I Can't Get No Satisfaction: "Backgrounding" Schools, Stakeholders, and Surveys

• In Event: Curriculum Matters and Matterings: Reimagining Research Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives
As K-12 schools in the U.S. emerge from the shutdown phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, the politics and polarity that pervade contemporary U.S. society contribute to an acceleration of neoliberal policies and approaches to solving the “wicked problems” (Rittel and Webber, 1973) proliferating in public schools. Amidst a looming recession, an affective tempest of anxiety, exhaustion and malaise, school accountability mechanisms scramble to adapt as post-Covid crises in schools exacerbate entrenched societal inequities. In response, schools use surveys in order to collect data around both families’ needs and satisfaction with school. Survey responses are evaluated based on responses and completion rates. Stakeholders’ needs and desires represented in this way, however, evade longtime understandings that “social problems [can] no longer be addressed by assuming, as science does, that they are ‘tame’ or ‘benign’, or definable, separable, and solvable, and thus able to be characterised, analysed and planned for by adopting a rational systems perspective” (Crowley and Head, 2017, p. 541).
Against this backdrop, I contextualize and challenge neoliberal understandings of stakeholder participation by engaging with post-representational theories and methods in order to help us think differently about entanglements of neoliberalism, politics and stakeholder participation in school accountability practices.

Perspectives
Engaging with synergies extended by diverse non-representational theories offered by Lorimer, (2005), Thrift (2008), Vannini (2015), and Manning (2016), I explore non-representational iterations of “background” (Stewart, 2007; Anderson & Harrison, 2010; Ingold, 2011) in order to re/de-contextualize stakeholders’ engagements with their local schools. From this perspective, the concept of “background” is understood as the backdrop “against which particular things show up and take on significance: a mobile but more or less stable ensemble of practices, involvements, relations, capacities, tendencies, and affordances” (Anderson and Harrison, 2010, p. 8).

Methods
In this conceptual paper, I engage with non-representational research methods conceptualized and deployed as a conglomeration of material-semiotic practices (Campbell, 2004, p. 175). These practices do not seek to construct “real” or “true” representations of the world, but rather [engage] in worlding with “a world [that] is agentic and interacts with knowers” (Tanesini, 1999, p. 184). Research understood in this way rejects prescriptive methods and instead seeks to “capture the ‘onflow’ of everyday life” (Thrift, 2008, p. 5).

Materials
Documents, web sites, maps, memories, conversations, yearnings, celebrations, emergencies, immigrations, emigrations, histories, becomings, and other material-semiotic entanglements.

Results
This paper contributes to an emergent body of work that assumes neoliberal data collection practices in schools fail to engage with the complex entanglements of matter and meaning in their environs. Instead, it offers an experimental engagement with non-representational theories and methods in order to differently understand some intricacies of stakeholder engagement.

Significance
This paper contributes to work by scholars desiring to escape humanist foundations in curriculum studies while still taking up critiques of neoliberal practices and their differential effects in contemporary public schools. Thus, experimental methods and theories explored in this paper explicitly engage with tensions that arise between representational politics and the opacity of political commitments articulated through non-representational theories (Rose, 2008, p. 342).

Author

• Mary J. Newbery, Quinnipiac University
  Presenting Author