Students Crossing the Impasse of an Enclosed Future

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: (En)countering the pre-owned future of public education

Proposal

In the summer of 2016, Alberta Education Minister David Eggen announced a comprehensive reform package as part of a broader government commitment to create a province that is “Future Ready” (CBC News 2016). As outlined in a recent Deleuzean critique of the government’s far reaching reform agenda (Author, 2018), this initiative included a range of policy pronouncements including “education, skills and training programs designed to ensure all Albertans can find rewarding work — today and tomorrow” (Alberta Government 2016). Running parallel to this ambitious agenda was a six-year, $64 million curriculum project in which “material will be developed to teach students financial literacy, climate change, the history of Indigenous people and residential schools, and gender identity” (French, 2016).
As school leaders, we are caught between the hierarchical structures of how institutional life in schools has been for decades—that of control and surveillance—and the impending promise of the future that is repeatedly framed as both perilous and promising. We are stuck between the two in an uncertain impasse described by Berlant (2011) as
a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event. (p 4)
To move beyond this impasse, we, as school leaders, might need to experiment forward and think radically about reforms such as Alberta’s “Future Ready” initiative and disrupt our current understanding of school life and school leadership.
This paper outlines how international partnerships that mobilized students, teachers and school leaders to cross boundaries to activate future imaginaries of a ‘great school for all’ advanced this work of disruption. During the past seven years, a case study analysis of these school partnerships between Finland and Alberta (FINAL); Alberta, Ontario, and Norway (NORCAN); and Alberta and New Zealand (NZAL) contributes to our conceptual understanding of how educational development can be enhanced.
Built on a theory of change that required that we think ahead, lead across and deliver within, students, teachers and school leaders have attempted to demonstrate that the internationalization of education is not just about sharing ideas and congenial school visits. In particular, the partnerships were most activated through student involvement including students questioning their positioning within the neo-liberal agenda of large-scale assessments. Their participation was crucial in signalling the immanence of the agentic life-long learner by opening localized and rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) interruptions and intensities of the question “what is a great school?”. These are the performative encounters that the paper highlights as students from across several countries populate the meaning of ‘the future’ and the curriculum with their own becomings as counternarratives to the growing cultures of fear, anxiety and pre-emption (Massumi, 2015; Miller, 2011 & 2016) that characterize educational programs and curriculum reform.

Author

• Penelope Jean Stiles, University of Alberta