Responsibility And Responsibilisation In Education

Concerns with the nature of and relationship between responsibility and responsibilisation pervade contemporary social, political and moral life. This book turns the analytical lens on the ways in which responsibility and responsibilisation operate in diverse educational settings and relationships, and social, policy and geographical contexts in the USA, Europe, the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Scholars have sought to explain the genealogy and the mélange of rationalities, technologies, bio-politics and modes of governmentality that bring responsibility and responsibilisation into being, how they act on and are taken up by individuals, groups and organisations, and the risks and possibilities they create and delimit for individuals, social collectives and their freedoms. Contributors to this collection have diverse views and perspectives on responsibility and responsibilisation. This disagreement is a strength. It underlines the importance of unravelling both the differences and similarities across scholars and contexts. It also issues a salutatory warning about assumptions that reduce the complex concepts of responsibility and responsibilisation to simplistic, fixed categories or to generalising and universalising single cases or experiences to all areas of education. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

The impetus for this book is the shift in welfare policy in Western Europe from state responsibilities to individual and community responsibilities. The book examines the ways in which policies associated with advanced liberalism and New Public Management can be identified as influencing professional practices to promote personalisation, participation, empowerment, recovery and resilience. In examining the concept of ‘responsibilisation’ from the point of view of both the ‘responsibilised client and welfare worker’, the book breaks from the traditional literature to demonstrate how responsibilities are negotiated during multi-professional care planning meetings, home visits, staff meetings, focus groups and interviews with different stakeholders. The settings examined in the book can be described as on the ‘margins of welfare’ - mental health, substance abuse, homelessness services and probation work, where the rights and responsibilities of clients and workers are uncertain and constantly under review. Each chapter approaches the management of responsibilities from a particular angle by combining responsibilisation theory and discourse analysis to examine everyday encounters. Taken together, the chapters paint a comprehensive picture of the responsibilisation practices at the margins of welfare services and provide an extensive discussion of the implications for policy and practice. Drawing upon both the governmentality literature and everyday encounters, the book provides a broad approach to a key topic. It will therefore be a valuable resource for social policy, public administration, social work and human service researchers and students, and social and health care professionals.

An accelerating pattern in Australia and internationally is the dismantling of public education systems as part of a long-standing trend towards the modernisation, marketisation and privatisation of educational provision. Responsibility for direct delivery of education services has been shifted to contracting and monitoring under the clarion call of school and leadership autonomy and parental choice. Part of this pattern is an increasing blurring of boundaries between the state and private sector, a move from government to new forms of ‘strategic’ governance, and from hierarchy to heterarchy. Challenges for Public Education examines the educational leadership, policy and social justice implications of these trends in Australia and internationally. It maps this movement through early shifts to school-based management in Australia, New Zealand and Sweden and recent moves such as the academies programme in England and charter schools in the United States. It draws on recent studies of a distinct new phase in Australian school reform – the creation of ‘independent public schools’ (IPS) in Western Australia and Queensland – and global policy moves in public education in order to provide a truly international dialogue and debate on these matters. This book moves beyond critique. It innovatively brings together Australian and international perspectives and a rich range of diverse theoretical lenses: practice philosophy, feminism, gender, relational, and postmodernism. As such, it provides a crucial forum for illuminating alternate ways to conceptualise educational leadership, policy and social justice as resources for hope.

Home education is the fastest growing educational movement in the world, yet the research remains limited on why and how it has become so popular. As more and more families seek to homeschool, it is imperative that further studies are undertaken to understand how students’ lives are impacted, as well as the challenges and opportunities that arise from this method of schooling. Global Perspectives on Home Education in the 21st Century is an edited collection that focuses on the major factors behind the global rise of the home education movement and explores many of the current issues faced in relation to homeschooling. The book examines key themes that include parents’ and children’s experiences of home education, how and why families choose to home educate, and what happens to home educated children once they are finished. Including topics such as unschooling, self-directed learning, willed learning, and holistic education, this book is primarily intended for home educators, school administrators, policymakers, researchers, academicians, and students.

This companion presents the newest research in this important area, showcasing the huge diversity in children’s relationships with digital media around the globe, and exploring the benefits, challenges, history, and emerging developments in the field. Children are finding novel ways to express their passions and priorities through innovative uses of digital communication tools. This collection investigates and critiques the dynamism of children's lives online with contributions fielding both global and hyper-local issues, and bridging the wide spectrum of connected media created for and by children. From education to children's rights to cyberbullying and youth in challenging circumstances, the interdisciplinary approach ensures a careful, nuanced, multi-dimensional exploration of children’s relationships with digital media. Featuring a highly international range of case studies, perspectives, and socio-cultural contexts, The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children is the perfect reference tool for students and researchers of media and communication, family and technology studies, psychology, education, anthropology, and sociology, as well as interested teachers, policy makers, and parents.

This edited book brings together teachers and education academics who are committed to education about, for and through democracy. It presents a diverse range of viewpoints about the challenges facing educators working across different sectors and discusses ways to challenge issues like neoliberalism, excessive managerialism and accountability and privatisation. It also engages with the times that education has, and continues, to fail students. This book outlines both logistical and ideological challenges which educators committed to democracy face and describes innovative approaches they have adopted, including networking, the use of social media and digital tools and extending their reach beyond their local communities to international audiences. It encourages conversations about how educators and academics might re-commit to education for democracy and generate further avenues for discussion and action by educators and academics.

"I highly appreciate the quality of Fejes’ and Dahlstedt’s research and writing. They manage to present in a comprehensible way some essential concepts of Foucault that help us to understand better what practices of lifelong learning, in a broad sense, are emerging nowadays in advanced liberal societies. In doing so, they contribute to the renewal of critical thinking in education. They convince me that such renewal is important and necessary... and I think both theoreticians and practitioners of lifelong learning will equally recognize and value this analysis, particularly also, because they present a good mix of theory and practice." -Professor Danny Wildemeersch Today, people are constantly encouraged to verbalise and disclose their "true" inner self to others, whether on TV shows, in newspapers, in family life or together with friends. Such encouragement to disclose the self has proliferated through discourses on lifelong learning through which each citizen is encouraged to become a constant learner. The Confessing Society takes a critical stance towards the modern relentless will to disclose the self and argues that society has become a confessing society. Drawing on Foucault’s later work on confession and governmentality, this book carefully analyses how confession operates within practices of lifelong learning as a way to shape activated and responsible citizens and provides examples of how it might be possible to traverse the confessional truth of the present time. Chapters include: Reflection and Reflective Practices Deliberation and Therapeutic Intervention Lifelong Guidance Medialised Parenting This controversial book is international in its scope and pursues current debates regarding trans-national policy and to research discussions on education, lifelong learning and governance, and it will provoke lively debate amongst educational practitioners, academics, postgraduate and research students in education and lifelong learning in Europe, North America and Australasia.

Focusing on Singapore’s education system from an equity perspective, Chiong’s book describes the often unheard perspectives of socio-economically disadvantaged families in Singapore. The performance of Singaporean students on international education benchmarking tests has been widely recognised. Relatively less known is how socio-economically disadvantaged families negotiate Singapore’s highly competitive, stratifying and meritocratic system. Yet, families’ perspectives can provide crucial insight in understanding how policy is ‘lived’ and experienced, and its effects on people’s lives. Drawing on 72 interviews with 12 families, this book traces the development of surprisingly close, collaborative relations between the state, schools and families on Singapore’s socio-economic margins. It demonstrates that in the 'strong' state of Singapore, families’ dependency on schools and the state facilitates the internalisation of individual and familial responsibility for future success. However, these very processes can injure, and perpetuate inequality. The analysis presented in this book has relevance in other contexts, in times where advanced capitalist states face growing inequalities and challenging relationships between institutional authority and the wider populace. As socio-economic and educational inequalities widen, this book asks timely questions and provides recommendations on what a more equitable state-citizen compact might look like. The book will appeal to researchers and students who are interested in the fields of the sociology and politics of education, social policy, and Asian culture and society.