Community and contestation: a Gramscian case study of teacher resistance

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on a specific example of an all-too-rare phenomenon in education studies: the successful resistance by ordinary classroom teachers of policy change at the macro-level. Focusing on the withdrawal of the 2013 Draft National Curriculum for History in England, it considers the views of six teachers who were personally involved in active resistance.

Furthering the view that teacher resistance can represent ‘good sense’, it is suggested that teachers’ self-described conceptualisations of this resistance are best understood in Gramscian terms. The paper does not propose the political theory of Gramsci as a blueprint for effective resistance, but instead suggests that categories which Gramsci associated with resistance to capitalism might emerge organically within other sites of resistance, and even among those unfamiliar with Gramsci’s work. Furthermore, it implies that theoretically-informed transformative intellectuals of the kind described by Giroux (1988) might still be found working in neoliberal education systems.

KEYWORDS:

• History curriculum
• teacher resistance
• curriculum contestation
• Antonio Gramsci

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This large conference of teachers working in the New History tradition takes place in Leeds in July each year. It takes its name from the ‘Schools History Project’ which, as the Schools Council for History Project, promoted New History in the 1970s.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith is a Lecturer in History Education at the University of Stirling, UK. His research concerns the framing of history curricula and the identity of history teachers. He has published on both history and education for both general and academic audiences, most recently in the British Journal of Education Studies and Scottish Education Review.