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.
