Knowledge, policy and practice in education and the struggle for social justice

Brown, Andrew
Wisby, Emma

2020

1-318

UCL Press

For 50 years, educator and sociologist Geoff Whitty resolutely pursued social justice through education, first as a classroom teacher and ultimately as the Director of the Institute of Education in London. The essays in this volume - written by some of the most influential authors in the sociology of education and critical policy studies - take Whitty’s work as the starting point from which to examine key contemporary issues in education and the challenges to social justice that they present. Set within three themes of knowledge, policy and practice in education, the chapters tackle the issues of defining and accessing ‘legitimate’ knowledge, the changing nature of education policy under neoliberalism and globalization, and the reshaping of teacher workplaces and professionalism – as well as attempts to realize more emancipatory practice. Whitty’s scholarship on what constitutes quality and impact in educational research is also explored. Together, the essays open a window on a life in the sociology of education, the scholarly community of which it was part, and the facets of education policy, practice and research that they continue to reveal and challenge in pursuit of social justice. They celebrate Whitty as one of the foremost sociologists of education of his generation, but also as a friend and colleague. And they highlight the continued relevance of his contribution to those seeking to promote fairer and more inclusive education systems.

Educational strategies & policy
Higher & further education, tertiary education
United Kingdom, Great Britain

english

9781782772774

10.14324/111.9781782772774

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/37587

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Knowledge, Policy and Practice
in Education and the Struggle for
Social Justice

To the memory of Geoff Whitty

Knowledge, Policy and
Practice in Education
and the Struggle for
Social Justice
Essays Inspired by the Work of
Geoff Whitty

Edited by Andrew Brown and Emma Wisby

First published in 2020 by
UCL Press
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk
Collection © Editors, 2020
Text © Contributors, 2020
Images © Contributors, 2020
The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.
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This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY
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Brown, A., and Wisby, E. (eds). 2020. Knowledge, Policy and Practice in Education and
the Struggle for Social Justice: Essays Inspired by the Work of Geoff Whitty. London: UCL
Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781782772774
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ISBN: 978-1-78277-305-4 (Hbk.)
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781782772774

Contents

About the Contributors
List of Figures and Tables
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Andrew Brown and Emma Wisby

vii
xv
xvi
xviii
xix
1

PART I KNOWLEDGE
1 Social Mobilizations and Official Knowledge
Michael W. Apple

13

2 Sex, Sexuality and HIV: ‘Education’, in the Broadest Sense
of the Word
Peter Aggleton

28

3 Education for Inclusion or Exclusion: Representation of Ethnic
Minorities in Chinese Mainstream History Textbooks
Yan Fei

39

4 Social Theory, Biological Sciences and the Sociology of
Knowledge in Education
Deborah Youdell and Martin R. Lindley

64

5 Geoff Whitty: Student, Friend and Colleague;
Some Personal Reflections 
Michael Young

83

v

PART II POLICY
6 The Neoliberalization of the State, the Processes of
‘Fragmentation’, and Research Implications of the
New Political Terrain of English Schooling
Stephen J. Ball and Richard Bowe

97

7 The White Bones of Policy: Structure, Agency and a
Vulture’s-Eye View with Critical Race Theory
David Gillborn

115

8 From Bastion of Class Privilege to Public Benefactor:
The Remarkable Repositioning of Private Schools
Tony Edwards and Sally Power

134

9 Pursuing Racial Justice within Higher Education:
Is Conflict Inevitable?
Nicola Rollock

149

10 The Policy Sociology of Geoff Whitty: Current and
Emergent Issues Regarding Education Research in Use
Bob Lingard

165

11 Revolutions in Educational Policy: The Vexed Question of
Evidence and Policy Development
Hugh Lauder

179

PART III PRACTICE

vi

12 Why Isn’t This Empowering? The Discursive Positioning
of Teachers in Efforts to Improve Teaching
Jennifer Gore

199

13 Can Teachers Still Be Teachers? The Near Impossibility of
Humanity in the Transactional Workplace
Sharon Gewirtz and Alan Cribb

217

14 Contestation, Contradiction and Collaboration in Equity and
Widening Participation: In Conversation with Geoff Whitty
Penny Jane Burke

233

15 Quality, Impact and Knowledge Traditions in the
Study of Education
John Furlong

255

Geoff Whitty: A Biographical Note

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77

Index

293

Co n t e n t s

About the Contributors

Andrew Brown is Emeritus Professor of Education and Society at the
UCL Institute of Education (IOE) and Senior International Research
Advisor  at the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education,
University of Newcastle, Australia. He is a sociologist of education with
research interests in the process of research capacity and capability
building and the relationship between everyday professional and
academic discourse and practice. He has been Visiting Professor at the
National Institute of Education, Singapore, and the Hong Kong Institute
of Education, and was founding Director (Research) at the Institute for
Adult Learning, Singapore. He served as Interim Director of the IOE
and UCL Pro-Vice-Provost (London). Before joining the IOE as a teacher
educator in 1987, he taught in primary and secondary schools in London.
Emma Wisby is Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the IOE. Prior to
that she was Committee Specialist to the House of Commons Education
Select Committee and a researcher in the field of education policy, during
which time she undertook a review of school councils and pupil voice for
the UK government. Following a PhD at the University of Sheffield, which
examined the post-Dearing shift to standards-based quality assurance in
the UK higher education sector, she spent her early career conducting
consultancy research for various government departments and their
agencies across schools, further education and teacher education policy.
Peter Aggleton is an honorary professor in the Centre for Gender and
Global Health at UCL, Emeritus Scientia Professor at the University of
New South Wales, Sydney, and a distinguished honorary professor at the
Australian National University. He is a sociologist and educationalist by

vii

training and held academic positions at the former Bristol Polytechnic,
Goldsmiths College, London, and the IOE in London, where for 10 years
he was Director of the Thomas Coram Research Unit. He has worked
internationally for national governments and UN system agencies on
issues such as HIV, gender and sexuality, and sexual and reproduct­
ive health.  He is the editor-in-chief of three major international peerreviewed journals: Culture, Health and Sexuality, Health Education
Journal and Sex Education, and co-edits (with Sally Power and Michael
Reiss) the Foundations and Futures of Education series published by
Routledge. His formative years as a teacher were spent working in adult
and further education – for the Open University and a number of colleges
of further education.
Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and
Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–
Madison and holder of the Distinguished Hui Yan Chair at Beijing
Normal University. A former elementary and secondary school teacher
and past president of a teachers’ union, he has worked with educational
systems, governments, universities, unions, and activist and dissident
groups throughout the world to democratize educational research,
policy and practice. Michael has written extensively on the politics of
educational reform, on the relationship between culture and power and
on education for social justice. Among his many books are: Ideology and
Curriculum; Education and Power; Teachers and Texts; Official Knowledge;
Democratic Schools; Cultural Politics and Education; Educating the ‘Right’
Way; Knowledge, Power, and Education; Can Education Change Society?;
and most recently, The Struggle for Democracy in Education. Michael has
been selected as one of the 50 most important educational scholars of
the twentieth century. His books Ideology and Curriculum and Official
Knowledge were also selected as two of the most significant books on
education in the twentieth century.
Stephen J. Ball is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology of
Education at the IOE. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in
2006 and is also a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Society of
Educational Studies and a lauSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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reate of Kappa Delta Phi; he has honorary
doctorates from the Universities of Turku (Finland) and Leicester. He is
co-founder and managing editor of the Journal of Education Policy. His
main areas of interest are in sociologically informed education policy
analysis and the relationships between education, education policy and

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A b o u t t h e Co n t r i b u to r s

social class. He has written 20 books and published over 140 journal
articles. Recent books include Edu.Net and Foucault as Educator.
Richard Bowe. After completing a degree at Manchester University
Richard completed a PGCE at Bath University and spent two further
years as a research assistant. Following three years as a teacher at
Hailsham Comprehensive school in East Sussex, Richard took up a
three-year studentship at the Open University. He subsequently worked
as an evaluator for the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative and
latterly at King’s College, London.
Penny Jane Burke is Global Innovation Chair of Equity and Director of
the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education at the University
of Newcastle, Australia. Since completing her PhD in 2001, she has
been actively involved in shaping the field of equity in higher education
through research, institutional leadership and the development of
research networks and programmes. Pushing the boundaries of the
field, she developed praxis-based approaches that work towards transforming educational spaces and imaginaries and bringing research,
theory and practice together. Her personal experience of returning to
study via an Access to Higher Education programme has fuelled her
ongoing commitment to generating research with impact. Penny Jane
has published extensively in the field, including Changing Pedagogical
Spaces in HE (with Gill Crozier and Lauren Ila Misiaszek) and The Right
to Higher Education. Penny Jane is also an inaugural member on the
Australian government’s Equity Research and Innovation Expert Panel.
Alan Cribb is an applied philosopher, based at King’s College, London,
with a particular interest in health and education policy, health services
research and professional education. He began his career at the University
of Manchester where he worked as Deputy Director of the Education and
Child Studies Research Group in the Department of Epidemiology and
Social Oncology and as a fellow of the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy.
He moved to King’s in 1989 where he is currently Professor of Bioethics
and Education and Co-director of the Centre for Public Policy Research.
In recent years he has undertaken research on shared decision-making
and collaborative working in healthcare, higher education values and
ethics, medical education and service learning. He is currently working
on a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded project entitled ‘But Why is That
Better?’, which is focused on the relevance of applied philosophy to
quality improvement.

A b o u t t h e Co n t r i b u to r s

ix

Tony Edwards taught history for eight years in London secondary
schools before holding posts at the Universities of Exeter and Manchester
and then becoming a professor at Newcastle University in 1979. His
research includes investigations of the Assisted Places Scheme (with
John Fitz and Geoff Whitty) and the Conservative government’s City
Technology College initiative (with Sharon Gewirtz and Geoff Whitty),
as well as the ‘Destined for Success?’ and ‘Success Sustained?’ projects
(with Sally Power, Valerie Wigfall and Geoff Whitty), which followed
into adult life many of the original assisted place sample. Tony chaired
the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise panel in education and served
as Chair and then Co-chair of the Universities’ Council for the Education
of Teachers.
John Furlong, OBE, is an emeritus professor of education at the
University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of Green Templeton College.
From 2003 to 2009 he was Head of the Department of Education at
Oxford, having previously held posts at Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea and
Cambridge Universities. A former president oSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
f the British Educational
Research Association, he was elected as a fellow of the Academy of Social
Sciences in 2004. His current research interests centre on both teacher
education and educational research policy and the links between them.
He has authored a number of government reports on teacher education
over recent years and is currently an advisor to the Welsh government on
this issue. His book Education: An Anatomy of the Discipline was awarded
first prize by the British Society for Educational Studies for the best
educational research book of the year. His most recent book (edited with
Geoff Whitty) is Knowledge and the Study of Education: An International
Exploration. John Furlong was awarded an OBE in 2017 for services to
research in education and advice to government.
Sharon Gewirtz is Professor of Education in the School of Education,
Communication and Society at King’s College, London, where she also
co-directs the Centre for Public Policy Research. Her research is in the
sociology of education and education policy, with a particular focus on
issues of equality and social justice, teachers’ work, and the changing
culture and values of schooling and higher education in the context of
managerial reform. She recently embarked on a five-year project funded
by the Economic and Social Research Council that is investigating how
England’s vocational education and training system can better support
the school-to-work transitions of the 50 per cent of young people who do

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A b o u t t h e Co n t r i b u to r s

not go to university. Sharon’s previous research includes studies of the
City Technology Colleges initiative and Education Action Zones.
David Gillborn is Professor of Critical Race Studies at the University of
Birmingham, where he is Director of Research in the School of Education
and Director of the Centre for Research in Race and Education. David
is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Race Ethnicity and Education. His
research focuses on race inequalities in education, especially the role
of racism as a changing and complex characteristic of the system. He
has written six books and more than 140 refereed articles, chapters
and reports that range from original studies in classrooms, through
national reviews of research evidence in the field, to analyses of the
changing policy landscape internationally. He is closely associated with
the approach known as ‘critical race theory’ and, in 2012, received
the  Derrick Bell Legacy Award, the highest honour possible from the
US-based Critical Race Studies in Education Association. David is a
fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts
and a laureate of  Kappa Delta Pi. Membership of the laureate chapter
is limited to 60 living scholars judged to have made ‘a significant and
lasting impact on the profession of education’.
Jennifer Gore is Laureate Professor in the School of Education at the
University of Newcastle, Australia, where she was Dean of Education
and Head of School for six years (2008–13). She has been Director of
the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre there since its inaugur­
ation in 2013. In 2017, Jennifer was named University of Newcastle’s
first female laureate professor and first laureate in the humanities
and social sciences. She was Co-editor of the prestigious international
journal Teaching and Teacher Education for four years and has won more
than 23.6 million Australian dollars in research funding, including
10 grants awarded by the Australian Research Council. Widely published
and cited, her research centres on quality and equity, ranging across
such topics as teacher development, pedagogical reform and enhancing
student outcomes from schooling. Her current agenda focuses on the
impact of Quality Teaching Rounds on teachers and students, using
randomized control trials, and the formation of educational aspirations
during schooling, using longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses.  In
2018 she was awarded the Paul Brock Memorial Medal for outstanding
contributions to social justice and evidSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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ence-informed policy, practice
and research.

A b o u t t h e Co n t r i b u to r s

xi

Hugh Lauder is Professor of Education and Political Economy at the
University of Bath (1996–present). He studied at the University of
London (IOE) and gained his doctorate at the University of Canterbury
(New Zealand). He was formerly Dean of Education at Victoria University
of Wellington. He specializes in the relationship of education to the
economy and has worked on national skill strategies and the global skill
strategies of multinational companies. He has been a visiting professor
at the IOE, the University of Turku and the University of Witwatersrand.
He is also member of the Economic and Social Research Council Virtual
College. His latest book, with Phil Brown and Sin Yi Cheung, is The Death
of Human Capital?
Martin R. Lindley is Senior Lecturer in Human Biology in the School
of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences at Loughborough University and
leads the Translational Chemical Biology research group there. His work
considers diet and exercise and their impact on inflammation in the lung,
specifically the function of omega 3 polyunsaturated fatty acids; exercise
and physical activity patterns and how they are measured; measurement
of health indicators and physiological capacity in the healthy ageing
population; and lung function, asthma and air quality in patients,
athletes and in the workplace. Recently he has applied this health and
exercise expertise to the question of the entangled biological and social
influences on capacities for learning, co-authoring the field-leading
book, Biosocial Education, with Deborah Youdell.
Bob Lingard is a professorial fellow of the Institute for Learning Sciences
and Teacher Education at the Australian Catholic University. His most
recent books include Globalizing Educational Accountabilities and Politics,
Policies and Pedagogies in Education. He is Editor of the journal Discourse:
Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education and of the Key Ideas in
Education book series. He researches in the domains of education policy
and the sociology of education. He has also held chairs at the Universities
of Queensland, Edinburgh and Sheffield.
Sally Power is a professor in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff
University, Wales, prior to which she was based at the IOE, during which
time she served as Head of the School of Educational Foundations and
Policy Studies. Sally is currently Director of WISERD EDUCATION and
Co-director of WISERD (Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research
Data and Method). Her research interests focus on the relationship
between education, inequality and civic participation. She is particularly

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A b o u t t h e Co n t r i b u to r s

interested in social class differentiation, as well as the relative success
and failure of education policies designed to promote greater equality of
opportunity and engagement.
Nicola Rollock is an academic, consultant and public speaker specializing in racial justice in education and the workplace. She is a member
of the Wellcome Trust’s Diversity and Inclusion Steering Group, part of
the British Science Association’s newly formed Equality, Diversity and
Inclusion Advisory Group and a patron of AdvanceHE’s Race Equality
Charter, which aims to improve the experiences and progression of
students and faculty of colour. Nicola was appointed, in 2019, as
the specialist advisor to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select
Committee inquiry ‘The Macpherson Report 20 Years On’, established to
examine whether there has been progress in meeting the 70 recommendations published in 1999. Her most recent research examines the career
experiences and strategies of UK Black female professors, the findings of
which were widely covered in the press.
Yan Fei is a postdoctoral research fellow at South China Normal
University. Prior to that he was a doctoral student at the IOE. His PhD
research focuses on the portrayal of minority ethnic groups in Chinese
mainstream history textbooks. His wider research interests include
nationalism in ChiSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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nese education systems, citizenship education,
education for minority ethnic groups in China and education policymaking and textbook studies.
Deborah Youdell is Professor of Sociology of Education in the School of
Education at the University of Birmingham. Her research in education
has focused on questions of educational inequalities and how these
inequalities come to be attached to particular groups of students, such
as minoritized race and ethnic groups and students identified as having
special needs. Her work has sought to understand how policies, institutions, pedagogies, meanings and practices constrain schools, teachers
and students at the same time as they create conditions of possibility for
action. Deborah’s most recent work is at the forefront of the developing
field of biosocial education, which brings emerging knowledge in the
new biological sciences together with such sociological accounts of
education to generate new insights into learning and the learner. Her
latest book, Biosocial Education: The Social and Biological Entanglements
of Learning, co-authored with molecular biologist Martin R. Lindley, sets
out an agenda for biosocial research in education.

A b o u t t h e Co n t r i b u to r s

xiii

Michael Young is Professor of Sociology of Curriculum at the IOE. He
studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge and taught
chemistry in London secondary schools for six years, studying part-time
for a BSc in sociology. After a year at the University of Essex, where
he obtained an MA in sociology, he became a lecturer in sociology of
education at the IOE in 1967 and has remained there ever since, later
as Senior Lecturer, Head of the Post-16 Education Centre and, from
1998, Professor. In 1989 Michael was awarded a PhD (Honoris Causa)
by the University of Joensuu and a fellowship of the City Guilds of
London Institute. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities
of Derby, Bath, Witwatersrand, Pretoria, Auckland and Capital Normal
University in Beijing. His main books have been Knowledge and Control,
The Curriculum of the Future, Bringing Knowledge Back In and, with
Johan Muller, Knowledge, Expertise and the Professions and Curriculum
and the Specialisation of Knowledge. His research has continued to focus
on the question of knowledge in education with particular reference to
the curriculum.

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A b o u t t h e Co n t r i b u to r s

List of Figures and Tables

Figures
15.1
16.1

Domains of quality
Geoff Whitty

258
267

Tables
3.1
3.2
3.3
7.1
15.1

Textbooks examined in this chapter
Table of contents from the PEP 2001 history
textbooks
Contents relating to ‘minorities learning from
the Han’ in the PEP 2001 history textbooks
The politicians interviewed and their
principal public roles
Knowledge traditions in the study of education

37
38
44
108
249

xv

List of Abbreviations

AARE
AERA
AI
AIDS
AVERT
BERA
BiTC
CASE
CBI
CCP
CEEHE
CRT
DCSF
DfE
DFID
ECU
EEF
EFPS
EI
ETEHE
EU
GCSE
GDST
HCT
HERU
HIV
HMC

xvi

Australian Association for Research in Education
American Educational Research Association
Artificial intelligence
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome
AIDS Education Research Trust
British Educational Research Association
Business in the Community
Campaign for State Education
Confederation of British Industry
Chinese Communist Party
Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education
Critical Race Theory
Department of Children, Schools and Families
Department for Education
Department for International Development
Equality Challenge Unit
Education Endowment Foundation
School of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies
Education International
Excellence in Teaching for Equity in Higher Education
European Union
General Certificate of Secondary Education
Girls’ Day School Trust
Human Capital Theory
Health and Education Research Unit
Human immunodeficiency virus
Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference

IOE
ISC
MP
NUT
OECD
Ofsted
PEP
PGCE
PISA
PPOEMs
PRC
PSC
QT
QTR
RAE
RCT
R&D
REF
RSA
SER
SIR
STEMM
TCRU
TEF
UCU
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UN
UNAIDS
UNESCO
UNSW
WHO

Institute of Education
Independent Schools Council
Member of Parliament
National Union of Teachers
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development
Office for Standards in Education, Children’s
Services and Skills
People’s Education Press
Postgraduate Certificate of Education
Programme for International Student Assessment
Praxis-based PedagOgical Ethical Methodologies
People’s Republic of China
Public Schools Commission
Quality Teaching
Quality Teaching Rounds
Research Assessment Exercise
Randomized Control Trial
Research and development
Research Excellence Framework
Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures and Commerce
School Effectiveness Research
School Improvement Research
Science, technology, engineering, mathematics
and medicine
Thomas Coram Research Unit
Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework
University and College Union
United Nations
Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS
United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization
University of New South Wales
World Health Organization

L i st o f A bb r e v i at i o n s

xvii

Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to:  Nicky Platt, former publishing director at the then
UCL Institute of Education Press, who responded so positively when
we first proposed the book;  Pat Gordon-Smith at UCL Press for her
invaluable assistance in bringing this book to fruition; the anonymous
reviewers, who have similarly offered sage advice and enthusiasm for
the publication; and, of course, our contributing authors. Most pieces of
scholarly writing are challenging to produce in their own right; in this
case colleagues had to meet that challenge in the context of having lost
a close friend, mentor and colleague in Geoff Whitty. The chapters they
have contributed to this collection represent a celebration of Geoff’s
scholarship but also of Geoff as a person.

xviii

Preface

This publication was first conceived in 2017 by Professor David Guile,
then head of the department in which Geoff Whitty was based as Director
Emeritus of the UCL Institute of Education (IOE). As fellow longstanding colleagues of Geoff we were asked to take the project forward.
We are both sociologists of education – Andrew had been faculty and a
member of the leadership team at the IOE (at that stage the Institute of
Education, University of London) during Geoff’s time as director there,
while Emma had served as a researcher and policy advisor to Geoff while
he was director and had continued to publish with him subsequently.
We were honoured to edit this collection. In the early stages we were
able to involve Geoff in helping to shape the book. But his health was
already beginning to fail and, sadly, he would not survive to see the final
publication.
Geoff was a major figure in educational research. He had a long and
close association with the IOE as by far the largest school of education
in the UK and one of the foremost internationally, a standing that his
own time as director had done much to advance. He would also take
on leadership roles within the wider educational research community.
His esteemed career as an academic and his wide networks meant that
we had many potential contributing authors to choose from. We settled
on those who had perhaps the closest and most enduring links to Geoff,
whether as his former tutor or as a research collaborator, as a peer or as
a younger colleague whose career had developed within the institution
Geoff led. The contributing authors also speak to the main themes in
Geoff’s scholarship, as reflected in the title of the book as well as the
education systems with which Geoff was most acquainted, those of the
US, Australia and China. It was no surprise that those we approached to

xix

contribute to the publication responded so enthusiastically. We were also
heartened by the warm reception news of the project received from the
educational research community more widely. We were only sorry that
we could not include more colleagues from across Geoff’s career.

xx

P r e face

IntrodSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
uction
Andrew Brown and Emma Wisby

From the outset, and in our initial discussions with Geoff Whitty in
formulating the proposal for this book, we have aspired to produce a
collection of papers which both addresses foundational and emergent
issues in the sociological study of education policy and draws out the
enduring influence that Whitty’s work has had on the evolution of the
field. In the development of Whitty’s work over a period of more than
40 years, while there have been a number of recurring themes and
distinctive contributions to knowledge and practice, there has never
been any attempt to draw these together as a particular ‘school’ of
thought or overarching position. Whitty’s influence has been more
subtle, and contextually sensitive, than any such attempt to define a
field would allow, and as a consequence, has enabled colleagues and the
members of the wider scholarly and research community to engage with
and be inspired by his work, without being dominated or constrained
by it. This also allowed Whitty to enhance and maintain his academic
influence while assuming a succession of education leadership positions,
culminating in a decade as Director of the Institute of Education,
University of London (now the UCL Institute of Education). In doing so,
Whitty’s academic career exemplifies the manner in which a productive
and creative dialogue can be achieved between research and practice,
and between scholarship and leadership, particularly important at a time
when a more sharply drawn division of labour between these domains
is evident. In mapping out the structure of the book, and drawing out
key themes from the constituent chapters, we hope that the importance,
and distinctiveness, of this achievement will become clear. In the closing
section of the book, we adopt a more personal tone to provide a brief

1

biography, which we hope will further reinforce an appreciation of the
depth and breadth of Geoff Whitty’s influence, and the manner in which
the interweaving of rigorous academic work with sustained educational
leadership and active engagement with policymakers and key stakeholders in education makes his contribution so profound.
The organization of the collection into three parts, focusing respect­
ively on knowledge, policy and practice, both reflects the development of
Whitty’s academic contribution and represents key themes in the critical
study of education policy and the pursuit of social justice. As will be
clear, these themes overlap and intertwine, and indeed Whitty latterly
returned to the consideration of knowledge in education and the struggle
for equity which formed the focus of his earliest work in the sociology of
education.

Knowledge
The question of ‘whose knowledge?’ is prioritized and valued in an
education system is a fundamental issue in the sociology of education,
and correspondingly has provided a fruitful focus for research and
scholarship in the critical scrutiny of education policy. In the opening
chapter to this section, Michael W. Apple directly addresses the
contested nature of the content of the curriculum and how this is taught
and assessed. How do we determine who has access to what, and who
are ‘we’ anyway in presuming to determine or influence such things? As
Apple recognizes, these questions sit at the heart of Whitty’s early work
in the sociology of education (see, for instance, Whitty and Young 1976),
and lay the foundations for the approach that he was to develop over the
coming years. Apple stresses the importance of maintaining engagement
with contesting ‘official knowledge’ and the key role of alliances in doing
this. His chapter not only reinforces the influence of Whitty’s work on
the sociology of school knowledge, but also, through the examples he
provides, the need to pay close attention to context and the forces that
shape the possibility for change, also characteristic of Whitty’s policyrelated writing.
The importance of personal relations and the intertwining of trajectories in the development of a field, and the shaping ofSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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the work of the
people and groups of which fields are composed, is illustrated by Peter
Aggleton’s account of his work with Whitty. This also provides a further
example of the power of alliances and collaboration in areas of contest­
ation and struggle. The principal context addressed here is the response

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of health education to the advent of HIV and AIDS. Aggleton’s sensitive
and nuanced account brings to the fore the necessity of being able to
move between levels of practice, for instance between the personal and
the institutional and between lived experience and policy, in order to
affect change, and the facility that Whitty had to create the conditions for
this both personally and intellectually. The chapter provides insight into
both the development of an important body of work, and the place of
personal care in enabling critical work like this to grow and thrive.
Yan Fei presents a very different context for the exploration of the
relationship between knowledge, policy and inequity, and exemplifies
another form of collaboration. The question of ‘whose knowledge?’
operates at two distinct levels in this consideration of the representation of ethnic minority groups in Chinese school history textbooks: the
content of the history curriculum and its texts, and the forms of theory
that are brought into play in analysing the constitution of the curriculum
and the effects that subsequent representations have on the advancement
of students from ethnic minority backgrounds. Here, the form of theory
and analysis advocated by Whitty and others in understanding the relationship between power and knowledge in schooling is recontextualized, scrutinized and deployed in a necessarily (given the context and
objectives of the study) detailed analysis. Whitty’s role in supervising
this work, and in subsequent collaboration (see Yan and Whitty 2016),
represents a reignition of interest in an earlier strand of his work in a
context of increasing importance internationally, and illustrates in yet
another way the interaction of decisions about legitimate knowledge
and the reproduction of inequalities. The focus on history textbooks
is apposite, and represents another return, albeit within a sociological
frame, to Whitty’s intellectual roots as an historian.
Another shift in direction of analytic gaze is evident in Deborah
Youdell and Martin R. Lindley’s sociological analysis of the relationship
between the sociology of education and emerging knowledge in the
biological sciences. The area of contestation here is what is seen as the
historical refutation of biology within sociology and the impact this has
on the capacity of the sociology of education to engage productively with
new biological knowledges and the development of biosocial education.
While this is not an issue that Whitty specifically addressed, the direction
and form of their analysis is clearly in line with the manner in which he
raises critical questions about school knowledge, and they state, ‘As Whitty
notes in relation to school knowledge, it is not simply a matter of which/
whose knowledge; it is a matter of what is done with it, how it interacts
with other knowledges, practices and institutions’ (Chapter 4, p. 70).

Introduction

3

Their analysis reinforces the assertion, which lies at the core of Whitty’s
work on knowledge and schooling, that identification of what constitutes
‘powerful knowledge’ is not sufficient in the struggle for social justice.
We have to engage with what is done with this knowledge, and what can
be imagined, said and enacted as a consequence. This leads to a call to
form counter-hegemonic alliances across disciplines, that holds open the
possibility of exploration of a productive, and challenging, interaction
between the social and biological in a radical sociology of education, able
to address pressing contemporary issues, such as classroom stress and
the effects of high-stakes testing regimes that impact on the potential of
schooling to enhance social justice.Syntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight

In closing the first part, Michael Young takes us back to the
beginnings of Whitty’s engagement with knowledge and schooling,
initially as a student and subsequently as a collaborator and interlocutor in the growth and passage to maturity of the ‘new sociology
of education’, and beyond. The account provides insight into both a
personal and an intellectual journey and reinforces key components of
Whitty’s distinctive contribution to the field, underpinned by the ability
to maintain a sustained, rigorous and principled intellectual engagement
while taking on a succession of demanding education leadership roles.
The reflective and autobiographical aspects of Young’s account provide
personal detail and texture to the emergence of the core ideas that have
influenced and shaped the contributions to this section, and which carry
over into work that more directly addresses education and social policy.

Policy
It is not possible, of course, to draw a firm line between the concerns
with knowledge explored in the first part and the analysis of policy that
becomes a more explicit focus for the chapters in this part. Indeed, a
key characteristic of Whitty’s work and his contribution to the field is
the imperative to contextualize our analysis and to move rigorously and
meaningfully between levels of analysis. The caution not to presume
from our research and debate that what can be argued, imagined or
desired can be non-problematically realized in practice is constantly
asserted and reinforced; as educators engaged in the struggle for social
justice, we are implored not to drift into ‘naive possibilitarianism’.
Whitty also recognized that both the academic field and that of policy
and practice are fundamentally dynamic and fragmented, and that this
further reinforces the need to be able to constantly assess and reassess

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what can be achieved in actively pursuing social justice in and through
education, and, as a consequence, the forms of alliance that need to be
formed. As Power (2019) notes, Whitty is notable among policy sociologists, and particularly those in the field of education, for seeking to
engage in dialogue with policymakers and other key stakeholders.
Exploration of the consequences of the fragmentation of the
English education system for understanding the relationship between
schooling and the state, and for forms of policy analysis in the future, is a
key focus for Stephen J. Ball and Richard Bowe. Apparent instability and
incoherence in reform, leading to a ‘fuzzy patchwork’ (Chapter 6, p. 98)
of provision, presents a challenge to critical policy analysis. As Ball and
Bowe note, in his policy analysis Whitty has addressed the fragmenting
effects of neoliberal economic, social and educational policies on school
systems (Whitty et al. 1998), the education of teachers (Furlong et al.
2000) and the teaching profession more broadly (Whitty 2006a). Ball
and Bowe explore the reverberation of neoliberal policies through
schooling from the systemic level to the identities and lived experiences
of teachers; they propose a new form of policy analysis to address the
reach and splintering effects of these calculative and commodified forms
of policymaking and implementation.
The movement between levels in the scrutiny of policy and its
effects is exemplified by David Gillborn’s analysis of race and racism
in education policy. He cites as inspiration for this approach Whitty’s
call for forms of analysis that are able to hold both macro and micro
processes and effects in view simultaneously (Whitty’s, 1997, infamous
‘vulture’s eye view’). Gillborn presents an analysis of interviews with
politicians which provides insight into the personal (micro-level)
aspects that underlie the formation of (macro-level) policy development
and illustrates how policies can become racialized and aspirations for
racial equity undermined in the interaction between these levels. This
reinforces Whitty’s insistence that policy analysis is able not only to
provide insSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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ight into macro and micro levels, but also how these interact
in the formation of policy.
The ability of the form of policy analysis that Whitty advocated to
reveal and explore disjunctions between stated policy aspirations and
what is achieved in practice is also provided by Tony Edwards and Sally
Power, who examine how, in public and policy rhetoric, private schooling
has been repositioned (from inequitable education for the elite, to
providing broader public benefit) and consider the extent to which the
claims made are warranted. Whitty participated in this research (see, for
instance, Power et al. 2006; Power et al. 2003; Edwards et al. 1989) and

Introduction

5

key themes in his approach to policy research and analysis are evident,
for instance in the rigorous tracing of the provenance of a discourse
which brings together both policy analysis and scrutiny of the positions
and practices of individuals implicated in the production of policy. Nicola
Rollock, likewise, with respect to racial justice and higher education,
takes up the disjunction between the stated commitment to enhanced
diversity in universities and what, from the analysis of empirical data,
has been achieved in practice. Understanding how particular groups
are advantaged and others disadvantaged, both systemically and within
specific institutions, requires critical scrutiny of policy and the operation
of privilege, and the impact of this on the day-to-day experiences and
longer-term trajectories of racially minoritized academics. The analysis
provided by Rollock offers a further example of the need to move between
levels of analysis in understanding enduring inequities in education and
how these relate to the formulation and implementation of policies. It
furthermore poses the question about the extent to which race and
racism are taken seriously by higher education, and what can and should
be done to ensure that pressure is brought to bear to move beyond what
is seen as immediately institutionally possible to take action which
addresses in practice the inequities faced by racially minoritized groups.
The starting point for Rollock’s chapter is reflection on the
question posed by Whitty in his 2005 presidential address to the British
Educational Research Association (BERA) regarding the extent to
which there is a necessary conflict between the outcomes of educational
research and the contingent and personal priorities of policymakers
(Whitty 2006b). Bob Lingard focuses on Whitty’s work in the field of
policy sociology in education, which he sees as arising from Whitty’s own
attempt to resolve pragmatically the demands of education leadership
and the desire to remain research-active. Lingard identifies a number
of key features of Whitty’s position with respect to research and policy/
practice, as expressed in his BERA address. These include the insistence
on providing support for a wide range of forms of research, and of
acknowledgement of the complexity of relations within and between
the activities of research and policymaking. Asking ‘what works’ is not
enough: there has to be mutual appreciation that research must be more
than purely instrumental, and that the dynamics and politics of policymaking, which change over time and from context to context, have to
be recognized. In his exploration of the complexity of this relationship,
Lingard brings into play consideration of contemporary fast policymaking and, with an increasing emphasis on data in policymaking, digital
governance, as well as the era of ‘post-truth’ and the rise of the affective

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in policymaking – the latter an issue that Whitty had only begun to touch
upon in his closing work (e.g. Wisby and Whitty 2019).
The chapters in this part have all taken as given that education policy
in the period covered by Whitty’s policy sociology work has been fundamentally shaped by prevailing neoliberal ideology. In the closing chapter,
Hugh Lauder explores the place of evidence in policymaking, starting
with the premise thatSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
in England the neoliberal paradigm in education is
on its last legs. Lauder scrutinizes the assumptions underlying three major
policy initiatives in education (relating to the market view of education,
school effectiveness and the economic rationale for education) and finds
a problematic, and degenerating, relationship between research and
policy, leading him to conclude that the neoliberal policymaking architecture, in the face, for instance, of crises such as the failure to recruit
and retain teachers, is ready to be dismantled. He proposes in its place a
process of incremental policymaking and change, subject to continuous
scrutiny and research. Lauder recognizes, however, that Whitty would
be quick to point out the pragmatic challenge of making such a change,
which lies beyond the reach of educational research.

Practice
In the latter stages of his academic work, Whitty became increasingly
interested in critical engagement with practice in education; a return
to the commitment to making a difference to education and its capacity
to enhance social justice. While this has always been a core concern,
such an engagement has commonly been mediated by other factors, for
instance by analysis of the formulation and implementation of policy or
by an exploration of the nature and social distribution of knowledge. In
the final part of this collection, practice becomes a primary focus, though
clearly a concern with knowledge and policy is never totally absent. The
chapters address, in turn, improving professional practice in schooling
(Gore), the working lives of educators (Gewirtz and Cribb), equity in
higher education (Burke) and the academic field of education (Furlong).
Jennifer Gore explores some of the tensions inherent in attempts
to improve the professional practice of teachers, in particular the paradoxically disempowering effects for some of the initiatives that claim
to enhance teacher agency. As she points out, this articulates Whitty’s
enduring concerns for teacher professionalism and social justice, and
dialogue with Whitty about the ways in which initiatives designed
to improve teaching can in fact impede change and growth provides

Introduction

7

the impetus for her chapter. The approach proposed, and explored in
practice, by Gore is fundamentally sociologically informed, for instance
in the attention paid to power relations and the impact of the day-to-day
working conditions of teachers.
The shifts that have occurred in the conditions in which teaching
takes place in schooling and higher education is the focus of the analysis
of the prospects for social justice in contemporary education provided by
Sharon Gewirtz and Alan Cribb. They argue that the rise to dominance
of a transactional conception of teaching has severely limited teacher
agency and potential for creativity, with a corresponding negative impact
on the potential for social change through education. In proposing a
more expansive notion of teaching, they note that Whitty’s influence as
a teacher and academic exemplifies this, in that it extends far beyond
his academic publications and formal leadership positions in education,
and reaches beyond intellectual impact to encompass the principles
that underpinned his commitment to the achievement of social justice.
They counterpose this transactional model with a relational ideal type
and explore the ways in which the space for more relational forms of
practice are being squeezed, highlighting, for instance, the quantification of performance and other features of contemporary policy critically
considered in the previous part of this collection.
In seeking to address, in practice, the limits being placed on teacher
autonomy and creativity, Gewirtz and Cribb invoke Whitty’s desire to
create a more democratic form of teacher professionalism (Whitty 2002),
which is consistent with the approach to professional development
proposed by Gore. Penny Jane Burke takes this a step further in
describing how, in a centre founded by Whitty, a form of practice, or
more precisely praxis, has been developed which Syntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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builds on sociological
critique and direct engagement with the exigencies of practice in higher
education. As co-directors of the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher
Education (CEEHE) at the University of Newcastle, Australia, Whitty and
Burke created the conditions for the development of a unique approach
to bringing theory, research and practice together to enhance equity
in higher education. Fundamental to this is the reframing of dominant
discourses and the production of a community of engaged practitioners
within and beyond the university with a strong ethical commitment to
social justice, characteristic of Whitty’s analytic work. Burke outlines the
relational basis of the ‘pedagogical methodology’ approach developed
and provides examples of how this is realized in practice in a number of
innovative CEEHE initiatives. The chapter provides an apposite example
of both the influence of Whitty’s work on our understanding of the

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relationship between educational policy and practice and the pursuit of
social justice and an indication of how this can inform transformative
practice.
In the final chapter, John Furlong brings us back to consider specif­
ically the field of practice, the study of education, which constituted the
context for all aspects of Whitty’s work, and in which all the chapters
in this collection have their roots. The principal focus of the chapter
is the work they did together on ‘knowledge traditions’ in the study of
education, which gave rise to a jointly edited collection (Whitty and
Furlong 2017). In a sense this can be seen as a return to a concern for
different ways of understanding what counts as knowledge, and how this
relates to context and impacts on practice. The analysis exhibits many of
the characteristics of Whitty’s work, and his contribution to the sociology
of education, and education more broadly. This includes recognition of
the need to attend to context (in this case, both national contexts, and
within this, institutional contexts), an acknowledgement of fragmentation and contestation, movement between levels of analysis, the need
for an awareness of what is possible in a given set of circumstances,
strongly framed principles and a strong commitment to social justice. It
is fitting that this last piece of work leaves us not with one dominant form
of knowledge, but a multiplicity of forms each of which has a dynamic
relationship with its macro and micro contexts, providing the impetus
for dialogue and contestations, and giving rise to the form of complex
configuration within which, intellectually and practically, Whitty thrived.
In this introduction to the collection we have attempted to give a
sense of some key themes in the critical sociology of educational policy
and how these are represented in the constituent chapters. We have also
aimed to illustrate how Geoff Whitty has influenced the development
of the field across the phases of his academic career. The three sections
of the book provide broad, and porous, divisions, and as will be clear,
themes from Whitty’s work, both intellectually and in his education
leadership roles, are woven into the work presented across the collection.
We also hope that readers get some sense of Geoff Whitty as a person,
particularly from the chapters by those of us who have worked closely
with him. Given that biography is explicitly present in and intricately
entwined with his academic writing, we felt that it was apposite to
close the collection with a short biographical section, which we hope
will enrich the personal accounts that readers will find in several of the
constituent chapters.

Introduction

9

References
Edwards, Tony, John Fitz and Geoff Whitty. 1989. The State and Private Education: An Evaluation of
the Assisted Places Scheme. London: Falmer Press.
Furlong, John, Len Barton, Sheila Miles, Caroline Whiting and Geoff Whitty. 2000. Teacher
Education in Transition: Re-Forming Professionalism? Buckingham: Open University Press.
Power, Sally. 2019. ‘A TribuSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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te to Geoff Whitty: A Special Kind of Policy Scholar’, Journal of
Education Policy 34 (1): 1–5.
Power, Sally, Tony Edwards, Geoff Whitty and Valerie Wigfall. 2003. Education and the Middle
Class. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Power, Sally, Geoff Whitty and Emma Wisby. 2006. The Educational and Career Trajectories of
Assisted Place Holders. London: Sutton Trust.
Whitty, Geoff. 1997. ‘Social Theory and Education Policy: The Legacy of Karl Mannheim’, British
Journal of Sociology of Education 18 (2): 149–63.
Whitty, Geoff. 2002. Making Sense of Education Policy: Studies in the Sociology and Politics of
Education. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.
Whitty, Geoff. 2006a. ‘Teacher Professionalism in a New Era’. Paper presented at the General
Teaching Council for Northern Ireland Annual Lecture, Belfast, 14 March 2006.
Whitty, Geoff. 2006b. ‘Education(al) Research and Education Policy Making: Is Conflict
Inevitable?’, British Educational Research Journal 32 (2): 159–76.
Whitty, Geoff and John Furlong, eds. 2017. Knowledge and the Study of Education: An International
Exploration. Oxford: Symposium Books.
Whitty, Geoff, Sally Power and David Halpin. 1998. Devolution and Choice in Education: The School,
the State and the Market. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Whitty, Geoff and Michael Young, eds. 1976. Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge.
Driffield: Studies in Education.
Wisby, Emma and Geoff Whitty. 2019. ‘Maintaining (Ecosystems for) a Broad View of Educational
Research and Its Relationship to Practice’. In An Ecosystem for Research-Engaged Schools:
Reforming Education through Research, edited by David Godfrey and Chris Brown, 187–201.
London: Routledge.
Yan, Fei and Geoff Whitty. 2016. ‘Towards Inter-Cultural Education in Xinjiang, North-West
China?’. In Establishing a Culture of Intercultural Education: Essays and Papers in Honour of
Jagdish Gundara, edited by Leslie Bash and David Coulby, 121–53. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Part I
KNOWLEDGE

Chapter 1
Social Mobilizations and Official
Knowledge
Michael W. Apple

Whose culture, whose knowledge?
From the early 1970s onwards, the issues surrounding the politics of
knowledge have been a major concern of the sociology of curriculum.
The work of Geoff Whitty was central to the development of this
tradition both theoretically and empirically (Whitty 1985; Whitty and
Young 1977), as were the analyses of people such as Bernstein (1977),
Bourdieu (1984), Young (1971), and myself (Apple 2019). At the very
core of this work is the commitment to the idea that interrogating what
counts as ‘legitimate’ or ‘high status’ culture, and making visible the
struggles over transforming it, are essential to building thick democratic
educational institutions both in the content of what is taught and how
it is taught, as well as in who makes the decisions about these issues. In
many ways, it connects directly to both a Gramscian argument that in a
‘war of position’ cultural struggles count in crucial ways (Gramsci 1971;
see also Apple 2013) and Nancy Fraser’s arguments about the significance of a politics of recognition as well as a politics of redistribution
(Fraser 1997) in significant movements toward social change.
Few words in the English language are more complex than culture.
Its history is interesting. It derives from ‘coulter’, a word originally
used to name the blade of a plough. Thus, it has its roots literally in the
concept of farming – or better yet, ‘cultivation’ (Eagleton 2000: 1). The
British cultural scholar Raymond Williams reminded us that ‘culture is
ordinary’. By this, he meant that there was a danger that by restricting
the idea of culture to intellectual life, the arts and ‘refinement’, we risk

13

excluding the working class, the poor, the culturally disenfranchised,
the racialized ‘Other’ and diasporic populations from the category of
cultured (Williams 1958; see also Hall 2016; Williams 1976, 1982).
HoSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
wever, even with Williams’s caution, and even with its broader
farming roots, culture has very often been associated with a particular
kind of cultivation – that of refined pursuits, a kind of specialness that
needs to be honed. And it is seen to be best found in those populations
that already possess the dispositions and values that make them more
able to appreciate what is considered to be the best that society has to
offer. Culture then is what is found in the more pristine appreciations
and values of those above the rest of us. Those lower can be taught such
appreciations, but it is very hard and at times expensive work both on the
part of those who seek to impart this to society’s Others and even harder
work for those ‘not yet worthy’ people who are to be taught such refined
dispositions, values and appreciations. This sense of culture then carries
with it something of an imperialist project (Eagleton 2000: 46). As many
readers may know, this project has a long history in museums, in science
and the arts, and definitely in schools and their curricula.
Given this history, as you might imagine, the very idea of culture
has been a source of considerable and continuing controversy over its
assumptions, its cultural politics, its view of the differential worth of
various people in society and over who has the right to name something
as ‘culture’ in the first place. As you might also imagine, there is an equally
long history of resistance to dominant understandings of ‘legitimate’
culture and an extensive literature in cultural studies, in social science
and in critical education that has taken these issues seriously (see,
e.g., Apple 2013; Apple et al. 2009; Clarke et al. 1979; Eagleton 2000;
Nelson and Grossberg 1988; Said 1993, 1994). The critical sociology of
curriculum is both a stimulus to and a product of this history. Indeed,
it is hard to fully understand Geoff Whitty’s (1985) contribution to
documenting the nature of these debates within education without also
connecting it to these larger issues.
One of the most significant advances that have been made in
education is the transformation of the question of ‘What knowledge is of
most worth?’ into ‘Whose knowledge is of most worth?’ This rewording
is not simply a linguistic issue. While we need to be careful in not
assuming that there is always a one-to-one correspondence between
‘legitimate’ knowledge and groups in power, in changing the focus the
question asks that we engage in a radical transformation of our ways
of thinking about the connections between what counts as important
knowledge in educational institutions and in the larger society and the

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existing relations of domination and subordination and struggles against
these relations. As I have documented, because it is a site of conflict
and struggle, ‘legitimate’ or ‘official’ knowledge is often a compromise,
not simply an imposition of dominant knowledge, values and dispos­
itions. Indeed, hegemonic blocs are often required to compromise in
order to generate consent and exert leadership (Apple 2014). All of this
has crucial implications for understanding what we choose to teach,
how we teach it and what values and identities underpin such choices
(Apple 2014).
Just as importantly, the question also demands that one word in
the final sentence be problematized – the word we. Who is the ‘we’? What
groups arrogate the centre to themselves, thereby seeing another group
as The Other? That word – ‘we’ – often symbolizes the manner in which
ideological forces and assumptions work inside and outside of education.
Especially when employed by dominant groups, ‘we’ functions as a
mechanism not only of inclusion, but powerfully of exclusion as well. It
is a verb that masquerades as a noun, in a manner similar to the word
‘minority’ or ‘slave’. No one is a ‘minority’. Someone must make another
a minority; someone or some group must minoritize another person
and group, in the same way that noSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
one can be fully known as a slave.
Someone or some group must enslave someone else.
Ignoring this understanding cuts us off from seeing the often-ugly
realities of a society and its history. Perhaps even more crucially, it also
cuts us off from the immensely valuable historical and current struggles
against the gendered/sexed, classed and raced processes of dehumanization. By severing the connections between nouns and verbs, it makes
invisible the actions and actors that make dominance seem normal. It
creates a vacant space that is all too often filled with dominant meanings
and identities.
These points may seem too abstract. But behind them is something
that lies at the heart of being critically democratic educators. A major
role they must play is to articulate both a vision and the reality of the fully
engaged critical scholar and educator, someone who refuses to accept an
education that does not simultaneously challenge the unreflective ‘we’
and also illuminates the path to a new politics of voice and recognition
in education. The task is to give embodied examples of critical analyses
and of a more robust sense of socially informed educational action as it
is actually lived out by real people, including committed educators and
cultural workers in the complex politics at multiple levels of education,
even when there predictably are tensions and contradictions. Geoff
Whitty was always deeply concerned with these complex politics at

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15

multiple levels, especially but not only in terms of the issues surrounding
policies involved in what should be taught, what counts as successful
teaching, how is it assessed and who should decide (see, e.g., Whitty
et al. 2016).
Of course, this concern is not new. Teachers, social activists
and scholars in multiple disciplines have spent years challenging the
boundaries of that usually unexamined space of the ‘we’ and resisting
the knowledge, perspectives, epistemological assumptions and accepted
voices that underpin them. There was no time when resistance, both
overt and covert, was not present (Berrey 2015). This is especially the
case in education, a field where the issues surrounding what and whose
knowledge should be taught and how it should be taught are taken very
seriously, especially by those people who are not included in the ways
in which dominant groups define that oh-so-dangerous word of ‘we’
(Au et al. 2016; Apple and Au 2014; Warmington 2014; Apple 2013).
Yet, there is another reason that the issues surrounding the
curriculum are central here. For all of the well-deserved attention that
is given to neoliberal agendas and policies, to privatization and choice
plans, to audit cultures and standardization, we must continue to pay
just as much attention to the actual stuff that is taught – and the ‘absent
presences’ (Macherey 2006) of what is not taught – in schools, as well as
to the concrete experiences of those who live and work in those buildings
called schools. Documenting and understanding these lived realities are
crucial to an interruptive strategy and to making connections between
these experiences and the possibilities of building and defending
something so much better. They are also crucial in building counterhegemonic alliances that create and defend alternatives to dominant
assumptions, policies and practices in education and the larger society.
This is not a utopian vision. There are very real instances of the successful
building of such alliances, of constructing a more inclusive ‘we’, ones that
show the power of connecting multiple groups of teachers, students,
parents and community members around an issue that they share. The
conflicts over school knowledge often play a key role here. And that is a
major focus of the two examples I give in the later sections of this chapter.

Knowledge and progressive mobilizations
First, let me make some general points. One of the most significant areas
that remain understudied is the complex role of struggles over what
counts asSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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‘legitimate knowledge’ in the formation of social mobilizations.

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Yet this phenomenon is crucial to the debates over whether education
has a role to play in social transformation (see, e.g., Apple et al. 2018;
Apple 2013). In the next section of this chapter, I examine the place of
conflicts over official knowledge in the formation of counter-hegemonic
movements. I pay particular attention to some examples of student and
community mobilizations in the United States to defend progressive
curricula and to build alliances that counter rightist gains.
It is worth stressing again that these examples of the politics of
culture and identity surrounding schooling document the significance of
curriculum struggles in the formation of both hegemonic and counterhegemonic movements. As I noted above, the fact that there is all too
often an absence of in-depth analyses of what is and is not actually
taught, of the politics of ‘official knowledge’ (Apple 2014) in so many
critical discussions of the role of neoliberalism in education is notable.
We simply cannot grasp the reasons why so many people are convinced
to come under the ideological leadership of dominant groups – or act to
resist such leadership – if we do not give a prime place to the struggle
over meanings in the formation of identity. This also makes Geoff
Whitty’s earlier work on the sociology of school knowledge such a lasting
contribution.
Social movements – both progressive and retrogressive – often
form around issues that are central to people’s identities, cultures and
histories (Apple 2013; Giugni et al. 1999; see also Binder 2002). More
attention theoretically, historically and empirically to the centrality of
such struggles could provide more nuanced approaches to the reasons
various aspects of conservative modernizing positions are found
compelling, and just as importantly to the ways in which movements that
interrupt neoliberal agendas have been and can be built (Apple 2013).
The importance of this is again clearly visible in the two analyses
that follow of mobilizations against rightist efforts to move the content
of the curriculum in very conservative and often racist directions. The
first alliance was built in response to the conservative takeover of a
local elected school board in the western part of the United States. It
galvanized students, teachers, parents and other community groups
to not only overturn some very conservative curricular decisions, but
also resulted in the election of a more progressive school board. Both
neoliberal and neoconservative policies were challenged successfully,
in spite of the fact that the conservative majority of the school board
had received a large amount of financial and ideological support by the
Koch brothers-backed group Americans for Prosperity, one of the most

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powerful and well-funded rightist organizations in the United States
(see, e.g., Schirmer and Apple 2016).
The second example focuses on the role of students in the struggle
over racist policies of incarceration and funding cuts in education.
Here the students employed what is usually seen as ‘elite knowledge’ to
interrupt dominant policies and to build a larger alliance. At the same
time, they successfully challenged not only educational decisions, but
the normalization of the racializing underpinnings of the ‘carceral state’
(Alexander 2012; Foucault 1977). Let us now turn to the examples.

Students in the lead
In the United States, conservative organizations have increasingly
focused their efforts on the local state. In the late summer of 2015, field
organizers for the well-funded and powerful right-wing group Americans
for Prosperity marched through the streets of Jefferson County, Colorado
(known as Jeffco), knocking on doors and leafleting voters about the
upcoming school board recall election. Jeffco had become deeply tangled
in political battles, and the school board became a key site for theSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
se
struggles. Jeffco had a mix of conservative and liberal tendencies. This
mix was important outside as well as inside the town. In such a political
context, skirmishes between conservative and progressive forces were
considered predictive for the rest of the state. As one political analyst told
news reporters, ‘As Jefferson County goes so goes the state of Colorado,
that’s why the stakes are so high here because it is a leading indicator
or a bellwether. . . . It is ground zero for all kinds of political wars but at
the moment that political war is over the public education system’ (CBS
Denver 2015).
In 2013 three conservative school board members gained control
of the Jeffco school board, and immediately pushed forward a series of
controversial educational policies. First, the school board recruited and
hired a new superintendent, whose starting salary of $280,000 a year
– one of the highest paid education employees in the state – provoked
public consternation (Garcia 2014b). Second, the conservative school
board and superintendent expanded school choice models by increasing
funding for additional charter schools and requiring that private and
public charter schools receive equal per-pupil funding as public schools
(Garcia 2014a). Third, the school board disbanded the union-approved
teacher pay salary scale and instead implemented a highly controversial
performance-based pay compensation model.

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The final straw in the school district, however, was when the newly
conservative board ordered changes to the school district’s Advanced
Placement U.S. History curriculum to promote more ‘positive’ aspects of
national heritage by eliminating histories of US social movements. The
curriculum changes were designed to ‘promote citizenship, patriotism,
essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority
and respect for individual rights’ while minimizing and discouraging
the role of ‘civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law’ (CBS News
2014).
This last ‘reform’ – the attack on more progressive elements in the
curriculum – provided the spark that turned into a fire that could not be
controlled by the Right. In response to the curriculum changes, hundreds
of students walked out of six high schools in the district in protest.
Marching and carrying signs with slogans such as ‘There is nothing
more patriotic than protest’, ‘People didn’t die so we could erase them’,
‘My education is not your political agenda’ and ‘I got 99 problems and
the B.O.E. is all of them’, the students’ demonstrations caught national
attention.
The effects of this spread not only to an increasing number of
students, but also to the district’s teachers and the community. The
students’ willingness to mobilize inspired teachers to conduct a two-day
sick-out in protest of the changes to their pay scales, which would now
implement performance-related pay for teachers based on students’
standardized test performance. This change frustrated many teachers,
who believed such compensation models were not only disproved by
research, but also damaged the collaboration and mentorship necessary
for effective teaching (Robles 2015). Parents also began to organize,
creating an online petition that garnered tens of thousands of signatures
from around the country.
Fed up with the curricular changes as well as a lack of investment
in important school programmes, like defunding an all-day kindergarten for ‘at-risk’ students, a group of parents, teachers and community
members organized a recall election of the three conservative school
board members. The grassroots recall election triggered the interest
of Americans for Prosperity. Determined to support the conservative candidates and defeat the community recall effort, Americans for
Prosperity spent over $180,000 (a very large amount for a local school
board race) on their opposition campaign, paying for flyers, door
knocking and a $70,000 television ad. As the Colorado state direSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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ctor of
Americans for Prosperity candidly declared, ‘We advocate competition.
Education shouldn’t be different’; ‘Competition really raises the quality

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of education. . . . Where you get the best solutions is through free market
principles’ (Robles 2015). Despite their heavily financed campaign
to protect the conservative school board, the efforts of Americans
for Prosperity were not successful. In November 2015, all three of the
conservative candidates were recalled. This defeat became a symbol of
progressive potential for many other communities throughout the nation.
While this seems like simply a small ‘local’ defeat, in many ways
Jeffco constitutes a test case for the conservative movement’s focus not
only on national and state-wide rightist elections, but increasingly on
local mobilizations. Jeffco was a politically mixed school district that
faced neoliberal education reform agendas: high-paid administrators,
expanding school choice policies at the expense of educational equity,
changes to teachers’ employment rights and diminished community
morale. In the district, progressives mounted opposition campaigns to the
conservative policy regime of the school board. In response to organized
progressive activism, Americans for Prosperity poured more funds into
the conservative campaigns in the district. Yet, unlike a number of other
high-profile school districts, progressives in Jeffco successfully defeated
the conservatives (see Apple et al. 2018; Schirmer and Apple 2016). Why
did such a well-funded rightist campaign lose in Jeffco?
Three key elements exist in the struggles in Jeffco. First, conservative forces in Jeffco focused their vision on key educational policy
forms (such as teachers’ contracts and school choice proposals), but
also on such issues as educational content itself – the knowledge, values
and stories that get taught in schools. This recognition of the cultural
struggles at stake in educational policy signalled their engagement
in a deeper level of ideological reformation. By overtly restricting the
curriculum to supposed ‘patriotic’ narratives and excluding histories of
protest and injustice, the conservative school board majority attempted
to exercise their power to create ideological dominance. Yet, despite
the school board’s attempt to control the social narratives of meaning,
they missed a key component of ideological formation: meaning is
neither necessarily objective nor intrinsic, and therefore cannot simply
be delivered by school boards or other powers, no matter the amount
of campaign financings. Rather, meaning is constantly being constructed
and co-constructed, determined by its social surroundings.
In the case of Jeffco, this meant that students’ response to the
curricular changes became very significant. Students’ organized
resistance became a leading and highly visible cause. One of its major
effects was that it also encouraged teachers to mobilize against the
school board. This is the second key element in Jeffco. In Jeffco, both

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students and teachers alike engaged in direct actions of protest and,
importantly, exit. Students walked out of school; teachers withheld
their labour in coordinated sick-outs. As social movement scholars
inform us, the most significant impacts of social movements are often
not immediate changes to social policy or programmes, but rather the
personal consequences of participating in activism. Once engaged with
networks of other activists, participants have both attitudinal willingness
and structural resources and skills to again participate in other activist
efforts (e.g. McAdam 1989). Organizing and participating in a series of
effective walkouts created activist identities for Jeffco high schoolers.
Cultural struggles over what should be taught, struggles that were close
to home for students and parents, galvanized action. This has important
implications for how we think about what kinds of stSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
ruggles can generate
progressive transformations. As I noted earlier, and as Nancy Fraser
reminds us, a politics of recognition as well as a politics of redistribution
is crucial (Fraser 1997; see also Apple 2013).
Finally, supporters of public education in Jeffco were able to
develop a coalition around multiple issues: curricula, teachers’ compensation models and school choice. This mobilized a coalition that had
sufficient popular support and power to successfully recall the conservative candidates. Thus, progressives in Jeffco were able to form a powerful
alliance that addressed multiple registers of the impending conservative reforms. This is truly significant since in other similar places it was
conservatives who formed such alliances (Schirmer and Apple 2016).
The creation of what I have elsewhere called ‘decentred unities’ (Apple
2013) provided the social glue and cooperative forms of support that
countered rightist money.
The failure of the Right in Jeffco reveals some key lessons in the
strategies of rightist movements. As I pointed out, the Right has shown
a growing commitment to small political spaces, and the political
persistence necessary to take control of them. There are now many
examples where the Right has successfully occupied micro political
spaces by waging lawsuits against the liberal school boards, running
political candidates to take over local school boards and providing large
amounts of financial support for these candidates. We also know that
conservative movements offer identities that provide attractive forms
of agency to many people. In the process, these movements engage in a
form of social pedagogy, creating a hegemonic umbrella that effectively
combines multiple ideological elements to form a more unified movement
(Schirmer and Apple 2016; Apple 2006).

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But as the example of Jeffco demonstrates, the Right is not alone
in understanding this. In Jeffco, this creative stitching together of new
activist identities into a united movement was crucial. Stimulated by
student protests against the attacks on progressive elements within the
curriculum, a series of issues that could have divided people into separate
constituencies instead united students with parents and teachers around
curricular changes, anti-school choice plans and against merit pay
for teachers. Whether this alliance can last is an open question. But
there can be no doubt that the initiative taken by students to challenge
conservative attempts to redefine ‘official knowledge’ played a crucial
role creating new more activist identities, for students and others. The
leadership of students was a key driver.

Elite knowledge, racialization and the (in)justice system
The above example of Jeffco directs our attention to the local level
and to issues internal to schools. But there are other examples of how
progressive alliances can be built that start out with a focus on school
knowledge but extend their effects well beyond the school system to the
larger society. These alliances may start with educational action and then
spread out to other institutions and groups in important ways. And once
again, students have often been at the centre. The movement by students
in Baltimore to interrupt the all too visible school-to-prison pipeline is a
significant example here (see Alexander 2012).
Baltimore is one of the poorest cities in the United States. It is
highly segregated by race; it has extremely high rates of impoverishment and unemployment among minoritized communities, and among
the highest rates of incarceration of people of colour in the nation. The
city and state were faced with predictable economic turmoil due to the
fiscal crisis of the state in a time of capital flight and the racial specificities of capital’s evacuation of its social responsibilities to the urban core.
As very necessary social programmes were being cut, money that would
have gone to such programmes was in essence being transferred to what
is best thought of as the (in)justice Syntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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system. In this case, a large amount
of public money was to be spent on the construction of a new detention
facility for ‘juvenile offenders’. The unstated choice was ‘jail’ or social and
educational programmes. And the choice increasingly seemed to be jail.
This meant that educational funding for the development of
innovative and more culturally responsive school programmes, teachers,
community outreach and building maintenance – the entire range of

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things that make schooling an investment in poor youth in particular –
were under even more threat than usual. In this example again, youth
mobilization was a central driving force in acting against this neoliberal
and racializing agenda (Farooq 2012).
Student activists within minoritized communities in that city
pressed forward with a campaign to block the construction of the youth
detention facility. A key here is a curriculum project – the Algebra Project
– that was created as an effort to equip marginalized poor youth of colour
with ‘academic’ knowledge that is usually denied to them, especially
high-status mathematical knowledge such as algebra and similar
subjects (Moses and Cobb 2002). The Algebra Project has developed a
national reputation for its hard work in pressing for responsive models
of curriculum and teaching in a subject – mathematics – that has been
a very real sorting device that actively marginalizes and segregates all
too many youths of colour. While the project is controversial within some
segments of oppressed communities, there can be no doubt about its
fundamental commitment to providing a transformative education to
youth of colour (Moses and Cobb 2002). The similarities between the
goals of this approach and Antonio Gramsci’s position that oppressed
people must have both the right and the means to reappropriate elite
knowledge are very visible (see Apple 1996).
When public funding for the Algebra Project in which the students
participated was threatened, the leaders of the project urged students
to ‘advocate on their own behalf’. This continued a vital tradition in
which the Algebra Project itself had aggressively (and appropriately and
creatively) pushed state lawmakers ‘to release about $1 billion in court
mandated education funding, engaging in civil disobedience, student
strikes and street theater to drive home its message: “No education, no
life”’ (Farooq 2012: 5).
Beginning in 2010 the students engaged in a campaign to block
the building of the detention centre. They were all too familiar with the
tragic and strikingly unequal rates of arrests and incarcerations within
black and brown communities compared to dominant populations. They
each knew first-hand about the nature of police violence, about what
happened in such juvenile ‘jails’, and the implications of such rates of
arrest and violence on their own and their community’s and family’s
futures.
Using their mathematical skills and understanding that had been
developed in the project, they engaged in activist-oriented research
demonstrating that youth crime had actually dropped precipitously in
Baltimore. Thus, these and other facts were on their side. Coalitions

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against the detention centre were formed, including an alliance with
community groups, with critical journalists and with the Occupy
Baltimore movement. The proposed construction site was occupied.
And even with dispersals and arrests, ‘daily civil disobedience and
teach-ins persisted’ (Farooq 2012: 5). All of this generated a good deal
of public attention and had the additional effect of undercutting the
all too common and persistent racist stereotypes of youth of colour as
uncaring, irresponsible, unknowledgeable and as uninvolved in their
education. The coalition’s persistence paid off. The 2013 state budget did
not include funding for yet another youth prison (Farooq 2012: 5). But
the activist identities developed by the students remained.
ThSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
e implications of this example are clear. The campaign grew
from the Algebra Project and its programme of reconstituting knowledge,
what it means to know and who are seen as knowers. It then led to
enhanced understandings of oppressive realities and misplaced budget
priorities, to activist identities, to committed action, to alliance building,
recursively back to even more committed action and then to success. Like
the previous example from Jeffco, it was students who took control of
their own lives and their lived experiences, this time with an oppressive
(in)justice system that incarcerated large numbers of the community’s
youth.
Once again, among the most important actors were the students.
Their mobilization and leadership were based not only on the larger
concerns with the claims of neoliberalism. Rather the radical changes
that the conservatives wanted to make that would limit the possibil­
ities of serious and progressive engagement with important and often
denied subject matter also drove the students to act. Clearly, then, the
curriculum itself can be and is a primary focus of educational struggles,
and is exactly what can be seen in the struggle by the youth of colour
involved in the Algebra Project in Baltimore when they employed that
project and its knowledge to create alliances and to successfully stop
the building of a new juvenile prison there. A form of knowledge that
was usually seen as ‘useless’ and simply the knowledge of elites was
connected to the lived realities of youth in a manner that enabled them
to become activists of their own lives (Apple 2013).

Conclusion
Like me, Geoff Whitty consistently grounded his work in the belief that
it is absolutely crucial to understand the social realities of schooling

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(see, e.g., Whitty 2002). What is happening today makes these analyses
even more significant. As I have shown, it is not neoliberalism and its
attendant policy initiatives alone that are changing our commonsense
about education. Indeed, it is a major error to reduce our critical analyses
of education to simply being a reflection of one set of tendencies within a
dominant hegemonic bloc (Apple 2006, 2014).
In expanding our focus, in this chapter I have chosen to focus on
struggles over ‘culture’, over what counts as ‘official knowledge’ in schools
and over its uses inside the school, but also in assisting and generating
mobilizations against dominant policies and practices. There can be no
doubt that Geoff believed very strongly that we have an ethical obligation
to challenge these dominant policies and practices and that it is crucial to
defend a robust education that is based on human flourishing.
As I noted, these kinds of issues were central to Geoff’s work on the
politics of school knowledge (Whitty 1985). In fact, he was a chronicler
of these tensions and issues in multiple books and articles.
But for those of us engaged in critical social and cultural research,
one other question has stood behind each of these other issues. It is the
central organizing question that gives meaning to these others. Indeed,
it is the basic issue that guides any critical education and especially
the critical sociology of education. Can schools change society? This is
the fundamental question that has guided almost all of my books and
much of the political and educational action of many critical educators
throughout the world. I do not think that we can understand much of
Geoff’s lifetime of work without understanding his dedication to helping
us understand what this means to critical educational theory, research,
policy and practice.
The two examples I gave in this chapter signify the continuing
search to answer this question in the affirmative. As I argue in Can
Education Change Society? (Apple 2013), schools are key parts of society,
not something that stand outside of it. Struggling over ‘legitimate’
culture, over educators’ labour processes, over privatization and so much
more is struggling over society. Anything less risks aSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
ccepting cynicism
and despair. In my many discussions with Geoff over the decades of our
friendship, his commitment to fight against such cynicism and despair
was visible.
But he was not a romantic. Indeed, from the very beginning he
warned against the ‘romantic possibilitarian’ tendencies of the Left
(Whitty 1974). Instead, he believed that our ‘journey of hope’ must be
grounded in our own continual development of serious knowledge of the
concrete ways in which our attempts to build a more socially critical and

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responsive education always occurs in a social and cultural field whose
traditions and realities offer both limits and possibilities. And he spent
much of his life offering us examples of the kinds of knowledge needed to
engage with these realities. Here too, his own ‘struggle over knowledge’
was important not only for him, but to us as well. One of the best ways to
honour Geoff is to continue to ask and answer the questions surrounding
the politics of knowledge inside and outside of education.

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Garcia, Nic. 2014a. ‘In Split Vote, Jeffco Board Hires New Superintendent’, Chalkbeat, 27  May.
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Garcia, Nic. 2014b. ‘Jeffco Board Majority OKs Tentative Compensation Plan for Teachers’,
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co/2014/09/04/jeffco-board-majority-oks-tentative-compensation-plan-for-teachers/.
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Chapter 2
Sex, Sexuality and HIV: ‘Education’,
in the Broadest Sense of the Word
Peter Aggleton

I first met Geoff Whitty in 1977 in the basement of a bar in Bath called The
Huntsman. I had been appointed to a lectureship in teacher education at
what was then the City of Bath Technical College having just completed a
postgraduate degree in education at the University of Aberdeen, where I
had been taught by John Nisbet.
I was taken to the bar by one of the Postgraduate Certificate
of Education students placed with me that year at the college. She
introduced me to the other students and to Geoff who was sitting with
them, as relaxed as anything, listening and sharing his thoughts. We
talked for a bit. At some point, he asked whether I had thought of doing
another degree, a PhD, and I replied, no, not really – until I found a ‘good’
supervisor. HeSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
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looked at me quizzically and both he and I never forgot
that conversation. In retrospect, it may have sounded slightly offhand to
speak in this way, but at the time I was somewhat tongue-tied and in
awe. I have always been shy, as I was later to learn that Geoff was too,
and shyness can sometimes cause the wrong things to be said.
While studying in Aberdeen I had come across two of Geoff’s
books in the library – the first was entitled Explorations in the Politics
of School Knowledge (Nafferton, 1976), edited by Geoff and Michael
Young, and the second was another collection entitled Society, State
and Schooling: Readings on the Possibilities for Radical Education (Falmer
Press, 1977) edited this time by Michael and Geoff, in that order. Both
books opened my mind dramatically, to the political nature of knowledge
and to the politics of education and schooling. If pushed to identify
myself in disciplinary terms, I had hitherto seen myself as a psychologist,

28

although I had taught sociology and other subjects at a further education
college in Worthing before travelling north to Aberdeen, but this was to
be a new awakening.
Both at the time and in retrospect, it was the passion evident in
both of these books that most appealed to me. The writing itself was at
times difficult to understand but the values that underpinned it were
clear: we live in a profoundly unequal world and inequalities (of class,
gender, race, etc.) are not inevitable, nor are they fair. Instead, they call
to be identified, understood and remedied. Perhaps for the first time, but
not for the last, I came to understand that good quality social research
is, and must always be, value-informed – and the particular set of values
that one adheres to really does matter.
After a short while teaching craft caterers, stonemasons, motor
vehicle apprentices and others at ‘Bath Tech’, as it was affectionately
known, I plucked up courage to approach Geoff and asked to be registered
as one of his students. At the time, he was very much involved in writing
and teaching the Open University’s Schooling and Society course, taking
forward with others many of the ideas contained in the aforementioned
two books. I was teaching the Open University’s foundation course in
social science at the same time and my understanding of sociology had
grown; we met on various occasions and I began my doctorate with him,
part-time, looking at issues of cultural and social reproduction among
young people studying in further education.
After gaining an award for full-time study and after Geoff himself
had moved to King’s College in London, I finished the degree there –
with Geoff as my supervisor and Basil Bernstein as mentor to us both.
It was a challenging experience and one that affected me deeply – intellectually, socially and in terms of gender and sexuality. No longer could
I see the world in the terms promoted by individual psychology. People
both personally and collectively may have a degree of agency, but they
exercise this within contexts determined by history, limiting possibilities
and, for many, introducing very real constraints. It was the structured
nature of these inequalities that interested me most. I found myself
wondering, where do they come from, what purpose do they serve, and
how can we change things for the better?
I continued to work at the technical college in Bath until 1984
when I was offered a position as a lecturer in sociology at Bath College
of Higher Education. One year later, in 1985, I was appointed to the
full-time staff in the Department of Education at Bristol Polytechnic. I
had worked there part-time for about five years, teaching on a certificate
course for teachers in adult and further education, but when Geoff

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29

moved from London to become head of department, I became full time.
Together with Len Barton, Gill Crozier, David Halpin, Andrew Pollard,
David James and many others, we became pioneers of a kind, putting
into practice what we felt was right for late twentieth-century teacher
educatSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
ion, seizing the numerous opportunities the Thatcher government
perversely provided us with, and transforming the polytechnic’s hitherto
somewhat conservative teacher training department into the radical
new set-up it became.
Scarcely two years passed though when the world was shaken by the
advent of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) – an incurable
disease which, in the West at least, was seen primarily to affect gay
men, sex workers and people who injected drugs. There was no effective
treatment and, for some time after the first cases were diagnosed, no
clear understanding of the condition’s aetiology. Panic set in. In the UK,
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and in the USA, President Ronald
Reagan, among others, viewed the disease as an opportunity to reclaim
a supposedly lost morality. Thatcher attempted to ban the first national
survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles, claiming that the average British
household would be affronted to be asked questions about sex, while
Reagan was US president for nearly five years before he uttered the word
‘AIDS’ in public, and engaged with a health crisis that would kill more
than half a million people in the USA.
Others were more circumspect, especially after a viral cause in
the form of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was identified
and cases of AIDS were diagnosed among people with haemophilia and
blood transfusion recipients and among a wide range of adults (and later
children) in the countries of the Global South. Into the vacuum created by
government inaction stepped a host of new social actors, including wellmeaning clergy and other religious leaders; physicians and nurses who
had cared for some of the first people to be affected by HIV; lesbian, gay
and bisexual community groups; HIV activists; social and behavioural
researchers; and many others. The beginnings of the fightback had
begun, with people and affected communities taking matters into their
own hands. Where governments and national authorities feared to
tread, gay men, lesbians, sex workers, drugs workers and others took the
lead, founding one the most effective social movements for change the
twentieth century was to see.
But what did teacher education do? Nationally in Britain, very
little, since few teacher educators wanted to claim special expertise in
responding to an issue that seemed to affect sexual and social minorities,
and others felt it quite improper for children in schools to be taught

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anything about sex and drug use. A combination of denial, refusal,
embarrassment and shame stalked the corridors of many a teacher
training institution. Even well-established health education courses in
England preferred to stick with talking about diet, nutrition, smoking
and physical activity than engage with an epidemic that raised questions
about sex, sexuality and drug injection.
Geoff took a quite different view. Seeing HIV as being as much
a social issue as a medical one, and viewing the manner in which the
epidemiology of the epidemic played unwaveringly into the fissures and
fractures of an unequal world, here was an opportunity to more properly
understand and make a difference through education. Together, we
were lucky in winning a series of major research contracts at Bristol
Polytechnic, initially from agencies such as the Health Education
Authority (created in 1987 from the earlier Health Education Council
as a special health authority with a specific remit to tackle AIDS) and
charities such as the AIDS Education Research Trust (AVERT) but later
from a variety of government departments. One of the first projects we
worked on was an evaluation of the government’s AIDS: Your Choice for
Life video resource for schools. I recruited Marilyn Toft, who had been
working as a teacher at Hartcliffe School in Bristol, to lead the work and
we began a collaboration that lasts until this day.
But the early years of the HIV epidemic were tough and called
for stamina and diplomacy in considerable quantities. Some of the key
issues coSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
ncerned the messages that needed to be promoted as part of
an evidence-informed response to the epidemic. Conservative morality
was everywhere at the time. Books on sex and sexuality (both same-sex
sexuality and otherwise) were hard to obtain other than through
specialist booksellers such as Gay’s the Word in London. Her Majesty’s
Customs and Excise intercepted, delayed and sometimes destroyed
imported material from the USA on topics such as anal sex, which were
deemed inappropriate or obscene. And if they were not intercepted at
the border, such materials could be intercepted by the institution where
you worked! I recall one day Geoff bringing over to my office a parcel of
books containing copies of the Joy of Gay Sex and the Joy of Lesbian Sex,
which had been placed on his (the head of department’s) desk already
opened by a well-meaning administrator with a note asking, ‘Is this really
suitable for a Department of Education?’ On another occasion, he had to
confront a senior member of staff who came to his office to express the
view that it would damage the polytechnic’s relationship with primary
schools were it to become too widely known about that the department
was working on education about AIDS.

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In the face of such adversity, Geoff’s commitment to issues of sex,
sexuality, drug use, education and health was unwavering. He let it be
known that the work would continue and indeed expand, that Bristol
Polytechnic’s Department of Education would host the 1st National
Conference on the Social Aspects of AIDS in September 1986, and that
new accommodation would be found for the rapidly growing research
and development team. Within a very short period of time, this team had
increased in number to around 20 in total with its work contributing to
nearly 70 per cent of the department’s research income at the time.
But from time to time a different kind of support was needed, and
in the provision of this Geoff was a rock to be relied upon. In my earlier
research with young people, I had learned from Geoff and other writers
such as John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, Angela McRobbie and
Paul Gilroy that the outcomes of any ‘fightback’ could be contradictory
and to a degree unpredictable. Subcultural resistance, for example,
could contribute to the reproduction of class, gender and racial inequal­
ities in a very profound way, and the youth ‘revolutions’ of the 1960s and
1970s were as much about individualization and personal struggle as
they were about social change. So it was with HIV and AIDS. As senior
politicians and government officials (including within the Department of
Health in London) sought to suppress and repress, so the reaction grew.
Under the influence of efforts to shut it up and keep it quiet, sexuality
was let of out the box in a way it never had been – as something that was
there, all around us in a sense, calling for attention. The personal and
political were never more intertwined, as sexual and gender minorities,
sex workers and drug users, struggled together with straight friends and
allies to confront the stereotypes and prejudices that the HIV epidemic
had unleashed.
While for some this was all too much, for others it provided the
opportunity to tackle broader issues such as the rights of lesbian and
gay teachers in polytechnic and university departments of education.
Marjorie Smith, who was then a special needs lecturer at Bristol
Polytechnic, led the charge, supported by students and a variety of
colleagues, calling for its Department of Education to take a public stance
on the matter. While her actions and those of the group she represented
triggered a more wide-ranging equalities review within the department,
they created freedoms and a change of climate that were a harbinger
of things to come. I myself was able to come out as an openly gay man
working in a senior role in a well-respected institute of teacher education,
something that had not been possible before. I smile now when I recall
being asked, ‘Are you a married manSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
Syntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
?’, during an earlier interview at

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another institution. In near terror, I said nothing; such was the silence
and fear at that time. Much had changed since then of course, some of
it under the influence of the pressure for structural change triggered by
HIV, but some of it as the result of individual acts of agency by kind and
forward-looking individuals such as Geoff himself. It should be noted
that Geoff’s care for others extended well beyond the institution in which
he worked, and he would often be there for friends who were navigating
difficult personal circumstances. It was well beyond the call of duty for
him to be involved, but he did what he felt right, with compassion and
understanding at all times.
I learned much about both the personal and the political from
Geoff: through the articles and books he encouraged me to read, through
the writing we did together and through the professional interventions
we made locally and nationally. Being a gay man in teacher education
was and is not easy – too many stereotypes (and the odd unhelpful
individual) abound – and the cloak of victimhood is too easily assumed.
As with all inequalities – of gender, class, disability and race – those of
sexuality call for recognition and response in ways that are genuinely
empowering for the persons concerned. We need the strong to stand up
for us, and Geoff did this in no small way, both at Bristol and later at
Goldsmith’s College in London where we took the core of the Bristol HIV
team in 1989 following Geoff’s appointment as Goldsmith’s Professor of
Education Policy and Management.
By now, the interests of the group had expanded to embrace a wide
range of policy and practice considerations. We named the group the
Health and Education Research Unit (HERU) and its members included
Elaine Chase, the late Helen Thomas and Ian Warwick, who had been
with us at Bristol. We recruited an extraordinarily talented group of
support staff and researchers, including Paul Tyrer, Austin TaylorLaybourn, Bridget Sansom (Sojourner) and the late Kim Rivers. With
the passage of time, our work came increasingly to focus on organizational and institutional aspects of HIV, sexuality and health and adopted
a broader international focus. Just like in England, most mainstream
educationalists and health educators, in Europe and elsewhere, had little
to say about HIV when the epidemic first appeared. Its closeness to sex
and sexuality frightened so many of them away.
It was within this space that a new set of researchers, advocates
and practitioners emerged – many of them influenced by close-hand
experience with the epidemic itself; others fired by the desire to do good
in a situation that others eschewed. They were strange times in many
ways – our days were filled with upset and dread, not least because for

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a while some of us feared that, in the eyes of the Thatcher government,
gay men were viewed as ‘disposable in their entirety’ (Watney 2000). But
there was also the excitement of working across disciplines and across
the research, policy and practice divide. Annabel Kanabus, one of the
founders of the HIV education charity AVERT, wrote, ‘It is hard now to
describe what it was like in those early years. The fear, the uncertainty,
the sickness and the deaths. But it also brought together people who had
a common aim of overcoming the problems, people whose lives would
never otherwise have crossed’ (AVERT n.d.)
The alliance between doctors, social scientists, community
workers and activists that would prove so central to the response to
HIV was beginning to take shape, and HERU was central to this work.
While others brought with them their expertise in public health,
community organizing or psychology, what we brought was a distinct­
ively educational stance – not ‘education’ in the limited sense of schools
and schooling but education ‘in its broadest sense’ – as a set of values
and practices concerned with politics and the oSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
pening up of issues for
debate; rights and responsibilities, both individual and collective; and
as a force for good and a power for change. This was the approach to
education that Geoff later pursued after becoming director of the
Institute of Education in London. It involved being committed, politically
astute, strongly theorized, and policy- and practice-relevant, all at the
same time. We began to be noticed and have an impact.
In late 1992 I was invited to join the full-time staff of the World
Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Programme on AIDS, as chief of
social and behavioural studies and support. I took with me into that
environment much of what I had learned from Geoff but gained new
insight into international policymaking and policy change while working
at a high level with governments all over the world. I clung to optimism
in the face of adversity, as had been Geoff’s approach, and was constantly
reminded of the need not to become disillusioned when things did not
go as expected, and when intractable hurdles presented themselves.
Some of the biggest challenges at that time (and to this day) involved
ensuring that understandings of sex, sexuality and relationships remain
culturally and socially informed – by this I mean neither ‘reduced’ to the
‘input-output’ frame of reference characteristic of much of mainstream
public health, nor transformed into risk behaviours and practices as
some psychologists and public health specialists would have it. Instead,
what people do and believe sexually carries meaning – both individually
and culturally – and this must be understood in relation to the time and
place at which it occurs. Understanding these meanings and working

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with them educationally is what HIV prevention, stigma reduction and
the care of people living with and affected by HIV is all about.
Had I never met Geoff, and had I not developed a sociological
imagination through our work together, I might never have understood.
But more than this, Geoff’s commitment to understanding and tackling
inequality opened my eyes to the deeper, more structural forces behind
the global epidemic. People who are marginalized – including sex
workers and drug users, people who are poor, women and girls in many
contexts, people who are racially or ethnically dispossessed or discrim­
inated against, and gender and sexual minorities – all come off worse
in the HIV epidemic. Programmatic intervention therefore demands far
more than the provision of facts, services and skills. Instead, it requires
structural change, of the kind that was by the early 2000s able to make
HIV antiretroviral medication available to countless millions of people
worldwide, at a speed and in a way never believed possible and never
before achieved.
Continuing to work closely with the UN system throughout much
of the 1990s and 2000s, I returned to the UK and to the Institute of
Education, to which Geoff himself had moved, initially as Karl Mannheim
Chair in the Sociology of Education and then later as its director. With my
move to Geneva and Geoff’s change of institution within London, HERU
had been relocated to the Institute of Education and the Department of
Policy Studies. Scarcely had I arrived at the Institute, however, than I
was asked by Peter Mortimore (the then Institute director) to take on the
directorship of the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU), a position I
was to hold for 10 years.
It was within this environment that a set of further skills came into
play, skills that had been acquired first at Bristol and later at the WHO in
Geneva. TCRU’s remit at the time was for the health, care and well-being
of children, young people and their families across family, health, social
care and other settings. The unit was relatively small when I arrived, and
some of its staff felt it odd to be based in an Institute of Education when
much of the unit’s work focused on children, parents and families. During
the first couple of years of my directorship, there was much talk Syntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
Syntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
about
the need to ‘break away’ since the unit’s mission was felt to be so poorly
understood by the Institute’s senior management. All this was to change
however, aided by the election of a New Labour government concerned
to ‘join together’ policies, services and administrative arrangements for
children, young people, families and education that had hitherto been
kept apart.

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TCRU’s major programme of research funded by the Department of
Health came quickly to be complemented by two additional programmes.
Safe Passages to Adulthood, which aimed to promote sexual health and
well-being among young people in developing countries, was funded
by the UK Department for International Development. A collaboration
between the University of Southampton, the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine and the Institute of Education, the programme ran
for seven years in total, with TCRU providing the ‘educational’ backbone
to much of the work. It was later joined by an additional programme
of research funded by the then Department for Children, Schools and
Families (DCSF), which included studies on work and family life led by
Peter Moss and by Julia Brannen, as well as some highly innovative work
on social pedagogy, under the directorship of Pat Petrie. But it was in
fields beyond these specially commissioned departmental programmes
that TCRU’s influence also began to grow. The first three evaluations of
the National Healthy Schools Programme in England (jointly funded
by Department of Health and DCSF) were undertaken from within the
unit and a series of studies (some funded by DCSF itself and led by Ian
Warwick) returned to the theme of sexuality by putting homophobic
bullying in schools on the national agenda. Their legacy was profound
and laid the foundations for the zero-tolerance policy shift endorsed by
all the major UK political parties and that remains in place today.
Although Geoff had not been keen on my move to TCRU so soon
after joining the Institute of Education, he was strongly supportive of all
this work and indeed of the research unit itself after he became Institute
director in 2000. The fact that we were able to undertake high-quality
research so closely aligned to national and international policy agendas
was in some ways a product of its time. The New Labour governments
from the late 1990s until 2010 were remarkable for the partnerships
they built with key academics and the institutions in which they worked.
Subsequent coalition and Conservative governments in the UK have
preferred to keep university researchers at arms-length when it comes to
social policy formulation and implementation.
Internationally, TCRU research at this same time – supported by
Geoff institutionally and intellectually – had tremendous impact. With
funding from the WHO, technical guidance was developed on a broad
range of topics including sexual health promotion and HIV prevention
and care among vulnerable young people. Funding from United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Joint
United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) led to the
development of the first international framework on Education and HIV:

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A Strategic Approach. Support from UNAIDS led to the development (with
Richard Parker at Columbia University, New York) of the conceptual
framework on HIV-related stigma, discrimination and human rights,
which underpinned the 2002 and 2003 World AIDS Campaigns. Work
with UNESCO informed and aided the development of their Technical
Guidance on Sexuality Education, first published in 2009. Such was the
reputation of the Institute of Education, that around the same time the
New York-based Ford Foundation commissioned an ongoing formative
evaluation of its Global Dialogues for Sexual Health (the largest funding
initiative of its kind ever undertaken) from TCRU with myself as its
director. Over the next seven years, extended periods of fieldwork took
place in the USA, Latin America (BSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
Syntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
Syntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
razil, Mexico and Peru), Africa (Egypt,
Nigeria and South Africa), South Asia (India) and South-east Asia
(Vietnam and the Philippines).
In 2009 I left the Institute to take up a new role as inaugural head
of the School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sussex.
I had a house in Brighton, having lived there since the early 1990s, and
the commute to London was taking its toll. But not so long after that I
would be on the move once again.

Australia calls (us both)
Throughout my time at the Institute of Education and at the University of
Sussex I held a visiting professorship in the National Centre in HIV Social
Research at Macquarie University in Sydney and then at the University
of New South Wales (UNSW). In late 2011, I was asked by UNSW to take
up a professorship in education and health. I moved to Australia in early
2012 and currently lead research on topics as diverse as sexual citizenship
among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth;
sex-based sociality and crystal meth among gay men; and love, sex and
relationships among indigenous Australian young people.
By this time, Geoff had retired from the Institute of Education,
becoming director emeritus in 2010. Just a few years later, he was
appointed Global Innovation Chair for Equity in Higher Education at the
University of Newcastle in Australia and we were able to catch up with
one another again. Although we never worked together in Australia, we
met regularly and in his usual way Geoff introduced me both to some
former colleagues and new friends. We always had dinner on each of his
extended visits to Australia. We talked about many things, although I have
learned much more about Geoff since his passing through obituaries,

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37

notes of appreciation and the kind words of others. His life was one of
high standards, high expectations and an unswerving commitment
to social justice. When times were hard or unexpected opportunities
arose, he never shied away from taking finely calculated risks and
making difficult decisions. For me, he was a committed supervisor, an
extraordinary manager and the dearest of friends. I miss him very much
and will continue to do so for years to come.

References
AIDS Education Research Trust. n.d. ‘AIDS and Young People: AIDS Booklets, Schools’. Accessed
8 July 2019. http://avertaids.org/aids-young-people.html.
Watney, Simon. 2000. Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay Identity. London: Routledge.

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Chapter 3
Education for Inclusion or Exclusion:
Representation of Ethnic Minorities
in Chinese Mainstream History
Textbooks
Yan Fei

Note on terminology
China has 55 officially recognized minority ethnic groups who were
identified between the 1950s and 1980s by state-organized groups of
scholars who were trained in the principles of anthropology as officially
promulgated in the Soviet Union under Stalin. According to the latest
census, the combined population of these 55 minority ethnic groups
is about 111 million, 8.35 per cent of the total 1.3 billion (NBS 2010).
The rest of the population is basically the dominant Han ethnic group,
plus several hundreds of thousands of unidentified populations who
disagree with the ethnic identities assigned to them by the government.
In this chapter, I use ‘ethnic minorities’ or ‘minority ethnic groups’ as a
translation of Chinese term shaoshu minzu, although until the early 2000s
the standard translation was the Soviet-style ‘minority nationality’. In my
analysis of history textbooks, however, I also use ‘non-Han’ or ‘non-Han/
Chinese’ to refer to China’s frontier groups in history. This is to avoid
confusion in terminology since many of these groups were not regarded
as Chinese in history (though they are now regarded as the precedents of
China’s ethnic minorities).

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Introduction
In 2018 one of the leading Chinese academic journals on education for
ethnic minorities (minzu jiaoyu yanjiu) published a review of the work
of Michael Apple and Basil Bernstein onSyntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
the sociology of education,
discussing the application of their theories to research into education for
minority ethnic groups in China. In the review, Minhui Qian (2018: 5)
criticizes Chinese researchers who ‘blindly adopted Western theories to
research, understand and interpret education for ethnic minorities in
China’ and contends that ‘there are limits and mismatches’ if Western
theories are used to examine the Chinese situation. Instead, he proposes
to develop theories with ‘native features’ (bentu tedian) to comprehend
and investigate the relationship between ‘official knowledge’, ‘education
for ethnic minorities’ and ‘cultural identity’ in a Chinese context. His key
point is that while concepts such as ‘hegemony’ are useful in understanding how inequality in Western societies is perpetuated, given that the
socialist state in China guarantees equality to every individual citizen
as well as to all ethnic groups, the exercise of such ‘hegemony’ by the
dominant ethnic Han group over minority ethnic groups is precluded
(6–7).
Although this argument may be crude and nonsensical, it is representative of official discourse and is shared by many scholars within
China.1 A typical example is justifying the government’s forceful and
widespread implementation of Chinese language teaching (hanyu, or
the language of the Han group) in schools in minority ethnic regions
using the argument that learning hanyu bears no relation to ‘cultural
assimilation’ or ‘symbolic control’ since hanyu is the national lingua
franca (Qian 2018: 7). Indeed, ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are interchangeable
terms in Chinese (generally translated as the same word, guo-jia, or
‘nation/state-family’), and are often accepted as being neutral or culturefree in China. Consequently, research into minority education in China
has rarely critically examined the content of the national curriculum and
textbooks,2 since the ‘knowledge’ delivered in the national education
system is widely assumed to be ‘neutral’ and ‘scientific’, having an
undoubtedly positive impact on minority ethnic students, and leading to
improved social mobility and integration.
But is this the case? In recent years, numerous studies have argued
a contrary view of minority education in China: in reality, students
from minority ethnic backgrounds often encounter problems in school,
such as academic underperformance and high drop-out rates (Yi 2008;

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Leibold and Chen 2014; Hansen 1999). Even Qian himself, in one of his
previous empirical studies, found that students from minority ethnic
backgrounds often suffered from the ‘cultural bias’ of schoolteachers,
who tended to regard these students as ‘losers’ (Qian 2011: 141–2). Qian
also revealed that these students often developed feelings of ‘inferiority’
due to the cultural obstacles they had experienced in school. Qian
seems to contradict himself here and it is clear from current literature
that schooling in China has resulted in reproducing the disadvantaged
position of many minority ethnic groups in Chinese society.
The question remains, though, as to whether Qian is nevertheless
right in his assertion that ‘Western theories’ on the sociology of education
cannot straightforwardly be applied to China – whether or not for the
reasons he gives. By examining the representation of ethnic minorities
in China’s mainstream history textbooks, in this chapter I investigate
the ‘historical specificity’ of the relationship between knowledge, power
and ethnicity in the Chinese context (Apple 2003: 18). I will contend
that, although theories of sociology of education developed in Western
societies are useful in explaining some aspects of the reproduction of
ethnic inequality in China, they can be misleading if applied without
careful consideration of wider political structures and relationships in
the specific Chinese context. These involve, for example, the authoritarian power of the Communist state in producing