Aust. Educ. Res. (2012) 39:259–274 DOI 10.1007/s13384-012-0062-z
My School, My University, My Country, My World, My Google, Myself… What is education for now?
Lyn Yates
Published online: 26 April 2012 The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc. 2012
Abstract Education is today in question, both in its institutional forms and in its conceptual remit. The sense of a knowledge explosion and a world in rapid change challenges the curricula of schools, universities, vocational colleges. And the institutions seem to have to account for themselves in new ways, as if their purposes have subtly shifted. Outside formal institutions the possibilities of new technologies and new forms of communication are highly visible. Do we need education when we have information? What happens to education when it is all about learning? And what is the role of education research in any of this? In this 2011 Radford Lecture, Lyn Yates discusses challenges and transformations evident across the education spectrum today, and why, in the flux of new possibilities and new kinds of institutions, there is a need to talk again about the distinct purposes of education and education institutions. Keywords
Policy Curriculum Higher education Technology Social change
If you Google1 the phrase what is education for? You will find it has become quite a popular topic. Google itself claims to find about 3,680,000,000 relevant results (in 1
‘Google’ of course is the ubiquitous proprietary search engine. However, as Alison Lee pointed out during this conference, while most previous Radford addresses would be understandable by readers across a long time span, the rapid social change that is in part the subject of this lecture is reflected in a proliferation of reference points, acronyms and terms such as ‘Google’ whose longevity remains a more open question.
This paper was delivered as the Radford Memorial Lecture at the 2011 Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education. L. Yates (&) University of Melbourne, 508 Alan Gilbert Building, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia e-mail:
[email protected]
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0.26 s). And the existence of Google and the Internet is one reason the question itself is on the agenda. What is the point today of the institutions and systems built in the 19th century to provide various forms of education: the schools, the working man’s colleges, the universities? In the world of the information society is education better left as an unfettered relationship between a consenting individual and their smart phone? And that is not the only reason the question ‘what is education for?’ is on the agenda. How today can we answer the question ‘what are the qualities of the educated person?’ (And I’ll give you the clue that I don’t think producing audit-style lists of graduate attributes is a good enough answer.) How can we work out what are the foundations that people need, to flourish in the future? What forms of work are going to be available, and who will be able to do well in them? What knowledge, skills, personal development and ways of being matter now, and what will matter in the future? We hear plenty of talk about these questions, in the media and in policy documents as well as in research. But even where there is a lot of apparent agreement about the kind of people we want to turn out (the problem-solving, ethical, flexible life-long learners, etc.), that is answering a different question from how such people can be brought into being via education. Moving on to education and the nation, we confront the question of whether the traditional role of school systems in building national identities needs to be rolled back in favour of a sense of the global citizen. Or, alternatively, does it need to be re-asserted in order that a civil society can continue and not descend into partisan forms of violence or anomie? If we look at schools we wonder whose answers to the question ‘what is education for?’ should get priority—those of economists? politicians? parents? educators? students themselves? (And where does the work of education researchers and scholars fit in?) If we look at universities, we find that the government itself seems to divide its own thinking about their role into two different ministeries with two different and, arguably, conflicting agendas.2 So should we be thinking about the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) agendas for higher education: widening participation, auditing graduate attributes, getting a good fit between courses and employment opportunities? Or should we be thinking about the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) and ERA3 agendas?—producing research and innovation and creativity of world quality, identifying where the best research happens and directing resources to that? Should we be thinking of the undergraduate years as a phase of general education for the 2
The division of responsibility for higher education into two separate ministerial portfolios was established by the Labor Government led by Kevin Rudd when it took office in 2007, initially with the then deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, heading a Department of ‘Education, Employment and Workforce Relations’ (later, after she became Prime Minister, replaced by Simon Crean in this portfolio, and in turn by Chris Evans). Kim Carr was Minister for ‘Innovation, Industry, Science and Research’ from December 2007 until December 2011. Shortly after this Radford Address was given (14 December 2011), the Government announced a reshuffle of its ministry and portfolios, and recombined the portfolio for tertiary education (under Minister Chris Evans) as Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research.
3
ERA is an acronym for ‘Excellence in Research for Australia’, the national research quality assessment exercise sanctioned by the Labor Government and administered by the Australian Research Council; its first iteration was carried out in 2010, with results released in January 2011.
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global citizen of the future? Or is it a phase of more specific and locally regulated vocational preparation for the professions and other knowledge work opportunities? I chose as title for this talk some phrases that are heard in today’s conversations about education. The phrases are not esoteric and they are lexically similar, but the simplicity is deceptive. They in fact call up very different kinds of agendas in relation to education. And their meanings and associations raise different kinds of questions for education research. In Australia, My School4 and My University5 (title case) mean quite different things from ‘my school’ and ‘my university’ (lower case). The title case versions (perhaps they should even have a little trademark symbol attached) are information sets, sanctioned by government and designed for the hypothetical rational consumer. They contain sets of facts and especially figures so you can compare school populations, resources and outcomes. The lower case versions, the ways we might talk to each other about our own school or university, are about experiences and human relationships: affective and irrational associations, and calculations of advantage and outcomes that go well beyond test scores (for example, who you will get to rub shoulders with if you go there, not just whether they actually value-add to your cognitive abilities). ‘My Country’ and ‘My World’ are very different beasts again. The ‘My Country’ of Dorothea MacKellar’s poem6 is not about a rational consumerist choice and not about something we can own, or some advantage we can achieve; it is a declaration of belonging and appreciating. The national concerns seen in the decision to prioritise history and civics as key elements of the new Australian curriculum reflect some of the same sentiment: an interest in where do we come from, how do we learn to belong? But enacting these concerns as a national curriculum is intrinsically a different act than the poet’s act in creating the poem. The curriculum ‘my country’ is different from the poet’s ‘My Country’ because it is selected and sanctioned in a particular way [it is ‘official knowledge’, to use Michael Apple’s (2000) term]; and it is intended to be normative as well as informative or evocative. Building a new Australian Curriculum is not just about what has been, but is self-consciously about where we (or at least the we who are authorised to set up an ACARA) want to be in the future, how we want to develop as a national citizenry or polity. Incidentally, prescribing something doesn’t make it a bad thing, but it does make it different from creating it as a poem or as an individual or family sentiment. The designation of curriculum content references the normative intents of curriculum 4
See the My School website http://www.myschool.edu.au/, which is hosted by ACARA, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, itself established by an Act of the Australian Parliament (8 December 2008).
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In March 2010 Julia Gillard, then Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and for Social Inclusion, issued a media release announcing the government’s intention to introduce a ‘My University’ website on the model of My School; that is currently in preparation.
6
For non-Australian readers, ‘My Country’ is an iconic Australian poem that most children learn at school. It was written by Dorothea MacKellar in 1908 when she was living in England and homesick for Australia. It begins with a verse explaining that unlike her English readers, she is not pining for the green leafy lanes of England, but ‘I love a sunburnt country/A land of sweeping plains/Of ragged mountain ranges/Of droughts and flooding rains.’ See http://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/archive/mycountry. htm for full poem.
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and of schooling as institution and system. The normative is not something that can be avoided in schools and especially in nationally sanctioned curricula. And we know from the past half-century of research and social movements and challenges that any normative selection is likely to create silences and some ‘othering’. But the consequences of doing without a deliberated selection is one of the agendas on the table when we become entranced with the possibilities of the free-wheeling Internet as an alternative to these old 19th century institutions and systems. Do we really want to do away with thinking about explicit social norms and purposes, or to leave these to private interests and decisions? Do we want to leave these to families, advertisers, Internet systems and the like? Moving further through my title… in curriculum discussions, ‘my world’ (or ‘globalisation’ as it is more commonly labelled) is actually used in a quite different way than ‘my country’ (this time lower case). For curriculum, concerns about ‘my country’ and the forming of national sentiments, are related to the idea that one important role of schools is a quite active formative role: to re-create this country into the next generation. The assumption is that what is learnt in schools and by graduates of universities and vocational colleges will make a difference to what we are as a nation; that this is about people, the next generation, actively creating the Australia of the future. But references to the world, or ‘the changing world’ or to ‘globalisation’ tend to be a shorthand way of referring to the conditions we live in and cannot escape, now and in the future. In contrast to ‘my country’, here the world is not generally referred to, except possibly in environmental studies, as something about which we have a choice, or as something which we play a part in making. When the world is talked about in curriculum-forming contexts, it usually refers to the conditions and settings outside our control within which such choices might be made, and within which an individual and national life will need to be constructed. The implication of many of the policy documents falling over themselves in their anxiety to explain what we need to do if we are not to be left behind is that we don’t have a choice to select our world in the way that we are encouraged to select our school or university. The phrase ‘my world’ is often used in the context of economistic thinking about ‘new times’ and what people will have to deal with in the future. It is used to talk about the ways people will have to negotiate their lives and become ‘lifelong learners’ in those new conditions. This way of thinking doesn’t tend to dwell much on the way these people may themselves impact on the world, just how they may negotiate better or worse fates within it. ‘My Google’ is an illustration of something the ‘my world’ talk points to, and to something a certain important 19th century thinker, now heavily out of favour, once said: ‘we make our own history but not in conditions of our own making’ (Karl Marx). With a personalized Google search we can customize and tailor our searches and information sets to our interests and purposes; we can individualise. But we are not the source of the options and the substantive material we access in this way—the system builders design algorithms and templates; advertisers influence priorities, and determine that not all information is considered equal. Yet ad hoc and democratic effects play a part too: the patterns created by previous searches are part of the algorithms and choices offered. As with the title case forms of ‘My School’
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and ‘My University’, putting ‘my’ and ‘Google’ together promotes the idea of an individualised opportunity and responsibility or, in Foucauldian terms, responsibilisation, while in fact embedding us in systems and differential advantages and constraints that are very much not of our own making. In this it is like a microcosm of the world and of some important aspects of education in that world. And finally, what of ‘myself’? Here we possibly find the most diversity. What kind of self is education concerned with? The cognitive capacity of the mind? The active agent of the market who decides which courses will flourish and which will die? The person whose sensibilities should be cultivated by exposure to learning they don’t necessarily get in their family, perhaps the arts or languages, or whose talents need to be nurtured by providing diverse opportunities and support for them? For sociologists, ‘myself’ is the socially formed individual who brings different kinds of interests, capacities and cultural capitals and baggage that pedagogy needs to learn to deal with, and whose social group characteristics consume equity talk. One of the first papers I published in education was called ‘Does ‘‘all students’’ include girls?’(Yates 1988). That was a paper about whose interests are taken as the norm, and which qualities are made invisible or inferior in education policy and practice, and this is a type of perspective on education that has continued to grow. We hear it in reports on the specific needs of different groups—aboriginal students, students from other countries or of different religions, boys, students with disabilities or from poorer background. Indeed, that focus on the student and on difference has grown so much that some of the sociologists who were prominent in developing it are now calling for some stepping back to make sure that education is paying enough attention to the power of disciplines, as Muller (2000), Young (2008), Moore (2007), Wheelahan (2010) would put it; or to ‘intellectual quality’, as the team involved in the Queensland Longitudinal School Reform Study put it (Hayes et al. 2006). These different concerns about education are constitutive of the field we work in. The context of this conference and our work now is that of a world spinning faster, and one where many of the traditional institutions and processes and underpinnings of the work we do have been shaken or questioned or transformed; where the question what is education for? is prominent but difficult to answer. I have begun by emphasising these different kinds of lenses on education because I believe education is a field where we need to keep a lot of different discussions and perspectives in play, not allow one kind of talk or research to dominate all the space. And that tends to become more difficult when we are pushed to particular uniform templates for assessing the quality of what we have achieved. Five years ago I began a project to study changes in curriculum policies and curriculum thinking in the different Australian states over the past four decades. Like any research project, especially given the limited funding that is the lot of education researchers in this country, this project wasn’t going to do everything. Other research and other projects are mapping spending, standards and outcomes of school, and are studying what is taking place in classrooms or are focusing on particular subjects in the curriculum, or phases of schooling and learning. My own project, School Knowledge, Working Knowledge and the Knowing Subject: a
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review of state curriculum policies 1975–20057 (Yates et al. 2011) was to focus on general policy documents, together with a limited number of interviews with people who had longstanding involvements in the curriculum-making of their respective states. Now it might seem perverse, just at the point when the National Curriculum Board8 and the prospect of a new Australian Curriculum were coming into being, that I should embark on what might be seen as a backward-looking project to see what had been going on around the country in the decades before this new initiative. It might seem a long way from the outcomes-oriented and impact-directed and ‘evidence-based’ research we are being urged to produce. I did it, in part, as a way of seeing better how in practice that question what is education for? gets thought about, and answered; in part as a way of not taking for granted, or taking as natural, the ways it is being taken up now; and in part as a way of engaging myself further with those difficult questions I’ve touched on in my opening, and particularly the debates about curriculum content. In setting out to examine how, at decade intervals, curriculum was being thought about around the different states, we have one means of seeing not only what has been our recent history, but what we are doing now (what is being emphasised now and what is no longer part of the discussion that once was). And in the sociological and philosophical questions that drove this project, we were also trying to get a better understanding about what is at issue now in trying to construct curriculum or to consider the purposes of education: what kinds of foundational knowledge or learning, or skills or capabilities, make sense in the 21st century? The questions the project started with were as follows: • • •
• •
When policies are formulated in relation to curriculum, where is knowledge seen to reside, and what sort of a thing is it seen to be? How are the ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ purposes of schooling depicted? What characteristics and dispositions are the learner assumed to bring to schooling, and how is difference among learners construed in terms of curriculum policies? What types of knowledge and what types of outcomes are named as core? How are agendas about schooling as a vehicle of knowledge and learning of the young being put together with agendas about schooling as a mechanism of competitive selection for life beyond school?
The first and second questions came out of my experience of being involved in a previous project on vocational learning (Chappell et al. 2005), and my awareness of some of the contending schools of theory and research as to how knowledge or learning is built—critical social realism, activity theory, actor network theory, cognitive science, and many more. In a project I did earlier, on dual accreditation 7
This project was funded by the Australian Research Council as an ARC Discovery Project and was conducted with Cherry Collins, with further research assistance and input from Kate O’Connor, Brenda Holt and Katie Wright.
8
The National Curriculum Board was established by the incoming Labor Government in April 2008, and was later transformed into a statutory body, ACARA (the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority) in May 2009. http://www.acara.edu.au.
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subjects in NSW, it became clear that the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) and the Higher School Certificate (HSC) were working with different concepts of what knowledge or know-how looks like, and how you examine it (Yates 2006). One approach sees knowledge or know-how as visible competencies that are assessed as achieved or not achieved; the other sees a hierarchy of knowledge and intelligence that is in the mind and can be assessed on paper and graded. In the vocational field the workplace is often seen as the heart of authentic knowledge. The problem-based and group assessments that have found growing favour in universities, reflect some similar sense of how effective knowledge is built, trying to replicate ‘real world’ or so called ‘authentic’ situations. I am currently supervising a medical educator, Jenny Barrett, who is doing research on medical education in the hospital setting, and there too she is finding a strong sense among the doctors and students that the place itself is a constituent component of knowledge that matters, of ‘where knowledge is seen to reside’. But these moves to prioritise what happens in the ‘real world’ beg a question about what, other than credentialism, is the role of colleges and universities: the question what is education for now? The talk of authenticity obscures the impossibility of expecting we can just go back to throwing everyone into simply learning on the job. These are live issues for educators and curriculum designers. In the curriculum project, we found significant differences between the states as to the extent they took their starting points as traditional disciplines or took work and activities in the world as the underpinnings of curriculum and their foundations for shaping what they did. The third question (What characteristics and dispositions is the learner assumed to bring to schooling, and how is difference among learners construed in terms of curriculum policies?) came out of questions that had tended to dominate the sociology of education since the 1970s, an interest in social and cultural and gendered difference as a source of inequality and the idea that formal education was built around cultural capital and dispositions of some groups to the detriment of others. It also was intended to pick up the extent to which students are primarily thought about as minds with better or worse cognitive capacities (that is, how much education curriculum policies are framed within cognitive developmental perspectives), and how far concerns about engagement and the diverse experiences students bring to school are important in the framing of policy approaches. Again, there was a lot of difference between the Australian states about what seemed to be foundational in their approaches and starting points for thinking about the activity of schools. In South Australia and, in a different way, in Queensland, that thinking about difference in the situations and experiences of the students who came to school had been foundational to how they started. In important ways their starting points had tended to be how to keep in the education track students who traditionally were easily shunted out of it, and curriculum frameworks were built up from that beginning. In other states, and NSW is a strong example, difference was not the starting point—in a sense, knowledge or even tradition was—and difference was addressed in terms of how to provide options or appropriate pedagogies, once the broad shape of the curriculum was in place.
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The fourth question (What types of knowledge and what types of outcomes are named as core?) is one in which there was a great deal of activity and experimentation over the decade or so preceding the establishment of ACARA— the work on essential learnings, and new basics as a different way of conceiving what is core; the arguments about which subjects should be included in the work of the National Curriculum Board, and the like, the discussion of capabilities. The fifth question (How are agendas about schooling as a vehicle of knowledge and learning of the young being put together with agendas about schooling as a mechanism of competitive selection for life beyond school?) is one of the big ones for schooling and indeed for education systems more generally. We expect and want education in its institutionalised form to do something valuable for students, but these also are selective and competitive institutional arrangements, and systems all face a problem related to the way in which that second purpose impacts on the first. Looking around this country at what has been happening roughly in my own working lifetime, here are some things we found.
A multitude of new policies One of the most striking things we discovered from the project is the sheer number of different attempts there have been since the 1970s to come up with a new statement or vision or framework about curriculum. Leaving aside all the specific inquiries into girls and boys, Indigenous students, vocational education, subjectspecific enquiries in music, maths etc., we found that over 100 state-based general curriculum policies were produced in the four decades of our study, and another fifteen at Commonwealth level—and this is prior to the huge amount of new work going on under the umbrella of ACARA. This is one indication of how today, education is being challenged by the times we are in. All around the country, authorities have felt some obvious need to keep having new goes at it.
Changing times and the future The documents are also full of concerns about the future, and of the need for schools to do something different in preparation for a future that is different from the past. Many of the debates about ‘subjects’, ‘key learning areas’, ‘essential learnings’ and the like are about this. One of the things they are trying to grapple with is what aspects of the past, especially in relation to disciplines and bodies of knowledge, are relevant, and what needs to be done differently to prepare for a world of such rapid technological, communications, and social change.
Worries about work There is a preoccupation with the changing nature of work, with worries about unemployment and Australia’s competitiveness, and what kinds of knowledge,
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skills and abilities young people will need in a world where jobs have been changing quite a lot. The highpoint of this rhetoric was probably in the early 1980s, no doubt subliminally influenced by George Orwell’s 1984, and by Barry Jones’ Sleepers, Wake!, when it seemed virtually every state and industry body was producing its own new Into the 80s statement for schooling. Industry bodies were invited to produce lists of competencies, and different schools and states experimented with portfolios and partnership and dual-accreditation and the like. In the policy documents at least, there was a move over time to consensus that completing secondary school should be an aspiration for all; but less agreement on the extent to which specific vocational preparation should be part of that.
Worries about values and citizenship The issue of citizenship and how we want young people to understand themselves and see others keeps being raised, and creates some of the most visible arguments about what the curriculum should be doing. It is one of the main backdrops to why History found itself as one of the four subjects initially sanctioned to be developed as foundations for the Australian Curriculum. Australia is not alone in this. The World Yearbook on curriculum I recently edited (Yates and Grumet 2011) makes clear that around the world there is a huge amount of curriculum reformulation going on, with some very specific attention to how to treat the story of the nation in the context of global developments of various kinds.
Changing structures of managing curriculum In the 1970s, reports and curriculum frameworks commonly were thin documents, produced by education departments of the respective state public service, except those for the final phase of schooling, which was designed for a minority as entrance to university studies, and which normally derived from an examination heavily controlled by cognate university academics. The documents were designed more for schools and teachers than for the general public. In the 1980s however, states began to bring curriculum more directly under the relevant minister (‘the ministerialisation of education’) and into more direct political debates. They began setting up new authorities to deal with curriculum (boards of studies). They began to build more glossy forms of curriculum. One consequence of this was that the details of curriculum became the subject of public debate in the media in a new way. Another was that the documents were often landed with simultaneously trying to give guidance to professionals and also to carry a message to the public about how well schools are being managed by the government. While I was doing this research on policies related to the school curriculum I was working in a role9 where much of my everyday focus was not schools but higher education, and particularly its research activities. Prior to that, I worked at a 9
As Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Melbourne.
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university (UTS) where adult and vocational learning was a key concern. One of the striking things about the list of concerns my research project identified as key characteristics of school curriculum policy developments over the past half-century is that they could serve almost equally well to summarise many of the developments and reports concerned with universities and with adult and vocational education over the same period.10 In these other arenas too, we see frequent attempts to address and commission reports on the appropriate content of the institutions (the competencies reports, the qualifications debates, the graduate attributes work), framed by wider concerns about changing forms of work, the global competitive environment, the need to look to the future. But, as with schools, far from seeing a big shift away from institutions in favour of self-directed alternative forms of learning (though there is certainly a growth in the presence of private providers and international players), we see an expansion of and more intense attention to universities, TAFE and the like, greater consumer appetite for these, and also a great intensification of the attempt by government to micro-manage them. In the Curriculum Policies Project we explored differences in the culture of different states in how they took up the problematic of curriculum (Yates et al. 2011). Two of the most important differences noted in the approaches of different states were in how best to conceptualise the core role of schools in relation to foundations/knowledge and how to deal with difference and equity agendas; again, these are areas in which universities around Australia also are taking some different approaches. Doing historical research helps us to see and think about some new emphases that are part of contemporary thinking about the role of education. We can see the kind of contribution that research like this makes in terms of identifying what is different, or what is not there, if we compare the project’s findings with one of the new and much consulted online authorities, Wikipedia. Wikipedia defines education in the following apparently uncontroversial way: Education in the general sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another. Education can also be defined as the process of becoming an educated person. An educated person refers to a person that has access to optimal states of mind regardless of the situation they are in. That person is able to perceive accurately, think clearly and act effectively to achieve self-selected goals and aspirations. This definition in fact manages to miss entirely two central elements of the changes we observed in our study of what has been happening in Australian curriculum over recent times, and I’ll say more about that shortly. At the same time, in its final two sentences, it takes a specifically contemporary way of thinking about education as 10
Perhaps with the exception of the citizenship and values discussion, which has certainly surfaced in a new way for universities, but is perhaps less present in the discussions in relation to TAFE and adult learning. This also reflects the vocationalisation of the broader adult learning institutional terrain, compared with some earlier periods.
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natural, rather than as an object that might need scrutiny. Being an educated person is no longer depicted as having to do with what one knows or knows about, but today is seen as being instrumentally potent, being the rational self-actualising person of the economists’ model: acting ‘effectively to achieve self-selected goals and aspirations’. This does reflect a contemporary and OECD-led commonsense, but it is not timeless. Turning now to what the Wikipedia definition misses, the finding from the Curriculum Policies Project that this Wikipedia definition misses entirely is that schools, TAFEs and universities have all been grappling in recent times with a major perceived problem: what they need to modify about that traditional purpose of ‘deliberately transmitting the accumulated knowledge, skills and values’ from one generation to the next. The reports are full of anxieties about that aim, and often, declarations of the need to turn away from it. What they have been worrying about is that the changes in the world, current and predicted, seem to be leaving the knowledge of the past generation behind or, at a minimum, calling into question which aspects of it to take up, and how broadly to let that past experience shape the current curriculum. Under fierce debate today is the question of what foundations are appropriate. Many of the reports we read (and many of the statements by politicians and education leaders) sound less like any commitment to an idea of education as passing anything on, and more like having a new purpose, which is to backward-map the skills they guess are needed in the future. This is one of the areas I am particularly interested in, and that my new project is looking at. Just beginning with where you want to end up has the distinct danger of hollowing out the kinds of learning you need to get there, and I think this is one reason why there has been such a strong and revived interest in Basil Bernstein’s work. Bernstein was one of the few sociological theorists who took seriously the dynamics of what is produced by different forms of curriculum, both in terms of identity-building and in terms of building powerful and new knowledge (many sociologists deal only with the first: the social messages or disciplining that curriculum is seen to deliver). I’m thinking in particular of his classic paper ‘On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge’ (Bernstein 1971), which I consider still to be one of the landmark contributions to curriculum theorising. In that paper, Bernstein contrasted two different kinds of programs of learning that he saw in schools and universities in the UK and in Europe. One was based on clear subject or discipline forms, strong boundaries, and strongly developed subject or discipline-based identities. The other approach, which Bernstein called ‘integrated codes’, took social themes and outcomes and the knowledge of the learner as more central to the education activity. It was interdisciplinary, and related learning to the topic or problem. The caution his analysis raises is that taking a particular approach at one stage can produce problematic or perverse effects at another. Integration codes do open up new ways of engaging and using the knowledge of students—but they have the potential danger of tying students to the dominating idea, and requiring a more uniform ideology by their teachers in order to work, rather than giving students the tools to go further. Collection codes conversely pose big problems for those concerned about social inequalities, for learners lacking the right cultural capital and dispositions, and they have the potential to produce
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some rigidity. Nevertheless, Bernstein argued, this kind of strong disciplinary boundary work, is also a source of the later boundary breaking and creative work that happens with those who make it through to the PhD. My new project is called Knowledge Building across School and University,11 and in it I am trying to see what is happening now in relation to boundaries, changing technological possibilities, and inter-relationships in two key discipline areas, history and physics, and also in the cross-curricular and interdisciplinary activities of educational institutions. We are studying the current kinds of thinking and actions here across elite and non-elite settings, and across school, undergraduate and research stages of higher education. We are in the very early stages of this project but some of my own interviews with those doing some of the knowledge creating work in some of the most prestigious interdisciplinary research institutes, have emphasised their views on the need for strong disciplinary and specialist foundations as a basis for the work that happens there, as well as making clear their excitement about the new kinds of knowledge being made possible through collaboration and breakthrough technologies. And interestingly, those I have interviewed have also been very strongly aware of the need to engage students and excite them (about science and history for example) as a key purpose of schooling. Knowledge-building, seen this way, is a lot more complicated than simple binaries of disciplines versus problems or content versus process. So, one of the things that the Wikipedia definition misses is this problem today of what foundations look like. In the concluding chapter of our book on what the Australian states have been doing (Yates et al. 2011), we try to explain why this task that ACARA and also universities are engaged in, is so genuinely difficult, and that neither trying to stick with the curriculum of the past nor trying to ignore that in favour of straight backwards-mapping of outcome attributes has been successful. The other element Wikipedia unwittingly misses in its definition is the rise of a particular kind of management perspective as the measure by which education is judged. Now, instead of talking about educational ideals, policies talk in more generic management terms that might apply to any activity. The task and the criteria for success are to manage particular kinds of institutional and system outcomes that can be measured in particular ways, and this in turn has some particular effects on the content of what is taught and learnt, and especially on what is prioritised. Bob Lingard (2011) took up this theme of ‘ruling by numbers’ in his Radford lecture last year. In the final part of this talk I want to say a little about how my themes and reflections today bear on the issue of education research and on AARE as a body of education researchers. Fortuitously, this final section also bears on the theme of this year’s conference: ‘Researching Across Boundaries’. In many ways, the question what is education for now? can be joined by a set of further questions—‘what is education research for now?’, ‘who is education research for now?’ and even, in the light of the recent research quality assessment ERA, another question: ‘who are education researchers now?’ 11 http://www.education.unimelb.edu.au/kbp/. Funded as an ARC Discovery Project 2011–2013. I am working on this with Peter Woelert, Victoria Miller and Kate O’Connor.
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Like many in this room, I was disappointed to see the results of the first national comprehensive assessment of research quality in Australia in relation to education research, even knowing first-hand the inevitable inadequacies and problematic nature of government-based assessments of research quality. The first ERA outcomes seemed to show that the quality of research in the field of education in Australia was relatively poor.12 One legitimate response here is that to some extent this is a technical artefact of the decision to code journals in particular ways, and to devolve a lot of the outputs of people present here not to Education but to ‘parent’ disciplines outside education. As Tasmania found with the Essential Learnings curriculum, when you try to squeeze concepts developed for one purpose into assessment categories that have a different rationale, you can easily get into trouble, and a whole curriculum reform can come tumbling down.13 Another legitimate objection to ERA might relate to the criteria built into the journal gradings. In my opening comments I was trying to show that while we are in a period of global movements and technologies of various kinds, in education, the national and the local are a long way from having disappeared into unimportance. My School and My University (title case) are Australian initiatives; very specific Australian policies frame the curriculum that is approved, or the ways universities must organize themselves; and in the debates about history and civics the local and national are being revivified by a sense of the global and technology flows, not displaced by these (see Yates and Grumet 2011). So a science-based model for a research quality ranking system that assumes the highest quality research is essentially universal in its subject matter (and in its potential readership) is necessarily flawed (Yates 2009). The local, the situated, the interpersonal are an important part of how education works, and that is one reason so many research students, especially those who also work as practitioners in education, choose to do qualitative work and case studies (though it is also easy to get a bit too comfortable with this!) And, as we know, ERA did not set out to include impact or contribution to professional concerns in its measures, though this is now back on the agenda. So a political response to ERA would be to lobby for a different way of counting and categorising; AARE I know is doing work of this kind, and the second iteration of ERA has already introduced some changes. But today I want to focus not on this necessary pragmatic and lobbying activity, but on how the perspective on education inherent in the first iteration ERA categories relates to my topic and to the examples I have been discussing in the course of the talk. The coding and boundaries of research outputs required for the last ERA submission implied that a research ‘output’ was either an output in sociology or psychology or an output in education. But either/or is the wrong way of looking at this for the field of education. The question is not whether education is a selfcontained research field, which it certainly is not, but about what is gained and what is lost by associating as education researchers rather than through other hats, and by 12 They also showed how little money per researcher is spent on education research in this country compared with other fields. 13 See chapters on this Tasmanian curriculum reform and its downfall by Connors (2011) and Andersen and Oerlemans (2011).
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seeing research activity through an education code rather than a disciplinary one. Philosophical, historical, psychological, sociological, cultural studies, pedagogical, subject-specific, even economic perspectives have legitimate grounds to be concerned with education, to study it, to make claims on what it does. The question is what is being made invisible by the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ categorising, in which a large amount of disciplinary work on education is deemed not to be education research, and an even larger amount of extremely different other kinds of work is lumped together as curriculum and pedagogy; and in which it appears that our strongest activity as a body of researchers is a field unhelpfully labelled ‘specialist studies of education’! The question should not be who is ruled in or out of the research or research discussion. The question should be what value and purposes are served by seeing the field in particular ways, including coming together as an education research community as we do here. William Radford, after whom this lecture is named, was a major advocate for the cause of education research and one of the small group who in the late 1960s and 1970s initiated a research association, AARE, that would bring together education researchers for the purpose of more effectively communicating with each other and addressing the professional issues and problems they faced as education researchers. He was part of the deputation too that lobbied the government for more and better funding of education researchers, and that led to the creation of a specific education research funding stream, through the Australian Advisory Committee on Research and Development in Education (AACRDE). Discussion about who education researchers were was a prominent issue in the initial stage of forming the association. When AARE was founded you had to meet fairly tough formal criteria to be admitted as a member. You needed to have a higher degree and to be working on education research, and this was rigorously assessed by a membership committee. As Bob Bessant and Allyson Holbrook’s (1995) invaluable history of AARE reported: One candidate with an economics degree and employed by a professor of education as a full-time research worker on a higher education project was refused because the projects she was working on ‘did not relate to her formal qualifications’. (Bessant and Holbrook 1995, p. 46) Another was rejected because the work was seen as directed to producing a psychological instrument rather than an education report (Bessant and Holbrook 1995, p. 47). The foundation meetings debated whether education historians were scientific enough to count as education researchers. Conversely, a number of those working as education researchers, though not the majority, had been reluctant to form as an education research association rather than continuing to see their main professional research communities as being the associations of psychology, sociology, history and the like. At a minimum, what an association of education researchers achieves is to have the field rather than the discipline as the context of the agendas. It makes it possible to take up the question ‘what is education for?’ in a way that is different from asking this question primarily through a pre-set disciplinary lens. It makes it
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possible to consider the directions inherent in a whole lot of research and policy activity related to education—how it is coming together. Education, as I’ve argued in a number of my books, is a somewhat unusual field in the extent to which what we might call lay opinion (including public and political and media interests) shapes its directions. Nevertheless, an important role of social science and humanities research is to try to deal with questions that are inherently non-specialist, but to do this in more systematic and creative ways, to enhance the culture and the professional activity by the work we as researchers do. One of the very big issues for research activity today, from the most elite levels through curriculum at all kinds of levels, is how best to produce collaborative crossdisciplinary and interdisciplinary work. Interestingly, this is often done by letting the topic or the field rather than the discipline be the arena for interaction. Public health researchers are a good example here, but sustainability, climate, design and many others are also clear examples. This is not about doing away with strong disciplinary associations and frameworks, which continue to be needed, but about how fields and problems of important social interest need conversations between and across these as well. So, finally, to return to my theme: My school, my university, my country, my world, my Google, myself: what is education for now? In this talk you may have observed that I have often been sliding between talking about education as institution, and education in the sense of an activity with particular directions and values. Both are important, and both need to be part of our interests and discussions. Going back to my starting point and those 3.6 billion Google links to discussions of what is education for?, I would suggest there are two main concerns that have led to the popularity of this theme. One is the availability of new vehicles for learning outside traditional institutions. These call into question the state steering and funding that has built education systems. The second is the uncertainty about how that traditional ‘passing on’ role of education might need to change; the contested views about what kind of formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual is good today. Together, these developments invite us to revisit our thinking about education and not just about learning. If we asked how the Internet educates, we would come up with different perspectives than if we asked how the Internet can be used for learning. Thinking about education, as a social institution, and as a special and valuable and deliberate form of development of individuals and groups and nations, is worth doing. It invites us to consider how that deliberate and institutionally directed activity should today be formed to enable something that is valuable for individuals and groups and nations; and how it might accomplish something different for individuals and groups and nations than the learning and socialisation they might get simply from hanging around in a world and a cyberspace that is changing in such major ways. Acknowledgement The author acknowledges and is grateful for funding support from the Australia Research Council for three research projects referred to in this article: DP0211943; DP0771231 and DP110102466.
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References Andersen, P., & Oerlemans, K. (2011). Curriculum change: The context for the development of the Tasmanian essential learnings curriculum. In L. Yates, C. Collins, & K. O’Connor (Eds.), Australia’s curriculum dilemmas: State cultures and the big issues (pp. 66–95). Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Apple, M. (2000). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age. New York: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (1971). On the classification and framing of educational knowledge. In M. F. D. Young (Ed.), Knowledge and control: New directions for the sociology of education. London: Collier Macmillan. Bessant, B., & Holbrook, A. (1995). Reflections on educational research in Australia: A history of the Australian Association for Research in Education. Coldstream: AARE. Chappell, C., Solomon, N., Tennant, M., Williams, C. & Yates, L. (2005). Changing work, changing workers, changing selves: A study of pedagogies in the new vocationalism. OVAL Research Report. Sydney: University of Technology, Sydney. Connor, J. (2011). Why curriculums fall over: The politics of innovation. In L. Yates, C. Collins, & K. O’Connor (Eds.), Australia’s curriculum dilemmas: State cultures and the big issues (pp. 261–275). Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Hayes, D., Mills, M., Christie, P., & Lingard, B. (2006). Teachers and schooling making a difference. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Lingard, B. (2011). Policy as numbers: Ac/counting for education research. Australian Education Researcher, 38(4), 355–382. McLeod, J., & Yates, L. (2006). Making modern lives: Subjectivity, schooling and social change. Albany: SUNY Press. Moore, R. (2007). Going critical: The problem of problematising knowledge in education studies. Critical Studies in Education, 48(1), 25–41. Muller, J. (2000). Reclaiming knowledge: Social theory, curriculum and education policy. London: Routledge Falmer. Wheelahan, L. (2010). Why knowledge matters in curriculum. Abingdon: Routledge. Yates, L. (1988). Does ‘all students’ include girls? Some reflections on educational policy, practice and theory. Australian Education Researcher, 15(1), 41–57. Yates, L. (2004). What does good education research look like? Situating a field and its practices. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Yates, L. (2006). Vocational subject-making and the work of schools: A case study. Australian Journal of Education, 50(3), 281–296. Yates, L. (2009). The quality and impact agenda in Australia: Developing a research quality framework. In T. Besley (Ed.), Assessing the quality of research in higher education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Yates, L., Collins, C., & O’Connor, K. (Eds.). (2011). Australia’s curriculum dilemmas: State cultures and the big issues. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Yates, L., & Grumet, M. (Eds.). (2011). Curriculum in today’s world: Configuring knowledge, identities, work and politics. Routledge World Yearbook of Education 2011. London: Routledge. Young, M. (2008). Bringing knowledge back in: From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education. London: Routledge.
Author Biography Lyn Yates is Foundation Professor of Curriculum at the University of Melbourne. She is a past member of the AARE Executive and was AARE President in 1998. Her books include What does good education research look like? (Open University Press 2004) and Making Modern Lives (with Julie McLeod, SUNY Press 2006) as well as the more recent curriculum publications referenced in the address.
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