of learning. An increasing number of schools are even reorganized with choice as primary organizing principle for the lower secondary years by introducing tracks with profiles such as Science, Sports and Health, Art & Performance and International but importantly, supposedly with the same academic level. When pupils at these tracked schools reach lower secondary they are asked to choose the track they desire the most from the ones the school offers. This toned but same level tracking has been recommended in policy documents to regain or revive desire to learn and prevent school disaffection. Creativity is called upon in schools’ supply of tracks as a policy document recommends ‘only limit is imagination’ (Skolens Rejsehold 2010). In 2013 a big national school reform emphasized its better possibilities for municipalities to work with tracks in lower secondary school (Undervisningsministeriet 2013).
The possibilities of tracking (for pupils as well as schools) are an example of one side of the Danish school reform which has been analyzed as governing through potentiality. A form of governing where it is kept open what a school, teaching and a teacher is (Pors 2014). On the other hand the past 10-15 years have seen a very strong emphasis on tests and standards internationally as well as in Denmark and the 2013 school reform introduces actual accountability-governing for the first time in Denmark. Such forms of accountability governing has been shown to work as a way pupils and parents can act as consumers in an education market, where schools are also competing for them by trying to do well on these measurable performance standards – and these markets have been shown to increase separate ways for different social groups (e.g. Ball 2003; Callewaert & Lindblad 2004).
The aim of the paper is first to show how schools with profiled tracks make affective transitions as they work to shape and reshape pupils’ desires to learn, and second to show how a focus on affect evolves understanding of how social class and inequality work in school today with new forms of governance with more choice and accountability.
Both the work of schools at the local level to shape and reshape desires to learn as well as the workings of class inequality is understood as entangled in the marketization of the school. The theoretical framework draws on sociology about the governing of education systems (e.g. Archer 1979) and class (Bourdieusian) and contributions from the ‘affective turn’ about ‘affective economies’ (Ahmed 2004) and affect and class (e.g. Skeggs & Wood 2012). The affect approach to class in school is especially developed through a rethinking of Skeggs & Woods study of viewers’ reactions to reality television with a revision of their approach into an educational context.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ahmed, S. (2004): The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh Univ. Press/ Routledge. Archer, M. S. (1979): Social Origins of Educational Systems. Sage Ball, Stephen J. (2003): Class Strategies and the Education Market. The middle classes and social advantage. RoutledgeFalmer Taylor & Francis Group. Callewaert, G. og Lindblad, S. (2004): Introducing Teacher Education under Restructuring, A contribution to the symposium at the EERA meeting 2004 Pors, J. (2014): Mellemrummets potentiale. Genopfindelser af folkeskolen efter reformen. [The potential of the inbetween. Reinventions of the common school after the reform] In: Unge Pædagoger, nr. 1. Skeggs, B. & Wood, H. (2012): Reacting to Reality Television – Performance, Audience and Value. Routledge Skolens Rejsehold (2010): Rapport A: Fremtidens folkeskole – én af verdens bedste. Anbefalinger fra Skolens rejsehold [Report A: The school of the future – one of the world’s best. Recommendations from the traveling team of the school]. Styrelsen for Evaluering og Kvalitetsudvikling af Folkeskolen (Skolestyrelsen). Undervisningsministeriet (2013). Aftale mellem regeringen (Socialdemokraterne, Radikale Venstre og Socialistisk Folkeparti), Venstre og Dansk Folkeparti om et fagligt løft af folkeskolen [Agreement between the Government (Social Democrats, Danish Social Liberal Party and Socialist People’s Party], Left and The Danish People's Party about an academic improvement of the Public School).
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