An Outreach School: An Entry Point Into (Counter)Hegemonic Social Practices, Forms, and Structures

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Democracy, Hegemony, and Totalitarianism: An Educational Study

Abstract

Ascendant neoliberal policy discourses shape public understandings and practices of student and school success/failure. To navigate how and where counter-hegemonic practices might best preserve schools as humanizing public spaces of education, these discourses and practices need be identified and interrogated. As such, this paper identifies examples of (counter)hegemonic discourses and linked social practices, forms, and structures (see McLaren, 2009 & Sewell, 1998) that animate and constrain students and staff understandings and experiences at a public outreach school program (Outreach High) in Quebec, Canada.
Staff and student experiences of schools such as Outreach High are shaped by competing imperatives: to educate a public (see Pinar, 2007); to (not) sort, punish, grade, rank and certify individual students (see Ayers, 1998). Outreach High students are positioned as subordinate vis a vis the credentialing mechanisms of the regular school system as they fail to adopt modes of behavior and thought that traditionally ensure school success. This paper explores how consent is (not) achieved among subordinate students, positioned as at-risk of failure, in the interests of dominant (neoliberal) interests and ideology. As a point of entry, my experience as a teacher at Outreach High exposed me to the powerful effects that school rankings produced by the Fraser Institute (a neoliberal Canada-based think tank) had upon my homeroom class. Students who previously expressed a sense of pride and belonging in relation to Outreach High identified the school as a “retard school” upon hearing of its ranking among the very lowest of the 400-odd private and public schools in Quebec.
Informed by my familiarity with Outreach High, I present competing articulations of the school that emerge from a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992) of the following texts: Quebec Education Program (M.E.L.S., 2004); the Fraser Institute’s justification of its school rankings (Fraser Institute, 2009); and student and staff interviews. Each articulation rests upon specific assumptions and practices that shape notions of success/failure and school purpose.
A contextualized analysis of (a)similarities among the texts indicate hegemonic social practices, forms, and structures that serve dominant neoliberal interests and animate Outreach High. For instance, through social forms that bolster the ongoing evaluation of students as failures vis a vis high stakes standardized examinations (see Handelsman, 2011), and the individualized attribution of blame/responsibility for student failure at the exclusion of other institutional or social explanations. Also indicated are the humanizing possibilities that smaller public schools might offer students and teachers, by (re)framing student success and the capacity to shape school policies (e.g. schedules, exam protocols) locally and in light of a closer familiarity with students and their lived experiences. By outlining these illustrative aspects of Outreach High, this paper contributes to an understanding of structure|agency in the context of power-inscribed hegemonic relations and in doing so offers one context-specific case from which to consider how best to leverage current social practices, forms, and structures to enhance our capacity to recognize “public education not as publicly funded academic vocationalism but as education of the public” (Pinar, 2007, p. 80).

Author

• Rodney Handelsman, McGill University