Pedagogies of care in performative schools

ABSTRACT

With growing policy pressures on schools to produce outcomes, there are concerns about the loss of caring relationships from education. In this article, we argue that rather than eliminating all forms of care, neoliberal reform agendas have co-opted the practices of care by encouraging an ethic of care that serves instrumental agendas of student achievement and performance. Drawing upon semi-structured interview data from a teacher and a principal in a school located in a low socio-economic suburb of Melbourne, we assert that such a care ethic often works to the detriment of socially marginalized young people. This is because schools’ caring practices driven by performative agendas fail to respond to the more complex relational needs of some students. The mismatch between the caring intentions of the institution and the actual needs of the students leads to relational tension paving the way for the breakdown of the caring relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Achievement
• ethic of care
• exclusion
• marginality
• neoliberal reform
• performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Babak Dadvand http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3362-8625

Hernan Cuervo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2960-3652

Notes

1 SEIFA is an aggregate measure of advantage and disadvantage derived from the 2011 census data by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. A low SEIFA score indicates relatively greater disadvantage while a higher score represents greater advantage. Areas with SEIFA scores under 1000 usually host households with low income and fewer assets, unemployed people and those with no qualifications or in low skill occupations.

2 The ICSEA is an indicator developed by ACARA to enable comparisons of NAPLAN results among students in schools across Australia. ICSEA provides a scale that numerically represents the relative magnitude of factors within students’ background, such as parents’ occupation or education level, and school-related factors, such as geographical location, as they bear upon the educational outcomes of young people.

3 Australian Tertiary Admission Rank or ATAR, which is calculated based on students’ academic achievement in Year 12, is one criterion used for entry into undergraduate university programmes in Australia.

4 Australian research shows a more fragmentary pathway of transition from school to higher education for ‘disadvantaged’ students compared to their more privileged peers. This is caused mostly by complex relationship between individual, community and institutional (school-related) factors (Abbott-Chapman, 2011; Gemici, Lim, & Karmel, 2014).