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Education is usually considered a force for good, associated with hope and optimism about better individual and social futures. Yet a case can be made that education and education policy in recent decades, far from being a force for good, has had nefarious effects at multiple levels. This can be seen in the growing alienation of significant numbers of teachers and students in disparate global contexts and in the growth of authoritarian models of schooling, involving ‘zero-tolerance’, ‘no excuses’ disciplinary approaches, that have undermined notions of the common school as a public good. Against this background, and drawing on philosophical literature and our own empirical research, this study interrogates the practice in schools in England of placing students in ‘isolation’. In considering this practice as an instance of banal education policy, our study makes obvious reference to Hannah Arendt’s characterization of evil in her account of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. But it also draws on the work of moral philosophers, Elizabeth Minnich and Simona Forti, in relation to the distinction between intensive and extensive evil, in order to analyse the nature and effects of school discipline policies and practices such as isolation in the neoliberal era as a contemporary form of evil.

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Abstract:In this paper, I will reflect on the initial reconnaissance, action, and reflection cycle of my doctoral research, exploring Community Philosophy as a tool for critical parental engagement in a primary school (Elliot, 1991). I will examine how I reflexively engaged with my influence on participants, which then significantly influenced the framing of, and the planning for, the second action research cycle. The challenges that the initial stages of my research have presented will be considered using Herr and Anderson's five components of validity (Herr and Anderson, 2014). I then use the four Chronotopes of Research developed by Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2005) to discuss the implications for my understanding of positioning, authenticity and transformation, and the resultant reframing of my research. In order to set the context for my research, I begin by giving a brief overview of my own interest in 'democratic voice'. This is followed by an exploration of the current 'closing the gap' discourse in English education (OFSTED, 2013; Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, 2014;Wilshaw, 2013), to demonstrate how parental engagement has become individualised, lacks democratic voice, and often valorises middle class parents. Hence I will argue that there is a need for a more democratic and collective model of parental engagement, and make a case for justifying Community Philosophy as a possible model.

The paper aims to explore how head teachers and other education service leaders and their teams have been experiencing shifts in their identities during the last decade of education cuts in Catalonia (Spain), and the possible effects during the current COVID-19 crisis on educational leaders. Our exploratory hypothesis covers the crisis years (2008–2015) and on into the non-recovery years (2015–2020) until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. During these years, through what Ball (2008) describes as a “ratchet effect,” education cuts and their everyday effects in schools produced learned helplessness (LH) in head teachers and leaders. Theoretically, we propose to examine this malaise from a political angle, seeing it as a disciplinary technology to transform education leaders’ identity and practices. To corroborate this, we conducted four interviews with head teachers of different public primary, secondary, and special education schools, and a psychopedagogical service leader in the same semi-rural area in Catalonia. The exploratory results show that the incremental and selective cuts soon became a new normal and created feelings of (political) learned helplessness that may be seen not as negative side effects but as a disciplinary technology that reshaped leaders’ subjectivity. At the same time, education leaders carried out some (ir)responsible practices of resistance that can be understood as care of the self and others. More research needs to be done with different agents to capture the complexity and ambiguity of cuts and LH as a political phenomenon.