Student agency in Non-Traditional Learning Spaces: Life in-between and on the fringes

Non-Traditional Learning Spaces (NTLS) boasting innovative building designs that embody an array of modern technology, visually and functionally sever schooling practices from the factory model, suggesting a reconceptualisation of what it is to ‘do school’ at the level of research and practice. This process of reconceptualisation includes reconceptualised pedagogical practice, and the development by students of spatial competency. In this regard, ‘student agency’ plays a significant role. For some years now, student agency has been prioritised by education policymakers and reformers alike, and it is a concept that has become central to questions relating to teacher practice and student life in NTLS. In this article, agency is construed as a contestable, politically domesticated construct that is reduced to student engagement with prescribed, mainstream and ‘official’ educational processes. We argue, instead, that the notion of student agency be taken beyond this sanitised usage, so that the broader complexity of agentic practices be understood. Understanding student agentic practice in NTLS is a critical dimension of the overall aim of more rigorously theorising spatiality, and in this article, we begin the task of considering how student agentic practices can be included in achieving that aim. Therefore, we discuss and explore the complexities of agentic student behaviour, considering where it is located in the complex relationship between the development of student spatial competence and mere compliance in NTLS.

TOOLS IN VIRAL TIMES: QUESTIONING THE USE OF TECHNOLOGIES IN MEXICAN SCHOOLING PRACTICES

From 1929 to 1932, the German critical theorist Walter Benjamin broadcast a radio show intended for children, «Enlightenment for Children» (Aufklärung für Kinder). His program consisted of illuminating lessons that bound together culture and history in creative ways, to teach children about the world. Used as a tool for convivial purposes, the radio waves transported German kinder to the sites where witch trials happened, or to learn the secret language built into the city walls of Berlin, or to wonder about the life of the Romani and imagine the features of the many characters that formed part of Benjamin’s radio plays. It was an imaginative pedagogical exercise that has made me wonder about the possibilities of technological tools in the service of learning experiences.

Securing the Future of Children and Youth: Uzbek Private Kindergartens and Schools in Osh

The chapter continues to study the securityscapes of Uzbeks in Osh following the violence of 2010. Its emphasis is on how certain imaginations of the future influence the construction of everyday securityscapes. In particular, the chapter concentrates on the schooling practices of Uzbek parents, that is to say, on their decisions concerning the kind of kindergartens, schools and universities to which they send their children. It finds that many Uzbek parents want their offspring to be educated in such a way that they are able to speak Russian without an accent. Not only would this help them to conceal their Uzbek identity. It also speaks to the imagination of a more secure future outside of Kyrgyzstan.

“Distressing” Situations and Differentiated Interventions: Preservice Teachers’ Imagined Futures with Trans and Gender-Creative Students

Background/Context Teachers can help ensure trans and gender-creative students’ opportunity for, and equal access to, education, yet the field of educational research has just begun to explore how teachers understand trans and gender-creative students’ experiences and negotiate their responsibilities to protect these students’ rights. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article aims to address this essential gap by exploring preservice teachers (PSTs’) understandings of, and preparation for, creating supportive educational contexts for trans and gender-creative students, guided by the following research question: How do PSTs construct their responsibilities as future teachers to support trans and gender-creative students? Ultimately, this study aims to inform the development of effective teacher education curricula and related policy on trans and gender-creative identities. Participants Participants were 183 undergraduate preservice teachers enrolled in 10 sections of an educational equity course. Research Design We conducted a qualitative, inductive, thematic online discourse analysis. Using a queer, social justice teacher education framework, we qualitatively analyzed 549 online PST-authored posts. Findings/Results Three themes emerged: (1) PSTs voiced discomfort negotiating conflicting values and roles in supporting trans and gender-creative students, and PSTs suggested (2) individualized, differentiated interventions, and (3) community education approaches to promote comfort for trans and gender-creative students—strategies that may reinscribe normative, institutionalized views of gender identity. Conclusions/Recommendations Findings suggest the pressing need for innovative teacher education on gender identity and fluidity: PSTs need more opportunities to learn about supporting trans and gender-creative students, to critically consider constructs of gender and sexuality, and to explore how systemic gender oppression intersects with other forms of oppression through schooling practices.

Teacher accountability, datafication and evaluation: A case for reimagining schooling

The purpose of this commentary is to push the boundaries (real and perceived) of how we think about teacher accountability, education and the purpose of schooling in contemporary times. It takes as a starting point a view that recent changes to the Every Student Succeeds Act does little to shift the underpinning logics of high-stakes teacher accountability that ultimately threaten the stability and adaptability of public schools. Building from this presumption, it explores more universal features of contemporary schooling practices (e.g., standardization, datafication and evaluation) that undermine teacher expertise, autonomy and professional discretion. The purpose is to provide a new lens for thinking about the role of education and to radically disrupt the ‘norms’ we have come to accept as necessary features of modern schooling. Ultimately, it serves as a thought experiment to provide some space for imagining new possibilities and thinking “outside of” the traditional accountability “box”.

Ways of seeing diverse working-class children and childhoods

This chapter introduces Worcester, Massachusetts, Park Central School, and the project through the lens of a critical childhood studies perspective. A key tenet of critical childhood studies is to take children seriously as witnesses to their experiences, no matter where they “fit” into child development discourses. A critical childhood perspective interrogates the changing meanings of childhood—including who counts as a child, when this status begins and ends—and recognizes that these meanings are contingent on historical, economic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Children's new identities as “learners” were intertwined with schooling practices developed to manage, control, and orient them to fitting into society. In addition, a critical childhood perspective must take account of how the legacy of slavery, institutional racism, and colorism shape who is afforded the protected status of “child” to begin with. In adopting a critical childhood perspective, then, this study aims to address multiple challenges—avoiding “adultist” and neoliberal viewpoints and placing young people's agency, voices, and images at its center; rethinking how children's value and worth is assigned, especially in schooling; maintaining a focus on parallels and intersections between women's and children's experiences of structural oppression; and accounting for how the legacy of slavery, structural racism, and anti-Blackness inform views of childhood, gender, discipline/punishment, and learning.

“You Never Know When You Will See Him Again”: Understanding the Intersectional Dimensions of Immigration, Indigeneity, and Language for Unaccompanied Indigenous Minors

This case explores the complex ways unaccompanied Latinx Indigenous minors experience the intersection of immigration policies and U.S. school policies and practices and the implications this has for school leaders. As such, we present three critical incidents that center three students’ experience with and through U.S. schooling—from enrollment, to navigating schooling linguistic support, and then finally the ways in which disciplinary policies heighten the consequences of immigration reform. Through the critical incidents, readers will meet Santiago, Manuel, and Cristian Indigenous unaccompanied minors and examine the ways in which school leaders and schooling practices shape and impact the schooling experiences of undocumented, unaccompanied, Latinx Indigenous students.