Insider Rebellions within Low-Cost Private Schools: Racialization, Empire, and International Education

• In Event: Education, Community and the Private Sphere

Proposal

In the proliferation of low-cost private schools (LCPS), edupreneurs claim that LCPS provide quality education to help eradicate global poverty. While transforming educational conditions within postcolonies is full of opportunities for reimagining education possibility, there are also risks of new forms of racialized extraction and commodification by western interests. The operations of LCPS often go unnoticed without complicating new forms of racialized extraction and commodification within modern conditions. The few inquiries that illuminate LCPS relationships to race, empire, and coloniality have garnered little attention. Even fewer works engage with insider experiences and forms of resistance in international and comparative education or through black studies and the black radical tradition. The sparse literature on LCPS in relation to insider experiences can be partially attributed to the proprietary private nature of operation and what the ramifications may entail for scholars probing their internal corporate workings. Previous interactions with LPCS networks and their teachers have been policed and surveilled, leading to arrest of academic researchers. Drawing from personal experiences working in LCPS networks and lived histories in the postcolonies, Presenter1 and Presenter2 recount their experiences working within a rapidly expanding international chain of schools based out of East and West Africa, while presenter 3 reveals encounters with edupreneurs in parts of Aisa with a hand in private education. The Presenters challenge their preconceived notions of academic writing and presenting through utilization of insider poetics as a method to communicate relationality, attuned to what they call the pulling together of collective schooling as well as the tearing apart or racialized enclosures of education. In this presentation, the authors offer insider experiences to interrogate racialized colonial formations shaping market-based approaches and scalable educational strategies of edupreneurs through venture capital and big tech companies. The Presenters also make the case that edupreneurs are embedded within global educational racial, economic, and political spaces where education for the poor is crafted and executed, taking advantage from policies that promote community building through education. These earlier self-help attempts by communities have now been seized by for-profit institutions who claim their chain of schools are set up in the spirit of Harambee and, thus, “are part of this response to the government’s call for communities to be involved with educational provisions” (Bradlow and Gituku 2016, 12). According to Kilemi Mwiria (1990), in Kenya, the act of Harambee, meaning “let us pull together,” took root as communities worked out ways to fina nce, build, and staff learning institutions. These schools became known as ‘independent schools’ because they were never supported by the colonial government or religious missionaries setting foot in the colonies. On a global level, community supported education is an effective form of resistance to colonization and has served as a transformational anticolonial tool (Tarlau 2017). The collective approach to education in many of the countries south of the Sahara can be argued were embedded in the black radical tradition. To build a framework for theorizing the racialized logics of LCPS beyond perspectives backed by western financial investment, we turn to interdisciplinary black studies, which denaturalizes whiteness as the pinnacle of humanity that measures all others against itself (Wynter 2003). Drawing from black studies and the black radical tradition of Harambee, the authors point to racial capitalism and empire for reexamining how racialization and forms of racism permeate in the different levels of LCPS. Racial capitalism is not a type of capitalism in itself but is instead a fundamental component of capitalism which signifies difference (in race) (Robinson 1983). Existing scholarship on race generally accepts that its foundation is socially constructed and accordingly favors the term racialization to describe the process by which racial identities and categorizations are created (Murji and Solomos 2005; Omi and Winant 2014). The Presenters use poetics as a method and “invitation for teaching differently about ways of doing inquiry, for producing knowledge differently and un/making different knowledge” (Presenter 1 and 3, 2021, 408). In poetics there might be instances or possibilities of displacing prescribed terrains of knowledge making, exceeding limits of surroundings (Glissant 1992). In the making of this presentation, the Presenters took questions within the conference's theme to heart, asking, “Why do we do things the way we do? What would happen if we threw caution to the wind and asked ourselves – what do we really want to accomplish? What would education look like if we took risks and dared to dream? How do we nurture our idealism into reality?” By doing what we really want to do, we write from our own experiences and imbed Poetics as method rupturing frameworks of language presented as universal, uncovering relationality with the other (Glissant 1992). Western language conventions govern spatial and temporal rhythms of knowledge making. Poetics allows us to come together, to unravel the past as we seek an understanding of what binds us and our experiences. Doing so enables interdisciplinary theorizing and creative method-making to open up possibilities in international education.

Authors

• Benjamin D Scherrer, UMass Amherst

• Korina Jocson, Faculty of Education, York University

• Mariam Rashid, Vassar College