Session Information
23 SES 11 B, Educational Work in Interdependent Times, Concept, Cases and Characteristics
Symposium
Contribution
Over the last 30 years, economic globalisation has enabled global flows of capital, information and people, and highlighted our interdependence. It has also transformed education and its relationship to work and everyday working lives. These changes have prompted successive reform agenda. Market reform of welfare states and the appropriation of ‘learning’ to fuel the knowledge economy produced a lifelong learning educational order, complemented by social inclusion to manage residual and resistant populations. In the process education was decentred, and learning spaces diversified within a global education market that served the world of work. Educators were remaindered by a rising tide of practitioners who ‘facilitate’ rather than ‘teach’.
Yet under the radar of flexibilised work and intensified accountability regimes, educational work was supporting social renewal in communities, occupations and within schooling. Learners were being inducted into ways of living that prioritised dignity in life as a human within interdependent social relations. Building capacities necessary to navigate through neo-liberal space-time compression and intensification of life and learning, revealed educational work as a core but unacknowledged resource in social innovation.
Such educational work interfaces with both socialisation and schooling but is different to both. It is about making spaces of orientation that are oriented towards dignified living against the grain of neo-liberal intensifications. This educational work supports self work and working with others by mobilising resources of space-time, knowledge, sociality and distance-proximity that construct practical locales, fabricate relationships and build community/collective capacities for action. These terms, conditions and practices of educational work enable a politics of ‘we’, with the capacity to: grasp the moral and political significance of interdependence; develop capacities for securing public agreements about the way we govern ourselves; and use power responsibly to sustain and renew collective identities, their territories and shifting boundaries and boundary zones in a changing world.
This symposium reports on a cross-national study of educational work. Building on earlier case study research that examined the impact of welfare state reforms on occupational ordering in human service work (nursing, teaching and social work) (Seddon, Henriksson and Niemeyer, 2009), we have begun to codify this educational work that is mostly invisibilised by lifelong learning reforms and also split and integrated relative to established occupational boundaries. The papers in this symposium report on cases of globally distributed human service work, in which occupational ordering is being renegotiated in new boundary zones and through different types of boundary work. In each case we ask:
- What is the character of educational work in this case?
- What are its terms, conditions and practices?
- What are its effects in terms of occupational identity, capacity for self-governing and its orientation towards living, learning and leading interdependently?
- What are its implications for the wider struggle between capitalism and democracy, profit and dignity in life as a human?
- What does this case tell us about ‘educating the educator’ – ie. how they come to educate, what they need to know, what capacities they must enact etc.?
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