A thousand tiny pluralities: Children engaging ethics and injustice amid debates on school futures in Ireland

Author(s):

Karl Kitching(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

07 SES 01 B, Children and Youth Voices on Inclusion and (In)justice

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-22

13:15-14:45

Room:

W3.17

Chair:

Francesca Gobbo

Contribution

The key research question for this paper is: "How can we understand children's engagement with ethics and social justice at school, and what implications does this have for forging socially just school futures and childhoods in contemporary, globalised Ireland?"

The paper involves in-depth conceptual and empirical analysis. The paper is situated within the intensification of public and political debate about pluralism and pro-Catholic discrimination in state-funded primary schools. Over 90% of state-funded primary schools are run by Catholic patrons. Irish education policy discourse has begun to offer the promise of a secular, pluralist school future, not by questioning the terms of the colonial, Catholic-favouring school patronage model, but by encouraging parents to choose alternative school patrons (such as the secular, equality-based Educate Together model) in areas of population growth. This approach, while appearing to draw on broader European secularist ideals of 'parental choice' and 'human rights' (Coolahan et al. 2012), actually leaves the Catholic ownership and management of the majority of existing schools intact. Futhermore, statutory intercultural guidelines issued in the past decade have not meaningfully tackled the majority Catholic nature of the system.

It is asserted that current Irish statutory approaches to school culture and change denote a form of liberal pluralism common in European intercultural education policy (Todd 2011) that elides the multiply differing dis/advantages, desires, tempos and spaces of children’s and adult’s lives. Drawing primarily on Deleuzian thinking, I argue against the implicitly hierarchical dichotomies (e.g. Catholic/Atheist) and moral essentialism that Irish and European liberal pluralism fails to challenge. Based on a qualitative study primarily with children, I put forward a political ethic of plurality as radically emergent in lived, complex and unruly relations of Life/existence. I draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983; 1987) radical political work on ‘becomings’ to seriously engage, rather than attempt to control or shut down the joyous, unremarkable and difficult aspects of childhood’s multiple desires, expressions and exclusions.

'Becomings' take place beyond the confines of pre-defined (conservative, liberal or even ‘radical’ pluralist) moralities and linear developmentalist notions of childhood. I analyse two case studies of children’s experiences of schooling in terms of their religious and non-religious encounters, but also in terms of multiplicities of (a) classed, gendered and generationed exclusions and desires and (b) human and non-human forces in a technologically advanced, consumerist world.

First, I analyse the ethico-political potential of 'Lily', a Catholic white Irish working class girl attending a large town Catholic school, to alter classed and gendered religious and consumer norms that offer her contradictory messages about ‘growing up’, ‘being good’ and ‘looking good’. I then examine 'Cormac's' case, a non-religious boy attending a rural Catholic school, as becoming with images (microphones, stand-up comedy), and modes of embodied expression (vampire, alien, funny faces) to alter or reconceptualise the religiously essentialised, adult-led space of the local Catholic church. The analysis refutes any notion of children’s creative engagements with fantasy and modes of corporeal expression as politically futile, egocentric desires to be ironed out ‘as they grow’ (Ringrose and Renold 2012).

The various data (interviews, drawings) generated with Lily and Cormac (pseudonyms) - and their encounters with significant images, concepts, materials, peers, and us as researchers - demonstrate how corporeal intra- and interactions are alive with a limitless, immanent ethical potential. The specific potential is for these bodies – broadly defined - to become other (sense, perceive and experience intensities) with Life (multiple materials, images, technologies, concepts) in unique, plural, unforeseeable ways that creatively exceed or alter policy and public discourse ordering children’s development in temporally singular, linear ways according to morally pre-defined school models.

Method

The data in this paper was generated as part of a large qualitative Irish Research Council-funded study of childhood, schooling and socio-religious change. It involved 172 participants aged between 6 and 92 years old. This study examined children’s, young people’s, parents’ teachers’, clerics’ and senior citizens experiences of childhood, school and society in four differing school localities with varying ethnic and class demographies. The fieldwork primarily combined classroom art and drama-based activities, and photo and video response techniques with friendship-based focus groups. Over one hundred 7-8 year old children, mostly attending second class (the fourth year of primary school) participated. Alongside the research with children, two weeks were spent interviewing older generations in and around mixed-gender contexts: in a large Catholic town-based school, a small multi-grade village-based Catholic school, and a suburban Educate Together (equality based, secular) school. The pilot study, or first phase of the research, took place over the course of a year in a boys’ Catholic city school. A report titled 'Children's Beliefs and Belongings' (Kitching and Shanneik 2015) was generated for schools and families, focusing on children’s experiences. As noted above, I examine the cases of two children and the forms of ethico-religious social relations they enter into in their school lives, and as part of our research. Instead of judging whether pluralism is working according to external, reified moral principles (e,g, religious, secular, atheist or humanist tenets), Deleuzian ethics involves evaluating the degree to which bodies affect each other, and are affected, to the end of the de-stratifying all hierarchies of being. The data analysis thus is less focused on what bodies are (i.e. the ultimately essentialist question of representation)than the ethico-political question of what bodies can do: what creative encounters, investments and relations part-objects (humans, arms, eyes, toys, visuals, animals, furniture) they can enter into, and what capacities they have to affect and be affected by other bodies - including bodies of meaning found in looks, images, moral systems, etc. (Coleman 2009). This requires a post-structural and trans-human understanding of the data analysis and paper itself as a form of open-ended becoming, where the focus is on 'plugging into' the data, or becoming a part of the children's lived assemblages and exploring what connections they open up or close down (Youngblood-Jackson 2013).

Expected Outcomes

This paper stakes a claim to imagine the futurity of the colonial, subsidiary state primary education system and childhood in other, i.e., radical, multiplicitous agonistic, democratic terms. I argue the greatest potential for engaging ethics and injustice in Irish and European schooling is not through liberal pluralist reformism, if such reform fails to recognise multiple agonistic relations and desires as constitutive of democracy (Todd 2011; Mouffe 1993). Rather, politically engaging a thousand tiny pluralities: those complex intra- and inter-corporeal encounters, which may alter or escape contextually differing socio-religious hierarchies in unique ways, offer a more creative way of conceptualising and negotiating school and childhood futures. We cannot make a rational plan for schooling and childhood to become otherwise, but we can clear some ground. Drawing in anti-classed, gendered, racialised, sexual and other desires, (including political protest), with the affects of encounters with human and non-human bodies, is an important step in claiming socially just learner-citizenship (Kitching 2014). Another key step in negotiating and imagining school futures is to do away with the political deployment of notions of national progress or backwardness in valorising this or that model (Rasmussen 2015). Liberal and conservative notions of ‘the nation’ or indeed any space as experiencing a unified tempo or historical trajectory are used to gain state recognition (Butler 2008), but in the process, may oversimplify and render people like 'Lily' as uncivilised, and render people like 'Cormac' solely in a victim role. Certainly, as bodies are constantly made subject to hierarchies of meaning and intellect over sensation and affect, and thus, political intelligibility, the potential for these encounters to challenge injustices are constrained. Yet thinking in terms of 'becoming' is important for finding creative ways to sense, perceive and live difference and to imagine child cultures and school futures otherwise.

References

Butler, J. 2008. “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time”. British Journal of Sociology 59 (1): 1-23. Coleman, R. 2009. The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Images, Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Coolahan, J., C. Hussey and P. Kilfeather. 2012. The Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector: Report of the Forum’s Advisory Group. DES. www.education.ie/en/Publications/Policy-Reports/fpp_report_advisory_group.pdf Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari.(1983) 2004. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: 1972). Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. (1987) 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. London: Continuum. Kitching, K. 2014. The Politics of Compulsive Education: Racism and Learner-citizenship. London: Routledge. Kitching, K. and Shanneik. Y. (2015) Children's Beliefs and Belongings: A Schools and Families Report. Cork: Authors. Mouffe, C. (1993) 2005. The Return of the Political. London: Verso. Rasmussen, M.L. 2015. Progressive Sexuality Education: The Conceits of Secularism. London: Routledge. Ringrose, J. and E. Renold. 2012. “Teen Girls, Working-Class Femininity and Resistance: Retheorising Fantasy and Desire in Educational Contexts of Heterosexualised Violence”. International Journal of Inclusive Education 16 (4): 461-477. Smith, G. 2005. Children’s Perspectives on Believing and Belonging. London: National Children’s Bureau for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Smith, D.W. 2007. “Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Towards an Immanent Theory of Ethics”. Parrhesia 2: 66-78. Todd, S. 2011. “Educating Beyond Cultural Diversity: Redrawing the Boundaries of a Democratic Plurality”. Studies in Philosophy of Education 30: 101-111. Youngblood-Jackson, A. 2013. Data-as-Machine: A Deleuzian Becoming. In Deleuze and Research Methodologies, edited by Ringrose, R. and B. Coleman, 111-124. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Author Information

Karl Kitching (presenting / submitting)

University College Cork

School of Education

Cork

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