192 pages
228 x 145mm
ISBN: 978 1 85856 299 5
Published 2003

This book exposes the practices that are controlling education and reducing it to little more than skills development in preparation for work. It is a call to educators to recognise and resist the rhetoric around education and to question oppressive practices.

The contributors reveal how pervasively and powerfully students all over the world are being controlled by education. David Hursh of University of Rochester, New York offers the example of the rise of testing and accountability, arguing that it has fostered the decline of teacher professionalism and local control, thus achieving compliance and making contestation all but impossible. Helen Colley of Leeds University, England questions the generally venerated strategy of mentoring to show how its dynamic requires docility from the learner and thus perpetuates inequality.

These are but two of the dozen or so academics who have come together to challenge the prevailing academic discourse. And in Part Two of the book, they suggest ways in which to provoke and enable students to critique the system, resist their educational oppression and take greater control of their learning.

Discourse, Power and Learning is for students, teachers, trainers, lecturers, researchers. This exciting and readable book will compel them to think again about what may seem to them inevitable educational practice. Those in positions of power will be set to questioning the status quo in education and considering the positive alternatives suggested here.

Elizabeth Atkinson is a reader in the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of Sunderland, Jerome Satterthwaite teaches in the Graduate School and Ken Gale is senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education, both at the University of Plymouth.