Session Information
ERG SES F 04, Philosophy
Parallel paper session
Contribution
The marketisation of education and the neo-liberal turn in Sweden (Lundahl, 2002) is described as paying no heed to issues of class background, ethnicity, migration and other possible structural restraints on freedom of choice and possibilities for taking responsibility for education and expressing ones interests and abilities in it. This is significant, not the least for pupils in the multi-racial, multi-ethnic suburbs surrounding major cities in Sweden (Kallstenius, 2010). These are usually stigmatised areas of multi-dimensional poverty according to earlier research that have effects on educational possibilities, anticipations and performances (Beach & Sernhede, 2011; Öhrn, 2012). The present paper explores this. It draws from one year of ethnographic fieldwork in a suburban, multiethnic Swedish secondary school and examines a teaching programme building on ideas and values from an American organisation for school leadership and the educational philosophy of Lorraine Monroe (Monroe, 1998). This programme has been marketed in Sweden by an education supply agency that for the purposes of the paper I have called Service Partner Ltd. It is marketed and has been used specifically in economically poor suburban areas to save schools from poor performances and a poor reputation.
The programme is innovatory. It is designed around concepts of strong discipline and leadership and might be defined as a ‘saviour discourse’ (Ball 2007). Pedagogically it exhibits clear reliance on practices of strong classification and framing of educational knowledge (Bernstein, 1990) and claims to solve a number of school issues, ranging from poor motivation and achievement to lack of discipline. The operational notion is that it will enable schools, school districts and their leaders to transform an ascribed identity as under-attaining and ineffective and to project themselves as actively committed to change and improvement.
The use of the Service Partner solution is however highly hegemonic. It stabilizes the official social order of education and shifts the blame for school failure and pupil difficulty away from politicians to schools, their managers to those who are under them.
An important question is how Service Partner has managed to profile, commodify and create a success story about an imported pedagogy from the United States that is so strongly based on the notion that suburban students are so special that they require good order, ritualized instruction and compensation for their backgrounds in order to attain any kind of educational success (Schwartz, 2010, Schwartz & Öhrn, 2012). There are several dimensions to this. As mentioned above, the model allows the school district and its leaders to show they are interested and are taking action. In addition it shifts the blame from this group to others – most often the pupils themselves, their families and the places they come from (today and originally).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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