Learning Beyond the School: International Perspectives on the Schooled Society 2018009034, 2018024457, 9781315110318, 9781138087712

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Learning Beyond the School

Whilst learning is central to most understandings of what it is to be human, we now live in a knowledge society where being educated defines life chances more than ever before. Learning Beyond the School brings together accounts of learning from around the world in organisations, spaces and places that are schooled, but not school. Exploring examples of learning organisation, pedagogisation, informal learning and social education, the book shows not only how understandings of education are framed in terms of local versions of schooling, but what being educated could and should mean in very different social and political contexts. With contributions from scholars based in Australia, Europe, the USA, Latin ­A merica and Asia, the book brings together accounts of learning outside of school. ­Chapters contain rich and detailed case studies of innovative projects, new kinds of learning institutions, youth, peer-driven and community-based activities and public pedagogies, as well as engaging with the dimensions of an argument about the place and nature of learning outside of the school. It challenges dominant versions of school around the world, whilst also critically discussing the value and place of non-institutionalised learning. Learning Beyond the School should be of interest to academics, researchers, postgraduate scholars engaged in the study of comparative education, youth work, education systems, digital culture, sociology of education and youth development. It should also be essential reading for practitioners and policymakers who are interested in youth and education system reform. Julian Sefton-Green is Professor of New Media Education at Deakin U ­ niversity, Melbourne, Australia. Ola Erstad is Professor and Head of the Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway.

Routledge Research in Education

This series aims to present the latest research from right across the field of education. It is not confined to any particular area or school of thought and seeks to provide coverage of a broad range of topics, theories and issues from around the world. Recent titles in the series include: The Arts as Learning Cultivating Landscapes of Democracy Edited by Jay Hanes and Eleanor Weisman The Changing World of Outdoor Learning in Europe Edited by Peter Becker, Chris Loynes, Barbara Humberstone and Jochem Schirp Democratic Education and the Teacher-As-Prophet Exploring the Religious Work of Schools Jeffery W. Dunn Teachers and Teacher Unions in a Globalised World History, Theory and Policy in Ireland Lori Beckett and John Carr Learning Beyond the School International Perspectives on the Schooled Society Edited by Julian Sefton-Green and Ola Erstad For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Education/book-series/SE0393

Learning Beyond the School International Perspectives on the Schooled Society

Edited by Julian Sefton-Green and Ola Erstad

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Julian Sefton-Green and Ola Erstad; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Sefton-Green, Julian, editor. | Erstad, Ola, editor. Title: Learning beyond the school: international perspectives on the schooled society / edited by Julian Sefton-Green and Ola Erstad. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, [2018] | Series: Routledge research in education | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018009034 (print) | LCCN 2018024457 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315110318 (E-book) | ISBN 9781138087712 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Non-formal education—Cross-cultural studies. | Education—Aims and objectives—Cross-cultural studies. Classification: LCC LC45.3 (ebook) | LCC LC45.3 .L42 2018 (print) | DDC 371.04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009034 ISBN: 978-1-138-08771-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11031-8 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by codeMantra

Contents

Figures Contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Learning beyond the school – international perspectives on the schooled society

vii ix xiv

1

J ulian S efton - G reen

2 Learning keywords – a cultural studies approach to schooling and pedagogy

16

J ames G . L adwig and J ulian S efton - G reen

3 Can we de-pedagogicise society? Between “native” learning and pedagogy in complex societies

28

M ari ë tte de H aan

4 Accountability in epistemic practice on a Micronesian Island

45

V era M ichalchi k

5 Ubuntu and bildung in Olso and Zanzibar: Communities of learning lives

61

Ola E rstad

6 Mapping the promise of non-schooled learning

79

J ames G . L adwig

7 Walking the city: A method for exploring everyday public pedagogies Keri Facer and M agdalena Buchc z y k

97

vi Contents

8 Taking part in the city: Rethinking “Wumenda Chengshi (Our Cities)” in Shanghai

118

L uo X iaoming

9 Digital media production outside the school: Youth knowledge and cultural participation in Argentina and Mexico

133

I n é s Dussel and A riel Benasayag

10 Remixing meanings, tools, texts, and contexts: Digital literacy goes to school

151

John S cott, G lynda A . H ull and J ennifer DiZio

11 Literacy practices and popular media culture in the “over-schooled” society

174

H yeon - S eon J eong

12 Outing the “out” in out-of-school: A comparative international perspective

193

J ulian S efton - G reen

13 The personal and pedagogical in the 21st century: Experiments in learning about marriage

209

A nita R atnam and N itya Vasudevan

14 Beyond the totally pedagogicised society: Final reflections

227

J ulian S efton - G reen

Index

233

Figures

2.1 Population completing primary schooling 1950–2010, constructed from data developed by Barro and Lee (2013) 19 5.1 The TAYI centre in Zanzibar, outside Stone Town 69 5.2 The TAYI centre in Zanzibar, outside Stone Town 69 5.3 and 5.4  Mathias showing me the stage where he performed at the youth club and the studio where he recorded his music 73 6.1 A local historical plaque, telling of the origins of what is now Menindee Central School 83 6.2 On the edge of school grounds, a ‘yarning circle’ has been constructed 91 7.1 A snapshot of learning invitations on three high streets in Bristol late summer/autumn 2017 107 7.2 Informal learning opportunities across three neighbourhoods 108 7.3 The pangolin street art in Easton 109 7.4 The political street art in Gloucester Road 110 7.5 An official community noticeboard 111 7.6 A shop-run community noticeboard 112 7.7 Part of the wool shop window 113 9.1 Stills from the video The socio-cultural world of Argentineans 139 9.2 Stills from Mexicanos 142 9.3 Still from Mexicanos 144 10.1 The Asset Library 157 10.2 Whiteboards depicting “Add Asset” feature 158 10.3 Reusing Assets to represent terminology from a course reading 159 10.4 Engagement Index: “Points Configuration” and “Leaderboard” 160 10.5 Impact Studio: “Activity Network” “Activity Timeline,” “Total Activities” 161 10.6 Whiteboard examples: language map 163 10.7 Asset detail and asset reused in peer Whiteboard 167

viii Figures 10.8 Examples of students borrowing designs 170 11.1 The front page of ‘Mente Comics’ 182 11.2 “The Cube”, an example from the comics of the 183 ‘Mente Comics’ 11.3 Exhibition of the students’ drawing as reading activities of webtoons 186 12.1 Diagram of the TUMO curriculum 195 13.1 Workshop scheme 219

Contributors

Ariel Benasayag is a Lecturer in Informatics and Society at the School for Political and Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, ­A rgentina. Director of the Undergraduate Program on Audiovisual Production and Professor of Visual Semiotics at the Universidad Maza, Argentina. Ph.D. ­Candidate, FLACSO/Argentina. He is currently writing his dissertation on the uses of fiction films in secondary schools in Argentina. Magdalena Buchczyk is an anthropologist and a Senior Research Associate at the School of Education, University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the ethnographic exploration of material culture, museums and  heritage, and everyday learning. She is currently working on the Reinventing Learning Cities project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities programme. This research uses Bristol as a laboratory to explore the multiple ways in which cities learn through social and material processes. Jennifer DiZio is a Researcher for Instagram in Menlo Park, California. Prior to joining Facebook, Jennifer received her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Her research focused on digital literacies and social networking in informal and formal classroom spaces. In 2012 Jennifer was awarded the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship to continue work in online education digital literacies. Prior to commencing her studies at UC Berkeley, Jennifer worked as a producer for film and television in the USA and UK. Inés Dussel  is Professor and Researcher at the Department of Educational ­Research, CINVESTAV, Mexico. She was Director of the Education Area, Latin American School for the Social Sciences (Argentina), from 2001 to 2008. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published extensively on pedagogical theory, history of education, and visual and digital media studies. She has been a fellow of the ­Spencer ­Foundation, DAAD and Georg-Eckert-Institut (Germany), and CNPq ­(Brazil). Her research interests focus on the relationships among knowledge, school, and politics, in a historical and sociological approach. She is currently

x Contributors studying the intersections between schools and digital visual culture. Since 2011 she has been a member of the Governing Board of the International Association for Visual Culture. Ola Erstad is Professor and Head of the Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway. Professor Erstad is an internationally leading researcher with a focus on digital literacy, but firmly rooted in the wider social and cultural context of learning beyond the technological aspects. His areas of teaching expertise are learning, technology and education, children and youth in modern society. He has been leading several national and international research projects and is part of several international networks and committees. He is vice-chair of a COST Action and is a board member of several international journals. In 2016 he was elected as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of Science Europe. Relevant books are Digital Learning Lives (2013) and Learning Identities, Education and Community: Young Lives in the Cosmopolitan City (with Sefton-Green, 2016). Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, UK, where she works on the implications for education and learning of technological, environmental, economic and social change. From 2012 she has been leadership fellow for the UK’s Connected Communities programme, a nationwide, 300-project research programme facilitating collaborative research between universities and civil society/community organisations, through which she has been examining the distinctive nature and role of universities in contemporary society. Her other areas of work have included the development of the field of Anticipation Studies, critical educational technology innovation (as research director of Futurelab), informal and place-based learning in homes and cities, and questions of ethnicity, class and gender in university–community collaborations. She has worked with a range of partners, from the BBC and Microsoft to local schools and city farms. Mariëtte de Haan holds a Chair in Social and Intercultural Education at ­Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her work focuses on processes of learning and socialization in both formal and informal educational settings with an emphasis on cultural diversity and the dynamics of processes of socialization in changing social worlds. A recurring theme in her research is how institutional learning relates to community or family learning and how normative traditions of learning and education relate to more spontaneously created environments for learning, including those in digital worlds. She directs a Master program at Utrecht University on Youth, Education and Policy which addresses many of these research themes. Furthermore, she is involved in several community service activities through research collaborations with NGOs and social entrepreneurs, board memberships and lectures for a broad non-academic audience. Glynda A. Hull is Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also holds the Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair in Undergraduate Education. A member of the

Contributors  xi US National Academy of Education, her current research focuses on building collaborative online spaces for creativity, expression, and learning, and exploring the burgeoning phenomenon of globally oriented schools. A recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, she offers undergraduate, graduate, and teacher education courses on literacy and media, qualitative research methods, and socio-cultural theory. Hyeon-Seon Jeong  is Professor of Media Literacy Education at Gyeongin ­National University of Education, South Korea. Her research interests include children and young people’s media literacy practices in and out of school settings, teacher education and classroom practices for media literacy education as well as the use of digital media technology and resources for media literacy education. She recently directed research on Innovating classroom practices for media literacy education (Ministry of Education, 2015), Developing models of school textbook units for media literacy education (Ministry of Education, 2016) and Systematizing news literacy education (the Korea Press Foundation, 2016). She has published in scholarly journals in South Korea and contributed chapters to Media Education in Asia (2009), Mapping Media Education Policies in the World (2010), and New Media and Learning in the 21st Century (2015). James G. Ladwig is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His work has focused on several large-scale reform efforts, in many parts of the planet, understanding schooling as a world-cultural institution, and understanding schooling and school reform as social phenomenon. His work has been published in every inhabited continent. He is co-editor of the American Educational Research Journal, the American Educational Research Association’s flagship journal. Xiaoming Luo is an Associate Professor working in the Program in Cultural Studies of Shanghai University. Her doctoral thesis focused on the curriculum reform in senior high school driven by the Chinese government, published in 2012. She also has written and published one book for those college students and young persons who are interested in Cultural Studies in Mainland China. Her research interests are: urban culture and social space in everyday life, especially on how to rethink and create new kinds of public space in contemporary China. She is one of the organizers of the “our cities” citizen forum since 2012, whose aim is inviting ordinary people to come together to discuss the city’s problems. Vera Michalchik, PhD, has studied the social organization of learning in outof-school settings in the USA and internationally for 25 years, with an ongoing interest in the diversity of ways people are held accountable for what they know. She previously led the informal learning research practice at SRI’s Center for Technology in Learning, where she worked on projects funded by the US Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and numerous private and corporate foundations. After working as director of research in the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at

xii Contributors ­ tanford University, she joined the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, S where she now applies her background in learning sciences, program evaluation, and social science research to enhance funding strategies. Vera has served on several National Research Council committees and panels focused on informal STEM learning and sits on the boards of science museums and other educational organizations. Anita Ratnam is the founder and executive director of Samvada (Bangalore), an organisation that has been working with youth on issues of social justice and sustainability since 1992. She is also co-founder and partner at Anekataa, an organisation that works on gender diversity in the corporate workplace. She writes and teaches on a range of issues related to youth rights, gender justice, crafts and traditional occupations, communalism, pluralism, and sustainable development. Her publications include “Traditional occupations in a modern world: career guidance, livelihood planning, and crafts in the context of globalization”, in Handbook of Career Development: International Perspectives (2014) and a host of media publications on issues ranging from garment industries, caste and development, night shift work for women, sex education, racism, rape, gender and religion. She has also helped shape the emergence of many organisations that work on human rights-related issues in Karnataka and elsewhere in India. John Scott is a Doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, new media artist, and former public school teacher. His work explores collaborative meaning-making and digital remix practices in educational and vernacular spaces. His research focuses on the design and implementation of digital tools for learning, and the influence of interfaces and algorithms on education and culture. Julian Sefton-Green is Professor of New Media Education at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has worked as an independent scholar and has held positions at the Department of Media & Communication, London School of Economics & Political Science, and at the University of Oslo, working on projects exploring learning and learner identity across formal and informal domains. He is a Visiting Professor at The Playful Learning Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland. He has been the Head of Media Arts and Education at WAC Performing Arts and Media College – a centre for informal training and education – where he directed a range of digital media activities for young people and coordinated training for media artists and teachers. Prior to that he worked as Media Studies teacher in an inner city comprehensive London; and in higher education teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses, leading teacher training degrees in media education. He has researched and written widely on many aspects of media education, new technologies, creativity, digital cultures and informal learning and has authored, co-authored or edited 13 books, and has spoken at conferences in over 20 countries.

Contributors  xiii Nitya Vasudevan  works at Baduku Community College (Samvada) as ­C o-­ Convener of the Centre for Wellness and Justice. She completed a PhD in Cultural Studies, on publicness and the bodily subject. Her publications include “The State of Desire and other flights of fantasy: sexuality, pornography, technology” (co-authored with Namita Aavriti), in Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law (2011), “‘Public Women’ and the ‘Obscene’ Body: An exploration of abolition debates in India”, in The Sexual History of the Global South: Sexual Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America (2013), and ­“Between Ooru, Area and Pettai: The Terms of the Local in Tamil Cinema of the 21st Century”, in the journal Positions (2017). She is also a co-organiser of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival along with a team of eight others who work on the festival out of sheer mad love for good cinema, performance and art.

Acknowledgements

We appreciate the funding provided by the Norwegian Research Council for an International Seminar connected with the research project ‘Knowledge in Motion Across Contexts of Learning’ (2013–2016) led by Professor Ola Erstad. We are also grateful for additional funding from the Department of Education, University of Oslo, which enabled us to invite international scholars to the Voksenkollen conference centre in Oslo in September 2016. We want to thank Øystein Gilje, Rolf Steier and Camilla Wig for their contributions to the seminar and for engaging with the ideas discussed in the volume. REDI at Deakin ­University also provided funds to support editing. Finally we are extremely grateful to Helen Nixon’s enthusiasm and pedantry as she helped us prepare this text for publication. Julian Sefton-Green, Melbourne Ola Erstad, Olso

1 Introduction Learning beyond the school – international perspectives on the schooled society Julian Sefton-Green Introduction The premise of this book is simple: that examining forms of out-of-school ­learning in different countries can help us make sense of school and s­ chooling– and thus by extension the different ways that learning is framed and valued around the world. The reasons for using the comparative lens of out-of-school learning practices and organisations to examine schooling are fourfold: first, is the argument that we are living through an unprecedented period of “educationalisation” – the penetration of forms of school organisation in to everyday life outside of times and structures allocated to schooling in people’s lives – and thus examining such change as a global phenomenon might help us focus on what is at stake in such change. Second, out-of-school institutions, practices, organisational forms, personnel and curriculum reveal a great deal about perceived market failure in schooling itself: in other words, the success and growth of outof-school as remediation, supplement or complement is a good way to understand the pressures, failures and success of local school systems. Third, the lens of out-of-school draws attention to forms of learning that evade or escape the way that education systems at a national level attempt to determine definitions of learning: any kind of alternative and resistance that exceeds or circumvents formal education points to important wider social values of learning. Finally, and as a fourth argument, the structure of this book, drawing on examples from nearly every continent, enables us to examine the persistence of schooling as a mode of social organisation through global comparison of out-of-school systems and institutions thus helping us avoid the kind of ethnocentric universalism that tends to accrue around studies of national school systems or local schooling. The rest of this introduction is organised around these four key principles and introduces key terms and concepts that are used by the contributors to this volume. It begins with a brief overview of the out-of-school field and concludes with a description of the ways that the various chapters address key problems raised in the discussion.

A brief map of learning beyond the school Philosophers and historians of education repeatedly distinguish between the three concepts of education, school (and/or schooling) and learning ­(Biesta 2011;

2  Julian Sefton-Green Hamilton & Zufiaurre 2013). Tracing a series of distinctions back to the ­earliest accounts of any forms of organised teaching, scientific study or “ ­ knowledge ­t ransfer”, and frequently drawing on etymological derivations as a way of outlining the changing meaning of these key terms, the history of education is told through a series of readings of key philosophical texts, architectural and archaeological evidence, and explication of the very few empirical accounts (mainly biographical) that can be found. In these discussions, learning is now understood as something that individuals do whilst education tends to refer to systemic structural institutions and modes of organisation at a societal level. The historical emergence of school and schooling, first as an elite aristocratic project and subsequently as a feature of mass industrialised society, has meant both a continuity of meanings and a slow process of revision of what different societies at different times might mean by education (Williams 1961). Key terms in the vocabulary of the discussion around learning are pedagogy (and ­pedagogue) didactics, knowledge (­epistemology), literacy (and increasingly, if only very recently, neuroscience). The philosophy of education traces a set of positions around what counts as knowledge, who does the counting and using what kinds of metric, the relationship of education to wisdom, culturally valued forms of knowledge, and of course the unequal distribution of power and social status (Dewey 1916; Bourdieu & Passeron 1990). How to theorise what it means to understand, and then transfer both the knowledge and the processes of understanding between people, relies on theories of mind, communication, behaviour and social practice. Because schooling is a relatively recent intervention in the wider and longer history of education, the formulation of “out-of-school” reads as an historical anachronism. In reality, education has taken place through many kinds of social practices: the tutor the symposium, the book, the monastery, the madrassa, the Grand Tour, the pulpit and so forth and so, as many scholars have pointed out, privileging learning at school as the singular dominant mode of education is atavistic. Scholarship of pre-modern (industrialised) forms and modes of education tends to pay attention to ethical purposes (e.g. societal or individualistic good) and epistemological processes (e.g. probabilistic reasoning, empiricism) and whilst these concerns are sustained over time, they become framed by the development of the school and modes of schooling as that institution has spread around the world. As school has become the norm, so its shadow has split most discussion of ­education into a form of binarism. It is probably impossible to pinpoint the first use of terms like “out-of-school” but there is now a significant literature examining “after-school”, “extended school” (Cole & The Distributed ­Literacy ­Consortium 2006; Hirsch 2005; Noam 2004), or even “not-school” ­(Sefton-Green 2013). In all of these studies, forms of organised learning which have emerged around the school system, and which in their different ways either seek to replicate or provide alternatives to its institutional form, have become the object of study.

Introduction  3 Similarly, and in some ways acting as a linguistic variant to the notion of “out-of-school”, is the prevalence of concepts which work as alternate or dialogical versions of learning: as in “informal learning”, “non-formal learning” or “semi-formal learning”. Just like the idea of out-of-school being the construct which only works in relationship to its presumed other, so any modifier of learning assumes a norm. In this literature, the notion of the formal is taken for granted but as much of this literature (Colley, Hodkinson & Malcolm 2003; Drotner, Jensen & Schroder 2009; Rogers 2005; Sefton-Green 2004) makes clear, the qualities of the formal are as much to do with form (shape and structure) as they are to do with the idea of tradition, performance and ritual. ­Sociocultural theory, which in essence explores learning as a social practice in context, has found these distinctions confusing, suggesting that such forensic discussion of formality runs the risk of missing the point about how learning works altogether even if it helps clarify the specifics of individual contexts ­(Rogoff et al. 2016) and see also Chapter 3. Chapter 2 contains an extended discussion of these terms. However, sociocultural approaches to analysis of learning have contributed significantly to the literature about learning beyond the school in the ways that they have opened up discussion of educational transactions across many different kinds of social contexts – especially where we might not expect to approach the social practice as a learning event (Salen 2008). In particular, studies of literacy in the new literacies tradition (Street 1985, 2001) have explored the ways that forms of literacy proscribed by the school can be validated and theorised as complex learning practices. In turn, the seeming paradox of an understanding of literacy that might exist outside of formal definitions of literacy raises the spectre of kinds of learning that are in conflict with contemporary cultural narratives of what it is to be educated (Levinson, Foley & Holland 1996). Here, the empirical studies of modes of learning show how defining education has become a site of social conflict in the ways that the older philosophical tradition might not have imagined.

Educationalisation A number of different scholars have explored the persistence and resilience of the school around the world, arguing that schooling is the key determining institution shaping modern societies (Baker 2014; Meyer et al. 1997). From this perspective, schooling determines social order, employment, class and labour stratification, authority, culture, compliance and indeed all the ways in which modern societies cohere and are organised. A key facet of the dominance of schooling is how its way of organising the transmission of knowledge, the ­h ierarchy and dominance of some kinds of knowledge and performance above  others, as well as its control over forms of accreditation and evaluation, its way of organising power relations between teachers and taught and the compliance of large groups of people in learning activities, all as modes of social

4  Julian Sefton-Green practice have spread beyond the school walls into other hitherto more private domains. This process of “educationalisation” (Davies & Mehta 2013) suggests that schooling as a recognised institutional form that legitimates some values while proscribing others, has found ways to extend its power by colonising other social institutions such as family life, and even shopping malls or doctors’ waiting rooms (Nixon 1998): David Buckingham has spoken of the “curricularisation of leisure” as part of this process (Buckingham & Scanlon 2002). In such research, attention focuses on the use of written materials (school literacy), the mode of address, the nature of sanctified authorities, and indeed the kinds of routines and practices that constitute socially approved behaviour. As Davies and Mehta (2013) suggest, not only are we living through a period where school organises other kinds of social life but schooling itself is held to be pre-eminently responsible for a whole range of other social outcomes. Thus, unemployment, economic growth and delinquency are three of the most common societal problems laid at schooling’s door with a concomitant policy gaze being levelled at education systems as a way of rectifying these other social ­problems. There is, for example, now considerable research looking at the wider long-term outcomes of education (Schuller & Desjardins 2007) even if such analyses are making the case about correlations rather than causalities. Education (and ­frequently teachers) is often seen to be the cause for widespread systemic problems however frequently academics like to argue that education systems can just as much be seen as the symptoms rather than the causes of these wider difficulties. The ins and outs of that argument are not germane here, what is important is the ways that many countries now often analyse their performance and even happiness in relationship to the input provided by schooling, thus signalling the acceptance of that institution as pre-eminent (see Chapter 2). The growth of lifelong learning, a particular policy imperative across the ­European Union, exemplifies the third trend of educationalisation: responsibilising individuals as active learners carrying the burden for their life trajectory (Edwards 1997; Field 2006; Field, Gallacher & Ingram 2009; Glastra, Hake & Schedler 2004). In the context of the social and economic restructuring brought about by the “knowledge society” (Baldwin 2016), learning has become uncoupled from schooling and individual learners have to manage their continuous education as part of their capacity to remain fit and competitive workers in an ­ever-changing labour marketplace. Yet in effect, the lifelong learning agenda is not a return to a philosophical tradition that values wisdom through age but far more the internalisation of the imperative to sustain an edge in increasingly ­precarious workplaces. Individuals have become pedagogicised subjects (see Chapter 2) constantly and continuously subject to forms of scrutiny, self-­improvement, always on the treadmill of further accreditation where failure to learn how to learn has dramatic negative economic, personal and social consequences. The world schooling and educationalisation approach to analysing the discourses, practices and social institutions and systems has strong links with the concept of the “totally pedagogicised society” advanced by Basil Bernstein

Introduction  5 (Bernstein 2000; Moore et al. 2009). Bernstein describes a conflict between casual everyday knowledge and disciplined controlled and arcane expressions of “formal knowledge”. He emphasised how school “re-contextualises” knowledge seeking to impose disciplinarity and exclusivity on new and emerging ­domains especially with regard to the use of specialised academic language (Moore et al. 2009; Tyler 2004). Approaching the challenge of making sense of the persistence and penetration of forms of schooling beyond the school, Bernstein sought a theory of pedagogy that could explain class-bound relations of power and argued that modes of pedagogy held the key to understanding both how control was exerted, regulated and internalised (Depaepe et al. 2008). ­Bernstein suggests that we are living through a wider pedagogicisation of society involving the spread of school-like forms of organisation and subjectivity beyond the boundaries of traditional learning institutions. The “totally pedagogicised society” (Bernstein 2001) has emerged as part of a reclassification of traditional knowledge boundaries brought about as a result of the knowledge society and the economic imperative of lifelong learning. As Chapter 2 discusses in more detail, pedagogicisation differs from educationalisation in its attention to the internalised governance of the self (Rose 1999). The chapters in this book examining out-of-school learning institutions and forms of informal learning contribute to this sociological tradition by exploring comparative international aspects of the “schoolification” of society. Whilst the educationalisation thesis tends to stress elements of systemic power, many of the contributions here also want to open up the ways that pedagogicisation can also bring into question dominant school-like values and, equally, make forms of learning accessible to wider sections of society in countries where the effects of schooling are not uniform. Thus, educationalisation or variants of the ­“totally pedagogicised society” comprise only one element in the ways that o ­ ut-of-school and informal learning might help us reflect on education systems more generally: and we now examine the relationship of out-of-school to school from the perspective of internal education markets.1

Not-school and the shadow education system Although the attention of governments around the world focuses on the formal educational institutions from kindergartens through schools to universities, there exists, of course, a huge raft of organisations dedicated to remediating, ­complementing and supplementing formal institutional provision. In a 2009 book, Mark Bray recounted the history and analysis of what he and others have termed the “shadow education system” (Bray 2009). This study is devoted to the role of ­supplementary privately funded tutoring which supports children and young people in different ways in different countries around the world. Bray analyses the different roles private tutoring plays particularly in relationship to economic inequalities where equal access to schools is not available to all. The differential economic, social and educational impact of access to private tutoring can be seen as both a threat and/or a complement to state (national) funded educational systems.

6  Julian Sefton-Green This sphere of activity is important for the analysis of out-of-school learning in this book because it suggests that in addition to the metaphor of the shadow, we can analyse the mode, variation and intensity of supplementary education (see chapter 2 of Bray 2009) more in terms of a metaphor of an iceberg or perhaps even a tree’s root system. Schools and schooling are visible above the surface but are supported, integrated with and given ballast by activities hidden from view. Supplementary education is clearly critical in countries with poor state infrastructure and this has significant implications for the teacher workforce, social mobility and equality of opportunity (especially in respect of gender discrimination). Bray’s work shows clearly how, as a form of infrastructure or even part of the education sector, private tutoring simultaneously extends, influences, supports and threatens formal schooling. From the perspective of world schooling, this approach is also instructive because comparative international analyses that show how pervasive schooling is as an institution around the world highlight the profound differentials within and between countries that attempt to remediate and supplement perceived gaps in national provision. Examining alternative provision in this way raises the question of whether it is helpful to understand its existence and function from an economic point of view in terms of market failure. In this instance, it could be argued that the supplementary education system provides a wider social need than that offered by public schooling. Bray’s study of, for example, the relationship between tutors and a professional salaried teacher workforce, the existence and provision of teaching materials and so forth, all point to an economic relationship between all levels of educational services within a national economy. Whilst conceptualising education in terms of a market has always been controversial (Callahan 1962), understanding all of the elements of education activities, all the different supply services and chains, especially incorporating out-of-school as part of the totality of the system, is instructive. Indeed, the “shadow education system” indicates the significant levels of investment (in both human and economic terms) devoted to the business of ­education – for example Bray (2009, p. 30) suggests that in 2006 South Korea spent 2.8 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on private tutoring (see also Chapter 11). Although, in general, private tutoring can be seen as both an extension of the principles and values of dominant schooling – with most of its work taking the form of exam preparation and/or maths and literacy support – there are also ways in which it also extends definitions of what it means to be educated. This can be exemplified by Bray’s discussion of the juku (Japanese private tutoring) where he looks at dimensions of these institutions’ atmosphere, curriculum focus, relation to school, composition of the student body, nature of the teaching materials, as well as the size of the juku and its institutional relationship with others, its admission process and reputation (Roesgaard 2006 cited in Bray 2009, p. 74). Rather than simply seeing private tutoring in terms of a closed and narrow extension of school forms of education – of a conservative educationalisation, to use the term from above – he shows how the juku complements and provides alternative to forms of schooling. For example, this sector can offer alternative pedagogies, modes of learning, environments, different kinds of peer relationships and even different curriculum domains (Bray 2009, p. 75).

Introduction  7 In a classic sociological study of social reproduction in the USA, Annette Lareau examined modes of parenting, exploring attitudes to education as a key site of the ways that different social classes seek competitive advantage ­(Lareau  2011). She coined the phrase “concerted cultivation” to describe the ways that middle-class families seek to invest in their children’s futures. It would be interesting to apply Lareau’s conceptual framework to the breadth of private educational provision that Bray brings together, as in the case of different types of juku. Although there are not many empirical studies investigating these kinds of questions it would be useful to know how far the experiential value of, for example, alternative pedagogy – the opportunity to explore non-traditional disciplinary domains, or indeed to enjoy and grow within a different kind of educational environment – motivates family expenditure in contrast to the assumption that families only invest in private tutoring simply to seek competitive advantage; see Livingstone and Sefton-Green (2016) for an investigation in a contemporary British context. Because much of the study of the “shadow education system” is ­f requently in contexts where there are evident gaps in state provision, policy attention tends to focus on questions of access, standardisation, quality and inclusion/­ exclusion rather than on questions examining the value of alternative ­meanings of what it is to be educated. Bray makes it clear that exploring international comparisons of private tutoring should bring this last question to the fore and this is especially important when examining the impact of private tutoring on mainstream education (Bray 2009, pp. 44–48). However, analysis of alternative modes of ­education has mainly taken place in discussion of community-­based, youth-­focused provision (Sefton-Green 2013). This sector is frequently a mixture of public and private funding 2 and rooted in social justice initiatives in countries of the global North to make different kinds of provision available. Unlike the shadow education system, this sector frequently and explicitly draws from radical and alternative educational philosophy in order to offer values-based rather than an instrumentalised educational experience. A good example of this might be the work conducted at Youth Radio in Oakland, California, which recruits marginalised youth from impoverished communities to produce and make expressive multimedia output reflecting on their diverse social experiences, but in a markedly different way – utilising on a form of “collegial pedagogy” – to that of their daily schoolwork (Soep & Chavez 2010). Educational activity in this space derives much of its power from being “not-school”: that its pedagogy and curriculum are organised and institutionalised but in explicitly different ways to a norm. This then, introduces young people to different ways of thinking about what the purposes and values of school might be.

In-formal, semi-formal and non-formal learning Prefixing learning or education with variants like in- and non- is by no means new. In one of the most extensive early discussions of this phenomenon, Alan Rogers (2005) recovers the history of informal education as a significant —­d imension of

8  Julian Sefton-Green development economics which is where the term originated (see also Chapter 2 for an extended discussion of this concept). Rogers captures the difficulty of using variants of formality as a way of categorising forms of learning or education in terms of social analysis of discourse, effectively arguing that prefixing learning and education in this way acts as a way of marking its difference from a norm and feeding into alternative ways of understanding pedagogy and curriculum. Indeed, this book, like much scholarship in this area is sceptical of the scientific utility of such terminology whilst needing to make use of it, to capture dimensions of educational experience that we do not otherwise have language for. Indeed, Rogers ends up arguing that whilst hard and fast distinctions between informal and formal education might not continue to have relevance, the conceptualisation of formality in education fed into reform discourses and these continue to have an impact on devising and developing inclusive forms of education. His study, effectively reviewing the last 30 years of the 20th ­century, pre-dates the effect of digital technology on young people’s lives and for learning and education more generally. A good example of the ways that the “new” technologies built on the informal education tradition can be found in the synthetic theory of “connected learning” (Ito et al. 2013). This theory and the work it both supported and collected is based on the premise that young people’s out-of-school interests – and especially those founded on forms of affinity grouping and connectedness through online interactions – are a good way to develop good habits of productive learning through making, sharing and curating. Whilst Rogers wanted to hold onto the discourse of informal education as a way of drawing attention to the increasingly blurred boundaries between formal and informal disciplines and pedagogies, connected learning also wants to draw attention to the existence of forms of knowing and ways of learning that are embedded in all kinds of digitally mediated social interactions. Indeed, the whole sphere of out-of-school, whether described as informal education or not, draws attention to fundamental questions of how learning is defined in society. Social anthropologists have argued that “being educated” is, in effect, no more than a cultural narrative – a way of marking (through discourse or other warrants) how contemporary and local societies define ­education ­(Levinson et al. 1996; see Chapters 3 and 4 for a further discussion of this). Whilst this position can be criticised as circular and relativist as a general theory of education, it does draw attention to the ways that certain kinds of knowledge domains and pedagogic practices remain vernacular and excluded from ­schooling. Reform projects such as the connected learning initiative draw strength from the energy that accrues around any form of boundary definition and institutional regulation. Such an approach also helps us pay attention to local, subcultural, alternative and other non-mainstream learning cultures. At times, as we shall see in the following chapters, these can be incorporated into a field of organised outof-school activity but – and this is equally important – the discourse of informality also helps us understand forms and modes of learning that derive their

Introduction  9 legitimacy because they are not incorporated into the mainstream. In this respect, attention to the out-of-school and the informal becomes an increasingly important focus to understand wider values of education than those named in any schooling system. Public pedagogy (Sandlin 2009), civic education (e.g. Jenkins, Shresthova & Gamber-Thompson 2016; Lauglo & Øia 2007) and even cultural pedagogy (Watkins, Noble & Driscoll 2015) takes place in not-school sites where forms of learning are mobilised and can often lead to social action, as, for example, ­Chapter 8 describes in relation to informal learning activities in Shanghai. These theorisations of learning exist in dialogue with contemporary modes of schooling but also derive from older and other traditions particularly those associated with working-class autodidacticism or forms of subcultural or feminist history (Colley 2009; McLaughlin 1996; Rose 2001). The interrelationship of these informal learning traditions, and especially the places where they can be found, and where and how they get enacted, are all part of the wider field of out-of-school.

Global and comparative perspectives Although it is not exclusively an explanation for examining schooling through the lens of out-of-school, this book’s international scope does provide an original conceptual rationale for such an approach. In an era of world schooling (see Chapter 2) where global statistical data such as that provided by Bray in his analysis of supplementary tutoring (Bray 2009), or the existence of global organisations like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and ­Development (OECD) which compare and contrast national education systems (see, for example, CERI 2008; Werquin 2010), it is easy to forget that education is, in its origin, a national project (Hamilton & Zufiaurre 2013; Williams 1961) where schools and schooling are intimately bound up with the growth of the nation-state. Globalisation and mass immigration have led to a process of universalising theories of learning frequently destroying the relationship between learning, location and land, as discussed, for example, in Chapters 4 and 6. The case studies in this volume bring together very disparate social contexts and very different local understandings of what learning is. One aim of this collection is to help readers challenge their own assumptions about education and learning by exploring the ways that seemingly natural and common-sense definitions that circulate in the reader’s own milieu may resonate very differently in other places around the world. This is of course a general principle of comparative educational study (Trahar 2006) but, like the comparative anthropological approach designed to show how being educated is a form of local cultural narrative (Levinson et al. 1996), this collection aims to explicate how ways of learning and the purposes of schooling are legitimated in discourse about education at a local level. Whilst one thread of the discussion in the cases collected here is the widely understood values and procedures associated with world schooling, so equally there is an attention to recording and theorising how education – in all its

10  Julian Sefton-Green diverse aspects – is understood in countries from every continent around the globe. This is not a systematic process of comparison: large swathes of the world are of course not covered at all here and this means that a range of different educational histories and different educational traditions are not represented. ­Magisterial studies comparing and contrasting educational systems ­(Alexander  2001) are few and far between, and finding global organisations to support the sort of in-depth, qualitative, cultural anthropological approach found in this volume is difficult. Furthermore, it is obvious from this introduction that “out-of-school” is a construct that is itself dependent on divergent theoretical perspectives and empirical foundations. At a structural level the three frames of argument presented here (educationalisation; supplementary out-of-school provision; and ­informal learning) capture well the systemic and institutional challenges at stake in analysing organised out-of-school education. However, it is mainly through a comparative lens that key elements of learning as a cultural process – how it is embedded in assumptions, language, values and aspirations at a local level – can be most fully explicated. What learning means to its actors and participants is framed and measured by the kinds of understandings about schooling that dominate in anyone’s ­society, but equally there are national traditions and political contingencies that shape the way these understandings are formed and utilised. The discussion in ­Chapter  6 about schooling in the Aboriginal communities of the ­Australian Outback, or the valuing of church learning in Micronesia in C ­ hapter 4, throw into relief not only how education and learning is understood by the people in those circumstances but how seeing such evaluation from their points of view contrasts with the kinds of values brought to these analyses by the authors themselves. Disentangling our readings of educational practice is an important restraint on any simplistic view that world schooling will propagate without adaptation. Ola Erstad’s comparison of bildung and ubuntu, in Chapter 5, shows how cross-cultural readings of two very different philosophies formed from different cultural and historical conditions can shed light on each other as well as our own assumptions about value and purpose precisely when they are brought into contrast with each other. Similarly, whilst the pedagogy of the city may derive from equivalent material institutional “facts”, the ­versions of what learning means for the inhabitants of Bristol and Shanghai (see ­Chapters 7 and 8) gain much from being brought into contrast with each other as they expose different underlying assumptions about the uses of education in their different contexts. In summary, there are very few systematic accounts of the out-of-school sector within national contexts, and even fewer that seek to explore the perspective that this sector gives to scholars of education from global and comparative positions. The contributors to this volume did come together to bring their ideas into debate with each other at an event and, as a way of continuing this exchange, this volume contains a concluding chapter to make explicit some of the conceptual themes that emerged from comparison at a global scale.

Introduction  11

The organisation and structure of the book The book is a result of a seminar (funded by the Norwegian Research Council) held in Oslo in September 2016 organised by the editors. Entitled ‘Pedagogicisation in the 21st-century: global research into learning beyond the school’, the seminar brought together a diverse international collection of scholars from Australia, ­Europe, the USA, Latin America and Asia to compare research into out-of-school learning with the aim of reflecting on global concerns with the pedagogicisation of everyday life. The book is structured to ensure full and proper debate of the meaning of the home/out-of-school sector within each country in order to produce comparative and contrasting analyses of: • • •

normative assumptions about the nature of education within each national society; differing conceptualisations of how learning is organised, structured, evaluated and valued; the learning of difficult-to-school values and practices from civic participation to cosmopolitanism to intrapersonal identity work and/or 21st-century literacies.

There are five sets of chapters in the book. The first set, by Mariëtte de Haan and Vera Michalchik (Chapters 3 and 4, respectively), examines theoretical ­a rguments involved in the construction of “native” or “natural” learning and how such a construct does and does not have a place in contemporary understandings of education. Both chapters investigate the meaning and nature of schooling and its relationship to the epistemological warrant provided by formal education. They take up the challenge identified above, of resisting schoolification or educationalisation by paying attention to the ways that learning is valorised – in de Haan’s chapter in a range of un-schooled settings, and in Michalchik’s in Micronesia – to shift the focus of debate away from schooling to education in general. The second pair of chapters, by Ola Erstad and James G. Ladwig (Chapters 5 and 6, respectively), are interested in looking at forms of schooling in more extreme circumstances; for Erstad, comparing organised informal but out-of-school provision in Zanzibar and Oslo, and for Ladwig, in the Australian Outback. Both of these chapters use educational philosophy to question contemporary institutions as the authors try to tease out how dominant versions of world schooling collide with both older and local traditions of meaningful educational engagement. These chapters engage with questions about educationalisation and the forms of world schooling by examining non- and not-school settings. The third set, Chapter 7 by Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk, and C ­ hapter 8 by Luo Xiaoming, is interested in public and civic pedagogy and the learning city, situating their cases in Bristol and Shanghai. In both cases, living well in the city is a political project and both chapters detail different ways of exploring how the city can be a site for learning and for the exclusion of swathes of the population from education. In Bristol, the focus is on the material arrangement

12  Julian Sefton-Green of learning infrastructure around the urban environment, while the Shanghai chapter details what it means to produce, enact and implement forms of “civic” learning to cope with the extraordinary urbanisation of contemporary China. The fourth set of three chapters explores the relationship between out-ofschool modes of literacy – especially forms of digital expression and popular culture – and the way that literacy is defined by formal education. These c­ hapters are interested in the boundaries and forms of regulation that are utilised by schools, young people and their families as ways of exploring where the formal meets the informal, the school and the vernacular. In these chapters literacy is used as a test case to make sense of the political debates surrounding the classification and categorisation of forms of learning. In Chapter 9, Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag examine the tension between the local, global, cosmopolitan and parochial in their analysis of youth-produced videos from Latin America. In Chapter 10, John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio build on earlier work examining youth-focused community-based out-of-school informal learning projects that draw on vernacular literacy practices, seeing how such practices were negotiated and re-contextualised when introduced into new kinds of online educational relationships. In Chapter 11, Hyeon-Seon Jeong examines the prospects for curriculum reform in what she calls the “over-schooled” society of South Korea, discussing what happens when the new literacies paradigm is introduced into this local context. The final pair of chapters examines the institutional and organisational variation in the non-formal learning sector, examining cases in India, Armenia and the UK (London). They examine some of the issues involved in developing alternative pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge in not-school settings. In Chapter 12, Julian Sefton-Green compares established out-of-school learning institutions in Yerevan (Armenia) and London, addressing the question of what it means to ­develop new or different kinds of pedagogy and curriculum expertise “against the grain”. Chapter 13 by Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan looks at what it means to talk about learning about sex and relationships in an out-of-school setting in Bangalore and how such a setting needs to develop forms of relationship and educational authority to make a difference in the learning lives of its students. Together, these five sets of chapters address both how education is imagined and enacted across a range of different countries as well as how forms of schooling are seeping into social practices not always described in terms of learning. The final chapter of the book, Chapter 14, returns to the key themes outlined in this introduction as it explicitly reviews the contributions and pays attention to the ways that out-of-school/informal learning is always constituted in relation to dominant theories of education and in the context of a comparative analysis of world schooling, and how these case studies point to interesting fractures and opportunities in the spaces around schooling. It broadens the scholarly focus to suggest these tensions and opportunities are of interest to policymakers and scholars even though they are frequently subordinated and ignored. Whilst none of the contributions to the volume would minimise the central importance of formal schooling, the conclusion wants to open up research and debate around

Introduction  13 the purpose, nature, access and value paid to the meaning of learning especially where that learning relates to forms of interpersonal or civic identity. Together we want to analyse and advocate for practices that seem central to the productive futures of so many societies however much they contrast with dominant understandings of the value of education.

Notes 1 Although the discussion here is around supplementary and alternative forms of ­education provision inside countries, the growth of the Internet and global edu-­ commercial enterprises (such as Khan Academy https://www.khanacademy.org) also means that supplementary education exists at a transnational level. 2 See www.youthsites.org for an extended analysis.

References Alexander, R 2001, Culture and pedagogy, Blackwell, Oxford. Baker, D 2014, The schooled society: the educational transformation of global culture, ­Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Baldwin, R 2016, The great convergence: information technology and the new ­globalization, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Bernstein, B 2000, Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity, Rowman & Littlefield, London. Bernstein, B 2001, ‘From pedagogies to knowledges’, in A Morais, I Neves, B. Davies & H Daniels (eds.) Towards a sociology of pedagogy. The contribution of Basil Bernstein to research, Peter Laing, New York. Biesta, GJJ 2011, Good education in an age of measurement: ethics, politics, democracy, Paradigm, Boulder, CO. Bourdieu, P & Passeron, JC 1990, Reproduction in education, society and culture, Sage, London. Bray, M 2009, Confronting the shadow education system: What government policies for what private tutoring? UNESCO/IIEP, Paris. Buckingham, D & Scanlon, M 2002, Education, entertainment and learning in the home, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, UK. Callahan, RE 1962, Education and the cult of efficiency, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. CERI (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation) 2008, Innovating to learn, learning to innovate, OECD, Paris. ­ fter-school Cole, M & The Distributed Literacy Consortium 2006, The fifth dimension: an a program built on diversity, Russell Sage Foundation, New York. Colley, H 2009, ‘Time in learning transitions through the lifecourse: a feminist perspective’, in K Ecclestone, G Biesta & M Hughes (eds.) Transitions and learning through the lifecourse, Routledge, London. Colley, H, Hodkinson, P & Malcom, J 2003, ‘Informality and formality in learning: a report for the Learning and Skills Research Centre’, Learning and Skills Research Centre, London. Davies, S & Mehta, J 2013, ‘Educationalization’, in J Ainsworth (ed.) Sociology of education: an A-to-Z guide, Sage, New York.

14  Julian Sefton-Green Depaepe, M, Herman, F, Surmont, M, Van Gorp, A & Simon, F 2008, ‘About pedagogization: from the perspective of the history of education’, in P Smeyers & M ­Depaepe (eds.) Educational research 3: the educationalization of social problems, Springer, ­A ntwerp, the Netherlands. Dewey, J 1916, Democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education, Macmillan, New York. Drotner, K, Jensen, H & Schroder, K (eds.) 2009, Informal learning and digital media, Cambridge Scholars Press, Cambridge. Edwards, R 1997, Changing places? Flexibility, lifelong learning and a learning society, Routledge, London. Field, J 2006, Lifelong learning and the new educational order, new revised edition, ­Trentham Books, Stoke-on-Trent, UK. Field, J, Gallacher, J & Ingram, R 2009, Researching transitions in lifelong learning, Routledge, London. Glastra, F, Hake, B & Schedler, P 2004, ‘Lifelong learning as transitional learning’, Adult Education Quarterly, vol. 55, pp. 291–307. Hamilton, D & Zufiaurre, B 2013, Blackboards and bootstraps: revisioning education and schooling, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Hirsch, BJ 2005, A place to call home, Teachers College Press, New York. Ito, M, Gutiérrez, K, Livingstone, S, Penuel, B, Rhodes, J, Salen, K, et al. 2013, ­Connected learning: an agenda for research and design, Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, Irvine, CA. Jenkins, H, Shresthova, S & Gamber-Thompson, L 2016, By any media necessary: the new youth activism, NYU Press, New York. Lareau, A 2011, Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life, 2nd revised edition, ­University of California Press, Berkeley. Lauglo, J, & Øia, T 2007, Education and civic engagement: review of research and a study of Norwegian youths, NOVA Rapport 14/06, Norwegian Social Research, Oslo, Norway. Levinson, B, Foley, D & Holland, D 1996, Cultural production of the educated person: critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice, State University of New York Press, New York. Livingstone, S & Sefton-Green, J 2016, The class: living and learning in the digital age, New York University Press, New York. McLaughlin, T 1996, Street smarts and critical theory: listening to the vernacular, ­University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. Meyer, JW, Boli, J, Thomas, GM & Ramirez, FO 1997, ‘World society and the ­nation-state’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 103, no. 1, pp. 144–181. Moore, R, Arnot, M, Beck, J & Daniels, H 2009, Knowledge, power and educational reform: applying the sociology of Basil Bernstein, Routledge, London. Nixon, H 1998, ‘Fun and games are serious business’, in J Sefton-Green (ed.) Digital diversions: youth culture in the age of multimedia, Routledge, London. Noam, GG 2004, After-school worlds: creating a new social space for development and learning. New directions for youth development, no. 101, vol. 9 of J-B MHS Single Issue Mental Health Services, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey. Rogers, A 2005, Non-formal education: flexible schooling or participatory education? ­K luwer Academic, New York. Rogoff, B, Callanan, M, Gutierrez, KD & Erickson, F 2016, ‘The organization of informal learning’, Review of Research in Education, vol. 40, pp. 356–401.

Introduction  15 Rose, J 2001, The intellectual life of the British working classes, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Rose, N 1999, Governing the soul: shaping of the private self, Free Association Books, Sidmouth, UK. Salen, K (ed.) 2008, Ecology of games: connecting youth, games, and learning, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sandlin, JA 2009, Handbook of public pedagogy: education and learning beyond schooling, Routledge, London. Schuller, T & Desjardins, R 2007, Understanding the social outcomes of learning, OECD, Paris. Sefton-Green, J 2004, Literature review in informal learning with technology outside school, Report 7, Futurelab series, Futurelab, Bristol, UK. Sefton-Green, J 2013, Learning at not-school: a review of study, theory, and advocacy for education in non-formal settings, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Soep, L & Chavez, V 2010, Drop that knowledge: Youth Radio stories, University of California Press, Berkeley. Street, B 1985, Literacy in theory and practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Street, B 2001, ‘Literacy events and literacy practices: theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies’, in M Martin-Jones & KE Jones (eds.) Multilingual literacies: reading and writing different worlds, John Benjamins Publishing, Philadelphia, PA. Trahar, S (ed.) 2006, Narrative research on learning: comparative and international perspectives, Symposium Books, Oxford. Tyler, W 2004, ‘Silent, invisible, total: pedagogic discourse and the age of information’, in J Muller, B Davies & A Morais (eds.) Reading Bernstein, researching Bernstein, ­Routledge, London. Watkins, M, Noble, G & Driscoll, C 2015, Cultural pedagogies and human conduct, Routledge, London. Werquin, P 2010, ‘Recognition of formal and non-formal and informal learning: country practices’, OECD Publishing, Paris. Williams, R 1961, The long revolution, Chatto and Windus, London.

2 Learning keywords – a cultural studies approach to schooling and pedagogy James G. Ladwig and Julian Sefton-Green

As Chapter 1 has suggested, ideas around the “schooled society” and the ideological functions of pedagogy have influenced educational philosophy and practice from earliest times. This chapter takes a historical materialist approach to the vocabulary of learning/schooling/education in the tradition of ­R aymond ­W illiams’s Keywords (Williams 1983).1 Developing argument in more depth than the preceding chapter it consists of four mini-essays on: schooling, world schooling, pedagogicisation, and informal/semi-formal learning. ­Clarifying these terms, their definitions and use helps us understand some of the ­assumption made about schools, education and learning in different countries around the world and will help establish a context for the chapters that follow. These terms, and the concepts and practices they describe, are often used in a confusing ­fashion especially when the same term is “translated” from one ­country to another. Given that this book as a whole deals with a series of ideologically laden concepts, our aim here is to offer as wide a frame of reference as possible to deal with the history and, at times, plural meanings that attach to our understandings of education. The fundamental premise behind this chapter is that everyday terms – even simple ones, like learning, education or schools – carry within them complex attitudes towards the relationship of social structure to ­individual agency and can imply different understandings about epistemology and the human mind. The language we use to label and describe key concepts from a comparative international perspective demands sustained attention.

Schooling Schooling is a deceptive term. At a very public level there is a common-sense notion of schooling as the durable overall effect of attending school. In some sense, this understanding of schooling is based on the lived-experience of it, from the individual perspectives of those who have been schooled. Two distinctions are carried with this notion of schooling. On the one hand, there is the individual–collective distinction. There is both an individual meaning to this experience as well as the sense of being schooled as part of (or into) a collective. In that sense, schooling is a prototypical example of the Durkheimian notion of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. In whatever time frame might

Learning keywords  17 be called the point of origin of a school, there is a specific collective identity that is the consequence of the individual’s schooling; but once established, the cyclical interaction between the individual and the collective is ongoing and bi-­ directional, over time. Common uses of the terms often carry this insight: ‘beginning school’ indicates an individual facing (perhaps rather abruptly) ­imposed learning, but also suggests a larger social validation. The second distinction which shifts the meaning of public uses of the term schooling, differentiates the observable evidence of schools (buildings, names, mottos, letterhead, email addresses, websites) from the more internal experience of being part of this or that school. School billboards may well be public evidence of a school, but the shared meaning of being in that school, of being that school, is an entirely different matter. There are many ways this latter distinction has been cast in academic studies, with more and less acuity (Parsons & Kroeber 1958), but a relatively common way to articulate this view is the sociological distinction between structures and cultures. In classic Marxist terms this would be the differentiation between the base and the superstructure (Williams 1977); in mainstream status-attainment or ‘functionalist’ sociology this is the position (or formal role) versus norm distinction. There is a very long history of treatments of the micro-level experience of schooling within the ancient literature of several philosophical traditions. From very early discussions of appropriate education in the Confucian tradition (from the Analects and beyond), normative recounts of schooling that pre-date modern schools can be found in the philosophical texts of Ancient Greece, several of which include dedicated commentary on different forms of teaching and training, as well as discussions of who should be trained or educated and how (as in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics). Similar more philosophical treatments of schooling can also be found in ancient texts of many religions, i­ncluding Hindu, Islam and several variants of Buddhism. That is, several ancient religious texts include some commentary on schooling such as in the Quran or the ­Vedic texts, where the issue of teaching “true” belief is a central concern, and in ­Buddhism, the debate on the role of disciplinary learning is the central distinction between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism (de Bary 2011). ­Discussions of more systemic forms of schooling arose within Christianity toward the end of the Middle Ages when the rise of Christianity, coexisting with the rise of ­European colonialism, facilitated the expansion of the religion through conversions of the colonised populations of the world (Hamilton 2015). Post Gutenberg’s Bible and the Reformation, the rise of the novel among the Western European petite bourgeoisie extended the literary interest in schooling from the individual perspective. Tales of individual experiences of schooling are a regular feature in Western fiction (e.g. James Joyce’s Portrait of the artist as a young man (1916), Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)) as well as in autobiographies of famous writers or thinkers (e.g. Simone de ­Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a dutiful daughter (1958)). In more academic literature, similar interest in the individual experience of schooling can be found in all the fields of social sciences and humanities that analyse children and schools  formally.

18  James G. Ladwig and Julian Sefton-Green But  beyond the more popular interests, many social scientific studies define schooling by reference to technical measures of how long people attend schools at both an individual and social level within an overall distribution of a given population. These studies are often very much focused on the “concrete” observable measures of schooling. At times, there are overt theoretical justifications for such measures, but often attending school is presumed to be a necessary “good”, and attending more is ostensibly better (Popkewitz & Lindblad 2004). Finally there is also a broader sociological understanding of schooling as an historical institution with significant social effect, operating through rituals and norms, a perspective John Meyer once referred to as a ‘macro-phenomenological’ perspective (Meyer 1977, 1986). Institutional analyses also address the individual level of schooling through the subjectivities created by and for those institutions. Thus, the term schooling can refer to one or any combination or all of these definitions with each use. Important historical, economic and social background factors have a significant impact on the chosen meaning of schooling within these academic studies. Historically, it is important to keep in mind that contemporary interpretations tend to invoke modern, industrialised connotations of the term schooling. In the history of education, for example, it is a standing current debate in Anglo-­ educational research from advanced economies as to whether or not schooling is functional for society, based on class conflict or the consequence of the historical accident called the modern state, or modern governmentality (Popkewitz & Lindblad 2004). Whatever the position held on that issue, the debate itself depends on the development of mass school systems, which were overtly built from ancient practices and adopted for the masses, modelled on mass production processes adopted from early industrial capitalism and modern bureaucratic efficiency (Hamilton 2013). That background is what makes current analyses of schooling plausible in the first place.

World schooling World schooling is a divided concept. On the one hand, there is little debate about the denotation of the term. With the growth and expansion of schooling systems around the globe, it is now the case that virtually all nations have mass schooling in some form. According to the latest UNICEF statistics, about 90 per cent of all primary school age humans now attend some level of primary schooling, with more than three-quarters reaching the final year of primary school (see, https://data.unicef.org/topic/education/overview/). If we consider the families of those 90 per cent, it isn’t much of a stretch to now claim that all humans know something about the experience of schooling. Indeed, the scale of the growth of school systems has reached remarkable levels of development, within the past century alone. Figure 2.1 is based on the data set developed by Barro and Lee (2013). The raw numbers should not be undervalued. The bars (left axis label) are simply the total number of people from the 15-year-old and over population, who

Learning keywords  19

Figure 2.1  Population completing primary schooling 1950–2010, constructed from data developed by Barro and Lee (2013).

completed primary school or more – that is, all those who completed primary level plus all who attended secondary or tertiary levels of schooling beyond ­primary (for the 146 countries from which Barro and Lee were able to construct a data set). As shown by the line (right axis label), roughly 80 per cent of the adult population of the planet has been schooled by this count. That compares to roughly one-third of the adult population completing at least primary schooling in 1950. We can thus see that while the percentage of population being schooled has been increasing in a nearly linear fashion, because of population growth, the raw number of schooled humans has ­increased exponentially. On the other hand, however, world schooling is also a term that carries a myriad of connotations. These range from celebratory pretence, such as in the now ubiquitous policy analyses seeking to expand schooling (e.g. McGaw 2008), to a semi-conspiratorial condemnation (such as in critiques of the homogenisation of cultural differences (Ritzer 2008)). Whether it references something people like or not, the nature of many of the disagreements about how to interpret the rise of mass education is illustrative – and helps show the multilayered and multi-­ levelled nature of schooling.

20  James G. Ladwig and Julian Sefton-Green In broad terms, there are several theorists of education who argue that the global spread of mass education carries with it some level of shared culture having made its way around the globe (Baker 2009). This basic observation comes from quite distant sub-fields within the sociology of education before the late 1990s interest in globalisation, and long before contemporary debates about global education (Ladwig 2000). Bernstein’s early formulations of his ‘pedagogicisation’ thesis (Bernstein 1990) was built on an observation about the nature of schooling that at the time had effectively just gone global. (The) interrelations represent the ordering principles (internal grammar) of the realizations of the European modal pedagogic device as institutionalized through State-controlled education systems, and this internal grammar is common to societies with different dominant principles (capitalist, dictatorship, or collectivist societies of the common form). This internal ­grammar… is not an inevitable realization of the inner logic of the pedagogic device but is a dominant historical and contemporary modality and produces fundamental similarities between educational systems in ideologically differently focused societies and, within broad limits, similar outcomes. (Bernstein 1990, p. 203) Other well-known authors have argued against the notion of a homogenised global cultural pedagogy. Robin Alexander’s comparative empirical analysis of pedagogy details national variations in pedagogical practices (Alexander 2001). For Alexander, it is quite possible to see cultural variation between nations deriving from unique national histories and traditions of schooling. This view might appear to contradict Bernstein’s broader vision. However, where Alexander traces national variation in pedagogy based on different national histories and cultures, for Bernstein, that variation could well all lie within boundaries of an institutionally shared cultural basis. The way in which Alexander makes the case for emphasising national variation is crucial. That is, Alexander (2001) works from a central concern about how meaning is constructed locally, whereas Bernstein’s multi-levelled model overtly attempts to see that local meaning in relation to regional, national and global pedagogic structures which have framed and classified knowledge and people in a manner which is recognisable around the globe. The question of meaning is also what motivates a quite different line of intellectual work from which the notion of world schooling has developed – the ‘new institutionalism’ of John Meyer and colleagues. Working from what Meyer himself termed a ‘macro-phenomenological’ perspective (Meyer 1986), the notion of world schooling was developed within a larger analysis of the growth of the modern state. This argument can be traced over several key conceptual steps (all building from empirical analyses): 1 first analysing schooling as an institution (which carries systemic characteristics like ‘de-coupling’) (Meyer 1977; Meyer & Rowan 1978), 2 through analysing the degree to which curriculum (forms or structures) have become global (Meyer 1992),

Learning keywords  21 3 alongside of explanations of the expansion of mass education (Meyer, Ramirez & Soysal 1992), and 4 an articulation of the modern state analysis, in which the characteristics of specific actors are articulated (Meyer et al. 1997); 5 actorhood defined in terms of the cultural norms established within the now global institutions (Meyer & Jepperson 2000). Thus, for this line of work, schooling is the archetypical (and central) lever of the modern nation-state, and the idea that schooling around the planet shares some degree of cultural norms is precisely what defines world schooling. Here the question of what actually makes schooling modern becomes central, not just for analyses of schooling as an institution, but also for any attempt to think “beyond” schooling. The history of schooling, however, is overtly connected to the rise of the modern nation-state in post-Reformation Europe, ­taking a form we would recognise as schooling in the 16th century (Hamilton 2015). Importantly, this timing coincides with the Weberian argument about the spirit of capitalism built from the Protestant ethic where Weber identified the mechanisms of modern bureaucracies under capitalism as attempts to manage meaning. For Weber, this was an ever-fleeting enterprise, giving rise to his now well-known formulation of the ‘iron cage’ of modernity. In essence, Weber ­a rgued that the more the specific logic of the modern state (which he identified as mean–ends rationality, or zweckrationale) was applied to more and more of social life (increased regulation, expansion of bureaucracies and so on), in pursuit of more meaningful lives, the more those aspects of life are rendered meaningless. Thus, the argument about whether or not there is world schooling is a concern for those who are fundamentally concerned about the meaning of what the term denotes. This fundamental debate relates directly to contemporary concerns about the expansion of international testing regimes (such as PISA and TIMMS) and their subsequent take up in local and national arguments about the role of schooling itself (Popkewitz & Lindblad 2000, 2004).

Pedagogicisation Pedagogicisation, as in ‘the pedagogicisation of everyday life’ or ‘the totally pedagogicised society’. This is an ugly word, no two ways about it. Pedagogy itself is difficult in English both to pronounce and to understand (Lusted 1986) but this variant seems, on the face of it, both brutal and complex. Usually, the suffix –ise (or –ize) turns a noun into a verb, but confusingly the suffix –isation is often used to form nouns from some verbs. The idea of –ising or –isation contains within it the idea of change of state, process or activity but that is to some extent what the noun “pedagogy” means in the first place. Pedagogy is more sophisticated than simply teaching and historically differentiated from didactics (Hamilton & Z ­ ufiaurre 2013), and can describe the process, interrelationships, context and structures that affect any form of teaching and learning. Pedagogy’s etymology hints at a quality of personal care and attention in that the Greek word root describes the person entrusted to look after a growing child and take him (sic) to school.

22  James G. Ladwig and Julian Sefton-Green However, the term pedagogicisation suggests a shift away from any personal or individual attention to a wider impersonal social process. It also hints at kinds of power relationships and equally processes of determination – the ways that society can be influenced and made – suggesting a considerable journey in its ­meaning. Whilst all language carries within it atavistic meanings that sediment over time – and thus, as we use words we are always beckoning back ­towards other worldviews, other histories, intentions, values and aspirations – the –­icisation of pedagogy is actually telling us something new. First, the term conveys the idea that forms of pedagogy have become synonymous with forms of schooling. There is a sense in which the pedagogicisation of everyday life could be parsed as “the schoolification of everyday life”. In this usage, there has been a slippage between modes of teaching, the organisation and validation of knowledge, the unequal power relationship between the teacher and the student, and finally, the ways the student is expected to both behave and perform under this regime. School with its highly coded forms of discipline, its rules and social conventions relating to the control of children by adults, has become a master metaphor for forms of soft power. Post Foucault, post Bourdieu, pedagogy – as used within the mass post-industrial school – is a specific mode of discipline. Pedagogicisation suggests that forms of school discipline can now be found outside of the school. Second, the word thus suggests that these regimes cannot only be recognised and defined as particular to school-based modes of discipline but also how forms of discipline have travelled out and away from their original institutional base into other social activities where their pedagogic nature now marks them out as being unusual. If we are interested in the pedagogicisation of everyday life then it is because the term allows us insight into a deep change in social practices and relationships. Irrespective of the empirical question – how can we define pedagogicisation in terms of observable phenomena and subsequently measure their increasing or decreasing presence? – the term gives us a theoretical tool to examine our cultures of learning. It is not that learning in and of itself is especially interesting – it seems as banal a fact of what it means to be human as breathing – but it is how learning is structured, organised, withheld, offered, validated and valued as a cultural process that gives insight into the meaning of what it is to be educated in particular times and places (Levinson, Foley & Holland 1996). Pedagogicisation alerts us to an increasing interest in, and language about, the more explicit place of education in our society. Third, pedagogicisation implies that learning is more than simply learning (in the tradition of focusing on cognition or other mental processes) and alerts us to the fact that all kinds of learning can be understood in terms of the development of subjectivity. From this perspective – derived significantly from the work of Foucault (e.g. Foucault 1995), pedagogicisation is part of a larger psycho-social process that constructs the self within the regimes of power that govern us. Thus, pedagogy is as much about understanding the operations of power, modes of thinking, the authority of certain kinds of knowledge, gendering, uses of language and ways of speaking as it is about the acquisition of

Learning keywords  23 academic disciplines. In turn, this perspective has led to analysis of pedagogicisation in terms of: the production of compliant citizens (Pykett 2013), the notion of public pedagogies (Sandlin 2009) and cultural pedagogy (Watkins, Noble & Driscoll 2014). All of these analyses build on an understanding of pedagogy as a social and political process working across many sites (Giroux 1995,  1983). Not only is it suggested that pedagogicisation is an original way to bridge the classic sociological ­d ilemma between structure and agency (Buckingham & ­Sefton-Green 2004), but that like mediatisation, commodification, individualisation and globalisation (Krotz 2007), it is a distinctively contemporary social process peculiar to our times. Studies in this tradition focus on the arrangements and affordances of systems and structures (from public spaces in the city to texts in online games to museum displays, the habits in everyday life and so on) in order to think of how people behave and how they develop or perform in all of these fields. Yet, in some ways this expanded notion of pedagogy – of seeing pedagogicisation as another form of social structuration – runs the risk of ignoring the term’s special qualities: how it encapsulates a reflexive understanding of being positioned in educational situations. This is what Basil Bernstein had in mind with his albeit brief hint towards the ‘totally pedagogicised society’, suggesting that forms of schooling – which for Bernstein meant particular control over language forms and knowledge c­ ategorisation – now distinguishes modern social life (Bernstein 2000; Moore et al. 2009). Pedagogicisation’s contribution to contemporary sociologists’ ­repertoire of concepts is its persistent reminder to us that all of our learning has taken and takes place in institutions, modes and discourses that derive from our societies’ education systems and it is how these are then embedded, and spun off beyond their original formation, that has consequences for all of our identities.

Informal/semi-formal learning Formal, informal, non-formal and semi-formal learning: as in the ‘spread of informal learning into the home’, the ‘growth of the non-formal learning sector’, or “informal science centres”. This is a popular way of apparently qualifying learning but it is conceptually muddy and descriptively imprecise, however well yoking together degrees of formality and learning seems to capture the new spirit of educationalism in the digital age. Historically, the use of the formal/informal dichotomy in relationship to ­education derives from its application in international development studies to a distinction between the formal and informal economies in “developing” countries (Hart 2009). In a reflection on what he called ‘the political history of an ethnographic concept’, Keith Hart speculates that the informal/formal pairing may have flourished because of the connotations surrounding the ‘stifling bureaucracy of the state’ in opposition to the agency and individuality associated with the free market. Indeed, although notions of formality stem etymologically from a concern with shape or form it is difficult to escape an emotional

24  James G. Ladwig and Julian Sefton-Green entanglement in the language and this emotive value carries through to its use in educational discourse. In a more specific investigation of the formal/­informal pairing in relationship to media economies (Lobato, Thomas & Hunter 2011), it has been suggested that the informal is useful as a way of describing ‘that which falls largely or wholly outside the purview of state policy, regulation, taxation and measurement’ (p. 900). But in what ways do, or even could, these dimensions of formality have any relevance for learning? And, whilst there is no simple answer to this question perhaps the work of Basil Bernstein with its attention to regulatory discourses and classification of knowledge (Bernstein 1973, 1990, 2000, 2001), or that of Pierre Bourdieu with his insights into struggles over what might define a field of practice (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990; Bourdieu 1990, 1993), might point the way. Hart (2009) stresses the dialectical value of the formal/informal binary arguing that the two terms help us question and understand how institutional practices are enacted and embodied by people – that the distinction between a formal and an informal domain is never hard and fast, but that the heuristic value of the binary helps us make sense of the boundaries that matter to people in everyday life. From this point of view, the formal/informal makes sense as a shorthand to challenge a number of elements in education. The formal is often taken as a cipher for school – a public, bureaucratic institution with its rituals, organisation and control of large numbers of bodies – but, as in discussions of ‘the informal curriculum’ (Giroux 1983), despite their surface rigidity, schools themselves can often encompass the informal. Whilst it is easy to understand the popularity of the terminology, from a scientific viewpoint this binary is annoyingly vague. Does it, for example, refer to (a) the form of learning in terms of its of context – the place where learning takes place, such as the hierarchically structured classroom in opposition to a cluster of kids milling around a computer screen? Or (b), are we talking about a distinction between prescribed and authorised knowledge as opposed to informal, subversive and subaltern ways of seeing the world: the form of the curriculum and informal knowledge (McLaughlin 1996)? And (c), these two dimensions are often confused with modes of teaching – of the nature of the interpersonal relationship between teacher and the taught (Pennac 2010). Since the terms themselves are only useful inasmuch as they focus on where the boundaries are drawn, these three dimensions serve to help people describe their experiences of education more than to isolate analytic structures (Sefton-Green 2004). Furthermore, because the formal/informal binary is attached to the more individualistic “learning” rather than the more systemic “education” ­(Biesta  2011,  2012), these distinctions become even more convoluted when they are applied to sectors or institutions within the field of education such as museums and libraries. Here, schools are again made to stand for the formal whilst long-standing cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, theatres, archives, or even gardens and outdoor centres – all of which have their own histories, funding and place within their local communities – become non- or semi-­formal learning institutions (Drotner, Jensen & Schroder 2009). In this

Learning keywords  25 frame, the quality of the content (or knowledge) may be just as formal and curricularised as anything found in school but the ways in which learners are engaged and, most importantly, measured (or not measured), is what defines their non-formality. The relationship between the kind of knowledge that might be the business of schools being offered, packaged and consumed in ways that schools do not measure has become a key concern of education policy around the world ­(Ladwig  2010). OECD and European Union education policy has thus attempted to create a hierarchy of formalities2 as a way of incorporating different kinds of learning experiences into a unitary framework. Digital technologies now offer ways to disrupt formal education and again the dimensions of formality and informality are in the forefront of arguments about the merits of such changes. Such debate addresses larger social questions about the value of credentials and the authority of transmitted knowledge (Broekman 2014). As interest in forms of learning has now spread from the school to all sorts of social settings, so academic interest in the varieties of informal and non-­formal learning has multiplied. A 2005 reader containing theoretical discussion ­(Bekerman et al. 2005) now takes the form of a thousand-page compendium anatomising the varieties of out-of-school learning (Peppler 2017). Sociocultural perspectives reject any attempt at qualification: learning is learning, and just takes place in a particular context. The popularity of the concept surely betrays a wider social concern with the purpose and place of education in general.

Notes 1 See also: http://infed.org/mobi/ideas/ 2 www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/recognitionofnon-formalandinformal learning-home.htm and www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/events-and-projects/projects/ validation-non-formal-and-informal-learning/european-inventory/europeaninventory-glossary

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Learning keywords  27 McGaw, B 2008, ‘The role of the OECD in international comparative studies of achievement’, Assessment in Education, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 223–243. McLaughlin, T 1996, Street smarts and critical theory: listening to the vernacular, ­University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. Meyer, JW 1977, ‘The effects of education as an institution’, American Journal of ­Sociology, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 55–77. Meyer, JW 1986, ‘Types of explanation in the sociology of education’, in JG Richardson (ed.) Handbook of theory and research in the sociology of education, Greenwood Press, New York. Meyer, JW 1992, School knowledge for the masses: world models and national primary curricular categories in the twentieth century, Falmer Press, New York. Meyer, JW & Jepperson, R L 2000, ‘The “actors” of modern society: the cultural construction of social agency’, Sociological Theory, vol. 18, pp. 100–120. doi:10.1111/0735–2751.00090 Meyer, JW & Rowan, B 1978, ‘The structure of educational organizations’, in MW Meyer and Associates (ed.) Environments and organizations, Jossey-Bass, San Franscisco, CA. Meyer, JW, Boli, J, Thomas, GM & Ramirez, FO 1997, ‘World society and the ­nation-state’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 103, no. 1, pp. 144–181. Meyer, JW, Ramirez, FO & Soysal, YM 1992, ‘World expansion of mass education, 1870–1980’, Sociology of Education, vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 128–149. Moore, R, Arnot, M, Beck, J & Daniels, H 2009, Knowledge, power and educational reform: applying the sociology of Basil Bernstein, Routledge, London. Parsons, T and Kroeber, A 1958, ‘The concepts of culture and of social system’, American Sociological Review, no. 23, pp. 582–583. Pennac, D 2010, School blues, MacLehose Press, London. Peppler, K (ed.) 2017, The SAGE encyclopaedia of out-of-school learning. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA. Popkewitz, T & Lindblad, S 2000, ‘Educational governance and social inclusion and exclusion: some conceptual difficulties and problematics in policy and research’, D ­ iscourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 5–44. Popkewitz, T & Lindblad, S. 2004, ‘Historicizing the future: educational reform, systems of reason, and the making of children who are the future citizens’, Journal of Educational Change, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 229–247. Pykett, J 2013, Governing through pedagogy: re-educating citizens, London, Routledge. Ritzer, G (ed.) 2008, The Blackwell companion to globalization, Blackwell, Oxford. Sandlin, J. 2009, Handbook of public pedagogy: education and learning beyond schooling, Routledge, Abingdon. Sefton-Green, J 2004, ‘Literature review in informal learning with technology outside school’ https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/FUTL72/FUTL72.pdf (viewed 18 January 2018). Watkins, M, Noble, G & Driscoll, C 2014, Cultural pedagogies and human conduct, Routledge, Abingdon. Williams, R 1977, Marxism and literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Williams, R 1983, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, 2nd edition, Fourth Estate, London.

3 Can we de-pedagogicise society? Between “native” learning and pedagogy in complex societies Mariëtte de Haan Introduction: “native learning” In this chapter I will address and analyse claims that argue that we need to turn to what has been lost through pedagogicisation, and that we need to de-­ pedagogicise society. I will discuss the limitations and the potential of going native in an apparently over-pedagogicised society, through reflecting on the questions: How do we understand pedagogicisation in relationship to learning? Is pedagogy, or teaching as a separate register unique? How do we understand a teaching register, and (why) do we need it? Can we speak at all of a “natural” way of learning removed from communities of practice? My interest in these questions stems from when I travelled in the 1990s to the Mazahua region in Mexico to study how children learn in a Native American community, a community that was drastically different from my own. At that time, my motives were not limited to understanding learning and teaching in that community but my ultimate aim was to understand learning across communities. I wanted to understand why certain forms of learning and teaching were happening in some places and not in others, and if it would make sense to learn from how other communities undertake the job of teaching the young. Given the literature on Native American learning that claimed that in these communities children learn remarkably well from observation, independently from adult instruction, a large part of my attention was drawn to the question: Is there something that can be called a “pedagogy” in this community, and what does it look like? (de Haan 1999, p. 224). And how can I describe this pedagogy, and how does it relate to what pedagogy is in my own culture and in the scientific record? I found that in the community I studied, a teaching register, as a way of thinking and talking about teaching as I knew it, did not exist. This was apparent from one of the first interviews I conducted with a Mazahua mother who lived ­somewhat away from the central village. She was kind, and curious enough to endure the flood of explorative questions that I had prepared to help ensure that I would come to understand their way of doing pedagogy. It was only after a while that I discovered my interviewee and I did not share the same language and underlying concepts, as illustrated in Box 3.1.

Can we de-pedagogicise society?  29

BOX 3.1 Research interview The interview takes place in the yard of the mother’s home, where her children are playing. We both sit on the ground, and she is holding an approximately 1-year-old baby. I have carefully formulated my questions, so as to make sure that my question do not reflect a certain interpretation of teaching or learning. I asked questions such as: ‘How do you as a parent make sure a child learns?’; ‘How do you show a child something (Cómousted ensena un niño)?’ The mother seemed surprised by my questions, but also confused. In the following, M = mother and I = Interviewer: M: 

Pero … ., nadie …, le enseñamos, para que aprende si.

M: 

But … ., nobody, we showed him, so that he learns, yes.

As I felt we were getting there, I continued to ask her for a certain rationale, a methodology. I: 

Y c ómo se ensena una cosa que un niño no sabe? Cómo se ensena?

I: 

But how do you show something a child does not know? How do you show (something)?

This kind of questioning and probing did not help her, and although she was very willing to help me out, she felt obviously awkward and embarrassed with this line of inquiry. After trying out a number of ­variations, and asking how she would go about situations in which she wanted her son to know something that he did not yet know, the mother concluded, laughingly: M: 

es que yo no sé, la verdad es que no sé.

M: 

I don’t know, really, I don’t know.

I insisted that I was not asking her about something that she did not know, as this was something related to her daily practice with her son. The mother looked puzzled and suggested: M: 

para hacer de qué, de trabajar o de… .

M: 

To do what, to work, or…?

I:  (encouraging

her) Sí, vamos a hablar de un ejemplo, no?

I: 

Yes, let’s talk about an example,

I: 

Qué cosas él aprendió de usted, que cosas usted enseñó, usted a él de hacer….

I: 

What he learnt from you, what things you show him, – you to him, to do…

M: 

Yó a el…

M: 

Me to him… (Continued)

30  Mariëtte de Haan (long silence) I: 

M:  I: 

  (long silence)

Son muchas, me imagino. A ver, el sabe cocer el agua? Él si.

Quién le enseñó a él?

I: 

There are many things, I suppose. Let’s see. He knows how to boil wáter?

M:  I: 

He, yes.

Who showed him this?

At that point, the mother starts laughing, very relieved. M:  I: 

Ahhh, ya lo entendí.

Ahh, ¿a ver? (both laugh) Entonces cómo?

M: 

Pues, yo dice que va a cocer el agua, así, así, se coza (laughs), así.

M:  I: 

Ahh, I already understand.

Ahh, you see. (both laugh) So, how?

M: 

Well, I tell him that he is going to boil water, like that, you boil (laughs), like that.

Source: de Haan (1999, p. 90)

Interestingly, it was only when we talked about the life sphere of work that the mother started to finally feel comfortable. All of my attempts to get her to tell me a story using educational language seemed futile. Only when she understood that I wanted to know how she gets her son to work, did she feel that I was tapping into something familiar. This finally resulted in her sharing some kind of script that described how this was accomplished, although the how was more related to the world of work, and certainly not to any educationalist discourse of pedagogy. In addition, I found that, although teaching was not signalled by her as a separate speech register, there was certainly much guidance by the mother in ­evidence, guidance that was mostly smoothly integrated into productive ­activities. ­Sometimes, however, this kind of guidance was marked as such, for instance, when skilled workers needed to slow down activities such as when sowing maize,  or building a market stall, or when a child could not keep up with the rhythm of labour or when making mistakes. My conclusion was that in this community, clear motives to “learn” as well as “teaching” efforts could be distinguished; for instance, when elders would encourage a child to observe carefully or scold a child when s/he did not pay attention. However, these teaching and l­earning opportunities were created without taking away children’s responsibilities as full participants and community members (de Haan 1999, 2002; Paradise & de Haan 2009). For instance, feedback given by parents was not directed towards the learning process of children (e.g. ‘you are already doing better’), but only related to the successful pursuit of activities (e.g. ‘you were supposed to do it like this’).

Can we de-pedagogicise society?  31 Although at the time this work provided me with an answer to the question of whether there is a “pedagogy”, and what it looks like in this Native American context, it did not help me to understand learning and teaching across societies. How this so-called “unpedagogicised” guidance, or perhaps alternative kind of pedagogicisation, related to formal and informal learning in my own society was a question to which I kept returning. According to Depaepe and Smeyers (2008) the idea of Pädagogisierung (a  German “umbrella” word that does not translate easily into English) was put forward by Michael-Sebastian Honig at the end of the twentieth century as meaning: “the institutionalization of childhood as a social subsystem, thus identifying an independent range of functions that prepared the new generation for participation in culture, politics, and the economy” (Depaepe & Smeyers 2008,  p. 379). It stood for the tendency to colonialise informal life spheres, such as leisure time or family life, using the register of schooling to capture these spheres in order to make them work for an educational agenda. Similarly, Sefton-Green (2015) has noted that ‘we are living through an era where the “creep” of pedagogicisation will inevitably penetrate all aspects of the individual life world’ (p. 57). For instance, one can speak of the pedagogicisation of family life when parents feel the pressure to regulate the growing up of their children in such a way that family activities are spent in educationally smart ways to maximise developmental outcomes for their children. Indeed, scholars have recently drawn attention to the phenomenon of hyper parenting, pointing to the fact that in particular in middle-class milieus, parents feel an increasing pressure and responsibility to control and monitor their children’s lives (Furedi 2008). These ever-more rationalised, controlled and designed childhoods are justified by claiming to reduce potential risks or damage to children, and to ensure social and educational success. According to this literature, parenting becomes another separate identity for adults, as a pedagogicisated life sphere that takes over from other informal social spheres. In response to this over-pedagogicisation some have argued that we need to return to earlier, forgotten, so-called “natural” practices of teaching and l­earning. The argument for returning to our “natural” habitus of learning is often based on the idea that we are overestimating our capacities to teach while we are underestimating the more “natural”, in-built, inherently human capacity to learn to become members of expert communities without rationalising or institutionalising this process. Indeed, opposing pedagogicisation is easy to imagine. ­Depaepe and Smeyers (2008) state that pedagogicisation ‘could easily be read in oppositional terms, over against autonomy, liberation, and independence – due to increased dependence, tutelage, patronization, mothering, infantilization, [and] pampering’ (p. 382). It is precisely this resistance to pedagogicisation that is addressed in calls to return to “natural learning”, questioning whether we haven’t gone too far in our attempts to implement pedagogical regimes. Often the argument for this opposition to pedagogicisation is that it has detrimental effects on children, or on

32  Mariëtte de Haan learning, such as withholding children’s rights to adult responsibilities and identities, or creating too much dependency by children on teachers (e.g. ­Depaepe & Smeyers 2008). At the same time, I want to relate these claims to those who argue for the further sophistication of pedagogy given that we are living in an increasingly socially and technologically complex society. Our current educational system is ­designed for the industrial age (Robinson 2011) whereas new forms of ­knowledge production ask for a new paradigm for learning and teaching (­Lankshear, Peters & Knobel 2000; Ito et al. 2010). Here I will ask: (How) do evolutionary and sociocultural perspectives on learning claim we are, or should be, developing more complex pedagogies? Can we – without serious consequences – “return” (if it is a return at all) to socalled earlier and presumably more basic forms of learning and teaching without acknowledging the socio-historical development of a ­society or community? Are we caught up in a sociocultural–evolutionary development that urges us to take the next step and come up with new paradigms of teaching and learning as some are claiming? Linking the issue of de-pedagogicisation to a socio-developmental approach complicates the answers to these questions but provides a necessary lens to understanding issues of pedagogicisation in complex societies.

Are we over-pedagogicised? A return to the “natural” way to learn? Although this question could be discussed in a number of different ways, here I want to examine the study of learning in so-called non-pedagogicised communities. The work of David Lancy (2015) makes a key contribution to this field, although it is possible to see the work of many others in this same line of reasoning (Adams & Coulibaly 1985; Paradise & Rogoff 2009; Rogoff 2014). Drawing upon a large record of studies on learning in non-Western communities, Lancy (2015) claims that Western schooling is antithetical to the usual way children learn in most countries across the world. Lancy raises the challenge that resistance to academic learning derives from the fact that children are cut off from their more natural habitus of learning claiming that teaching is historically and cross-culturally rare, and appears to be unnecessary in order to transmit culture or to socialise children. Based on extensive reviews of the anthropological literature, Lancy (2016) concludes that: ‘teaching was extremely rare and did not seem to map onto any inventory of critical survival skills. In parental ethno-theories of “proper” child-rearing, teaching was specifically proscribed – even deemed harmful’ (p. 35). While according to contemporary Western standards learning is organised top-down, and supposed to happen through the transfer of knowledge from ­experts/teachers to novices/pupils, the ethnographic record shows a pattern that is bottom-up, and happens through eager, self-initiated and self-directed learning, based on observation of, and gradual participation in, community practice. Moreover, Lancy (2016) argues that more generally teaching is not a natural way to make learning happen. He claims that:

Can we de-pedagogicise society?  33 despite spending billions on developing curricula, methods, and teacher training, the schooling process, at least across much of the US, seems, by many measures, seriously deficient. There seems to be very little that is “natural” about effective pedagogy. On the contrary, promoting successful ­pedagogy seems like an engineering challenge comparable to sending humans to the moon. (Lancy 2016, p. 56) Even if it is the case that in Western societies teaching might be more necessary due the academic and complex nature of the tasks people need to master, there is evidence that in Western societies, educators do try to teach things children would learn by themselves. Lancy shows that there is a growing body of research that reveals that parents in Western middle-class families are unnecessarily using the teacher register for tasks that children can and have always learned by themselves, such as when teaching children to speak, to play with their peers or to play with toys (Lancy 2016, p. 38). Lancy thus raises the fundamental question about the uniqueness of the teaching register to accomplish learning, suggesting that there is little evidence that “lessons” or learning plans about how to pursue a particular skill or behaviour can do anything else that is not already routinely present in human interaction such as speech or shared intentionality (Lancy 2016, p. 48). In fact, his argument can be read as a plea to reconsider our focus on the pedagogicisation of learning, as it makes adolescents too dependent on others, and ‘tames the autonomous learner’ (Lancy 2015, p. 326). A similar argument has been developed by Peter Gray (2013) who argues that our current schooling model un-learns children to learn. Based on comparative anthropological and historical work he argues against the pedagogicisation of both schooling and everyday life. He states that there is evidence that humans have what he calls “educative instincts” which are minimally invasive or intrusive to others. Humans have a natural curiosity and a natural playfulness which motivates them to engage in culturally relevant activities, to explore and practise, and finally they have a natural sociability which allows learning to spread ‘like a wild fire’ to others (Gray 2013, p. 112). From the study of learning in hunter-­ gatherer societies, the history of education and play, the biological and psychological functions of play and alternative forms of schooling amongst others, he comes to the conclusion that children are biologically predisposed to take charge of their own education and there is no need for them to draw upon the forced lessons of standard education. Even worse, these only interfere with children’s natural ways of learning (Gray 2013, p. 6). This line of argument would define pedagogicisation, then, as taking children out of their own learning activities, and bringing them into the regimes of others to make them learn. However compelling these arguments are, they leave us with a couple of questions, especially given the fact that key activities to be learned are not equal across societies. Indeed, how might Gray’s claims hold for societies that depend on, for instance, the teaching of complex literacy skills, theoretical physics or specialised surgery – skills that are both inaccessible and too complex for the eager learner’s

34  Mariëtte de Haan observation? Does the complexity and inaccessibility of some knowledge ask for a different and more formal pedagogical regime in which masters need to show the way, and skills need to be built step by step leading towards increasing complexity according to well-­designed curricula? And how do these claims hold in a global information society with its new ways of producing, organising and accessing knowledge?

Learning versus pedagogy: (how) can the two be disentangled? In a piece on pre-assumptions in the concept of tutoring,1 Maier and Valsiner (1996) claim that while there is no doubt that human development is immersed in cultural transmission, it is less clear what the status of “tutoring” is for the discipline of developmental psychology (p. 27). In line with what others (Koops  2000; Depaepe & Smeyers 2008) claim about the nature of pedagogy, Maier and Valsiner define tutoring as intentional acts of a tutor towards a tutee that have a planned character, in which specific techniques of instruction are used that guide the learner and that attempt to impact learning outcomes, according to some culturally desirable outcome. ­Tutoring has a rational organisation, justified with/based on scientific notions of ­development or guidance that are characterised by means–end relationships. In this sense, tutoring is defined differently from any other goal-directed social interaction or from any “accidental” explorative learning of an individual child. However, so they argue, this planned and intentional directing by the tutor happens irrespective of whether the learner accepts this direction. When considering the co-constructive nature of development in these tutor settings, that is, when considering that the learner is also an active agent in this kind of instructive interaction, and that his/her development is just as well defined by his/her own actions as those of the teacher, it becomes clear that the distinction between tutoring/teaching and other social interactions is relatively inexact. This is illustrated, for instance, in a study by Elbers et al. (1992) showing how a learner can resist or sabotage tutoring while setting her/his own goals relatively independent of the goals of the tutor. In other words, tutors might have an intention to steer the development of learners, but learners have intentions too, and in the process new goals can be constructed (p.28). Thus, tutoring is, according to Maier and Valsiner (1996), ‘dynamically goal oriented’, highly variable and unpredictable. In other terms, actual human development or learning is far more complex than can be conceived or captured in the planned and stepwise procedures of tutoring. Another reason for the relatively inexact distinction between this definition of tutoring and other social ­interactions is, as the authors state, that all types of interactions between a child and social others – where some kind of normative expectations are involved or problems need to be solved – could be seen as learning and exploration opportunities. Tutoring/teaching interactions are then, in terms of ­learning opportunities, and potential developmental outcomes, not very different from individual (playful, explorative, socially guided) learning, except

Can we de-pedagogicise society?  35 for one distinctive characteristic: the intention of the teacher and the rational, planned character of the interaction.

Do we need (more complex) pedagogies in more complex societies? In order to argue whether teaching is basically a superfluous cultural register, and in particular whether this claim could also hold for complex societies, here I will present arguments from three different disciplinary fields: evolutionary psychology, sociocultural theories of learning and social-organisational aspects of teaching and learning. 1 In the field of evolutionary psychology the claim is made that a distinction can be made between those things for which learners are naturally equipped with the skills to learn without instruction, and those things that need instruction and which are typically associated with modern, specialised, complex societies. 2 Sociocultural theories of learning have made claims about the relation between learning and teaching and the increasingly complex nature of mediation. 3 Social-organisational accounts of the nature of teaching, in particular related to the institutionalisation of learning, give rise to reflections on the normative nature of pedagogicisation. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, it would not be possible to “go back” to the natural capacity of learners to learn in complex societies. The argument against going back to “natural” learning would be that learners can learn technologically simple activities that are easy to observe, access and understand, but this is not possible in technologically complex activities, symbolic systems or complicated semiotic codes such as those involved in learning literacy, medicine or information science. The overall implication from evolutionary biology is that with more complex forms of life, more complex forms of learning and transmission are needed. This view is based on the idea that not only have cultures developed though human evolution, but so has the capacity to acquire cultures (e.g. Csibra, & Gergely 2009; Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner 1993). Human beings, in contrast to other primates, have the capacity to learn from each other in ways that allow them to preserve accumulated cultural practice across generations. These “ways to preserve” are fundamentally different for basic and more complex cultural forms, as argued by evolutionary psychologist Geary (2007). He suggests that it is useful to distinguish between primary forms of knowledge and abilities for which the human brain is biologically primed, and secondary culturally specific ones that need to be taught. Examples of primary abilities are language skills or spatial skills, while typical examples of secondary abilities are literacy and maths. Primary abilities are typically learned early in life, while the secondary abilities develop on the basis of the first. According to Geary (2007), teaching is necessary to learn

36  Mariëtte de Haan competencies that would otherwise not develop spontaneously; and modern societies would not survive without teaching. This distinction is not relative, but absolute as, according to Geary, evolution has afforded children with acquisition skills to master key domains necessary for survival but not with the acquisition skills to master these secondary abilities for which they depend on teaching by experts. Thus, from this point of view, the idea of going back to more “basic” forms of teaching and learning would be catastrophic for complex societies. Sociocultural theory does not distinguish between natural (innate) forms of behaviour and cultural ones in human development (Wertsch 1985; Wertsch & Tulviste 1992). As a theory about the social origin of the nature of uniquely human individual mental functions, a distinction between the natural and the cultural phase in the development of individuals does not hold. The social origin of ­mental–individual functioning can be illustrated from the example of language learning: a child uses a social sign system, which is used and developed to influence and direct others, and adopts it to influence his/her own thinking and actions. Children of about 3 years old use speech (Vygotsky calls this egocentric speech) to plan and regulate their actions, and in doing so, they use social signs, derived from previous participation in social interactions with others (Wertsch & Tulviste 1992, p. 549). Thus, from a sociocultural point of view, a distinction between “natural” learning (biologically given), and cultural learning (needing teaching), does not hold. Although it is evident that a biological base exists, almost from after birth children’s learning starts to be socially and culturally “mediated”. Children start to be impacted and transformed by social interaction, endowed with meanings, with ways of seeing and acting upon the world that can be seen as “products” of the history of earlier social interactions. As learners explore their environment, even if they do so without much explicit and intentional help of social others, they cannot help but do so in already inhabited spaces that “speak” somehow of the social and cultural history of how others have dealt with those spaces before. However, sociocultural theory, in particular given its premise that human mediation becomes more complex through history, provides us with reasons to ­believe that as mediation becomes more complex, learning and social interaction become more complex too. As accumulated histories of signifying, meaning making, literacies, technologies and the intelligent ways of acting upon the world need to be passed on through social interactions, these social interactions also carry the traces of these accumulated complex histories (Wertsch 1985; Bakhtin 1981). Illustrative of this growing complexity in mediation is work on how the ­development of external memory systems (images, letters, digits) have “unloaded” the biological brain’s task in remembering, as Säljö (2012) has described. In contrast to the human brain, such systems have huge storage capacities and are publically available for further processing. Memorising, but also seeking, ­selecting and using information in such cases takes place while coordinating with these technologies. These processes become located at the intersection of the human mind and these technologies, and their current form is dependent on a very long history of production and human–machine interaction (Cole & Derry, 2005, cited in Säljö, 2012).

Can we de-pedagogicise society?  37 Learning in societies that have developed such technologies is fundamentally different from those that have not. In contrast to oral societies, in literate societies learning is not only defined by the collective accessibility and preservation of information outside of the human brain itself, it becomes geared towards the organisation and productive use of such systems (Donald 1991, in Säljö 2012). In other words, it needs an inauguration in what Säljö calls the epistemic practices of how these technologies function, and often also some background on the history of their use and production. These technologies form part of meaningful practices, conventions and insights about their use that are not ‘given by nature’ (p. 9) but ‘acquired through experience and enculturation’ (p. 9). With automation, more and more cognitive functions (through modelling algorithms and rules) are externalised, stored and automatically produced. In addition, due to the digitalisation of technology, the distributedness of ­socio-cognitive processes is undergoing major transformations. As learning to work with these technologies does not entail the learning of these algorithms and rules themselves anymore, and a large part of such complexity is taken over by machines such as calculators, statistical programs, spelling checking software or global positioning systems (GPS) systems, many of the technological complexities are no longer part of the learning of individual learners, but instead are “blackboxed” for them (2012, p. 61), simply because the use of these technologies would otherwise not be possible or too time consuming. Säljö states that from a learning point of view: such tools imply that users’ knowledge and skills, as it were, are parasitic on the collective insights that have emerged over a long time and which have been entered into the instrument in a crystallized form: algorithms, grammatical rules and concepts. (Säljö 2012, p. 14) The fact that learners feel as ‘digital natives’ (Prensky 2001) in such environments, is thus, one could argue, not solely due to their capacities to deal with these technologies, but also due to efficient blackboxing and the smart design of developers that hide complexities from users. Following this sociocultural line of reasoning, the accumulated histories of human action and technologies makes it unlikely that denying the guidance of experts and their instructive efforts will enable the next generation to become as skilled as the former to be able to continue to understand and manage our knowledge systems and technologies. It is safe to assume, given the above, as well as from the socio-historical nature of learning, that in order to have access to the history of the development and use of these technologies, some kind of guidance and introduction of experts is indispensable. However, societies with complex technologies do not need per se complex pedagogies, given that the complexity of technologies is also regulated in other ways (e.g. through blackboxing) so that not all of the burden of passing on this complexity is on the shoulders of pedagogues.

38  Mariëtte de Haan The difference between learning as a by-product of being engaged in authentic practices, and learning as something that is set apart from authentic activities, is well explained by Wertsch, Minick and Arns (1984). Borrowing from Leontiev’s notion of activity, which stands for an actual, identifiable, unit of life – a system with its own structure, motive and goal – they explain that in institutionalised learning, learning is the dominant “motive”, while in other activity systems a learning motive might be present, and can be an important goal, but it does not form an independent activity-motive system. In these last cases, learning is inextricably linked with the activity itself and follows the organisation of that activity, while in institutionalised learning the organisation is defined by didactic principles and rules. An example of the last case (thus a case of non-­ institutionalised learning) is described in a study by Greenfield and Lave (1982) of tailor shops in Liberia. Apprentices learn to tailor starting with smaller garments and sewing buttons, instead of the more risky cutting the design. ­A lthough the shopkeepers are aware of the critical importance of the apprentice’s learning, their learning does not change the structure of the activity, but instead, the logical order and nature of the production process defines their learning. Apart from the issue of setting learning apart from other life spheres, the need for pedagogicisation also depends on the political organisation of knowledge in a society as Maier and Valsiner (1996) argue. Societies that are socially differentiated, and which stratify access to forms of knowledge and the formation of an intellectual elite, introduce pedagogicisation for the young of that elite, so that the unequal distribution of knowledge will be preserved. In contrast, societies with no central authority, where knowledge is accessible to all, and in which there is a clear and shared view on what valid knowledge is, there are no, in-principle reasons for specific pedagogies, as almost any adult could act as an adequate teacher and there would be no need to distinguish between pedagogic interactions and other forms of interaction. A second explanation for pedagogicisation is where possibilities for observation and participation are limited or non-existent. An example from the ethnographic record that Lancy (2016) mentions in this respect is the explicit, lesson-based instruction described by Gladwin (1970), which is considered necessary to train long-distance navigators in the Puluwat Islands. Their navigation system is considered too complex and inaccessible to observe naturally and so must be explicitly taught by an expert.

Concluding thoughts on de-pedagogicising in complex societies Here I would like to resolve the questions that I posed at the beginning of this chapter, namely: Can we (re)turn to what is lost through pedagogicisation, and do we need to de-pedagogicise society? And, in particular, can we do so while we are living in an increasingly socially and technologically complex society? In this chapter I have examined different perspectives (evolutionary ­psychology, sociocultural learning theories, and social-organisational aspects of learning)

Can we de-pedagogicise society?  39 in order to investigate whether we could throw away our (over)­pedagogicised practices, returning to a mode of learning from earlier times where teaching is reserved for exceptional circumstances, and is, generally, considered more of a burden than an effective resource? Overall, my conclusion is that there is not much basis to conclude that as societies grow more complex, pedagogicisation grows equally complex (in the sense that we have developed increasingly complex forms of pedagogy for the passing on of increasingly complex forms of human life, technology or knowledge). First, as we have seen from the analyses of presumptions in the concept of tutoring, an important conclusion is that pedagogy, as a separate teaching register, is not unique when compared to other forms of social participation that allow learners to understand and appropriate socially and culturally desirable knowledge, skills, norms and values. However, it is unique as a culturally defined (speech) register. Second, as is clear from sociocultural accounts about the increasing complexity of mediation, even if social interactions pass on the accumulated histories of signifying, and the intelligent ways acting upon the world somehow also carry traces of their accumulated complex histories, it does not follow that pedagogicisation grows more complex. It does mean that pedagogicisation becomes geared towards the organisation and productive use of such systems, or the induction into, what Säljö (2012) calls, epistemic practices. Third, as was clear from socio-organisational accounts, pedagogy as a teaching register is not per se associated with the learning of more complex skills or systems, but rather with the lack of or impossibility of access to and participation in expert practices, or the decision to rationalise and organise the steering of the development of the inexperienced and/or the young relatively removed from the  practices any such learning was meant to prepare them for. This happens both in more complex societies as well as in the relatively unspecialised, traditional communities where the ethnographic record states that teaching is rare. The twofold complexity thesis – increasingly complex technologies require increasingly sophisticated means of transmission – seems further hampered by the fact that, as we have seen, automation, digitalisation and the distribution of intelligent activities in information societies seem to “regulate” the amount of guidance to some extent by “hiding” part of the complexities of technologies from their users. At the same time these three points speak against the fundamental distinction between learnable and teachable skills defended by evolutionary psychologists. Instead, we might speculate that instead of pedagogy becoming more complex, it seems rather that the opposite is the case: namely, that through the institutionalisation and professionalisation of pedagogicisation (understood here as “separating out” and rationalising the guidance of the young), pedagogical principles have become similar across contexts and, as historical research on schooling and child raising has shown (e.g. Rockwell 1999; Sterns 2006, c­ hapters  1  and 2), have proven surprisingly stable over time. We could perhaps say that the generalisation and abstraction from everyday practices that necessarily is part of its

40  Mariëtte de Haan institutionalisation, has caused a certain “mummification” (in  the sense of a fixation, resistance to change) of pedagogy that makes it relatively immune to changes outside of educational institutes. I believe it is precisely this tendency for relative stability that makes it necessary both to de-pedagogicise, but also re-pedagogicise societies.

The need to de-pedagogicise in complex societies I would plead for de-pedagogicisation in complex societies, not in the sense that we should go back to more “natural” habits of learning, but in the sense of finding more flexible, diversified forms of pedagogicisation that are more in tune with creating the means for observation and participation in authentic expert practices, and depend less on rather restricted scripts that follow only the rules of the discipline. It seems that the reason we are using the teaching register as our main and most important script to pedagogicise our practices is not because we have ample proof that it is the most efficient, but because it has become the dominant paradigm of how to prepare new generations in modern society ­(Depaepe & Smeyers 2008). In their analyses of the history of pedagogicisation in modern society, ­Depaepe and Smeyers (2008, p. 382) point out that, as is the case with the process of medicalisation, where a greater supply on the medical market does not necessarily lead to a healthier society, the increasing dependency on professional pedagogy likewise does not necessarily lead to a new generation that is better prepared. They point out that the success of the project of schooling depended on the professionalisation of education, the legitimation of the asymmetric educational relation, and the authority of the teacher ‘moulding students in the direction of socially desirable behaviour’ (p. 379). The increased academicisation and professionalisation of pedagogy legitimised and stimulated the development of general scripts and principles associated with the project of schooling. This is precisely the reason that the teaching register is often presented as superior to “just” participating and observing, while there is evidence that participation and observation are often superior to pedagogic exposition. The effectiveness of observation and imitation, as opposed to or in contrast with “teaching”, has been argued for from the perspective of the learning sciences (van Gog & Rummel 2010), sociocultural theory (Rogoff 2014) and anthropology (Paradise & Rogoff 2009). In a piece that describes community learning, Paradise & Rogoff (2009) signal that this un-pedagogicised learning is often defined as a residual category – in opposition to something else (formal, schooled learning) – rather than as a thing in itself. Descriptions of how children learn through observing and participating directly in their shared social and cultural world are labelled by Rogoff (2014) as ‘learning by observation and pitching in’ to emphasise the integration of learners into a range of activities in the community. Similar concepts that describe informal community learning are ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991), or learning in communities of practice (Wenger 1998). Characteristics of this form of learning are access to,

Can we de-pedagogicise society?  41 and keen observation by children in, community activities; collaboration and contribution in shared collective efforts; and a sense of belonging and identification. Paradise and Rogoff (2009) see this form of learning as panhuman, inherently cultural, and they argue that it is a mistake to see this form of learning as a “natural” form of learning, given its social nature, and its inherent connection to community participation. Despite these efforts, these unpedagogicised learning practices continue to be under-conceptualised and go relatively unnoticed both in science and daily practice, even though they represent the basic and omnipresent practice of guided learning in communities, both in non-Western and Western societies. As I pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, in modernised societies, in which the project of schooling has impacted the cultural metaphor of ­learning, this kind of community learning is often undervalued and replaced by a school-like register, even when this is redundant. However, any possibility of de-pedagogicising societies has to face up to the social organisation of learning, and the social dynamics of how the advancement and distribution of knowledge is connected with authority and privilege. This then makes the debate political. Giroux (2004), for instance, draws on the notion that the pedagogical is a political practice, and argues against a notion of the pedagogical as something to do with a technique or method, making the case that in current society, pedagogicisation is a necessary means to counter global economical–political hegemonic forces. Pedagogy always implies a particular version and vision of (civic) life, the future, and how we might represent ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. It is always an introduction to and a legitimation of particular forms of social life and represents always someone’s vision of the future (Giroux, 2004, p. 33). However, according to Giroux, educators need a new pedagogical and political language to address the changing societal contexts of our post-modern societies that face ‘a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources – cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological – to exercise powerful and diverse forms of hegemony’ (p. 32). Arguments for de-­pedagogicisation are thus dangerous, and especially so in complex societies. Where there are new technological complexities that are not easy to manipulate or oversee, more emphasis is needed for guidance, interpretation and the moral underpinnings of certain ways of behaving (Säljö 2016). This is the case despite the fact that new technologies make learners feel they have more autonomy because of the self-­ explanatory nature of some applications and platforms (cf. the discourse on native learners and digital natives, e.g. Prensky 2001).

The need to re-pedagogicise in complex societies Pedagogicisation as a form of rationalising and organising what needs to be learned cannot be dismissed, especially in complex, differentiated, globalised societies that are characterised by huge knowledge bases that are difficult to oversee, have long histories of growing into increasingly complex technologies, and

42  Mariëtte de Haan that through digital technology provide access to multiple different communities and life worlds. Re-pedagogicisation is necessary in those cases where there are pedagogical voids, forgotten or new domains not addressed by ­t raditional institutes of education, that, if not attended to by more experienced members of the society, will lead to undesirable (unsafe, unjust, inefficient, improper) outcomes for inexperienced members. In other words, it is important to be more conscious about what exactly needs to be pedagogicised, and what needs to be released, unleashed or left to community learning or self-exploration. There are therefore specific challenges for re-pedagogicisation in relation to globalised, information societies highly defined by digital infrastructures. It is for instance easy to imagine that observation and participation become more complicated in a world characterised by open knowledge production models, in which knowledge production and sharing happens not in one clearly identified community but through decentralised and distributed networks, in which a wider variety of resources over greater distance is available for learners, and where learners need to deal with the contradictory frameworks and meaning systems related to being in touch not just with one community, but many (de Haan et al. 2014). Although some have argued that new technologies make pedagogues redundant, it is also clear that new terrains for pedagogical intervention open up because of new technological complexities. For instance, the many pathways a learner can choose in the hyper textual structure of the Internet (Cousin 2005), and the fact that learners can only control or manipulate a very small part of the intelligent system of which they are a part, directs our understanding of learning towards interpretative acts. In turn, this might mean that more emphasis is needed on guidance in meaning giving, social interpretation and moral codes of conduct (Säljö 2016). Further, the potential for socio-technical changes to amplify social and economic inequalities urges us to ask new questions about fairness and inequality in our new educational ecologies (Facer 2011). Finally, although my conclusion is that the practices of learning and pedagogicisation in traditional societies certainly cannot be translated in any direct way to counter the over-pedagogicisation of the schooled society for many different reasons – only some of which have been addressed in this chapter – the comparison between different traditions of learning and pedagogicisation is insightful especially helping us to overcome any cultural blindness when imagining alternatives to traditional schooling.

Note 1 Maier and Valsiner use the term tutoring referring to guided problem solving between a tutor and a tutee which was a site of study in sociocultural research in the 1980s and 1990s in line with the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, but their argumentation applies to teaching more generally.

Can we de-pedagogicise society?  43

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44  Mariëtte de Haan Lankshear, C, Peters, M & Knobel, M 2000, ‘Information, knowledge and learning: some issues facing epistemology and education in a digital age’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 17–40. Lave, J & Wenger, E 1991, Situated learning. legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Maier, R & Valsiner, J 1996, ‘Presuppositions in tutoring: rhetorics in the concept’, ­Archives de Psychologie, vol. 64, pp. 27–39. Paradise, R & Haan, M, de 2009, ‘Responsibility and reciprocity: social organization of Mazahua learning practices’, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 187–204. Paradise, R & Rogoff, B 2009, ‘Side by side: learning by observing and pitching in’, Ethos, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 102–138. Prensky, M 2001, ‘Digital natives, digital immigrants, part II: do they really think differently?’, On the Horizon, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 1–6. Robinson, K 2011, Out of our minds: learning to be creative, Capstone Publishing, Chichester, UK. Rockwell, E 1999, ‘Recovering history in the study of schooling: from the Longue durée to everyday co-construction’, Human Development, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 113–128. Rogoff, B 2014, ‘Learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavors: an orientation’, Human Development, vol. 57, pp. 69–81. Säljö, R 2012, ‘Literacy, digital literacy and epistemic practices: the co-evolution of ­hybrid minds and external memory systems’, Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, vol.  01, pp. 5–19. Säljö, R 2016, ‘Symbolic technologies, hybrid minds and communities as sources of learning’, Keynote address, EARLI SIG 10, 21 and 25 Joint Conference, 28–29 August, Tartu, Estonia. Sefton-Green, J 2015, ‘Negotiating the Pedagogicisation of everyday life: the art of learning’, in M Watkins, G Noble & C Driscoll (eds.) Cultural pedagogies and human ­conduct, Routledge, New York. Stearns, PN 2006, Childhood in world history, Routledge, New York. Tomasello, M, Kruger, AC & Ratner, HH 1993, ‘Cultural learning’, Behavioral and brain sciences, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 495–511. van Gog, T & Rummel, N 2010, Educational Psychology Review, vol. 22, no. 155. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10648-010-9134-7 Wenger, E 1998, Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wertsch, JV 1985, Vygotsky and the social formation of the mind, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Wertsch, JV, Minick, N & Arns, F 1984, ‘The creation of context in problem solving’, in B Rogoff & J Lave (eds.) Everyday cognition; its development in social contexts, ­Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wertsch, JV & Tulviste, P 1992, ‘L. S. Vygotsky and contemporary developmental psychology’, Developmental Psychology, vol. 28, pp. 548–557 doi:10.1037/0012–1649.28.4.548

4 Accountability in epistemic practice on a Micronesian Island Vera Michalchik

On quitting school Schooling creates a singular type of moment for self-presentation. This moment gets universally re-enacted, constituting the presentation of self – and the experience of the knowing subject – in much the same way no matter the cultural surround. Take the case of Emily, on the Micronesian island of Kosrae. The first thing that Emily’s family members said to me was that she would have nothing to teach me. After all, I was obviously well educated and this 57-year-old woman had only stayed in school until the fourth grade. It was mostly her nephews who said this, government employees who had air-conditioned offices and had traveled off island for work. They used words like stupid (puhlakfohn) and bumpkin (toming) to describe her, and always laughed affectionately as they teased her. She laughed, too, and swiped her hand past her mouth as if to punish it as she confessed to her “broken English.” When I came to Emily, asking for her help in learning things Kosraean, I had already lived on the island for three years. I had met her when I first arrived, but she now needed paid work and I needed help, too. I explained to Emily that I needed her to help me learn – about gardening and cooking, massaging and childrearing, fishing and pig raising, and the ways of a church member. She was an expert in all these things, and this apprenticeship arrangement seemed straightforward enough to me. But other Kosraeans found it humorous, and because of this I came to see better the kind of institutional associations I carried with me. I could see, especially, the extent to which I represented school. My very presence evoked its logic, as if I went about parading credentials and asking others to produce theirs. At these moments, I inadvertently established a context for comparisons along a standardized dimension broad in its applicability. The fourth grade is readily measured against the seventh or the twelfth grade. Of course, the institutions that I unwittingly dragged along with me extended beyond school: money, the colonizing nation state, salaried employment, and the language – or so it seemed – on which these other things depended. If I had come to Emily for help with any of these things, if I had asked her for money, for example, or for a job, her nephews would have laughed, too. Because, though, I had come to Emily for learning, the jokes centered on school.

46  Vera Michalchik Soon after I arrived on the island, I began looking to see how Kosraeans constructed categories like smart (suhmaht) and dumb (puhlakfohn), educated (mwet etuh) and ignorant (mwet nihkihn), able (kuh in oruh) and unable (tiyac kuh in oruh). My research centered on how much they varied across Kosrae’s major institutional settings – school, church, and family, in particular – and what being knowledgeable meant in each. How much knowledge did someone have to show to get by? To get ahead? How did these displays of knowledge take place (that is, how were they socially arranged)? My goal was to sketch an epistemological landscape and associated practices, charting situationally what kind of knowledge mattered and how it was accessed and accounted for. I also wanted to describe what being knowledgeable looked like when reaching that state did not involve the type of personal display typical of school. Kosrae was a good site for examining an educative ecosystem. The Kosrae of today comprises an acute juxtaposition of contrasting institutional worlds within a relatively small and isolated space. Although they are always changing – ­influenced by new types of technology, and by shifts in the economy, in policy, and in demographics, among other factors – family, church, and school shape the lives of nearly all Kosraeans and still represent distinct kinds of historical origins and distinct social purposes. Going from home to church to school with Emily, her great-nieces and nephews, or other Kosraean friends allowed me to see that knowing means something different in each of these three places. What knowing means, I decided, depends on the ways in which people hold one another accountable for being knowledgeable. Emily’s life was full of such moments of accountability and their outcomes, when she and people around her pointed not just to how little she knew of some things but to how much she knew of others. Her reputation as a skilled healer, for example, had long been established, and indications of this still abounded; one niece of hers, having not conceived some months after getting married, ­traveled the thousand miles from Guam to receive fertility treatments from her. But a­ lthough she was among the best at one moment in her work as a healer, a weaver, or a gardener, the next moment she would chuckle out excuses, blaming her mispronunciations of English words on missing teeth or simple stupidity. She e­ ventually offered a grand excuse. She had quit school, she humorously explained, for rubba. It seems that the technicians who operated a U.S. naval weather station on the island handed out pieces of torn weather balloons to children who lingered around them. It remained a source of embarrassment to her, almost fifty years later, to have given up so much for so little.

Pedagogicised accountability More than any other defining element of contemporary schooling, arguably, accountability seems to characterize the zeitgeist. In 2015, half a million students representing 28 million 15-year olds in 88 countries and economies sat for the most recent administration of the exam known as PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, which uses the test results to compare national

Epistemic practice on a Micronesian Island  47 averages in reading, math, and science (OECD 2018). The US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) continues to expand its products and global reach, which includes sales of its exams in 180 countries (ETS 2018). Debates rage in the face of proposed policies that promote the expanded use of standardized tests as a mechanism to hold teachers, schools, and local agencies accountable for achievement and as a source of data on which to base mandates for change (Kempf 2016; Phelps 2017). The social apparatus mobilized by the regime of accountability includes modes for arranging it, claims based upon it, practices dependent on it, trainings geared towards it, tests to equip it, and sanctions to enforce it. At the same time, this apparatus mobilizes resistance to its imposition, critiques of its assumptions and distorting social repercussions, and efforts to attenuate some of its effects on teachers, children, parents, and others caught in its gears (Koretz 2017; Shepard 2000). Invariably, the burden for sustaining the apparatus by answering these questions rests on the shoulders of individuals held accountable for what they know. Put simply, questions about who knows what have very real impacts on people, institutions, and societies. The social interactions that index know-how and put it to use include moments organized for display. Although implied throughout sociocultural or situative frameworks of learning research (Bransford et al. 2006; Sawyer 2014), little in this body of work explicitly addresses issues of how knowing is accounted for in everyday life and how these types of assessments are put to use. The most pertinent studies represent the ways that everyday assessments fit in the social negotiations that position persons in activity, thereby constituting the knowing subject – roughly meaning, the direct experience of what it means to know (Gee 2010; Lave & Wenger 2002; McDermott 2010; Michalchik 2017; Stevens 2010). Delving into the role of assessing knowing, know-how, and, for purposes of this chapter, knowledgeability in everyday life, can potentially re-center our approach to thinking about assessment in and out of school, to realizing the value of a broad diversity of social practices for promoting learning, and even to designing and implementing more productive, engaging, and promising learning experiences. It also gives us an analytic lens for examining pedagogicisation in diverse contexts. The notion of display in the sense used here gets its inspiration more from Goffman (1974, 1979) than anywhere else (cf. Schechner 2017). Goffman’s approach provides a model for examining knowledge display events in terms of their functional effects, particularly their potency to position persons relative to one another. A concern with indexicality, scheduling, and the constitutive nature of display can guide inquiry into the practical arrangement of moments in which persons are held accountable for showing what they know. These moments have symbolic value within particular interpretive frames that get evoked for specific communicative purposes – for example, the frame of educational attainment that put Emily at a disadvantage. The effects of displays within such interpretive frames are often cumulative and realized retrospectively, display’s ‘minor allocations’ resulting in ‘substantial consequences’ (Goffman 1979, p.  8). In ­Goffman’s terms, the ‘evidence of the actor’s alignment in a gathering’ produced by a display (1979, p. 1) serves as ‘a passing exhortative guide to

48  Vera Michalchik perception’ (1979, p. 3). Other theorists have similarly described the evidentiary functions of specially framed behavior as ‘embedded instructions for seeing and describing a social order’ (Wieder 1974, p. 172). The framing itself is critical, in that ‘[a] way of saying invites a way of seeing’ (Packer 2018, p. 114). In sum, how persons present as more or less knowledgeable is arranged socially according to the norms existing in particular settings, institutions, cultures, and so forth. The moments for displays of knowledgeabililty are organized variously, but share a similar basic structure. The formal properties of knowledge display events are: 1 A situation is organized requiring a person to show what they know (or can do). 2 The person shows what they know (or can do). 3 There is an evaluation of the person’s behavior, consequential in some way. The consequences of knowledge display events are what shape the local meaning of knowing by holding people accountable, in particular ways, for what it is they show they know. Simply put, the meaning of knowing comes into relief through an examination of the social consequences of being more or less knowledgeable. Knowledgeability is more than an epiphenomenon of a subject’s inner mental state; it is the direct product of social interactions. A test in school, a presentation in church, or an effort toward some practical accomplishment such as cooking at home all can serve as knowledge display events, generating indices of just how knowledgeable a person shows herself to be. Knowledgeability, once produced, becomes a quantifiable asset, a symbolic good with value beyond the immediate circumstance. Indications of a person’s knowledgeability – diplomas, titles, or the stories people tell about one another, for example – therefore can be revisited, circulated in social interaction throughout the course of a person’s lifetime. Systems of accountability shape the way opportunities for learning get organized, both in and out of school, and hence also organize the ostensive outcomes of these opportunities. A relative newcomer to constituting ways of knowing and being, schooling nonetheless often is the favored player in defining what it means to know, exerting its pedagogicising influence all the more inexorably through global interconnectivity (Baker 2014). Its “ways of saying” what counts as valued knowledge undoubtedly contributes to “ways of seeing” who might be considered knowledgeable. However, there are other games around, other institutionally organized times and places for self-presentation that situate individuals within participation structures according to their display of valued knowledge. An examination of the construction of knowledgeability within a geographically circumscribed and demographically homogenous society, relatively speaking, is useful for examining the relationship among schooled-but-not-school educative spaces and places. On Kosrae, family structure has been continuous for hundreds of years; the church reflects the radical reorganization of society around 19th century missionization aims; school is the outcome of mid-20th century geopolitics. Together, these

Epistemic practice on a Micronesian Island  49 institutions cover in scope the formal, informal, and implicit education of the island’s people. Despite the relative distinction of these institutional domains, their boundaries are porous, their practices bleed, and their prescriptions can get messy. Still, the essential logic of what it means to be knowledgeable in each domain on Kosrae has persisted.

Codes of (pedagogicised) accountability in Kosraean life The setting A high tropical island of 42 square miles, Kosrae lies just north of the equator roughly halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines in the western Pacific. Its abundance made it a favored wintering stop for 19th century American whalers looking for fresh food, water, and diversions. Within a few decades after first contact with Western explorers in 1824, however, the introduction of diseases and other disruptions led to a preciptious decline in the island’s population ­(Ritter 1978). The rapid loss of life on the island left Kosrae’s highly hierarchical political system in confusion. By century’s end, the efforts of an American missionary, Reverend Benjamin Snow, led to the reorganization of sacred and most social life in the mold of 19th century New England Congregationalism. Meanwhile, a succession of colonial powers in the region – Spanish, German, ­Japanese, and American – introduced progressively more formal bureaucracies and, with them, increasingly comprehensive school systems. Starting in the 1960s, all Kosraean children were required to attend American-style schools up through the eighth grade; many students continued on to high school. Over time, increasing numbers of high school and college graduates intensified competition for wage-­earning government positions, and roughly half still engage in subsistence farming and fishing (Hezel 1989; US Dept. of State 2017).1 The codes of accountability for knowing and learning in the ongoing activities of Kosraean life are holding relatively steady in their form and function. The formulae are fairly simple. Demonstrated knowledgeability serves the purposes of: • • •

Salvation in church Survival in the family Success in school.

That is, being relied upon and responsible for valued forms of knowing and capability are tied directly into the essential function of the institution for both church and family; successful individuals serve the collective directly. A successful student in school, however, does not by virtue of his or her demonstrated knowledge feed her capabilities back into the successful functioning of the institution. He or she is not fulfilling responsibilities for teaching peers or in other ways improving the outcomes for the school community or individuals within it. The logic of showing what one knows in school is very different from the logic of showing what one knows elsewhere in island life.

50  Vera Michalchik A regime of clarity Before the Reverend Benjamin Snow brought Christianity to the island in the 1850s, Kosraeans lived in what they now see as the dark time, pacl losr. In sermon and in song, in the ordinary discourse of Kosraean life, this period of darkness sits in opposition to the light of clarity, of understanding, and of God’s goodness and grace. Kosraeans symbolically reproduce the distinction between darkness and light often; it is a leitmotif throughout public events. Most dramatically, it appears in the yearly Christmas pageant when Kosraeans, after weeks of practicing for hours each evening, gather in their churches to march in elaborate formations that ultimately lead them, in their symbolic reenactments of ancient events, to the light of the star of Bethlehem. Echoing throughout the church in multipart harmony, the songs of the marchers make the meanings of the movements clear: ‘Onward to the star of good light’. However impressively they maneuver their well-rehearsed patterns throughout the open space of the church, before concluding their performances the groups each assume one simple formation: the marchers line up in straight rows behind the several young women chosen to carry aloft tinsel and foil representations of the bright, guiding star of the Christmas story. The orientation towards light that characterizes this performative moment is about more than the journey of the Gospels’ three wise men. It is also about the acute, historical reordering of ­Kosraean society around the Christian church at the end of the dark time, and about the personal meanings for each Kosraean of becoming etawi – followers of the straight path – in the church of today. The heart of personal Christian duty is to enlighten and inform others by preaching. The knowledgeable Kosraean is thus simultaneously accountable to show both his or her understanding of the Biblical revelation, including its Kosraean moment, and to use this knowledge in guiding others. Kosraeans use light as a symbolic tool to account for the ­Kosraean experience and remind themselves of who they are. The Congregationalist Church of 21st century Kosrae reflects the doctrine and practices of its 19th century missionary founders. It is a church in which salvation comes through both faith and good works. Unsurprisingly, moral rectitude, in addition to the call to all members to preach as Jesus did, are central to the ­Kosraean scheme of good works. One peculariarity of practical theology on ­Kosrae is the importance of public confession of sin, which holds a central place in the mechanisms by which Kosraeans are situated in the social order. Confession, like preaching, is an act of revelation, shedding light on forms of darkness (sin) that detract from rather than contribute to the common good. The canonical sins to which Kosraeans confess are viewed in the community as ‘essentially self-­ interested’ (Schaefer 1977, p. 222). Smoking and drinking take resources, including time and money, away from church, family, and community activities. People who ‘indulge’ in fornication ‘fail… to cooperate, primarily with family members’ (1977, p. 187). The effects of any sin, extend, ripple-like, throughout the community. The “sinner’s cycle,” which entails public indexing of both the darkness and light in the pursuit of salvation, is ubiquitous and collective on Kosrae.

Epistemic practice on a Micronesian Island  51 Textuality in church practice Asking Emily if she knows anyone who does not read brings a chuckle. She thinks hard, when posed with this question, and remembers one man, long ago, who had some difficulty with his eyes and seemed to not know how. She wonders aloud when I mention limited literacy in the USA, reflecting her assumption that reading is both necessary and natural, attainable by all. Senior officials in the Department of Education react almost similarly as Emily does to the question. They admit that there may be a few Kosraeans with organic impairments severe enough that reading at a functional level is physically impossible for them; otherwise literacy is universal. It has been this widespread since as long as memory serves even the oldest Kosraeans, whose parents and grandparents never attended school but regularly, from childhood, attended church. Children, free from sin, are exempt from participating in the practices associated with fall and redemption in the Kosraean church. They bear no burden for collective salvation. The church begins to hold youth accountable for their behavior once they have reached the age of 15, although for several years after they age into the sinner’s cycle youth are given a pass, expected to flout the standards of virtuous behavior established by the church. Ultimately, however, they will be part of an island-wide system of ongoing responsibility for inclusion and redemption of any fellow Kosraeans who, for reasons of sin or non-participation, fall from the straight path. In support of these aims, at roughly preschool age, Kosraean children begin to learn to preach. The Sunday School prepares young children to present publicly by training them in the overall substance of religious presentations and by giving them the opportunity to participate in the kalwen (summaries), a form of presentation much like those adults give as church members. At the end of each of the year’s quarters, several students from each age group are assigned to present summaries of recent lessons. The youngest children, aged 3 to 7, are given text that they memorize and repeat verbatim. The older children, up to age 15, also memorize their summaries, but they often have a say in the composition of these, preparing them for adulthood when they prepare their own summaries. Most of the quarterly kalwen for the junior Sunday School take place in the “little church,” but occasionally the kalwen is presented to the entire congregation. On a prescheduled day, the children from the Sunday School stream into the main church where, in the company of their parents, they watch their peers take the microphone and recite their few sentences to the several hundred people gathered. One of Emily’s grandchildren, Marty, participates. Standing before the assembled congregation, Marty’s wiry little 7-year-old body is as tall and poised as he can make it. Between him and the distant doors of the simple whitewashed building, hundreds of tightly packed people look up at him: the men of his village from the pews on his left, the women from the pews on his right, and the children from the woven pandanus mats in the large area directly before him. Marty holds the microphone steadily in his hand and speaks clearly about Jesus’ miracle with loaves and fishes.

52  Vera Michalchik Marty’s church participation began early. In infancy, Kosraean children are carried by their mothers and grandmothers into the main Sunday morning service, where they are held and nursed during hymns, homilies, and offerings. Past toddlerhood, children take part in a Sunday School immediately following worship services that parallels the adult classes held at the same time. After j­ubilant songs, prayer, and an introduction to the lessons, the children break up into small, same-sex groups for a didactic lesson; today, the lesson is from Genesis, about Joseph in Egypt during the great famine. Many of the students in these groups seem to be minimally attentive, yet, despite this, the teachers never comment, never tell the students to look up, to be quiet, to stay put, to remove their gum. They continue their lesson, and at the end of their explanations ask their students some review questions. Almost always, at least one or two of the students offer answers; if they don’t, the teacher simply provides the answer herself and then moves on to another question. Once the small group lessons are over, the whole junior Sunday School reconvenes. Marty’s older sister, Ariannie, 11, squeezes in between two of her friends on the girls’ side of the room, a sea of colorful polyester dresses and large, lacy hair bows that contrasts with the plain shirts and slacks worn by the boys. The leader has taken the microphone at the front of the church and quiets the room. Before posing his own questions about the day’s lesson, he urges the children to be bold in offering answers, arranges a little competition between the girls and boys, and emphasizes the importance of wisdom in living a good life. His first question goes to the boys. After a sixth-grader stands up and gives the answer, the leader teases by repeating what the boy has just said in a comical, almost mocking voice. The children all laugh. It’s the girls’ turn. ‘Who was Joseph’s wife?’, the leader asks. Ariannie whispers the answer, and says it again louder as her neighbor, Sherlianne, turns to her for a confirmation. When the other girls around them tacitly agree, Sherlianne stands up and answers ‘Asenath.’ The questions continue to go back and forth, to the boys and to the girls, for a few more turns until it is time for songs before announcements and the final prayer. The collaborative nature of answering questions – of displaying knowledge – that we see with Ariannie, Sherlianne, and their friends, is characteristic of Sunday School life, and of church life more generally. Beyond the c­ ollaboration – ­A riannie helping Sherlianne – the knowledge display events within the institutional domain of the church do little in the short term to hold individuals accountable for demonstrating what they know. Although the educational events themselves are school-like – lectures, memorization, question and answer – the accountability is not. As long as someone answers the question, filling the slot for this behavior, then everyone has acted appropriately and the agenda has been carried forward. In a sense, one person’s knowledge display is as good as everyone’s. For Ariannie and Marty, as for all Kosraean children, presenting the kalwen, answering questions, and other forms of knowledge display only help in establishing the foundation for a lifetime in the church. Within this framework, Ariannie and Marty are free from being characterized as especially good or especially bad

Epistemic practice on a Micronesian Island  53 at their efforts. Their status is not predicated on the quality of their performance, nor can it lead to failure or exclusion. Marty and Ariannie are equally successful in church because they are equally successful at engaging with its formal requirement of presentation; participation is its own, even-handed standard of success. Elsewhere, their lives diverge.

‘Reveal your knowledge, man!’ ‘These are the smartest kids of all,’ joked Marty’s teacher, a young man recently returned from college in Hilo, Hawaii. He had just finished teaching a period of English composition, forty minutes of drilling on grammatical rules with the lowest section of the third grade at the elementary school barely a hundred yards from Ariannie and Marty’s house. This type of poking fun occurs often on Kosrae. Fitting in with other modes of clarification, it is very much “making light” in both senses of the word: evoking laughter and shedding light to make an interpretation universally accessible. At this school of 650 students, serving the largest municipality on the island, tracking begins in the third grade. Based on their grade point averages at the end of the first quarter, the children are regrouped into equal-sized class sections. The best students are in section A and the worst are in section C. When visiting Marty’s third grade class, I see the same energetic, inquisitive Marty I know from other settings. On certain days, he may look out the window a bit more frequently, talk to his friends a little longer, or blurt out an answer with less worry about its correctness than his more successful peers. When it comes time to take tests, he may be a few facts, or a few increments short of savvy, or maybe just a few seconds of attention away from the leading edge of the third grade. Although he reads and writes, subtracts and adds and multiplies, he still is comparatively inadequate. By contrast, Ariannie, who sits in the front row of her fifth-grade class, away from friends, is considered particularly smart. The worst and the best students at the school are mostly indistinguishable except for a few behaviors that under other circumstances would be unremarkable. In the competition for higher education and paid government work that brings in cash, Ariannie is a likely winner, while Marty is not. One of Ariannie and Marty’s cousins, Kimberly, a fourth-grader who lives in the house adjacent to theirs, received an award for perfect attendance in Sunday School this quarter. She sings in her neighborhood children’s choir; she presents in church. Like Marty, she is in section C. Her teacher offers an explanation of her section C students: ‘These aren’t the ones whose parents work in the government, or have those good jobs, like the students in section A.’ Her teacher never elaborates on any reasons why this would be so. As we go through her class lists over the next few days, it becomes clear to me that children with parents in the government’s employ, earning high wages, are distributed fairly equally among the three fourth-grade sections. Two of the four children, including Kimberly, who are named as needing “special” – local shorthand for special education – have fathers with exceptionally high-status and high-paying jobs.

54  Vera Michalchik The differences between fourth-grade sections, nonetheless, is concretely represented in their classroom on large sheets of construction paper with the names of the students listed down the left side. Each time a child raises her hand and answers one of the teacher’s questions correctly, she earns a shiny metallic star that goes alongside her name on the chart. Some of the children have long rows of stars beside their name; a few of the children have none. At a glance, anyone can see who does the best in each section and how the sections compare. Students in section C have fewer stars; section A students accumulate the most. In many respects, section C behaviors look quite similar to section A. Hands shoot up, nearly yanking children out of their seats when the teacher poses a question. The children she calls on give good answers. But in section C, the teacher lectures more, asking fewer questions. Also, fewer children ask for or are offered stars after giving the right answer. Today’s class, near the end of the school year, is characteristic. Conrad, who has the most number of stars in section C, has gotten off to a bad start, having been caught not knowing his place in the textbook. He still tries. When the teacher calls on a girl to define the English word “busy,” Conrad complains, ‘Hey, I had my hand up before you.’ The girl recites: ‘busy: full of activity.’ As she slips by Conrad’s seat to add her new star to the chart after her name, Conrad mutters to her, in English, ‘I’m going to kill you!’ Rema, the quietest girl in the class, has no stars on the chart on the wall. After the children have read a story, the teacher directs, ‘Name three of the characters. Rema, say one of them.’ Rema asks, very much to the point, ‘People?’ Once the teacher affirms her interpretation of the term “characters,” Rema says, ‘Mother,’ giving a fine answer to a question regarding a story about a young boy’s love for his parents. The teacher says, ‘Very good,’ and Rema says nothing. She finishes the fourth grade without getting a star by her name. In a sixth-grade classroom at the same school, students are reviewing the answers to grammar homework a group of peers had written up on the board. After each problem is reviewed, the teacher challenges the students’ judgments as to whether the boardwork is correct, with questions such as ‘How do you know?’ and ‘Why do you say that?’ Based on his challenges, the students repeatedly show uncertainty, changing their judgments from ‘right’ to ‘wrong’ and back again. After some back and forth, the teacher pushes them to be aware of the reasons for their judgments and exhorts them to have more confidence in themselves. He repeats, ‘Reveal your knowledge, man!’ several times as he explains to students the importance of showing what they know. In his utterances, he is formulating basic maxims of classroom life: school is about individual knowledge display; the teacher controls the conditions for this display; those conditions can be as tricky as the teacher deems appropriate; individuals who are knowledgeable should show it. Marty, Rema, Kimberly, and other children like them will continue to learn to do many varied and interesting things in their lives. They will most likely remain active participants in the church, and will use their abilities to read and write, to present and analyze, in a lifetime of service to that institution. They will

Epistemic practice on a Micronesian Island  55 also continue to help in the fishing, cleaning, cooking, gardening and sewing, and the planning and administrating, too, that are part of family life, ­becoming gradually more competent in these skills as the years go by. But they will probably leave school as soon as possible, having already learned by the age of 8 or 9 that they are losers in a contest where the success of some is defined by the failure of others.

‘If you don’t know how, don’t join in’ Tonight, at home, Emily has returned from her evening bath and resumed care of her newest grandchild, 3-month-old Castro, whom Ariannie had been watching for the past thirty minutes or so. As is typical, Ariannie moves to other activities when an adult, more able in caregiving, steps into this role. Ariannie is now playing solitaire at one side of the room, while Marty moves between the three older persons there – his grandmother, his sister, and the researcher – watching, commenting, and waiting for an opportunity to join in with what the others are doing. Unsure if he will be allowed to play in a game of “Crazy 8s” that is forming, Marty is particularly delighted to see that Ariannie has drawn up the score sheet to include him. He is emboldened to say, in anticipation, ‘Let’s see who the winner will be! Let’s see who the winner will be!’ Looking to tonight’s game as a validation of his skill or knowledge, or even his luck, he has taken on a dual challenge: showing that he knows how to play, and trying to win. Marty’s grandmother questions his participation, ‘Do you know how? Are you going to play?’; Marty does not respond. Instead, his sister tells him to sit next to her on the floor, a spot that clearly is within the players’ circle. But Marty’s position is vulnerable. Every turn at play reinforces this. Emily tells Marty to play the first card of the game, and he questions this with one simple word, ‘Me?’ When he lays down his card, Emily feigns surprise at the appropriateness of his play. He again asks, ‘Me?’ with his next turn, and when he plays an eight, he is reminded abruptly that he must change the suit. Changing it to spades, he hears his grandmother joke, ‘Spades! He probably doesn’t even have any!’, in a reference to what would be Marty’s least strategic move. Marty does his best to keep up, avoiding playing out of turn by asking ‘Me?’ prior to each of his plays and often being the object of others’ displays of impatience. Despite many difficulties, he stays in the game, coached by Ariannie a bit but still vulnerable both to loss and to expulsion. Hand after hand, Marty does, in fact, lose. On the heels of another disappointing round, he tries to change the game to a simpler game he has played more often and is more likely to win. His request is ignored, and after he checks the score sheet again, he then succeeds in changing the activity, this time by kicking his sister while his grandmother’s attention is turned to the baby. A ­ riannie tells him he can’t behave that way, and he kicks her again, rubs his eyes and melts into the floor. Once Ariannie draws their grandmother’s attention to Marty’s behavior, Emily addresses the little boy at length, scolding him (‘You don’t know how to behave’) and attributing the source of his problems to his insistence on

56  Vera Michalchik participating in a game he did not know how to play (‘If you don’t know how, don’t join in. No one forced you to join.’). Her words provide for Marty and others in the room a culturally coherent account of what has gone wrong and why, making Marty’s behavior intelligible all the while that it promotes an interpretation, a particular way of seeing the world and acting in it. Marty has made two mistakes – joining in a game he does not know how to play, and participating in a social situation he does not know how to negotiate.

Evoking codes of compassion Although Marty’s difficulties are characterized as the repercussion of him overstepping the bounds of his knowledgeability, there are other forms of accountability at play tonight. The game has continued, without Marty, who remains curled up and disengaged on the floor. As others in the game lose hands, especially once Ariannie has a particular string of bad luck, the players start circulating expressions of sympathy. The phrase pahko muhtuh, signaling a deep feeling of compassion or empathy, gets voiced a few times. The conversation shifts to feelings about winning and losing, good and bad luck, learning and struggling, taking interest, wanting to know, getting things right, keeping hold of them. At one point, as I try to remember a term we had discussed the week before, Emily wonders if I had written it down. At another point, as we try in Kosraean to translate the word “interesting,” Emily expresses confusion, then, laughing, raises her hand as if we are in school and says, in English, ‘Question!’ All conversation has shifted away from Marty and his difficulties. During our discussions, Marty assumes to more relaxed body positions, moving closer to the circle, and realigning his attention to the others’ activity. As Ariannie finishes preparing a new score sheet on her notepad, Marty looks, sees his name there, touches it gently, and settles more comfortably into his place in the players’ circle. We continue with “Crazy 8s,” and Marty has some good luck. At one point, he has only one card left. ‘Last card!’ he announces, as the rules require. Emily watches his play and, using his preferred Kosraean name, says, ‘Smart, Lepalik’ and cheers him, laughing and clapping for him while his sister overtakes his advantage. Ariannie wins. Emily does not stop, though, encouraging him with, ‘Pretty soon you’re going to win.’ Much has changed over the course of the evening – the activities have broadened, hierarchies of knowledgeability have been inverted, the visiting researcher clearly indicates she is happy to have Marty in the game. But the most helpful shift away from pressure on Marty has been the rest of us engaging codes of compassion. Enacted forms of pahko muhta, these codes of compassion, are used in Kosraean life to overcome a wide range of interactional difficulties, to repair breakdowns, and to re-establish relationships, unify, and even create solidarity when other frames do not. Pahko muhta works at times to bypass more official rules and constraints, too. Rema, the fourth-grader who, despite giving correct answers, ends the school year with no stars by her name on the wall chart, is working on a final exam the

Epistemic practice on a Micronesian Island  57 last day of the school year. Her teacher, who has been watching Rema from her desk at the front of the room, tells me to go to her and help her. I coach her and she fills in many of the blanks on her paper. I look around the room at the other children to see if they disapprove of my behavior and there seems to be no concern. As the exam period ends, only Kimberly and Rema still work on their papers. The teacher comes to me and expresses frustration that the girls did not get the benefits of individualized attention in a special education class. Noting particular sympathy for Rema, the teacher dismisses her knowing she will pass the test and be promoted to the fifth grade. In the teacher’s view, acts of pahko muhtah level an otherwise unfair playing field, serving as an equalizer where some students understandably need more support than others. The various rituals of forgiveness and redemption in the Kosraean church approximate an institutionalized form of pahko muhta. These rituals rely primarily on the collective acceptance by the congregation of a sinner’s request to rejoin the church following a display of contrition and repentance. Underlying these rituals is a premise allowing return to the church an unlimited number of times, with the goal of securing a sinner’s redemption before his death. There is no sin too great to be forgiven, and there is no person too flawed to be redeemed. The track between sinner and stalwart member can be jumped, as often happens repeatedly in a person’s life. More important than locating sin, is absolving it. The various acts of pahko muhta – towards Rema, towards Marty – that we have seen can be viewed as interpersonally analogous moves, salvaging participation, inclusion, and belonging from pedagogicised codes of accountability.

The future of accounting for knowing on Kosrae (and elsewhere) Kosraean codes of epistemic accountability will undoubtedly shift, develop nuances, and perhaps eventually be disrupted or undermined in ways as yet unanticipated. Some of this change comes with the introduction of new forms of pedagogicisation. In 2014, for example, Tulensru Waguk received a PhD in education from the University of Hawaii, the first Kosraean to receive such a degree, and shortly after became Director of Education for the state. His dissertation focused on early childhood mathematics in the home and community, and concludes with the recommendation that schools: [B]egin reaching out into the homes of preschool children, and learn about the activities… which have impacts [on] their early mathematics learning development. Parents of preschool children should be brought together to share and discuss ways that preschool children learn early mathematics in the homes and that preschool children could be better prepared for formal schooling, not just in mathematics… Teachers… should have some training in working with parents of preschool children in early mathematics learning in the home. (Waguk 2014, p. 69)

58  Vera Michalchik Waguk notes throughout his work that explicit early mathematics instruction had been quite foreign to the parents he interviewed, even those who are teachers, yet, because of his intervention, some had ‘already begun to do pre-­counting and basic counting correctly’ (2014, p. 68). It is interesting to speculate, as Waguk does, that Kosraean parents might increasingly assume responsibility for early academic cultivation of their children while before they assumed little to none. Similarly novel is the Kosrae Youth Council, which served its inaugural term in 2017 and included as members the 16 local teenagers chosen for the island’s first “Most Remarkable Teens” awards – a program that originated in the USA and was instituted on Kosrae by a Peace Corps volunteer who had run a similar program in the West Indies. The Council undertakes various projects aimed at encouraging positive behavior among peers, participating in local civic and governmental activities, and recruiting other youth to support social development initiatives such as summer camps, island clean-up efforts, and the like. Although Kosrae High School has sponsored a local version of Close-Up – which sponsors field trips to government offices and agencies – and other civic engagement programs for many years, the Kosrae Youth Council represents a distinctive move towards a public discourse of youth empowerment and secular leadership. It comes as Compact funds step down, 2 digital technologies become more prevalent on the island, and, in public perception, access to higher education off-­ island is increasingly scarce. It also seems to reflect the pursuit of extra-curricular achievements and out-of-school enrichment that is a hallmark of affluence and aspiration in the USA (Snellman et al. 2017). While these examples illustrate ways that new influences can continually add texture to the epistemological landscape on Kosrae, the existing frameworks of its primary socializing institutions persist. The characteristic codes of church, family, and school shape what it means to know. Nonetheless, whatever changes occur, these changes will in one way or another be bound by a central rule: learning and knowing are integral to the organization of status achievement, and therefore accounting for knowing is as well. As pervasive as is the influence of schooling – with an authoritative version of learning as curricularized, standardized, monitored, and so forth – its distinct take on accountability is not the only one. Accountability for knowing in its wide array of possible forms and functions exists prior to and outside the influence of schooling. There are three entry points or approaches to examining the social codes of accountability as part of epistemic practice. First is locating the display event’s formal aspects: situational requirement, observable display, and consequential evaluation. The second approach is identifying the relationships between display events, other classes of linked events, and the types of consequences that accrue with regularity within an institutional framework. These relationships have spatial, temporal, and symbolic links to other codes and their events. We understand the codes of knowledgeability in the church in relation to responsibility for morality and salvation. In the family, responsibility for courteous and deferential behavior interplays with demonstrations of know-how and maturity. Schooling

Epistemic practice on a Micronesian Island  59 comes with a complicated set of implicit and explicit instructions about how to show up smart (Varenne & McDermott 1998; McDermott 2010). The third approach is representational, discursive in situ instructions for how to see and act on the world and which are reflective of the codes themselves. At home, Emily tells Marty, ‘If you don’t know how, don’t join in.’ At school, a teacher instructs his kids, ‘Reveal your knowledge, man!’ At church, reticent speakers are told by senior church members, ‘You learn by doing.’ The ultimate point of such exploration lies in the opportunities for interrogation it provides. Arguably, in the schooled society we are as empowered as we are clear in our analysis of the ways schooled forms interplay with other forms of holding us ­accountable – for being certain types of subjects in a certain type of world. Altering our subjectivities and our world depends on developing the capacity to analyze them, and the epistemic practices across institutional settings on Kosrae serves as a case in point.

Notes 1 Kosrae is one of four island groups constituting the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), which became independent in 1986 and entered at that time into a Compact of Free Association with the United States. Under the articles the Compact, the USA provides the FSM over $130 million in direct assistance along with a variety of federal grants and services each year. Although a stated aim of the Compact is to set the FSM on a path to economic self-sufficiency, it is unclear to what degree this will be achieved by the time the Compact expires in 2023. The vast region of the western Pacific that lies within the Exclusive Economic Zone of the FSM continues to be of ongoing strategic interest to the USA and other Pacific powers, most notably China (Matelski 2016). 2 See note above.

References Baker, D 2014, The schooled society: the educational transformation of global culture, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Bransford, JD, Barron, B, Pea, R, Meltzoff, A, Kuhl, P et al. 2006, ‘Foundations and opportunities for an interdisciplinary science of learning’ in K. Sawyer (ed.) The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, Cambridge University Press, New York. Education Testing Service (ETS) 2018, ‘About ETS’, viewed 3 February 2018, www.ets. org/about Gee, JP 2010, ‘Human action and social groups as the natural home of assessment: thoughts on 21st century learning and assessment’, in VJ Shute & BJ Becker (eds.) Innovative assessment for the 21st century, Springer, Boston, MA. Goffman, E 1974, Frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Goffman, E 1979, Gender advertisements, Harper & Row, New York. Hezel, FX 1989, ‘The price of education in Micronesia’ Ethnies:droits de l’homme peuples autochtones, vol. 8–10, (Spring), pp. 24–29. Kempf, A 2016, The pedagogy of standardized testing: the radical impacts of educational standardization in the US and Canada, Springer, Boston, MA.

60  Vera Michalchik Koretz, D 2017, The testing charade: pretending to make schools better, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Lave, J & Wenger, E 2002, ‘Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice’, Supporting Lifelong Learning, vol. 1, pp. 111–126. Matelski, T 2016, ‘America’s Micronesia problem: the end of the compact of free association with the Federated States of Micronesia would have serious repercussions’, The Diplomat, viewed on 3 February 2018, https://thediplomat.com/2016/02/americasmicronesia-problem/ McDermott, R 2010, ‘The passions of learning in tight circumstances: toward a political economy of the mind’, Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, vol. 109, no. 1, pp. 144–159. Michalchik, V 2017, ‘Assessment’, The SAGE encyclopedia of out-of-school learning, SAGE Reference, Thousand Oaks, CA. OECD 2018, ‘Programme for international student assessment (PISA)’, viewed on 3 ­February 2018, www.oecd.org/pisa/ Packer, MJ 2018, The science of qualitative research, Cambridge University Press, New York. Phelps, R 2017, Kill the messenger: the war on standardized testing, Routledge, Abingdon. Ritter, P 1978, The repopulation of Kosrae: population and social organization on a ­M icronesian high island, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Stanford University, CA. Sawyer, K 2014, ‘Introduction: the new science of learning’, in K. Sawyer (ed.) Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, Cambridge University Press, New York. Schaefer, PD 1977, Confess therefore your sins: status and sin on Kusaie, Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota. Schechner, R 2017, Performance studies: an introduction, Routledge, Abingdon. Shepard, LA 2000, ‘The role of assessment in a learning culture’ Educational Researcher, vol. 29, no. 7, pp. 4–14. Snellman, K, Silva, JM, Frederick, CB & Putnam, RD 2017, ‘The engagement gap’, in T Haas & H Westlund (eds.) The post-urban world: emergent transformation of cities and regions in the innovative global economy, Routledge, Abingdon. Stevens, R 2010, ‘Learning as a members phenomenon: toward an ethnographically adequate science of learning’, Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, vol. 109, no. 1, pp. 82–97. US Dept. of State 2017, ‘Fact sheet: US relations with the Federated States of Micronesia’, viewed on 3 February 2018, https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/1839.htm Varenne, H & McDermott, RP 1998, Successful failure: the school America builds, ­Westview Press, New York. Waguk, T 2014, A community approach to introducing young children to early mathematics: a study of Kosraean preschool children in their homes, Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Hawai’i. Wieder, DL 1974, ‘Telling the code’, in R Turner (ed.) Ethnomethodology: selected readings, Penguin Education, Harmondsworth.

5 Ubuntu and bildung in Olso and Zanzibar Communities of learning lives Ola Erstad

Introduction One consequence of the performance-based dominant discourses about global education during the last two decades has been a lack of research and understanding about the dynamic processes of learning as part of people’s lives. However, against the general trend of international actors like the OECD, international aid programs on ‘education for development’,1 and national policy makers’ emphasis on institutional forms of education (Hogan, Sellar & Lingard 2016), there are a number of initiatives focusing more on the role of non-formal and informal ways of learning among young people (Sefton-Green 2013; Ito et al. 2013; Rogoff et al. 2016). These can be seen as alternative perspectives on the role of education and learning in our societies and they can inform us about different approaches to the life pathways of young people – not as individualized performances, but as broader collective and community-oriented participation. What is at stake for educational models in contemporary societies is highlighted by debates about the role of school. One example is Robert Putnam’s (2015) critique of the way that the American education system has changed from providing equal opportunities through education to increasing the opportunity gap between young people from “have” and “have-not” backgrounds. He shows this through statistical data, but more importantly through telling cases from his own high school class compared with cases from the same community today. Something fundamental has changed at the community level in the way that children from rich and poor backgrounds now never meet across geographical or social boundaries. Putnam’s main point is how educational opportunities and trajectories have fundamentally changed and depend on which neighbourhood you are born in, and where community college might be the only option for a young person from a poor family without many prospects for employment. From a different perspective, several educational philosophers – for example, Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (2013) and Gert Biesta (2006) – have raised issues about public schooling and the broader aspects of bildung 2 in our societies today. Their work focuses on the social engagement and democratic participation of young people, beyond the narrow definition of learning in educational policies today. Biesta (2006), for example, is critical of the way learning

62  Ola Erstad as a concept is used in educational policy, especially in the phrase “learning outcomes”, and argues that we need to focus on how human beings act in the world through a responsible understanding of difference and otherness in democratic education. A further debate concerning the role of schools and education focuses on 21st century learning, and how changes in competence development, methods of inquiry and deep learning are needed due to technological developments and changes in labour markets around the world. What 21st century learning describes are the skills and competences individuals need in order to enter the future labour market and to act as citizens in changing societies. By contrast, the argument in this chapter is that we need to attend more to the role of communities and a range of people outside schools in young people’s trajectories as learners. As such, a key vision for global education could build on the concept of community-based learning, with inspiration from John Dewey who emphasized authentic experiences that connect everyday life and school activities (Dewey 1916/1997). For many students schools do not seem relevant or engaging as sites for learning; this is often in contrast with other activities outside of schools such as computer games (Gee 2003) and social media (Ito et al. 2013). My argument in this chapter is that we need to orientate educational research towards a deeper understanding of young people’s participation and engagement within specific communities and consider the implications this might have for conceptions of learning and the value of knowledge beyond the individualized epistemology of school. My focus is on the tension between the personal and the collective (McIntyre-Mills et al. 2018) in relation to what some African educationalists define as the ubuntu paradigm: ‘a philosophy of being that locates identity and meaning-making within a collective approach as opposed to an individualistic one’ (Oviawe 2016, p. 3). This chapter draws on results from two projects – one in Zanzibar (Tanzania) and one in Oslo (Norway) – which both have a community perspective on young people and educational trajectories. The aim is to explore and critically define ways that education can play a role for young people and communities by including learning beyond school, and through the lifecourse (Biesta et al. 2011).

Towards communities of interest Schools in many post-industrial nations increasingly require standardization of product and outcome, determined by quantifiable measures of performance on standardized tests. Thus, as explored in the first two chapters of this volume, the agency of individuals undertaking learning outside of expected roles and structures is often re-contextualized (see also Nocon & Cole 2006). Formal education’s sorting, marking and submergence of individual agency, diversity and critical thinking has caused theorists and practitioners to both explore and support the value of informal education (Lave & Wenger 1991; Sefton Green 2013; Rogoff et al. 2016). In Democracy and education (Dewey 1916/1997), and in the book he cowrote with his daughter, Schools of tomorrow (J Dewey & E Dewey 1915),

Ubuntu and bildung in Olso and Zanzibar  63 John Dewey offers a focus on the learner beyond the school context. One of ­Dewey’s main arguments was the need to question and critically evaluate school systems in contemporary societies in order to develop education systems fit to tackle contemporary and future challenges. Thus, Dewey was not only concerned with ways of organizing content within subject domains, but with ways to make knowledge accessible for all students. Throughout the last century this approach became a key tenet of sociocultural learning ­philosophy with a conception of learning as part of cultural and historic processes, as defined in ‘cultural psychology’ (Cole 1996), ‘funds of knowledge’ ­(Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti 2005), ‘everyday cognition’ (Rogoff & Lave 1984) and ­‘communities of practice’ (Lave & Wenger 1991). A key point is the interrelationship between the person, the community and culture as expressed in what James Wertsch (1998) calls ‘mediated action’: interaction between people always involves cultural tools like language and different forms of technologies. As new forms of technology are implemented in social practices, this interaction also changes in form and content. ‘Identity’ and ‘agency’ are seen as part of ‘cultural worlds’ (Holland et al. 1998), and operate in different contexts and developmental processes. In their book Local literacies (1998), David Barton and Mary Hamilton discuss the term community. In the research literature ‘community’ is often a concept that is difficult to specify and it overlaps with family, home and neighbourhood. It also raises some issues about boundaries between communities and how these are drawn and for which purposes. Barton and Hamilton argue for using the term community and in their research they focus on many different kinds of what they call ‘communities of interest’ (1998, p. 15). In reference to adult literacy practices they write that: The notion of community is an amorphous one, but people nevertheless identified with particular communities of interest, such as allotment associations or as parents of children attending particular schools; literacy often has a significant specialised place within these communities. (Barton & Hamilton 1998, p. 251) This implies that communities are constructed by participation, however defined, and draws attention to people’s different interest orientations. This conception of community is apparent in the two communities described below. Learning in this sense is understood much more as activities that are embedded in people’s lives, and where people have different cultural resources and ‘funds of knowledge’ (Gonzalez et al. 2005) available to them. This is in contrast to the individualistic and performance-based approach outlined in my introduction above. As Jay Lemke (2002) has argued, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Lemke describes how a community approach to learning and development helps us to understand how the practices people are involved in have implications for their lives. ‘As we learn’, Lemke explains, ‘we gradually become our villages: we internalize the diversity of viewpoints that collectively make sense of all that goes

64  Ola Erstad on in the community’ (2002, p. 34). And, referring to his concept of ‘timescales’, he adds: It takes a long lifetime to ‘become a village’. Some routines can be learned in minutes, performed in seconds, but they only make sense when integrated into activities that may last for hours and are in turn small links in chains of interdependent projects that keep the village running and changing over the course of our lives and the community’s history…. In this view of human development, schooling today would seem to be paying too much attention to what we study and not enough to who we become; priding itself on what it brings into the classroom but blinding itself to all it shuts out; teaching isolated literacies but not how to make them work together; and creating many meanings for an hour but few for a day and none for a lifetime. (Lemke 2000, p. 35) By combining ‘knowing’ and ‘becoming’ – as in, what we learn affects how we live – we open up a more dynamic understanding of learning. As Lemke asks: ‘How do we successfully learn through participation in social activities to become members of a culture whose long history is not yet over?’ His answer is that we have to look ‘beyond schooling’ (2002, p. 43). However, what is referred to as informal learning is unclear in the literature as it often identifies ways of learning that are not ‘formal’ (Rogoff et al. 2016, p. 357). The main challenge of trying to define informal learning derives from the fact that it is often taken for granted, and people do not seem to have to work hard to learn in informal learning settings – as when children learn their first language (see Chapter 3). As Rogoff et al. (2016) write: We believe that how learning is organized and supported is more important than where learning occurs. After all, schools themselves can be organized in informal ways, and many settings outside of schools employ the factory model of instruction that is often found in schools. (Rogoff et al. 2016, p. 358) In their discussion of different ways of organizing learning outside of schools they define some shared features across diverse settings. Informal learning is: non didactic; is embedded in meaningful activity; builds on the learner’s initiative, interest, or choice (rather than resulting from external demands or requirements); and does not involve assessment external to the activity. (Rogoff et al. 2016, p. 356) Other features of the organization of informal learning are: guidance for learners, orienting them through social interaction and/or the structure of activities (to which the newcomers also contribute), and all

Ubuntu and bildung in Olso and Zanzibar  65 include innovation of new knowledge and skills as well as learning of current knowledge and skills. (Rogoff et al. 2016, p. 358) These are all important points for the discussion in this chapter dealing with communities and young people’s participation, engagement and trajectories of learning within and beyond these communities as ways of building their ‘learning lives’ (Erstad et al. 2016). We then have to look towards local and diverse cultural and community framings. How such culturally sensitive framings can be defined, and how they support or disrupt development of lives and communities over time, is key here. Some European projects in Africa have shown how sustainability of educational innovations can be designed to build on indigenous cultural values and practices while promoting progressive social change and thereby better support development. For example, Serpell and Adamson-Holley (2015), studied the challenges of providing sustainable change within education and how this is linked to social change within Zambia. However, they also made an interesting comparison between certain practices in Africa and what are now termed 21st century skills. They write that: The African traditional practice of assigning social responsibility to young people from an early age is highly compatible with contemporary goals of education in Africa and elsewhere. At best, it can serve as a context for learning about health and nutrition, as well as fostering the values of cooperation and nurturing support of others, contributing to peaceful coexistence in society. Participation by children in family work is construed in many African societies as priming for social responsibility, an important dimension of intelligence. Work and play are better understood as complementary dimensions of activity than as discrete alternatives. Cooperation with peers can be mobilized as a resource for co-constructive learning. Strategic opportunities for countering systemic bias in educational systems include generative curriculum development, teacher sensitization to psychosocial dimensions of learners’ development, and legitimizing local community impact as a criterion of educational success. (Serpell & Adamson-Holley 2015, p. 2) The core issue then is to reflect on how such traditional practices should be defined as much more central to educational development than what has been provided by formal education. This could be defined as an asset for many African communities compared to western societies. It could also be an important way to counteract the large problem of dropouts in formal education. By emphasizing traditional practices, it might be easier for students to engage themselves in educational trajectories over time and make learning more relevant.

Ubuntu: the personal in the collective Modern interpretations of the German term bildung emphasize the need to look beyond school in order to address how education can affect people’s lives and

66  Ola Erstad work, especially in relation to the developments of digital culture. The Norwegian educational philosopher Lars Løvlie has used the term ‘interface’ to highlight how the interrelationship between the self and culture, between the I and the we, is changing over time (Løvlie 2003). For Humboldt (1767–1835), bildung requires interchange between individuals. Bildung starts with the individual embedded in a world that is, at the same time, that of the differentiated other (Løvlie & Standish 2002, p. 380). The term bildung is then used strategically as more than learning (Biesta 2006; Straume 2016). It also changes the purely individual connotation of the term (derived from the Humboltian tradition) to become more collectively oriented in that people are understood to coexist and develop within diverse cultural settings (Straume 2016). More recent discussions about bildung, but framed within an African context, can be found in a re-consideration of ubuntu (Brock-Utne 2016): Ubuntu is envisioned as a framework that is part of the humanist traditions of broader African belief systems, although this specific term originates in Southern Africa. Ubuntu is a philosophy of being that locates identity and meaning-making within a collective approach as opposed to an individualistic one. As a result, the individual is not independent of the collective; rather, the relationship between a person and her/his community is reciprocal, interdependent and mutually beneficial. (Oviawe 2016, p. 3) The way this approach is used today represents an interesting approach to education suggesting a less positivistic, Eurocentric and individualistic outlook. In the African context the argument is not to eliminate the western educational model as such, but rather to suggest how: a combination of valuable attributes of the positivistic and the non-linear organic systems of knowledge might create the ideal framework to foster an ethos of a holistic, transformative and emancipatory educational experience for all. (Oviawe 2016, p. 2) However, there are also elements of a fundamental critique of education as standardized and individualistic, especially in the way education has been linked to development. As Piper explains: Communities believe that education is the route to stable employment, that education structures are designed to provide access to languages of power, and that education levels the playing field for the poor. Results, however, are contrary to that promise: Pupils who have been in school for years have limited learning outcomes, results are inequitable across background categories, and illiteracy awaits many graduates. It is astonishing that faith in education remains robust in the face of facts and data, and research has

Ubuntu and bildung in Olso and Zanzibar  67 shown that the returns for the individual are sometimes less than families had expected. An ubuntu education would emphasise the shared contributions of all actors. (Piper 2016, p. 105) Piper then goes on to argue for local engagement around people and activities. A term like ubuntu makes us reflect on the role of the local community in how learners are engaged in activities that have impact on their own lives and those of others. Development is then interpreted more from the bottom up; education and learning engage people in what matters for them and their communities.

Engaging people’s learning lives: Zanzibar and Oslo In this section I use two cases as a way of understanding how communities have implications for young people’s educational pathways beyond formal education.3 The focus is on community settings outside of schools and how they relate to the ‘learning lives’ (Erstad et al. 2016) of young people. My intention is not to compare, since the cultural settings are very different, but rather to discuss how two different community centres engage young people in learning trajectories with a focus on collective (ubuntu) and personal (bildung) orientations of development and growth.

Dropouts repositioned: Zanzibar, Tanzania This case relates to an ongoing collaboration (2015–19) between the University of Dar es Salaam, the University of Zanzibar and the University of Oslo focusing on the social implications of dropouts from school in Tanzania. This is especially important for girls who drop out from school at around the age of 13–14 (Makame, Lubega & Ramadhan 2010). Within this project the main objectives are to create more awareness about dropouts as a social issue, to build up masters and PhD programs at the university, and to collect research data. One core challenge is that within the national policy in Tanzania and Zanzibar, as implemented in curricula, English is the language of instruction in most subjects rather than Kizwahili, the language spoken at home. One consequence is that teachers struggle to teach and students do not understand content, leading to alienation from school. Another cause of dropout identified by local researchers is the lack of contact between formal schools and the community and homes in supporting young people’s educational trajectories (Makame et al. 2010). During a visit to Zanzibar in February 2017 I was invited to a community centre just outside Stone Town that worked towards engaging local youth in developmental pathways to build confidence as learners, but also to offer training in specific skills in areas of interest. This visit, and follow-up correspondence, raised some issues about the role of such centres within this local frame, both about their possibilities but also, critically, for the youth involved. It triggered

68  Ola Erstad some interest in trying to understand what relevance such community-based centres – even those with clear educational aims – could have for young people. The community centre is part of a network of similar centres in Tanzania called Tanzania Youth Icons (TAYI) run by non-governmental organization (NGO), that was set up to: ‘help youth empowerment and to improve the lives of young people by expanding learning opportunities available to them, pointing to a future full of hope and creating that future together.’4 To what extent the activities at the centre actually supported young participants’ learning trajectories over time was an open question, and something I did not find addressed in any documentation. During my short stay there was no possibility for me to research this in any substantial way, but I met some of the regular participants. The centre is situated in a community with very poor housing. However, the centre itself is a square stone building with an open inner yard surrounded by rooms for different activities. It is open for young people to come and visit, and it also has an office for family consultancy with an adult to help families. As such the centre very much exemplifies the idea of ubuntu and collective responsibility for every child and family. It also defines learning in a holistic way, emphasizing different aspects of young people’s engagement. The centre thus strategically positions itself as different from formal schools in the way it offers learning opportunities and in its ways of collaborating with young people. The main activities at the centre are defined by specific projects, for example: linked to the environment, such as planting trees to prevent deforestation; youth empowerment against HIV/AIDS and drugs/substance abuse; computer literacy skills; library and reading campaigns among youth; cooking; and sports. All these projects are aimed at impacting knowledge and skills.

Pathways through a community centre My visit to the centre consisted of a tour around the facilities and a conversation with a group of boys and girls who were involved in different activities. The tour showed that the centre tried to offer resources to provide learning opportunities for youngsters. The centre had received several donations of books from the global North, but most of them were old and worn out, and they were just piled up in one room as shown in Figure 5.1. Looking more closely at the books it was clear that most of them were in English and not accessible to youngsters in this community. This raises some critical questions as to what the role and function of such a community centre can be with respect to supporting the learning trajectories of young people. Since this centre was only recently set up, it obviously needs to communicate with participants that this is a place where learning takes place; in this context books represent cultural capital. The pile of books shown in ­Figure 5.1 is located in the first room people enter from the street when they come to the centre. Similarly, in the computer room all the computers and servers were a donation from international NGOs to equip the centre with modern tools for learning (see Figure 5.2). My impression from employees and young

Figure 5.1  The TAYI centre in Zanzibar, outside Stone Town.

Figure 5.2  The TAYI centre in Zanzibar, outside Stone Town.

70  Ola Erstad participants was that the other activities mentioned above were far more popular than these more school-like activities of reading books or developing computer literacy. And, in contrast to reading and computer use, most of these other activities took place outside in the open yard. Indeed, discussion (with about 15 youngsters and 6 adults, sitting in a circle in the outside yard, and with an interpreter), revealed how these youngsters used the centre. Many of them were dropouts from school. Of importance in this setting was that they could speak Kizwahili, as opposed to the English language that they had to speak in school. What was striking when listening to the youngsters was the way they talked about the community, the centre and activities as a collective orientation. They were not speaking about themselves specifically, but rather how all activities were done as a group. The activities they talked most about were linked to the community or their families. Several of the youngsters emphasized the activity of planting trees not far from where they lived. Preventing deforestation was of great importance for the whole island and something the youngsters felt strongly about. In my field notes I wrote that two of the boys (16–17 years of age) explained this in more detail. The boys told me that during this activity they met others from different communities on the island and they worked together, transporting the small trees, and digging and planting them in different areas. This activity also meant they interacted with foreign experts (an NGO from Finland) on deforestation. The two boys explained how their interaction with one of the Finnish experts meant they could practise their English, and also that they learned a lot about deforestation from the expert – about the specific challenges for Zanzibar as an island, how foreign companies had cut down trees for their own profit, and how it was necessary to raise consciousness among the population in Zanzibar and address the local government about the importance of planting and protecting trees for the future of the island. The two boys also thought about working in forestry as a future occupation for themselves, which spurred them on to think about completing their education and what they would need to be able to enter this occupation. A similar activity was cooking – courses were held in the outdoor space at the centre and seemed to attract several of the girls. They learned about traditional recipes and ways of cooking that had links to their families and homes. During a personal chat with some of the students, one girl (about 15 years old) explained how she learned about different methods of cooking, what kinds of ingredients to use and what to consider in practical terms. While cooking, she learned these things from older women in the community who came to the centre on a voluntary basis to teach the girls. The girl talked about this in an engaged way with the interpreter and me, also explaining that as a consequence of this new-found competence, she now had more independent responsibilities at home. It was also important to her that she could socialize with friends and different mentors in this way. However, unlike the boys, she did not talk about this as a pathway to re-entering school in order to complete her education. Rather, she talked about her future in terms of a more domestic trajectory, staying in the community and

Ubuntu and bildung in Olso and Zanzibar  71 with her family – even though, in addition to the cooking itself this activity did seem to strengthen her self-confidence in the way she talked about her participation at the centre. This centre, with its different activities and links to the wider community and society, seems to build on the idea of ubuntu. The participants were involved in collective activities and, even though they talked about themselves, this was part of talking about more collective engagements. And this reoriented attitudes toward education: the two boys seriously considered returning to school, but this was not the case for the girls. The centre did not pressure the ­participants to re-enter school in any way, but defined themselves in terms of providing broader educational opportunity that might prevent the dropout rate from schools within this community.

Building learning trajectories: Groruddalen, Oslo, Norway A similar kind of community centre to be found in many European cities are youth clubs. At such clubs, often originating from the 1970s, young people engage in making music, films and other topical courses, or just hang around meeting friends, dancing or playing games. For many young people these centres provide opportunities for learning that are quite different from school. Such youth clubs are related to the concept of bildung in the sense that young people are engaged in wider social activities even if they are attracted to them on a personal level. In this sense such an approach is more directed towards personal engagement than the collective trajectories in the case of ubuntu. In this section I will describe the trajectory of one boy engaged in one community centre in Oslo. As part of the ‘learning lives’ project in the community of Groruddalen (in the Grorud valley in Oslo) we explored community centres. These were situated in local neighbourhoods and often located close to schools. As documented in that project, such community centres played a significant role in the lives of the young people we studied (Erstad et al. 2016). There were a number of different community centres that played a key role in the lives of these young people. Due to living conditions in this valley, with more families living in apartment buildings, and with a larger number of family members living together than in other parts of the city, young people often met in different public spaces such as public libraries and these became important both for doing homework and as places to hang out. Sport clubs and training centres were important places where young people could engage their interests and socialize with friends. However, we also found that there were community centres that were special for this valley. These were the cultural centres targeting specific ethnic groups – Turkish, Polish, Tamil, Vietnamese and Somali – who had been growing in numbers since the beginning of the 2000s. When visiting several of these centres, we were struck with the ways that in addition to their cultural activity – where children and youth learned about dancing, singing, cooking, and families used the social space to meet – the centres also had specific school-related functions. There were specific

72  Ola Erstad ‘classrooms’ for teaching school subjects, and indeed the teachers there were former youth from the same centre who were now enrolled in prestigious courses at the university, but also spending every weekend from 9 to 12 at the centre as volunteer teachers in Science and Maths. However, the atmosphere was very different than regular school since there were fewer students, and the fact that the teachers were young and of the same ethnic origin as the students.

Pathways through a youth club Youth clubs, as a type of community centre, had existed in the valley since the 1970s and they were among the first in Norway. The clubs worked more or less the same way as each other in offering different activities for youth such as creating music using their own recording studio and making films, as well as just being able to come to the centres to play pool, chess, or to dance. In one of these youth clubs I interviewed the leader who had been involved in the youth club movement in Oslo since the 1970s and had strong opinions that this was an alternative community space in direct comparison with school. He emphasized that the activities at the centre were very much defined, developed and run by the youngsters themselves. In talking to some of the youngsters (16–18 years old), it was clear that they spent a lot of time at the club. In their opinion the club had two key functions in their lives. First, it was a place to meet friends instead of just hanging out at a local street corner. And second, it was a space to pursue one’s interests and get support to develop this further in a different way from school, both because they could follow interests in depth and at their own pace, as well as because it was self-initiated. One boy (Mathias, 18 years old), for example, had an interest in rap that had started when he was 12 years old. One specific youth club close to where he lived was important to his identity as a rapper and as a young person growing up in this valley. After a couple of years he performed at different youth clubs in Groruddalen and became quite well known. He was attracted to the clubs because of the music making, but also because he was joined to a community of interest (rap) developing a collective orientation (performing rap). There he met regularly with other rappers and shared ideas for texts, beats and performance experiences. He wrote the rap texts himself as well as developing his beats. When he was 14–15 years of age he became part of a larger network of rappers in the area and appropriated an identity as a rapper. The youth club played a major role in this. In one of the interviews he explained: I was probably not the smartest at school, but what I did with music that was what I could do, and there was no one that could do that better than me at that time. I felt like, this is my thing. I feel like I manage school, and in addition I have trained a lot. I feel that I still am good in music, but I know many musicians that are very good, but it is not enough to be good. Everything has to connect. (Interview, 2012)

Ubuntu and bildung in Olso and Zanzibar  73 Obviously, for Mathias rapping meant a way to be a person, to create an identity based on the confidence that he was good at something. During a visit, he brought me to the studio where he recorded his music (see Figures 5.3 and 5.4) He told me how he often hung out at the youth club after school, and especially in the studio where he could experiment at the mixing-­ table and in the small recording room. He showed me the stage at the youth club where he started his performances (see Figure 5.3). He proudly remembered how

Figure 5.3 and 5.4  M  athias showing me the stage where he performed at the youth club and the studio where he recorded his music.

74  Ola Erstad several hundred young people had cheered him while he was performing. All this seemed to strengthen certain ‘funds of identity’ (Esteban-Guitart & Moll 2014), building not just personal self-confidence but an awareness of his role in acting in the social world of his peers: It is fun. It is probably the strongest and coolest experiences I have had, when you are on stage and there is strong pressure [“trøkk”] from the audience and stuff. There is not a lot that is stronger than that. But it is not that that really drives me, it is just the feeling of when you have a text that just sits with the beat, and you get goosebumps, and you just get this magical thing of making a song. That is what drives me. It is not being on stage, even though I like it. But it is like… I am very nervous before I get on stage, and when you are on stage everything is gone. I like it and enjoy it. But I would not characterize me as a typical sort of stage guy. I like best to be in the studio and the artistic part of that. (Interview, 2012) He expressed the importance of these experiences for his own future in this way: The dream is to be able to do music, but that is the dream. But I do not dare to go after it. And it is very troublesome really, because I wish I could, but I don’t dare. Then I need to choose something that is much more safe. But what I think is that when I am finished with my education, hopefully not too far off, three years, and then make money and things, and then be able to take it up again, a bit, and try. Maybe not work as an artist, but maybe as a songwriter or work in a studio. But a songwriter is maybe what I really most want to work as. Write songs for people. It is the writing I like best. (Interview, 2012) Here he talks about the importance, on a personal level, that working with music has for him. He was not motivated at school, nor academically high achieving, but he was self-confident about performing. Youth clubs are based on collective processes of young people coming together around common interests and just hanging out with friends. However, it is also very much about personal trajectories where special interests like music or film making are guided by more experienced adults or youngsters at the club. For Mathias, this neighbourhood youth club became very important for his personal growth.

Communities of learning lives The two cases mentioned above are both similar and different in several ways. They are similar in the way they show how young people get involved in activities outside of formal education. These activities can have links to formal education: young people gain knowledge about content of relevance to schooling

Ubuntu and bildung in Olso and Zanzibar  75 such as planting trees, cooking or writing rap. However, both of the examples presented here show how these activities are framed very differently in youth centres and clubs than at school. The youngsters themselves recount how they are more involved in deciding and developing activities, even if they are not all completely self-initiated. There are adults present both in the community centre in Zanzibar and in the youth club in Oslo, but these adults play a very different role than adults in schools. The type of knowledge the youngsters gain is also interesting since it is linked more closely to their everyday lives. There are also differences between the two examples. One difference is, of course, the cultural differences between Zanzibar and Oslo. The cultural resources available to young people in Groruddalen are fundamentally different from the ones available for young people in Zanzibar. There are a variety of different spaces in the community of Groruddalen where young people can participate in order to follow their interests and be with family and friends, such as libraries, ethnic cultural centres, youth clubs, sport facilities and so forth. In Zanzibar, such spaces are almost non-existent. Second, young people in both Zanzibar and in Oslo expressed the comparison between the collective and the personal quite differently. Reflecting ubuntu, the young people I met at the community centre in Zanzibar talked more about the collective implications of their activities than the young people I met in the Grorud valley in Oslo. The youngsters in Oslo talked more about their personal trajectories and interests and also how these trajectories intersected with educational prospects. For youngsters in Zanzibar there was a clear division between school education and activities they were involved in at the centre and in their community. The centre in Oslo described in the narrative of Mathias has a specific focus on youth per se, and provides resources for individual young people to pursue their interests. The centre in Zanzibar is defined more as a community centre with close links to families. A core issue in this chapter has been the ubuntu approach to education, knowledge and learning. Both the Oslo and Zanzibar settings exemplify such an ­approach even if they represent different aspects to it. The example from ­Zanzibar shows the ways young people get engaged in collective activities of importance for themselves and their community. It shows how the centre, the people involved and the different activities all are linked to the community and are not experienced as something outside this collective orientation towards learning and development. In contrast, the narrative of Mathias can be interpreted as an individualized trajectory of one boy and his interests. Nonetheless, this narrative also shows that he is intertwined in different networks, past and present, which indicates a strong collective aspect to his learning life. The youth club represents a community of participation in which he can follow his interests in collaboration with others, and he talked about the importance this community has on his learning. He got support from others at the club to become better at what he was interested in. And, in becoming a rapper, he has become part of a broader community of rappers through performance. His learning life was embedded in this collective orientation of learning and development, and his self (the I) is at the same

76  Ola Erstad time part of a collective (the we). And in both examples these spaces outside of school support very different means of engagement and participation important for learning than do their school experiences because they provide young people with more agency over their learning trajectory, as exemplified by the two boys in Zanzibar and Mathias in Oslo.

Invasion of after-school or potential educational spaces? As already mentioned in this chapter and in Chapters 1 and 2, scholars today argue that the model for formal learning in schools that we have had for the last century stems from specific societal needs of mass education. They argue that new models of learning and knowledge creation are needed to prepare young people for their future work and citizenship (Claxton 2008; Rogoff et al. 2016). Forms of learning beyond school have often been defined in contrast to school learning, and less often considered on their own terms. As attention towards informal learning is increasing across many societies in the world, we also need to adopt a critical perspective about the ways such learning provides possibilities as well as restrictions for people and their communities. Traditional perspectives, such as the Norwegian initiative in Tanzania, are mainly looking at how education can be used as a prospect for global social progress, ­economic growth and ways to tackle challenges like technological developments, ­immigration and humanitarian emergencies on a global scale. I have suggested, however, that we need to take a critical approach to such global initiatives in r­ espect of educational trajectories of young people in contemporary societies. In this chapter I have drawn on one approach defined as ubuntu. By emphasizing the collective rather than the individualized, several African educationalists have addressed the community orientation of people’s lives and learning. In order to study this community orientation, we have to look beyond school and into informal learning settings. I have highlighted young people’s learning in specific community centres and the implications these centres have for people and communities. One critical issue is of course not to just celebrate the potential of communities, but at the same time to see them as potentially important learning spaces for 21st century learning. My argument in this chapter is not against formal education per se, and I follow some educationalists who argue ‘in defence of school’ (Masschelein & Simons 2013) by pointing out the role of formal education in our societies. However, as Chapters 1 and 2 to this book have explored, there are a variety of different activities beyond school that need more attention in discussions about learning in the 21st century. Some of these take the form of private instruction in after-school hours, or as home schooling with parents or instructors or in cultural centres as described in Groruddalen where young volunteers come to teach young people during weekends in core school subjects. Such initiatives represent a pedagogicisation of young people’s everyday lives as formal education takes up more and more of their time in what has been described as an ‘invasion of after-school’ (Nocon & Cole 2002).

Ubuntu and bildung in Olso and Zanzibar  77 Still, as I have emphasized in this chapter, there are other understandings of education, knowledge and learning that are important in ways of grasping how young people are engaged in different activities of importance for their own learning and growth as well as for their communities. As a philosophy, Ubuntu includes activities outside of schools because formal learning today is focusing on individualized and performance-based approaches and this view is part of how community centres provide alternative models of potential educational spaces.

Notes 1 www.osloeducationsummit.no/ 2 Bildung refers to the German tradition of self-cultivation. In English it is similar to the concepts of education or self-formation. The term is often used to refer to a model of higher education based on the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Historically, definitions have changed. Today, “bildung” is a broad concept, encompassing knowledge, judgement, a broad cultural and political orientation, an understanding of science and technology, and a cultivation of the fine arts. See: https:// www.uv.uio.no/english/research/subjects/bildung/ 3 I have been involved in both of these cases; one funded by the Norwegian Developmental Aid Agency taking place in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and one funded by the Norwegian Research Council taking place in a multi-ethnic community in Oslo, Norway. 4 https://envaya.org/tanzaniayouthicon

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78  Ola Erstad Gonzalez, N, Moll, LC & Amanti, C (eds.) 2005, Funds of knowledge. Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ. Hogan, A, Sellar, S & Lingard, B 2016, ‘Commercialising comparison: Pearson puts the TLC in soft capitalism’, Journal of Education Policy, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 243–258. Holland, D, Lachicotte, WJ, Skinner, D & Cain, C 1998, Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Ito, M, Gutiérrez, K, Livingstone, S, Penuel, B, Rhodes, J, Salen, K, et al. 2013, Connected learning: an agenda for research and design, Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, Irvine, CA. Lave, J & Wenger, E 1991, Situated learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Lemke, J 2000, ‘Across the scales of time: artifacts, activities and meanings in ecosocial systems’, Mind, Culture and Activity, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 273–290. Lemke, J 2002, ‘Becoming the village: education across lives’, in G Wells & G Claxton (eds.) Learning for life in the 21st century, Blackwell, Oxford. Løvlie, L 2003, ‘Teknokulturell danning’, in R Slagstad, O Korsgaard & L Løvlie (eds.) Dannelsens forvandlinger, Pax Forlag, Oslo. Løvlie, L & Standish, P 2002, ‘Introduction. Bildung and idea of liberal education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 317–340. Makame, AM, Lubega, CA & Ramadhan, RM 2010, The nature and extent of out-ofschool children in Zanzibar. The case study of Kijini and Jang’ombe schools, Report November 2010, Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWEZANZIBAR), Zanzibar, Tanzania. Masschelein, J & Simons, M 2013, In defense of the school. A public issue, E-ducation, Culture & Society Publishers, Leuven, Netherlands. McIntyre-Mills, J, Romm, N & Corcoran-Nantes, Y (eds.) 2018, Balancing individualism and collectivism: social and environmental justice, Springer, Cham, Switzerland. Nocon, H & Cole, M 2006, ‘School’s invasion of “after-school”’: colonization, rationalization, or expansion of access?’, in Z Bekerman, NC Burbules & D Silberman-Keller (eds.) Learning in places: the informal education reader, Peter Lang, New York, NY. Oviawe, J 2016, ‘How to rediscover the ubuntu paradigm in education’, International Review of Education, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 1–10. Piper, B 2016, ‘International education is a broken field: can ubuntu education bring solutions?’, International Review of Education, vol. 62, no. 1, pp 101–111. Putnam, R 2015, Our kids: the American dream in crisis, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY. Rogoff, B & Lave, J (eds.) 1984, Everyday cognition. Development in social context, ­Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Rogoff, B, Callanan, M, Gutierrez, KD & Erickson, F 2016, ‘The organization of informal learning’, Review of Research in Education, vol. 40, pp. 356–401. Sefton-Green, J 2013, Learning at not-school, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Serpell, R & Adamson-Holley, D 2015, ‘African socialization values and nonformal educational practices: child development, parental beliefs, and educational innovation in rural Zambia’, in T Abebe & J Waters (eds.) Labouring and learning, geographies of children and young people. Springer Science+Business Media, Singapore. Straume, I 2016, ‘Danning (Bildung)’, in OA Kvamme, T Kvernbekk & T Strand (eds.) Pedagogiske fenomener, Cappelen, Oslo, Norway. Wertsch, JV 1998, Mind as action, Oxford University Press, New York, NY.

6 Mapping the promise of non-schooled learning James G. Ladwig

Introduction In this chapter, I hope to show that the promise of non-schooling – and the reasons for taking it very seriously – can be seen when we look carefully at the limits of what schooling can and cannot do. I begin from what might seem self-­evident: schooling is best understood on its frontiers. It is much easier to see what is taken for granted by schools, and the limits of what schooling can do, when you can also see what it’s like when they aren’t there. From this perspective it becomes evident that non-school-based educational programs offer the possibility of taking up two essential tasks for the continuation of humans as a species-being (Dewey, 1916) that are highly unlikely to be met by schooling. First, as with all forms of Western institutional bureaucracies (Wagner, 1994), ­schooling has always been only partially successful in meeting its promise. ­A fter all, social exclusions from school exist everywhere and that means that no schooling system in the world can truly claim full participation in any country. Thus, strategies to reach those not able or willing to access schooling form one rationale for some non-school educational programs. Second, the history of the 20th century bluntly confronts us with two forms of human self-destruction: we now have the technological capacity to kill all humans; and we have the capacity to destroy the environment we need to survive. In this light, of the most basic reasons for education – sustaining human life into future generations – two sub-fields of education most obviously relate to these tasks. But findings from the history of environmental education and anti-racist or multicultural education make it clear that school-based curriculum initiatives to lessen our environmentally self-destructive practices, and lessen the likelihood of ongoing human-to-human conflict, are, to date, insufficient for these tasks (Ladwig, 2010). Both of these fundamental tasks have been the overt goal of several non-school programs around the planet, such as those presented in this volume, suggesting good potential for our collective future. At a time when the need for human cooperation has never been more apparent in confronting new global challenges, it is also the case that Western democracies are tracking paths of raw self-interest. Without being melodramatic, at such times it is important to name promising pathways to a sustainable human future.

80  James G. Ladwig Articulating, discussing, naming, debating such pathways is always a central function of educational theory even if the long history of anti-establishment educational theories, projects and traditions appears not to be able to halt the ongoing momentum of conventional schooling: world schooling is sufficiently hegemonic to warrant pause before raising false hopes for a new paradigm of education for children and young adults. One of the ways in which we can see the outline of the culture of world ­schooling – one main medium in which children develop their own ­subjectivities (see Chapter 2) – is by talking to people who live and work in contexts where schooling is (still) a new thing. One of my first ventures into the centre of ­Australia was to the southern part of the Northern Territory – the lands surrounding the small central city of Alice Springs and Uluru (previously known by its colonial name, Ayers Rock). There, on a tour of schools involved with a school reform initiative, I was introduced to the local parliamentarian – the person who represented this part of Australian in the Northern Territory government. He had studied linguistics and Indigenous languages at the national university (which has specialised in documenting and teaching Indigenous languages for a very long part of its own history), and that had led him to the Territory – ­u ltimately to his representing this region. The land of this electorate included all of the southern part of the Territory, minus Alice Springs itself. Most of this region, in terms of both land mass and population, is made up of Indigenous communities from about half a dozen different language groups. Outside of Alice Springs itself, the region is sparely populated; it is the iconic ‘Outback’ marketed by Tourism Australia. After spending several hours of discussion and sharing of experiences, he handed me his business card as we prepared to depart company. On that card was his phone number, and a picture of him. Nothing else. I paused as I looked at the card, turning it over to see if I was missing something, and he chuckled. He explained that when working with these A ­ boriginal communities there were two important factors. First, most would never be ­a nywhere near his office nor use the post (this was in the mid-1990s). Most of the communities outside of Alice, then, were accessible only by air or very long drives on very rough dirt/sand roads (we met about 400 kilometres west of Alice in a community on one such road). At that point there really was only one paved road running east–west, and that was to Uluru. But the main reason for the card was to carry his picture. As he explained, within Indigenous community cultures there was no regard nor concern for any formal position nor office as such. What mattered was if people knew you directly – as a person, a whole person. There was no distinction between public and private individual. No definition of organisational role per se. There were people you knew (and either trusted or not) and there were strangers. At the time, the importance of this cultural insight was clearly connected to the way in which schools were staffed – one reason we had been asked to the community. That is, all staff were appointed by the government education department based on formal qualification and bureaucratic procedures, which always meant

Mapping promise of non-schooled learning  81 teachers were literally shipped in from afar. They were not known to the community before their arrival. In fact, at the time of this visit, every fully paid teacher in this school had come from Melbourne within the past month – a journey of 2,500 kilometres. When you are on the frontiers of modern states, as you are across much of the Australian Outback, history has a way of making its presence felt. In this case, our local Member of Parliament was well aware that the social organisations based on formal roles and positions had not been in place long enough to really work, yet. § Students of sociology of education would very quickly recognise that the reality being described by the “fathers of the field” around the turn of the 20th century still exists on the edges of our modern nation-states. Writing at a time concurrent with the rise of mass schooling, Max Weber (1922/1968) analysed the relationship between the rise of bureaucracies and education and provided c­ rucial insight into contemporary, global educational expansion. For this analysis, ­Weber made four important points: (a) bureaucracies are built from and ­reinforce the form of reasoning he named zweckrational, means–ends ­rationality; (b) examination processes function as social selection mechanisms that sort people into specific social strata based on ‘expertise’; (c) areas of expertise thereby have subsequent effects on the curriculum and the expansion of technical knowledge as a basis for specialisation (based on utility); and (d) this modern state differed from previous bureaucratic forms from other sides of the planet (notably as compared to the ‘Chinese literati’). While sociologists continue to debate whether or not Weber really understood Confucianism, we are no doubt familiar with the way in which bureaucracies apply means–ends rationality. In education, this is overt. One of the most common forms of curriculum theory and design remains overtly means–ends rationality. American curriculum theorists would characterise this as “Tylerian” – based on ‘Tyler’s rationale’ which basically amounts to identifying your ends and figuring out the means to get students to reach those ends (Kliebard, 1995). In the hands of so-called neoliberal government managers, such as in the Blair administration, bureaucratic, means–ends reasoning can be applied to just about any goal determined to be desired by government (Barber, 2015; Barber, Moffit, & Kihn, 2010); it would surprise no scholar of education to discover the main protagonist of that government’s “delivery unit” was trained as a head teacher. It is difficult to really understand how such appeals have been so successful in policy rhetoric since they so clearly represent what Weber himself identified as ‘the iron-cage of modernity’ (Weber, 1950). That is, as early as the original 1905 ­publication of Weber’s Protestant ethic, it has been clear – at least to ­European social scholars – that attempts to expand or increase human meaning by the application of zweckrational to social management will ultimately be self-­defeating. There are several components to Weber’s iron-cage argument, but in essence Weber

82  James G. Ladwig showed how applying technical rationality to all things human meant that meaning was always reduced to utility alone. In other words, the more we apply bureaucratic reasoning to our pursuit of a better life, to meaning, the more we make life meaningless. The 1950 translation of Weber’s work into English (by Talcott Parsons) made this insight all the more difficult to ignore, at least for some people – including the ­Frankfurt School scholars (Adorno, ­Horkheimer, Marcuse et al. and the E ­ xistentialist philosophers; see Habermas, 1987; H ­ orkheimer & Adorno, 1987/1944; Marcuse, 1964).

Travelling to Menindee A decade after my first ventures into remote Indigenous Australia, I was asked to work with a remote school in a community far to the east of Alice – Menindee, in western New South Wales (NSW). By then I had learned there are two important elements to learn about Indigenous Australians if you want to work with them: their land, and their history. Some aspects of each of these can be found in uncontroversial formal sources. Basic facts and official histories help, especially when you are talking about land on which the grip of modernity is tenuous. Menindee lies about 120 kilometres to the southeast of the only town of any size in that part of Australia, Broken Hill. Broken Hill is one of the iconic mining towns of Outback Australia, and the point of origins for the now global mining giant, the original Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP). BHP was established in 1885, two years after the town of Broken Hill, decades after Menindee. The reason Broken Hill exists as a town at all relates directly to the ore deposit that was the actual hill; at 1.8 billion years old, it is one of the oldest known exposed rocks on the planet. It is because of Broken Hill that Menindee has a bitumen road at all. With a roughly evenly split in population between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, Menindee is far more developed than similar sized settlements in the deserts west of Alice Springs. There is a simple reason Menindee is sufficiently developed to have a paved road to it: water. This is the land along the Darling River, the northern main artery of the continent’s major river system. The area is known as the region of the Menindee Lakes, a chain of shallow ephemeral freshwater lakes. That’s a way of saying these lakes exist after flood but are mainly otherwise dry – were it not for human engineering. The town of Menindee, positioned on the river amongst the lakes, itself is historically known as one of the early European inland invasion areas and as a well-known historical site for the stories Europeans tell of the exploration and settlement of the inland. The school in this town is long-standing, being one of the first remote schools of the first Australian colony, New South Wales (as ­depicted in the street plaque that now stands before it, see Figure 6.1). Menindee and the nearby former Aboriginal mission are also the sites of a history only recently made very public (Commission, 1997). The mission is upstream, out of town, and was formed in 1933 through the forced settlement of Aboriginal people according to government policy of the day. Many of the current Aboriginal folks in Menindee are members of families forced to the mission

Mapping promise of non-schooled learning  83

Figure 6.1  A local historical plaque, telling of the origins of what is now Menindee Central School.

from elsewhere. But the history of forced removal isn’t one event, but many ongoing acts. At least as recently as 1949, when the then mission was closed and moved due to drought, Menindee was also a site to and from which Aboriginal children were separated from their families. This means that formal history is also living memory for the elders of Menindee’s Aboriginal families.

84  James G. Ladwig The reason I was in this community was to assist in a school reform initiative that was intended to build strong partnerships between the school and its community. Because of its history and demographic make-up, this was not a unified community when I first started working with them, but my own inclinations meant that I was soon connecting with many of the Aboriginal mothers and families in discussions about what the school could or should do as part of this program. Predictably the issue of teachers and principals coming and going from their position – and therefore the town (and region) – was raised as a concern. In Outback New South Wales, most new teachers travel from communities closer to the coast (around 1,200 km from Broken Hill). In the attempts to understand how this impacted the relationship with the Aboriginal community, the explanation given was quite direct: James, my children are the most important part of my life. How do you think I feel when I have to leave them each morning, with people I don’t know? For all these mothers, the first day they leave their eldest bub at the kindergarten is terrifying. We don’t know these people. [Nyampa mum, personal communication] Reflecting on simple human observations is hard not to do after such conversations. It’s hard not to ask how we do many of the most common, modern, things we do. How do we trust our children to positions, people playing roles, people we don’t know? But of course, as school systems include higher percentages of each successive generation (what sociologists call ‘horizontal expansion’) more and more of all humans do, these days.

The contradictions of schooling and modernity The observation that schooling is now a global enterprise, with systems of schools now constructed in all of the 200 or so nations around the globe, is by now a common presumption. There no doubt is a lot of variability in the degree to which these are systems and well-functioning, of course. But all nations have either established or are trying to establish school systems. Apart from the buildings and people populating them (teachers and students), several scholars have documented the degree to which we can say there is something of a world curriculum – a form of knowledge management common across these nations. Much of this work stems from that line of research developed by John Meyer and his colleagues, as part of the larger notion of a developing world society (Meyer, 1992; Meyer, Krücken, & Drori, 2009). From this work it is clear that whatever variations are also evident from nation to nation (Alexander, 2001) there is a very wide expansion of the forms of curriculum, and more importantly, the nature of the schooled human-subject and rationality, in the Weberian sense, carried with the institution of schooling. In the sociology of education, the Weberian analysis of how this rationality, this logic, plays out in the expansion of schooling was overt in Randall Collins’s

Mapping promise of non-schooled learning  85 (1979) analysis of our seemingly insatiable desire for credentials. (It was Collins who coined the term ‘credentialism’.) In educationally specific terms, the increase of credentialism was clearly connected to “vertical expansion” (the number of years of schooling, from primary through to tertiary) of schooling into growing arguments for universal higher education and two dynamics already identified by Weber. That is, on the one hand, the use of credentials as a means to secure social pathways into higher status strata was inflationary (the more people achieved one level of credential, the more people pursued the next). This inflationary pressure carries the consequence of decreasing advantage for levels of educational attainment which historically would have been an advantage in previous generations. (The more people within a society who obtain a secondary educational credential, the less that credential is worth.) On the other hand, this inflationary pressure, and the push for ever-increasing access, carries the consequence of de-coupling in which the content of what a given credential is supposed to represent is de-coupled from its actual technical functioning or utility beyond itself. Weber himself was fairly blunt on this issue: As the curriculum required for the acquisition of the patent of education requires considerable expense and a long period of gestation, this striving implies a repression of talent (of the ‘charisma’) in favour of property, for intellectual costs of the educational patent are always low and decrease, rather than increase, with increasing volume. (Weber 1922/1968, p. 1000) This notion has been woven into the analyses of the “new institutionalism” of sociology (Meyer, 1977; Meyer & Rowan, 1977) and was clear in Bourdieu and Passeron’s early analyses of educational expansion in 1970s France (Bourdieu, 1967; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). All of these points can be found in Weber’s early analysis of the relationship between education and bureaucracy, including the dynamics we have come to know as the conversions of cultural and economic capital, and including the ambiguous relationship between bureaucratic creation with its reliance on expertise and democracy (Weber, 1922/1968). But in addition to these, Weber also was very clear that the development of this bureaucratic expansion, based as it was on a Calvinist ascetic and the pursuit of material accumulation in this life, was quite distinct from earlier forms of bureaucracy and educational exam systems (as was found in China and early Greece). That is, where earlier uses of examination systems were bound to particular notions of a “cultivated” person – itself prone to abuses of patronage based on kinship and personal ties – the modern bureaucratic state had become tied to faceless technical reason and economic expansion (Weber 1922/1968, pp. 1001–1003). The interesting thing about our application of technical–rational reasoning is the very idea of making major life decisions on the basis of the trust we invest in positions, offices and professions – not trust in real people. The very idea of meritocracy and equal opportunity on which many of the global middle classes

86  James G. Ladwig rely, assumes a separation of the person from the position. Equal opportunity is defined as existing when the actual person given a position doesn’t matter – what matters is that person meets all the right criteria and credentialled requirements (Rawls, 1971). And that’s just one of the cultural ideas that has driven the expansion of schooling. The hard part for many people is seeing their own culture. We social scientists have a plethora of ways for naming or describing culture, but even for us, seeing our own culture is never easy. Saying this does rely on a specific and professional definition of culture that isn’t exactly the way the term is used in Indigenous politics and education. That definition is the notion of understanding what is collectively unconscious for specific groups of people. Things groups of people take for granted because the presumption is that everyone also does so – thereby the status of unquestioned fact is attributed to group-specific norms, beliefs, practices – is what the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) identified as a ‘network of meaning’. We all live in cultures we don’t see, until we leave them and attempt to live with people who don’t share that culture. But in the case of “traditional” Aboriginal culture, some of these cultural beliefs are fundamentally alien to Western culture. This has been known from the earliest attempts to trace the logical structure of classification systems (a favourite topic among early European linguistic anthropologists (Boas, 1940)). It was quite common for these analyses to be posed in dualistic oppositions between the primitive and the modern, and they are, in many ways, the origins of the sociology of knowledge and religion (Durkheim, 1917/1965). It is at the interface of cultures that Indigenous education has always worked. The idea of (at least) two cultures coming together is a long-held traditional theme in the literature of Indigenous educators (Cazden, 2017; Harris, 1990) and (of course) bilingual education, dating back at least to the early 20th century European continuation of the colonisation imposed on Indigenous cultures around the planet. The basic terms of original cultural conflict for Indigenous Australians who have to deal with schools are well known: from the basic questions of regimenting time and space (and land), through to recognising the authority of the knowledge of local Elders, the basic infrastructure of Australian school systems regularly violates traditional Indigenous culture (Donovan, 2007; ­Heitmeyer & O’Brien, 1992). From the expectation that unknown teachers from somewhere else can be trusted, to the idea that anyone young (many teachers in these contexts are junior teachers in their first posting) actually knows something worth teaching, to the idea of a daily clock-based schedule that doesn’t shift for ­significant family events (deaths and community mourning are the most often noted), to the idea that being successful at school means leaving home to attend university, and many more, the idea of a clash of cultures isn’t abstract on the frontiers of modernity. To outline, first, the regulation of the school day is an obvious imposition, but the daily schedule isn’t really the main issue (even if getting students to follow that takes overt effort). Perhaps more importantly is the question of how

Mapping promise of non-schooled learning  87 calendars, not just clocks, impose time – time to get to know people well. Time to make collective decisions well. School calendars do not wait for the right time, for just about anything. The need to renegotiate calendars is an issue across many, if not most, Indigenous communities in Australia (time for mourning, seasonal shifts of life in the tropics, are all connected to this). Second, the regulation of space doesn’t just mean the school assumes it sits on neutral space. For those carrying generational wounds created by schools (a reality not just for Indigenous people), school place is by no means neutral but remains on land where inhumane memories still live. But also, the perpetual churn of staff who do not live their lives in that place is also a regular issue for most rural and remote Indigenous Australian communities. Third, knowledge in these schools is clearly not knowledge which would normally be recognised by Indigenous communities who understand the land from its rhythms and cycles, not from abstracted scientific laws, and who recognise knowledge born of experience and the wisdom of Elders. For young teachers appointed to these schools, simply being accepted as a legitimate source of knowledge is a cultural imposition – a challenge they often never surpass. Traditional knowledge is not representational, nor transportable. Being “one who knows” is about as distant from bureaucratically credentialled teachers as can be imagined. Thus, the contours of school culture become clear: (1) positions and roles based on bureaucratic structures and credentials, distributed not by kinship nor apprenticeship – not real individual people and families; (2) structured time and space based on abstracted, decontextualised standardised principles; and (3) knowledge that clearly does not come from local understanding and people – all woven together in a form of rationality that was virtually non-existent before schools came to Australia.

From school reform to the edges of school One of the problems with simple binary comparisons or oppositional contrasts between incommensurate cultures is that it really is rarely that simple in day-today practice. In places like Menindee, given its relatively long but by no means simple history, it isn’t as if many aspects of traditional culture are no longer obvious. The regulation of time and the use of land are by no means new to anyone in Menindee (although I wouldn’t say that about the eldest community members). The unique nature of each local history means outsiders have to be prepared for standard explanations to throw up some surprises. My work in Menindee began when a new principal was appointed to Menindee Central School following a review of Aboriginal Education which in turn led to the establishment of a pilot program designed to develop strong partnerships between Indigenous communities and their local schools. Being one of the schools in the pilot gave Menindee resources to call on ‘experts’ – in my case, expertise around a model of classroom practice adopted by New South Wales Department of Education (Ladwig, 2007, 2009). One aspect of that model included the question of building from local cultural knowledge. The conventional research

88  James G. Ladwig which developed this work had also documented the degree to which Aboriginal cultural knowledge was very, very rarely observed in typical classrooms in NSW. One of the most obvious reasons for this is that young teachers tend not to know any local cultural knowledge (Phillips & Luke, 2017). Teachers typically are taught the stereotypically binary accounts of Aboriginal culture (as opposed to Western), but they also know that account is so simplified as to be inaccurate in any one local site. Because young teachers often must take positions in places far from their own homes, they typically don’t know local knowledge. This eventually led to me conducting a study based on asking Aboriginal ­Elders and older students what cultural knowledge they thought their teachers should know. In one of these conversations two Aboriginal mothers in M ­ enindee explained how the more recent history of the mission blended with more traditional family structures in a way unrecognised by the school. Whilst I ­began with me asking about traditional spirituality and dreamtime stories, I  was quickly guided elsewhere: ‘ya know the dreamtime and all that means nothing to me, to us, we’re on about survival… We’re just trying to survive.’ What did matter to these mothers was a need for teachers to understand and acknowledge specific history, recent history – in this case that meant understanding the local effects of the ‘Stolen Generations’.1 Both of these women were members of the families forcibly moved onto and off the mission. Combined with the economic realities of these families’ history, there are realities they didn’t think most t­ eachers ­understood: ‘the death… There’s lots of death these children live with.’ They continued and told of a young mother of four children who had died the previous year, leaving four orphaned children at the school. Each of these children were being cared for by extended families – along lines of family networks – from all around the state; networks that developed in response to the forcible scattering of their people. At this point in history it would be difficult to figure out whether these extended family networks are mostly the consequence of traditional family structures (which are complicated to Western eyes) or the effect of having families torn apart and re-built. Whichever is the case, it was a tough time for the kids. Unsurprisingly, one son subsequently began acting out in school. The school gave disciplinary records for each act, eventually suspending the boy. When told of the family’s circumstances, the temporary acting principal said, ‘well, he broke the school rules’. Regimented rules imposed by someone in a position of authority, onto a child in a position of subordination, irrespective of the personal reality of either – but classic faceless (Weberian) bureaucracy isn’t abstract for children infringing school rules. And yet Aboriginal mothers do send their kids to school – because they also have learned that school culture and knowledge is a matter of survival – not least because the very land and water on which they have relied is subject to much legal and political struggle these days. For these Aboriginal families, access to power – the power that controls their land and livelihood – requires school culture and knowledge. For the children of these Aboriginal families, finding a way to survive (and flourish) in schools means adopting a subjectivity fit for purpose.

Mapping promise of non-schooled learning  89 Each one of these children, like all children, is given the task of finding out just what makes a child ‘schooled’. This tension replays an older argument. Durkheim’s view of school was as the main, and perhaps only, institution capable of developing a collective sense among future citizens (of France) – the main institution of political socialisation, linking the family to the State. In the context of his somewhat evolutionary understanding of the development of modern societies, schools were seen as a natural extension of the family when societies grew larger, more differentiated and stratified (in the shift from ‘mechanical’ to ‘organic’ solidarity). When Durkheim compared the educational requirements of the modern state to that found in traditional societies, where education of the young was linked to adult initiations and conducted by Elders, he saw schooling as a necessary intermediary in the overall socialisation of the young into citizens of the ever-increasingly complex modern French state: The bonds uniting the citizens of a given country have nothing to do with relationships or personal inclinations. There is therefore a great distance between the moral state in which the child finds himself as he leaves the family and the one toward which he must strive. The school environment is most desirable. It is a more extensive association than the family or little societies of friends. It results neither from blood relationships nor from free choice, but from a fortuitous and inevitable meeting among subjects brought together on the basis of similar age and social conditions. In that respect it resembles political society. On the other hand, it is limited enough so that personal relations can crystallize. The horizon is not too vast; the consciousness of the child can easily embrace it. The habit of common life in the class and attachment to the class and even to the school constitute an altogether natural preparation for the more elevated sentiments that we wish to develop in the child. (Durkheim, 1973) Thus, in this view, the socialising aspects of the school environment itself carried significance beyond the overt content of curriculum and pedagogy. In American educational literature, of course, this influence of schooling would later become a matter of several debates, from understanding schooling as a force of conformity and docility (Henry, 1955, 1957), through identification of these dynamics as ‘the hidden curriculum’ (Jackson, 1968), through Marxist critiques of ‘the hidden curriculum of work’ (Bowles & Gintis, 1976), and beyond. By now, educational literature has well documented the degree to which schooling has been imposed on Indigenous cultures around the globe, even to the point of there now being a sub-field of research methods for understanding this global phenomenon (Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008). From the historical struggles of First Nations people in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, through the remains of colonialisation within Europe among the Sami, Newfoundlanders, the Basque, the Romani, to the cascading recognition

90  James G. Ladwig of Indigenous cultures of Asia and Africa, it is clear that whatever differences luxurious European observations make about nationally cultural differences in school practices (Alexander, 2001), from the perspective of Indigenous peoples around the globe, schooling looks pretty similar as a cultural tool, and as an instrument of colonial domination. That is, whatever the sometimes very large cultural differences that exist amongst those we now call Indigenous cultures, there are some very clear cultural presumptions associated with schooling that fit none of them. At the core of the technology of schooling lies an imposition of regulated time, space and knowledge (Keskitalo & Määttä, 2011) – all carrying substantial implications for relationships among humans; relationships between humans and ‘the environment’; between humans, their work and the product of their work (inclusive of knowledge here); and between humans and themselves (cf. the basic forms of alienation Marx identified in his 1848 manuscripts). Over time, in the attempt to understand the children of these families – there are five extended Aboriginal families in this town, who can trace their familial heritage to the days Europeans first met their ancestors on the river – I began to understand what it means for these Indigenous people to have the school regulating time, space and knowledge as it does. Let me note that these families ­include many university graduates, teachers, principals, healthcare workers, nurses, park rangers, and business owners. On the surface of it, most non-­Indigenous people would not see these families as extremely culturally different to their own. But the impositions of time, space and knowledge are a daily reality for the Aboriginal people of western NSW.

Beyond reform to non-school When viewed from outside of Occidental culture, the connection to global knowledge and culture is overt. This community and school is literally connected to the outside world through its use of the internet – both as part of the means by which secondary education is delivered to them and as part of economic and political lives beyond the schools. Indeed, many of the Aboriginal students in this school are very adept in using technology for their own purposes – from coding to website construction, the children of these Aboriginal families are no strangers to the web. So it is that the global reaches of bureaucratic instrumental reasoning live side by side the traditional songlines of the people of the Darling. The idea of contradictory cultures existing simultaneously within individuals is in many ways the basic reality of schooling. These contradictions are often visible, especially in the artwork produced by the students in Menindee (see Figure 6.2). But this opposition has not been observed only in relation to comparing ­Indigenous cultures with that of schooling. Similar oppositions have been noted in the cultural differences between the accumulationist (and c­ onsumerist) cultures of schooling with those needed to live sustainably (Bowers, 2008; ­Stevenson, 2008). If we compare the above characterisation of the world culture

Mapping promise of non-schooled learning  91

Figure 6.2  On the edge of school grounds, a ‘yarning circle’ has been constructed.

of schooling as an archetype of subjectivity with those found within environmental education curriculum based on direct engagement and experiences with outside, non-school environments, it is clear that it isn’t only Indigenous culture that lies outside of the norms of schooling. Both of these differing subjectivities (Indigenous and ‘environmental’) can be found in non-school education. There are several examples of in situ based environmental education programs around the world, in which the explicit intent is to help students develop a direct relationship with “the land” or environment and work collectively on projects designed to create sustainable schools and communities, and to involve the students directly in the “implementation” and doing of those projects.2 But these are not the only forms of non-schooling to be found in Australia. There are also now many “not-school” programs which are designed to educate students who either cannot (or don’t) attend a conventional school, but offer school-based attainment and access to a conventional curriculum (Sefton-Green, 2013). In Australia, the most obvious and well-known example is the “School of the Air”, an early distance education program for children of the families who run cattle or sheep stations in the vast Outback. But these not-school programs are not cut of the same cloth as the more “green” environmental education curricula. These not-school programs more closely resemble contemporary discussions of the frontiers of technology, in which the logic of schooling doesn’t change, but intensifies.

92  James G. Ladwig So the comparison between schooled minds, and humans educated by non-schooling, could ultimately be conducted empirically. While I know of no empirical examination of it, analytically this line of reasoning does raise what is an important distinction in thinking about the effects and desirability of non-schooling. In very general terms, the distinctions made thus far have been between “ancient” and “modern” educational intents and between schooling and non-schooling. These two distinctions help demonstrate relative cultural proximities among different non-schooling programs (see Table 6.1). In many ways, I suggest, informal schooling programs which are designed to reach students in a different way and which promote achievement in a conventional curriculum, are entirely consistent with this “world subjectivity” in the degree to which both require significant individual and individualistic capacities, and in the degree to which both depend on transportable, decontextualised knowledge, skills and dispositions It is clear that non-schooling is by no means a homogenous monolith of educational thought and practice. In fact, if our concern is developing forms of education that can maintain human life on this planet, there is no compelling reason that any one form of non-schooling should be chosen, to the exclusion of others. The account just articulated clearly simplifies things and sets up a stark comparison between the “world culture of schooling” and more “organic” cultures that is based on distinctions which are themselves not new to Western scholars (see Chapter 3). But those analytical distinctions become very concrete in places like Menindee locally, and are evident across Australia. This is where the theoretical isn’t really theoretical at all, it is literal. The prospect of human ­advancement leading to our own self-destruction isn’t hard to see on the ­Darling River. That once great and navigable river is literally drying up because of increased industrial agriculture (made possible by the very same world culture Table 6.1  Heuristic analytical distinctions of non-schooling Schooled

Non-Schooled

Ancient

• Monastic training • Disciplining of time, space and bodies • Recitation • Selective

Modern

• Disembodied skills and knowledge • Self-objectification • Management of the self • Near universal

• Indigenous education based on knowing ‘the land’ • Environmental education based on connectedness • Community-based universalism • Entrepreneurial/virtual acquisition of skills and knowledge • Self-disciplining/ objectification • Marketing the self • Individualised universalism

Mapping promise of non-schooled learning  93 of schooling) that has grown upstream. When you add in the longer term and more slowly evident effects of climate change, the idea that we need to find other ways of living, of educating our children, is far from an abstract idea in the Australian Outback.

From local to global survival The political connection between those involved in Green politics and ­Indigenous cultures is perhaps well recognised (if suspiciously), and the critique of schooling as being antithetical to truly sustainable culture has already been well articulated (Stevenson, 2007). What is most important to understand about that link is that the congruence isn’t about political correctness or even some sense of justice; it is based on the fact that we have only one finite planet on which to live. So for this chapter I would simply like to build from those links to draw a differentiation between what might be gained from non-schooling. There are no doubt several uses of non-school educational programs designed to use alternative means to draw students into the world culture of schooling as a means to economic or political participation (Rogers, 2005). At the same time, the same technologies have been put to non-accumulationist and sustainable goals. But here is where I think we need to distinguish carefully b ­ etween and among non-school enterprises – between those that seek to essentially pursue the expansion of world culture for the sake of participating in the economic ­expansionist culture that drives our current pathway to what (­ Skidelsky & Skidelsky, 2013) refer to as our insatiable acquisitionist economy – as opposed to those that seek to promote sustainable cultures. Here I hope to have shown that economy and its culture are decidedly linked to the same historical forms of rationalist subjectivity on which modern schooling is built. Hopefully the reasons I think it important to clarify the hopes of non-schooling and its potential are a little more clear as well. As a first approximation, I take both schooling and non-schooling to be absolutely essential for humans, as a species. When Dewey (1916) framed education as essential for our continuation as a species-being, his understanding included seeing the advancements made possible by our historically developed achievements in science and public reasoning (Dewey, 1927) and our ‘essence’ as evolutionarily developed biological animals (Dewey, 1925). This part of the argument extends in two directions: (1) on the question of which forms of schooling are most likely to be most attractive and successful for which populations (taking into account demographic and cultural differences, within and between nations); and (2) on the question of how we are going to manage to minimise what I take to be apparent forces of human self-destruction (i.e. our history of killing each other and the planet all in the name of progress, as was so cruelly exposed to me at ­Menindee). While drawing out these distinctions cannot anticipate the consequences of designing non-school programs in different forms, distinctions among non-­ schooling programs are going to be necessary to systematically fi ­ gure out which are worthy of advocacy.

94  James G. Ladwig If we are to successfully confront the damage we have wrought on the planet’s environment, it is important to keep in mind a point well recognised by the 20th century American anthropologist, Jules Henry. When considering how we humans face our own limits, Henry argued: The ability to reclaim land through irrigation, enrichment of the soil, filling gullies and the proper adjustment of furrows to the contour of the land is as much an achievement of social organization as it is of science, for only a well developed social organization can make such science possible, and only through the high development of social organization – modern government – can the discoveries of science be brought to bear on large tracts of land, to make them bear fruit, when the natural character of the land would have ordained that they be fallow. Actually, then, the limitations of human survival on this planet are at least as much a function of social organization as they are of natural environment. (Henry, 1950) To me, the main issue facing non-schooling isn’t whether or not a case can be made to advocate a new non-school-based form of mass education. The case against schooling is well rehearsed and well known. To me, the question remains whether we can leverage the promise of being free from the necessarily alienating technologies of schooled forms of education and could find a new social organisational form that prevents our all-too-human propensity for self-destruction. For me, the question is the very same one facing Indigenous Australians: Can we find ways to educate our children so that they collectively understand our dependence on the planet and work together to preserve our future on it? For those of us who have inherited the advantages of modern societies, the position here isn’t about speaking for marginalised peoples, it is about learning from and with them.

Notes 1 The ‘Stolen Generations’ is a term referring to the generations of Indigenous children taken from their parents for their racial assimilation and the overt attempted extermination of the Indigenous population in Australia under its early 20th century White Australia policy. 2 For Australian examples see ‘Earth-keepers’ and ‘Streamwatch’.

References Alexander, R. J. (2001). Culture and Pedagogy: International Comparisons in Primary Education. Oxford: Wiley. Barber, M. (2015). How to Run a Government: So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy. London: Penguin Books. Barber, M., Moffit, A., & Kihn, P. (2010). Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Educational Leader. London: Sage.

Mapping promise of non-schooled learning  95 Boas, F. (1940). Race, Language, and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, P. (1967). Systems of education and systems of thought. International Social Science Journal, 19(3), 338. doi:citeulike-article-id:6241181 Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture (R. Nice, Trans.). London: Sage. Bowers, C. A. (2008). Why a critical pedagogy of place is an oxymoron. Environmental Education Research, 14(3), 325–335. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Cazden, C. B. (2017). Communicative Competence, Classroom Interaction, and E ­ ducational Equity: The Selected Works of Courtney B. Cazden. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Collins, R. (1979). The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification. New York: Academic Press. Commission, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity (1997). Bringing Them home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved from https://bth.humanrights.gov.au/the-report/bringing-them-home-report Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., & Smith, L. T. (2008). Handbook of Critical and ­Indigenous Methodologies. London: Sage. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of ­Education. New York: Free Press. Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and Nature. Chicago, IL: Open Court. Dewey, J. (1927). The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt. Donovan, M. (2007). Do Aboriginal knowledge and Western education mix?: To get ­Aboriginal cultural knowledge in schools to make all the kids smile. International Journal of the Humanities, 5(5), 99–103. Durkheim, É. (1917/1965). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (J. W. Swain, Trans.). New York: Free Press. Durkheim, É. (1973). Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education (E. K. Wilson & H. Schnurer, Trans.). New York: Free Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Harris, S. (1990). Two-way Aboriginal Schooling: Education and Cultural Survival. ­Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Heitmeyer, D., & O’Brien, A. (1992). Aboriginal education: the challenge of implementation and the need to change existing practices. Curriculum Perspectives, 12(3), 33–39. Henry, J. (1950). The principle of limits: with special reference to the social sciences. Philosophy of Science, 17(3), 247–253. Henry, J. (1955). Docility, or giving teacher what she wants. Journal of Social Issues, 11(2), 33–41. doi:10.1111/j.1540–4560.1955.tb00313.x Henry, J. (1957). Attitude organization in elementary school classrooms. American ­Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 27(1), 117–133. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1957.tb05206.x Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (1987/1944). Dialectic of Enlightenment (J. ­Cummings, Trans.). New York: Continuum. Jackson, P. W. (1968). Life in Classrooms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Keskitalo, P., & Määttä, K. (2011). How do the Sámi culture and school culture converge – or do they? Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 40, 112–119. doi:10.1375/ ajie.40.112

96  James G. Ladwig Kliebard, H. M. (1995). The Tyler Rationale revisited. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 27(1), 81–88. doi:10.1080/0022027950270107 Ladwig, J. (2007). Modelling pedagogy in Australian school reform. Pedagogies: An ­International Journal, 2(02), 57–76. doi:10.1080/15544800701343919 Ladwig, J. G. (2009). Working backwards towards curriculum: on the curricular implications of Quality Teaching. Curriculum Journal, 20(3), 271–286. Ladwig, J. G. (2010). Beyond academic outcomes. Review of Research in Education, 34, 113–141. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Meyer, J. W. (1977). The effects of education as an institution. American Journal of Sociology, 83(1), 55–77. ­ rimary Meyer, J. W. (1992). School Knowledge for the Masses: World Models and National P Curricular Categories in the Twentieth Century. Washington, DC: Falmer Press. Meyer, J. W., Krücken, G., & Drori, G. S. (2009). World Society: The Writings of John W. Meyer: Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: formal structures as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–363. Phillips, J., & Luke, A. (2017). Two worlds apart: Indigenous community perspectives and Non-Indigenous teacher perspectives on Australian schools In W. T. Pink & G. W. ­Noblit (Eds.) Second International Handbook of Urban Education (Vol. 2, pp. 959–995). ­Dordrecht: Springer. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rogers, A 2005, Non-formal education: flexible schooling or participatory education? Kluwer Academic, New York Sefton-Green, J. (2013). Learning at Not-School: A Review of Study, Theory, and ­Advocacy for Education in Non-Formal Settings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Skidelsky, R., & Skidelsky, E. (2013). How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life. New York: Other Press. Stevenson, R. B. (2007). Schooling and environmental education: contradictions in purpose and practice. Environmental Education Research, 13(2), 139–153. Stevenson, R. B. (2008). A critical pedagogy of place and the critical place(s) of pedagogy. Environmental Education Research, 14(3), 353–360. Wagner, P. (1994). A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline. London: Routledge. Weber, M. (1922/1968). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Trans.). Los Angeles: University of California Press. Weber, M. (1950). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (T. Parsons, Trans.). New York: Scribner’s.

7 Walking the city A method for exploring everyday public pedagogies Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk

Introduction Bristol, our home town, has a famous tower that stands on one of its highest points. Climbing up inside the narrow staircase in the dark, you suddenly come to an archway at the top that brings you out blinded into the light and to a vision of the city spreading out beyond you: the parks, the river, the serried ranks of brightly coloured terraced houses climbing the many hills, the corporate headquarters by the docks, the trainlines snaking through the housing estates in the suburbs, the view out to the countryside beyond. From this perspective, it’s tempting to believe you can hold the city in the sweep of your hand as you reach out and draw it all in. As de Certeau (1984) observed, this elevated position is the vantage point from which plans can be made, blueprints drawn up for the city; top down, it gives the impression of a comprehensive and comprehensible view of the city. From this God’s eye view, however, the everyday, street-level behaviours that generate the actual lived experience of the city are invisible. The small acts, the everyday decisions, the repeated practices of short cuts and preferred strolls that produce the lived geography of the city remain out of sight. For those living in the city, seeking to build resources that support their own and others’ learning, the question is – how to make comprehensible the micro-­ practices that constitute the learning infrastructures that are being built? This tension between the top-down vision of the city planner and the lived experience of individuals actually navigating and making that city through everyday activities, as well as the conceptual and methodological challenges of exploring the everyday practices of learning, are the focus for this chapter.

Background: the Learning City In 2013, the UNESCO Learning Cities network (made up of several hundred cities across the world and of which Bristol is a part) made the following declaration: We recognize that we live in a complex, fast-changing world where social, economic and political norms are constantly redefined. Economic growth and employment, urbanization, demographic change, scientific and

98  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk technological advances, cultural diversity and the need to maintain human security and public safety represent just a few of the challenges to the governance and sustainability of societies. We affirm that, in order to empower citizens – understood as all residents of cities and communities – we must strive to give them access to and encourage their use of a broad array of learning opportunities throughout their lives. (UNESCO Learning Cities Network 2015) In this declaration, the Learning Cities network is reflecting a wider trend in urban studies as a whole, in which learning – both formal and informal – is increasingly viewed as central to enabling cities’ adaptation to economic, technological and social change. Alongside this declaration are 42 indicators and measures that aim to track the extent to which a city might be described as a learning city. These include measures associated with social cohesion and political participation, with gender equality and economic growth, with teacher quality and participation in learning activities in homes, community and schools. This attention to learning as a means of adapting to social change is not simply the concern of agencies such as UNESCO. Increasingly, urban studies scholars are arguing that without attention to the role of learning in urban change, all other moves toward creating sustainable future cities will not be achievable (e.g. Hambleton 2016). Cities and city mayors around the world are therefore beginning to actively experiment in this area. This experimentation is taking many different forms, from the ‘city as laboratory’ initiatives associated with the Smart Cities and the Urban Living Labs movements to the ‘resilient’ cities approach promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation.1 The idea of the Learning City (or Educating City) has its own distinct genealogy within this landscape. It originates in the 1972 UNESCO Report of the International Commission on the Development of Education Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow (Faure et al. 1972), with its vision of learning as a means of creating sustainable cities. The idea later gained widespread purchase on educational and economic discourses in the 1990s through its association with the OECD/EU/Delors vision of the learning society. In so doing, it became closely articulated with the concepts of lifelong learning as a strategic response to the economic and intellectual transformations associated with the idea of the knowledge economy (Longworth 2006; Osborne, Kearns & Yang 2013). In this articulation, successful cities were framed as those in which citizens successfully invested in themselves, upgraded their capabilities to meet the changing exigencies of global competition and clustered in creative innovation networks in which new ideas, skills and services were developed, all the better to enable the city to compete in the global marketplace (Florida 2002). Juceviciene’s (2010) case study of the process of turning Kaunas, Lithuania, into a Learning City exemplifies how the idea of the Learning City can be enacted in practice. Here, there are clear and somewhat dogmatic associations presented about what constitutes desirable learning in the city. Juceviciene (2010, p. 422) describes how, in Kaunas, the aim of the Learning Cities programme was

Exploring everyday public pedagogies  99 to ‘make its citizens aware of the need for continuous learning’; to ‘transform… organisations into learning organisations’; and to encourage ‘learning professionally and emotionally in families’. It had a set of sanctioned forms of learning that it promoted, encouraging ‘dissemination of “good practice”, festivals of learning and other means’ (p. 422). And it valued, in particular, certain forms of learning in so far as they ‘enabl[e] continuous learning of individuals and organisations to acquire modern competences, competitiveness in the market, quality leisure time and good relationships’ (p. 422). This perspective, however, fails to acknowledge or value any everyday learning that might pre-exist the formal city-led initiative. Indeed, citizens are chided in the paper for ideas of learning that ‘lacked the depth described by constructivist writers’ (Juceviciene 2010, p. 423) and the author describes herself as being ‘unable to find any true learning organisations which fulfilled the criteria as normally defined in the city’ (p. 425). Indeed, this vision of a Learning City, at least as interpreted through this author’s eyes, seems to be premised wholly on a deficit model of citizens’ capacities to innovate and learn. As Plumb, Leverman and McGray (2007) observe, in this framing: ‘A city becomes a learning city not just when learning prevails, but when a certain type of learning prevails’ (p. 44, emphasis in original). Whether these ideas of the Learning City can be enlarged to acknowledge and build upon the citizen-led and sometimes unruly practices of everyday learning in the city, whether they can encompass a more plural notion of what counts as ‘learning’ that is more recognisable from the street level of the city, may determine, in the end, whether the Learning Cities discourse can encompass the rich diversity of human life, or whether it simply becomes another initiative co-opted to the preparation of human capital for the labour market. The aim of this chapter, then, is to begin to work out how we might develop conceptual and methodological tools to produce a more plural account of everyday and street-level learning in the city.

Public pedagogy and the Learning City The Learning Cities policy field has been developed with limited reference to the existing literature on urban education and to the education research field in general. Equally, the educational research field has not yet fully engaged with these city-scale developments and has not yet begun to provide substantive empirical analysis or theoretical foundations to address this question of how ‘cities’ can be understood to ‘learn’ (although see Lido et al. (2016) and related publications as notable exceptions). As Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick (2011) have argued, the education research field is only now beginning to reposition itself to address learning outside schools and universities: the shift from spaces that are governed by institutional metaphors and hierarchies to spaces in which education and learning take on more performative, improvisational, subtle, and hidden representations potentially calls

100  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk for researchers and theorists to examine their methods, epistemological and ontological assumptions, and language to avoid the synecdochical association of education as schooling. (Sandlin et al. 2011, p. 362) For the purposes of beginning to map the messy, complex, interconnected practices of learning in the city through a lens that is not framed by schooling, we propose to work with the concept of public pedagogy, which has a long-standing pedigree in education, albeit one that is suffering from some problems of definition (Sandlin et al. 2011). Public pedagogy is defined by Sandlin, Schultz and Burdick (2010) as: a concept focusing on various forms, processes, and sites of education and learning occurring beyond formal schooling and is distinct from hidden and explicit curricula operating within and through school sites. It involves learning in institutions such as museums, zoos, and libraries; in informal educational sites such as popular culture, media, commercial spaces, and the Internet; and through figures and sites of activism, including public intellectuals and grassroots social movements. (Sandlin et al. 2010, pp. 338–339) Public pedagogy, as it is currently understood within the research field, is seen to be associated with places that are distinct from formal education. Sandlin et al. (2011) argue that the scholarship frames public pedagogy in five key areas of activity: (1) citizenship and public-oriented learning activities within and beyond schools, (2) the pedagogic practices of popular culture in and of everyday life, (3) the role of informal institutions such as museums and galleries, and public spaces, (4) the production of identities and ways of living through dominant cultural discourses, and (5) the work of public intellectuals and social activists. This scholarship draws attention to how everything from graffiti to arts practices to activism ‘teaches’. Drawing on the Gramscian traditions of cultural studies, it foregrounds the identity work of cultural practices and their invitation to inhabit particular ways of being in the world. For the study of learning cities this work is therefore invaluable; drawing attention, as it does, to the multiple and highly diverse practices of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ that are present in the everyday life of cities. What is missing in this field at present, however, is a theoretical framing that might enable an interrogation of the interrelationship between these different elements and the ways in which they work with and against each other as they collide in citizens’ lived experience of the city. How/are the public pedagogies of city streets and activist networks articulated with the museums and galleries? How/are the advertising hoardings and shop fronts articulated with the work of public intellectuals? To understand learning in the city as more than a disconnected set of discrete cultural practices we need to more closely understand the multilayered nature of public pedagogies in place.

Exploring everyday public pedagogies  101

Walking as method In the Reinventing Learning Cities project 2 of which this chapter reports on just one part, we adopt a multi-sited ethnographic approach (Marcus 1995; Pierides 2010) to enable us to trace how what we are calling a ‘learning infrastructure’ (understood as interconnected social, discursive and material resources that facilitate learning) is produced in the city (Facer & Buchczyk 2019). In so doing, we recognise that such resources do not simply pre-exist the attention of the ­researcher – or indeed the learner – they are created and recreated through analysis and participation. As Larkin argues: Infrastructures are not, in any positivist sense, simply “out there.” The act of defining an infrastructure is a categorizing moment. Taken thoughtfully, it comprises a cultural analytic that highlights the epistemological and political commitments involved in selecting what one sees as infrastructural (and thus causal) and what one leaves out. (Larkin 2013, p. 330) If we seek to understand the heterogeneous activities that create possibilities for learning in the city, therefore, we cannot respond to this challenge simply by identifying a set of activities that we feel constitute ‘everyday learning’ and start from those sites; we need to avoid beginning with a framework that filters, in advance, the sites and places that we pay attention to as reservoirs of ‘valuable learning’. Instead, we need a different way in to the learning activities of the city. To respond to this challenge, we were playfully inspired by de Certeau’s (1984) original essay ‘Walking in the city’, which set the everyday practices of citizens walking city streets and making their own lively urban geography in opposition to the blueprint perspective of the planners and city designers. We were also inspired by Amin’s call to pay attention to: The plurality of things happening, the changes occurring over the course of the day, the many different pursuits and affects of the people gathered, the resonances of the still architecture and silent infrastructure, the amplifications of the amassed bodies and entities. (Amin 2015, p. 252) Both our interest in public pedagogy and in learning infrastructure encouraged us, therefore, to adopt a method of walking the city. This approach – which derives from urban studies, from archaeology and from literary studies (Pierce & Lawhon 2015) – would enable us to attend to the lively jumble of learning activities as experienced ‘on the ground’ by citizens of the city. Walking, we hoped, would enable us to connect up the different sites and practices of learning highlighted by the public pedagogy traditions and in so doing would allow us to trace what learning infrastructures emerge in the course of everyday walking routes in the city. Our approach, however, was not the open-ended curiosity-driven

102  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk stroll of the flâneur (Benjamin 1940/1999), nor the psychogeography of the Situationists. Rather, we follow Pierce and Lawhon (2015) in taking a more explicit approach to enhance the trustworthiness of the work, potentially enabling comparisons and replicability of our method. We chose three routes that encompassed significant high streets of the city of Bristol in three different neighbourhoods: first, in the affluent area of Clifton we traced the path of Whiteladies Road through an area of town associated strongly with the university, the BBC and high-income residents; second, we followed the more bohemian interconnected streets of Stokes Croft and Gloucester Road that link the city centre via an area known for its activism, to the more sedate left-leaning but affluent area of Gloucester Road, famous for the longest road of independent shops in the UK; third, we walked the highly ethnically diverse interconnected routes of Stapleton Road and St Mark’s Road, the first infamously described as ‘the worst street in Britain’ by the national press, the latter rapidly gentrifying. These routes were chosen because we know they are lively centres of activity within the city; because they offer us insight into diverse communities’ resources and practices; because they allow us to challenge some of the assumptions about the balance of learning resources in the city as a whole (a narrative that assumes that the wealthy places are predominantly well served with facilities), and because they enable us (as Pierce and Lawhon advocate) to start with a familiar place, in our case, the Gloucester Road, an area one of us has lived around for nearly two decades. For each route, we followed the high street until it no longer seemed to be ‘lively’ – in other words, we followed the street to the points at which it no longer acted as a gathering place for pedestrians. This means that each route differed in length and each walk differed in duration. Our purpose here was not to produce a quantifiable comparison in terms of density of learning activities, for example, but to create a rich picture of the activities that might afford learning in each place. To focus our attention during the walks, we drew on the categories of public pedagogy identified by Sandlin et al. (2011); this meant that our walks paid attention to the following: 1 The streetscape and the identities that it invites citizens to perform through official notices, advertising, graffiti. 2 Memorialisation, museums, historical sites inviting engagement. 3 Sites of grassroots action and collective activism. 4 Institutions offering explicit learning activities. 5 Invitations to participate in the work or encounter with public intellectuals or university-associated activities. 6 Invitations to engage with popular cultural practices in pubs, cafes. 7 Invitations to action presented by shops and shopping centres. We adapted this framework, however, after early pilots of the walking method. The early walks, for example, required us to ask what precisely we were interested in when we were looking for learning activities in these spaces. What, after

Exploring everyday public pedagogies  103 all, did not count as an everyday learning practice? Insistently, we realised that we wanted to exclude both commercial advertisements and official instructions, signs and rules both for practical reasons (documenting them all would overwhelm the process) and for more substantive reasons. We agreed that we were not interested simply in how the city teaches its inhabitants to behave (how a city ‘educates attention’ or affects the body has already been documented by researchers such as Elizabeth Grosz (1998), Tim Ingold (2000) or Colin M ­ cFarlane (2011)). Instead, we were interested in learning activities understood as what Fenwick and Edwards (2010) describe as the opportunity for ‘expanded possibilities of action’. In other words, learning as an expansion rather than a restriction of current ways of being. To this end, the strict injunctions of the street sign or the narrow appeals to consumption of commercial advertisements could not, we felt, be included in the maps we would be drawing of everyday learning in this city. This is not to say that such invitations are not pedagogic, clearly, they are; our interest, however, is in the plural and diverse opportunities that a city offers for everyday learning, for the expansion of self that is distinctive in the encounter between self and the city. Some advertisements challenged our analytic frame: what were we to make of the flower shop sign in the street saying ‘flowers never fail to make someone smile’, or the chalk board outside the pub declaring ‘work hard and be nice to people’? These, in the end, we dropped into a new category of ‘public education’ alongside the pharmacy health posters warning of the need for vaccination or the potential to spot the early signs of cancer. As we walked we used a blank sheet of paper to create an emerging messy map that documented the sequence of learning invitations that we noticed on either side of the street and used photography to capture every instance we saw. In particular, photography was particularly useful for allowing us to document for later analysis the abundant invitations that make up community noticeboards. Walking as method, however, needs to be recognised as an embodied and sensous methodology (Stoller 1997; Pink 2012, 2015). As researchers walking a city street, we are ourselves implicated in the way that the street shapes us, our expectations and our gaze (Valentine 1996). There are places we are comfortable to walk at particular times of day, and places we feel less relaxed. As we are learning on the move (Bates & Rhys-Taylor 2017), we are engaging with the city’s own dynamic, ever-changing rhythms. As Edensor (2010) noted, ‘walking bodies are rhythmic elements in a complex amalgam of rhythmicities’ (p. 71), and our walks are part of the rhythmical unfolding of the city, as we are continuously adapting to the flows, stylistic conventions, materialities, regulations and interruptions of the streets. There are times when we may not feel comfortable loitering, as women trained to be alert to risk in public spaces. As two white non-religious women, British and Polish, we will necessarily miss and misunderstand some elements of the cities that we are walking around. There are some sounds and smells that will arrest our attention as novel or strange and others that we will miss. And because we are walking our own city, there are places that may be over-familiar, that we can no longer ‘see’ because they are the background infrastructure of our lives. In writing the story of the public pedagogies

104  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk of the city, in documenting the learning infrastrutures of the city in this way, we are necessarily paying attention only to what we notice – we cannot claim that these invitations to learning are interpreted in the same way by all a city’s inhabitants. Indeed, we recognise that we are operating within the limits of any textual reading of a cultural activity – that we are reading through our own lens, a problem familiar from any form of textual analysis as evidenced by reception theory (e.g. Grossberg, Nelson & Treichler 1992). It is with this provisionality in mind that we present these accounts of the learning infrastructure as we encountered it during these walks, and it is with the aspiration that this method might be used to generate and proliferate accounts of the everyday and interconnected public pedagogies of the city, to stimulate alternative readings and narratives of different ways of ‘reading’ and ‘walking’ the city, that we present this here. In other words, this is not an attempt to provide a totalising reading of the city, but to offer tools to generate multiple and competing readings and a basis upon which these might be discussed.

The walks Gloucester Road The Gloucester Road, from Egerton Road to ‘the Arches’ (the Victorian railway bridge that runs high over the street and carries passengers over to Clifton), is an intense mosaic of independent shops shot through with pubs, cafes, the odd supermarket. It forms one stretch of a busy narrow road that runs from the centre of town all the way to the motorway; it is a main artery for the city. Either side of the road are Victorian suburbs, a park overrun by families and students in the summer, and houses increasing in price on the west side due to proximity to a highly rated state school. Its relative wealth only comparatively recent in the city, the stretch that we walk has the occasional sporadic tree, two lanes wide with a perilously narrow bike lane on each side, bordered by shops and houses giving immediately onto the pavement. The buildings are terraced, no more than one storey tall, a mix of Victorian and early 20th century, with witty and political street art appearing on many blank walls and side roads. On Saturdays, this is an intensely bustling place with queues for the butcher’s homemade burgers and the fish shop’s fresh oysters jostling alongside the stacks of hay from the pet shop and crates of plastic boxes from the pound shop. This is a mixed economy of charity shops and expensive, sourdough-serving artisan bakers. Our learning walk here takes some time. It is a communicative street, notices and flyers proliferate; community noticeboards welcome visitors at the entrance to supermarkets and cafes; invitational graffiti from small stickers to impressive large-scale art distract attention from the shopping at hand. We are distracted and tickled by the offers of placenta encapsulation on the noticeboards (something that seems distinctive to this area). To those who know the street though, it is clear that some of its learning invitations are invisible to our walking methodology. The top floor cafe hidden from the street where people gather monthly

Exploring everyday public pedagogies  105 to write letters for Amnesty International would not be visible to the Saturday stroller. Nor would the expert advice and guidance in the DIY store where men who know how to fix things serve hapless or curious customers wondering whether this screw would work for this size of shelf. Knowing the city here engenders caution when walking and reading other city streets, knowing that its invitations to learning will not be visible to the newcomer. Such an observation makes clear, therefore, that the learning city is relational; its invitations dependent upon the encounter between this particular person and this particular place at this particular time. The infrastructure is enacted through the encounter.

Stapleton Road and St Mark’s Road This circular route connects two high streets in the same area of the city, Easton, a working-class community with a significant Asian and African origin population that is rapidly gentrifying. In the shadow of the M32, the motorway that runs into the city centre, this part of town is cut off from more affluent areas of the north of the city by motorway underpasses that are now thriving sites for skateboarding and graffiti culture. The high street as we followed it on a sunny/showery Saturday morning runs along Stapleton Road – an eclectic mix of halal butchers, large fishmongers, hairdressers, beauty parlours and fast food shops with posters advertising international money transfers – before looping back along St Mark’s Road, an area known across the city for its famous Sweet Mart, a sprawling independently owned supermarket specialising in high quality and high quantity Asian food and delicacies, alongside staples, and which proudly displays its 50-year history in the area with photographs throughout the shop. Stapleton Road is a major thoroughfare heading east; a bus route with the occasional tree, single-storey Victorian terraces and shopkeepers displaying posters enjoining customers and residents to keep Easton tidy. St Mark’s Road starts and finishes with tall terraced Victorian houses, in the middle of which is a hub of lively cafes, food shops and restaurants next to the local train station with its connections into the city centre. At the end of Stapleton Road is a mix of cafes, the Islamic study centre and adverts for ballroom dancing and the Scouts; the road finishes at the large Eastville park, home to the annual Eastville music festival. This walk is the only time we are stopped to ask what we are doing as we take photographs and notes. Two young African heritage men running a cafe ask why we are taking photos and if we have permission to do so. We discuss the project with them and ask if they would like us to delete the data; they are happy we haven’t photographed them and they let us continue. Later a middle-aged white man approaches us, walking fast after us down the street to find out what we are doing. He is curious as to whether we are Londoners coming to check out the place before buying, such is the expectation of gentrification in this area at the moment. These two questions draw attention to tensions in the area: the young black men who likely have had enough of being stopped, searched and documented without their permission, as well as the pricing out of long-term residents as buyers with more wealth enter the area.

106  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk Our walk here is one that is punctuated by three publicly owned formal community noticeboards, painted a uniform orange and displaying the same eight posters – a mix of community consultation notices, creative workshops for children, and updates on activities from the local arts and community centre. This is not the haphazard jumble of cards and flyers seen elsewhere on shop doors, but a curated and intentional effort to disseminate officially sanctioned information. Here, also, we note anti-fascist posters, the first we have seen in our walks around the city, alongside huge quantities of music and arts entertainment events that span everything from opera to hip hop to classical sitar music. The learning opportunities here are rich and diverse; only absent are formal ­institutions – there is no library, no school, no established university presence other than the request for volunteers to participate in an alcohol dependency study and the ghosts of a university in the posters from the Barton Hill Settlement, a community centre set up in the early 20th century by the university but long since independent.

Whiteladies Road We walked the Whiteladies Road and Blackboy Hill, names redolent of Bristol’s slave trade past, on a sunny Friday. The walk starts at a busy roundabout, well tended with huge and regularly changing flowerbeds overlooked on two sides by large Victorian civic buildings: the first is the ‘Victoria Rooms’, the music department for the university, and the second is the Royal West of England Academy, the Bristol Art School and Art Gallery. From this architecturally impressive start, Whiteladies Road makes its gracious way north. On the side streets either side of the road are large Victorian villas, many subdivided for students, and others owned by families with large cars in the drive and the wealth to maintain the gardens. For some of the route, the road is wide, tree lined, edged on either side by gardens and grand houses, now given over to businesses and the BBC, including the nationally celebrated Natural History Unit. Further up, the road narrows a little, twists, becomes populated by cafes, bars, interiors shops, and is met by Cotham Hill, where a jumble of post office, charity shops, vintage and health cafes spills into a major intersection with Whiteladies Road. The train station, the modern shopping centre and a department of the university cluster next to each other. Further up again, the trees return, the road widens out. Shops are stolid, with established, large glass windows and selling expensive sofas and bathrooms; there are banks, supermarkets, high-end restaurants. As the road heads steeply up towards the large open spaces of the city’s downs land at the top of the hill there are smaller shops: fishmongers, estate agents proliferating, organic vegetables. Churches punctuate the road; a library half way up is still in service; the final church has been turned into a gym. Our learning walk here takes little time. There is less to document, less to notice than in other areas of the city. We are entertained by the fact that this is the only area in which we notice classes teaching cocktail making, and by the steam punk ‘museum’ selling expensive vintage Victoriana, but it seems an

Exploring everyday public pedagogies  107 uncommunicative space, lacking in invitations to engage with the world. Even the invitations to collective action from charities are self-oriented, all directed towards charity walks, runs, hikes – more associated with healthy leisure activities than anything else. Where else, and how else, do people here find their opportunities to expand their horizons? Not from the street it seems. Notably, this is the home of sites of educational prestige – the BBC, the university – and yet around it, is what feels, in comparison to our other walks, a learning desert. The possibilities of and invitations to expanded action are sparse.

Learning skylines Just as a city has a distinctive skyline, so too, we would argue, do different areas of a city seem to have distinctive contours in terms of the learning resources available. While the same walk next week will bring changes in the posters, in the noticeboards, in the classes on offer, quantifying what we observed in the walks does allow us to produce an overview of the general ‘feel’ or learning skyline of the learning resources in each area. We can see where calls to civic action and participation in public life are strong and where weak; we can see which areas are well served by formal institutional resources, and we can see patterns of invitation to informal learning. The chart in Figure 7.1 might be read as an impressionistic snapshot of each area – imagine Monet painting Westminster bridge at night; it gives a feel for the place rather than its formal photographic representation. Equally usefully, it allows us to check our subjective observations and feelings as we walked. Were there really so few invitations to participate in informal learning in Whiteladies Road, an area with large numbers of students and affluent families potentially with time on their hands? So many music and 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

Whiteladies Rd

Gloucester Rd

Stapleton/St Marks Rd

Figure 7.1  A snapshot of learning invitations on three high streets in Bristol late summer/ autumn 2017.

108  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk entertainment posters in Easton? It allows us to consider whether Gloucester Road’s reputation for hippy activism is justified as the opportunities for civic action of environmental and social forms outnumber those of the other areas. It raises other questions: Why/are there more public education announcements in Easton, or is this picture skewed just by two particular pharmacists’ distinctive enthusiasm for promoting health interventions? Why/does the presence of formal educational sites seem to correlate with fewer numbers of informal learning activities? When we look (see Figure 7.2) at the types of activities that form the basis for invitations to participate in informal learning we see interesting patterns emerge across the city and between areas. The different demographics of the city, for example, are reflected in the relative numbers of appeals to parenting or children’s activities in the three areas – as the wealthier, student-rich Whiteladies Road has relatively fewer than the younger, more family-oriented St Mark’s/Stapleton and Gloucester roads. Wellbeing courses, focusing on mental health, self-care, are also relatively less visible in St Mark’s/Stapleton Road – reflecting what? A stronger more resilient community? Or less disposable income to spend on such activities? At the same time, we note that citizenship test and language services are nowhere to be seen along Whiteladies Road. These observations would need to be repeated many times before it was possible to argue for robust patterns of learning activities in these areas. Nonetheless they do encourage us to ask questions and to unsettle some taken-for-granted assumptions about the resources that might be available in different areas of Bristol as a learning city.

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

5

0

Making Arts

Cra (incl cooking) Health (e.g. walking, health, yoga, tai chi)

Wellbeing (e.g. Languages/ Skills/ counselling, Training asserveness courses, meditaon)

Stapleton/St Marks Rd

Gloucester Rd

Parenng/Children

Whiteladies

Figure 7.2  I nformal learning opportunities across three neighbourhoods.

Other

Exploring everyday public pedagogies  109

How might we understand the everyday invitations for public pedagogy through these walks? If we return to Sandlin et al.’s (2011) typology of public pedagogy as we interpret it through these walks, we can see that there are some notable absences and patterns at street level. The public intellectual and the university, for example, are absent from these walks save through their physical presence as city buildings. Clearly the medium of the public intellectual is no longer the city street (if it ever was other than for a short period in the 1960s), and the public invitation to participate in universities is channelled through sanctioned routes targeting specific ‘hard to reach’ sectors. Nonetheless it is worth wondering what is lost by the invisibility of the intellectual from the streets, given that, at previous critical historical moments, this was an important site for action and participation (Marshall 1992). Also limited in these three areas, is the role of graffiti or street art as part of an ongoing dialogue with city participants. Where street art does exist, however, it can be read as a relatively stable and in some ways sanctioned work of identity building. The multicoloured almost mythical image (see Figure 7.3) of the pangolin on the side of the Easton cafe with the message ‘Pangolin – the most trafficked mammal in the world’ in an area rich in migration stories and battles for citizenship, invites reflection on the interactions between human and animal, movement and global trade. On Gloucester Road, the side alley completely transformed by a mural ­(Figure 7.4) depicting politicians as puppets and jokers, and publics as mindless observers, participating in pointless voting, is a provocative and powerful challenge to notions of democracy as participation in elections. It is glanced side-on

Figure 7.3  The pangolin street art in Easton.

110  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk

Figure 7.4  T  he political street art in Gloucester Road.

as you walk down the main street, an unsettling moment of disruption, an eruption of critique in the everyday walk to work or the shops. Both murals remain unmarked by other graffiti artists and taggers and untouched by local authority wall painters; they are becoming part of the everyday landscape of these streets. Equally rare on these walks is the work of memorialisation and heritage learning. Civic memorials were restricted in the main to engraved stones in church walls bearing the names of the local citizens who laid them with no further explanation; we are asked to remember these ghosts of people unknown and unexplained. The only museum was a tongue-in-cheek ‘steampunk’ museum framed to sell expensive ‘vintage’ artefacts, and whose commitment to public learning might be tested should anyone come in seeking to understand more with no intention to buy. More intriguing were the two examples of memorialisation in the Barber’s Shop on Gloucester Road and in the Bristol Sweet Mart. In both locations, there are signs and photographs celebrating over 50 years of successful trading and tracing routes from Italy and Uganda, respectively. These photographs narrate a history of migration and integration, the interweaving of global and local histories encountered through the everyday business of buying groceries or having a shave. Encountering these is learning a narrative of the city as dynamic, interconnected, and of its people as resourceful, diverse and committed to making a positive change and place in the world. Invitations to participate in informal learning and in civic action, in contrast, are abundant, proliferating in flyers, posters, business cards – from calls to join protest marches and campaigns, to weekends of self-discovery, from children’s creative art

Exploring everyday public pedagogies  111 workshops, to offers of walking and friendship groups. Critical to this abundance is the everyday learning infrastructure of the shop windows, doors, walls and noticeboards that act as mechanisms for circulating and communicating learning activities in the city. This infrastructure, however, productively troubles simplistic divisions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ learning resources. The noticeboards and shop windows promote learning opportunities that are sometimes publicly available to all, sometimes only for those who have the resources to pay. Many noticeboards are located in supermarkets where anyone can put up any notice with no prior vetting by the manager; these shops are private companies offering a publicly accessible means of communication to support public activities. Other noticeboards are c­ ommunityor publicly owned, with glass doors in front of the flyers; see Figure 7.5.

Figure 7.5  A  n official community noticeboard.

112  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk In most of these cases there is no information about how to get information onto the board; these effectively become, therefore, private mechanisms for promoting particular forms of learning opportunity. Many of these ‘public’ (private) noticeboards are out of date with faded notices, their presence less a sign of thriving community dialogue and more redolent of the need to pay lipservice to civic consultation. Interestingly, many are tagged and hard to read. Healthfood shops position themselves ambiguously between openness and constraint; often actively curating their noticeboards (see Figure 7.6), being clear that notices need to fit their ethos, that they will only be displayed for limited amounts of time. In both supermarkets and high-end healthfood shops, it is clear that the

Figure 7.6  A  shop-run community noticeboard.

Exploring everyday public pedagogies  113 community noticeboard is part of the active construction of an aesthetic and ethic of community engagement – how far what could or could not be promoted there is debatable. These learning opportunities displayed on flyers, posters, business cards sometimes have a hyperlocal identity. One shop on Gloucester Road, for example (one of the few remaining knitting and wool shops in the city, Figure 7.7), is notable for its posters that specifically address women. Here, in this shop window, we saw invitations to participate in a female circle of elders to address contemporary social challenges, to join a female retreat, to harness women’s power for social

Figure 7.7  Part of the wool shop window.

114  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk good. Does the wool shop summon women who may be interested in aligning themselves with other women to learn together to address social change? Or does shop owners’ commitment to this identity keep the wool shop open? Who knows? The sign at the top of the window that reads ‘please note this window the property of [shop name], posters displayed are put here by me, [owner name]’, however, suggests that these choices are intentional rather than haphazard. The appeal to women and mothers across all the noticeboards was also apparent. The experience and fears and communities of pregnancy underpin many of the invitations to mothers’ groups, to activities that can be done with children, to pregnancy classes and care. Men were addressed specifically only in the example of the invitation to join the Bristol Men’s Choir. Are these noticeboards gendered? Is there a specific dialogue that happens between women in these places? Does the presence of these noticeboards in food shops and cafes bring a gendered dimension to the modes of address and forms of learning opportunities on display?

Conclusion The walking methodology we have described here aimed to explore invitations to inhabitants to participate in learning at the street level of the city. Such walks have their limitations, as we have already discussed: they are constrained to offering a particular narrow temporal viewpoint onto a necessarily dynamic phenomenon; they are necessarily dependent upon what can be seen, tasted, felt by that particular walker with their knowledge of that particular place; they cannot tell us about how people respond to the learning invitations in the city; they focus (in this instance) on high streets where rents may be higher and, therefore, where other learning opportunities such as those in community and civic centres may be less visible. What they offer us, is a view of the learning resources that coexist with our sites of commerce and everyday public places rather than those to which a city inhabitant might make an intentional journey. Nonetheless, its contribution is to help us understand that there is an invisible (to the education and city planner) economy of informal learning operating in the city which is abundant, dynamic and which transgresses simple boundaries between public and private learning facilities – from the memorialisation of personal histories and international narratives of migration in the shop/museum that is Bristol Sweet Mart to the co-dependency of healthfood shops and community noticeboards. As Pierce and Lawhon (2015) argue, however, the value of walking methods is ‘to shape questions rather than support specific conclusions, requiring the researcher to further interrogate impressions generated from walking’ (p. 660). And we have a number of questions arising from these walks. First, we have questions about what we didn’t see. Much of the Learning Cities literature is oriented towards upskilling citizens for the ‘knowledge economy’ with the development of individual capacity to operate in changing workplaces and in digital environments. And yet, we saw very little in the way of opportunities to learn

Exploring everyday public pedagogies  115 digital, employment and work-based skills. Indeed, these were only visible in the St Mark’s Road/Easton area in the local Learn Direct centre. Instead, when we look at the resources that are on offer here, we see invitations to participate in activities associated with mental health, wellbeing and personal and emotional development. Indeed, our analysis of these learning invitations might suggest that the informal and everyday learning culture of wealthy and middle-class areas of Bristol as a city is characterised not by the adaptation of its citizens to the exigencies of the knowledge economy, but to an often-individualised personal inquiry into surviving in that context already. Such an observation may have many causes. It perhaps reflects the parlous state of mental health care in the UK and the relative wealth of individuals in different parts of the city to address that deficiency. It may also suggest, as does the high level of arts, craft and health-based activities on offer, that individuals with sufficient economic resources continue to value learning and personal development for their own sake. Whether this reflects the lived realities of these inhabitants would, of course, require further investigation using different methods; we will need further empirical work to understand whether these texts and these invitations reflect the lived practices and readings of citizens and what underpins the seeming absences we have noted. We also have questions about the economy of these informal learning invitations. We note that these invitations to learn are, in the main, commercial. With the exception of civic engagement activities such as charity volunteering, marches or self-help groups, we need to recognise that the informal learning opportunities we describe here are far from a truly ‘public pedagogy’. They are subject to a market logic, accessible only to those with disposable income. Where do people go to access these sorts of activities if they have no money to pay private practitioners? Who is providing truly public pedagogy that addresses these fundamental questions of meaning, purpose and identity in contemporary conditions? Is this an area where universities and public intellectuals might begin to shape a new role? This chapter is part of a wider research agenda where we will continue to explore these questions. Finally, as researchers interested in learning cities as an international phenomenon, these walks also make us ask whether what we have found is distinctive to Bristol or replicated in other cities. What would the learning skyline of other cities look like? What happens when others take the methodology we have elaborated here and apply it to their own city (or suburban/rural) high streets? Our informal walks in other areas suggest that the informal learning landscape elsewhere may be fundamentally different, but we leave this for others, working in their own cities, to determine.

Acknowledgements Our thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding Keri’s AHRC Leadership Fellow for Connected Communities [AH/K50337X/1], of which the Reinventing Learning Cities project is one part.

116  Keri Facer and Magdalena Buchczyk

Notes 1 See the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities Network www.100resilientcities.org/; the ­European Urban Living Labs network www.urbantransformations.ox.ac.uk/blog/2017/ european-urban-living-labs-as-experimental-city-to-city-learning-­platforms/; and the UK’s Urban Living Pilots http://urbanliving.epsrc.ac.uk/ 2 See https://learningcitiesproject.org/

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Exploring everyday public pedagogies  117 Marshall, P 1992, Demanding the impossible: a history of anarchism, Fontana Press, London. Osborne, M, Kearns, P & Yang, J 2013, ‘Learning cities: developing inclusive, prosperous and sustainable urban communities’, International Review of Education, vol. 59, no. 4, p. 409. Pierce, J & Lawhon, M 2015, ‘Walking as method: toward methodological forthrightness and comparability in urban geographical research’, Professional Geographer, vol.  67, no. 4, pp. 655–662 (doi: 10.1080/00330124.2015.1059401). Pierides, D 2010, ‘Multi-sited ethnography and the field of educational research’, Critical Studies in Education, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 179–195. Pink, S 2012, Situating everyday life: practices and places, Sage, London. Pink, S 2015, Doing sensory ethnography, Sage, London. Plumb, D, Leverman, A & McGray, R 2007, ‘The learning city in a “planet of slums”’, Studies in Continuing Education, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 37–50. Sandlin, J, O’Malley, M & Burdick, K 2011, ‘Mapping the complexity of public pedagogy scholarship 1894–2010’, Review of Educational Research, vol. 81, no. 3, pp. 338–375. Sandlin, J, Schultz, B & Burdick, J 2010, Handbook of public pedagogy, Routledge, New York. Stoller, P 1997, Sensuous scholarship. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA. UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning 2015, Global Network of Learning Cities: guiding documents, UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, Hamburg, Germany, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002349/234986e.pdf ­ odyspace: Valentine, G 1996, ‘(Re)negotiating the “heterosexual street”’, in N Duncan (ed.) B destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality, Routledge, London.

8 Taking part in the city Rethinking “Wumenda Chengshi（Our Cities)” in Shanghai Luo Xiaoming More than thirty years after the “(改革开放)” reform and opening up, government-initiated urbanization has greatly transformed all social spaces across China. Although “Cities” in China are constituted at different levels (metropolises, middle-tier and small cities), urbanization has created a new kind of monstrous social fact controlling every aspect of daily life. Since the operation of modern cities is usually not only based on the imagination of developers, but is also unequivocally located in the central role urbanization plays in Chinese economic policy, the way in which we view and understand cities in China determines how we understand possible modes of participation for citizens. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, by the end of 2016, 57.4 per cent of the total population lived in cities. China has more than 792 million urban residents, but the fact that they live in a city does not mean that they are real citizens – and this contradiction has become one of the most important features of urbanization in this era of globalization. Real citizenship not only refers to whether people are dwelling in the city and entitled to social security provided by the state, but also refers to their right to the city, as proposed by Lefebvre, their right to transform and renew the city and their urban lives together (Lefebvre 1996, p. 158). Although ordinary people in China, especially the young, continue to move into cities in search of a better life – as illustrated in the slogan for the Shanghai Expo 2010, “better city, better life” – living and working in a city neither means that people are necessarily members of it nor that the city accepts them and their families. The truth is that the better cities in China are sustained and nourished by the contribution of ordinary people, but these same people are deprived of their right to imagine and demand the kind of city they want. This does not mean that there is no change in these Chinese cities: the city always changes, even if it is believed that change only occurs in the near future, and that transformations and improvement only happen according to the government’s own logic – despite the feelings, emotions, and opinions of ordinary people living in the city.1 As a result of this kind of lack of imagination about and participation in the process by ordinary people, the troubles and crises caused by urbanization have accumulated, and have been exacerbated by all kinds of natural and man-made disasters in recent years. Social inequality and instances of discrimination have

Taking part in the city  119 increased rapidly, while city diseases caused by traffic congestion, lack of food safety, poor air quality, a poor environment, and the problems of ageing have become more and more pressing. Since these social inequalities and city diseases are directly related to the futures of their families and their children, ordinary people need to ask themselves a series of basic questions: Why is this city better? Better than what? What kind of “better” makes a really good city? While these may be traditional questions in the history of western cities (Krytyka Polityczna & the European Cultural Foundation 2015), they are new to Chinese citizens because of the different history of cities in China. The combined impact of imperialism, socialism, and the market economy in the last century is complex, but it is imperative that these questions are asked and discussed in this new century. More and more people are beginning to wonder if they need to change the way in which they participate in urbanization, and it is hoped that some debate can lead to a new kind of social consensus and make these cities amazing places that function for all.

“Wumenda Chengshi (Our Cities)”: a forum for change The “Our Cities” citizen forum, which began in the autumn of 2012, was a reaction to this changing social thought. The initiators were a cultural studies researcher, a sociology professor, and an architect. Most of the organizing work is done by the teachers and students in the Program of Cultural Studies at the university where I work. So for me, it was also a kind of practice of cultural studies in mainland China in an attempt to look beyond academic institutions. The aim of this citizen forum was to do more educational work in the everyday life of the city, to intervene in the current production of culture, and form a new type of common space across Shanghai. This practice was solidly based on three types of observations about the reality of urban life in Shanghai. The first significant feature of urban living is that people have an urgent desire for self-education 2 to protect themselves from everyday disasters. This also means that each everyday crisis is an opportunity for ordinary people to rethink the way they live and discover how they are deprived of their rights to the city. A distinctive example is the public voice raised during and after the Shanghai Expo 2010, the slogan of which in English, as previously mentioned, was “better city, better life”. In Chinese, it has a slightly different meaning that can be translated as “it is the city that makes life better (城市让生活更美好)”. The two different versions (and meanings) of this slogan triggered a public dispute at that time. Why is city living described as better when more and more issues associated with urbanization are telling the opposite story? What is a “better” life? Who has the right to define the meaning of better, life, or better city? Why is the city the subject in the Chinese version, and what agency is concealed in such a personification that avoids the question of who controls city life? The awkwardness of the slogan drove people to ask these questions. Unfortunately, these diverse voices were not permitted a forum during the Shanghai Expo. In the same year, just after the Expo, a high building in Jiaozhou Road in Shanghai was completely destroyed by fire. This fire, and its cause – exposed

120  Luo Xiaoming later by the media – made people feel that urban life was extremely risky and that any accident might make it spiral out of control. It seemed that there was only a thin layer between a “better life” and a life that lacked the necessary level of safety, even in a modern Chinese metropolis like Shanghai. Then, all kinds of problems appeared in succession: a lack of food safety, air pollution, traffic jams, and the high price of houses, all of which increased the feeling of living an unsafe and uncomfortable city. This series of issues destroyed any established image of city living and has continued to occupy people’s minds in the past decade. The conviction that city life is unquestionably better no longer exists. Yet, people find it difficult to use these contradictory experiences to wholly understand this situation, although each one of these issues is a potentially good starting point for further education to reshape their knowledge, and ambitions to live in the city. So, how could this demand for self-education be satisfied; and these diverse and confused feelings be steered in the right direction? How can an effective agenda be designed to transform this confusion into useful energy directed towards rethinking urbanization in China? These questions constitute an important duty and a necessary step toward education for everyday life.3 The second feature relates to the position of “public space”4 in the Chinese urban structure. Urban reform has transformed city spaces by commercializing them one after another in the last three decades. The main motive for this shift is the relationship between capital and the state, which has become the basis of a new alliance since the 1980s. This relationship was established on the foundations of a socialist social structure and a state bureaucracy and one result of this transformation is the difficulty of defining what is “public” in today’s city spaces: the right to use land in cities has been sold to private developers, while ownership remains in the hands of the state. Public space, which was used by ordinary people in the socialist period – as in the “cultural palace” or the “club for workers”, the streets and lanes in the cities which could be occupied and used freely – disappeared rapidly during this transfer; and commercialization leaves no redundant space for public use. At the same time, local government continues to try to supply old types of public space in a bureaucratic and de-politicized managerial way, such as in the “community library” or the local citizen centres. Thus, if there are any public spaces left in cities, they are usually the products of a squeezed competition between local government and the land sold for commercial profit.5 This means that opportunities in public space to offer and support learning for and about the city are always uncertain and fleeting. Therefore, if we want to promote educational work during everyday crises, we must endure the pressure of this competing situation and create our own public educational or common space. The last part of this practice is based on the need to define who should be participants in public space, and the kinds of social activity they should be involved in. Here we need to identify the main forces which unperpin participation in cities, and who would be willing – and might be sufficiently powerful – to change things. If the name of our forum is “Our Cities”, then who is the ‘us’? In each everyday crisis, almost all people are overcome by panic and eager to learn

Taking part in the city  121 new knowledge to save them from danger, but this is only a temporary emotion for most people, and it easily disappears. This is especially so in the light of new social media, which can gather the public’s focus in a very short time, but then this kind of attention disappears as fast as it comes creating a challenge on how to sustain focus and change. The goal of, and the way to organize, the “Wumenda Chengshi (Our Cities)” citizens’ forum were initially designed on these principles. The objectives of the forum were confirmed as “citizen, living, and progress”, and the aim was to create a new social space for discussion and promote a form of everyday learning or education in and about the problems of the city. To achieve this aim, it was first supposed that the forum would be constituted of four types of people: namely, officials at different levels, professionals in various fields, white-collar workers and college students, and media workers, whose distinctive positions weave and sustain the whole production process of urban culture and the image of everyday life in this city. These people were all required to join in the aim of cultivating a different image of the city by means of self-education and learning from each other. Jointly organized by the Contemporary Culture Research Centre at Shanghai University, the Urban Research Centre, and the Regional and Urban Law Research Centre at Jiaotong University, “Wumenda Chengshi” holds a forum every two months which focuses on one topical issue or a longterm problem that needs close attention. Each forum lasts for three hours and is divided into two parts consisting of a main talk and then an open discussion.

Health: rumours and information A good example of the work of the “Wumenda Chengshi” forum happened during the large-scale avian flu epidemic in Shanghai in the spring of 2013. In response to this public health crisis, the Shanghai government closed all the live poultry markets and killed hundreds of thousands of chickens. In the May forum of that year, the topic was “fighting cocks: a challenge to public health”. The program in this forum consisted of three speakers and a small audience. One of the speakers was a farm owner from Anhui Province whose chickens had been killed by the local government. His concern in this emergency was what happened to his dead chickens. He explained why he believed that the local government’s actions were not helpful and that it had only wanted to protect its own interest in this public health crisis. The second speaker was a researcher from the local food safety department, who tried to explain the reaction of the local government and why it could not have acted more effectively in the face of this urban health crisis. In contrast with the farmer’s position, he observed that there was no local government bloc, but many different departments were involved in the emergency, each of which had its own duties and self-interest. The last speaker talked about how public health information was spread by ordinary people, and how their reactions became an important part of the solution. Information about this forum was posted on the internet in advance but the people who took part in it had no prior knowledge of each other. The audience comprised: college students who

122  Luo Xiaoming wanted to know what they could do in this situation; mothers who were worried about their family’s health and wanted to know how to buy food; the basic level of government officials who were not satisfied with the situation but had no idea what they should do; investors who were trying to find new opportunities to make money; and journalists who wanted to report an unusual event. The people who attended thus had different aims. It is true that they learned some facts in this special or unusual educational space, but more importantly, they needed to think, not only from their own position, but also from each other’s perspectives and acquire an integrated understanding of the whole issue. To date (mid-2016) there have been 18 “Wumenda Chengshi” forums, the content of which has covered many aspects of everyday urban living. One focus has been related to long-term urban construction, such as the public traffic system, city density, urban garbage treatment, and housing problems, while another has consisted of speedy reactions to hot social issues, such as individuals’ rights on the internet, the Uber economy, and the golden-week on May Day. In fact, not every forum comprises the same of kind of educational space. The number and type of participants are uncertain and fluid – between 20 and 100 people attend the same event. Some topics caused an impressive reaction beyond our expectation, while others that we thought would be useful or informative were not received enthusiastically. All of these aspects continue to challenge the way we organize and establish each subsequent forum. To some extent, we have theorised that educators in these forums, and thus outside school, seem to be organic – rather like peasants living in the social environment, always relying on their knowledge and familiarity of the weather, sunshine or rain, to determine how to deal with crops to ensure a better harvest.

Timing: when to create an educational space? In the three years since we established “Wumenda Chengshi”, we have endeavoured to determine how these learning for everyday life events can happen and in what kind of social space in contemporary Chinese society. As already mentioned, there is no ready-made public space that we could use. Moreover, finding a comparatively free and stable space for “Wumenda Chengshi” not only refers to the physical meaning of space/place or location; it also refers to how to create a really different educational space through the practical operation of these special groupings or communities. One discovery we made as we progressed was that social spaces in Chinese cities have become more solid and rigid, despite drastic urban reform. Unlike the claims of market advocates, the commercial process has not brought diversity and elasticity into the urban space; on the contrary, these spaces have become more rigid. The only thing that has changed is the way they are governed. This means that existing social spaces that might be made available for discussion about the city’s problems, already have their customs, implied audience, and potential rules. If a necessary step of everyday life education is to pull people out of their old disciplined spaces and invite them to build new common ones together,

Taking part in the city  123 the first thing to be understood is what kind of old spaces already exist and how do they function? One type of possible social space in which city problems are usually discussed openly is the university. Urban studies has been a popular academic discipline since the problems of city development have became so numerous that they have caused the Chinese government a big headache. More and more urban research centres have been built in the past decade, and, at the same time, the number of projects and conferences on urban questions has rapidly increased. Unfortunately, this kind of space for debate belongs to the so-called elites and officials and is usually closed to ordinary people. Apart from the fact that the funding for these centres mainly comes from the government, there are another two reasons for this exclusion. One is a kind of inert imagination of what higher education in China might do, and the other is based on the contemporary structure of space in the whole city. Despite university education becoming common for the masses in China since the mid-1990s, imagining a new kind of social function for universities has not taken place alongside this growth. Chinese universities are not willing to open their doors and share their resources with the public; yet, they regard themselves as an effective means of access that allows ordinary people to acquire knowledge and life-long learning. While universities serve their “customers” ( students and the government) they also maintain direct governance of their own space. A contemporary reason for this is that most universities have moved into the suburbs (on account of urban development) in the past decades and local government regards university education as an outstanding resource that raises the price of land in the suburbs of Shanghai. Thus, educational resources and/ or spaces for debate have been taken far from the city centre, so that most people cannot use them conveniently. As a result of these moves, universites usually have no capacity to solve everyday life problems. Most of them have become factories of theory or policies that only operate for the benefit of the government. It would obviously have been an unwise choice for “Wumenda Chengshi” to use this kind of ‘free’ and ‘stable’ space to create a new common educational space. The second type of possible space for open discussion of the city’s problems is the so-called public space managed by different levels of local government. In recent years, local governments, such as that of Shanghai, have paid great attention to creating public culture and invested a huge amount of money in building community libraries, cultural clubs, and citizen centres. Since they announce this as a package-deal plan to serve the public’s cultural production from the top down, could this kind of space be used to discuss the city’s problems? The answer is no. The interest of all these community libraries and citizen centres in popular or public education is undeniable, and they also are well equipped to offer cultural events. However, the conservative nature of these kinds of spaces is decided by the entire institutional system and the bureaucratic culture in which they are rooted. This not only refers to censorship of topics and possible speakers, but also a bizarre booking system, which requires an application for public use to be submitted a year in advance As a result, these public spaces are not able to host discussions about what is happening today. While they may seem to be

124  Luo Xiaoming “available”, they are, in fact, useless for the purpose of exploring complex urban social problems. Third, after three decades of reform of urban space, more and more booming cultural spaces in Shanghai are controlled by commercial capital.These spaces can be further divided into two types, one of which is controlled by big international organizations that always support vanguard artists and alternative cultural events in order to add value to their real estate and business: the Himalayan Art Centre in Shanghai, K11, and Bund No. 22 are typical examples. The second type consists of those small and comparatively independent spaces, supported by small groups or individuals, such as bookstores, cafés, and small theatres. The emergence of the latter needs to be located and understood in the context of the history of literature and arts in contemporary China since 1989. Since that time, most literature, art, music, and drama to some extent, has no longer provided a means to rethink, reform or rebel aginst society, but has become a focus for individual consumption – acting as a shelter to save helpless individuals (usually labelled “petit bourgeois” ) from a disturbed world. Their relationship with the city, and their feelings about it, may be extremely complex, being intertwined with passion and exclusion, and their critique of the city may be harsh, but at the same time, their existence absolutely depend on its condition. Finding ways to encourage this kind of person to rethink the city’s diseases and social problems, and to participate in alternative ways forward, is not easy. The final but no less important type of space is the fictional public space shaped by a combination of the internet and social media. Since 2013, ­“Wumenda ­Chengshi” China has experienced the most intense transformation of the means of communication. During this period there has been both a sharp decline of websites, but a growth of new social media, such as Weibo (Chinese twitter), Weixin (Chinese Facebook), and the revival of radio broadcasting on the internet, all boosted and then reduced one by one in China’s public communication space. How to build on this fast transformation to retain interest in “Wumenda ­Chengshi” is critical and we have had to reflect and make timely adjustments. Do we need to record the whole forum and make it a public “course” on the ­internet – a very popular educational form in China, influenced by TED and other courses developed by famous western universities? Do we need to build a public account to broadcast information and arguments about current issues to expand our effect? How should we cooperate with journalists from both newspapers and internet media? How can we choose the right moment to set an appropriate topic and reshape existing discourse on hot issues in such difficult social circumstances? The aim of reflecting on these existing social spaces is not to underline the difficulties of “Wumenda Chengshi” as a new educational common space, but to explain the concrete social conditions in which a new one could operate. An important point to note is that people who are either organizers of “Wumenda Chengshi” or participants come from these older social spaces. Their thoughts and actions are usually constrained by these spaces in conscious or unconscious ways, and the people who may take the chair, act as speakers, or are organizers who decide the agenda of the forum are all a distinctive example of this. Most of

Taking part in the city  125 them come from the academic space, in which the institution of the university confirms its authority over knowledge in the form of courses, classrooms, the examination system, academic language, and so on. This kind of authority may still be acceptable, but it is no longer absolute in the public educational space, especially since the problems we are trying discuss are issues related to the city and the future of our society. In terms of this debate, academics still have a long way to go to be honest with themselves and simultaneously reform themselves as intellectuals in contemporary China.6 On the other hand, the participants who used to be the audience in all the existing noisy but monotonous social spaces, also need to change their communication habits from being passive receivers who come to acquire “correct” knowledge to people who try to add their experiences to an existing agenda in a new public educational space. If these are problems generated in existing social spaces through participants’ actions, there is also another problem caused by a kind of absence, namely, the absence of officials. This is not to say there is no censorship or scrutiny of “Wumenda Chengshi”, but the officials who dominate urbanization at different levels refuse to enter this public space because of their bureaucratic rules. It is still hard to make them recognize that they are part of the city and persuade them to take part in this more public self-education instead of occupying the status of masters of the city. This absence demonstrates the real attitude of the managers of the city and illustrates their lack of understanding of the direct relationship between the people, the power, and the city. Overall, the production of a new common educational space needs to contend with the existing ones. All of these arguments and this kind of competition means that three objectives need to be achieved simultaneously. The first is the willingness to adopt the idea of a new form of education in certain conditions, which includes how to set an agenda, how to design appropriate procedures, and so on. The second is the ability to engage in self-education from a different position in this new educational space, which means that those creative forms could remind and encourage people to relocate themselves outside their normal social positions and perceive different meanings. The third is the endeavour to connect everyday life education and the production of social space more dynamically. The goal of everyday life education may not be the certain knowledge of everyday life itself, but the creation of a new common space in this special time of urbanization.

One case: success or failure? Whilst the initial form of “Wumenda Chengshi” was to choose and create topics related to urban social living, and to hold one forum on each topic, now it also consists of the process of pushing the whole discussion into both mainstream and personal media, in order to encourage wider debate. Since the space is composed of a physical and virtual space, and the character of this education is floating and uncertain, we will unavoidably encounter some difficulty with assessment criteria.

126  Luo Xiaoming The eleventh forum was entitled “Go home in the Spring Festival? The plight of the city and the country” and it provides a good example for discussion. The Spring Festival is an important Chinese festival during which it is the custom for people who are living away from home to return and spend time with their families. This custom may have changed a little in recent years, but the core principle remains that people should be with their family at this time. The  ­majority of rural and small-town populations have continued to move into the cities in the past decade and often have had to leave their parents or children behind because they are unable to keep the whole family together. This means that most of new city populations need to go back to their home town in the Spring Festival- in turn, causing unprecedented transport problems. In other words, the contradiction between the city and the country in China can be directly represented by these transport problems, and although people always experience this contradiction in relation to family issues in their everyday lives, this representation still makes the whole of society feel more anxious during the Spring Festival. More than that, this contradiction is also bound up with a strange law the government tried to establish based on its definition of social harmony and stability, requiring that people whose parents still live in their home town must go home for the Spring Festival. This demand only exposed the complex emotions of those people who have lived and worked in the city for several years, exacerbating feelings of both homesickness and the sense of being an outsider in their new home. The intense emotions enveloping a combination of eagerness, embarrassment and reluctance, have made going home in the Spring Festival a distinctive cultural and social phenomenon. This problem may be a good position from which to rethink the relationship between the city and the country so we decided to choose it as a forum topic before the Spring Festival of 2015. Of course, this forum could not hope to explore all of the problems related to such a complex issue, but, in the initial design, we tried to find people who could analyse or research the history of transport problems during the Spring Festival, who had worked in Shanghai for several years and could talk about their feelings when going home, and could especially comment on how the standard of success set by the city had changed their relationship with their home town. The first criterion might be met by a researcher or a scholar, and the others could be addressed by blue- and white-collar workers of the city. However, our idealistic goals could not be turned into reality because few researchers have studied the transport problem around the Spring Festival or its history, and few blue- and white-collar workers were willing to express their real feelings in public unless it could be done anonymously via the internet. Particularly for young people, the idea of expressing their emotions via the internet, or talking about them rationally in public, are two different things. Most of them perceived such a rational discussion as being useless and only worthy of media entertainment. In the end, postgraduate students of the Program in Cultural Studies became the main speakers in this forum. They reviewed reports in ­Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) since the 1950s and talked about their experience and observations during past Spring Festivals when they had gone home.

Taking part in the city  127 Compared to other forums, often with more than 100 participants, this one was definitely unsuccessful.7 The impact of the forum via the mass media over two weeks was pretty good, but not particularly outstanding and not commensurate with the significance of the topic.8 However, if a criterion of success was whether participants learned to self-­ educate, this forum had special value. The students in our program are usually responsible for communication and dissemination about “Wumenda Chengshi”, while the educational content tends to belong to the professionals. The main responsibility of the students who take part in “Our Cities” is to learn how to do the organizational work rather than the research. However, this time, they found that they could be effective researchers, which was not only a cause of great self-satisfaction, but also had more effect on the mainstream media. To some extent, their oral accounts may have been more straightforward and vivid than those of some academic professionals.9 Also, if the forums are expected to create a new connection between different social spaces, this one made a different attempt because of its (accidental) setting in a café. Although the café space was too small to hold more than 30 people, it was an open space and attracted passers-by. Some of them stopped, listened, and asked what was going on. They may have been parents with their children, older women, or some youngsters. If they were really interested, they stood outside the café for a long time. My most interesting encounter was with an old grandfather, who, after standing and listening for several minutes, asked me to invite him to give a talk the next time. He thought that what the students were talking about was just knowledge learned from the history books, but what he knew came from real experience and it would be more valuable for our forum. Considering that the space of a café, even in Shanghai, is still a kind of the commercial space, usually reserved for young people, the grandfather’s interest and passion for joining us was significant. So, from this forum, we had some unexpected results. We not only crossed a potential boundary between the professional and the lay, but also overcame separate spaces between different generations. A surprise transition emerged on the last day of the old year when a journalist who took part in this forum put one of the speeches given by a Ph.D. student on a website. Over the next few days, this speech became one of the most popular in this New Year with more than a million clicks. The people who went home in the Spring Festival seemed to have a deep connection with this speech and relayed it, adding their own comments. In this wave of relaying via the internet and social media, the terms “nostalgia” and “Ph.D. student” became keywords of social attention. Following this trend, discussion of the relationship between the city and the country engendered by different forms of media lasted for over a month. Such a large-scale social argument not only illustrated the discourse on which the media habitually rely when they report problems in the city and the country, but also explored some powerful social emotions that have been brewing in China since the first decade of the 21st century. Obviously, the keywords that caused this attention – “nostalgia” and “Ph.D. student” – are the result of media discourse. As Raymond Williams noted, nostalgia is universal and persistent and will be held

128  Luo Xiaoming in a complicated moment (Williams 1975, p. 12). The countryside becomes the object of nostalgia as a way of rejecting the uncomfortable feelings that emerge during a sharp shift to urbanization, and is a significant part of the structure of feeling during this period. However, at the same time, the presupposition of such nostalgia maintains a stubborn dichotomy between the city and the country, and this kind of dual thinking continues to frame the whole discourse. Another important point explored by our debates is people’s standpoint about the relationship between school education and urbanization. The notion that ‘Education will change fate’ has been an accepted way of convincing ordinary people of the value of school education since the 1980s. School education was regarded as the main means of social mobility for the younger generations living in the countryside at that time. However, this has been undermined by solidifying of the urban–rural structure, the widening gap between different social classes, and a deficiency in registering citizens as belonging to one city. Apart from being an admission ticket to city life, what is the meaning of the knowledge learned in school? Why do the younger generations leave their home town after being schooled instead of staying and contributing to their towns? Why does the city they are working in refuse to completely accept them and regard them as outsiders? If education and knowledge really do change young people’s fate, why do we still feel so helpless and lost in the city? Why do we not feel reassured and familiar in any place? These questions drive most people to rethink the relationship between knowledge and urbanization. The idea that “Ph.D. student” could become one of the keywords of our event suggests the complicated emotions that exist around these questions. In a survey posted by “Wumenda Chengshi” online, we listed more than 15 questions and asked which ones needed to be further debated in the future. The online readers identified the following: “Why does school education drive people to leave their home town?”, “Why is either going back to their home town or staying in the city so difficult to achieve for the young who move from the country to the city?”, and “How could a developed city re-nourish the countryside that has sacrificed itself to the city’s development in China for the past decades?” Debates on these issues are in great demand, which illustrates the common social sense of a disordered relationship between the city and the country today, and these questions will absolutely be our next focus. In the light of this discussion, the problem of how to estimate the educational effect of this forum are complicated. If a criterion of success is to change or restructure the existing discourse on the country and the city, the effect of this forum may be useless if it is not developed further. What we witnessed during this debate is a persistent double thinking, not only about the relationship between the countryside and the city, but also a fragmentation of experience and a disconnected recognition of historical and contemporary social institutions. However, if a criterion of success is to connect different people hidden across the city with various social spaces and produce further questions, building further discussion, it may have its own value; but we need to think more about valuing this perspective in terms of everyday learning.

Taking part in the city  129

Being the soil：commoning spaces in China Following this interpretation of our forum in the Chinese social context, I will raise three questions to open up discussion about the pedagogization of everyday life. The first is: Who are the “citizens” in this kind of pedagogy in the context of Chinese urbanization? While the ideal assumption is that everyone living in the city will be a citizen, “Wumenda Chengshi (Our Cities)” has actually encountered various people shaped by differently regulated spaces and disciplined by time factors structured by the whole system of the city in the past three decades. In general terms, these inhabitants are the result of the resurgence of a global gated urbanism (McFarlane & Vasudevan 2012), but in China, they are also the products of the transformation and reshaping of those rigid and disciplined social spaces controlled by the alliance of the state and capital since the 1990s. More importantly, when this transfromation and reshaping happens, there is no so-called civil society in contemporary China, which means that ordinary people are directly driven by the power of the market or the state without any other space to inhabit. Partha Chatterjee once used the concept of a “political society” to capture the awkward situation that exists outside the traditional political theory of civil society in a western capitalist context. According to him, the people living in the slums of Indian cities are symbolically invited to be citizens in the frame of capitalist democracy, but in fact, they would never be allowed to be so because of the dominance of property and privilege (Chatterjee 2011).The situation in ­Chinese cities is similar to some extent, but the social conditions are very different. If the theoretical problem in India is that a kind of civil society is presupposed and confirmed without any eligible citizens, the plight in Chinese cities is framed around the kind of relationship that can be shaped between the people, cities, and the state in this huge transformation – in the absence of even a promise of civil society from a political system which emphasizes economic development and urbanization. If education outside school tries to intervene in shaping the process, what kind of definition of “citizen” should it use? And, what kind of new subjectivity does this everyday education create or produce in such an urbanized world? It is not possible to discuss the special situation of citizens in China in this chapter. They are sitting both in and out of civil and political society. While we have tried to take historical experience from western capitalist society, normative social space was public in different ways over time. Real public space rapidly appears and disappears during any transformation of the spatial structure and no public space is stable and absolute. The de-public and re-gated process happens all the time if there is no resistance, and in this context, sensitivity about existing social space becomes the prime and significant focus of citizens. Our experience from “Wumenda Chengshi” suggests that new citizens in China need to be people who not only have an interest in, but also the ability to distinguish and shuffle, the different kinds of social spaces that are separated by capital and the state in the process of urbanization, rather than indulging themselves in limited groups or opting for one type of space and fighting for it.

130  Luo Xiaoming The second question is closely connected with this finding. It is how to raise the interest and ability of people to participate in these struggles over meaning by programming crises into everyday life education. This will be a crucial step in the pedagogization of everyday life in China and it needs more theoretical thinking; for example, how do we define a crisis in everyday life when we establish topics and programs? In the case of “Going home in the Spring Festival”, the problems described by the government and mainstream media were around the technocratic management of traffic and congestion. When redefined by a largescale social controversy, it is not only the traffic crisis, but also the disequilibrium between the countryside and the city that causes failure. In a speech on the Fukushima nuclear crisis, Yoshihiko Ikegami（池上善彦） suggested that there was a positive learning movement that involved all the people during and after this crisis, since they had lost trust in government and big companies and were trying to recognize and define the nuclear crisis in everyday life by themselves (Ikegami 2012/13). This kind of situation where people lose trust, and only believe in themselves, also happens in China. However, at the same time, we know that government is assembled and achieved through crisis or emergency, and each event will call for the invention of new techniques by the government or by the market (Adey, Anderson & Graham, 2015). So, on the one hand, there is the passion for people’s self-learning movements when facing a crisis, and on the other, the redeployment of existing knowledge by the government and the market, using the crisis in order to impose further discipline. There is a persistent competition between how to explain and illuminate the crisis from different sides of the frames, and the key point may be how to define the crisis from a limited social space, separated and disciplined by the power of the state and the market. To support it, the main duty of “Wumenda Chengshi” or other educational work focused on everyday life, is to design original topics and activities to create a common space across the uncertain connection between different spaces to help individuals become a collective again. Then, the third question is: What relationship between this kind of education and the media should be developed through this mode of pedagogization? As an element that has an educational function outside school, the media – controlled by the government and the market – has power. We may have designed “Go home for the Spring Festival?”, but what happened later was definitely beyond our imagination, so whatever we did was reactive. Therefore, one lesson from this is how to utilize the media to serve our purpose of defining the problem, especially in the confusion of a crisis. There may be no easy answer to any of these questions, but Lu Hsun, an outstanding modern Chinese writer and thinker, once wrote about the meaning of soil in one of his essays: Before we expect a genius to appear, we should first call for a public capable of producing a genius. In the same way, if we want fine trees and lovely flowers, we must first produce good soil. The soil, actually, is more important than the flowers and trees. (Lu Hsun 1960, p. 78)

Taking part in the city  131 At this time, while the genius of ordinary people may be an authentic public space, their right to the city, and their freedom to imagine the future has been taken out of their hands. At this moment, we need to reserve and expend our mental and physical efforts in producing good soil for these good things in the future.

Notes 1 A recent example was when the local government tried a number of strategies to generate change, including: halting leasing contracts, defining illegal businesses, closing some small shops located in the centre of Shanghai and driving tenants out regardless of how long they had lived there. At the same time, the government proclaimed they would build more shopping malls in the same place. This is a special kind of gentrification mainly driven by order of the executive department of the state instead of by the market. Of course, there are neither pure market nor state motives. Different types of gentrification happen around the world for diverse reasons but, while this process is dominated by the government, it is more difficult to find effective ways to negotiate. The bookstore which helps us to hold our forums is one of these shops. The official reason for their forced closure is that the lease contract they signed is illegal, and has to stop by the end of 2017, even though this bookstore has been located in that same place for more than ten years, which means it has been illegal for a long time until it was suddenly ‘exposed’ one day. 2 This term derives from ideas of ‘self-remoulding’ or ‘self-reformation’ which is usually used to name a requirement on the members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and officers of the Chinese government. I am using ‘self-education’ to describe a requirement on ordinary people while they build better lives during the waves of reformation. Self-education does not only refer to autonomous learning but also emphasizes learning knowledge and getting skills in the special context of Chinese society, which includes the rigid control of media, distrust of authorities and officials, rumours, and so on. So if the terms ‘self-remoulding’ or ‘self-reformation’ usually imply that there is one correct direction to follow and one great aim to achieve in the past socialist context, or in a western process of modernization, self-education is not associated with such certainty; it has no implied correct and straightforward direction to follow, and ordinary people have to search it out for themselves during this process. 3 See note 2. 4 The “public space” is always a contested concept in each different social context. Actually, how to define what is the public is one of the most important and confused problems in Chinese society in recent years and the experience of “Wumenda Chengshi (Our Cities)” described below will explain this puzzle further. 5 Here public space refers to those spaces in the cities created by the ordinary people when they want to find some different ways and means to live together beyond the double pressure of the state and the market, which always separates them and makes them atomized. 6 There is a great deal of literature on the concept of ‘public intellectual’ in western thought(Said 1996), while few authors focus on concrete discussion and controversy in the context of contemporary China. A significant social phenomenon during the last decade is that the authority of the intellectual has fallen dramatically in the eyes of the public. For example, one of the hot phrases used to describe “the professor” using Chinese homophony is “the beast who does education work”. 7 The small numbers might also be attributed to a small organizational error on our part. 8 In two weeks, one local newspapers(Oriental Morning Post, 3 February 2015, http://money.163.com/15/0203/08/AHH2R84N00253B0H.html), one news app (The Paper, 17 February 2015, www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1304570)

132  Luo Xiaoming and one weekly magazine(Oriental Outlook, www.lwdf.cn/article_1028_1.html) reported our forum and tried to discuss this topic further in their reports. 9 For example, to express their opinions the young students made lively PowerPoint and Flash presentations which attracted people’s attention easily and directly.

References Adey, P, Anderson, B & Graham, S 2015, ‘Introduction: governing emergencies: beyond exceptionality’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 3–17. Chatterjee, P 2011, Lineages of political society: studies in postcolonial democracy, Columbia University Press, New York. Ikegami, Y 2012/13, ‘Nuclear accident and Japanese society. People and science’, (trans. Qibin Feng) Cultural Studies Quarterly, no. 126: https://csat.org.tw/Journal.­ aspx?ID=22&ek=95&pg=1&d=1539# (viewed 9 January 2018). Krytyka Polityczna & the European Cultural Foundation (eds.) 2015, Build the city: perspectives on commons and culture. European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam. Lefebvre, H 1996, Writings on cities, Blackwell, Oxford. Lu, H 1960, Before there were no geniuses. Selected works of Lu Hsun (II), Foreign ­Languages Press, Beijing. McFarlane, J & Vasudevan, A 2012, ‘Rethinking enclosure: space, subjectivity and the commons’, Antipode, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 1247–1267. Said, Edward W 1996, Representations of the intellectual: the 1993 Reith lectures, Vintage, London. Williams, R 1975, The country and the city, Oxford University Press, New York.

9 Digital media production outside the school Youth knowledge and cultural participation in Argentina and Mexico Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag Introduction If there is a site where out-of-school learning is notorious these days, it is ­d igital platforms. The skills and knowledge involved in participating in social ­media have been defined as multitasking, networking, visualizing, collaboration ­(Jenkins et al. 2006); remixing, reframing and sharing content (Jenkins, Ford & Green 2013, p. 2), and querying and curating information (McEneany 2015). The relationship of these new skills to school knowledge has been the s­ ubject of much debate in educational policy and research. The notion of 21st century skills advanced by the OECD and UNESCO – comprising creativity, problem-­ solving, critical thinking and collaboration – stresses the gaps ­between formal, disciplinary school knowledge and the competences demanded by the new knowledge society as epitomized by digital media (Ananiadou & Claro 2009). These gaps have been, more often than not, presented as ­irreconcilable; schools are seen as disconnected from the skills and knowledge needed to function in a digital, globalized world (World Economic Forum 2017), and teachers as old-fashioned adults unable to guide the new generations of digital natives.1 Another strand of research and reflection has pointed to the connections between the ways of learning in and out of school. Scholars have posited that young people mobilize literacies such as reading and writing, research skills and critical analysis in their participation in digital media (Willet 2009) from an early age, even if they are less visible and less glamorous than the transmedia navigation and creation of 21st century skills. This approach wants to overcome the binaries of old and new literacies, emphasizing instead the mobilization and connectedness of learning across platforms and activities (Nespor 1994). In this conceptual move, the theory of connected learning is useful for understanding learning as ‘oriented toward shared practices that emerge from youths’ repertoire of practices developed in the horizontal movement and flow as youth move across everyday settings’ (Ito et al. 2013, p. 47). Rather than setting an a priori higher value to digital settings, this theory considers that the ability to connect, translate or transfer knowledge from one site to another is what promotes and enhances learning.

134  Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag Grounding these approaches to learning in contexts that are more fluid and connected than the dichotomies of in/out of school suggests, in this chapter we discuss the kinds of knowledge that are being mobilized by young people in their digital productions, pointing not only to their interactions with digital platforms but also to the local contexts of schooling and politics that make particular self-positionings2 available to them. We will claim that their digital content combines not only schooled and non-schooled modes of learning, but also global and national–local languages and media genres, in ways that are always context-specific. We will base our argument on the analysis of amateur videos produced by two young men whom we met in the course of our research on digital media and schooling in Argentina and Mexico. For us, the videos show the multiple modes of semiosis in which young people move – with images as a privileged language – and the plural learning cultures that are behind their modes of participation in digital culture. These videos themselves stood out because of their content. They had a distant resemblance to the exercise that Robin Alexander carried out with primary students in his five-country study (Alexander 2000), in which he asked them to write a short composition on a free theme. The writing exercise, despite its methodological limitations, somehow “transpired” national motifs and poetics in poignant ways. The videos also had this quality: as multimodal, rich texts, they were full of expressive content and sophisticated cultural references; they were global yet also distinctively national. The videos can be seen as complex social and political commentaries on their producers’ simultaneously cosmopolitan and local, national identities, that complicate the distinctions between the local, the national, and the global, and introduce other nuances to the social and brand activism that have been identified in young people’s participation in social affairs (Ratto & Boler 2014). We want to argue that a comparative stance towards divergent national and local cultures can contribute to producing more nuanced and complex understandings of digital literacies, and also of young people’s social participation in contemporary societies. In the next section, we consider the relationships between the global and the local in youth media culture, the kinds of knowledge and self-positioning that are mobilized in these national and transnational flows, and the privileging of images as a mode of semiosis. In the following section, we will present the media productions themselves, analysing what they tell us about the ways that young people are engaging with public life in digital culture. Finally, we reflect on the different trajectories of participation in global knowledge flows of the media landscape, problematizing binaries such as school/not-school, and global and local.

Global and local flows of knowledge in youth digital media culture It is almost a truism to say that young people’s digital cultures are shaped by transnational media flows that give them global cultural references and styles (Jenkins et al. 2013). National frontiers and local communities appear less

Digital media production outside the school  135 important as youth identities are forged in consumption styles and media fandom across the globe in seemingly more appealing ways than older political or legal constituencies (Rizvi 2012). In these studies, “global” often implies a “global village” (McLuhan’s term) of homogenized screens and contents shaped by transnational corporations that create a global media Esperanto. Media practices are perceived as increasingly deterritorialized, having weak bonds with the places in which they occur but strong connections with long-distance peers that share interests and tastes (Kennelly, Poyntz & Ugor 2009; Nilan & Feixa 2006). More moderate about the weight of these global forces, other scholars have ­credited new media technologies with generating ecologies for identity work that enable new identity scripts but also new margins for transgression, moving fluidly between the local and the global (McCarthy et al. 2014). In our approach, we would like to take a step further away from the idea of a transparent, universal experience, and show how people’s engagement with digital media is inscribed in particular localities. Local and global, thus, should not be considered as binaries (McLeod 2009), with digital media supposedly on the side of the global and people, schools or neighbourhoods on the local side. ­Indeed, we suggest that this conceptualization is limited in at least two significant ways. First, digital media are also local. They emerged in the particular conditions of metropolitan entrepreneurial individualization, typically located in the US coastal cities. This is different to the scammers and bride-hunters that Jenna Burrell studies in Ghana, or Cristina Fuentes Zurita’s poachers at Mexico City cybercafés, who use digital media as alternate public spaces where generations and expert-novices meet, have coffee and construct a life together (Burrell 2012; Fuentes Zurita 2012). There is an inscription of the local (i.e., Silicon ­Valley, where many digital technologies originated) in the global that should not be overlooked. The second way in which this conceptualization is limited is that the local actors cannot be cut off from these transnational flows and technologies, as they use global icons, languages and genres to produce particular self-positionings in their contexts. Linking these notions of the global and the local to connected learning, we suggest that young people are bringing together different types of knowledge as they move across learning trails or paths (Ingold 2011).3 It is not just a matter of mastering codes and sets of practices within digital platforms – becoming fluent or expert (“geek”) in their languages – but also of connecting references, categories and modes of semiosis to young people’s own paths, to their life histories and local contexts. As will be seen later in this chapter, our young media producers mobilized knowledge about digital productions (how to make a video and share it or spread it), but also about national identities, politics, and old and new media, that show traces of school knowledge and of other learning spaces. Our comparative analysis is set in particular localities. We agree with current critiques of the methodological nationalism that has tainted most educational research (Shahjahan & Kezar 2013), taking nations as closed and rigid containers. Nations are contested projects (Yates & Grumet 2011, p. 12), as feminist and postcolonial critiques have made it clear; yet we will claim that the scale of the

136  Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag nation also matters, and national political activity remains a salient organizer of social assemblages. In our cases, the role of political activism seems to be more significant than in other regions of the world; and debates about national identity appear as privileged topics. The young producers we studied are not f­ollowing the model of the entrepreneurial self that has become prevalent in other cases (McCarthy et al. 2014 for Barbados), nor are they similar to the nationally disengaged children of postcolonial metropolis (Grosvenor & Myers 2017). In their sustained interest in politics and national community, these cases illuminate the contradictions of the present world – its ‘constitutive asymmetries’ (Herlinghaus 2013, p. 28); and show that nations might still be a significant level ‘of place and affiliation’ (McLeod 2009, p. 284). Along with the persistence of the nation in young people’s engagement with transnational media flows, there are two other traits that speak about the connections involved in their learning in and through digital media production. One is related to the positioning of the self that is produced through the actions of creating, sharing and remixing. Studying youth media initiatives in India and Palestine, Sanjay Ashtana (2015) posits that digital media ‘allow[s] young participants a creative range of possibilities for commentary, critique and dialogue’ (p. 43). The opportunities to intervene, rewrite and spread or circulate a given sign make room for different interactions that promote a type of citizenship that speaks up and is capable of ‘successful self-invention’ (Harris 2012, p. 148). Isin and Ruppert (2015) suggest this kind of participation carries ‘a social, cultural, economic, and political demand expressing an obligation’ (p. 87), defining a new calling or regulatory ideal about how and where to participate. In our cases we analyse how this regulatory ideal is aligned with what the school curriculum promotes in Argentina and Mexico: a critical citizenship that is post-nationalistic and self-critical about the wrongs of the past (Cox, Lira & Gazmuri 2009), and a strong appeal to expressive skills in all subjects (Nieto 2017). The second important feature of these videos is their use of visual modes of semiosis as part of new visual regimes. Argument, tradition and critique appear primarily as a trail of visual signs. In our contemporary visual regime, images are increasingly ephemeral; they are “Kleenex-images”, more loaded with the phatic functions of language than with a referential semantics (Fontcuberta 2016). ­A nalysing the uses of domestic photography 20 years ago, Don Slater said that ‘[t]aking pictures is a taken for granted part of leisure activities; but looking at them is marginal’ (Slater 1995, p. 139). However, social media platforms and portable devices have changed that: images are to be looked at, and the act of sharing them and reacting to them is critical to current uses of photography and video. They are ‘tools for conversation and circulation’ ­(Fontcuberta 2016, p. 120): no longer a conversation about an image, but a conversation through images. Pictures are not important because of who took them; the image’s most relevant feature is to be found in the digital traces it leaves and the number of conversations it enters. These conversations increasingly operate as markets for branding the self and achieving a commodified popularity in social media (Banet-Weiser 2012; van Dijck 2013). It should be noted that this kind of

Digital media production outside the school  137 participation involves an understanding of issues of property and rights, of how to negotiate the boundaries between publicness and intimacy (boyd 2014). In contemporary visual regimes, an important dimension of ephemeral images is the politics of their management and circulation: what becomes decisive is ‘who manages the life of the image’ (Fontcuberta 2016, p. 67), who gets to stabilize its meaning and who controls its circulation through spreadable media (Jenkins et al. 2013). This is central to the images that young people produce for themselves. We will show how their images seem to be narrowly defined by dominant rules on how the self can be presented (sexy, playful, ironic and so on), but also by the imperative of sharing all archives: an imperative that social media corporations have successfully imposed on public interactions (van Dijck 2013). These new modes of representation should not be seen as the opposite of school. For example, the subject History in contemporary classrooms in Latin America is often presented as a set of events pictured through images, tables or maps more than as a composite of verbal or oral texts that have to be scrutinized and eventually mastered. The use of films as instructional resources has greatly contributed to this trend (Dussel 2018). Connected learning, then, involves not only what happens in social media and at home, but also how school curriculum and pedagogies are shaping what counts as knowledge, and the signs and languages used by young people in their social worlds.

Researching youth media production We encountered the young media producers discussed in this chapter in the context of research on the use of digital media in secondary schools in ­A rgentina and Mexico, institutions now in the midst of massive programs for digital ­inclusion.4 Research questions included how space and time were being redefined in digitalized classrooms, and the new hierarchies of knowledge and legitimate school texts in the new media ecology and material life of classrooms. As part of the research, we conducted in-depth interviews with teenagers and asked them for their audio-visual productions in classrooms and in their social media. In that context two videos caught our attention immediately: they expressed an activism that went beyond charitable causes or environmental issues; they were overtly political and engaged in a radically critical narrative about national identities. We studied the videos and conducted interviews with the two young men who made them about how and why they produced the videos and which references they used.5 The analysis was grounded in cultural and visual studies of youth media production (Berliner 2014; Buckingham, Pini & Willet 2011; Dussel & Dahya 2017) and on a socio-semiotic approach (Kress 2003), looking at style, aesthetics and media choices, contents, and flow. From a “teacherly” point of view, both videos qualify as average in terms of their technological competence. Neither of these young men considered himself a techie, nor did they use sophisticated equipment: in the case of the first video, the producer Frank ­(pseudonym) only had a personal computer, and in the second case, Oscar

138  Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag (­ pseudonym) only had a digital camera and a tripod. However, these young producers made use of media affordances to comment on, critique or spread other signs, and use remix or mash-up as cultural forms that explicitly quoted and relocated cultural references. In contrast with Alexander’s (2000) study on national school cultures, we were not looking for a singular voice that represented national identities. The videos were clearly made up of inconsistences, babblings, irony and parody, plays of disclosure and hiding of the self, and we believe this is a significant factor in the production of identity narratives and the forms of public participation that they define. Moreover, they showed an intense inter-connectivity between school knowledge and the languages and styles privileged in digital media; we consider them a fine example of the blurring of boundaries, or the crossing paths of knowledge in which young people learn and live.

Video 1: The cosmopolitan national The first video, The socio-cultural world of Argentineans, was posted in 2010 on Facebook. It was produced by Frank, an 18-year-old Argentinean young man who had just finished secondary schooling at a private, progressive school. He came from a middle-class background, with both parents being university ­graduates. This was the first and only video that he produced and posted. We interviewed him again four years later, when he was studying sociology at a public university, and came to know that he had become involved in political activism and was fully engaged with Twitter and other written-text postings but no longer with producing audio-visual content. The video lasts 4 minutes and 37 seconds, and consists of 208 images and inserts; each image lasts on average a little over one second, giving the video a fast rhythm in keeping with the genre of the music video (see Illescas 2016). The images are shown with automatic transitions that use the edit-mode “star”; the music comes in the Template options of Windows (Kalimba, by Mr. Scruff). When he posted it on Facebook, Frank introduced it as: ‘a “semi-artistic” ­attempt to express, in a few words and hundreds of images, the socio-cultural view of “the Argentinean” of his/her own country, his/her self and the world’ [post on Facebook, 5 October 2010]. In the interview, he said he chose images because he wanted people to ‘watch and feel, not to understand’ (Interview, 14 February 2015). He produced it in one day, and only revised it once before posting on Facebook. The 208 images are almost equally divided into international and national references, and range from political and historical icons or events to mass culture or pop icons. There are references to objects, movies and other symbols of national identity (for example, the cow in Argentina is a typical icon of the pampas and the asado/barbecue). The international references are primarily historical and political; the video shows images of the Second World War, the Vietnam War (the napalm girl), 9/11, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and violent clashes in the Middle East. The visual iconography is dominated by powerful male figures

Digital media production outside the school  139 and well-known icons (see Figure 9.1). In relation to Argentinean history, while there are some images from the 19th century, most refer to the 20th century, with the dictatorship and the 1990s “neoliberal decade” figuring predominantly. Again, the historical and political dimensions are central in the construction of a national narrative. The historical images are decontextualized and they are there to be cut, edited, tinkered with, even twisted as when new associations and sequences are built. This can be seen in the order of the sequence of images in the video, which seems to follow a semantic association. For example, images of the signing of agreements for the privatization of the communication sector in the 1990s, which went mostly to

Figure 9.1  Stills from the video The socio-cultural world of Argentineans.

140  Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag Spanish companies, is followed by an image of C ­ hristopher ­Columbus – Cristóbal Colón in Spanish – which implies a play with words from Colón to c­ ontemporary colonization, evident in the juxtaposed image of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spanish Prime Minister at the time. However, in interview, Frank said that the sequence was random, following an alphabetic order that was produced from the tags he put on each image. There was no mention of a chronology or narrative framework. This is made evident in other sequences: images of bank notes are placed close to former presidents’ pictures or to half-­naked TV divas. As memes and other digital mash-ups, these images are immersed in the iconoclastic, profane visual ­regimes of the present, exacting the ‘fragmentation and collage’ of the image – ‘the unmitigated martyrdom of the image’, as Boris Groys (2008, p. 71) calls it. Frank’s video shows an irreverent relationship to images, particularly in comparison to the reverence with which historical images have been treated in traditional school textbooks (Cruder 2008). In this respect, the video seems to build upon, but also distance itself from, the schooled relationship with images. Besides images, the video also includes 32 intertitles with phrases that mostly come from song lyrics (tango and Argentinean rock), but some are Frank’s own creation. In the interview, he said that he produced these statements because: what I wanted to express were more words than images… some texts came out of me, maybe more poetic – not sure about the word – but at any rate less objective, less precise, to express some views on reality, sometimes even exaggerated, even pornographic.6 (Interview, 14 February 2015) Frank believed that images should stand beside words; he found images ambivalent and thus decided to use words to make sure that his message was understood, and with this gesture he seems to be rejecting alternative semiosis and validating the sort of logocentrism that has characterized school knowledge. We reproduce fragments of the interview here not because we believe that his intentions can explain or contain the meanings of the video, but because they show how Frank is positioning himself ambivalently in relation to the new visual regimes. While he valued images as a way of making people “feel”, he seems to long for a mode of semiosis where he could be more in control of its circulation. This uneasiness with how images circulate led him to discontinue video p ­ roduction, and he reported feeling ‘much more at home’ in platforms like Twitter where verbal statements are central. He was disappointed by the poverty of comments on Facebook: ‘one works so hard and then people just click on a “like” button’ [posting on Facebook, 6 October 2010). It seems like he wanted to engage in a conversation but that the platform did not favour this. Overall, these perceptions call for some caution about the fluency with which young people use visual media, the blind spots with which they participate in them, and also the limitations of the expressive possibilities that these media offer. Frank reported that he followed a random process in his video production, and we think it is interesting to follow the trail of this randomness to make

Digital media production outside the school  141 visible which learning paths he followed. Frank did not have a script before he made the video, but some general mental images about the cultural universe of Argentineans; he searched for these images in Google and then saved the ones he thought were iconic. Here, Frank is revealing, without being conscious of it, a national imaginary of symbols that has been mostly defined by schooling and in popular media. In his searches, he did not find all the images he wanted, but he found others that were included if they seemed fit for purpose. For example, he wanted to talk about money, and found an image of an Argentinean bank note with the portrait of a 19th century national president, and decided to focus on this image as an interrogation of national symbols, shifting from the bank note to the presidential image. He then looked for images of the massacres of native peoples ordered by this president – facts he learnt from his school’s revisionist teaching of history. Frank tagged the images with the keyword from his search, and, once he had a significant set of images, used Windows Media Maker to produce a video that used them in the alphabetic order of these tags. Frank’s aesthetic choices were constrained by technologically predetermined options. Whilst he may have described his search methods in terms of free association, we suggest that this randomness appears less as a serendipitous outcome and more as the result of the opaque algorithmic program design (van Dijck 2013), shaping what he could find and also directing the presentation of his material. The ending of the video is quite abrupt, and consists of a series of intertitles following a critical sequence of media pop icons or ‘puppets’, as he calls them. The inserts read: ‘I offer myself/or better not, I’d rather not offer myself.’ The final image is an insert that says ‘BASTA/STOP’ in capital red letters. While it is ambivalent about what has to be stopped (the puppetry of the national pop icons), the statement that he would rather not offer himself to this socio-cultural world shows a radical rejection, a cutting-off or opting-out from the national imaginary portrayed in his video.

Video 2: Mexicanos and the identity mirror The case of the video Mexicanos has some striking differences to The socio-­ cultural world of Argentineans. Oscar, a 15-year-old student at a secondary ­public school in Mexico City (with an arts orientation), chose a different genre, that of the YouTuber, inspired by the figure of the TV anchor but also at times by the stand-up comedian. Yet, when asked about which models he followed, he referred not to TV but back to his childhood, when he liked to tell stories to imaginary friends and even made up film plots. Oscar is sophisticated and highly reflexive; he aspires to become a full-time artist when he grows up. He also comes from a middle-class family; his father is a journalist and his mother a psychologist. His mother enrolled him in a film school for children where he learned ‘the wonders of montage and editing according to Eisenstein’ (Interview, 8 December 2013). He got a digital camera when he was 12, and started playing and messing around with the camera and

142  Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag his computer from early on; by the time we met him he felt like an experienced filmmaker.7 He decided to go public: he created his own YouTube channel and posted on it because he thought the videos were funny. He said that he later discovered that what he was doing was called “videoblogs” and that they were the ‘worst and cheapest resource possible’. Since that time, he has become much more careful about what he posts as he wants to save good material for future artistic productions; for example, he made a series of stop-motion short films that he did not upload as he didn’t want to give away his ideas. He is well aware of property rights and privacy, and negotiates with the platform in more skilled ways than Frank. In secondary school, Oscar slowed down the rate of his video production because of the burden of school work. Despite the fact that the school is oriented towards the arts, he did not perceive it as enriching his expressive ­capabilities because of time constraints and also because of a lack of teachers’ interest in his productions. He saw himself as an artist-in-the-making, with the management of his image central to his motivations in becoming a contemporary artist (Groys 2008). While he said he was not sure why people would want to see him, he flipped out when he got 800 views after being “liked” by two friends on ­Facebook; popularity and self-promotion become increasingly blurred in his case. Mexicanos lasts 6 minutes and 34 seconds, and was published on 2013 on a YouTube channel along with other short videos. The video is a monologue recorded in his room, with almost the same frame but with abrupt cuts that keep the rhythm up. There are 72 cuts in the video, one every 6 seconds or less, which act as some sort of punctuation. There are three personas assumed by the performer (Oscar): first, a Mexican citizen who talks critically about national identity (food, relationship to the foreign or colonial mindset, national myths); second, an imaginary friend who asks questions or makes short comments; third, the director of the video who is filming himself in the room, laughing at himself (for example, in the opening sequence where he says ironically: ‘So that they do not say that I have no budget’, when he shows that he has no support for illumination or sound) (see Figure 9.2). In the video, Oscar wears a hat as a visual signature (repeated across all photos and videos, as an artist’s stamp). The video has several textual levels, and ­Oscar is highly skilled in how he moves from one level to the other. For example,

Figure 9.2  Stills from Mexicanos.

Digital media production outside the school  143 he makes “backstage” comments on camera commenting on budget constraints; he pretends to talk to other people behind the camera – while we know he was alone when filming – as a “homage” to his childhood friends. The video is quite complex in how it deals with different personas played by only one actor-director. The monologue is an improvisation but follows a line of characterizing what is wrong with Mexican people and their relationship with Mexico. In the second sequence he says: To be Mexican is a double-edged sword, and with that I refer to… a ­Mexican is nationalistic only when the national football team wins, when somebody dies abroad, or when talking badly about Mexico is at issue – because even for that one has to be nationalistic. A common thread throughout the performance is the relationship with others, that is, the global mirrors against which Mexicans define themselves, especially the complicated relationship with Europe: a reference that is in itself telling in how Oscar inscribes himself as part of the bohemian and professional middle classes still looking up to Europe, while Mexico’s culture is becoming more and more Americanized (Echeverría 2008). For example, the video includes a dialogue between two friends in which one is celebrating his birthday not with tacos but going to Italiannis, an Italian food chain. The narrative points to the irony that when later this same person goes to Italy, he’d rather have some tacos: The best Mexican, when abroad, will criticize everyone else. But when he comes back home, he will say ‘but you know, Mexican cuisine is not that good’. I really don’t know why we are still here, you know dude. The narrator refers to a train accident in Spain, but says that the only thing that mattered to Mexicans is that there was one Mexican killed in the incident. However, he says, nobody cares about the many people that are being killed by drug lords and gangs in the country, because that is considered normal. The commentary is cruel and sharp, and denounces the hypocrisy and the double standards of nationalistic feelings. In the rest of the video, Oscar makes several critical comments about corruption and racism as a Mexican trait. He ends with some of his poetic text inserts: How much time will it take to make things better? We are all victims of a confiscated State… It is a rotten nation with a wounded population. Mexico, Mexico, Mexico. I know that what I ask would not be impossible if somebody cared about my opinion (sic). But I sincerely hope that this will help somebody to realize that we’re screwing it up as a society.

144  Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag The final insert is a nationalistic slogan, slightly rewritten: ‘Que viva México/ Y que (re)viva México cabrones’ (see Figure. 9.3). The reference to Eisenstein’s 1932 movie of the same title is unequivocal (the Russian director was one of Oscar’s heroes), but it is also a nod to Mexican nationalism (since the 1910 revolution, this exclamation is part of public celebrations). Thus, and despite all the criticism, Oscar’s ending is a nationalist cry that appeals to a well-known ‘we’. This contrasts with Frank’s video whose final image assumed that it was better to cut oneself off from any Argentinean national identity. Mexicanos wants Mexico to live again, and hopes that this video will help to do that. Despite its constitutive cynicism and parody, it is not far from the kind of self-critical nationalism that schools promote nowadays, as well as the type of individualized self-positioning that schools cultivate – critical and reflexive.

Youth media production as a site of learning cosmopolitan identities These two videos offer examples of young people’s connected learning through media production. They make visible different trajectories of participation in global and local knowledge flows of the media landscape. The videos are full of cosmopolitan references, and while both young producers are from Latin ­A merica, their narratives are not necessarily peripheral in how they position themselves in relation to world history and politics. Their technological fluency is limited, although Oscar is certainly knowledgeable about film history and expressive resources. Both authors are middle class, and use the scaffolding that their parents’ education and resources have given them in much the same way that Willett (2009) found in her analysis of UK video producers. In their narratives, it is clear that these two young people ‘are not mirrors or receptors of a free-floating global youth culture’; on the contrary, ‘they confront,

Figure 9.3  Still from Mexicanos.

Digital media production outside the school  145 mediate, and experience things in diverse and not predictable ways’ (McLeod 2009, p. 284). Both use the global as a mirror and as an unavoidable reference for the articulation of the nation, but the nation is critically presented as a set of visual and verbal clichés or slogans, an oppressive identity defined by a double-­ standards morality and by internal exclusions (Cox et al. 2009). These videos reflect a remarkable uneasiness and un-homeliness as part of a cosmopolitan self (Pollock et al. 2000). The multi-vocality of these videos is impressive. In their productions, brand culture, celebrity fandom, national icons, pop music, spoof videos, national cuisines, and TV and social history are mobilized to produce critical versions of the Argentinean or Mexican self. Frank and Oscar are playing with media, moving comfortably through icons, references, costumes, and producing themselves as popular creators – in Oscar’s case more comfortably than in Frank’s. In this kind of positioning, it is also possible to see the marks of social class and of a liberal education that entitles these young men to a particular reading of the world, as well as the effects of the digital visual culture that invites tinkering with images and texts. Brand culture has a remarkable presence in both videos, despite their critical stance. As Sarah Banet-Weiser describes: areas of our lives that have historically been considered noncommercial and “authentic” – namely, religion, creativity, politics, the self – have recently become branded spaces… [which] are increasingly only legible in culture through and within the logic and the vocabulary of the market. (Banet-Weiser 2012, p. 14) This shift is, for her, highly ambivalent, as it implies a duty to cultivate a selfbrand and blurring of the differences between advertising and self-expression (van Dijck 2013). Banet-Weiser (2012) says that the ‘adolescents’ question of “Who am I?” becomes more “How do I sell myself ?”… precisely as a way of ­figuring out personal identity’ (p. 66). Thus, the YouTube amateur videos might end up working both as ‘home made documents’ for the family (and friends) and as ‘audition tapes that enhance the popularity of users’ (Berliner 2014, p. 298). This is most evident for Oscar as an artist-in-the-making, who sees his productions as part of the construction of his brand and negotiates the limits of privacy and disclosure very consciously. Yet they might also taint Frank’s participation, and his disappointment, showing that activism in social media is increasingly indistinguishable from self-promotion, and posing uncomfortable questions about the kind of public life and the care of the common good that this participation enables (Mukherjee & Banet-Weiser 2012). For these young men, their video productions are acts of sincerity and of authentic critique. Their “low tech” nature underscores how these amateur videos are more “authentic” and more “real” than professional media. In the case of these teenagers, authenticity comes with irony and parodic play; in Frank’s case through pictures and short phrases and intertitles, and in Oscar’s case through

146  Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag an ironic MTV-style anchor who mocks the average Mexican and makes sharp, at times cruel, comments about the hierarchies and ethics that organize interpersonal relationships and national identity. ­ arodic How to read this irony? Which kind of knowledge is mobilized in these p gestures? For Banet-Weiser (2012), brand culture loves controversy (p. 86), and that generates a different politics of ambivalence: The articulation of critique, or of subversion, is often co-opted and ­d isplaced within brand cultures. But its function – calling attention to inequities in global labor practices – remains subversive of power. (Banet-Weiser 2012, p. 214) However, irony can be considered today as the ultimate brand-image. Jacques Rancière is less optimistic than Banet-Weiser about its subversive power: Have not all the forms of critique, play, and irony that claim to disrupt the ordinary circulation of images been annexed by that circulation?… The procedures of cutting and humour have themselves become the stock-in-trade of advertising. (Rancière 2007, pp. 27–28) In the case of Mexicanos, reference to the ambivalence of parody is quite evident.8 In interview, Oscar said that one can say whatever one wants to say ­w ithout people understanding it. As with Frank, there is a sense in which it is clear for these producers that watching and feeling become more important than a rational understanding of the content. The mode of address in many digital platforms seeks the emotional rather than the rational, and an immediate affective adhesion (van Dijck 2013). But it might also explain why both videos use inserts and intertitles to convey their messages: images alone are perceived as too ambivalent. Their ethical and political stance, thus, seems to be that of the ironic: Irony presupposes the endlessness of the process of interpretation, while cynicism presupposes a (lost) faith; he or she believes that pleasure and sharing the sensible are the only truths that humans can reach. (Berardi 2013, p. 67) We believe that more research should be done into the kinds of learning that the parodic gesture mobilizes, and how it relates to schooled knowledge. In our research, we saw several examples of students’ school assignments mobilizing the same ironic genres that are visible in the two videos analysed in this chapter. These school assignments were celebrated by teachers as clever commentaries but not interrogated for their ethical or political positionings – thus, implicitly validating the languages and styles of contemporary digital media. Two suggestions could be made here for working with and through irony in classrooms. First, to bring a historical perspective to the study of ironic

Digital media production outside the school  147 gestures and the carnivalesque, in order to interrogate under which conditions such modes are able to question the status quo exemplified by Rancière’s (2007) warning quoted above about how the ironic gesture has been appropriated by advertising. Second, to explore the ethics of parody and how such responses stand in relation to human suffering or injustice. Frank learned this ambivalence when he posted his video on YouTube, yet the school was not able to help him work through his questions and produce a different text to share with others. Bringing into classrooms these challenges about parody and irony in digital media might help students to learn to use these languages and styles, and also to be more reflexive about how they are participating in contemporary culture. To conclude, we would say that these texts provide a rich point of entry to complex structures of feeling about the nation, the world, the self, and about being a teenager today using new expressive possibilities that connect several paths of learning. True, these are personal narratives as well, and they are constrained by technological limitations and by the media knowledge that these young men can mobilize in their productions. However, the topics, icons, rhythms, frames, openings and endings visible in these productions are telling us something valuable about the ways in which the global circulation of knowledge and cultural references confronts, bumps, obstacles, detours and redirects in its encounter with other flows that occur at other scales, for example those of national politics, the narratives of national identities at schools, or the expressive possibilities that young people have because of their upbringing or available ­cultural resources. As educators and researchers, we should engage more ­actively in studying and intervening in the connections between different modes of learning about national and cosmopolitan identities, in order to start richer conversations about possible futures.

Notes 1 This position has seen the unexpected confluence of transnational agencies such as OECD and the World Economic Forum, media corporations and foundations, and progressive educators. For a critical reading of this confluence, see Masschelein and Simons (2013) and Williamson (2013). 2 By self-positionings, we understand the production of a particular stance from where the self relates to her/himself, others, and the world (see Yates 2012). 3 The metaphor of the path or trail is related to Ingold’s emphasis on knowing as moving around an environment, walking and feeling/hearing/sensing what is around and connecting these observational data with previous knowledge (Ingold 2011). The path is not to be considered as prefigured but as a spatially and time-bound activity that defines a cursus, a trajectory of movement. Any learning situation, then, implies trails of knowledge that are traversed differently by each knower. Yet, as Jan Nespor argues, in these different trails there are ‘very deeply worn channels’ that organize the movement – schooling and media being two of these, but also visual culture (Nespor 1994, p. 15). 4 Both countries, but most notable Argentina, adopted technology-intensive programs of digital inclusion in their school systems: Conectar Igualdad in Argentina (since 2010) and MiCompu.Mx (later Mexico Aprende) since 2013. To study how these programs were enacted in schools, four research projects were developed in

148  Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag ­ rgentina and Mexico between 2011 and 2016, which included classroom obserA vations in public secondary schools, in-depth interviews with teachers and students, and ­a nalysis of school homework that involved digital media (videos, documents, visual ­presentations). Overall, more than 40 classes were observed in the different projects, including different disciplinary subjects; 82 students and 64 teachers were interviewed in depth, on occasions twice or three times; the research corpus includes over 60 audio visual texts made by students. 5 As Rebekka Willet (2009) points out, it is not uncommon that top producers are male, which is partly related to a long history of gendered constructions of the relationships with technology and media. See also Dussel and Dahya (2017). 6 There are almost no nudes or explicit sex in the images he selected; the reference to pornography seems to refer to a certain obscenity of images – images of power and money, more than imagery of a sexual nature. 7 See Strauven (2016) for a provoking analysis of the effects that these early experimentations with filmmaking and visual technologies might produce in future developments of filmic languages and of cinema more generally. 8 The ambivalent use of irony and parody has been discussed for some time now in media literacy research: see Grace and Tobin (1996).

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10 Remixing meanings, tools, texts, and contexts Digital literacy goes to school John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio

Introduction: resisting binaries To make meaning is to remix – to reassemble, re-voice, revise, and re-contextualize words, images, and media from all manner of symbol systems, piecing together, re-fashioning, sculpting, making something else from something found, and thereby, in the end, putting one’s mark, one’s meaning into the world. Yet, for most recent history in the USA, notions of meaning-making other than remix have held sway in most schooled settings, where aesthetically simpler, language-based forms of sense-making and knowledge production dominate, delivered through pedagogies overwhelmingly governed by systems of testing and accountability. It is not surprising, then, that the last twenty years have seen spring up alternative spaces for composing, creating, and making, outside the school day and the school door; spaces often designed to be consciously defiant of commonplace notions of learning, literacy, and being schooled. Importantly, this growth has occurred in tandem with and, to a significant extent has been fueled by, the proliferation of digital tools that facilitate multimodal meaning-making. Like others in the fields of digital media, literacy studies, and the learning sciences, we have participated in the out-of-school movement, by designing, implementing, and researching after-school and community-based programs for children, youth, and adults (Cole 1996; Erstad 2010; Hull & Schultz 2002; Ito et al. 2013). This work has been motivated by our long-term, ongoing desire to put into practice more expansive notions of literacy and composing as remix, along with pedagogical approaches that focus on fostering individual voice and local and global connectivity, and to document and theorise the same. In the present chapter, we recount the most recent instantiation of our work, which centered on the creation and use of a set of digital apps to facilitate remix ­practices.1 However, another equally important aim of the chapter is to step across, if you will, the “in–out” boundary that has characterized a good deal of work in literacy, digital media studies, and the learning sciences. What we have experienced through our projects over the years is that contexts are more permeable than the binaries we adopt to characterize them. Rather than fenced off and hierarchically ordered  contexts – that  is,

152  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio the  non-schooled  and the informal and the everyday versus (and at-themercy-of) the schooled and the formal and the academic – we see flows and ruptures, influences and mergers, shifts and realignments. Indeed, the work we report here represents an explicit effort to take digital remix tools and practices, birthed online in popular culture, not just to school, but to university, the bastion the world over of traditional values and practices around literacy. As we shall see, this remixing of institutional contexts is not for the faint of heart but entails, rather, serious challenges and dilemmas for students and teachers. It also offers, we hope to show, enlivening opportunities to experience what are arguably quintessential 21st century meaning-making practices, and to reimagine, at least at a modicum, dominant conceptions of schooled spaces and some of the pedagogical, philosophical problems that have long bedeviled them.

Theorizing remix: modalities, engagement, and authorial agency The term remix describes the art of digital blends, most commonly in music – beats and rhymes self-consciously appropriated, repurposed, and circulated anew. But other modalities and artifacts can be easily remixed in a digital, modular world, and it is this broader understanding of a contemporary, authorial, digitally driven process, with roots of course in pre-digital times, that informs our work. Media theorist Lev Manovich (2001) observes that for a text to be remixable, it must be “modular,” made up of components that can be pulled apart and put back together again, combined with components from other texts, while each maintains its separate identity. Modularity, then, becomes a defining characteristic of new media objects (Manovich 2001), and “remix” becomes the cultural logic associated with new media cultures, as artists come to expect their work to be remixed rather than to stand inviolable. Lessig (2008), commenting on the thorny issues of copyright law in a remix culture, argues the importance of digital remix as an everyday writing practice, believing it to be the most invigorated cultural form of the day. Knobel and Lankshear (2008), working from a sociocultural perspective on literacy, lay out the educational landscape, identifying the significant challenges but greater possibilities of integrating into classrooms what they term the ‘art and craft of endless hybridization’ (p. 32). To such accounts of remix as a cultural phenomenon can be added complementary theorizations of communication and authorship. Most descriptions of remix point out its functional fungibility: that is, the process of remix can and does apply to language image, music, movies, sound. This is a broadening of the symbolic repertoire that can be routinely drawn upon and manipulated for communication and knowledge construction. In contrast to the traditionally logocentric focus of schooling, communication is ‘multiplex’ and ‘versatile,’ as characterized by anthropologist Ruth Finnegan. Indeed, Finnegan (2002) believes that ‘our practice of interconnecting at once through many modes,

Digital literacy goes to school  153 simultaneously, overlappingly, subtly, differentially’ (p. 243), across time and space, is one of humanity’s distinctions. Likewise, theorists of multimodality such as Kress (2003) have long emphasized the design decisions a new media age calls upon writers to make, ‘choosing among and using available technologies, media, and modalities for expression and communication’ (p. 117) – choices, like the meaning-making capacities that Finnegan described, which are part and parcel too of remix culture. The focus that interests us here is the process of taking symbolic material, at present from a vast digital ocean of available words, images, sounds, memes, artifacts, and discourses, and combining or otherwise acting upon those excerpted bits to construct and offer meanings in one’s own contexts, a process that in turn stimulates further acts of appropriation and meaning-making, or remix. This characterization recalls Bakhtin’s (1986) famous chain of speech communication, where every utterance indexes and echoes previous ones as well as anticipates future responses. It also reminds us of a related pre-digital formulation by Bauman and Briggs (1990) that elucidates certain aspects of the process and power of symbolic borrowing and remixing. Writing about performativity and verbal art, these linguistic anthropologists consider how texts can be lifted from one context and recontextualized or recentered in another. They discuss the formal features of oral texts when they are thus transformed: to decontextualize and recontextualize a text is to exercise authorial control, creative power, and agency. But to be able to do so, caution Bauman and Briggs, requires: access to texts, the authority to act upon them, the competence to transform them, and the cultural capital to promote their value. These factors still hold sway in a variety of contexts and institutions, including of course classrooms and schooling, where injunctions against plagiarism bump up against an ethic of remix.

Theorizing learning: activities, networks, and assemblage Bauman and Briggs’ (1990) discussion of textual economies begins to complicate the power and freedom of remix as a creative compositional practice, especially when that practice is itself recontextualized, recentered, taken out of popular cultural, informal contexts, and introduced into classrooms and formal educational settings. Put another way, understanding remix practices in a university setting requires us to analyze, not simply individual or even collective acts of symbolisation, but the sociomaterial systems that mediate, give meaning to, sustain, disrupt, and even thwart those activities. We think of sociomaterial systems as the human and non-human actors (including digital tools and data) that make up an activity in a particular institutional space and the relations and effects that flow from their juxtaposition and intersection. Such systems have been theorised and operationalised in a number of ways, building from Vygotsky, who understood human development as mediated by both material and psychological tools, such as oral and written language and other symbolic systems, acquired gradually, over time, through social

154  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio interaction (Vygotsky 1986; cf. Cole 1996; Freedman et al. 2016). V ­ ygotsky put symbols and tools front and center in his account of individual and societal development, and such a theorization that traces their starring role in ­meaning-making is key in contemporary explorations of digital media and remix practices. Vygotsky’s work has been buttressed and its reach expanded to include, not only individuals and their uses of tools and signs, but also “activity systems” that speak to collective action in communities and institutional contexts. Activity systems are dynamic and changeable, as different participants, with their own histories, values, and motives, confront each other and the system’s organizing rules and norms. Engeström (1987) argues that we must therefore analyze systems in relation to one another, looking especially at the intersection, or the “contradictions,” between and among them. In our case, then, we need to be alert to the tensions that surface when digital media and digital remix practices from popular cultural, informal settings are introduced into the activity system of the university classroom, with its own norms, requirements, rules, and textual expectations. We also should be on the lookout for moments of “expansive learning” that are byproducts of these intersections, such as new and emerging literacy practices and the creation of new social and symbolic capital. While Vygotsky focuses us squarely on the semiotic mediation that is the linchpin for individual development, and activity theory importantly expands the unit of analysis from the individual to the collective and its setting, organization, and interactions (Engeström 2014; Cole 1996; Cole, Engeström  & Vasquez 1997), we believe that our digital world increasingly requires a theorization of learning sensitive to the ways the outcomes of schooling represent the emergent expressions of dynamic systems: shifting configurations of people, technologies, and digital information. Actor–Network Theory (ANT), as proposed by Latour (2005), offers a way to understand social relations that famously insists upon the distribution of agency among humans and non-­ humans alike, both of whom he terms “actants.” ANT appeals to us because it gives equal pride of place to people, artifacts, practices, technologies, participant structures, and pedagogies, to list a few of the important actants in a classroom or other educational space. It also provides a path to thinking about the composition and influence of remixes, including how disparate elements can be juxtaposed, linked, and combined, and how such symbolisations can take on a life of their own. But ANT also warns us not to obsess over the impact of a single actant, if we seriously want to understand social relations of an actor–network, but rather to hold the dynamic association and emergence of the whole in view. The same is true of “assemblage,” a related conceptual approach useful for further extending an understanding of sociomaterial systems. While ANT’s major metaphor is of course the network, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) proposed “assemblages” in order to suggest similarly the relations that are created when disparate elements temporarily coalesce. Assemblage, unlike ANT, puts

Digital literacy goes to school  155 trust in human creative and expressive capacities, as opposed to non-human actants, partly by assigning a primary role for “wish” (the translation of the French désir) in making assemblages and in unmaking or dis-assembling them (Muller & Schurr 2016). We have employed the notion of assemblage in our research in several ways. Most generally, it served as a heuristic when we considered the process of taking tools and practices from informal or popular cultural contexts and re-contextualizing them in the formal learning settings of university classrooms. More particularly, assemblage thinking helped us capture the dynamics and flux of networked learning spaces, where students and artifacts, technologies and media, and assignments and pedagogy come together in sometimes unpredictable ways. We have leveraged assemblage concepts and the notion of ‘component planes’ to account for changes in student participation across semesters, which we position as the “emergent effects” (DeLanda 2006) of shifting configurations of software tools and course designs (Scott & Nichols 2017). Thus, in what can seem, especially in formal educational contexts, to be impenetrable bureaucratic and disciplinary regimes, an assemblage approach remains alert to unexpected moments of possibility. Last, and as we will demonstrate briefly in later sections, the metaphor of assemblage can capture well the authorial, compositional practices that constitute remix in the context of digital tools for creation, curation, and collaboration.

Digital literacy goes to university: designing SuiteC Our interest in remixable content and its intersections with the social and the dynamic space of the classroom began in an urban community center on the west coast of the United States. It was here, almost twenty years ago, that university researchers, students, and staff began working and playing with local youth, community members, educators, artists, and technologists, attempting to spread the narrative power of movie-making across university and community contexts and to learn from the same. Digital stories, at that time, were a means of telling personal stories and representing a self, writing and rewriting who one was and who one wanted to be, by remixing memories, emotions, places, people, and dreams (Hull 2003; Lambert 2013). Indeed, sometimes we saw young people in our after-school programs invent their biographies anew, moving, for example, from reputations as disengaged during the school day to interested participants and skillful communicators after school (Hull & Katz 2006). Our research focused on naming the power of multimodality, exploring the value added from braiding together the modalities of image, word, and music (Hull & Nelson 2005). We also explored the actants of after-school – the kids’ trajectories, the artifacts they produced, the participant structures of informal learning, community values and norms, and the technological affordances and constraints of the tools we used (Hull et al. 2006). Such a focus helped us understand, for example, why youth sometimes struggled to articulate a desired identity, and how digital stories could take on a life of their own, traveling to

156  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio school and beyond, framing youth’s accomplishments and aspirations (Nelson, Hull, & Roche-Smith 2008). If early work on digital storytelling revealed the authorial power of expanding people’s communicative repertoires with remix practices and tools-of-themoment, our later work on global social network exchanges magnified that value and its challenge, as youth connected across time and space to speak to a distant audience of peers. Building a private social network for youth, and linking the young people we knew locally with youth around the world, this research aimed to exploit the functionality of social media, turning it toward educational purposes (Hull & Stornaiuolo 2010), and using it to foster “cosmopolitan” literacy practices of reading and writing and remix (cf. Silverstone 2007). It traced the sometimes striking, potent influence of individual digital stories on network youth, following an artifact from country to country, program to program, and author to viewers, and documenting how it was received, mirrored, and reappropriated (Hull, Stornaiuolo & Sahni 2010). There were instances in which youth transcended language, geography, and culture to connect and understand (Hull & Stornaiuolo 2014), moments that relied heavily on the multiple senses that Finnegan celebrated as the quintessence of human communication. But as Bakhtin would have expected, students also strained to take up the dialogic challenge, both because of the complexity of the task at hand, and also because of deficiencies in the early social networking tools and supporting sociomaterial systems (Hull & Scott 2013; Stornaiuolo 2012). Such challenges continued when we took what we had learned, from both strands of design-based research, to university classrooms. In a profound sense, higher education became part of the vast network of digitally driven, sociomaterial systems many years ago: courses, administrative infrastructure, and communication systems each have their major online components, while media platforms and practices conceived half-outside the academy knit together students’ school and non-school lives. Despite the ubiquity of digital tools and their uptake by almost everyone, universities and, to an extent, most formal educational systems, stand in ambivalent relation to them, lamenting the loss of physical co-presence for students and teachers and worrying that learning online is qualitatively different from what is possible in a brick-andmortar classroom. We set out to address some of these concerns, believing that our own and others’ research on digital remix and networked communication out-of-school provided insight on how to imagine online courses in ways that improves the experience of teaching and learning rather than subtracting from it. Thus, we both developed an online education course on literacy and language in a global, digital world and the software tools, known as SuiteC, to help mediate that course. To remix those practices and tools from our out-of-school projects required that we imagine how those parts fit together coherently with not only the material and bureaucratic components of the tertiary institution, but also the wishes of the university as an emergent configuration of people, parts, and policies. For example, the university values grades as both a mode of evaluation and to

Digital literacy goes to school  157 report achievement in a consistent, recognizable format. Therefore, both our proposed course model and software had to be imagined in relation to something like grades, which were absent in the after-school context. In our tool designs, we were committed to the more expansive view of composing and texts that motivated much of the after-school work around multimodality and digital storytelling. More than just a variety of modes and media formats, we wanted to preserve the malleability and dynamism of living, breathing texts by situating all course media content in a remix ecosystem – one which allowed texts to be curated, shared, discussed, juxtaposed, and combined with each other in an ongoing cycle. Our version of such a remix ecosystem is captured in the Asset Library and Whiteboards, two of the four applications that comprise the SuiteC learning software. In the Asset Library (see Figure 10.1), students curate media content of all types, and tag media with course hashtags representing assignment prompts. Like the searchability of media on sites like Instagram, SuiteC offers a way to organize media according to various dimensions of social indexing. Students are asked to view, like, discuss, and pin “assets” created by peers, as well

Figure 10.1  The Asset Library.

158  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio as remix those assets in the Whiteboards. The Whiteboards (see ­Figure 10.2) allow students to collaborate in real time by designing multimedia artefacts that include shapes, free-hand drawing, text, and media from the Asset Library. When Whiteboards are ready to be shared, they can be published into the Asset Library, to be further remixed by peers, while the Asset Library tracks all occurrences of asset reuse back to any original web URLS. This last feature satisfies not only a pedagogical desire around textual transformations, but also an institutional mandate to protect against plagiarism and to foster academic honesty. To take advantage of the abilities of the Asset Library and Whiteboards, we situated them in a curriculum that orchestrated diverse kinds of composing and remixing activities in weekly modules. Students were asked to curate or share media artifacts (such as an image from the web) to the Asset Library to represent a concept from the course reading. Another expectation was that students would collaborate with peers to create Whiteboards that reused assets and other design elements to explore connections among different representations, their own experiences, and language and literacy theories (see Figure 10.3). Activities were carefully coordinated between the two tools, and intended to scaffold cycles of collaborative remixing across several weekly activities. We expected every student to add content to the course, in the form of images, texts, and commentary, believing that such creative practices were core to the kind of learning about literacy and symbolisation that we wanted to promote. But we also recognised that such participation might frustrate or unnerve students accustomed to more logocentric, mastery-based courses.

Figure 10.2  W hiteboards depicting “Add Asset” feature.

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Figure 10.3  R eusing Assets to represent terminology from a course reading.

In contrast to an after-school context, where activities can be more flexibly organized to preserve autonomy and “fun” and where the intended audience is peers and family, we anticipated that the formalisation of those creative leisure-type activities into graded assignments could make them more of a chore for students, and reorient a performance towards instructors rather than peers. To ­encourage students to share and produce assets that attracted interest from peers, as well as to track student participations, collaborations, and media transformations over time, SuiteC contains two other applications: the Engagement Index and Impact Studio. The Engagement Index (see Figure 10.4) allows instructors to configure point values for all of the social/collaborative activities that ­students engage in in the Asset Library and Whiteboards. Students earn points through their c­ ontributions and the engagement those contributions generated from peers, and their sum scores are displayed on a course Leaderboard. To track students’ participation and impacts on the course community in a more fine-grained way, the Impact Studio (see Figure 10.5) includes four visualizations that delineate students’ participation: (1) the Activity Timeline that dynamically plots all interactions with peers and the content of those ­interactions; (2) the Total ­Activities bar charts that show the breakdown of the different forms of ­participation a student engages in via the Asset Library and ­W hiteboards; (3)  the Activity Network that shows social ties formed among students and the nature of their interaction history; and (4) Trending and Most Impactful Assets in the Asset Library.

Figure 10.4  E  ngagement Index: “Points Configuration” and “Leaderboard”.

Figure 10.5  I mpact Studio: “Activity Network” “Activity Timeline,” “Total Activities”.

162  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio

Boundaries and permeations: sociomaterial relations unfold through remix For the undergraduates (and instructors) who took part in our new online course with the SuiteC tools, we observed a complex, at times contentious, negotiation among the participants around how best to situate such a learning experience within the spectrum of expectations and logistical structures of a university course. These continual negotiations were necessary, despite our best efforts to anticipate and address some of the obvious incongruences between digital media practices drawn out-of-school from popular culture, and participant structures and course requirements associated with school – like attending a lecture or taking a multiple-choice quiz or working alone to write an essay. We locate these tensions and what they allowed us to discover by assembling illuminating examples gleaned from several years of data collected on the use of the SuiteC in our online undergraduate course (enrolling across five semesters approximately 350 students), including an ethnographic and a design-based dissertation project (DiZio 2017; Scott 2018). We have taken a mixed-method approach that fuses ethnographic and user-experience techniques, data mining, and content analysis to identify emergent practices of meaning-making and knowledge production in the course. Focusing on the boundaries and permeations between the after-school context and the university course context, we organize our findings across two dimensions of student and instructor activity, each of which intersects with the technological and pedagogical designs of the course experience – the sociomaterial system – and which come into being through various forms of remix.

Texts in motion Our effort to resituate the creative, personal, and multimodal digital composing practices that highlighted student activity in the after-school programs required us to reimagine those activities in a semester-long course. While in previous university courses, we had grown accustomed to introducing a multimodal project (for example, ‘create a digital story’ rather than ‘write an essay’) as a kind of oneoff assignment to encourage students to critique the predominance of print text, we used SuiteC to make multimodal designing an integral and recurring learning activity. As part of the course design and mandated assignments, students created or shared or remixed several multimodal artifacts each week. Most often they worked individually or in tandem to create artifacts with the Whiteboard tool, guided by curriculum prompts asking them to reuse visual components from the Asset Library to make connections among their personal experiences, popular culture, and issues in education and literacy. Composing activities included working with a partner to create language maps, designing a timeline of literacy tools, remixing past assets to represent key terms from a reading, and developing visual outlines for papers (see Figure 10.6). Such assignments raised the stakes: they no longer represented a break from the norm, but rather a new

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Figure 10.6  W hiteboard examples: language map.

norm – one that positioned multimodal design as a regular and demanding portion of the course’s workload that instructors would see and sometimes evaluate (Jewitt, Bezemer & O’Halloran 2016). In the after-school context, evaluations were not absent, but rather were delivered by peers and the community in the form of complements or criticisms, with teachers focusing primarily on supporting youth’s composing and inspiring their thinking. But in the university, instructors were expected on occasion to evaluate a Whiteboard and even to assign it a numerical score – a practice that conflicted with the spirit of creative, personal meaning-making activities. Instructors further had a difficult time weighting the various dimensions of an artifact: How well was it designed? How did it demonstrate understandings of the concept or term? When authored collaboratively, who contributed what, and was that collaboration evident in the artifact?

164  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio Ambivalence on the part of the instructors about evaluation was compounded by a lack of prior experience on the part of students in designing multimodal texts, making it difficult to establish a shared understanding about what constituted, in a very deliberate and quantifiable sense, an ‘A’ artifact. Whereas the digital stories of after-school authors could be appreciated and celebrated as expressions of each student’s life without a quantified measure of their worth, the expectations in a classroom, on the other hand, tended toward methods of assessment that could be defended as transparent and rigorous. Alternately, when students in the university class leapt outside their compositional comfort zone to create a digital story in response to an assignment to write a ‘literacy autobiography,’ they were sometimes taken aback, even disappointed, when their instructors adhered to a rubric and evaluated their work, rather than recognizing and celebrating their aesthetic, intellectual, or socio-emotional achievements. To engage in remix practices, or to recontextualize a text in Bauman and Briggs’ (1990) terms, requires the assumption and exercise of an authorial agency that students in most classrooms generally do not have. Students’ uncertainties and frustrations around the evaluation process sometimes deterred them from engaging in multimodal activities when given a choice between them and more traditional academic activities. As one student describes: Never in my life have I ever been graded on a media essay type… So, I don’t know what the standard is… So I’d rather take the safer route. The route that I know I’m going to type a nine-page paper and then I’m going to submit it rather than I’m going to do some with paper and some of it oral. (Interview, Eva, 2 March 16 2016) In this case, the “safer route” refers to Eva’s familiar academic literacy practices, including a clearer set of expectations around writing papers, such as the amount of time it would take to produce and the instructor’s approach to evaluation. Even though Eva was a prolific blogger in her life outside of school, managing her own website and producing multimodal texts regularly, for her the translation of these practices into her academic life remained problematic. Consistent across both the university course and the after-school program, successful composing opportunities, and the resonance of those artifacts, also depended on the ease with which students could produce compelling material with limited mastery of the entire technological toolset. One of the key innovations in media production software like iMovie over the past decade has been to ease the barrier of entry for people with limited editing experience, and to enable novice users to transform a deck of images into an animated slideshow with visually enticing transitions and high-resolution effects. In surveys and interviews, students reported that the Whiteboards lacked sufficient design features and were difficult to use compared to other similar, more familiar tools. Frustrations around the usability of the tool no doubt led some students to lose interest in carefully constructing their designs, concluding that it required too much effort to create the kinds of artifacts they envisioned.

Digital literacy goes to school  165 Impatience in the face of new technical challenges, the desire to receive high grades in a transparent grading or evaluation system, were two dominant actants in our online course. Put another way, competing activity systems were in conflict here, auguring against our pedagogical aims and technical designs. We became especially interested, then, in exploring why it was that many students nonetheless embraced the recurring semiotic, technical, and aesthetic challenges. Some students claimed that the Whiteboard activities were their favorite part of the course, a rare opportunity in their university education to think creatively and aesthetically. Such students spent extra time designing, and pursued inventive solutions to working around some of the technical limitations in the toolset (such as adding graphical background images and screenshots created in other software programs). We also observed that the assets mediated one of the signature intellectual moves in the course, from personal to theoretical and back again, helping to organize threads and forge connections among experiences, representations, and concepts. One student, Pieter, described how the process of using assets to recount his parents’ experiences in Soviet Armenia sparked a ‘breakthrough’ in his writing process. Pieter was able to source images and music to guide a reader through the connections between his life experiences and the literacy and language theories of the course. As we shifted our gaze from individual artifacts to the ongoing production and remixing of texts by a community, we began to realize that the colorful fabric of interconnected works was perhaps more meaningful as a whole than as distinct parts. Recognizing Whiteboards as think-pieces and visual experiments that form a series of related, overlapping designs proved to be an important step in better situating multimodal design activities in the course. Instead of thinking about “published” Whiteboards as analogous to digital stories, as polished artifacts meant to be experienced as a cohesive text, Whiteboards and Asset Library posts seemed more akin to brainstorms and fragments of ideas, which, when pieced together, revealed students’ emergent understandings of course concepts and themes. Positioning Whiteboards as provisional texts in motion helped instructors reorient how they communicated those assignments to students. Instructors felt more empowered to modify and remix individual activities described in the syllabus to better suit the needs and interests of their students, and to allow students more freedom in the assignments they chose to prioritize. In the absence of more synchronous opportunities for the learning community to engage with each other, the ongoing production of multimodal artifacts became a mode of dialogue between the participants that helped them make sense of the course content and each other.

Peer-sharing: remixing or copying? Texts in motion, strung together and assembled in the production of an online presence, reinforce the social life of artifacts in networked environments, as well as highlight the potential for shared artifacts to be taken up in various

166  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio ways by others in the network. Despite the many social networking applications and tools available to educators, mobilizing an active community of learners who share and engage with each other in educational contexts is a challenging task, in both after-school and university alike. Unlike the more unstructured social networking activities undertaken by students in our after-school work, the university course introduced a curriculum structure and schedule that deliberately orchestrated social interactions and media sharing. Course instructors maintained this facilitator role informally in pointing students to relevant work shared by a peer; however, the curriculum played a more prominent role in organizing diverse forms of remix practices that could take advantage of the SuiteC tools. Activity prompts early in a work week asked students to curate a media artifact – such as an image searched from Google or a web link – into the Asset Library to represent a course concept or term. ‘Redistributing’ content in this way (Edwards 2016), students remixed media by opening it up to a new audience who could proceed to commend it (through likes), engage in conversation with its creator or other viewers, or ignore it. Later in the work week, Whiteboard activities often required students to revisit assets shared by peers in the Asset Library, and reuse them to explain or contrast new topics or experiences with previous course ideas (see Figure 10.7). With 70–100 students contributing several assets per week, the Asset ­L ibrary became a vibrant space for sharing and peer interaction – a site where media and remixes of media formed an archive of the community’s emergent understandings of course ideas, and a portrait of each participant, detailed in their body of works and traces of interaction with the work of others. Noted one student: Yeah. I see myself changing a lot through getting exposed to different assets or opinions other people provide. Before I think I lived in a little bubble where I thought oh my opinion should be right in some way but then after getting exposed to these Ed classes or other socioeconomic related classes. I feel like oh I could be completely wrong sometimes. (Interview, Gloria, March 16 2016) Another student in a survey commented: The Asset Library and Whiteboard parts of this class are engaging and helpful because they allow me to better understand the material because I can see multiple varied examples of topics. For these students and others, the Asset Library, as a content assemblage of diverse representations shared by peers, helped to both ground understandings of abstract concepts in real-world examples and to expand or challenge their own cultural assumptions on issues which surfaced in those representations. Expanding worldviews through sharing and creating representations of local culture was a primary pedagogical aim in the founding of our after-school

Figure 10.7  A sset detail and asset reused in peer Whiteboard.

168  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio global youth network, and in that context, we found that generating spaces for dynamic social interaction led to unexpected learning opportunities, as a seemingly benign media artifact shared by one student in one local context sparked lively interaction when taken up by global peers with vastly different cultural lenses. Because the university course design aimed to foster similar kinds of encounters, the peer exchanges around the assets also revealed unanticipated learning opportunities, as students made sense of a complex fabric of media representations related to literacy, schooling, and equity. For example, one student created an asset that included an image of the Chicano Labor Movement flag to represent an idea relating to critical literacy. A student unfamiliar with this image commented on the asset, ‘I am surprised (and disturbed) by the resemblance of the flag on the left to the Nazi flag… Do you know if this was intentional? I’d be curious to learn more.’ Two students immediately replied to his comment: ‘I definitely see the resemblance, but the particular image I posted is the symbol of the United Farm Workers (UFW), a labor union during the 1960s… I think it’s an essential symbol of Chicanos.’ ‘Hi. Why are you disturbed by the flag’s image?… Frankly, I am disturbed at your lack of knowledge of this particular flag.’ In the way that a lively seminar or section discussion unearths unanticipated, even divergent, opportunities for learning, the redistribution of media in the form of assets makes possible these moments in an asynchronous, virtual environment. While examples of these moments abound, there were also times when the conversation in the Asset Library turned to noise, the equivalent of a seminar when everyone is talking at once. In surveys, students reported that the Asset Library became cluttered and difficult to navigate, even with various tagging and search features designed to keep content organized. Instead of feeling that their contributions had entered into a vibrant social space for feedback from peers, students experienced the clutter of hundreds of assets being added in the space of a week – a huge content dump, never to be explored by others except the instructor’s evaluative scrutiny. Remedying these content management issues required innovative solutions, both technical and pedagogical, to better manage content that could initiate generative social exchange, as well as to preserve students’ enthusiasm to create. Reducing the number of asset-creating activities and replacing them with other social activities was an obvious pedagogical solution to reduce the clutter and energize the discourse. As a technical solution, we designed the Impact Studio with the hypothesis that a more strategic entry-point for discovering assets and tracking social interactions would help students navigate the clutter and elevate the quality of discourse in the Asset Library. We also recognised that in making everyone’s activities transparent to the class, the Impact Studio introduced a level of surveillance that could act upon participants and other tools in the course. For example, the Impact Studio’s ability to survey activity provided instructors with new powers to monitor and arbitrate ethical matters related to academic integrity, particularly plagiarism. When one instructor became leary that a student

Digital literacy goes to school  169 had deliberately copied the Whiteboards of a peer, thereby violating the university’s honor code, the instructor examined the student’s Impact Studio page (see Figure 10.4 above) to verify that the student had indeed been engaged with the Whiteboards that he appeared to be copying. The student responded to his instructor’s query by explaining that he had viewed his classmates’ assets for inspiration, taking up the invitation to remix, a practice he assumed was encouraged, since everyone’s work was available for view. His response confirmed that an ethics around reuse and remix had to go beyond a record of interactions, and account for the meanings generated when someone acts upon an artifact with the intention of transforming it. The assemblage provides a useful conceptual model for organizing and mapping these transformations in meaning, and captures the compositional structure of the Whiteboards themselves, which are very deliberately assembled with various media elements (assets and shapes and text boxes arranged to form an emergent whole, whose parts can be broken off and added to other Whiteboard assemblages). While the visual appearance of an asset remains consistent across multiple Whiteboards, as part of a unique assemblage of media elements, the asset takes on new layers of meaning that are an expression of that emergent configuration. In the case of the student’s “copying,” a careful look at his Whiteboards as a configuration of media elements suggested that the trivial modifications he made to a peer’s Whiteboards did not qualify as a remix – that is, to transform or expand upon the meanings of an existing text. Given the complexities and lack of precedent in making an ethical determination about the academic integrity of a student’s remix practices, the instructor took a pedagogical rather than punitive approach with the student, suggesting some strategies to be more generative in how he reused and transformed peer media. In other cases, peer-sharing in SuiteC resulted in remix practices that were transformational as was the case when a single asset appeared in numerous Whiteboards throughout a semester, but each use taking up that asset in unique and expansive ways. In one assignment, students were asked to use media assets to represent Scribner’s (1984) three metaphors for literacy, a reading for the course (see Figure 10.8). A student chose to use three overlapping circles with images in each circle to represent both the individual metaphors and relations across metaphors. Once this artifact had been shared to the Asset Library, a peer noticed this design choice, and used a similar strategy in her own Whiteboard. However, she made modifications to the design itself, as well as reusing different assets as well as articulating different explanations of the concepts represented in those assets. Further, in her published Whiteboard, she noted, ‘I credit Jenna for giving me the idea of making interconnected circles in order to express how related Scribner’s metaphors are.’ In this case, the notion of ethical or responsible remix and peer-sharing appears fully realized, as the student was able to remix a multimodal design to develop her own understanding about a concept, expand upon the representations used to express these concepts, and give credit to her peer for the inspiration.

170  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio

Figure 10.8  Examples of students borrowing designs.

Conclusion: sociomaterial systems, assembled and remixed In piecing together these moments of frustration and celebration from our research in- and out-of-school over the last two decades, we have, in our illustrations, tried to disentangle the complex arrangements of tools, practices, values,

Digital literacy goes to school  171 and people from which the artifacts of composing and social interaction emerge. Among these sociomaterial configurations, we identified components unique to the university that shape and are shaped by participants, like evaluation systems, software features, and honor codes. At the same time, we demonstrated consistencies between these systems, overlappings in the ways digital tools and an ethos around remix and personal narrative opened spaces for unexpected discoveries and aesthetic transformations. Instead of drawing a hard line between in- and out-of-school, in effect, rendering those systems static, we turned to sociomaterial systems thinking to express how the artifacts and traces of social interaction emerge from dynamic systems of people and tools in motion. We have found in Activity Theory a model to analyze at the micro level how norms, expectations, and outcomes shape participants’ involvement and feelings toward an activity, such as in designing a Whiteboard for an assignment. With Actor–Network Theory, we were able to widen this vantage point from the activity to the broader network of people, machines, and information in which activities are embedded. And Assemblage Theory offers a perspective and set of terms to account for the dynamic, contingent nature of these networks, as components – such as a new digital composing tool or a grading rubric – are plugged in and out of different systems, generating emergent effects that stabilize or destabilize the identities of those systems. The assemblage also allowed us to refine our thinking around remix, both as a classroom practice but also, as we have argued here, as an elemental aspect of digital culture. The modularity and immediacy of our digital culture, its capacity to be remixed and rearranged, has no doubt shifted how we think about boundaries and borders, including those that have traditionally defined in-school and out-of-school spaces. Whether we privilege the ways that students’ out-of-school lives are becoming more regimented and structured – ­pedagogicised, if you will – or the ways that schools continue to usher in digital tools and gamified learning to reflect life outside of school, the remix offers a model for tracing how tools, practices, and artifacts are transformed as they become instantiated in daily life.

Notes 1 This chapter is based in part on work supported by the United States National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1623468 and 1623258. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the National Science Foundation. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Chamberlain Foundation; the Peder Sather Foundation; the University of California’s Innovative Learning Technology Initiative; the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Educational Technology Services at the University of California, Berkeley. Sincere thanks to the researchers, designers, programmers, students, and staff who have been key to this effort. They include (in alphabetical order): Jessica Adams, Anne-Sophie De Baets, Kyle Booten, John Crossman, Flint Hahn, Matt Hall, Adrienne Herd, Oliver Heyer, Paul Kerschen, Keith Martin, Nicolaas Matthijs, Greg Niemeyer, Amy Stornaiuolo, Jenn Stringer, Devanshi Unadkat, and Rian Whittle. 2 All personal names are pseudonyms.

172  John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio

References Bakhtin, MM 1986, Speech genres and other late essays, trans. VW McGee; M Holquist & C Emerson (eds.), University of Texas Press, Austin. Bauman, R & Briggs, CL 1990, ‘Poetics and performances as critical perspectives on language and social life’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 59–88. Cole, M 1996, Cultural psychology: a once and future discipline, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Cole, M, Engeström, Y & Vasquez, OA 1997, Mind, culture, and activity: seminal papers from the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. DeLanda, M 2006, A new philosophy of society, Continuum, New York, NY. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F 1983, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. R Hurley, M Seem & HR Lane, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. DiZio, JK 2017, Digital writing in the academy: gains, losses, and rigorous playfulness, Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Edwards, N 2016, ‘Framing remix rhetorically: toward a typology of transformative work’, Computers and Composition, vol. 39, pp. 41–54. Engeström, Y 1987, Learning by expanding: an activity–theoretical approach developmental research, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Engeström, Y 2014, Learning by expanding, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Erstad, O 2010, ‘Educating the digital generation’, Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 56–71. Finnegan, RH 2002, Communicating: the multiple modes of human interconnection, Routledge, New York, NY. Freedman, S, Hull, GA, Higgs, J & Booten, K 2016, ‘Teaching writing in a digital and global age: toward access, learning, and development for all’, Handbook of research on teaching (5th ed.), American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC. Hull, GA 2003, ‘At last: youth culture and digital media: new literacies for new times’, Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 229–233. Hull, GA & Schultz, K (eds.) 2002, School’s out: bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom practice, Teachers College Press, New York, NY. Hull, GA & Nelson, ME 2005, ‘Locating the semiotic power of multimodality’, Written Communication, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 224–261. Hull, GA & Katz, ML 2006, ‘Crafting an agentive self: case studies of digital storytelling’, Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 43–81. Hull, GA & Stornaiuolo, A 2010, ‘Literate arts in a global world: reframing social networking as cosmopolitan practice’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 85–97. Hull, GA & Scott, J 2013, ‘Curating and creating online: identity, authorship, and viewing in a digital age’, in K Drotner & K Shroder (eds.) Museum communication and social media: the connected museum, Routledge, New York, NY. Hull, GA & Stornaiuolo, A 2014, ‘Cosmopolitan literacies, social networks, and “proper distance”: striving to understand in a global world’, Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 15–44. Hull, GA, Kenney, NL, Marple, S & Forsman-Schneider, A 2006, Many versions of masculine: an exploration of boys’ identity formation through digital storytelling in an afterschool program, Afterschool Matters Occasional Papers, The Robert Bowne Foundation, New York, NY.

Digital literacy goes to school  173 Hull, GA, Stornaiuolo, A & Sahni, U 2010, ‘Cultural citizenship and cosmopolitan practice: global youth communicate online’, English Education, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 331–367. Ito, M, Gutiérrez, K, Livingstone, S, Penuel, B, Rhodes, J, Salen, K, et al. 2013, Connected learning: an agenda for research and design, Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, Irvine, CA. Jewitt, C, Bezemer, J & O’Halloran, K 2016, Introducing multimodality, Routledge, London. Knobel, M & Lankshear, C 2008, ‘Remix: the art and craft of endless hybridization’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 22–33. Kress, G 2003, Literacy in the new media age, Routledge, London. Lambert, J 2013, Digital storytelling: capturing lives, creating community, Routledge, New York, NY. Latour, B 2005, Reassembling the social, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lessig, L 2008, Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, Penguin, London. Manovich, L 2001, The language of new media, MIT Press, Boston, MA. Muller, M & Schurr C 2016, ‘Assemblage thinking and actor–network theory: conjunctions, disjunctions, cross-fertilisations’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 41, pp. 217–229. Nelson, ME, Hull, GA & Roche-Smith, J 2008, ‘Challenges of multimedia self-­ presentation: taking, and mistaking, the show on the road’, Written Communication, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 415–440. Scott, J 2018, Impactful participation: social media remix in online learning, Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Scott, J & Nichols, P 2017, ‘Learning analytics as assemblage: criticality and contingency in online learning’, Research in Education, vol. 98, no. 1, pp. 83–105. Scribner, S 1984, ‘Literacy in three metaphors’, American Journal of Education, vol. 93, no. 1, pp. 6–21. Silverstone, R 2007, Media and morality: on the rise of the mediapolis, Polity, Cambridge. Stornaiuolo, A 2012, The educational turn of social networking: teachers and their students negotiate social media, Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Vygotsky, LS 1986, Thought and language, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

11 Literacy practices and popular media culture in the “over-schooled” society Hyeon-Seon Jeong

Introduction: literacy in the “over-schooled” society This chapter explores the implications of attempts to recognize and incorporate students’ out-of-school culture within school, focusing on the challenges and difficulties that are raised for literacy education in the world’s most “overschooled” society, South Korea. Multiliteracies and new literacies theories and research have flourished in countries such as the UK, the USA and Australia over the past 20 years, fundamentally challenging the epistemology and ontology of traditional and functional literacy, proposing an ideological definition of literacy (Street 2000). This approach examines literacy as multiple, sociocultural and discursive practices, based on the participants’ own language and culture that vary according to diverse social contexts, modes and media of communication created by digital technology (New London Group 1996). This chapter discusses how these theoretical projects might have limitations in terms of their impact on formal literacy education in South Korea. South Korea is notorious for the long hours students take classes at both school and in private tutoring as well as for the low level of satisfaction and happiness that students might feel about their education. The cases that are presented in this chapter could be considered meaningful efforts to take into account students’ out-of-school experiences that are often excluded from formal education. However, these efforts are ultimately bound to have limitations due to the Korean context with its narrow vision of school literacy and a limited competitive education system that focuses exclusively on preparation for university entrance examination. This chapter will address the difficult issues of alienation of students in formal literacy education and the tensions between school literacy learning and students’ out-of-school culture through a case study of recent education reform that aimed to redress these difficulties in the current South Korean system. Sociocultural perspectives on literacy emphasize that ‘literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script, but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use’ (Barton 1994, p. 24), and that literacy practices are ‘particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts’ (Street 2000, p. 22). This approach to literacy has

Literacy and popular media culture  175 raised the importance of understanding how people use literacy in their everyday lives and of recognising and incorporating students’ out-of-school ways of practicing literacy, to make literacy learning (in school) more meaningful and relevant to students’ lived experiences. The view of literacy as social practices emphasizes that literacy is not a set of cognitive skills that a person can learn and test but sources of pleasure and even resources for building identities. The theory of multiliteracies has also extended the notion of literacy, placing significant emphasis on the role of power relationships in shaping literacy and literacy learning in schools and societies. It takes the view that meaning-making occurs through a variety of communicative channels ‘in which written linguistic modes of meaning are part and parcel of visual, ­audio, and spatial patterns of meaning’ (Cope & Kalantzis 2000, p. 5).

The South Korean context However, this view of literacy is geographically constrained, mostly in the ­A nglo-world such as the UK, USA and Australia: in contemporary South Korean schooling, definitions of literacy are still narrow and insufficiently reflect students’ lived experiences outside of school. In South Korea, approaches to literacy are dominated by traditional and functional understandings; even though multimodal and media texts are included in the mother tongue language curriculum, and digital technology is widely used in the classrooms for effective teaching and learning. The research and principles described in my opening two paragraphs seem to have had no impact on South Korean schools. Elements of the national curriculum for Korean language (Ministry of Education 2015) emphasize ‘using media in order to present content with consideration of effectiveness’, ‘reading diverse texts of different modes and media’, ‘selecting appropriate content and media considering purposes and themes’ and ‘evaluating author’s intentions and textual features for expression’. However, media are mostly taught from the perspective of functional literacy rather than as ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll et al. 1992) for literacy. Children’s and young people’s media culture, such as comics, webtoons, games, moving image contents and social media, are regarded as an impediment to ‘proper learning’, as a waste of time and a source of negative influences on their minds and behaviors. This is because literacy is viewed as a cognitive instrument for input and output of information rather than regarded as a sociocultural practice of reading and participating in the world, developing and shaping identities and cultures. School curriculum, textbooks, examinations, tests, classroom activities determine what might be socially and educationally valued as literacy (Luke & Freebody 1997). Research on the perception of children about their literacy education in South Korea showed that children might find literacy activities in school increasingly less pleasurable as they grew older because the activities focus exclusively on academic achievement rather than enjoyment (Yoon 2009). With the prevalence of private tutoring which has become a ‘shadow education system’ in South Korea (Bray 2009), out-of-school literacy activities tend to be

176  Hyeon-Seon Jeong filled with academic lessons and assignments; many students are taking classes or doing homework set by private tutoring ‘schools’ outside of school.1 As the introduction to this volume suggests, the existence and operation of private tutoring are related to the realities that formal schooling and the childcare system do not function properly. As there is a shortage of public childcare facilities for working parents (who often have to work overtime), private tutoring academies in music, art and physical education tend to function as substitutes for childcare for young children and lower-elementary school children. The report of the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education (Kim et al. 2016) showed that even 2-year-olds receive private tutoring due to the anxieties about early education as well as for childcare. However, the main purposes for receiving a private education were to supplement school education (76.8 percent), to advance learning (44.0 percent) and to prepare for admission to prestigious schools or universities (32.3 percent) (Statistics Korea 2017). In fact, South Korea has gained a notorious reputation for “over-schooling”, a term used to describe domestic situations where middle and high school students study late into the night even after spending the whole day at school. In this context, the average level of life satisfaction expressed by South Korean students is one of the lowest among PISA-participating countries and economies (Phillips 2013). This is in striking contrast with the results of PISA 2012 that showed that South Korean students’ academic achievements in areas such as reading and mathematics are among the highest. The analysis of 6,408 Korean elementary, middle and high school students’ learning time showed that out-ofschool study time was 203.2 minutes per day for middle school students, 189.2 minutes for high school students, and 151.7 minutes for elementary students (Eun 2015). The out-of-school study time included time spent in private tutoring as well as time spent at home studying alone. In a society where going to prestigious universities increases the chances of high earnings and stable employment, education has become highly competitive. Private education, starting in infancy, enhances educational inequalities that lead to widening socioeconomic inequalities.2 There has been a growing criticism that the PISA scores do not reflect the reality of public education in South Korea (Callahan 2015). South Korea has achieved extraordinary economic growth – the ‘miracle of the Han River’ – as it has recovered from the destruction of the Korean War in the 1950s, partly due to private investment by parents in their children’s education. There has been a consensus that everybody had to work hard to escape from poverty and that students should study hard and competitively for future success. Graduation from prestigious universities was believed to have been rewarded with high social status and economic wealth. However, since the financial crisis of the late 1990s, insecure employment and social inequality have increased, even though the economic effects of that crisis have been largely overcome. In this situation, parents have become even more anxious about their children’s future, which seems to be significantly determined by academic success and entrance to prestigious universities. School examinations and public examinations such as governmental officer selection examinations have required memorization

Literacy and popular media culture  177 of relevant subject knowledge and essay writing. In this context, private tutoring academies, known as hagwons, have been optimized for preparation for these tests, and therefore they have been regarded as places that students should attend to improve their grades (Bray 2009). While there are social pressures on parents to send their children to private tutors, there have been growing concerns that private tutoring has almost become a form of child abuse in the name of love in that children spend too much time and effort on private tutoring, and sacrificing their rights to play. In this context, a particular definition of literacy dominates. As functional literacy is closely connected with academic achievement, South Korean parents eagerly invest in their children’s reading in comparison with the other forms of cultural activity such as going to theatres or museums (Kim & Byun 2007). Reading comprehension is required for written examinations, and literacy skills are thought more likely to compensate for children’s other academic attainments. Therefore, parents invest more in their children’s reading by purchasing books, taking children to libraries and bookstores, and having discussions about books, not to mention investing in private tutoring, so as to encourage reading to become their children’s hobby in order to improve their reading skills. However, as the research tradition outlined in the opening to this chapter suggests, literacy is not simply an instrument of learning but is central to ways of understanding oneself and participating in the world. Popular media such as cartoons, animations, television entertainment, films, games and social media play important roles in children’s and young people’s lives as valuable identity resources (Dyson 2003) and ‘sponsors of literacy’ (Brandt 1998). Such ‘sponsors’ refer to people, objects and institutions that might be involved in forming, maintaining, promoting and controlling individuals’ literacy practices; this includes popular media, as well as parents, teachers, schools and churches. Indeed, literacy is not a universal or impermeable concept that does not change; its meanings vary across historical and sociocultural contexts. The spaces of literacy practices have been extended from pages of print media to the various screens of digital media in which written and oral languages are combined with images, graphics, sounds, moving images and hyperlinks. Media literacy theory and research on children’s media culture has found that children’s understandings of media, and their media production activities, are complex and valuable meaning-making processes (Buckingham 2003). In formal literacy education in South Korea, however, the understanding, production and utilization of digital media texts is mainly conducted from the perspectives of functional literacy in terms of dealing with information and technology, while the enjoyment of popular culture is largely ignored (Jeong et al. 2015). In the formal literacy curriculum of mother tongue education, the media are dealt with in terms of interpreting and presenting information such as advertising, news and websites. The subject of Arts deals with visual arts and culture, while the subjects of Moral Education and Social Studies focus on understanding the problems of the information society, mass media and popular culture. The arts education programs, which are provided by instructors who are dispatched to schools by

178  Hyeon-Seon Jeong the Korea Arts Education Service, might deal with the appreciation and creation of popular media culture, particularly in the genres of cartoons, animations and films. However, the number of schools and students having the benefit of such programs is small and connections between formal literacy education and arts education can also be very limited. In this context, popular media culture is hardly recognised as an informal and pleasurable literacy practice in the formal education curriculum of the school as a whole. The study of elementary school children’s out-of-school literacy practices reveals that children rarely recognize their popular media practices such as reading webtoons or writing fan-fictions outside school as meaningful literacy practices, just as their teachers and parents do not (Chung et al. 2015). In this situation, the school is not regarded as a place where students might practice ­literacy that they feel is pleasurable, and this results in students’ alienation from literacy. Therefore, there are important issues for literacy education in South ­Korea to address in terms of how the school curriculum might respond to changes in popular media culture; how it might address problems of literacy alienation; and how it might explore how these two issues might be interconnected.

Popular media culture as informal literacy practices Contemporary Korean society has been profoundly transformed by digital technology: 80.6 percent of households have desktop computers, notebook computers and smart pads; 95.8 percent of teenagers use the internet every day; and 72.2 percent of elementary school students have smartphones (Yim et al. 2013). Children and young people participate in reading, watching and responding to texts and images on the internet as well as talking to others online and distributing their productions. Because of the popularity of YouTube and the success of star creators of YouTube videos that target young children and elementary school children, elementary school students tend to idealize being a “YouTube creator” as a future career option. However, this extraordinary transformation in literacy practices has had little effect on popular understandings of literacy. Research and debates about digital literacy which are popular in Europe, North America and Australia have had very little impact on research and school literacy curriculum in Korea. Picture books, cartoons, animation, advertisements, news, text messages, PowerPoint slides and the internet are listed in the national curriculum for Korea as types of texts that can be used in literacy learning. While reading the ‘content’ of these types of texts might be practiced as the extension of comprehension activity, however, meaning-making of multimodal texts, the pleasures of audience participation and the sociocultural contexts of the production and consumption of texts tend to be ignored. In fact, media coverage and research regards the use of media such as smartphones as being an obstacle to reading and writing activities, and a source of negative influences on children in general (Kim & Shin 2015). Parents are advised to restrict children’s media use in the interests of helping their children to grow up as good readers and writers. For instance, parents are addressed in

Literacy and popular media culture  179 claims that a brain that is heavily exposed to visual content becomes a ‘popcorn brain’ (Cohen 2011) which makes it difficult to react properly to informational texts required for school work. In this way, digital parenting seems to be associated with control over children’s media use. For anxious parents worrying over their children’s media use, new media are not seen in relation to schooled subjects or assessment. In this situation, it is natural that students feel that their new media practices relating to reading and writing of cartoons, blogs or other online contents are not valued and appreciated by teachers and parents (Chung et al. 2015). This creates a difficult and contradictory situation. Previous studies of reading and writing suggest that the sociocultural dimensions of home and classroom are major factors influencing students’ motivations, attitudes and perspectives toward literacy, in so far as students are required to comply with the expectations of parents and teachers (Baker & Wigfield 1999). For example, research about children who grow up in homes where reading is viewed as a source of entertainment have greater reading-related competences, compared with children who were raised in homes which emphasized reading skills as simple decoding. A study about the development of a love of reading also showed that children and young people who read books on a daily basis in everyday lives were regularly conversing about the content or characters of what they read with members of the family who perceived reading as a leisure activity (Strommen & Mates 2004). Such research emphasizes the importance of pleasure and engagement with literacy activities and of course the knock-on effect of such engagement on formal literacy activities. The problem is that school and parents with a traditional view of literacy fail to recognize children’s informal literacy practices, especially when these are developing in relation to new digital media. Research suggests that children’s enjoyment of book reading decreases as they grow older, and that fifth- and sixth-graders’ (10- and 11-year-olds) enjoyment of reading books decreases even below those of first-graders (6-year-olds) (Yoon 2009). However, a survey of 5,110 children of third- to sixth-graders (9- to 11-year-olds) showed that children using computers and mobile phones were reading digital content such as cartoons, text messages, social media and the internet as well as writing on blogs and drawing cartoons on the web (Jeong et al. 2014). Another large-scale survey (n = 10,111) of third- to sixth-graders found that children were increasingly looking to use the internet to share their experiences and feelings with others, as they grew older (Seo et al. 2016). Young people use digital media and become interested in popular culture more as they grow older, not just because media are channels for communication and popular culture, but also because they serve young people’s interests and build a sense of identity and belonging to peer groups. Partly in response to these concerns and arguments, and partly to ameliorate negative attitudes to school, the national curriculum revisions of 2015 introduced two initiatives: ‘Creative Experience Activities’ and the ‘Free Semester System’ (OECD 2016). I will now turn to a discussion of these initiatives as

180  Hyeon-Seon Jeong examples of the problems and opportunities raised in relation to opening up meaningful spaces for learning about popular media culture within formal school hours as well as to the challenges in terms of the kinds of knowledge and practices that might be legitimized in school.

Recognising and incorporating children’s out-of-school literacy practices within school ‘Creative Experience Activities’ were originally introduced in the national curriculum revision in 1997 as ‘free activities’ in which teachers were able to create their curriculum beyond the constraints of traditional subjects. This therefore opened up opportunities for children’s media storytelling with cameras and moving image editing programs (Jeong 2009). Just as in classes for traditional subjects, ‘Creative Experience Activities’ take place within school hours but they are programmed as student-centered club activities or field studies based on ­real-life interests and concerns. These classes can be taught by external experts as well as teachers. Public institutions and civic organizations concerned with media and media arts, such as the Korea Press Foundation, Community Media Centers and the Korea Arts Education Services, provide educational materials, programs and instructors for media and arts education in schools. The ‘Free Semester System’, introduced into middle schools by the 2015 national curriculum, provides another space where media and popular culture can be explored within school hours. The ‘Free Semester’, which can be periods of one or two semesters, is named because students are ‘free’ from the burden of taking examinations in individual subjects. This initiative was introduced to decrease students’ stress stemming from the competitiveness of schooling, and to let students participate in diverse club activities, integrated curriculum, extensive reading and field trips based on students’ interests and choices (Choi et al. 2014). For ‘Selective Courses’ in the ‘Free Semester System’, schools provide a wide range of learning opportunities related to media and popular cultures, such as photography, news, film, television entertainments, video production, cartoons, animations, K-pop music and games (Jeong et al. 2015). While there are limitations to ‘Creative Experience Activities’ and ‘Selective Courses’ in the Free Semester System in terms of the restricted time devoted to them, and the fact that they are optional courses, they can provide opportunities for popular media culture to be legitimized as student-centered learning within school. Students can bring their out-of-school literacy practices into official school hours in order to explore their own interests, discuss their experiences, and read and write about real-life concerns. These progressive interventions challenge social norms. However, it is not obvious how the values of such practices can be recognised and supported in both schools and homes, and how they might bring about changes to school literacy education. To answer these questions, I would like to discuss some of the results of two recent case studies (Won & Jeong 2016; Park, Yim & Jeong 2016). First, I will discuss a case study of an online cartoon community of sixth-grade boys

Literacy and popular media culture  181 (11-year-olds) from elementary school. Contrary to the expectation of many parents and teachers, this online community activity demonstrated meaningful literacy activities through participation. Then, I will discuss a case of literacy education in middle school Korean language classes combined with reading club activities in which students were allowed to read and discuss webtoons, a very popular form of media culture among South Korean young people. These kinds of learning opportunities created by collaboration between teacher and students could be regarded as a result of an act that recognised popular culture as being part of legitimate literacy practices within the school. However, the cases illustrated here can be regarded as rare examples in South Korean schools and would not be applicable to most schools and teachers. They also reveal the limitations of schooling in terms of accommodating popular media culture as legitimate literacy practices, in that parents would only allow their children online activities on the condition that these out-of-school practices would not interfere with academic learning associated with traditional literacy. Although the teachers respected and recognised students’ interests in popular media culture as valuable practices, they still emphasized the use of popular media as a motivational aid that assisted students to meet existing curriculum requirements, for instance, in writing short stories.

Sixth-grade boys’ online comic community practices Research consistently indicates that male students show lower interest and achievement in reading than female students (PISA 2009a). This trend is also pronounced in South Korea. Interestingly, however, boys were found to read and draw comics more than girls (Chung et al. 2015). The PISA results also found that while girls would outperform boys in both print and digital reading, the gender gap in digital reading was narrower than it was in print-reading proficiency (PISA 2009b). These results could imply that boys might find multimodal and new media-based literacy practices, such as reading and drawing comics, more pleasurable and more connected to their own lived experiences of reading and writing. Parents and teachers tend not to encourage reading comics to children because they seem afraid that children might become reluctant to read formal written texts and prefer reading comics. The question of the negative impact of cartoons and webtoons is also raised in relation to their content and descriptions that depict violence. However, the multimodal characteristics of comics that utilize both ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ not only facilitate readers’ understanding but also help writers’ creation of stories. The narrative gaps between comic’s panels create nonlinear narratives and allow readers to actively choose, connect and interact with visual narratives. In South Korea, cartoons, comics and animations can be taught in elementary or middle school as a selective arts education program for one semester by the support of the Korea Arts Education Service. However, in the context of literacy education, they are used as exemplary texts for students to learn about non-verbal communication rather than as a part of multiliteracies.

182  Hyeon-Seon Jeong The sixth-grade boys’ comics community was named ‘Mente Comics’ (see ­Figure 11.1) and operated on ‘Naver’, a South Korean internet portal that allowed the students to share and comment on the comics that members created. The members of the community found the word ‘mente’ (which means ‘mind’ in Italian, according to the boys) on the internet and used it to symbolize their spirit and passion towards comics. This study was started when the class teacher accidentally witnessed that the boys were making comments on the comics that members created during a break time in the classroom. The children used online IDs instead of their real names and named each other using titles such as ‘CEO’ and ‘manager’; they were even using business cards with their online IDs. The ‘Mente Comics’ community was originally founded by two children, but the numbers of members increased as the culture of drawing comics spread throughout the classroom. There were six leading members of the community, and they uploaded their comics to receive comments from classmates, either online or during the break times in the classroom. The creators enjoyed interactions with their readers online and carefully monitored responses and used them to develop their stories in a series of episodes. The comics were created mostly by individuals, but members planned to produce a collaborative work named the ‘Universe League’ by sharing the plot and the characters across the community. ‘Webtoon’ (a compound of web and cartoon) means internet comics, and it is one of the major popular cultural forms enjoyed by children and young people in South Korea. A new comic form of webtoon was created by writers who published short essay-style comics on their home pages when the internet and personal computers became popular in South Korean homes in the late 1990s. Since the widespread take-up of smartphones from 2009, webtoons have evolved as a form of visual storytelling best suited for viewing on smartphones. The boys who

Figure 11.1  T  he front page of ‘Mente Comics’.

Literacy and popular media culture  183 operated ‘Mente Comics’ uploaded comics drawn on a paper sheet on the online community (see Figure 11.2), but their practices in the online community were not so different from the way that webtoon artists interact with their readers. In ‘Mente Comics’ there were elements borrowed from the comics, webtoons, movies, games and television programs that students enjoyed. However, the children carefully chose the elements that were appropriate for their works rather than blindly copying them. For example, there were traces of popular culture, such as giving a title to a cartoon or using the bell sound of smartphones used by the characters in work. It could be said that the children played with the ‘textual toys’ of popular media culture and recontextualized them in their own stories for their purposes (Dyson 2003).

Figure 11.2  “  The Cube”, an example from the comics of the ‘Mente Comics’.

184  Hyeon-Seon Jeong In school, children tend to learn to write ‘informational’, ‘persuasive’ or ‘fictional’ texts focusing on the functions and structures of the purposes and genres of texts rather than exploring various writing styles of popular media that they enjoy outside of school. While children are often encouraged to draw pictures or cartoons to create ideas for writing, they are not encouraged to include visual texts in the results of the writing. Due to the burden of the assessment focusing on the procedures and forms of writing written texts, children feel uneasy with sharing their texts with teachers, parents and friends. Members of ‘Mente Comics’ had positive support from their parents, the ‘sponsors of literacy’ at home (Brandt 1998), albeit in contradictory ways. Parents of the boys recommended ‘good’ comics, animations, television programs and movies to their children, just as they would do for books, as they told us in interviews. As such, various media and popular cultures such as comics, television programs and movies – alongside books and conversations about various forms of media – functioned as important sponsors of digital literary for the boys. The boys told us in interview that they had a belief that their writing of comics would be supported by members of the community because they were their friends, and they always gave positive feedback on their work; they said that this belief stimulated their creation of comics and motivated writing among the community. These boys were not deficient regarding their abilities in traditional literacy, but they enjoyed these multimodal and new media literacy practices of reading and writing comics. As they read their favorite comics, they also wanted to create works and to have the pleasure of creating comics and communicating with the online community. In terms of being ‘sponsors of literacy’, parents had contradictory perspectives on children’s participation in the online comic community. In interview, parents approved online practices as positive activities that developed creative thinking, the ability to express one’s ideas and feelings, and the ability to choose appropriate images for words. They thought online practices also developed children’s personalities as they produced collaborative works with friends. However, parents prioritized written forms of reading and writing rather than popular cultural activities by stating that the latter activities should not interfere with academic studies – they should be only hobbies rather than a future career option. Children told us that while they enjoyed reading and discussing books, newspapers and movies with their parents, they also felt frustrated when their parents set limits on the time allowed to draw comics at home and disapproved of their consideration of becoming a comic artist as a carer option. This case illustrates how parents and teachers positively perceived students’ out-of-school practices in an online comic community as evidence of children’s creativity, friendship development and sound hobbies. Popular media culture was recognised and supported by parents and teachers as was the case with reading books. However, the online comic community was regarded as an activity that needs to be properly managed outside school culture so as not to interfere with formal study. Next, I will discuss how popular media could be connected to literacy learning in school through a curriculum reform at a middle school.

Literacy and popular media culture  185 Creating a space for popular media culture within school curriculum The case study was begun by a teacher who wondered whether the creation of a story in mother tongue class would necessarily have to be done through writing alone (Park et al. 2016). The teacher had discovered that many students did not enjoy writing short stories and found them difficult, even though this task had been quite popular among students in the past. It was not that students had no stories to write, but that they did not know how to begin writing in short story genres. Through a series of conversations with students, the teacher found that the webtoon was the storytelling medium most familiar to students from their everyday lives. She also discovered that students were interested in Kang Full, an artist who reputedly created the webtoon genre, and who is the author of 26  Years, a webtoon that deals with the aftermath of the 1980 Gwangju ­Uprising, which they had read in their moral education classes. The teacher reconstructed the lesson plan for Korean language lessons (four hours a week) by allocating three hours to the usual lessons and one hour to reading webtoons. Because of students’ interest in Kang Full, the teacher focused on reading various works of the artist, who was also a resident in the school’s neighborhood. In class, students read webtoons and participated in various activities such as drawing favorite scenes, writing letters to the artist, drawing the artist’s caricatures and reconstructing episodes in the stories in their own ways. Students exhibited and shared these works, and had opportunities to talk about their impressions, interpretations and evaluations of the webtoons. As a member of a professional association of Korean mother tongue teachers, the teacher had been trying to find ways to deal with young people’s media and popular culture in the classroom for more than ten years and had come to an understanding that media and popular culture could be a valuable part of students’ lived experiences and informal literacy practices. This class’s focus on webtoons could be seen as highly radical and disruptive of the traditional approach to Korean lessons by blurring the boundaries of the school subjects mother tongue language and the arts based on students’ interests. Reading activities in the Korean language class led to the project of creating short stories after participating in a ‘Meet the author’ event organized by the students of the ‘library club activities’. Based on the experience of visual storytelling gained from webtoons, students created their own stories by arranging photographic images and then wrote their own short stories. They also made book covers with illustrations, bound the books, and shared them in the class before reading and writing reviews (see Figure 11.3). In this way, students were motivated to start writing with the help of learning storytelling methods and finding stories through webtoon reading. In this regard, the teacher was able to create a learning space for reading and writing stories by connecting the pleasure of reading webtoons outside the school to literacy activities in the language curriculum at school. The reading activities associated with the use of webtoons in the Korean class was loosely connected to the ‘library club activities’, which was one of

186  Hyeon-Seon Jeong

Figure 11.3  Exhibition of the students’ drawing as reading activities of webtoons.

the creative experience activities in which students could choose to participate. Library club activities usually focus on reading books. However, in this case, the teacher transformed library club activities into an intensive project based on reading webtoons. The teacher proposed the webtoon project as a way to explore the works of the artist Kang Full, and to develop an understanding of comics and animations more broadly as well as negotiating activities that could be carried out with students. The students organized field trips to visit museums and local exhibitions and participated in workshops about creating comics and webtoons. After the field trips, they wrote reports about comics and webtoons, the places that they wanted to visit in future and the artists that they wanted to meet. The students became interested in drawing comics about their own experiences because the main content of popular webtoons was focused on everyday life and social problems. Students exhibited their works in an online community as well as in the spaces of the library and the school corridors in order to share their works with other members of the school. The teacher also organized a special lecture on webtoons by inviting Kang Full to be the guest at school reading week. The students worked collaboratively in different teams to: manage the venue; design posters and tickets; prepare the interview, and document and record the event. The artist gave a lecture on the unique storytelling capacity of webtoons. The event was organized with the active support of the whole school. The auditorium was full so that there were students who were even standing to listen to the lecture. The other

Literacy and popular media culture  187 teachers who participated in this event were amazed at the positive attitudes of students concentrating, engaging and asking questions, in contrast to in their usual classes. This case is an example of how teachers might be able to intervene in the practices of literacy education to engage with students’ media and popular culture. With increasing interest in learning that is closely linked to real life rather than being trapped in classrooms, diverse digital media can be used to connect classrooms and real worlds in order to explore common goals and interests in order to produce knowledge among people of different generations and cultures. This class is an example of how to create opportunities to incorporate out-of-school literacy practices within schooling, to enhance and diversify formal literacy activities and to increase schooled literacy outcomes. As with this class, attempts to incorporate popular media culture are found in many ‘Selective Courses’ under the ‘Free Semester System’, partly due to the support of Community Media Centers, the Korea Press Foundation and the Korea Arts Education Services (government agencies providing educational programs for media production, news literacy and arts education). Government policy recommends humanities, social studies, inquiry and cultural programs suitable for students’ interests for selective courses. For instance, there was a middle school where 10 out of 22 programs provided opportunities to explore and critically understand the media in daily life, to understand music in advertisements and movies, to make music videos, to photograph, to watch society through dramas and movies, to produce sports-related photos and videos, to understand media art and to make documentaries (Jeong et al. 2015). The programs during the ‘Free Semester System’ were intended to make students, who were previously alienated from a school culture driven by competitive tests focusing on factual knowledge, feel more ‘happy’ about school. Therefore, the programs emphasized cooperation, collective inquiry and discussion, with hands-on experiences as well as field trips. However, the responses to this policy and programs in school reveal difficulties with and challenges to what counts as learning and how learning can be assessed. On the one hand, there are studies that evaluate the policy positively in that students can be free from the stress of taking examinations (Choi et al. 2014). On the other hand, the content and quality of these new programs are bound to be varied, and parents likely to be critical because students think they are not learning properly at school. Ironically, given the initiative’s purposes, the number of parents who use the free semester period in order to strengthen their children’s private tutoring is increasing (Park 2015). This case study also shows the importance of the role and ability of the teacher who is able to construct a literacy activity to enable students to actively participate in their learning beyond the boundaries of the official curriculum. The teacher creatively and actively reorganized the hours of the lessons of the school subject and connected the learning of the subject with creative experience activities to link together literacy practices that traditionally had been experienced outside school.

188  Hyeon-Seon Jeong However, the webtoon-based literacy activities described in this chapter would not easily spread to other schools in the South Korean context where a  ­teacher’s  curricular autonomy is often still quite limited (Hong & Youngs 2016). There is also a question about the ultimate aim of the activities as a whole; they seemed to be aimed at students’ creation of their own short stories, as required by the official literacy curriculum: exploring webtoons as a visual storytelling and popular culture was not the ultimate goal. This then challanges the ideology of what counts as literacy learning in school. Without the efforts of trying to recognize and incorporate popular media culture as a legitimate part of young people’s literacy practices, and changes to what is understood by literacy, and changes to school curriculum and assessment, the  aims  of bringing popular media culture into the classroom will not be fulfilled.

Conclusion The two case studies examined in this chapter show how teachers might be able to accommodate the new literacies approach within the existing Korean school system, in an effort to deal with problems of students’ demotivation and disengagement in schooled literacy activities. Recognising and incorporating students’ out-of-school experiences could become a transitional process of recalibrating what counts as literacy. However, there are ideological difficulties that these new forms of literacy learning cause both at school and back in families. First, the narrow, competitive education system is destined to be a source of conflict and difficulty in so far as students are required to suppress their pleasure for their academic achievements. Popular culture that comes to stand for outof-school literacy is proscribed by the school, and it seems to be permitted only if it does not intervene in ‘legitimate’ literacy learning. Parents of the boys who participated in the cartoon community in the first case study approved their children’s popular media culture activities as evidence of creativity and friendship, but they were concerned that the activities should not interfere with their study both in school and in private tutoring. Second, the identity of the subject of mother tongue language, where literacy learning is situated in the national curriculum, constantly refuses to recognize popular media culture as a legitimate part of literacy. Multimodal texts and digital technology are included in the literacy curriculum in so far as they extend the forms of texts and the methods of reading and writing. However, traditional and functional literacy is not replaced by the new literacies. While media can be included in parallel to traditional and functional literacy, the study of popular media culture seems to be restricted so as not to threaten the cultural status of literature in the literacy curriculum. For this reason, webtoons might be used as a means to motivate students to produce written texts of fiction, as in the second case study, but not as an ultimate object of study in itself as a legitimate part of literacy learning.

Literacy and popular media culture  189 Therefore, there are difficulties in spreading these innovations. In the school curriculum, literacy is seen as a cognitive learning tool from a functional literacy perspective. Students’ interests, pleasures and identities are not at the center of schooled-literacy curriculum in the over-schooled society where the home is colonized by private tutoring as a shadow system of formal schooling. There are real challenges for teachers who have to work within the constraints of the segmented curriculum of traditional school subjects and the assessment system, which are ultimately aimed at allowing successful students to gain entry to prestigious universities. These challenges have brought about some changes in the South Korean school curriculum that could open up opportunities for teachers’ autonomy in terms of designing curriculum based on students’ interests, so that media and popular culture could be addressed within school hours. Government and local education authorities have pursued various policies including a revision of the national curriculum that now emphasizes core competencies, integrated curriculum and performance assessment as well as the ‘Free Semester System’ initiative. There is also an emphasis on the improvement of teaching methods for a more student-­centered approach. However, parental aspirations for their children’s education are narrowly competitive and the school literacy curriculum is still confined to traditional and functional views of literacy. In this context, children’s and young people’s popular media cultures as arenas in which to develop informal literacy practices are underestimated in an over-schooled society. In the long run, it is important for curriculum developers to take a view of literacy not just as a tool for learning but as a sociocultural practice that is closely related to learners’ identities and everyday lives; however, this is an ongoing challenge. It is also important for teachers to educate students to live their learning by focusing on themes and phenomena beyond what is required in the official literacy curriculum. Teachers and parents need to be aware of discourses that describe the dynamics of out-of-school literacy practices and innovative approaches to literacy learning beyond the boundaries of the current literacy education in schools. Results of such research needs to be shared with parents, teachers and society in general, in order for the creation of new spaces that could bring to the school literacy practices that children might enjoy, and that could lead to a shift in parents’ awareness of schooling and literacy. It is important for researchers to play a role in this process of argument and persuasion, and to draw up policies to appease anxiety around education. The new literacies tradition helps us understand how literacy is always a contested concept and how necessary such an approach is in the context of the over-schooled society of South Korea.

Notes 1 A recent national survey showed that 80.0 percent of elementary school children, 63.8 percent of middle school and 52.4 percent of high school students received private education in 2016 (Statistics Korea 2017). In terms of the average weekly time spent for private education, it was 8 hours for elementary school children, 6.2 hours for middle school students, and 4.6 hours for high school students.

190  Hyeon-Seon Jeong 2 There is substantial inequality in terms of private education across South Korea, with expenditure on private education by household income showing a differential gap of nearly nine times (Statistics Korea 2017). Households with an average monthly income of over 7 million won (an equivalent of average annual income of over 77,820 US dollar) spend a monthly average of 443,000 won (an equivalent of 410 US dollars) per student for private tutoring. In contrast, households with an average monthly income of less than 1 million won (an equivalent of average annual income of less than 11,112 US dollar) pay 50,000 won (an equivalent of 46 US dollar) per student for private tutoring. The participation rate of households whose average monthly income is over 7 million won is 81.9 percent and the participation rate of households with a monthly average income of less than 1 million won is 30.0 percent.

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12 Outing the “out” in out-of-school A comparative international perspective Julian Sefton-Green As the first two chapters of this book argue, we know that there is something extraordinarily uniform about schools and schooling all around the world. Children and young people are taken from their families, they are disciplined in specially designed institutions in age-defined groupings; curriculum and assessment, although variable, structure the day and the year and stratify occupational futures; and similarly constrained, pedagogy oscillates between the transmissive and the progressive (Baker 2014). The modern 19th-century school was an integral part of the way that the emerging state worked to govern its subjects (Hunter 1994) but of course pre-modern schooling was similarly structured and organised through, for example, the monasteries of Europe and the temples of China. Yet, despite this structural homogeneity in institutional form (Meyer et al. 1997), national and cultural differences have and continue to work to valorise the meaning of what it is to be educated in contrasting and unexpected ways (Levinson, Foley & Holland 1996). And nowhere is this more apparent than in the provision and understanding of organised learning outside of the school. Although participation in organised activities for young people has been a constant feature of modern industrial urban life (e.g. Davies 1999), the learning ascribed to such participation was frequently moral or civic – from the frontier preparedness of the Boy Scouts to the growth of neighbourliness and community (McLaughlin, Irby & Langman 1994). Over the last 20 years or so, however, participation in out-of-school learning has been much more explicitly focused on the achievement of school-like learning and outcomes (Sefton-Green 2013). What counts as learning seems to be far more consistent across more social practices and domains than in previous times and, I suggest, shows how forms of schooling are now incorporating other kinds of activities which were previously not “counted” as such (Ladwig 2010). The desire nowadays to interrogate all social practices for the ways that they exemplify schooled learning is contradictory, contrary and frequently surprising. For example, there is a strong tradition in progressive educational scholarship which seeks to excavate forms of social practice as deeply educational despite their marginalisation and their failure to attract academic credentials. For example, the extraordinary work of Mike Rose (2005, 2009)

194  Julian Sefton-Green describes and articulates forms of tacit understanding, calculation and service often through embodied labour (see also Harper 1987). This approach has been parlayed into more formal attainment (Nasir 2008), with scholars arguing that the ways of the hand (Sudnow 2002) or the eye (Sennett 2008) are no more than specious exclusions from what really counts as learning. On the other hand, scholars following the growth and spread of digital technologies into the home have pointed to the “curricularization of leisure” (Buckingham & Scanlon 2002) as “education” was used discursively to justify and rationalise purchasing and using digital technology on a daily basis (Nixon 1998). In line with analyses that have underscored the increasing competitiveness in the threatened middle classes of the global North who have sought to use education as a way of securing advantage for their children (Lareau 2011), scholars have analysed the spread and growth of out-of-school learning practices and the breakdown in consensus of non-academic learning values as signalling the spread of school-like forms of learning into hitherto unschooled private social spaces. In this chapter I want to question whether these tensions may be particular to the countries of the global North in that the whole argument about the place and meaning of out-of-school learning depends on how the boundaries between school and not-school are defined and legitimated and how dominant the institutional form of schooling is in these societies. Does the form of outof-school learning differ between countries? Are there different degrees of institutionalisation? Does the meaning and nature of the teaching and learning in these places differ in broad cultural terms? And in terms of explanation, are the particular anxieties experienced by the pressures of globalisation and economic austerity (Mason 2015) tilting the argument about the place of this boundary between school and out-of-school rather than opening up more general insight into the pedagogicisation of everyday life? As a way of investigating the cultural specificity of how and who defines the boundary between in and out-of-school, and how forms of learning are institutionalised, I want to offer two snapshots of out-of-school organisations. The first is called TUMO in Armenia and the second is WACArts in London.

TUMO The TUMO Centre for Creative Technologies,1 in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, occupies two floors of a brand-new building, and provides a range of organised learning experiences that develop creative uses of digital technologies. Young people (starting around age 12 and supposedly meant to finish at around age18 – although in practice many stay on as they begin university) can follow courses in animation, web design, filmmaking and game development but also in graphics, music, 3D modelling, robotics and photography, as captured by the curriculum map, Figure 12.1. When the centre opened in 2011 it developed a substantial online program to support self-directed study. In 2016, a content team of around 30 people

Outing the “out” in out-of-school  195 Animation

Writing

Drawing

Music

3D Modeling

Game Development

Filmmaking

Photography

Graphic Design

Motion Graphics and Post Production Robotics

Programming Online Literacy Web Development

Figure 12.1  Diagram of the TUMO curriculum.

wrote units for study and to assess progression. The contemporary building vividly contrasts with the decaying concrete apartment blocks in the disorganised post-Soviet city un-planning that surrounds it and it screams a particular vision of a techno-future. However, as the centre grew – 7,000 young people now come through its doors every week and it is opening satellite centres in three other locations across Armenia – it has significantly changed its teaching. Now students do the online components more as a form of introduction and continuous study and attend workshops which are more intensive collective, social and ­production-based forms of activity often leading to presentations, performances and public displays. Often drawing on expertise from diaspora Armenians who are more than happy to come and teach for a small period of time, the range of content areas has now morphed and grown, often focusing on more unusual one-off activities from architectural design to a photography exhibition on a train (travelling between the cities of Yerevan and Gyumri and which acts as a mobile open market). TUMO is mainly funded by diaspora Armenians (mainly based in the USA) and, unlike the UK, has no state- or city-based funding. It is virtually free to all-comers although it is not known what kinds of young people, in terms of demographic or social class, take up this offer. (The kinds of social categorisation

196  Julian Sefton-Green we might expect to find in relation to clients of UK or US initiatives are both so different from those norms in their definitions, and also not part of public social science discourse (Amsler 2011).) Despite the extremely organised and focused attention to learning pathways, TUMO stands outside of the formal education system and this has a number of consequences. First of all, attending organised out-of-school appears to be much more common in Armenia than perhaps in the USA or the UK. Again, hard evidence is difficult to come by but it seems as if there is a tradition of after-school education from music or art schools, and especially chess schools, to TUMO. Many young people (and again more research is needed here) have private tuition after the school day finishes at 2:30-ish. The existence of this “market” not only frames the activity as educational but it means that both the young people and their families have the expectation of a certain sort of outcome from taking up these opportunities. There is a higher level of disadvantage across the country as a whole than in other countries of the global North where of course disadvantage exists much more in terms of profound social inequalities. Again, translating our norms of providing for underserved youth needs recalibrating. Second, the Armenian education system, probably as part of its Soviet inheritance, is very traditional (to use our language), focusing significantly on maths and science. Not only does this mean that many young people might be excluded from such a tightly controlled curriculum but it also means that huge areas of human invention and activity – especially those relating to new forms of disciplinary provenance such as animation, computer programming, and indeed many forms of creative uses of digital technologies, are entirely absent from the school or university curriculum in general. For many people in Armenia, digital technology means access to computers rather than an understanding of what to do with them and how to build on their cultural and economic possibilities. Young people attending TUMO find the creative and production uses of the technology, and the introduction to a huge range of aesthetic and arts-based production possibilities, profoundly different from their experiences at school. Third, the Armenian education system has also inherited what we might think of as a conservative transmission-based attitude towards knowledge and learning in general. Many classroom activities take the form of closed comprehensions or direct instruction with teacher-talk and subservient students. Assessment is rigorous but very much based on a correct/incorrect or pass/fail model. The TUMO experience offers a far more progressive pedagogy both online and face to face. It is social, collective and production-based. Thus, although to the outside eye, activities and student behaviour at the centre might look like they could be taking place in London, LA or Toronto, given the focus on youth-centred cultural productions, the centre’s position in relation to dominant (Armenian) educational practice actually means that for participants its meaning might be quite different than for students in these other places around the world (see for example accounts in Soep and Chavez 2010). At TUMO, the look and feel of participation in an educationally progressive

Outing the “out” in out-of-school  197 environment is not so much oriented towards student engagement, as in the case below, but more oriented towards offering forms of schooling absent from local provision.

WACArts WACArts2 was founded by two teachers of drama and dance working in a comprehensive school in the London borough of Camden in 1978. It began as a program of activities, offering dance and drama lessons to young people from low-income families on Sundays at a local interdisciplinary community organisation. These lessons were offered to 14–25-year-olds (the definition of youth used by arts funders in the UK) who the founders had identified as being talented and interested in drama and dance but who had been denied the advantages of private lessons. WACArts intended to offer high-quality, professional standard teaching so that students would be able to become sufficiently skilled to compete at auditions to conservatoires or pursue other routes to employment in the arts. This focus on skills teaching and professional training implicitly defined a pedagogy and mode of practice, which has sustained the organisation over the last 40 years. It led to a form of organisation modelled on schools and other training centres, especially those derived from conservatoire settings. Staff were, and still are, recruited on the basis of their credibility as professional artists. This in turn impacted on teaching styles and aspirations. Inner London is socially diverse and WACArts aimed to meet a social/political objective in conjunction with its desire to foster talent and create opportunity. Around 75 per cent of current students are black – mainly from London’s Afro-Caribbean communities. The desire to offer practical opportunities for black and working-class young people drove WACArts, and it has focused over the years on providing a point of entry into what is now known as the creative and cultural industries. However, it is very keen to balance opportunity alongside the aspiration to foster talent so that it preserves a social as well as a vocational purpose. Activities are organised around conventional arts disciplines: drama (incorporating physical theatre, text and audition work); music (incorporating vocals, music technology and instrumental work); video; digital arts; and dance (incorporating contemporary, jazz, ballet). Although there are integrated theme-based projects (which is how many community arts projects are organised), and productions, this curriculum structure has remained. In the mid-1980s, WACArts opened its junior programs (for children aged 5–13) on Saturdays. These classes follow a similar curriculum structure and aim to prepare students for progression into the senior WAC program but above all to offer an experience of pleasure and structured activity stressing performance disciplines. This junior program clearly espoused the general value of arts education with beliefs in the transferability of learning and the value of positive feedback. Like the senior program, junior classes lead to performance

198  Julian Sefton-Green and public presentation – the main form of validation. Although forms of certification and termly reports are offered (at junior and senior level), these are not publicly examined (unlike the model of standardised grade advancement on offer in music and dance); stakeholders derive their own sense of value from participation. Partly in response to the success of delivering programs to a larger cohort, WACArts began a dedicated project with young people with severe learning difficulties, frequently with complex physical impairments. This program does not offer typical forms of arts therapy (in the medical sense) but aims to provide broader kinds of respite care and stimulating activities and to promote communication and expression. This tradition of work has continued and WACArts has developed dedicated facilities with a range of communication and sensory equipment and long-standing programs for young people with autism as well as for those with physical impairment. Many students attending WACArts work on this program as volunteers, as do a wide range of staff. In the mid-1990s, WACArts began offering a dedicated series of social inclusion programs and broadening its arts base to include media activities in video, music technology and digital arts. The social inclusion programs were aimed at offering an arts/media program to young people who had failed or been failed by the school system but allowing students to pursue formal qualifications. The programs (lasting from six months to an academic year), targeted young people who had been in prison, or who were coming out of care or who were homeless – those experiencing multiple social deprivation. These programs offered organised study with media and arts training and, in most cases, formal accreditation and qualifications with WACArts up-skilling itself to become an accredited examination centre. In 2003 WACArts started offering a Foundation Degree (undergraduate level). The relationship with a university proved too complex so WACArts became accredited to deliver a vocational diploma in 2006, offering training in drama, dance and music at professional standards. Most of the students on this course are black and the course content focuses on art forms of non-­ Western origin. This will complete a journey from the provision of supplementary classes offering access to professional training to WACArts becoming the kind of institution (complete with accreditation functions) that delivers that training itself. This move to formal status was mirrored again in 2014 when WACArts became an “alternative provision” “free school” (similar to a charter school in the USA). This builds on the social inclusion courses offered in the late 1990s as WACArts now teaches 40 young people (aged 14–19) across arts and media who are at risk of being, or have been, excluded from mainstream provision. This process of gradual institutionalisation encompasses a wide range of additional activities. For a period, WACArts ran youth club activities in a neighbouring local centre. It has run activities for young mothers and offered projects for young babies and carers. It has run training programs for artists, offering workshop skills, and it aims to offer staff a wider range of employment opportunities

Outing the “out” in out-of-school  199 in the creative sector. It ran holiday and drop-in programs during the week. It has acted as a research centre in partnership with universities exploring its unique forms of teaching and learning as well as being a site for innovative program development. It offers support and incubation facilities for small businesses in the creative sector, and has managed a program of apprenticeships in the creative industries. It provides learning opportunities for around 1,100 young people per week over a year, has around 20 full-time staff and employs about 200 part-time staff over a year. It has worked with 35,000 students over the last 35 years and in financial terms turnover is around £2M per year. If any such an archetype might exist, WACArts could stand for a kind of outof-school, community, arts-based provision that is widespread in many countries of the global North.3 Explicitly modelling alternative forms of pedagogy deriving from social practices now not that common in schools, its strong social mission is attentive to the challenges of student engagement and participation. If TUMO could be said to represent forms of schooling not found locally, WACArts seems to be offering forms of education that aren’t equally available to all and which clearly represent only a minority share of dominant modes of education.

“After” or “out” of school? In some ways, despite their geographical distance from each other and some of the differences in scale that pertain to their local histories and contexts, these organisations look remarkably similar. Indeed, given that out-of-school learning is not organised by countries in a systematic fashion and does not exhibit key features of the institutions that we take to comprise the modern nation state, it is extraordinary how similar they seem. They are both in custom-built “modern” buildings that have been designed for young people in that they are both wired (and wireless) and full of equipment for production purposes. From the clean, open and well-lit private bathrooms to the canteen spaces, and back to the banks of modern computers, these places look much more like idealised schools than schools themselves – as the young people who attend both organisations commonly attest. Similarly shared were other ways that the young people themselves are treated. Unlike schools there were no bells or buzzers or adults directing the bodies of the young people, more a motivated flow of youth in clusters and activities. A superficial glance at sessions would show an adult – more often than not in their twenties or thirties, and often with youthful assistants – usually leading activities. But, although at times they would direct a class, more often than not they were working with groups of young people amidst a focused buzz of conversation – another feature frequently missing from schools. An online presence and timetabled shared productions/events tended to govern the rhythm of activities. Indeed, a Martian visitor might see the young people moving around the place in terms of a cybernetic organism – there are clearly modes of structure and focus but they aren’t always visible or external in terms of directions and authority.

200  Julian Sefton-Green Indeed, apparent commonalities continue to leap out from the simplest of comparisons. The young people were in mixed-age groupings (perhaps covering three or four years). Again, this is not favoured in schools anymore. Attendance was high although of course the young people only attended for discrete sessions each week: indeed the concept of absence – given their voluntary, participatory ­structure – barely figured. In both institutions, nominal fees were levied, although given both institutions’ interest in hard-to-reach communities, these were often waived or subsidised. Both institutions were interested in follow-on and continuing activities (from core classes) in terms of helping young people start up their own enterprises or supporting them into further and higher education. Both organisations prided themselves on the idea that students never left, even if this only created greater demands on their limited resources. Social relations with staff were informal in contrast with how young people are used to conducting themselves in schools and there was a flow of older/senior students into junior teaching roles. Whilst none of these features might seem out of the ordinary in and of themselves, the ways that they had been integrated into an institutional presence seemed remarkable and stands in clear contrast to far more delimited functional sets of relationships that, in general, pertain to mass schooling. As part of their analysis of world culture, new institutionalist scholars used the observation that “isomorphism” in schooling (at a number of levels including curriculum, pedagogy, utilisation of space, discipline accreditation and so on), even in circumstances where schools did not perform equivalent social functions, demonstrated that schooling could best be explained as a kind of “script” rather than in terms of a classic sociological functionalist rationale (Lechner & Boli 2005; Meyer et al. 1997). It is the irrational commonalities in schooling that are most difficult to define without recourse to such a kind of explanation. The observations above are therefore intriguing in the light of such a theory because these out-of-school learning sites are not schools with their status, importance and centrality to the modern nation state. They both stand outside of conventional funding regimes and are therefore not subject to the usual regulations governing performance and management. The history and funding of both of these organisations is markedly different both in motivation and in practice. However, although TUMO may have borrowed from observations of earlier models from other places in the world (given the Armenian diaspora’s internationalist reach) this was not explicit, so how, other than with reference to the idea of a world cultural script, can we explain such structural similarities? In other words, what kinds of common understandings about what youth need, and what should be provided for them, underpinned the growth of both organisations? And, crucial for this book, what notion of learning did both organisations have in common or where did such suppositions differ?

Opportunity, poverty, inclusion and stratification Both organisations began with some notion of deficit. For TUMO, gaps existed at a national scale and were significantly defined in terms of learning

Outing the “out” in out-of-school  201 experiences. Schooling in Armenia is conservative in both pedagogy and curriculum and TUMO wanted to offer a way to give young people a different experience of learning. This meant putting them in charge of their own progress (drawing on contemporary studies in educational technology), personalising or at least individualising the learning experience and giving them control over both the pace and, to an extent, the nature of internal assessment – including deliberately rejecting external certification. Here the ambition was very much to provide young people across the country with different kinds of educational experiences. These were explicitly defined in terms of those on offer in other countries (filtered, as was clear from the centre’s director’s words, from constructionist MIT-inspired American discourse) but absent from ­A rmenia. As the organisation has grown and reflected on its journey, it is important to note that this definition of learner-centredness has moved away from a wholly ­technology-oriented relationship (between the learner and their online progress) to one mediated by older arts-based production traditions (itself closely allied with a Dewyian progressivism). Whilst the original vision of a technologically mediated learner-centredness derived from a particular modernist vision of cutting-edge education distinctive from the Armenian norm, the social, collectivist arts-based production model was equally absent from the ­A rmenian milieu even though it draws on older traditions. By contrast, ­WACArts also wanted to engage and motivate young people in positive educational experiences but these were and are in no ways especially defined in terms of an experience that young people couldn’t find in their schooling or possibly even in other spaces. This then leads into the second kind of deficit, which is one of access and resources. Both organisations have an explicit social agenda to provide opportunities where none exist. This obviously means different things in the different national contexts. In London, WACArts, like many community arts and youth organisations in the global North, explicitly reaches out to sections of the population who are oppressed, repressed and marginalised – mainly those from ethnic minorities. There is a clear principle of redistributive justice at work – providing opportunities to those denied them through forms of economic exclusion. The state maintains an ambivalent attitude towards this kind of provision in that it supports such projects and interventions whilst at the same time sustaining forms of social reproduction that only maintain the same problematic social structure. However, the problem in Armenia is more one of absolute rather than relative poverty. Extremes of social inequality still tend to be structured around a rural/urban divide but, within Yerevan, disparities between an affluent middle class and a working class denied social mobility do not, as of now, seem the most pressing challenge. This is partially a question of Armenia’s economic development but also because of the effect of the wider diaspora, in that successful middle-class families will often look beyond the country’s borders for economic and educational opportunity. In this context, the resource/ access deficit seems more equally shared across the population although there were already signs that young people’s differential access to technology in the

202  Julian Sefton-Green home was already having effects on their capacity to continue working with their peers and on projects beyond their experiences of TUMO. In other words, the redistributive justice dimension of these interventions is still fundamentally remedial but the norm – where the catch-up is presumed to happen – is national (in London) and international (in Armenia). The opportunity horizons appear significantly different.

Motivation and disciplinary expertise Both organisations were set up to simultaneously meet and stimulate demand. Attendance and participation is of course voluntary but TUMO had a far greater sense of working with family rather than individual ambition in that enrolment at TUMO required family registration whereas young people came to, at least the older programs at WACArts, on their own initiative or by wordof-mouth amongst their peers. (This is by no means a hard and fast distinction and also reflects the fact that the age range for starting at TUMO is younger than at senior WACArts; young people of that age (junior WACArts) do attend with their family.) It is of course the voluntary and apparently highly motivated nature of young people’s engagement in out-of-school learning that appears to distinguish it from formal education so the nature of this motivation is interesting. Common to both organisations is an “ideal” student who is entirely self-­ reliant, self-motivated, personally organised and autonomous in the way that we commonly imagine adults to be. Indeed, part of the justification around the resource/access deficit described above is the moral certainty of providing an activity which in some ways has been denied or withheld from this ideal individual; as if people know what they want but can’t always get hold of it. TUMO offered opportunities for shorter-term participation and a structure that allowed students to complete units asynchronously and return into the program after gaps whereas WACArts required a mode of signing up into programs for a fixed period of time. In principle TUMO could make some of its online units available outside of the facility so that a more blended form of participation could be offered. WACArts was keen to recruit young people who hadn’t had prior opportunities to do drama, dance, media arts and so on, and where there was a competition for places this would be used as a guiding principle. TUMO was effectively offering courses to young people who had had no previous opportunity to study these disciplines in school or in any organised fashion out-of-school. In what sense then did the young people who signed up for these courses know what they wanted to do before doing it? TUMO certainly fits into the future-proofing discourse of expectations that surround digital technologies (Facer 2011) so there was a sense that these opportunities could leverage exciting prospects despite the fact that the precise routes were unclear and, when it came down to it, pretty difficult to find within Armenia. The creative/performing arts career trajectory offered by WACArts has a clear and long-standing tradition of the difficulties

Outing the “out” in out-of-school  203 that might be faced if taken forward into employment but of course these are offset against hypothetical rewards. However, even though family narratives in both organisations may have been fed by these narratives of “future-making” (see Erstad et al. 2016, chapter 7), for the young people themselves it was actually the nature of the engagement within the learning experience that seemed most important. For students who had already been enrolled and had built up some experience, the idea of developing disciplinary expertise became its own justification and explained a great deal of the continuous motivation and interest in the programs on offer at both organisations. Not only did both organisations provide a model of expert-tutors, that is professionals whose credibility was marked by their ­real-world expertise and experience, but they fed the responsibility of autonomous learning by raising the stakes of participation. Students were encouraged to feel that they were important within the collective activity, and that their absence created problems for the activity and for others: this is diametrically opposite to the kinds of responsibility they are denied in school contexts. The idea of disciplinary expertise, and of being able to achieve a standard of performance in real-world contexts, is not a new educational principle but these organisations were able to actualise this idea in ways that sustained motivation and engagement (Soep & Chavez 2010). The fact that disciplinary expertise in both organisations can be located within tangible and specific labour market places – in opposition to the generic abstraction of school disciplines – is again a key principle of progressive education but it seems to require out-of-school organisations to make such principles real. Finally, it should be noted that both organisations’ curriculum offer was explicitly geared towards the individual. The appeals to a career trajectory for an adult-self may have helped legitimate interest for students’ families, but in practice it was the direct address to them as individuals, and a way of the cultural nature of the activity speaking directly to a sense of self, that might explain students’ levels of “engagement” or “motivation”.

The responsibilisation of learning This address to something discrete within the person of the learner – that sense of working at both organisations being important and worthwhile, of connecting to a deep interest within the young person – was remarkable on two counts. First, because of the double game these organisations played by not being schools, yet being schooling (Sefton-Green 2013); and second, because of the ways that both organisations created the capacity to help learners responsibilise their learning. By this, I mean that contemporary theories of governmentality and bio-politics (Lemke 2001) suggest a mode of power whereby individuals are controlled not so much by external threat but by internalised desires, assumptions, rewards, fear and guilt. These theories (for a fuller exposition see N. Rose 1999) are interested in ways that the state now distributes its power through forms of control as individuals are required to take responsibility for themselves

204  Julian Sefton-Green when the state and traditional forms of social hierarchy and organisation are dispersed (Beck 1992). This kind of explanation is relevant for our case studies because it has been suggested that forms of lifelong learning provide a key site for the ways that the state is individualising – in that education which used to be imagined as a collective social process is now far more constructed in terms of individual competition, with people being required to take responsibility for pursuing their competitiveness in the labour market for the whole of their lives (Field 2006, 2008). This “responsibilization” (Ilcan & Basok 2004) of learning is clearly enacted and driven through the expansion of out-of-school learning where we can see forms of schooling penetrating what used to be private or leisure times and spaces. In the context of this book the question is whether the address to individual satisfaction, and the motivation to attend and participate in these organisations’ activities, is in some ways part of the process by which the state is normalising education as something which now occurs beyond the formal institutions of schooling. In other words, in what sense is our interest in young people’s motivation and our focus on their engagement actually an insight into the processes of individualisation rather than, as is so often taken to be the case, a focus on existential well-being (as is usually the case with motivation)? Here the difference between contexts is illuminating. For TUMO, the field4 of creative technology in some ways has little legitimacy within Armenia. Although many people there are informed and interested in all kinds of digital technology, computerisation and the creative and cultural industries, such knowledge and value exists within a discourse that is explicitly outside of the formal education system. These fields are barely recognised at university level and certainly don’t exist in the school curriculum. There are no examinations, a few syllabi, and no recognised progression routes for students to pursue expertise in these domains. However, popular discourse is internationalist; TUMO’s appeal is based on young people and their families recognising the value of learning about and engaging with creative technology even if that comes from beyond the school. Significantly on account of the diaspora, discourse about knowledge and learning in Armenia has radically different horizons than those established by the state. Yet this does not mean that formal education is undervalued. In fact, the reverse is true given the “market” for after-school education and the large-scale business of semi-institutionalised private tutoring in which many young people are engaged (it would be very helpful if research existed quantifying this locally; for a global analysis see Bray 2009). This raises the question of how and why young people can invest in an after-school educational field of indeterminate value (as defined by their current horizons). By contrast, the arts field in which WACArts operates has considerable valorisation across British society – even if the arts tend to go in and out of fashion within educational discourse: contemporary educational policy for example tends to overvalue science and mathematics at the expense of humanities and

Outing the “out” in out-of-school  205 the arts. Nevertheless, it is far less problematic to understand why young people and their families might be interested in these fields in principle. What is more challenging in this context is why disadvantaged and marginalised communities might think of high-status, competitive and precarious labour markets as offering reasonable or even sensible progression opportunities (Gill 2009; Gill & Pratt 2008; Taylor & Littleton 2008). Scholars of creative labour (Banks, Gill & Taylor 2013; McRobbie 2015) are continuously troubled by the seeming contradiction in the fact that people are attracted to and invest heavily in forms of creative labour despite the obvious and evident difficulties they face and the material uncertainties such work usually creates. Nevertheless, they point to what appear to be shared existential pleasures in making and creating that exceed the circumstances in which people frequently find themselves (Hesmondhalgh & Baker 2011). Does this help us explain both TUMO and WAC’s seeming illogicality – that they are appealing as places of learning in contexts where the value of that learning is either contradictory or problematic within the prevailing local discourse? Individuals and families are clearly drawing on wider cultural explanations beyond their contexts and these seem to trump local logics. But why? I suggest that explanations that draw on theories of responsibilisation are the best way of unpicking these contradictions between negotiating domain legitimation and educational commitment because it is significantly through an appeal to a form of individual disciplining – a mode of being which supersedes national and local discourses – that enables both organisations to reconcile their work within their seemingly very different contexts.

Conclusion Nancy Fraser suggests that second-wave feminism has become the handmaiden of new capitalism through the process of incorporation and re-­contextualisation (Fraser, 2013, chapter 9). She cites studies of the new spirit of capitalism ­(Boltanski & Chiapello 2007) to argue that capitalism has found forms of validation for artistry and self-expression – practices that had been previously critical in spirit – and thus found a way of transforming feminist critique within a patriarchal structure. I want to suggest that the new spirit of capitalism5 has equally incorporated pedagogicisation as part of its transformation of every nook and cranny in everyday life. It is difficult to argue that TUMO or WACArts exemplify the kind of competitive search for social advantage that I suggested sociologists have attributed to the growth of after-school activities in the introduction. Indeed, it is much easier to show how both organisations perform a similar kind of function in validating innovative forms of knowledge or creative practice in the face of conservative and restrictive field definitions. However, both organisations offer ways of pedagogicising bodies and practices that appear outside of standardised field definitions and so clearly play a part in a wider process of pedagogicisation, however much that process only appears to be closely tied to schooling. Following the analogy I have made with

206  Julian Sefton-Green Fraser’s work, I am suggesting that the process of pedagogicisation is clearly part of the ways that the new spirit of capitalism works to re-contextualise critique. The focus on habits of study, collaborative performance even compliance with a discourse of creativity and making, all fold resistant or deviant behaviour into positive, socially valorised activities. This would also suggest that despite the extraordinary differences in national and local context between my two cases, TUMO and WAC, there is a genuinely global process at work combining disparate institutions and social circumstances under the more singular process of pedagogicisation. My final question is that given I believe both institutions do a great job and make an offer to their constituencies which clearly fulfils a social justice agenda, why am I troubled by this globalising process? Why does the idea of a universal international pedagogicisation make me uneasy? Partly I think this has something to do with the philosophical challenge that if such a process is totalising, what could be outside it? And partly I think it may be to do with the new spirit of capitalism a­ nalogy – how can we reserve a space for critique if all forms of learning are being re-­ contextualised in the way I have suggested?

Notes 1 TUMO: http://tumo.org/ 2 WACArts: www.wacarts.co.uk 3 See www.youthsites.org for an international comparative project studying this sector. 4 I am obviously drawing on the work of Bourdieu here (Bourdieu 1990, 1993). The concept of education as a field of practice, although problematic, is helpful in that it allows us to see how qualifications, educational institutions, accreditation, entry into the labour market and even pedagogic discourses all stem from a particular logic. 5 See also the work of Richard Sennett, as propounded by McRobbie (2015, chapter 6).

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Outing the “out” in out-of-school  207 Erstad, O, Gilje, O, Sefton-Green, J & Arnseth, HC 2016, Learning identities, education and community: young lives in the cosmopolitan city, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Facer, K 2011, Learning futures: education, technology and social change, Routledge, London. Field, J 2006, Lifelong learning and the new educational order (new rev. edn), Trentham Books, Stoke-on-Trent, UK. Field, J 2008, Social capital, Routledge, London. Fraser, N 2013, The fortunes of feminism: from Women’s Liberation to identity politics to anti-capitalism (1st edn), Verso Books, London. Gill, R 2009, ‘Creative biographies in new media: social innovation in Web work’, in P Jeffcutt & A Pratt (eds.) Creativity and innovation, Routledge, London. Gill, R & Pratt, A 2008, ‘In the social factory?: immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 25, no. 7–8, pp. 1–30. Harper, D 1987, Working knowledge: skill and community in a small shop, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Hesmondhalgh, D & Baker, S 2011, Creative labour: media work in three cultural industries (culture, economy and the social), Routledge, London. Hunter, I 1994, Rethinking the school: subjectivity, bureaucracy, criticism, Allen & ­Unwin, St. Leonards, NSW. Ilcan, S & Basok, T 2004, ‘Community government: voluntary agencies, social justice, and the responsibilization of citizens’, Citizenship Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 129–144. Ladwig, J 2010, ‘Beyond academic outcomes’, Review of Research in Education, no. 34, pp. 113–143. Lareau, A 2011, Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life (2nd rev. edn), University of California Press, Berkeley. Lechner, F & Boli, J 2005, World culture: origins and consequences, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Lemke, T 2001, ‘“The birth of bio-politics”: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality’, Economy and Society, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 190–207. Levinson, B, Foley, D & Holland, D 1996, Cultural production of the educated person: critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice, State University of New York Press, New York. Mason, P 2015, PostCapitalism: a guide to our future, Allen Lane, London. McLaughlin, MW, Irby, MA & Langman, J 1994, Urban sanctuaries: neighborhood organizations in the lives and futures of inner-city youth, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. McRobbie, A 2015, Be creative: making a living in the new culture industries, Polity Press, Cambridge. Meyer, JW, Boli, J, Thomas, GM & Ramirez, FO 1997, ‘World society and the ­nation-state’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 103, no. 1, pp. 144–181. Nasir, NS 2008, ‘Everyday pedagogy: lessons from basketball, track and dominoes’, Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 89, no. 7, pp. 529–532. Nixon, H 1998, ‘Fun and games are serious business’, in J Sefton-Green (ed.) Digital diversions: youth culture in the age of multimedia, Routledge, London. Rose, M 2005, The mind at work: valuing the intelligence of the American worker (reprint edn), Penguin Books, New York. Rose, M 2009, Why school?: reclaiming education for all of us. New Press, New York. Rose, N 1999, Governing the soul: shaping of the private self, Free Association Books, Sidmouth, UK.

208  Julian Sefton-Green Sefton-Green, J 2013, Learning at not-school: a review of study, theory, and advocacy for education in non-formal settings, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sennett, R 2008, The craftsman, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Soep, L & Chavez, V 2010, Drop that knowledge: youth radio stories, University of ­California Press, Berkeley, CA. Sudnow, D 2002, Ways of the hand: a rewritten account (2nd rev. edn), MIT Press, ­Cambridge, MA. Taylor, S & Littleton K 2008, Creative careers and non-traditional trajectories, National Arts Learning Network, London.

13 The personal and pedagogical in the 21st century Experiments in learning about marriage Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan Introduction: marriage as a site of learning Motivated by the question, ‘What are the specific histories that have shaped learning in different contexts?’, we set out in this chapter to think through the ways in which young people learn in the Indian context. We put into question what we argue is a historical barrier placed between the personal and the pedagogical in the Indian context, and expose the operations of this barrier. Through this, we offer ways of re-imagining the relationship between politics, personhood and pedagogy in the 21st century. We start our chapter with a series of responses from young women and men who attended workshops1 we conducted on understanding marriage and what it means in their lives. These participants were mostly from marginalised and ­d isadvantaged communities in the state of Karnataka and ranged between 18 and 25 years of age. After discussions on how they feel about marriage, whether they approve of “love” or “arranged” marriages, whether they would like to choose who and when they marry, whether they want to marry someone from the same community they belong to, what their ideal partner would be like, and what they thought of the powers granted to men and women within marriages, we asked them what they had learnt. This is a sample of what they had to say: I wish I had attended this workshop a few months ago. I might have then fought to keep my sister from getting married off so early. (Student at the Bangalore Youth Resource Centre, Samvada) There should be respect and equality between men and women, and there should be emotional understanding within relationships. (Student at Sakhi Yuva Samvada Kendra, Hospete) I understood what I want in a life partner, and what expectations are i­nvolved in marriage; also understood that love and sexual desire/needs are different from each other. (Student of Sakhi Yuva Samvada Kendra (YSK))

210  Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan Gender equality starts from the house, I can adopt this myself. (Student at Sakhi YSK) I attended the workshop as a student counsellor, expecting to learn things that will help me with my work. But I also ended up thinking about my own life. (Student counsellor who attended a Facilitating Women’s Wellness and Justice course) Girls in my area in Bellary2 are married off at the age of 10 and even below. I need to know how to negotiate with my family in such a way that I can get married when I’m ready. (Student of the Facilitating Women’s Wellness and Justice course) I understood that if we want to bring about any change in the world we have to start in our homes. I need to work on my relationship with my own family. (Farmer and student of the Sustainable Agriculture course) These statements draw attention to young people’s anxieties about gender, caste, class, religion and sexual practice, when they are faced with the possibility of unlearning what they have learnt outside of formal schooling, about who they are and who they ought to become. Such pronouncements demonstrate that outof-school learning about marriage has taken place gradually with an intertwining of the personal and pedagogical in subtle but powerful ways. In the context of increasing turbulence around marriage in contemporary ­Indian society, marriage, as object and subject of learning, has caught our attention as it cuts across learning around gender, sexuality, family, caste, culture and identity in multiple ways. It is also an exemplar of the pedagogicisation of everyday life with implications for young people’s entry into the 21st century in a globally significant economy and polity. Despite the centrality of marriage in Indian society, marriage as an object or subject of learning is in itself unheard of, within the Indian context at least. It is an institution that is embedded in the private–familial zone, although there is great public investment in it in the form of laws, religious diktats, economy, social movements, media debates and so on. In terms of academic scholarship, marriage has become an object within disciplines and fields in the Indian context in particular ways. Anthropology, sociology and history have located the practice called marriage and the transformations it underwent in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Feminist scholarship has addressed specific issues like child marriage, dowry, divorce, domestic violence, marital rape, property inheritance, personal law and so on, as part of a history of: (a) making the state accountable for what takes place within the domestic–private realm of the household and the family, and (b) theorising the nature of patriarchy in our context. Psychology approaches marriage as one of the various sites at which counselling is required, that is as a social institution that demands a certain set of mental capabilities that can be developed through the process of counselling or psychotherapy. A field

The personal and pedagogical  211 like development studies reads marriage through the lens of what it means to be a developed nation and society – the rate of child marriages, the occurrence of honour killings, the rate of divorces, the rate of domestic violence cases reported, all give the measure of the development of India as a nation. In all of these fields/disciplines, marriage is everything but an experience – it is an historical practice, it is a governmental statistic, it is a measure of modern living, it is a site of legal change. Feminist literature and scholarship has come closest to examining marriage for what it is, a process that women and men participate in daily, that leads to the formation of families and is maintained through rituals, ideas, transactions, cultural affiliations and contractual obligations. The existence of young people as knowledge-bearing subjects who engage in learning around marriage at different sites and at different times in their lives, or as decision-making subjects who act on the basis of this knowledge, is never acknowledged. Schools and colleges do not conduct official courses or even ­extra-curricular discussions on choices and desires related to marriage. Marriage and education are positioned as two separate vectors that intersect at given points, that is, marriage can and does interrupt education, education could change the nature or the age of marriage and so on. Marriage is also seen as the phase of life that follows formal education, and is therefore separate from it. Boys are told to educate themselves in order to then support their families after marriage, and girls are told to educate themselves just enough to then be intelligent/“useful” wives to their husbands. The large percentage of girls dropping out of higher education to get married suggests that marriage is the basis of women’s exclusion from education (United Nations Development Programme 2010), and that the coexistence of marriage and education is rendered impossible within a certain imagination of women’s lives. Despite this overt separation of marriage and formal learning, we offer the idea of marriage as a site for knowledge building and an understanding of the self. Concomitantly, we undo the notion that a person’s learning only happens within designated educational spaces, rendering everything else “personal” and not pedagogical. Positioning marriage as a site of learning, this chapter attempts to: (a) map practices, histories and pedagogies of formal and informal learning in the Indian context, and the separation of personhood, politics and learning, (b) explore the scope to foster ruptures in this system of learning through an alternative pedagogy, and (c) examine the “pedagogicisation of the 21st century” in terms of its potential to foster social transformation.

The pedagogy of everyday life: learning within the domain of the social Our first question then has to be: How we do learn to become the people we are? In this section we look at five sites – family, religion, caste, location, ­cinema – at which we have learnt the lessons that have shaped our psychic processes, self-­ image, actions and beliefs in relation to marriage. We start, of course, with the family.

212  Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan Internal landscapes of love and fear: the family as your first teacher Traditionally, the primary agent of socialisation has been the family. Inside the institution of family, marriage has been treated as a practical economic living arrangement that provides a legitimate and socially sanctioned platform for reproduction, companionship, mutual support, and as a crucible for child-rearing and care of the elderly. From childhood the key messages conveyed by parents and extended family are: • •

• •

• • •

• • • •

• •

• • • • •

Marriage is good, right, inevitable and compulsory. Choice of children’s spouses is best made by parents who will enquire after the caste and economic status of the family being considered in order to select the bride/groom. Inter-caste and inter-religious marriages are wrong. Parents will also consider the bride/bridegroom’s age, education and ­employment status to ensure either equal status or upward mobility through marriage. Elders will enquire into individuals’ characters through social networks to ensure that there are no “bad” habits or previous relationships. Obeying your parents in marital decisions is synonymous with loving and respecting them. The boy’s family will visit the girl’s home and, after seeing the girl briefly, will communicate to the girl’s parents their acceptance/non-acceptance of the match. The girl child is a temporary member of her natal family and her permanent home is the husband’s home. Love and affection will emerge after marriage. Single, widowed or divorced people are not socially acceptable/acknowledged and threaten the social fabric. The bridegroom and male members of his family will be the primary bread winners with women playing domestic roles and supplementing the family income if possible/necessary. Women cannot receive immovable property as inheritance as they will eventually move to their marital homes. As women are economic burdens, a dowry is to be paid to the groom’s family who will henceforth be responsible for her maintenance. Because of this dowry girls are a burden, and because girls are a burden a dowry needs to be paid. Marriage expenses are borne by the girl’s family. Extra- or pre-marital sex is taboo, especially for girls. Girls should marry aged between 18 and 22 and boys a couple of years later. It is better if the girl is younger than the boy. Boys should marry girls who are less educated or earn less than them. In terms of appearance, the girl needs to be fairer and shorter than the boy.

The personal and pedagogical  213 • •

Marrying within extended family networks is best. Marital vows are made before God and the community, and therefore require social rather than legal sanction.

Repeated oral instructions inside the home between parents and children ­regarding divisions of labour in the family, wisdoms espoused by the elderly in everyday conversations, proverbs quoted, religious dictates referred to, threads of conversations among family members – especially in reference to the children’s future – and comments/judgements about people outside the family; all these come together in the pedagogy of the family.

Iconography, ritual and narrative: the lessons we learn from religion While religious studies and epics were once an integral part of formal school learning, today they are officially outside of it or are to be found in special institutions of a religious nature. Yet in the 21st century, religion- and m ­ ythology-based messages are constantly evoked in everyday life, and the discourse of living by your religion has only intensified in the face of the growth of Hindutva3 power in the country. One method of teaching is exemplification, that is, using stories from religious myths to inculcate the right ideas about marriage and relationships in the minds of children. Hindu mythology has several romantic couples, mainly among the pantheon of gods and goddesses, kings and queens, and even includes a god of love and desire – Kamadeva. Love is presented as a gendered space with clear roles for men and women and no hint of equality in relationships. Men were depicted as having multiple paramours and wives, as conquerors, rulers, rescuers, judges of character and yet sometimes insecure about women’s fidelity! Women as lovers were objects of sensual beauty arousing desire, but not always c­ onsidered as socially recognised wives. And yet the hallmark of her romantic love was her willingness to sacrifice her life, be entombed or jump into funeral pyres for love. Similarly, parables from the Bible and teachings from the Quran are used in Christian and Muslim communities to reinforce ideas of endogamy, chastity, honour and gender hierarchy. Repetitive practice through rituals and wedding/marital practices are also a way of learning about marriage. In dominant caste Hindu families, rituals include the girl sitting on her father’s lap and touching her husband’s feet (‘my husband is my god’), the girl’s family “persuading” the boy to enter the marriage hall, the tying of the mangalsutra around the girl’s neck (as if to mark her as her husband’s property), the kanyadaan where the father “gives” his “virgin” daughter to another man, and so on. After the wedding there are a string of other practices that teach children about familial relationships – the ritual fast that the wife undertakes to ensure her husband’s long life, the ritual of the ‘first night’ and the value given to virginity, the value given to the woman who dies while her husband is still alive (meaning she wasn’t ‘reduced’ to the status of a widow and was lucky to die before him!) and so on.

214  Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan The onus of maintaining ‘culture’ and religiosity is often placed on the women of the family and the shame and dishonour of transgressing that culture also attaches mostly to them. These are the lessons young people learn and faith is then linked to the ways in which these stories and illustrations come to guide their understanding and actions.4

Divisions of space and labour: the pedagogy of caste Even in the 21st century, the age of so-called posthumanism, a young person in India is forced to contend with a site of learning that institutes a sense of hierarchy/superiority/inferiority and controls her/his choice of a partner – caste. While growing up, young people from dominant castes remain largely unaware of their own privileges and their prejudices, while those from the non-dominant castes have a heightened awareness of caste because of the discrimination and inequality they face, be it in romantic relationships or friendships, educational spaces, economic status, occupational choices, media representations and encounters with the law and police, with caste difference enforcing itself in both micro and macro transactions that affect the “lower” caste person’s sense of ­self-worth and dignity. Community-based pedagogies around marriage and pedagogies around caste are interlinked. Arranged marriage ensures endogamy and the perpetuation of the caste system. Even if a family becomes open to accepting a bride or groom from another caste, they are viewed with disapproval for threatening the social order around which the political economy of a community is built. Of much concern in our time is the increasing number of honour killings where family elders murder their own children and their lovers, if the former dare to love or marry persons from other castes, and we find very few convictions in these cases because of the collusion between the families and the police.5 This shows us that there is a whole sphere of social practice where atrocities continue unabated and this is not addressed in any way by the existing formal schooling systems in the country.

Location as pedagogy: imaginary/real villages and the cities Many of the lessons we learn about romance, love and marriage are through observing or unconsciously absorbing the codes of the place we live in, whether it’s a village, small town, island or large city. In a country where 68.8 per cent of the population (Census 2011) live in villages and practise agriculture, village life, community norms, workplace discourses and practices in agriculture are significant sites of learning about marriage. Typically, sons are entitled to inherit land from their fathers and, as the marriage takes place when a son is still tilling his father’s land, he is totally dependent on his father for his occupation, identity, status, income and dwelling place. In comparison to the villages, the city is seen as more permissive, though it is not entirely without its own surveillance systems, moral codes and control mechanisms.6 Towns and cities have emerged as texts and as theatres of learning,

The personal and pedagogical  215 spaces where culture is continuously created (Armstrong & McGee 1988; ­McGee 1967; Goh & Yeoh 2003; Duncan & Duncan 2004). The cityscape offers plenty of visual representations of the couple as an entity – movie posters and billboards, couples strolling in parks and public spaces, sitting together on motor cycles and in coffee shops and theatres. The married/unmarried couple is now visible. The general trend is for runaway couples to leave their villages or hometowns and seek refuge in the largeness of the city, where they can escape notice and not be traced easily. These melting pots have changed notions of marriage for young people in many ways as cities tend to have smaller families and more diverse family types than villages: nuclear families, women-headed households, single-person households and young people living away from families with friends or partners (Shah 2005; Singh 2003; Dommaraju 2015). During the workshops, the distinction between halli (village) life and city life emerged strongly through the narratives offered by the students. Halli life is seen as prohibiting certain acts: meeting a lover alone in public, showing physical affection, wearing certain kinds of clothes and enacting other ways of stepping away from cultural boundaries. The halli then becomes a spectre in the imagination of young people, even if they no longer live there. But this village is also defended against the city, as a space that is more caring and supportive, more compassionate, less deceptive and misleading in terms of how relationships are conducted. The city then also takes on a spectral aspect, with ideas on what it offers/takes away looming in the minds of young people. Freedom, privacy, care, ethics, adventure, love, are all shaped by these two sites that involve both material practices and conditions, and imaginary messages about what kind of romance or marriage is desirable or possible.

Kaho Naa… Pyar Hai:7 cinema, the heart’s teacher Indian cinema has always given centre stage to narratives of love and marriage through stories of feuding families, socially forbidden relationships, troubled marriages and grand love affairs that either end in tragedy or conjugal bliss. In the film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun,8 when the protagonist is asked what kind of marriage he would like – an arranged or a love marriage – he replies, without a moment of hesitation, an “arranged love marriage”. The pact between patriarchy and capital – the limited opening up of sexuality by consumer culture and its containment within patriarchy – could not have been expressed in a pithier phrase than this one. “Women are prepared for such an arrangement through numerous calls to combine the traditional with the modern, the ethnic with the global” (Kapur 2009, p. 228). Over the last few decades Indian films, television and popular music have increasingly constructed and fed young people’s aspirations for “love marriage” as compared to “arranged marriage”. The message to young people is that romantic love is what we need in order to be happy, with marriage being the only desirable culmination of a romantic relationship. ­Romantic love used to be mainly an urban or middle-class fascination as a r­ esult of exposure to Western societies’ ideas, literature and experiences (Giddens 1992;

216  Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan Shumway 2003), as well as the influence of Indian mythology and l­iterature. ­Today, the aspiration to experience romantic love and/or to choose one’s own life partner has pervaded rural and marginalised communities as well, cutting across class, caste, language, region and religion (Banaji 2006). The role of cinema in the life of the Indian viewer cannot be underplayed and the cinema as an institution is tied to the ways in which desire is organised in our lives. This is why the cinema is often accused of “influencing” young people in problematic ways. For example, a charge that is often laid at the door of cinema is that it has made young boys think that the best way to win a girl’s affection is by relentlessly stalking her until she gives in and becomes his girlfriend. A critical engagement with cinema is then necessary for any young person thinking about love, romance and marriage. Through the workshops we screened films that approached marriage and love from different angles and the students discussed their reactions to the films – shame, shock, embarrassment, anger, disagreement, disbelief, happiness, curiosity – and also related the films to their own lives. All the students who attend the workshops are immersed in different ­media – cinema, blogs, print and broadcast news, television, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter – and it would be a huge loss if the latter were not looked at for their pedagogical value when it comes to love, sex, relationships and marriage. Now that we have laid out different sites of out-of-school learning we turn to the ways in which these collude with formal schooling in order to ensure the emergence of a “schooled” subject that does not threaten either the social or economic fabric of contemporary Indian life.

The separation of personhood and learning: the nexus between formal and non-formal schooling The history of the current formal education system in India has to be located in the history of colonialism and the debates around education for Indians in the late 18th century, when British colonialism intensified its focus on governance and its role as civilising agent (Zastoupil & Moir 1999). Orientalist colonial officials and scholars advocated a project of “reconciliation” which meant an active encouragement of “traditional” Indian knowledge systems and methods. The Anglicists argued that Western education, with an emphasis on English language, ­European rationality and scientific knowledge, was the only thing that would pull the Indian populations out of the black hole of civilisation that they appeared to be living in. Despite much debate and discussion between ­Orientalists, ­A nglicists and the Indian Brahmin elite, colonial educational policy was a s­ tronghold of the Orientalists until the 1830s, when utilitarianism took predominance in a nexus between the coloniser and the Brahmin elite ­(Macaulay’s “Minute on ­Education” 9 is the most famous instance of this moment). Historically, this utilitarianism and its idea of what a “useful” education entails is evident in the two main streams of formal schooling – mainstream ­academic institutions such as schools, colleges and universities, and vocational

The personal and pedagogical  217 or occupational education for employment in factories or for self-employment, for example tailoring, automobile repair, carpentry, electrical maintenance and so on. While the former produced a category of white-collar workers, the latter produced a working class, thereby creating and strengthening a class stratified society.10 Let us examine the only move in recent Indian history that claims to put the idea of “life” into the realm of formal education and learning: the advent of “life skills”, implying skills that are necessary in life. The skill development project is clearly geared towards fulfilling the needs of the market, turning youth into employable figures who will be able to function at high levels of productivity and standardisation in order to ensure the smooth operation of the service industry and other sectors that work in collaboration with global partners. Life Skills programmes are funded through Corporate Social Responsibility portfolios with the declared intention of giving marginalised youth a step up towards an economically stable life and a career. These youth are trained in English and digital skills and then “placed” as staff in companies or in food outlets like Coffee Day, KFC, Barista and so on. The pay they receive is a paltry amount and they are often subject to cruel and harsh working conditions that are not supervised or ­regulated by the agencies that train them or the companies that fund this training. The place of education in current cultural conflicts, the separation of the arts from the sciences, the increasing threat of the saffronisation of education,11 the sidelining of agriculture in favour of manufacturing and then service (and consequently the sidelining of agricultural education); the ways in which late capitalist knowledge systems work in tandem with existing systems of education – all of these contain traces of the above-sketched history of what the colonial encounter did to existing relationships of learning. It is not surprising that such a utilitarian education system has failed to create individuals who can critique society or engage with social change. A critique can be made of both academic and vocational streams of education, in that they separated the process of learning from the processes of daily life. We argue that there is an invisible and powerful collusion between formal and out of school learning as both work together to stifle autonomy, agency and critique. Within out-of-school sites of learning, codes of conduct, ­d ivisions of labour/resources, oral histories, rewards and punishment, myths and iconography, media representations that valorise and stigmatise, all evoke fear, faith, obedience and love in an attempt to school young people into submission through lessons about marriage and one’s role in life. Formal e­ ducation with its utilitarian approach, systemic exclusion and marginalisation of personhood has reinforced the pedagogy of family, caste and religion by focusing on producing citizens who can be subordinated to the state and its power, who will be useful to the economic agenda of the state/market, and who will participate in reproducing the culture-structure of society by accepting and perpetuating societal hierarchies. In other words, aspects of selfhood have been carved up between these realms and kept separate and it is precisely this separation on which the

218  Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan power exerted by both formal and non-formal schooling rests: the first takes hold of the young person’s ­“usefulness” to ­nation, state and economy, while the second takes hold of his/her role in maintaining and participating in cultural and social relationships. For young people, such divisions of experiential and educational realms, and the resulting dissonance between experience and self-image, has resulted in an internalisation of powerlessness.

Thinking through personhood and politics: a return to the marriage workshops Keeping these objectives in mind, Samvada has developed a pedagogy for ­reflexive learning. The marriage workshops as they came to be called are based on pedagogical frameworks that bring together personhood and learning with the politics of relationships. Though workshops were only of four days’ duration, they were embedded either in the three-year leadership development programme for college students or the livelihood-focused courses conducted by Baduku Community College. The workshops were designed and used to create new imaginations of the self, critiques of family/state/society, aspirations regarding intimate ­relationships and a redefinition of life skills for the 21st century. In this section the approaches used, messages conveyed, and the processes of unlearning and re-learning that young people went through in discovering their agency and autonomy are briefly described. We end the section with questions that this pedagogy has thrown up about learning that is necessary for the 21st century.

Foregrounding the subtexts of learning Through the workshops a set of methods – memory work, textual analysis, ­debate, letter writing, theatre, role play, body movement – were used to change the idea of what constitutes knowledge building. They were used to pull marriage, intimacy, romance, friendship and sex out of the sphere of the private and render them public,12 thereby making these the subjects of ­k nowing, learning and changing. This was the route to then questioning the idea of the “skills” a young person needs in order to survive in the 21st century. Do we need only communication skills, “problem-solving skills”, functional literacy, English and digital skills? Can the “personal” realms that form so large a part of our lives not be considered in the ways in which we prepare for our lives ahead? The workshops began with explorations of gender and moved on to love, marriage and family and then to sexual practice and choices (see Figure 13.1). In each section, the terrain covered moved from individual to society and back to the individual.

The personal and pedagogical  219

MARRIAGE

SEXUAL PRACTICE

GENDER

What I Expect from Marriage

My Gender Identy

My Sexual Self

How I Feel about Marriage

Feelings and Experiences of Sex

Masculinity/Femininity

My Ideal Partner

Body Image

Histories of Marriage

Body Mapping

Gender Roles within the Family

Marital Pracces and Society Caste, Class, Religion

What is Sexuality?

Gender and Society (Caste, Class, Religion)

Gender and Sex within Marriage

Gender Rights

Preparedness and Autonomy

Sexual Pracces and Culture (Caste, Class, Religion – Shame, Sgma, Morality, Difference) Sexual Autonomy

Figure 13.1  Workshop scheme.

Here is an extract from one of the discussions that took place in a workshop, between student (A) and teacher (B): A:  Of

course, my father is the head of the household! of course? A:  Because he knows most about what’s going on in the world outside and he earns money and has a job. B:  Who does all the work inside the house? A:  My mother B:  Why isn’t she then the head of the household? Why doesn’t she take all the decisions inside the house? A:  Men are better at these things, they are better at taking decisions and managing money. B:  Why do you think they’re better at taking decisions? A:  I don’t know, they just are. B:  And who decides how much money to spend on groceries, food, clothes and festivals in the family? A:  My mother B:  So how do you say that your father is better at managing money? A:  Because he’s better at business. B:  So if women also worked outside the house and earned as much money, would they also know about the world and be able to make decisions? A:  No, my mother doesn’t have education. B:  Why do you think that is? Did she decide not to study when she was younger? B:  No, she stopped her education when she got married. She had to take care of the house. A:  So your father’s been given more opportunities to go and discover it, study, work and have a life outside the home, and so he knows more about the world outside. If I said this, would you agree? A:  Maybe… B:  Why

220  Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan We decided to take the project in the direction of marriage preparedness, which landed us squarely in the realm of pedagogy – how could we teach young women and men how to prepare themselves for marriage as an institution and all its aspects, involving the notion of inevitability, the boundaries of caste, the strictures of religion, dowry and wedding expenditure, division of labour within the household, hierarchies within the family, the role of gender, marriage and sex in the workplace, intimacy between husband and wife, the demands of parenthood, control over sexual choices, pre-marital relationships and so on? How could we teach them ways of taking control of their own lives, thereby developing ­methods of understanding the processes they were going to go through and developing ways of negotiating or resisting coercion? The above excerpt from one of the sessions is the unravelling of the idea of the father as the assumed head of the household (in a question put to them, a majority of the students named the father as the head, hence the choice of this passage). A process of thinking through this supposedly simple assumption could lead to fissures within given ways of receiving and acting on the pedagogy of familial and cultural mores. Together we discovered that in order to unravel this figurehead of the dominant father, we also needed to address access to education, division of labour, the gendering of respect, and eventually the question of what qualifies as knowledge. The young person who was sitting in the workshop had to render his/her family, gender identity, body, views on marriage, sexual landscape, all as texts to be read closely. The students entered the workshops with meanings they had ascribed to their experiences, on the basis of their out-of-school learning. The tensions between high modernity (Giddens 1992), individuation (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002), community, tradition and family were made evident by the discussions that were held and the positions students took. Importantly, the students were not blank slates onto which messages were inscribed. The teachers who conducted the workshops could not with any certainty be prescriptive in their approach, since they weren’t dealing with one linear narrative but with multiple narratives. The workshops first helped locate and historicise their individual experiences in social structures and phenomena without in any way belittling or dismissing the intensity or validity of these experiences. From this the students moved on to reflections on how they understood and carried their experiences and turned them into codes of conduct for themselves. With the self as the text, and reflexive discussions and activities as methods, learning encompassed the sharing of experiences and the articulation of emotions they carried – be it fear, sorrow, rage, guilt, shame, joy, hate or despair. Continuous movement between emotional expression, cognitive learning, listening to others’ experiences and theoretical debate provoked by the facilitators led to new insights about society, alongside affirmation of the person. One young farmer spoke about his fear that the woman he was in a relationship with was too young for him; a college student cried because his friend had died and he had turned his grief into anger; an aspiring career counsellor said he had been abused for four years as a child, something he had told no one else; a young Muslim woman shouted at the men in

The personal and pedagogical  221 her group saying there had been no support from religious leaders when she had sought a divorce; another young woman spoke of her dreams of being a theatre actor and how her family considered it disreputable; an aspiring teacher spoke about how the idea of sex made her physically nauseous. They were loud debates on the place of religion in women’s lives, on love versus arranged marriage, on equality between men and women – all of these moments provided the scaffolding to ­explore right and wrong, justice and injustice, victimhood and agency, power and powerlessness. The attempt in the workshops was to create new inner landscapes of freedom with an understanding of responsibility for one’s choices, a paradigm shift from no freedom and therefore no question of responsibility. The workshops were not a zone of complete “transformation” or “conversion” from a former self into a new one. The challenges that emerged included moving away from politically correct formulations that could be fed to them and that they could then repeat (‘Of course men and women should be equal!’), to actually thinking about what equality means in the world, for you and for someone else (‘Will you then share housework equally with your partner or spouse?’); dispelling the utterly defeating levels of shame that surround topics like sex and genitalia (‘It’s a private matter, why are we talking about it here?’); helping them move towards not just a conception of their freedom (‘I can now enter into relationships with boys’), but also of what this freedom would entail (‘How will power work between me and my boyfriend? Can I control when I have sex with him?’); and pulling love and romance out of the fog of romanticism (‘My fiancé should have a blue motorbike and have no hair on his body’), and patriarchal expectation (‘My girlfriend should be able to take good care of my parents’), while not making them despair of romance entirely! All in all, we needed to help young people develop ethical frameworks rooted in social justice, to aid decisions in their own lives and their actions towards/on behalf of others. By the end of the workshops the students were able to carve new imaginations of marriage as they had developed a critical understanding of marriage as an institution caught up in systems of gender, caste, religion and class. The re-­ visioning of marriage as partnership and companionship beyond or without social constrictions had begun. The students also began to see marriage as a choice and not an inevitable or compulsory way of living. As the emotional, physical and financial consequences of early or forced marriages came alive, they realised that they should and could push back and postpone their marriages till they were ready, and had completed the education that they wanted for themselves. (At the time this chapter was being written, one of the girls who attended the workshops brought her mother and brother to the youth resource centre because they wanted her to get married immediately and everything in her rebelled against this happening – she then wanted some form of compromise to be made possible by the youth mentor and teachers.) With regard to choice of partner, both young men and women students clearly stated that they wanted to participate in the choice of their spouse and felt the need to enter into a dialogue about this with their parents. They also expressed a desire to support other young people in the family to recognise and exercise choice in terms of when and whom to marry.

222  Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan Drawing from our experiences in these workshops, the question we then pose is, What are the skills necessary for young people in the 21st century to reshape both their own individual realities and simultaneously transform collective realities involving different forms of injustice? While grappling with the possibilities revealed to us, the participants and facilitators became acutely aware of the skills and stances young people would need, to move from re-imagination to reality. Some of the skills they recognised as necessary were the ability to: • • • • • • • • •

Analyse experiences and responses using an understanding of systemic ­inequality and structures embedded in history. Articulate emotions without packaging them into what would be considered socially expected or acceptable. Disobey parents without a breakdown of their relationships. Have difficult conversations with intimate partners. Take risks and make decisions with autonomy. Negotiate and plan one’s future. Gather information about study and work options. Make friends with people of all genders and communities. Negotiate the line between personal and professional relationships.

Conclusion: a youthful fantasy The current imagination of “21st century skills” presents us with ways of being that are apolitical, ahistorical and individualistic (a-communal). These are ways of being that feed market, state and “global” requirements instead of feeding any sense of self-worth or understanding of one’s place in society and how to change it. While 21st century skills promise to be precisely the thing that will free you from the industrial era and bring you into a new era that will reap your potential (problem-solving ability, critical thinking, innovation, creativity are the trending terms), you are forced to disregard huge portions of your own history and experience within the sphere of education and the workspace. “Critical thinking” in the list above does not in any way refer to thinking about your position in society, it rather refers to analysing data in new ways or using new methods to approach information technology. The bland and a-political ­definition offered by the new age – ‘Critical thinkers will identify, analyse and solve problems systematically rather than by intuition or instinct’13 – does not include the ability to bring together politics, personhood and learning, or the ability to raise questions about injustice, whether to the self or to collectives in society. In the recent history of Indian education, there have been three landmark political moments that have seen the young people of India emerge as political actors and agents raising voices against the state and educational institutions. The three moments are all very different from each other. The year 1990 marked the rise of dominant caste students fighting for their “rights” when the Mandal Commission recommended the reservation of seats in education for students from the lower castes.14 The second moment was when a young Dalit15 scholar and member of the Ambedkar Students’ Association

The personal and pedagogical  223 (ASA), Rohith Vemula, committed suicide in Hyderabad Central University in January 2016. The suicide was driven by discrimination by upper caste student groups affiliated to the Hindu right and by the university’s efforts to silence ­Vemula and other members of the ASA by withdrawing their fellowships and forcing them out of their hostel rooms and onto the street. This led to countrywide protests against institutional murders, casteism, Hindu majoritarianism, censorship and inequality within public universities.16 The third moment is taking place as this chapter is being written. In October–November 2017, in the aftermath of the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment in both the film industry and the media in the West (largely USA), Raya Sarkar, a young lawyer, offered to display names of men in Indian academia who had sexually harassed their students (the students would remain anonymous and the men’s names would be put up on Sarkar’s Facebook page in the form of a list). This event rendered public several “open secrets” that had been circulating about many Indian male academics, and revealed more than 70 names of some of the most prominent academics in the country. This list was followed by a second list, of men who had harassed Dalit Bahujan women within academia. These lists generated heated discussions about due process, the defunct nature of academic anti-harassment complaints committees, and the nature of sexism and harassment within academia. These moments signify the eruption of something “personal” into the space of education. The anti-Mandal protests took place because suddenly social privilege was revealed and discussed, and dominant caste students had to contend with the fact that they were being educated not because they were the best students but because their caste privilege had enabled it. In other words, that education was not a space outside of the personal. In the second moment, it was precisely the falseness of the “neutral” educational space that the protesters wanted to take apart, arguing instead that the educational system was rife with inequality that was based on those very personal aspects of one’s life – caste, gender, class, religion – that the management claimed did not affect education. For these students, the message was clear – education is politics and politics is personal. In the third moment the abuse of institutional authority to “personally” harass women students was brought into clear focus. At this tumultuous point we arrive at the figure of the young person we want to see take shape in the 21st century, our personal–professional fantasy so to speak. In the marriage workshops the fantasy in operation was of young people who would go on to decide whether they wanted to get married, and if they did, to whom and when; who would work to ensure emotional, cultural, social and economic equality within their relationships; who would be able to overcome shame, fear, apprehension, powerlessness and blind loyalty and be able to find a high measure of emotional and physical happiness in their relationships; who would not have to choose between their education/career and their marriages; who would be able to stand as independent individuals who at the same time have a sense of community and history; and finally, who would call out inequality or coercion elsewhere when they encountered it, whether in families, communities or society at large.

224  Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan This fantasy is not and cannot be disconnected from the larger dream for education in the 21st century. As long as the nexus of formal and non-formal schooling works to push young people down paths that they do not desire, whether in terms of marriage or career, we will continue to have the problems of inequality, jobless growth, depression and youth suicide, honour killings, all amounting to a terrible waste of lives. We have reached a conjuncture in which while we are inching closer to fast-moving metros and the latest forms of global connectivity, inter-caste marriages still remain taboo, marriage is still inevitable, and the number of women dropping out of the workplace is increasing.17.The number of honour killings and similar punishments of caste and religious transgression have increased, and while it may be easy to point fingers at “traditional” practices as backward, relationships between young women and men in the most urban of contexts are not getting any easier. Abusive boyfriends, the threat of suicide, new forms of dowry harassment and new not-so-equal divisions of labour within the household have emerged, which renders our personal learning at this point more crucial than ever, in order for us to become subjects with actual and not just industry-defined “critical thinking”. We then desperately need a pedagogical framework that does not separate out personhood and politics from learning. It is only through a careful and self-reflexive redefinition of the personal as a site of learning that we can imagine moving forward into the 21st century. To borrow an idea from Gorgio Agamben (2009, p. 45), the lights of our century blind us. We are told that we are constantly moving towards the future in a straight line of progress and development. By rendering both our self and the self of society as texts that can be read, historicised, annotated and re-made, we can perhaps actually disrupt this narrative that seeks to make us “shining” embodiments of either the past (by eradicating any choice in how we live our social lives) or of the future (as square pegs that are wedged into the round holes of the late capitalist market).

Notes 1 Between 2015 and 2017, Samvada, an organisation that has been working with youth on issues of social justice and sustainability since 1992, conducted a series of workshops on Gender, Sexuality, Relationships and Marriage, with college-going students in Bangalore, Tumkur, Hosapete, Bantwala, Chitradurga and Kolar (areas across the state of Karnataka in south India). These workshops were also conducted for participants of the courses run by Baduku Community College (established by Samvada in 2007): Sustainable Agriculture, Journalism for Peace and Development, Youth Work, Facilitating Women’s Wellness and Justice, Learning Lenses (on creative teaching), Early ­ ounselling. Childhood Care and Education, Solid Waste Management and Career C The workshops were funded by the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) as part of a project titled “Strengthening Gender and Sexuality Education in Baduku”, to help address the problem framed as Early and Childhood Marriage (ECM). 2 Bellary a district in Karnataka records a high number of child marriages each year. 3 Introduced by VD Savarkar in 1923, this term was originally meant to refer to “Hinduness” as an attribute, but now, with the growth of organisations and political

The personal and pedagogical  225 parties that seek to describe India as a Hindu nation and persecute non-Hindus as minorities or outsiders, it refers to an ideological position and its accompanying forms of majoritarianism. 4 Of relevance here is the May–November 2017 social and legal battle of Hadiya, a young Hindu woman in Kerala who converted to Islam in 2016 and then went on to marry a Muslim man. Both these acts led to her enraged family filing a case of kidnapping and terrorism against those who supported her in this transition. See: “Hadiya’s Story: A Timeline of Kerala ‘Love Jihad’ case” (NDTV, 27 November 2017, http:// bit.ly/2BGfi4p) and “Hadiya’s Choices” (Kavita Krishnan, The Indian Express, 30 November 2017, http://bit.ly/2Adkm3P). Viewed on 6 December 2017. 5 For Example, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/girl-killed-­allegedlyby-parents-for-inter-caste-marriage/ (a girl who was strangled by her parents after her inter-caste marriage; Delhi, 2014); www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/manmurdered-by-wifes-relatives-over-intercaste-marriage/article7219551.ece (a young man from the Uppara caste who was bludgeoned to death by the relatives of the dominant caste Lingayat girl he had married; Raichur, 2015). 6 See the crackdown on couples in public parks by Meerut police (2005), the Mangalore Pub attack (2009), the Pink Chaddi campaign (2009), the Kiss of Love campaign (2014), and Mumbai police arrests and shaming of couples found in hotels (2015). 7 A film made by Rakesh Roshan in 2000, the title translates as Say it . . . You’re in Love. 8 A 1994 film by Sooraj Barjatya, touted as the biggest of the 1990s middle-class family dramas that centred around a couple, their respective families and the forever looming marriage. 9 Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Education” (1835), a document prepared for Lord William Bentinck’s educational policy was endorsed by the English Education Act, 1835, and made English the language of education. It did not, as suggested by Macaulay, eradicate existing institutions of learning, but de-prioritised them within educational policies and resource distribution. 10 The birth of Industrial Training Institutes and vocational training programmes can also be traced back to the colonial era and discussions on the need for occupational training. See www.teindia.nic.in/mhrd/50yrsedu/q/34/3S/343S0201.htm for a short account of this history (Viewed 9 September 2016). 11 The ‘saffronisation’ of education is a reference to a process by which right-wing Hindu majoritarian ideology is imposed upon the field of education, influencing policy and governmental measures towards representations of the histories, opinions, experiences and knowledges of only dominant caste Hindu communities. The Hindu right-wing is signified through the use of the colour saffron in their clothes and publicity material. 12 Albeit with respect given to the person’s control over their own narrative and who they want to share it with. 13 https://www.skillsyouneed.com/learn/critical-thinking.html (Viewed 14 September 2017). 14 The Mandal Commission was set up in 1978 to make recommendations to eradicate caste-based inequality in educational institutions and government jobs. The antiMandal agitations or protests took place after the government announced in 1990 that it would implement 27 per cent caste-based reservation in public educational institutions and government jobs for people belonging to Other Backward Classes (OBCs), besides the percentage that was already reserved for those belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCs/STs). 15 “Dalit” is the self-chosen political name of those who belong to the castes that were deemed “untouchable” and therefore not even part of the varna (caste) system. 16 Rohith Vemula was a member of the Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA), and on 3 August 2015 this group held protests. After a scuffle with members of the Akhil

226  Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the youth wing of the ruling Hindu right-wing party BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), Rohith and other members of the ASA were suspended and barred from their hostel. After months of trying to fight the administration, which was acting on the order of the BJP, Vemula finally wrote a heart-rending suicide note and took his own life in January 2016. 17 See “How to Get India’s Women Working? First, Let Them Out of the House” (Rohini Pande, Jennifer Johnson and Eric Dodge, 9 April 2016, IndiaSpend, w w w.indiaspend.com/cover-stor y/how-to-get-indias-women-work ing-f irstlet-them-out-of-the-house-74364).

References Agamben, G 2009, ‘What is the contemporary?’, in Kishik, David and Pedatella, Stefan, Trans. What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Armstrong, W & McGee, T 1985, Theatres of accumulation: studies in Asian and Latin American urbanization, Methuen, London. Banaji, S 2006, ‘Young people viewing Hindi films: ideology, pleasure and meaning’, Merz: Medien + Erziehung, vol. 3, pp. 12–18. Beck, U and Beck-Gernsheim, E 2002, Individualization, Sage, London. Census of India 2011, Rural urban distribution of population (provisional population tables), p. 5; Dr. C Chandramouli, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India; Ministry of Home Affairs, New Delhi, 15 July. Viewed 7 December 2017, http:// censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/paper2/data_files/india/Rural_Urban_2011.pdf Dommaraju, P 2015, ‘One person households in India’, Demographic Research, vol. 32, pp. 1239–1266. Duncan, J & Duncan, N 2004, Landscapes of privilege: the politics of the aesthetic in an American suburb, Routledge, New York. Giddens, A 1992, The transformation of intimacy: sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Goh, R & Yeoh, B (eds.) 2003, Urbanism and post-colonial nationalities: theorizing the South East Asian city, World Scientific Publishing, Singapore. Kapur, J 2009, ‘An “arranged love” marriage: India’s neoliberal turn and the Bollywood wedding culture industry’, Communication, Culture and Critique, vol. 2, pp. 221–233. McGee, T 1967, The Southeast Asian city: a social geography of the primate cities of ­Southeast Asia, Bell, London. Shah, AM 2005, ‘Family studies in India: retrospect and prospect’, Economic and P ­ olitical Weekly, vol. 40, no. 1, pp 19–22. Shumway, D 2003, Modern love: romance, intimacy and the marriage crisis, New York University Press, New York. Singh, JP 2003, ‘Nuclearization of household and family in urban India’, Sociological Bulletin, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 53–70. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 2010, The human development r­ eport, Palgrave Macmillan; New York. Zastoupil, L & Moir, M (eds.) 1999, The great Indian education debate: documents ­relating to the Orientalist–Anglicist controversy 1781–1843, Curzon Press, Richmond, Surrey, UK.

14 Beyond the totally pedagogicised society Final reflections Julian Sefton-Green

The spread of forms of schooling beyond the school gate is, as many of the contributors to this volume can testify, a truly global phenomenon. Yet whether the persistence of the institutional form of schooling can be said to have brought about a “totally pedagogicised society”, as outlined in Chapter 1, remains ­contested. This brief concluding chapter brings together the themes of this volume in order to reflect on how an international comparative analysis of out-ofschool can help us understand the significance and meaning of education around the world today.

Mapping the field of out-of-school The introduction to this book suggested five areas of investigation that linked the ways that the following chapters approached the extremely broad field of out-of-school. Indeed, part of the difficulty this volume faced was finding an underlying framework that could reasonably be said to encompass the diverse theoretical traditions that cohere under the wide range of out-of-school and formal/informal learning terminologies. Chapter 1 suggested that four key axes might help us understand out-of-school as a field (understood here in terms of shared social practices striving for social legitimation (Bourdieu 1993)). These were educationalisation, supplementary/complementary provision, informal learning and comparative international perspectives. The sets of chapters do not, of course, constitute an attempt to “map” (Sefton-Green 2017) this field because a central part of the volume’s collective authorial argument is the ways that prefixing out-of, or in-formal, is a kind of discursive work that operates in local conditions in order to rationalise, qualify and legitimate what counts as learning in the first place. Such a model of contestation over what counts as education could not lend itself to any simple descriptive cartography. Nevertheless, the sets of case studies collected here – which we hope will inspire more investigation of other ways of defining learning in communities, cities and cultures as they are brought into relief through contrast with dominant ­educational paradigms – do add up to a rough outline of a field. Mariëtte de Hann and Vera Michalchik (Chapters 3 and 4, respectively) explored the relationship between “natural” or “native” ways of understanding pedagogy and

228  Julian Sefton-Green how such formulations encounter different modes of warrant or legitimacy both in the context of seemingly distant social institutions like school or church in Kosrae, or in de Haan’s case, as a way of coping with technological complexity. Challenges over the authority of a warrant also underpinned Ola Erstad’s and James G. Ladwig’s contributions (Chapters 5 and 6, respectively). Ladwig’s exploration of the limits of schooling – in its “world schooling” mode  – as it is encountered and enacted in the Australian outback contrasted with Erstad’s complementary interest in progressive educational philosophy (in his case, ubuntu and bildung). Both of these broader concerns with definitions of what it is to be educated conflict sharply with the dominant political consensus, a point echoed by Ladwig, and almost paradoxically both of these authors found a ­Deweyian vision of education-for society in out-of-school community learning centres. This theme was taken up in the final set of chapters where Anita Ratnam, Nitya Vasudevan (Chapter 13) and Julian Sefton-Green (Chapter 12) examined the institutionalisation of out-of-school in India, Armenia and the United Kingdom. Their focus on alternative pedagogy, innovative curriculum and different ways of institutionalising learning habits and relationships points to a more contested and socially embedded place for learning not entirely outside of dominant pedagogicised forms of schooling but on boundaries where such definitions are contested, negotiated and frequently redefined. The theme of alternative visions of learning clearly underpinned explorations of the “learning cities” of Bristol and Shanghai. Keri Facer and ­Magdalena Buchczyk’s analysis (in Chapter 7) of clues, cues, embedded histories and assumptions about what constitutes education and learning in the everyday city landscape contrasted with Luo Xiaoming’s (in Chapter 8) description of social interventions in the more restrictive and troubled environment of rapid urbanisation. Luo’s analysis of pop-up forms of civic education showed the struggle that alternative sites for learning have within her particular political context, perhaps also creating a thematic bridge to the institution set of chapters (Chapters 12 and 13), as they all try to characterise different modes of institutionalising learning outside of the school. Both studies of the city show how pedagogicising citizens to live “well” in their sometimes-troubling environments is an ongoing process of negotiation – perhaps a return to an older definition of lifelong learning. The three chapters exploring how understandings of literacy working on the boundaries between the schooled and non-schooled also open up the school curriculum itself as it copes with the powers of vernacular culture in different societies. In relation to South Korea, Hyeon-Seon Jeong (Chapter 11) examined progressive educational interventions based on global scholarship, and showed how modes of classification, categorisation and re-categorisation make the process of negotiated change very challenging in such a conservative environment. By contrast, John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio ­(Chapter 10) showed how new literacies are affecting the wider ecology of learning among stakeholders in a more progressive context. Their theories of assemblage recalibrates any simplistic, binary version of “boundary crossing” as structural

Beyond the totally pedagogicised society  229 change. Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag’s (Chapter 9) account of cosmopolitan meaning-making “flows” also has links with Ladwig’s and Erstad’s interest in progressive educational philosophy. In Dussel and Benasayag’s case, the cosmopolitanism is not just a liberal philosophy but is bound up with other kinds of flows in late monopoly capitalism and the networked society. In the context of the boundary between schooled and unschooled literacies the chapter suggests it is the out-of-school which re-contextualises the school in terms of expressive media – quite in contrast to the re-contextualising movement in South Korea, where schooled forms of classification dominate, and in a different kind of contrast with the capacity of a university (as described in Chapter 10) to adapt various out-of-school pedagogies in its offer to students

Pedagogicisation What then does this analysis tell us about the contemporary state of our pedagogicised societies – as speculated about in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book? In many ways, these chapters support the theory that modes of pedagogicisation are increasing (becoming more visible) and have consolidated their work to lubricate the social mechanisms by which power is exerted and maintained in society. At the same time, because forms of education contain within them destabilising, challenging and critical impulses, it would be overstating claims to say that we live in a “totally pedagogicised society”. Even in the flow of challenge and re-contextualisation that Hyeon-Seon Jeong described in the “over-schooled” society of South Korea, and the interplay of popular culture and formal definitions of literacy attainment (both complicated by continually changing and emerging digital modes of communication and expression), it would be unfair to label the kind of school projects she describes in any simple fashion. Similarly, for all the exclusion and control exerted by levels of government in Shanghai, the public debate or “everyday life education” described by Luo Xiaoming, does not suggest a lack of critical appraisal or the impossibility of education for democracy. Indeed, in almost every case in this book, from the diverse cultural assemblage in the signs and streets of Bristol to the isolation of the Australian outback, and through the community centres of London, Bangalore, Oslo, Stone Town and Yerevan, a wide range of forms of schooling thrive in dialogue with dominant models – even if they are underfunded, under resourced and continually have to justify their case. Indeed, perhaps it is in the legitimation discourses in play in all these different contexts that we can see the most interesting and progressive interpretations of pedagogicisation at work. For example, Vera Michalchik’s description of the balance between the “authority” of family, experience, church and school in Kosrae, or the negotiation of identity through the image flows of national/ global signs and images as analysed by Inés Dussel and Ariel Benasayag, suggest more how people bring the vernacular and the formal into a relationship with each other in ways that make the performance of being educated powerful in its

230  Julian Sefton-Green every day context. This builds on the tradition of making sense of education in a cultural narrative (Levinson, Foley & Holland 1996) where the display of learning in context and the utilisation of forms of knowledge as warrants is used to legitimate all kinds of social interactions. The structural innovations described by John Scott, Glynda A. Hull and Jennifer DiZio may have originated in an observation and analysis of “symbolic creativity” (Willis 1978) in informal youth/ community learning organisations but the import of such principles into very different institutional context also shows how what counts as being educated can be reconfigured as circumstances change. Thus, whilst the seminar which stimulated this collection began with a focus on pedagogicisation as a mode of control and explored how forms of schooled learning were colonising the popular, the vernacular and the informal, many of the chapters here have a greater interest in what people do with their learning. The young video makers in Mexico and Argentina, the boys making webtoons in South Korea, the citizens and students coming to terms with disinformation and complex metropolitan life in Shanghai, the young people exploring sex and relationships in Bangalore, and the youth using new technology for creative purposes in Yerevan are all in their diverse and different ways using forms of knowledge and learning to change their circumstances – in many cases at a small scale, but one that is meaningful for them. The authors of most of these chapters find arguments about the structuring processes of pedagogy (­Buckingham  & ­Sefton-Green 2004) less compelling than the ways that these kinds of cases might seek to persuade their wider societies about the value of alternative visions of learning. This leads inevitably to a consideration of the ways that these kinds of scholarly analyses or excavations can and cannot contribute to wider debates about the purposes of education and schooling. Just as I have just suggested that using arguments about what counts as learning is important in legitimating value in local contexts, so any international community of scholars is also contributing to a struggle for authority in debates about education in national and global policy.

From pedagogicisation towards reclaiming popular education: a new research agenda From this perspective, this book runs against the grain of contemporary research and education. It is difficult to generalise, but as a discipline, much research in education is concerned with what happens in schools. In line with the world of schooling thesis outlined in Chapter 2 (and as Erstad argues in Chapter 5), attention to international comparisons of standardised outcomes in PISA, TIMMS, etc. and which is even now spreading into diffuse conceptualisations of 21st-­ century skills or global competence,1 much education research is not interested in out-of-school. The most widely cited education scholars, most news coverage of education policy, activity and reform, much public intellectual activity and even popular narratives of school and school days, and shared local familial concern, all tend to revolve around the school as a proxy for education in society.

Beyond the totally pedagogicised society  231 There are obviously respected academic traditions that do not just do this, but both public and philanthropic research funding and public debate do not tend to include consideration of the out-of-school, the vernacular or learning lives (Erstad & Sefton-Green 2013; Erstad et al. 2016) as part of their agenda. This means that studies like those collected here in this book tend to be measured in terms of what they contribute to the role of schooling whereas, as we have seen, they precisely want to broaden and change what that might mean. As Mariëtte de Haan suggests in Chapter 3, there is an analogy here between the colonising discourse of world schooling and pedagogicisation and the relationship of Western post-Enlightenment scientism to indigenous knowledge practices that paradoxically has been rejuvenated by the vernacular digital practices in what she calls “complex societies”. Indigenous scholars now call for a project of decolonisation (Poitras Pratt et al. 2018) and, from our point of view, this would mean not so much a project of de-pedagogicisation but of finding a way to allow subaltern, vernacular and the unschooled voices – voices like those captured in this volume – an equal presence in debates about education. In other words, part of the significant contribution out-of-school research might make to debates about education is an argument for more diverse, more plural and more varied institutional ecologies of learning than that simply represented by the school. Here then, our aim has to be finding ways of challenging the simple equation of schooling with education and of helping policymakers and other social actors manage a subtle and complex understanding of learning as opposed to simple academic attainment. There are many more kinds of study of out-of-school yet to be conducted. There are many voices and practices like those so eloquently given presence by Mike Rose (2005, 2009), and there are many kinds of organised learning/­ educational practices already theorised and described in solid academic study. We hope that this book can build on such traditions and above all contribute to a wider public debate about the purposes of education in our societies today.

Note 1 See for example: www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/teaching-for-global-competencein-a-rapidly-changing-world_9789264289024-en

References Bourdieu, P 1993, The field of cultural production: essays on art and literature, Polity Press, Cambridge. Buckingham, D & Sefton-Green, J 2004, ‘Structure, agency and pedagogy in children’s media culture’, in J Tobin (ed.) Pikachu’s global adventure: the rise and fall of Pokemon, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Erstad, O, Gilje, Ø, Sefton-Green, J with Arnseth, HC 2016, Learning identities, education and community: young lives in the cosmopolitan city, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

232  Julian Sefton-Green Erstad, O & Sefton-Green, J (eds.) 2013, Identity, community, and learning lives in the digital age, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Levinson, B, Foley, D & Holland, D 1996, Cultural production of the educated person: critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice, State University of New York Press, New York, NY. Poitras Pratt, Y, Louie, DW, Hanson, AJ & Ottmann, J 2018, ‘Indigenous education and decolonization’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, doi:10.1093/ acrefore/9780190264093.013.240 Rose, M 2005, The mind at work: valuing the intelligence of the American worker, ­Penguin Books, New York, NY. Rose, M 2009, Why school?: reclaiming education for all of us, New Press, New York, NY. Sefton-Green, J 2017, ‘Representing learning lives: what does it mean to map learning journeys? International Journal of Educational Research, vol. 84, pp. 111–118. Willis, PE 1978, Learning to labour: how working class kids get working class jobs, ­A shgate, Aldershot, UK.

Index

References to illustrations are in bold. accountability: knowledge display 47; for knowledgeability 46, 47; pedagogicised 46–9; standardised tests 46–7 accountability codes, Kosrae Island 49–57, 58–9 Activity Theory 171 Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 171; and remixing 154 Alexander, Robin 20, 134, 138 Amin, A. 101 Armenia: diaspora 201; education system 196; private tuition 196; traditional pedagogy 196; see also TUMO assemblage: Asset Library as 166, 167; meaning 154–5; and remixing 171; theory 171; and Whiteboards 169 Asset Library 157; as assemblage 166, 167; and Impact Studio 168–9; problems with 168; see also Whiteboards Australia: Broken Hill 82; out-of-school learning 91; “Stolen Generation” 88, 94n1; see also Indigenous Australians Australian Outback 80–1 authenticity, youth media productions 145–6 avian flu epidemic, and “Our Cities” citizen forum (Shanghai) 121–2 Bakhtin, M. 153 Banet-Weiser, Sarah 145, 146 Barton, David & Hamilton, Mary, Local literacies 63 Bauman, R. & Briggs, C.L. 153 Beauvoir, Simone de, Memoirs of a dutiful daughter 17 Bernstein, Basil 4–5, 24; pedagogicisation thesis 20

Biesta, Gert 61–2 bildung 61, 65–6, 77n1; in African context 66; and ubuntu 66, 228 Bourdieu, Pierre 24 Bray, Mark 5, 6, 9 Bristol (UK): community notice boards 111, 112, 113; informal learning 108, 108, 110–11, 115; as Learning City 102–8; learning invitations in three high streets 107, 108; memorialisation 110; public pedagogy 102–4; street art 109, 109–10, 110; walking routes 102, 104–7 Broken Hill, Australia 82 Buckingham, David 4 capitalism, and pedagogicisation 205–6 caste: and marriage 214; pedagogy of 214 Chatterjee, Partha 129 China: public space 120, 129; Spring Festival 126–7, 130; universities, elitism 123; urban population percentage 118; urban studies 123; Weibo (‘Twitter’) 124; Weixin (‘Facebook’) 124; see also Shanghai cognitive functions, externalised 37 Collins, Randall 84–5 colonialism, Kosrae Island 49 communities of interest 63 communities of practice 63; learning in 40–1; tailoring apprenticeships, Liberia 38 community, definition problems 63 community centre, Zanzibar see TAYI community centre Congregationalist Church, Kosrae Island 50 connected learning 8, 133, 137; digital media in 137–47; global and local

234 Index 135; video studies 134; youth media productions 137–47 credentials, de-coupling of content 85 credentialism, growth 85 crisis, and self-education 130 cultural knowledge, Indigenous Australians 88 culture: Aboriginal 86; generational transmission 35; as network of meaning 86 Davies, S. & Mehta, J. 4 de Certeau, M. 97, 101 de-pedagogicisation 32; in complex societies 38–41; see also re-pedagogicisation Dewey, John: Democracy and Education 62; on education 93; on out-of-school learning 63; Schools of Tomorrow 62 digital images: control of 137; as conversation enablers 136; and selfpositioning 137, 155 digital media: in connected learning 137–47; global and local 135; and literacy 177; and out-of-school learning 133; in S. Korean homes 178 Durkheim, Emile, on schools 89 Edensor, T. 103 education: bureaucracy 81, 85; and development, criticism of 66–7; Dewey on 93; environmental 79, 94; Indigenous 86; and individual competition 204; long-term outcomes 4; meanings 2; means-ends rationale 81–2; multicultural 79 education research: on out-of-school learning 99–100, 231; on schools 230 education system, USA, criticism of 61 educationalisation 1, 4–5, 227 Engeström, Y. 154 Erstad, Ola 10 ethnic minorities, and WACArts (London) 201 ETS (Educational Testing Service) 47 everyday life, pedagogy of 211–16 family, and marriage 212–13 family life, pedagogicisation of 31 Finnegan, Ruth 152–3 formal learning, and informal learning 23–5, 64, 92 Fraser, Nancy 205 Fukushima nuclear crisis 130

Geary, D.C. 35–6 Geertz, Clifford 86 Goffman, E. 47–8 Grau, Peter 33 green politics, and Indigenous cultures 93 Hart, Keith 23 Henry, Jules, on human limits 94 Hindutva 213, 224n3 Honig, Michael-Sebastian 31 honour killings 211, 214, 224 human limits, Henry on 94 identities: and literacy 175; youth media productions 145 Ikegami, Yoshihiko 130 images see digital images India: Dalits, discrimination against 222–3; learning about marriage 209–16; Life Skills programmes 217; Mandal Commission 222, 225n14; marriage workshops 209, 215, 216, 218, 219 (scheme), 219–22; urban/rural divide 214–15; vocational education 216–17 Indian cinema, love and marriage narratives 215–16 Indian education, colonial base 216 Indigenous Australians 82; and calendar time 87; cultural knowledge 88; family networks 88; and school knowledge 87; and school rules 88; and school space 87 Indigenous cultures: and green politics 93; and world schooling 89–90, 91 individualism, and the collective 66 informal learning 227; Bristol (UK) 108, 108, 110–11, 115; and formal learning 23–5, 64, 92 irony: in schools 146–7; in youth media productions 146 Japan, private tutoring 6 Joyce, James, Portrait of the artist as a young man 17 Juceviciene, P. 98 Kamadeva 213 Kaunas (Lithuania), Learning City 98–9 Knobel, M & Lankshear, C. 152 knowledge 2; primary and secondary 35; see also cultural knowledge knowledge display: accountability 47; accountability for 47; in everyday life 47; organization of 48; purposes 49; and schooling 48

Index  235 knowledge economy, and lifelong learning 98 knowledge flows, youth digital culture 134–7 knowledge organisation, and pedagogicisation 38 Kosrae Island 45, 59n1; accountability codes 49–57, 58–9; American-style schooling 49; Christianity 50; Christmas pageant 50; Close-up programme 58; codes of compassion 56–7; colonialism 49; Compact with USA 58, 59n1; Congregationalist Church 50; economic activity 49; education systems 49; history 49; literacy 51; pre-school children, recommendations 57–8; researcher’s bias 45; school assessments 53–5; Sunday School training and teaching 51–2; Youth Council 58 Kress, G. 153 Lancy, David, on teaching 32–3 language learning 36 Lareau, Annette 7 Larkin, B. 101 learning 2; about marriage 209–16; community-based 62, 63–4, 76; forms of 25; independent vs institutionalised 38; in literate and oral societies 37; mediation of 36; in non-Western communities 32; ‘on the move’ 103, 104–7; vs pedagogy 34–5; “responsibilization” of 204; and sustainable cities see Learning City; and teaching 32–3; and the teaching register 33; and traditional African practices 65; see also connected learning; formal learning; informal learning; lifelong learning; out-of-school learning Learning City: Bristol (UK) 102–8; experimentation 98; indicators 98; Kaunas (Lithuania) 98–9; and public pedagogy 100; Reinventing Learning Cities project 101; and social change 98 learning infrastructure, creation of 101 learning opportunities, remixing 166, 168 “learning outcomes”, criticism of phrase 62 learning trails 135, 147n3 Lemke, Jay 63–4 Lessig, L. 152 lifelong learning 4; and the knowledge economy 98 literacy 3; and digital media 177; and identities 175; informal practices 179;

meanings 174–5; metaphors for 169, 170; and popular media 177; South Korea 175, 177 location, as pedagogy 214–15 Løvlie, Lars 66 Lu Hsun 130 Manovich, Lev 152 marriage: arranged 209, 214, 215; and caste 214; and the family 212–13; in Indian cinema 215–16; in Indian society 210–11; learning about 209–16; and religion 213–14; as site of learning 211 marriage workshops (India) 216; discussion extract 219; marriage preparedness 220–2; methods 218; necessary skills 222; participants’ anxieties 209–10; purpose 218; rural/ urban contrasts 215; scheme 219 Massschelein, Jan 61 memory systems, external 36 Menindee Central School (Australia): historical plaque 83; and local cultural knowledge 87–8; student art 91; student use of technology 90; ‘yarning circle’ 91 Mente Comics see South Korea, comic community practices meritocracy 85–6 Meyer, John 18, 20 modernity, and schooling, contradictions 84–7 multicultural education 79 nation-states: as contested projects 135–6; and schooling traditions 20; and world schooling 9, 21, 81 natural learning 11; vs pedagogicisation 31–2 navigators, Puluwat Islands, training 38 non-schooled learning see out-of-school learning non-Western communities, learning in 32 Oslo, youth club 71–2, 73, 74; individual focus 75; TAYI community centre, comparison 75 “Our Cities” citizen forum (Shanghai) 119–21; absence of officials 125; and avian flu epidemic (2013) 121–2; educational space 122–5; organisation of 121; purpose 121; Spring Festival issues 126–7, 130; topics discussed 122, 128; see also Shanghai

236 Index out-of-school learning 76; Australia 91; Dewey on 63; and digital media 133; in education research 99–100; in-school learning, distinctions 92 (table) 199–200; organization of 64–5; overview 1–3, 227–9; potential 93; scope 193; and social media 133; see also public pedagogy; TUMO; WACArts overschooling, South Korea 174, 176 pedagogicisation 5, 229–30; Bernstein’s thesis 20, 23; and capitalism 205–6; of everyday life 129, 130; of family life 31; and knowledge organisation 38; Kosrae, accountability codes 49–57; meanings 22, 31; vs natural learning 31–2; opposition to 31, 33; out-of-school connotations 22–3; and power 22; see also de-pedagogicisation; re-pedagogicisation; schooling pedagogy: of caste 214; etymology 21; of everyday life 211–16; vs learning 34–5; location as 214–15; research interview 29–30; see also public pedagogy philosophers, of education 61 Piper, B. 66–7 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 46–7; South Korea 176 plagiarism, and remixing 153, 158, 168–9 power, and pedagogicisation 22 primary schooling (1950–2010), graph 19 private tutoring 5; Japan 6; South Korea 6, 176, 189n1 public pedagogy: Bristol (UK) 102–4; definition 100; key activity areas 100; and the Learning City 100; see also out-of-school learning public space, China 120, 129 Putnam, Robert 61 Rancière, J. 146 rap music 72–4 re-pedagogicisation: in complex societies 41–2; see also de-pedagogicisation religion, and marriage 213–14 remixing: and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 154; added value of 155; and assemblage 171; learning opportunities 166, 168; of meanings 151; multimodal, with SuiteC learning software 162; and plagiarism 153, 158, 168–9; scope

152; of texts 153, 162–3, 163, 165–6; theorising 152–3 Rogers, Alan 7–8 Rose, Mike 193–4 Säljö, R. 37 school dropouts, Zanzibar 67–71 school exclusions 79 school rules, and Indigenous Australians 88 schooled society 16 schooling 1, 2; academic studies 17–18; in ancient religious texts 17; Confucian tradition 17; dominance of 3–4; exclusions 79; and Indigenous culture 91; individual-collective distinction 16–17; and knowledge display 48; limits 79; in literature 17; Marxist definition 17; mass processes 18; and modernity 84–7; pervasiveness of 3–4; as “script” 200; and self-presentation 45; structural similarities 200; traditions, and the nation-state 20; youth clubs, links 74–5; see also overschooling; world schooling schools: Durkheim on 89; education research emphasis 230; irony in 146–7; and organised learning 2 Sefton-Green, Julian 31 self-education: and crisis 130; meanings 131n2; in Shanghai 120 self-positioning: definition 147n2; and digital images 137, 155 self-presentation, and schooling 45 Serpell, R. & Adamson-Holley, D. 65 shadow education system 5, 6, 7 Shanghai: Expo 2010: 119; self-education, need for 120; urban dangers 120; see also “Our Cities” citizen forum (Shanghai) Simons, Maarten 61 social change, and learning cities 98 social media, and out-of-school learning 133 social networks, educational purposes 156 sociocultural theory 36 South Korea: comic community practices (Mente Comics) 181–4, 182, 183; digital media ownership 178; digital parenting 178–9; economic growth 176; ‘Free Semester System’ 180, 187; literacy 175, 177; media and media arts organisations 180; overschooling 174, 176; PISA program 176, 181; private tutoring 6, 176, 177, 189n1–2; webtoon reading 185–8, 186 “Stolen Generation” 88, 94n1

Index  237 SuiteC learning software 157–8; Engagement Index 159, 160; evaluation 162; Impact Studio 159, 161; multimodal remixing 162 Tanzania Youth Icons (TAYI), purpose 68 TAYI community centre (Zanzibar) 67–8, 69, 70–1; collective focus 75; Oslo youth club, comparison 75; ubuntu 75 teaching: of complex skills 33–4; in complex societies 35; Lancy on 32–3; and learning 32–3 teaching register 28, 40; and learning 33 testing regimes, international 21 tests, standardised 46–7 texts, remixing of 153, 162–3, 163, 165–6 TUMO Centre for Creative Technologies (Armenia) 194–7; curriculum 195; funding 195; “ideal” student 202; WACArts (London), comparison 199–205 tutoring: definition 34, 42n1; learner resistance 34; South Korea 175–6; see also private tutoring Twain, Mark, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 17

“ideal” student 202; purpose 197; social inclusion programs 198; staff/student numbers 199; students with learning problems 198; training programs 198–9; TUMO, comparison 199–205; vocational diploma 198 walking, as method 101–2, 103–4, 114–15 walking routes, Bristol (UK) 102, 104–7 Weber, Max 21, 84; on educational bureaucracy 81, 85 Wertsch, James 63 Whiteboards 158, 158–9; for and against 164–5; and assemblage 169; evaluation 163–4; language map creation 162, 163; see also Asset Library Williams, Raymond 127–8; Keywords 16 world schooling 9, 18–21; development of concept 20–1, 80; and Indigenous cultures 89–90, 91; meanings 19; and the nation-state 9, 21, 81

Vygotsky, L.S. 153–4

youth clubs: links to schooling 74–5; purpose 74 youth digital culture, knowledge flows 134–7 youth media productions: authenticity 145–6; brand culture in 145, 146; connected learning 137–47; identities 145; irony in 146; Mexicanos 141–4, 142, 144, 146; significance of 147; The socio-cultural world of Argentineans 138–41, 139, 144 Youth Radio Project 7

WACArts (London) 197–9; and ethnic minorities 201; “free school” status 198;

Zanzibar: school dropouts 67–71; TAYI community centre, projects 67–8

ubuntu 76, 77; and bildung 66, 228; definition 62; TAYI community centre, Zanzibar 68, 71, 75 UNESCO Learning Cities Network, declaration 97–8