Disciplinary regimes of ‘care’ and complementary alternative education

Abstract

In schools, the notion of 'care is often synonymous with welfare and disciplinary regimes. Drawing on Foucault, and a study of alternative education across the UK, and looking in depth at two cases of complementary alternative education, we identify three types of disciplinary regimes at work in schools: (1) dominant performative reward and punishment, (2) team building and (3) therapeutic. We argue that while all three regimes aim to steer identified students back to the norm, the two complementary approaches that we saw avoided the narrow instrumental behaviourist approaches of the dominant pattern. In so doing, they also opened up wider horizons of possibility and ways to be and become.

Vulnerability, Resistance, and Reciprocity: Recasting Responsibilities of Care in Schooling Through Troubling Animal-Child-Adult Encounters Within a School for Marginalized Children

“…The animals are instrumental in supporting this agenda. This can be seen as reproducing dominant enactments of care in mainstream schools that focus on teachers ensuring behavioural compliance (Mills et al, 2017;Thomson & Pennacchia, 2016). However, the above quotes also illustrate the sense that there is more to these animal-child-school relationships that cannot easily be articulated-something which is also noticed by a teacher in Hohti and Tammi's (2019) research with animals and school-age children.…”

“…Furthermore, such caring relations are often seen as "natural" and positive adult-child relations and are seldom interrogated in detail (Ailwood, 2017). Yet, discourses of care are also used to support exclusionary practices in schools, where children with "disruptive" nonconforming behaviours are pushed out of mainstream schooling on the grounds of caring for both them and the other, compliant, children (Graham et al, 2015;Mills et al, 2017;Thomson & Pennacchia, 2016;Tuck, 2011).…”

“…At the same time, enactments of care focusing on therapeutic approaches in working with marginalized students are becoming increasingly common in both alternative schools and mainstream schools, parallel to discourses of care as segregation and exclusion (Mills & McGregor, 2016;Mills et al, 2017;Thomson & Pennacchia 2016). Other-than-human animals are increasingly being incorporated into schooling approaches in support of children's learning and well-being in such therapeutic approaches (Brelsford et al, 2017;Jalongo, 2015;Serpell et al, 2017).…”

“…However, while children frequently draw attention to the importance of animals when asked about what matters to them in their lives, these relations are rarely explored in depth (Tipper, 2011). Furthermore, as Thomson and Pennacchia (2016) warn, therapeutic and animal-assisted approaches to care in schools often retain a core function as "disciplinary regimes of care" that ultimately aim for behavioural compliance and normativity within the frames set by schooling. For children who are marginalized in schools, such a lens of caring animal-child relations invites a deficit perspective of them as flawed and in need of being fixed in order to "fit in. "…”

Alternative spaces of failure. Disabled ‘bad boys’ in alternative further education provision

“…The research found that these young people experience a lack of support, low trust and disregard from peers and some professionals at a crucial time in their educational careers. Riddell, and Weedon 2015;Malcolm 2015;Thomson and Pennacchia 2016). How young disabled people fare or are marginalised in APs has received limited attention in the literature, further contributing to their marginalisation.…”