Interrogating Belonging for Young People in Schools

356 Pages·2018·3.172 MB·English

by  Christine Halse

INTERROGATING BELONGING
FOR YOUNG PEOPLE IN SCHOOLS
EDITED BY CHRISTINE HALSE
Interrogating Belonging for Young
People in Schools
Christine Halse
Editor
Interrogating
Belonging for Young
People in Schools
Editor
Christine Halse
The Education University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong, China
ISBN 978-3-319-75216-7 ISBN 978-3-319-75217-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75217-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936142
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For the young people who are our world’s future
Preface
This book had an unusual genesis. It is a tale worth recounting because it
serves as a message—even a moral—to those academics and researchers
who feel alone, isolated and crave for an intellectual space, place and com-
munity where they feel they can belong. The book’s genesis is also unusual
because it was a pleasurable, positive consequence of Australia’s research
assessment exercise known as ‘Excellence in Research’ (ERA)—that inten-
sive, periodic, bureaucratic exercise in research accountability and govern-
mentality that haunts academics and universities around the globe.
Reflecting on the publications submitted for ERA, it seemed self-
evident that the School of Education at Deakin University had a group of
highly-talented scholars doing cutting-edge research on issues of gender
and sexuality, race, intercultural relations and multicultural education, as
well as citizenship and class. Many worked with post-structural theory
but would describe their research field as falling in the gamut of educa-
tion sociology. However, they largely worked independently and in isola-
tion, publishing in different journals and attending different conferences.
Many were only vaguely aware of the work done by their colleagues or
the potential intellectual connections and intersections in their research
interests and scholarship.
These conditions gave birth to a collaborative reading and writing
group called the ‘Critical Studies of Young People Research Group’.
vii
viii Preface
We comprised 12 academics. Overwhelming, our group comprised
women at the beginning or middle of their careers, with a couple of
exceptions.
We set up our group by agreeing on some ‘ground rules’. First, we set
ourselves a common theoretical goal, namely to interrogate the concept
of belonging and its salience to our research interests. Second, we set up
a modus operandi. We would read and critique various theories of belong-
ing, relate these to our respective research in education, and to develop
ways for collaborative writing—a new experience for many—about
belonging for young people in schools. We also undertook to fulfil these
ambitions by meeting for two hours, face-to-face, every month for
12 months. This was a significant commitment because we all worked on
different campuses, the furthest of which were 270 km apart. But the
benefits of face-to-face meetings, colleagues agreed, outweighed the bur-
den of travelling between 1.5 and 4 hours (one way). We swapped the
meeting location occasionally to share around the travelling and, in hind-
sight, we might have done better in sharing the burden more equably.
I expected attendance to fall off quickly as the weight of the travel and
busy-ness of teaching, marking and academic administration swamped
us. To the contrary, the diligence of the Critical Studies of Young People
Research Group surprised us all. Our monthly meetings became the
event we all looked forward to and only extraordinary circumstances,
such as the birth of a child, caused us to miss meetings or fail to complete
the readings we took turns setting and leading in discussions. What’s
more, our meetings soon morphed into half or full day events. It was just
too easy to continue once we started talking and writing. And our initial
12-month commitment stretched out to nearly 20 months until one of
us moved universities and the group’s composition was altered by inter-
nal, structural changes with the university.
Until this time, and despite the busy-ness of academic life, we treated
our research as we did our teaching: preparing, turning up and complet-
ing our follow-up tasks and writing. The regular meeting of our group
gave us the space and place where we felt comfortable, ‘at home’ and
where we belonged. These meetings also gave us permission: to stop; to
think, talk and engage with colleagues; and bring these activities together
in our writing.
Prefac e ix
We also adopted a process for collaborative writing that was new to
many in our group. We grouped ourselves according to the theoretical
aspect of belonging we were interested in writing about, and revisited data
from our prior individual research projects to identify extracts or elements
that aligned with our theoretical concerns. We shared these with our writ-
ing team, selected the body of data that ignited our imaginations and, in
some cases, reworked the data into an extended vignette. Chapters 1 and
15 are illustrations. Each team collectively analysed the vignette, drilling
down into the theoretical insights the empirical data generated. We then
allocated the task of writing up the analysis across team members and col-
laboratively read, reviewed and revised the multiple iterations.
We all felt the silent pressure of not letting our team down. This was
productive pressure and we each worked hard to ensure we kept our respec-
tive commitments and obligations. I will not speak for others in the group
but, at a personal level, it was one of the most collegial, engaging and
authentic experiences of collaborative work that I have ever experienced.
There were two concrete products from our collective endeavours. The
first was an international symposium on ‘Interrogating belonging of
young people’. The symposium was standing room only and had a wait-
list, testifying to the interest in belonging generated among education
researchers. Second, the publication of this edited collection. From the
larger group of authors who presented at the symposium were drawn
most of those whose chapters appear this collection. All these chapters are
extensive revisions of the symposium papers, reshaped in the light of the
ideas and thinking that emerged during the symposium and subsequent
peer review. And some contributors have been added.
The commonality across the contributions to this collection is that
authors bring theories of belonging from disciplines beyond the field of
education into dialogue with empirical data. In particular, they focus on
the tangible, material and desired ways young people experience, enact
and understand belonging through their interactions with peers, teachers
and practices in schools. Schools are critical sites in the construction of
belonging and nonbelonging in young people’s lives. Schools and school-
ing give young people the opportunities for the social interactions and
educational experiences that create their present and open up possibilities
for their futures. At the same time, schools are social institutions of the
x Preface
nation-state. Their purpose is to socialise and structure individuals into
the values and practices that serve the interests of the social majority and
nation state and, in doing so, risk reinforcing the marginalisation of those
who do not meet normative expectations.
Bearing in mind these complexities, this book addresses three over-
arching questions:
1. How is ‘belonging’ understood, enacted and experienced among
diverse young people in schools?
2. What pedagogies and practices do teachers and schools deploy that
impact on young people’s experience of youth and schools as places of
‘belonging’?
3. How might belonging and non-belonging in schools be theorised in
the light of these analyses?
Attending to these questions, each chapter examines a facet of belong-
ing in the lives of young people. It is a collection that is directly relevant
to academics and students of education, sociology of education, and
related other disciplines. Its chapters will also provide new insights for
teachers, school, and schooling. Each chapter engages with one or more
central themes in education and the sociology of education including
race, class, citizenship and national identity, gender and sexuality, cur-
riculum, pedagogy and practices in schools. Each chapter, however,
focuses unselfconsciously on the micro-detail and effects of belonging in
the daily lives of young people across primary and secondary schools. In
doing so, the authors variously address the spaces and places, flows, emo-
tions and relationships to different peoples, objects, social structures and
contexts through which belonging is constructed, enacted, experienced.
These close, detailed analyses expose the diverse ways belonging is cre-
ated, enacted and manifested, and how quickly and covertly belonging
(and non-belonging) is done and undone.
Each section in the book concludes with a reflective commentary by an
internationally renowned scholar. These commentaries engage with the
ideas and arguments in the preceding chapters, relate them to the com-
mentator’s own work, and raise provocative political questions about the
intersections of belonging, schooling and the everyday of young people’s
Prefac e xi
lives. Collectively, the chapters not only extend empirical analysis, thinking
and theorising about belonging in new directions but construct a new
grammar of belonging for education as a discipline and a field.
Hong Kong, China Christine Halse