Pockets of resistance

Posted on 06/09/2022

In commending the latest issue of FORUM, whose contributors explore various kinds of resistance to current education policy from inside the system, Patrick Yarker is glad to be unsettled.

In their book ‘The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900’, published two years ago by Yale University Press, historians Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux explore the pocket’s social and political significance. They write:

Across several centuries, for women, unlike the situation for men, a pocket was not an integral element in clothing but a tie-on accessory. Two or three might be worn at once, hand-sewn (often of linen)  and embroidered, and necessary for keeping at hand all manner of accoutrements, tools, valuables, keepsakes, snacks, possessions. Pockets were kept, patched, re-cycled, retained, preserved, while fashions changed. They embody what has been called ‘a culture of preservation’ by which women of all social classes preserved a space for themselves within the structures of patriarchy and with which to help them negotiate these, or endure them. 

Can a classroom be, metaphorically, a pocket, where teachers keep at hand tools of their trade, accoutrements and valuables—the immaterial sort—and even a few snacks, all the better to preserve within the increasingly intrusive and unfree structures of contemporary schooling a distinctive and emancipatory way of teaching?

The summer issue of FORUM suggests it can. Edited by Rachel Marks, Gawain Little and Sue Cox, and entitled ‘Pockets of Resistance: taking back control from within our education system’, the issue gathers together articles which consider certain kinds of refusal or delineate thinking and practices which, in the words of the Editorial, say no to ‘the status quo, to current policy and to ever more stringent and directed ways of being and doing emerging across learning and teaching’. In this issue, neophyte teachers act as agents of change. Early Years educators engage in ‘pocket-sized…hidden subversions…’ resisting policy demands they find to be egregious. Teachers in academies resist identifying as academy teachers, and hold fast to values which the academisation programme tries to drain of worth. Educators work to counter the gendered social norms that abet sexual harassment, and the curricular inadequacies that help perpetuate racist attitudes.

There’s a stone in the shoe, though. Or a thorn in the pocket. One contributor, John White, points out that, welcome and admirable as they are, such individual and local act of resistance against the status quo are not in themselves enough.  A thorough-going collective challenge to the system is imperative. He argues it should be directed at the system’s Achilles heel: the utterly inadequate conception it holds of the desired aims of education.  He quotes all the DfE has to say about the aims of the National Curriculum, ‘forty vapid words’ which he sets against the rich consideration given to the question of educational aims by educational philosophers—that endangered species—and the thoughtful and detailed articulation which underpins the new aims-based curriculum for Wales.

If education is all of a piece, talk about curriculum requires in the same breath talk about matters of pedagogy. The ‘what’ of teaching is bound in with the ‘how’, and with matters of assessment and student voices too. The summer issue touches on all these. It acknowledges the multi-faceted nature of ‘resistant’ education within the mainstream, and affirms the vitality as well as the necessity of that resistance.

But John White’s thorniest question remains. How can those who create their pockets of resistance justify the values that have led them into opposition? What makes those values good, or better at any rate than the values which inflect and animate the current system?

The beginning of such justification might base itself on three ideas. Firstly, that to learn is to recreate or reconstruct what we know of the world, not simply to receive a given world. Then, that human educability in any individual is limitless: we’re always learning and can always learn more. And thirdly that to be a teacher is to be made aware in particular ways of the infinite ethical responsibility each of us owes everyone else, and of the need to act in the light of this.

As far as I can tell, current policy emerges from an intellectual tradition (steeped in a set of values) which sets its face against such ideas. This tradition endorses the ‘banking’ or delivery model of teaching, the conviction that learning is mostly remembering and curriculum mainly core knowledge, a belief in fixed innate ‘ability’ and fealty to the selective educational structures which inevitably follow from that idea, a deep-seated distrust of teachers as professionals and of the rational exercise of pupils’ and students’ voices, and the commitment to ever-tighter ministerial control, not least via undemocratic mechanisms of school governance. The structures which embody education policy informed by this tradition, and the practices which this tradition upholds, inhibit rather than encourage education’s principle emancipatory power, the enabling of a mind to change itself.

Faced by this tradition’s manifest tenacity, its long endurance, resisting it can stale into routine: a conditioned reflex. Hence the benefit of a stone in the shoe, a thorn in the pocket. These unsettle, and make me think again. They remind me that resistance ultimately springs from wanting to say yes, not no.  What I stand for—those valuables of the immaterial sort—compels my resistance more than what I stand against. The summer issue of FORUM offers reading by which to revitalise our reasons for saying no, and for saying yes.