Beyond the curriculum: fostering associational life in schools was written in 2005 by Mark K Smith. It was later published in Bekerman et al. (2006). Learning in Places. The informal education reader.
Contents: Introduction | Globalization, professionalization and commodification in education | Associational life and the public interest | The nature and potential of informal education | The decline in classroom teachers’ involvement in informal education – and the rise of the specialist | The extension of curricular activity and a focus on outcome | Individualization and the move to case-management | Conflicting frameworks | Conclusion: what future for informal education within schools? | References
There has been a significant growth in the number of specialist informal educators working within schools in a number of countries. In Britain, for example, political pressures to raise educational standards have led to narrowing of the focus of classroom teachers. It has entailed increased workloads, the implementation of a national curriculum, and an emphasis upon ensuring that school life is marked by reasonable behaviour and is attractive to potential students and their parents. One result has been a range of government and local programmes to introduce informal educators and support workers into schools. The Excellence in Cities (DfEE 1999) initiative introduced learning mentors into many English schools; the Connexions strategy (DfEE 2000) personal advisers; and the Scottish New Community Schools programme (Scottish Office 1999) youth workers. Alongside this, there has been a growing orientation among policymakers to learning beyond the classroom and its contribution to formal educational achievement, and the deepening of the skill base seen as necessary for economic competitiveness (e.g. Bentley 1998; Leadbeater 2000). An aspect of this has been the use of problematic notions such as lifelong learning (Field 2000). In the United States, we have seen a parallel growth in interest in full-service schooling (Dryfoos 1994); a concern with ‘helping in the hallways’ (Hazler 1998); and a growing interest in after-school programmes (Halpern 2003). Similarly, those schools that have tried to grapple with the notion of multiple intelligences have had to look at creating a variety of environments for learning, many of which embrace the informal.
Unfortunately, increasing the number of informal educators has not necessarily enhanced the quality of informal education in schools. They, like their teacher colleagues, often find themselves running pre-packaged programmes and constrained by inappropriate targets. Worryingly, a number have chosen or absorbed ways of thinking and being that approach education as a commodity. They have lost touch with informal education as a non-curriculum form and the possibilities for learning that flow from associational life (la vie associative). In this piece, I explore some key aspects of the current situation, drawing heavily on UK experience. I suggest that it is still possible to cultivate a ‘vocabulary of hope’ (Halpin 2003) within schooling – and that informal education with its emphasis on conversation and association can make a significant contribution to the development of a more convivial public life. However, there are particular areas of tension that must be addressed if space is to be carved out by classroom teachers and informal educators for engaged and critical practice.
Globalization, professionalization and commodification in education
The increased use of specialist informal educators within schools has to be set in the context of broader movements. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, and particularly in those countries where neo-liberal economic policies dominated, there was strong pressure to ‘roll-back’ local state regulation, and to transform non-market and ‘social’ spheres such as public health and education services into arenas of commercial activity. Such marketization was, and is, increasingly difficult to disentangle from the intensification of globalization (Giroux 2000: 6). We saw attempts within many education and welfare systems to:
- Reconfigure services so that they can be priced and sold.
- Induce people to want to buy them rather than simply have the right to expect them as citizens.
- Transform the workforce from one working for collective aims with a service ethic to one working to produce profits for owners of capital and subject to market discipline.
- Underwrite risks to capital by the state. (Leys 2001: 4)
In other words, there was a process of commodification – and the attempt to standardize ‘products’ and to find economies of scale. While being linked to an intensification of globalization, this process was also part of a long-running growth in institutionalization and reliance on ‘expertise’. In his influential exploration and critique of these movements, Ivan Illich (1972, 1977) argues that they contribute to dehumanization. ‘[I]nstitutions create the needs and control their satisfaction, and, by so doing, turn the human being and her or his creativity into objects’ (Finger and Asún 2001: 10). There has been a reconfiguration of what it means to be ‘professional’. In more recent years, within many education systems, this has been expressed as a shift away from a concern with connoisseurship and criticism (Eisner 1985, 1998) and a wish to work well within a community of practice (Wenger 1999). In their place has come a much stronger focus on rule-following, correct procedure and management.
The opening up of education systems within the United Kingdom to corporate activity required major intervention by national government. By the end of the twentieth century, the UK had moved from having one of the most decentralized schooling systems in the world to one of the most tightly controlled and state-regulated (Alexander 2000: 122). The corporate need for efficiency, calculability, predictability and control (the qualities that Ritzer [1993] used to define the ‘McDonaldization process’) required government action.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, this project was partly carried forward by the rise of managerialism in many ‘western’ education systems. Both frontline educators and those in authority were encouraged and trained to see themselves as managers, and to reframe the problems of education as exercises in delivering the right outcomes. The language and disposition of management also quickly moved into the classroom via initiatives such as the UK national curriculum. In many systems, there was also a wholesale strengthening of the market. Schools had to compete for students, for example, in order to sustain and extend their funding. This, in turn, meant that they have had to market their activities and to develop their own ‘brands’. They had to sell ‘the learning experience’ and the particular qualities of their institution. To do this, complex processes had to be reduced to easily identified packages; philosophies to sound bites; and students and their parents became ‘consumers’ (see, for example, Wolf 2002). We have seen a growing focus on outcomes and an associated intensification of testing and accrediting learning. As Stewart (1992: 27) demonstrated some time ago there is a fundamental problem with the way that such business models have been applied: ‘The real danger is that unthinking adoption of the private sector model prevents the development of an approach to management in the public services in general or to the social services in particular based on their distinctive purposes, conditions and tasks’. The result was a drive towards the achievement of specified outcomes and the adoption of standardized teaching models. The emphasis was less on community and equity, and rather more on individual advancement and the need to satisfy investors and influential consumers. Education had come to resemble a private, rather than public, good.
As a result of these processes, schooling is now viewed as offering lucrative market opportunities. Giroux (2000: 85) reports that in the United States, the for-profit education market represented around $600 billion in revenue for transnational, corporate interests. Over 1000 state schools have been contracted out to private companies (Monbiot 2001: 336). In Britain, education management ‘looks like it is about to become big business’ (op. cit.). Educational Action Zones (beginning in 1998) have had significant corporate involvement. The Lambeth Zone is run by Shell, for example, not the local education authority. In Southwark, the education service was contracted out to W. S. Atkins (unsuccessfully as it turned out), and Kings Manor School, Guildford, became the first state school to have its administration handed to a private company in 1999. Kenway and Bullen (2001) have charted similar shifts in the marketization of Australian schooling.
Learning has increasingly been portrayed as a commodity or as an investment, rather than as a way of exploring what might make for the good life or human flourishing. Teachers’ and educators’ ability to ask critical questions about the world in which they live has been compromised. The market ideologies they have assimilated (along with others in these societies), the direction of the curricula they are required to ‘deliver’, and the readiness of the colleges, schools and agencies in which they operate to embrace corporate sponsorship and intervention have combined to degrade their work to such an extent as to question whether what they are engaged in can be rightfully be called education (MacIntrye 2002). In a very real sense they are engaged in furthering what Erich Fromm described as alienation. People become treated as commodities, and experience their ‘life forces’ as an investment which must bring them ‘the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions’ (Fromm 1957: 67). It is a form of education that looks to ‘having’ rather than ‘being’ (Fromm 1976).
Associational life and the public interest
To counter the effects of commodification and institutionalization we need to step outside the current, dominant discourses within schooling systems. We need, for example, to adopt ways of thinking and acting that have at their core an informed commitment to human flourishing in its fullest sense (Marples 1999). We also need to reassert the public domain and to police the boundaries between it and the market sector with some vigilance (Leys 2001: 222). Furthermore, we need, as educators, to be able to do what is right rather than what is ‘correct’ (Jeffs and Smith 1990: 1-23). But how is all this to be achieved within societies and systems conditioned by globalization and neo-liberalism and in which there are asymmetrical relations of power? The answer, of course, is that progress will always be partial. But we can, at least, offer alternatives and seek to undermine the narrowing and demeaning processes that pass under the name of education in many systems. Ways of educating that look to well-being and participation in the common life have been well articulated. However, accounts of such work and exploration of the vision that runs through it are sometimes dismissed as ‘utopian’. Yet without that appreciation of what could be, and a critique of the present, there can be little hope for education. As David Halpin (2003: 44) has argued, the challenge for schooling today is ‘not to learn without utopias, but rather to seek to delineate new ones which help to fuel fresh conceptions of what might contribute to the creation of schools of positive consequence for all that attend them’.
Of particular relevance is working for a recovery of approaches to education that embrace democracy and association. Alexis de Tocqueville made the case long ago (in the 1830s) that ‘the strength of free peoples resides in the local community’ and that local institutions have considerable educative power: ‘they put [liberty] within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it’ (1994: 63-3). Local institutions such as churches, tenants groups and community organizations involve people in freely combining together in order to further some agreed purpose, and are part of larger political processes. They also usually carry within them some valuing of co-operation and a commitment to those in memberships, and may be thought of as mutual aid organizations (Bishop and Hoggett 1986: 33; Smith 1994: 151-3). The democratic potential of such associations, the way in which they foster dialogue, relationship and friendship, and the extent to which the reciprocity and co-operation involves offer a counterbalance to the individualization and commodification of neo-liberalism provide us with an obvious and important starting point. As Freire (1974: 36) once put it, people learn social and political responsibility, ‘only by experiencing that responsibility’.
Association – joining together in companionship or to undertake some task, and the educative power of playing one’s part in a group or association (Doyle and Smith 1999: 44) – was a defining feature, for example, of youth work in the UK for most of the twentieth century and was strongly advocated in the Albemarle Report (HMSO 1960). It has also been a key aspect of the community association and centre movement (Broady et. al. 1990; Fisher 1994), and an important strand within community work and ‘community education (Elsdon et. al. 1995; Galbraith 1990). However, ‘association’ has been less of an explicit focus for exploration and practice in recent years in the UK. At one level, this is hardly surprising given the pressure towards commodification and market individualism outlined above. While associational activity remains significant, there are indications that there has been a significant decline since the 1960s (paralleling that charted by Putnam [2000] in the United States). Alongside this, Putnam argues, has come a growing social distance between neighbours, friends and the extended family. The result, he contends, is a significant decline in social capital – social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity.
The nature and potential of informal education
It is in this context that we have to make sense of informal education. Within schooling discourses, the term has usually been associated with the flourishing of particular approaches to primary school practice in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Alexander (1988: 148) has commented:
Certain words have acquired a peculiar potency in primary education, and few more so than ‘informal’. Never properly defined, yet ever suggestive of ideas and practices which were indisputably right, ‘informal’ was the flagship of the semantic armada of 1960s Primaryspeak . . . spontaneity, flexibility, naturalness, growth, needs, interests, freedom . . . self-expression, discovery and many more.
In more recent years, the most consistent usage with regard to primary schooling appears to be the noun ‘informality’, rather than the adjective ‘informal’. Thus, instead of informal education, we might talk of informality in pedagogy, in curriculum, in organization, in evaluation and in personal style (Blyth 1988).
In other practice settings, there has been a tradition of more sustained attention to the principles and practice of informal education. This includes the work of Malcolm Knowles (1950) and others within adult education (drawing on traditions of thinking articulated by an earlier generation of educators such as Eduard Lindeman [1926] and Basil Yeazlee [1929]); and Josephine Macalister Brew (1946) within youth work. Significantly, such thinkers have explicitly linked informal education to the cultivation of associational and group life.
Much of the subsequent discussion of informal education has tended to flow from an administrative perspective. Perhaps the best known approach is to separate formal, non-formal and informal education (after Coombs et. al. 1973). Within this categorization informal education is the lifelong process in which people learn from everyday experience, and non-formal education is organized activity outside formal systems. Formal education is linked with schools and training institutions; non-formal education with community groups and non-governmental organizations; and informal education covers what is left (Jeffs and Smith 1999a: 118). There is an important point for policy in this distinction, as the recent interest in what has been termed ‘informal learning’ within UK discussions has shown (see, for example, Colley et al, 2002, Coffield 1999). If schools and colleges have only a limited place in the learning that occurs in a society, questions must be asked about the focus on such institutions. Would funding be better deployed elsewhere? Does the current obsession with accreditation have any merit? Should researchers explore learning in everyday life in more depth? However, once this point is noted, there is little conceptual mileage in this particular division of education (or, indeed, learning – see Billett 2001).
The main problem with regard to theoretical development is that as soon as we begin to look at the characteristics of learning activities within ‘dedicated’ and non-dedicated learning environments, we find a striking mix of educational and learning processes in each (Smith 1988: 125-126). For example, as Henze (1992) and others have shown, people teach and organize educational events as part of their everyday experience. A grandfather might show a child how to use a key to unlock a door; a mother may work with her daughter around reading, and so on. These educational events would not be defined administratively as ‘formal – yet in their essence, they may be little different to what happens in a classroom. Both grandfather and mother may set out to teach particular skills. For this reason, discussion of informal and formal learning, or informal and formal education, must move beyond a simple focus on context or setting, and look to the processes and experiences involved in each. In the case of the latter, it can be argued that informal education is largely driven by conversation (and has formal interludes), while formal education is curriculum-driven (and has informal interludes) (Jeffs and Smith 1990; 1999a). In other words, formal education entails a plan of action and defined content. It also involves creating a particular social and, often, physical setting – the most familiar example being a classroom. In contrast, informal education is shaped by conversation. It is not tied to particular environments. However, whether we are identified as formal or informal educator we will use a mix of the formal and informal. What sets the two apart is the relative emphasis placed upon curricula and conversation, and the range of settings in which they may work. Different settings will offer a novel mix of resources and opportunities for learning and will have contrasting expectations associated with them (Jeffs and Smith 1990: 1-23).
Informal education tends to be unpredictable – practitioners do not know where it might lead. In conversation, they have to catch the moment where they can say or do something to deepen people’s thinking or to put others in touch with their feelings (Jeffs and Smith 1999b: 209-210). This ‘going with the flow’ opens up considerable possibilities and the opportunity to get into rewarding areas. There is the chance, for example, to connect with the questions, issues and feelings that are significant to people, rather than what they think might be important. ‘Catching the moment’ can quickly take conversations into the realms of feelings, experiences and relationships. In informal education, we respond to situations, to experiences.
Thus far, we can see that when viewed as a process, informal education works through, and is driven by, conversation; involves exploring and enlarging experience; and can take place in any setting. Not having recourse to a curriculum, informal educators have to discern what might be the appropriate response. To do this with integrity, they have to develop with others some sense of what might make for human flourishing. It could be argued that all educators should develop this if they are to act in an informed and committed way. However, without the prop of curriculum, it is revealed as a fundamental necessity for informal educators. Although some might want to avoid its implications, they cannot. The medium they work through – conversation – is a relation they enter into – they can be caught up in it and sometimes carried away by it (Burbules 1993: xii). It involves particular commitments and dispositions. Unlike many of those working in formal settings, relationships with informal educators take place on a voluntary basis. People are rarely under any obligation to talk to an informal educator (Jeffs and Smith 1999a: 84) It is for these reasons that informal education has a particular place in the process of working so that people may share in a common life (Dewey’s famous [1916] focus for education). The sorts of values and behaviours needed for conversation to take place are exactly what are required if democracy and ‘fraternity’ are to flourish.
Not having a curriculum also removes a hiding place for educators. Instead of seeking to transmit information, they have to engage with situations and with people, and this inevitably throws their character into the spotlight. Their behaviour, attitudes and values are scrutinized. If they do not ‘practice what they preach’, or are not fair, truthful or unselfish in their conduct, they will not be heard or heeded. This also applies to formal educators. If we are to believe Parker J. Palmer (1998: 10), good teaching cannot be reduced to technique, but flows from ‘the identity and integrity of the teacher’. It entails self-knowledge.
When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life – and when I cannot see them clearly, I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject… I will know it only abstractly, from a distance, a congeries of concepts as far removed from the world as I am from personal truth. (ibid.: 2)
However, it is easy in many education systems with their focus on the ‘delivery’ of pre-packaged programmes, testing, and the achievement of externally set targets and outcomes for educators to become technicians and to lose their sense of agency. In the UK, following government interventions in teacher training, teachers now learn little about the social context of teaching and educational philosophy, and there is little attempt to develop Eisner’s (1998) twin orientations of connoisseurship and criticism. The training of informal educators such as youth workers has lagged behind such regulation, and has retained some emphasis on self-knowledge, critique and social awareness – although this is disappearing as the impact of the broader forces of commodification, globalization and institutionalization is felt – and government policies (especially in England) around youth work shift towards a more overt focus on targeted intervention and accreditation (Smith 2003).
The decline in classroom teachers’ involvement in informal education – and the rise of the specialist
Not unexpectedly, given the commodification and institutionalization of education, one of the significant long-term movements within schooling and further education in the UK has been a decrease in the amount of time that classroom teachers have been able, or prepared, to give to informal education – both in terms of extra-curricular activity and free-ranging conversation within the classroom. The formal side of their work has increased markedly. Their average working week has risen significantly since the mid-1980s (to somewhere around 56 hours during term time). Four particular things have been significant here:
The increased use of coursework. The use of coursework as a form of assessment has grown markedly since the early 1970s. It began, in part, as a means of accrediting those students who experienced difficulties in doing exams. Subsequently, the ability to assess longer-term and more substantial pieces of work has appealed, as has its relative success in keeping students working. Coursework has meant a significant increase in the marking load of teachers and lecturers, and a corresponding decline in time available for extra-curricular activities.
The need to address curriculum requirements. With the introduction of the national curriculum (and the associated regime of testing and inspection) there appears to have been a marked change in the orientation of teachers within classrooms. There has been considerably less freedom for teachers and students to explore ideas and phenomena outside their detailed specifications – and to take time on those areas that excite them. A process of standardization has taken place. Teachers are under pressure to complete programmes and to raise and sustain student performance in assessed subjects. This tendency has been further strengthened with the introduction of literacy and numeracy strategies in the second half of the 1990s. Moreover, the way the national curriculum was framed placed students in a ‘more passive and conformist role’ (Alexander 2000: 565). Space for conversation and the freedom to ‘go with the flow’ were severely constrained. The tone and direction of school inspections added to these movements, and helped to sustain a climate of conformity. Failure to address the requirements of the national curriculum and other government initiatives has important consequences for schools.
An increased emphasis upon monitoring and bureaucratic activity. The expansion of course work and the operation of a national curriculum have contributed to a significant growth in bureaucratic activity – course work has to be recorded and organized; and the progress of students monitored and evaluated. The activities of teachers, too, have to be checked. Other factors have also been at work here to increase the amount of time that teachers have to spend in writing reports and keeping records, and in taking part in meetings. Two key elements here have been changing policies around students with special educational needs and the impact of child protection legislation.
A focus on teachers as managers. As has already been noted, the vocabulary of management has become part of the everyday experience of teachers and educators within schools. Not only are they encouraged to frame curricula activity in managerial terms, they also have to organize the activities of classroom assistants and others. A number of things flow from this. One of the most significant features is the impact on the way they conceptualize their role and their relationship with learners. As managers of learning situations they are less likely to join with students in the search for meaning and understanding. Significantly, there is less talk of teaching being a calling. There is now a strong appeal to the technical in which plans have to be followed, skills employed, and outcomes monitored. Schooling and education are seen as productive activities rather than an invitation to engage in the formation of practical judgement (to use Aristotle’s distinction).
The overall impact has been a decline in the amount of time and freedom that classroom teachers have to engage with their students in conversation and open-ended activities. They are also less disposed such engagement. There has also been a growth in the numbers of specialist and ancillary workers involved in schools and colleges. The biggest increase has been in classroom assistants, but there has also been a significant expansion in England in the number of youth workers, learning mentors (largely as part of the Excellence in Cities Initiative) and personal advisers (as part of the Connexions Service). The rationale is clear. As the Department for Education and Skills has stated in respect of learning mentors,
… they take some of the burden off teachers, who often feel as though they should be helping pupils to overcome problems inside and outside school. Having a Learning Mentor to help pupils tackle these problems free teachers to teach…. [and] to concentrate and focus on delivering the national curriculum. (DfES 2002a)
While there has been some room for interpretation in the learning mentor role this is now being eroded and there are strong central expectations associated with it. It is hard to escape the conclusion that we have seen Taylorism in action. Schools and colleges have come to more strongly resemble production lines: the educational task has been sub-divided, workers operate in their particular areas to a centrally defined plan, and their products dispatched to the market.
The extension of curricular activity and a focus on outcome
Alongside growing constraints upon the activities of classroom teachers and others within schools and colleges there has been a growing appreciation in policy debates of the significance of relationships and learning beyond the formality of the classroom. This appears to have been picked up earlier in the USA where has been a sustained tradition of participation in student government and sports and arts clubs (Fashola 2001). However, there has been a developing body of research in both Britain and the USA demonstrating links between involvement by children and young people in organized activities and associational life and educational achievement (as well as there being broader benefits in terms of building social capital) (reviewed in NFER 1999; see, also, MacBeath 1999), and around creating the right environment within the family and local networks (discussed in Hughes et. al. 1994; Munn 1993).
One of the most significant developments in the UK has been around ‘out of school learning’. With the operation of organizations like Education Extra in the UK – and the development of government policies around raising educational achievement, lifelong learning and social inclusion – there has been a growing interest in out of school hours learning (OSHL). Michael Barber, for example, has written that, ‘however much schools improve, inspiration and motivation to learn are much more likely to come from children who benefit from involvement in out of school activities as well as formal schooling’ (1997: 257). Government-funded studies demonstrated a link between what were considered successful schools and the amount of extra-curricular activity and homework (Barber et. al. 1997). Significantly, these researchers looked to both the traditional sphere of clubs and societies (what they called ‘curriculum enrichment’) and additional study support provided through the medium of homework clubs and extra tuition (so called ‘curriculum extension’). Government and other monies (e.g. from the National Lottery New Opportunities Fund and the Princes Trust) began to flow into schools and colleges (especially those in areas of significant educational disadvantage) and to other settings like libraries to develop the work. Unfortunately, the focus has been on curriculum extension.
The employment of informal educators like youth workers and learning mentors has been a significant feature of these developments. Sometimes working alongside teachers and lecturers, sometimes working on their own, informal educators classically offer the opportunity to develop more associational and conversational environments for learning. There is often a tension here, particularly with regard to homework clubs, and it mainly comes from two directions. The first concerns the informality and noisiness of the work (and the contrast it provides with the other activities that usually happen around study in schools and libraries). The second involves worries that many informal educators are putting broader educational aims above the more specific curriculum objectives linked to the completion of homework.
This last tension highlights a worrying trend. One of the key features of the current interest in out of school (and college) hours learning is that the more liberal notion of extra-curricular activity has been replaced by curricular-focused activity. This has certainly been a feature of government policies in England around the ‘transformation’ of youth work (DfEE 2001, DfES 2002b). Out of school hours learning looks to extend and enrich the curriculum, to tie such learning more closely to government and schooling objectives. It is not necessarily about the interests and enthusiasms of students. In this respect it is interesting to contrast this with the development of informal science education in the United States. Often linked to museum and science center activity,
… informal education consists of learning activities that are voluntary and self-directed, life-long, and motivated mainly by intrinsic interests, curiosity, exploration, manipulation, fantasy, task completion, and social interaction. Informal learning occurs in an out-of-school setting and can be linear or non-linear and often is self-paced and visual- or object-oriented. It provides an experiential base and motivation for further activity and learning. The outcomes of informal learning experiences in science, mathematics, and technology include a sense of fun and wonder in addition to a better understanding of concepts, topics, processes of thinking in scientific and technical disciplines, and an increased knowledge about career opportunities in these fields. (National Science Foundation 1997)
Unfortunately, the current obsession with targets and the completion of prescribed coursework rather works against the sense of fun and wonder that the National Science Foundation values. It is also a further example of the movement toward institutionalization that Ivan Illich discussed some thirty years ago. The extension of schooling (and other forms of institutionalization) undermines people he argued. ‘It diminishes their confidence in themselves, and in their capacity to solve problems… It kills convivial relationships. Finally it colonizes life like a parasite or a cancer that kills creativity’ (Finger and Asún 2001: 10). We can see that informal education can offer an alternative – but it does depend on its practitioners’ developing strategies to distance their work (and their thinking) from the sorts of packaged and prescribed activities that are the normal fare of schools and colleges and holding on to the notion of extra-curricular activity rather than falling into the trap of curriculum extension. It also entails them working with lecturers, classroom teachers and managers to deepen their appreciation of educational forms that value process and conversation – and to demonstrate that there are ways of evaluating the work other than an obsession with measurable changes in the individuals they are working with.
Individualization and the move to case management
Within UK government policy generally, there has been an increasing focus upon targeting interventions at identified individuals. Perhaps the clearest expression of the move toward individual targeting can be found in UK government initiatives to insert learning mentors and personal advisers into schools and colleges. People are identified who are in need of intervention so that they may re-enter education, training or work. Individual action programmes are devised and implemented. Programmes are then assessed on whether these named individuals return to learning or enter work – rather than on any contribution made to the quality of civic life, personal flourishing or social relationships that arise out of the process. Essentially, a form of case management is seen as the dominant way of working (see Jeffs and Smith 2002).
The work of learning mentors is a good indication of the direction work has taken. Some schools in England did not initially adopt a case-management approach. They preferred instead to focus more strongly on what they might be doing to cause or exacerbate problems with students. For them, learning mentors offered an opportunity to open up a dialogue with students and to see how the school might alter to better accommodate their needs. While still having to ‘deliver’ to the objectives set by the government, there did appear to be some freedom in how these may be approached around the role of the mentor. However, learning mentor posts are funded directly by central government – and they each have to undertake a common training. As a result, there has been pressure to focus on one-to-one mentoring and support and to take on many of the information, assessment and coordinating and accessing roles associated with personal advisers. According to the Department for Education and Skills in England, their task is to work alongside teaching and pastoral staff in order to, ‘assess, identify and work with those pupils who need extra help to overcome barriers to learning inside and outside school’ (DfES 2002a). Their focus on the individual is clear. A central task is to provide ‘one-to-one mentoring and support’. They are expected to:
To draw up and implement an action plan for each child who needs particular support (except where the child is already subject to an individually-tailored plan, in which case, to contribute to reviews and work towards objectives in the plan). To maintain regular contact with families/carers of children receiving support, and to encourage positive family involvement in the child’s learning. (DfES 2002a)
Learning mentors are also expected to work ‘work closely with parents to help them provide an environment at home which is conducive to learning’ (op. cit.).
The model involved is very close to the notion of case management within social work. It stands in direct contrast with the traditional orientation within youth work and informal education to the group and its life. Part of the issue facing informal educators here is that there has been a loss of faith in the educative power of group and associational life within some key sectors – most noticeably within youth work and community work. In the former, the demise of the youth centre as vibrant work environment in many UK youth services (in large part an outcome of wider social forces and the need to satisfy government funding agendas) has contributed to a turning away from associational ways of working like the club work. In the 1980s we witnessed a move to more focused and targeted work, often with individuals, often in the form of short-term projects. Thus, when the government accelerated their push towards more individualized forms of intervention in the late 1990s, they were pushing at an open door. Many youth workers and their managers had lost sight of what lay at the heart of their work. ‘To encourage young people to come together into groups of their own choosing is the fundamental task of the Service’, the Albemarle Report famously declared in 1960 (Ministry of Education 1960: 52). That is not what current strategy involves in England (DfEE 2001, DfES). Instead, youth services are being pushed into adopting an individualized model of work bearing a close resemblance to traditional north American approaches to youth development (Smith 2003).
Conflicting frameworks
The major danger facing informal educators in the light of the above is that they get incorporated into activities that work against their core commitments. Given the dominance of curricular-thinking, individualization, and the orientation to control, ways of working that stress conversation, association and relationship are not likely to be easily understood nor appreciated. Indeed, this has become an area of fundamental concern. UK government services and funding, for example, have tightened their foci and targets, and implemented much stronger regimes of monitoring, inspection and evaluation. For those informal educators who have worked to stay true to their craft there are four key flashpoints when functioning within schools.
Confidentiality. The status of the information that informal educators gain about the lives and situations of the people they are working with in schools and colleges and how they are expected to handle it is one of the most problematic areas. What is right from the perspective of informal educators is not necessarily what is correct in terms of school and college policies and procedures. The problem here is usually that workers are expected to pass on information about students. If young woman comes to an informal educator to talk about her worries that she might be pregnant then this conversation will normally expected to be reported to the relevant person in the pastoral system etc. That young woman might not want the school or college authorities to know about this aspect of her personal life – and may just want space to explore matters. This can put the informal educator in a difficult position is she or he is employed by the school or college. One way of creating some room for this sort of conversation has been to ensure that the informal educator works for an external agency, and that there are clear agreed boundaries with regard to disclosures (e.g. as is the case in many of the new community school initiatives in Scotland). However, similar issues are now arising within UK state-run and sponsored youth services, especially in England. The requirement to track individual progress via a national database within the Connexions strategy and an emphasis on multi-agency working has led to a diminution of the ability of young people to limit the spread of personal information about their lives and experiences.
Discipline. On the whole informal educators have a more relaxed orientation to questions of discipline. If they are looking to association and relationship, then their fundamental concern is to work so that the group can take responsibility and look to its tasks. They may make very firm interventions – for example – where there are issues of safety and justice. However, for much of the time informal educators look to help build environments where conversation and engagement can happen. This tends to mean that there is more noise and playfulness in the settings where they are working than is usually associated with educators in schools and colleges. Inevitably tensions arise with other teachers and with managers. For example, informal educators working in hallways in colleges may well be comfortable with boisterous behaviour, but the lecturers in adjoining classrooms could well find it disruptive.
Learning about sensitive issues. The approach that informal educators may take to the discussion, for example, of sexual behaviour or drug usage has, historically been more open and direct than that usually associated with schools. Indeed, what is taught in schools (and, to some extent, colleges) is more closely circumscribed by law and the threat of external intervention. The cautious approach adopted by many schools leads to ‘a reliance on pre-packed teaching materials and presentational styles which focus on information giving, both of which predictably thwart dialogue’ (Jeffs and Smith 1999b: 207). Informal educators generally offer an alternative way of working with their attention to experience, open conversation and relationship – but can hit real difficulties, especially if they are directly employed by the school or college.
Targets. Success may well be measured in very different ways by schools and colleges, and informal educators. The former are more likely to look to academic achievement, attendance and ‘good’ behaviour as indicators of success; historically informal educators are more likely to be concerned with the quality of the life of the group, the learning involved and the all-round flourishing of individuals. The ‘problem’ facing informal educators is that their work cannot be honestly evaluated by the sorts of crude outcomes usually employed by schools, government inspectors and even their own agencies. In truth, the same argument can also be made about schools and colleges, but it does pose a particular problem for informal educators as they do not have the same recourse to familiar indicators like exam success. One result of the pressure to demonstrate outcome has been a misguided turn to schemes that accredit experience and learning by some informal educators – a trend accelerated in England by government policies around youth services (Smith 2003).
This is not an exhaustive list of the sorts of issues that arise – but it does bring out some of the key dimensions. There are bound to be conflicts when educators and workers from different practice traditions have to work together – but informal educators in schools and colleges start with an obvious disadvantage. Their orientation and approach is, generally, significantly out of step with the ways of working that dominate schooling. The fundamental tension lies in their commitment to conversation (and what flows from it), and to practical reasoning. They have to work out what might be right for each situation and relate this to what might make for human flourishing. The result is a concern for process, relationship and praxis – informed, committed action. It was for this reason that the McNair Report (Board of Education 1944: 103) described the role of youth worker as ‘guide, philosopher and friend to young people’. When working with colleagues and in systems oriented to targets and outcomes, submission to externally designed curricula, and to hierarchy there will always be tensions – and the possibility of taking on ways of working at odds with the central concerns of informal education.
Conclusion: what future for informal education within schools?
From this survey we can see that the expanding numbers of workers within schools and colleges in the UK who are not classroom teachers has meant that a number of informal educators have found themselves walking through school and college gates. Some have been able to develop innovative work that looks to relationship and association. Others have experienced a constant and disheartening struggle. The dominant tides of surveillance, curricular expansion, and individualization have sometimes proved too much for them. The values and practices of informal education do not fit easily into the current schooling paradigm – but its practitioners have a duty to work within institutions like schools and colleges so that they may be more convivial for learning. As Ivan Illich wrote, ‘[W]e must find more ways to learn and teach: the educational qualities of all institutions must increase again’ (Illich 1973: 30). Unfortunately, the political context and orientation of many education systems is such that it is all too easy for informal educators to lose their way and to take on ways of thinking and working that fail those they work with. In addition, they are often employed on programmes that relate to specific government targets or policy aims – and this can seriously compromise the quality of the encounters they have with learners. If they enter into conversation with a strong agenda formed outside the situation they are in constant danger of hijacking and ultimately sabotaging the exchange.
It is perhaps a sign of the times that in recent years one of the strongest arguments for the need to examine the learning potential of institutions has come from those like Peter Senge (1990) who have sought to alter the character of business organizations (creating so-called ‘learning organizations’). While some of these writers have had a concern with dialogue and organizational forms that are more just, many have not had the sorts of interests and commitments that Ivan Illich described as ‘convivial’. Within education there has been much talk of lifelong learning but it has only impacted on schools and colleges in the most instrumental ways. Sadly, Illich’s analysis of schooling has increased resonance today:
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. (Illich 1973: 9)
So how might progress be made?
First, it is important that specialist informal educators with children and young people recognize that they are engaged in an activity that is in the ‘middle territory’ between social work and classroom teaching (Kornbeck 2002: 49). They have to resist attempts to bring their activities more into the mainstream of schooling and other welfare services. In England, for example, there has been a concerted attempt to transform state sponsored and run youth work into ‘youth development’. The result has been a significant turn to individualized from associational endeavour, an increased emphasis on formal and planned activity; and a focus on outcomes that can be accredited. In other words, there has been a shift from informal to formal education and training (Smith 2003). Within schools specialist informal educators need to work in the ‘in-between’ spaces on the margins of systems and groups. When informal educators are drawn into the centre of systems two things tend to happen. On the one hand they fall prey to the very things they need to be counteracting – institutionalization, commodification and individualization – and in so doing lose their distinctive identity. On the other hand, they tend to function in a way that centralizes their role and diminishes the agency of learners. By working on the margins of systems and groups, informal educators can focus on helping to create environments where others can take responsibility and build relationships that are mutually satisfying.
Second, it is crucial that informal educators keep trying to encourage people to recognize and experience the power of association. As Josephine Macalister Brew (1943; 1946) argued some years ago, the central vehicle for informal educators to cultivate a commitment to community, citizenship and co-operation is the voluntary association of members – the club or group. Brew saw in the ‘club’ a means by which people could freely identify with one another and gain the skills, disposition and knowledge necessary for citizenship. In some respects the current interest in social capital (most significantly expressed in the work of Robert Putnam 2000) provides a hopeful discourse for informal educators. The significant gains in happiness, health and welfare in those communities where there is a strong associational life provides a strong rationale for informal education. In this respect specialist informal educators have a role in schools and colleges. Working so that people may join groups – whether they are organized around enthusiasms and interests, social activity, or economic and political aims – can make a considerable contribution to welfare in itself. Putnam also demonstrates that educational achievement is likely to rise significantly, and the quality of day-to-day interaction is likely to be enhanced by a much greater emphasis on the cultivation of extra-curricula activity involving groups and teams.
Third, it is necessary to keep on making the case against seeing curriculum as a central, defining feature of education. Currently dominant appreciations of curriculum theory and practice emerged in the school and in relation to other schooling ideas such as subject and lesson. Informal educators work with purpose and intent – and manage without resort to a curriculum for most of the time. It is only in the interludes where they need to facilitate more formal explorations that it becomes a possible reference point. Alongside the imposition of national or external curricula on schools, one of the more disturbing phenomenons in a number of education systems in recent years has been the colonization of a range of extra-curricular activities and encounters through the means of curriculum ‘enrichment’ and ‘extension’. The extension of curriculum thinking and practice inevitably leads to the formalization of encounters, the limitation of journeys of understanding generated by conversation and dialogue, and the subverting of associational spaces. Unfortunately, this process hasn’t only happened within schools. Within the UK, for example, there was been growing adoption of curriculum theory and practice by youth workers. In part this arose out of a concern to demonstrate their worth – and the use of notions like curriculum appeared to make it easier to gain recognition. The result was a slide into accreditation and growing dictation from the centre with regard to the direction, content and organization of the work.
Fourth, we have to recognize that while specialist informal educators can contribute to educational renewal in schools, it is in the realm of the classroom teacher that fundamental movement has to happen. Informal educators when they are able to embrace their role as ‘guides, philosophers and friends’ provide a glimpse of what a renewal of teaching might involve. When space is made for association, relationship and conversation people are able to learn in a deeper way about themselves, being with others, and being in the world. Limiting the role of curriculum allows us to attend to experience. It also enables us to approach students as whole people.
In addition, the way in which informal educators have to develop and engage an appreciation of what might make for human flourishing to inform their involvement in the lives of others is of fundamental significance to classroom practice. It helps us to see how we can strengthen the moral dimension of teaching (and connect it more strongly with the essence of education). As Liston (2000) has argued, we need to place an understanding of the ‘Good’ and an orientation to love at the heart of teaching. This, in turn, entails recognizing that the character, orientation and integrity of educators are of deep importance. It is no accident that the training of informal education normally involves significant attention to the self – and it needs also to so for classroom teaching.
[K]nowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self-knowledge. When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life – and when I cannot see them clearly, I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject – not at the deepest levels of embodied, personal meaning. I will know it only abstractly, from a distance, a congeries of concepts as far removed from the world as I am from personal truth. (Palmer 1998: 2)
Specialist informal educators can only do so much. They like classroom teachers have been constrained, and to some extent overtaken, by institutionalization and commodification. However, we can still see how much classroom teachers can learn from informal educators’ concern with association, relationship and conversation.
Last, it is important to place the above within a historical and political context. Some may well suggest that the idea that schools and classrooms can be changed so they foster association, relationship and conversation is a utopian dream. Yet such a ‘vocabulary of hope’ is an essential feature of education. As David Halpin (2003: 30) has argued teaching is premised on hope – on the possibility that it will foster improvement. Being hopeful as a teacher, he maintains, ‘facilitates innovation and an earnestness to do well in ones work’. He also contends that hope is a relational construct ‘which in the education context requires teachers to look for and build up “Good” in their students’. Viewed historically, the current obsession with outcomes, curriculum and testing is a strand of thinking and practice that ebbs and flows. It gains ground and is then found wanting (see, for example, Kliebart 1987). We also know that the ‘more overtly and more directly politicians attempt to organize education for economic ends, the higher the higher the likelihood of waste and disappointment’ (Wolf 2002: xiii). Furthermore, we can appreciate that the dominance of one set of ideas can never be complete, and that power is never stable and so cannot be monolithic (Gramsci 1971: 323-33). In complex systems such as schooling there are usually gaps and spaces that can be inhabited by those who engage in a ‘vocabulary of hope’. It might well be that the room for manoeuvre is constrained at times, but things can change quickly. Within any system there are moments of crisis and dysfunction that can be utilized by those who seek educational renewal along the lines discussed here (Smith 1994: 151-67).
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The opening image is learn by Mark Brennan on Flickr heycoach |_cc-by-nc-sa2 licence.
How to reference this piece: Smith, M. K. (2005). Beyond the curriculum: fostering associational life in schools. The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education. [https://infed.org/mobi/beyond-the-curriculum-fostering-associational-life-in-schools/. Retrieved: ]
This piece draws upon research reported in Smith 2002.