Discourse, Power, Resistance: Challenging the Rhetoric of Contemporary Education

This book is a call to educators to recognize and resist the rhetoric around education and to question the practices that are controlling education all over the world, reducing it to little more than skills development in preparation for work.

David Hursh of University of Rochester, New York argues that testing and accountability have fostered the decline of teacher professionalism and local control, thus achieving compliance and making contestation all but impossible. Helen Colley of Leeds University, England questions the generally venerated strategy of mentoring to show how its dynamic requires docility from the learner and thus perpetuates inequality.

These are but two of the dozen or so academics who have come together to challenge the prevailing academic discourse. In Part Two of the book, they suggest ways in which to provoke and enable students to critique the system.

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

"While the book evidences perhaps more ideology critique than deconstruction and I am less sanguine than some of the authors regarding "the liberating possibilities [that] are offered simply through the act of naming a regime of truth" (p. 98), the book speaks well to the putting of such theory to work in thinking through academic practices under conditions of a range of discourses of power." -- International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education "There are subtle, interesting and compelling insights about how apparently pastoral forms of governance draw in students, teachers, researchers and mentors into self-regulating, disciplinary regimes and how these processes affect one's identity, both personal and professional. It is clear that the organisers and contributers have hit on some of the most profound problems in education." -- British Journal of Educational Studies.