School trouble : identity, power and politics in education

176 Pages·2011·1.261 MB·English

by  Deborah Youdell

School Trouble
What is the trouble with schools and why should we want to make ‘school trouble’?
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 tools and tactics that might destabilize educational ine-
qualities 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 pedagogy, and ethnographic observations of
school practices, the book investigates empirical examples of critical action in school, from
overt political action pursued by educators to day-to-day pedagogic encounters between teach-
ers 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 everyday
injustices and wide-reaching social inequalities.
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 pursuing 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.
Deborah Youdell is Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Foundations
and Policy Studies at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK.
Foundations and Futures of Education
Series Editors:
Peter Aggleton School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex, UK
Sally Power Cardiff University, UK
Michael Reiss Institute of Education, University of London, UK
Foundations and Futures of Education focuses on key emerging issues in education
as well as continuing debates within the field. The series is interdisciplinary, and
includes historical, philosophical, sociological, psychological and comparative per-
spectives on three major themes: the purposes and nature of education; increasing
interdisciplinarity within the subject; and the theory-practice divide.
Previous titles include:
Language, Learning, Context
Wolff-Michael Roth
Learning, Context and the Role of Technology
Rosemary Luckin
Education and the Family
Passing success across the generations
Leon Feinstein, Kathryn Duckworth and Ricardo Sabates
Education, Philosophy and the Ethical Environment
Graham Haydon

Educational Activity and the Psychology of Learning
Judith Ireson
Schooling, Society and Curriculum
Alex Moore
Gender, Schooling and Global Social Justice
Elaine Unterhalter
Education – An ‘Impossible Profession’?
Tamara Bibby
Being a University
Ronald Barnett
Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age
Neil Selwyn
Forthcoming titles include:
Irregular Schooling
Roger Slee
The Struggle for the History of Education
Gary McCulloch

School Trouble
Identity, power and politics in
education
Deborah Youdell
First published 2011
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2011 Deborah Youdell
The right of Deborah Youdell to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pu blication Data
Youdell, Deborah, 1970–
School trouble : identity, power and politics in education /
Deborah Youdell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Education—Political aspects—Great Britain. 2. Education and
state—Great Britain. 3. Critical pedagogy—Great Britain. I. Title.
LC93.G7Y68 2011
379.41—dc22
2010019494
ISBN 0-203-83937-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN13: 978–0–415–47987–5 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–47988–2 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–83937–9 (ebk)
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Prologue ix
Introduction 1
PART I
Troubling ideas: identity, power and politics 5
1 The politics of schooling: converting the education assemblage 7
2 Tactics for political practice 17
3 Theorizing political subjects 36
PART II
Troubling schools: places, people, feelings 57
4 Troubling school knowledges 59

5 Schooling’s unruly subjects 74
6 Everyday political pedagogy 85
7 Political feeling in the classroom 102
8 Pedagogies of becoming 115
9 Becoming-radical in education 129
References 145
Author index 158
Subject index 161
Acknowledgements
I need to thank a lot of people for being part of the research and thinking from which
this book has emerged. Thank you to all of the No Outsiders research team and
schools, and especially Laura and Fin (ESRC reference: RES-062-23-0095). Thanks
also to the staff and students at Bay Tree School, in particular Miss Groves, Miss
Appleton, Mr Parsons, Mr Newton and the boys in year 9. Sally Power, Michael Reiss
and Peter Aggleton, the editors of this series, have given endless support as well as
feedback on drafts and have undoubtedly made this a much better book. Mike Apple,
Felicity Armstrong, Tamara Bibby, David Gillborn, Zeus Leonardo, Emma Renold,
Jessica Ringrose and Michaelinos Zembylas all read first drafts of chapters and I am
enormously grateful for their insights, time and friendship. Colleagues at the Institute
of Education and the universities of Melbourne and Wisconsin-Madison who have
been part of the ‘Three Deans Partnership’ have made an important contribution to
the trajectory of my thinking over a number of years and I want to thank them all, as
well as Geoff Whitty, Field Rickards and Julie Underwood for their ongoing support
of the conference that has been such an invaluable place to think. I was invited to par-
ticipate in the ‘(Anti)Racism and Pedagogy’ workshop and conference, supported by
the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia and Yunggorendi First
Nations Centre for Higher Education and Research at Flinders University, Adelaide
SA, while I was writing this book. It was an important learning experience and I want

to thank all of the workshop participants for their generous collegiality and also Robert
Hattam and Daryle Rigney who organized the workshop and conference. Thanks also
to Mindy Blaise, Mary-Lou Rasmussen, Jane Kenway, Anna Hickey-Moody, Dena
Leahy, Kalervo Gulson and Patrick Carmichael for sharing ideas and pushing mine,
as well as to everyone who attended the seminar at the Education and Social Research
Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University where I gave these ideas their first
public outing. Finally, much love and thanks for everything to my sister Linny and her
family, my mum Pat, and my excellent friends Clare, Kate, Sue, Sarah, Paul, Catherine,
Mark, Ron and Kitty Hough.
Prologue
Falling1
Tommy shifts in his seat in the exam hall as he and the rest of his year group begin
the first of this year’s national tests, the test that every student in the country his age
is taking right now. As he scans the pages of the test booklet he wonders where he’s
been for all the years of Maths that he suddenly seems to have missed. He shifts some
more, adjusting his grip on his pencil and almost imperceptibly dropping his head a
little closer to the test paper as he feels Mrs Church’s glare.
Tommy isn’t sure exactly how he went from being a smiling kid who loved the
world and thought the world loved him back to this. How he went from loving the
fact that before he even started school he could write in his baby brother’s birthday
card and play alphabet games with him, to being this 14-year-old not-boy-not-man
struggling to find the heart to start a Maths test.
But he knows it has a lot to do with years of being the last to get to choose what
to play at during free class time; years of being separated from the one boy in class he
really got on with because the teachers thought they were a ‘bad influence’ on each
other; years of being last to be called on for an answer, no matter how quickly, how
high or how long his hand was in the air, or told to stop messing about when he was
called on to answer even though he was sure his answer had been right, or at least
plausible; years of being pounced on at the slightest infraction – a snort at another
student’s dropped item, a distracted amble into a classroom a minute after the bell
– and of rapid and heavy sanctions if he ever did anything serious. Like the time he
had a stand-up row with Mr James when he tried to explain that he wasn’t disrespect-
ing him by ‘coming along to class at anytime he liked’ but had been held up in the
corridor by Mr Smyth who wanted to talk to him about a fight between some younger
boys that he’d seen that morning. That event ended with him outside the headteach-
er’s office, mum up at school, and an unwanted day at home. Until he found he just
wasn’t able to ask, the hand just wouldn’t go up into the air anymore, the words just
wouldn’t come out.
Tommy knows school might have been different if his mum and dad had stayed
together, if his mum had done better at school herself and got a good job instead of
the string of part-time stuff, if she’d been a ‘respectable’ White woman, a possibil-
ity Tommy knows is precluded in Whiteworld by the warm cedar tone of his skin,