‘By ones and twos and tens’: pedagogies of possibility for democratising higher education

Abstract

This paper concerns the relationship between teaching and political action both within and outside formal educational institutions. Its setting is the recent period following the 2010 Browne Review on the funding of higher education in England. Rather than speaking directly to debates around scholar-activism, about which much has already been written, I want to stretch the meanings of both teaching and activism to contextualise the contemporary politics of higher learning in relation to diverse histories and geographies of progressive education more generally. Taking this wider view suggests that some of the forms of knowledge which have characterised the university as a progressive institution are presently being produced in more politicised educational environments. Being receptive to these other modes of learning cannot only expand scholarly thinking about how to reclaim intellectual life from the economy within universities, but stimulate the kind of imagination that we need for dreaming big about higher education as and for a practice of democratic life.

Keywords:

• politics of education
• higher education
• popular education
• prefigurative politics

Notes

1. The Browne Review had a budget of £120,000, apparently £68,000 of which was spent on the research. The evidence base was a single survey administered to 80 school students, 40 parents, 40 full-time university students and 18 part-time university students. Answers to questions were given with reference to a maximum tuition fee of £6000, rather than the present maximum fee of £9000. For the report, see Browne (2010). See Collini (2010, 2012); Holmwood and Bhambra (2012) and McGettigan (2011) for further commentary. The UK government’s White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System, was loosely based on the results of this review, Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (2011).

2. Giroux (2013), borrowing a concept from Didi-Huberman, describes disimagination as a process by which ‘institutions, discourses and other modes of representation … undermine the capacity of individuals to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance’. David Graeber (2013) has elsewhere argued, more appropriately for this context, that political imagination is being foreclosed through a materialised ‘apparatus of hopelessnes’.

3. Fielding and Moss (2011) draw heavily on the notion of ‘education-in-the-broadest-sense’ in their work on radical democratic education.

4. Dewey once argued that philosophy could be ‘defined as the general theory of education’, insofar as, on the one hand, philosophy’s concern with ‘fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow [human beings]’ is toothless without educational practices to make it a matter of public concern and, on the other hand, such practice – regardless of its disciplinary location – tends ‘to become a routine empirical affair unless its aims and methods are animated by … a broad and sympathetic survey of its place in contemporary life’, which is a philosophical problem (Dewey 1916, 331).

5. There is presently no inventory or archive of contemporary educational struggles and movements in global perspective, and none comprehensive historically. For US-American and European perspectives, see Wallerstein and Starr (1971) and BoRen (2001). Partial chronologies and records can be found on the site of the International Student Movement (http://ism-global.net/protests_worldwide_june2012) and on the Edu-Factory website (http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/).

6. I am grateful for the advice of an anonymous reviewer on this point.

7. For more on post-structuralist readings of anarchistic thought and politics, see May (1994) or DeWitt (2000).

8. The Research Exercise Framework (REF) is the UK’s national assessment of research quality, which has taken place in different forms since 1986 (in 1989, 1992, 1996, 2001 and 2008). For further information, see the official REF website at http://www.ref.ac.uk/. For competing analyses of its purpose and legitimacy, see Martin (2011) and Smith, Ward, and House (2011).