Young People, the Capacity to Imagine Futures, and Policy Dampeners at Work in Schools

• In Event: 31.033 - Imagination, Imaginaries, and Policy Sociology in Education: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

Abstract

Purposes:
This paper emerges from longitudinal research (2012-2015) funded by the Australian Research Council. Working with schools in Melbourne’s ‘low SES’ western suburbs, the project aims to identify and support Year 9/10 students’ cultural resources—across contexts of family, community and school—for imagining and pursuing viable futures. This paper uses data from one school to analyse how capacities to imagine futures, among young people from power-marginalized social positions, are helped or (mostly) hindered by ways that ‘dominant policy imaginaries’ (Rizvi & Lingard 2010) infuse curricular and pedagogic regimes.

Theoretical tools:
A key framing for this paper is Appadurai’s (2004) theorisation of capacities to aspire, including capacity to imagine futures not simply along received lines of dominant discourse, but along alternatively emergent lines of flight (Zipin et al. 2013). Another key tool is the funds of knowledge approach of Moll, Gonzalez and associates for identifying cultural resources—in family and local community contexts—from which young people create identities (Esteban-Guitart & Moll 2014). Literatures are drawn upon that conceptualise how current material-historical conditions dampen optimistic pursuit of futures (Berlant 2011), despite simplistic neoliberal policy/populist promises of ‘human capital’ paths to desirable goals (Brown et al. 2011; Sellar 2013), which many young people at least latently see as false promises (Bourdieu & Champagne 1999; Zipin & Dumenden 2014).

Methods and data:
The research combined (1) interviews with students, parents, teachers and principal; (2) curriculum work with students as researchers of key issues for local community futures; and (3) classroom dialogue in which, informed by their research, students imagined likely, desirable and possible futures. University researchers kept ethnographic notes about school factors surround students’ research and future-imagining work, which—in university team discussions, supported by readings—were linked analytically to current policy trends. Data deriving from the above methods inform the paper.

Findings/arguments/significance:
Analysis suggests that, for these power-marginalized young people in this school (with generalizable implications), complex labours of imagining futures (Appadurai 1996) run into significant tension with simplistic dominant policy imaginaries that suffuse curricular and pedagogic regimes. The university team, working with students on their research, found substantive evidence of capacities to read the present and imagine potential futures in complex ways, but in ‘moments and spaces of trust’ that the project created, against grains of mainstream schooling suffused by policy regimes. Consequently, students’ imaginative capacities emerged largely outside of school recognition. Indeed, many students avoided imaginative efforts within mainstream school time/space, which they saw as not ‘for them’; and (2) their teachers could only manage sideways glances at manifest capacities that, in a different regime, they might have engaged pedagogically. The paper argues that current policy exigencies acting upon schools make it increasingly harder for alternative curricular approaches to succeed in engaging student’s cultural resources (funds of knowledge) for imagining. The paper concludes that there is critical need for more thoughtful educational policy which can grasp young people’s imaginative potentials in their complexity, rather than hedge students and teachers within simplistic policy imaginaries.

Author

• Lew Zipin, Victoria University - Melbourne