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School Trouble
What is the trouble with schools and why should we want to make ‘school trouble’? Schooling is implicated in the making of educational and social exclusions and inequalities as well as the making of particular sorts of students and teachers. For this reason schools are important sites of counter- or radical- politics. In this book, Deborah Youdell brings together theories of counter-politics and radical traditions in education to make sense of the politics of daily life inside schools and explores a range of resources for thinking about and enacting political practices that make ‘school trouble’. The book offers a solid introduction to the much-debated issues of ‘intersectionality’ and the limits of identity politics and the relationship between schooling and the wider policy and political context. It pieces together a series of tools and tactics that might destabilize educational inequalities by unsettling the knowledges, meanings, practices, subjectivities and feelings that are normalized and privileged in the ‘business as usual’ of school life. Engaging with curriculum materials, teachers’ lesson plans and accounts of their pedagogy, and ethnographic observations of school practices, the book investigates a range of empirical examples of critical action in school, from overt political action pursued by educators to day-to-day pedagogic encounters between teachers and students. The book draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to make sense of these practices and identify the political possibilities for educators who refuse to accept the everyday injustices and wide-reaching social inequalities that face us. School Trouble appears at a moment of political and economic flux and uncertainty, and when the policy moves that have promoted markets and private sector involvement in education around the globe have been subject to intense scrutiny and critique. Against this backdrop, renewed attention is being paid to the questions of how politics might be rejuvenated, how societies might be made fair, and what role education might have in pursing this. This book makes an important intervention into this terrain. By exploring a politics of discourse, an anti-identity politics, a politics of feeling, and a politics of becoming, it shows how the education assemblage can be unsettled and education can be re-imagined. The book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars in the fields of education, sociology, cultural studies, and social and political science as well as to critical educators looking for new tools for thinking about their practice.
176 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2010
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August 15, 2012
A couple of decades ago Judith Butler wrote a book called Gender Trouble. I guess you could say that Butler is on a rather extreme end of feminism – rather than seeing the need for a movement to enable women to find ways to authentically live lives as women outside the patriarchy – that is, in opposition to masculinity in the male and female binary that is generally set up – she wants to ‘trouble’ gender more explicitly. I’m about half way though that book by Butler, but will get back to it soon. The bottom line, I think, with Butler’s work is that the way we think of what it means to be male or female is generally based on some sort of essential characteristics that are supposed to be universal and inevitable. However, all of us know people who don’t fit the stereotypes all that well: homosexuals, transsexuals and intersexuals being the most obvious 'problems' faced by such ‘essentialist’ categories. My reading of Butler so far is that what you do is much more important that what you are. That is, she is much more interested in people as ‘agents’ than in people as subjects.
This book wants to play with the ideas on how people are created as subjects by schools and what teachers might be able to do to trouble such school subjectivities – particularly when these subjectivities create roles for kids that make it impossible for them to really engage in school or to be whole people. This isn’t just about troubling our notions of gender roles in schools, but also other constructions such as what it means to be defined as ‘special needs’, for example. It does this by stressing that for every victim of school classification systems like these there are people who, in being defined as normal, end up benefiting and therefore are unlikely to want the situation to change all that much.
In this book Youdell uses the work of Deleuze and Guittari – I am not going to pretend to be an expert on their work. In fact, when Richard Dawkins wanted to show how postmodernism is essentially an intellectual fraud he quoted extensively from the works of Deleuze and Guittari. It is not hard to find passages of their work that reads like it has been generated by one of those computer programs that write culture studies essays. But that said, some of the commentary I have read on their work (their texts by themselves are almost impenetrable) have very interesting things to say. This book (from about page 45 to 49) gives a really useful (although still hard work) introduction to many of their key concepts and ideas. Central to their thinking is the idea of the rhizome. This is a plant that is essentially all roots in a network which can sprout at any point. So, rather than there being single ‘subject’, you get networks of interactions and these throwing up complexes. I quite like this metaphor.
Youdell’s own metaphor for much the same idea is one she discussed extensively in Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves, that of ‘constellations’. The idea being that we have at our disposal many, many stars that we might use to define our subjectivities. However, once we choose a particular group of stars to be a constellation we tend to only see that one pattern. So, he’s a fish, she’s a lion. But if we add other stars to the basic pattern we would change those constellations – perhaps even entirely.
This is a really interesting idea and one that I think helps us understand how certain children relate to how they are defined by school. Her discussion of boys who had been defined as special needs students is particularly illuminating on this score.
Take some kids who are struggling to learn to read and might have a series of other behavioural and learning issues. It is not hard to select a group of stars from this part of the sky and to constitute them as a constellation that defines these boys as ‘trouble makers’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘special needs’. It is hardly surprising that these boys might seek to resist such a constellation being constructed around them. But there are limited ways in which they would be able to resist having this constellation imposed on them - but resist it they must, that is fairly clear. One way that would be open to them and that is more or less a ‘socially acceptable’ alternative, is a kind of hyper-masculinity. Looking back to the idea of a rhizome, such a plant is always spreading out from what is effectively its centre. It is seeking ways to find a ‘line of flight’ from that centre. This is what the boys are attempting in their adoption of hyper-masculinity, to take flight from how they have been defined, a definition that devalues them as people in everyone’s eyes (their own included) and to find a personality that can have value.
A central idea here is that people are embodied, but being a subject with a body is also to be a subject with feelings and emotions. There’s an experiment reported elsewhere in one of those books on psychology I spent so much time reading a couple of years ago, where they get men to walk across a bridge that is rickety, one that lunges frighteningly as they walk across it. They then get them to talk to some woman on the other side. Another group of men just talk to the woman without the terrifying experience first. When they ask the two groups of men what they thought of the woman they spoke to they find that the ones who had walked over the rickety bridge think she is much more attractive than the other men did. There’s lots of speculation about why this might be the case, but I tend to think that it is because we only have a certain number of physical responses – sweaty palms, racing heart, dry mouth – and constellations of these physical responses are associated with certain emotional responses. So that if we are talking to a woman and our heart is racing and we are having trouble catching our breath, then one reason for that might be we find her attractive. But if we have just been through an ordeal that has caused the same effect then it isn’t surprising if we might confuse our physical responses and their cause.
This book points to how certain physical responses of teachers and students force them to define themselves in ways that make their place in schools difficult for everyone and therefore makes learning impossible. What is particularly nice about this book is that she doesn’t give simple answers to how to ‘fix’ the problems she mentions. For example, a little boy says, “boys have muscles and girls have boobies”. One of the female teachers, a sporty type, who overhears this walks over to him and shows him her arm muscles and asks him if he still thinks that what he said is true. He runs off. Rather than just say, well, that showed him, Youdell goes into an interesting discussion of the likely emotional responses of each of the characters in this little drama. There is also a horrible scene where a young boy is ‘subdued’ by an adult male, his face pushed into the ground while being held with his arm twisted up his back which deeply affected both the author and this reader.
There is a lengthy discussion of a project called ‘no outsiders’ that was run in Britain and sought to address issues of inclusion for homosexual students in schools. One teacher brings a homosexual poet to the school and this causes howls of protest from the parents. This is the point, I think. Inclusive education is troubling education, and not just for teachers and students, but also for many parents and is therefore highly political. But ignoring this work is part of the reason homosexual students are likely to have such an incredibly tough time at school. Creating a situation where this is not the case means seeking to find ways to reconfigure the how certain ways of being are understood – but this is often to effectively ask schools and teachers to overcome the full weight of our society. The problem is that to ignore this is to have children defined as deviant or impossible learners or social misfits. Finding ways of allowing other ways of being, that is, ways that the students themselves haven’t really ‘chosen’ as they are fundamental to who they are as people, is an answer, but not one that is, in any sense, easy.
If we are the performances we enact – as Butler contends – then allowing safe spaces where people can enact these performances in personally enhancing ways would be a particularly noble vision of what a teacher’s role ought to be. That this is also anything but the road of least resistance is both acknowledged and made very clear by the case studies analysed in this book. These are anything but simple problems with simple solutions.
This book wants to play with the ideas on how people are created as subjects by schools and what teachers might be able to do to trouble such school subjectivities – particularly when these subjectivities create roles for kids that make it impossible for them to really engage in school or to be whole people. This isn’t just about troubling our notions of gender roles in schools, but also other constructions such as what it means to be defined as ‘special needs’, for example. It does this by stressing that for every victim of school classification systems like these there are people who, in being defined as normal, end up benefiting and therefore are unlikely to want the situation to change all that much.
In this book Youdell uses the work of Deleuze and Guittari – I am not going to pretend to be an expert on their work. In fact, when Richard Dawkins wanted to show how postmodernism is essentially an intellectual fraud he quoted extensively from the works of Deleuze and Guittari. It is not hard to find passages of their work that reads like it has been generated by one of those computer programs that write culture studies essays. But that said, some of the commentary I have read on their work (their texts by themselves are almost impenetrable) have very interesting things to say. This book (from about page 45 to 49) gives a really useful (although still hard work) introduction to many of their key concepts and ideas. Central to their thinking is the idea of the rhizome. This is a plant that is essentially all roots in a network which can sprout at any point. So, rather than there being single ‘subject’, you get networks of interactions and these throwing up complexes. I quite like this metaphor.
Youdell’s own metaphor for much the same idea is one she discussed extensively in Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves, that of ‘constellations’. The idea being that we have at our disposal many, many stars that we might use to define our subjectivities. However, once we choose a particular group of stars to be a constellation we tend to only see that one pattern. So, he’s a fish, she’s a lion. But if we add other stars to the basic pattern we would change those constellations – perhaps even entirely.
This is a really interesting idea and one that I think helps us understand how certain children relate to how they are defined by school. Her discussion of boys who had been defined as special needs students is particularly illuminating on this score.
Take some kids who are struggling to learn to read and might have a series of other behavioural and learning issues. It is not hard to select a group of stars from this part of the sky and to constitute them as a constellation that defines these boys as ‘trouble makers’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘special needs’. It is hardly surprising that these boys might seek to resist such a constellation being constructed around them. But there are limited ways in which they would be able to resist having this constellation imposed on them - but resist it they must, that is fairly clear. One way that would be open to them and that is more or less a ‘socially acceptable’ alternative, is a kind of hyper-masculinity. Looking back to the idea of a rhizome, such a plant is always spreading out from what is effectively its centre. It is seeking ways to find a ‘line of flight’ from that centre. This is what the boys are attempting in their adoption of hyper-masculinity, to take flight from how they have been defined, a definition that devalues them as people in everyone’s eyes (their own included) and to find a personality that can have value.
A central idea here is that people are embodied, but being a subject with a body is also to be a subject with feelings and emotions. There’s an experiment reported elsewhere in one of those books on psychology I spent so much time reading a couple of years ago, where they get men to walk across a bridge that is rickety, one that lunges frighteningly as they walk across it. They then get them to talk to some woman on the other side. Another group of men just talk to the woman without the terrifying experience first. When they ask the two groups of men what they thought of the woman they spoke to they find that the ones who had walked over the rickety bridge think she is much more attractive than the other men did. There’s lots of speculation about why this might be the case, but I tend to think that it is because we only have a certain number of physical responses – sweaty palms, racing heart, dry mouth – and constellations of these physical responses are associated with certain emotional responses. So that if we are talking to a woman and our heart is racing and we are having trouble catching our breath, then one reason for that might be we find her attractive. But if we have just been through an ordeal that has caused the same effect then it isn’t surprising if we might confuse our physical responses and their cause.
This book points to how certain physical responses of teachers and students force them to define themselves in ways that make their place in schools difficult for everyone and therefore makes learning impossible. What is particularly nice about this book is that she doesn’t give simple answers to how to ‘fix’ the problems she mentions. For example, a little boy says, “boys have muscles and girls have boobies”. One of the female teachers, a sporty type, who overhears this walks over to him and shows him her arm muscles and asks him if he still thinks that what he said is true. He runs off. Rather than just say, well, that showed him, Youdell goes into an interesting discussion of the likely emotional responses of each of the characters in this little drama. There is also a horrible scene where a young boy is ‘subdued’ by an adult male, his face pushed into the ground while being held with his arm twisted up his back which deeply affected both the author and this reader.
There is a lengthy discussion of a project called ‘no outsiders’ that was run in Britain and sought to address issues of inclusion for homosexual students in schools. One teacher brings a homosexual poet to the school and this causes howls of protest from the parents. This is the point, I think. Inclusive education is troubling education, and not just for teachers and students, but also for many parents and is therefore highly political. But ignoring this work is part of the reason homosexual students are likely to have such an incredibly tough time at school. Creating a situation where this is not the case means seeking to find ways to reconfigure the how certain ways of being are understood – but this is often to effectively ask schools and teachers to overcome the full weight of our society. The problem is that to ignore this is to have children defined as deviant or impossible learners or social misfits. Finding ways of allowing other ways of being, that is, ways that the students themselves haven’t really ‘chosen’ as they are fundamental to who they are as people, is an answer, but not one that is, in any sense, easy.
If we are the performances we enact – as Butler contends – then allowing safe spaces where people can enact these performances in personally enhancing ways would be a particularly noble vision of what a teacher’s role ought to be. That this is also anything but the road of least resistance is both acknowledged and made very clear by the case studies analysed in this book. These are anything but simple problems with simple solutions.
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