One size does not fit all when it comes to education.

In modern society, education has been and continues to be shaped, informed, and driven by a so-called “grammar of schooling”: an approach which completely ignores the many and diverse identities that learners own, are given, and encounter. Categorising students into neat, labelled boxes, splintering knowledge into strictly defined subjects, and fracturing learning – this grammar of schooling desperately needs rewriting.

Through narratives from teachers, students, and their families, this book explores the lived experiences of those who are forced to live with the current approach, and the consequences for their lives, relationship, and education. It also asks the question of what creative and holistic alternative approaches might look like – when the rules aren’t working, the rulebook can be rewritten.

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• v
• viviiContents
• viiiixLearning objectives
• 1 Schooling, technologies, and equity in times of crisis
  • Lived DIGITAL experiences
  • Schooling
  • Technologies
  • Equity
  • A socially just education?
• 2 The repetition of the grammar of schooling
  • A brief history of the grammar of schooling and the modern Western school
  • From physical to digital: The repetition of the grammar of schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic
  • Pandemic and the longed-for return to normality: Contextualising technologies and the enthusiasm for digital inclusion
  • Digital technologies and the resilience of the grammar of schooling
    • Micro-exclusions and exclusions between the virtual and the regular classroom
  • Discipline and digital reification of classrooms’ material spaces and routinised visibilities
  • Hierarchical relations of power, authorities, and objectifying techniques of examination
  • Emergency strategies, the persistence of the grammar of schooling, and repetitions of exclusion through technologies
• 3 Rewriting the grammar of schooling
  • A brief history of reform
    • Dewey and the whole child
    • The comprehensive ideal
    • Contemporary challenges to the grammar of schooling
  • Insider rewritings
  • Finding new learning lines
  • Smoothing the school
  • Connecting people and places
  • Changing places, spaces, and subjectivities
• 4 Unsettling identities for a socially just inclusion?
  • Sustainable becomings
    • Learning to live with – and love – uncertainty
    • Trusting teachers to do the “right” thing
    • Embedding children’s experiences and desires in the design of technologies
    • Ensuring inclusive and context-based practices in all aspects of teaching and learning
    • Enabling flexibility in knowledge, time, and space
  • Rewriting the grammar of schooling: Where to begin?
    • A whole school overhaul of the grammar of schooling
    • Student-led reworkings
    • Teacher-led projects on curriculum rewriting
    • Experimentation workshops
    • Parents, carers, and communities in partnership and in alliance
    • Collaborations and exchange with other educational and community realities
  • Unsettling identities for a socially just education?
• 124125References
• Index

Julie Allan PhD is Professor of Equity and Inclusion in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham (UK). She has published widely and advised governments in the areas of inclusion, equity, and rights.

Francesca Peruzzo PhD is a Research Fellow at the Educational Equity Initiative at the School of Education, University of Birmingham (UK). Her work encompasses education policy sociology, post-structural approaches in education, and their implications for equity and inclusion in educational communities.

On Thursday Feb 29, 2024, we held a seminar in our Topics in Education Studies series:

Ending Educational Inequities: Teachers Finding New and Creative Solutions

This free seminar was a conversation between author Julie Allan and Janise Hurtig, Lived Places Publishing Collection Editor. They discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced and exacerbated many of the inequalities in education, and led to a continuation of what sociologists have described as a ‘grammar of schooling’. This is an idea that describes features of education systems that persist throughout time, contexts, and cultures and includes the division of knowledge into separate subjects, rigid school timetables, the reproduction of particular forms of knowledge alongside the silencing of others, and exclusions and marginalisation from regular schooling.

>> VIEW SESSION REPLAY