Professor Patrick Alexander

In this theoretical and reflexive article, we explore the process of developing principles of practice, the concept behind a different approach to professional learning for teachers at international schools. The concept of principles of practice was developed in the context of a year-long professional learning programme offering a small group of teachers (25) a space for depth-engagement with research and encouraging radical thinking about the nature of schooling. Engaging seriously with the principles of practice obliges teachers to embrace lack of consensus as a profoundly positive aspect of professional practice, and it demands that teachers rethink schooling, often in ways that are disruptive to received wisdom about what ‘works’ or what is ‘good’ about it. Challenge and resistance are important parts of this process, and there is perhaps no better time to be asking uncomfortable questions about the future of international schooling. However, asking such questions is no easy task, which leads to a further pragmatic question: how can such a programme be made sustainable in the broader ecosystem of an international school organisation? Exploring this question reveals the radical promise of the concept underpinning this particular example of professional learning.

By analysing an academic exhibition on the Amazon region made by Year 5 children from an Oxford-based primary school, this qualitative study explores the ways that children perceive a representation of a natural environment geographically distant from their home context. The phenomenographic analysis of written and visual documentary sources focuses on incorporated biophysical and socio-cultural elements. Three hierarchically inclusive ways of perceiving the Amazon were identified: (1) Nature as species of wild fauna and their habitat; (2) Nature as political economy; and (3) Nature as an imaginative world. Correspondingly, findings highlighted: (1) children’s affiliation to other living organisms; (2) children’s stereotypical constructs in relation to developing countries; and (3) nature as a concept that is actively constructed by children, including the conjuring of imagined ‘natural’ worlds. The findings have implications for interdisciplinary approaches to Environmental Education in primary contexts.

This article uses a social generations approach to explore the lives of young people transitioning to life after schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research in England during the geopolitical uncertainty of 2016–2017, we track the trajectories and narratives of six individuals. The research begins with final year pupils in schools talking about their futures, during and after their A-Level exams. We then follow these individuals on routes to Higher Education and employment, exploring how they are socialised into imaginings of the future and/or struggle to inhabit these futures. A deeply ingrained, modernist, neoliberal reckoning of future time is normalised through experiences of schooling. However, this logic is troubled profoundly in the transition to life after school. Young people’s experiences in an unpredictable present run in stark contrast to the ordered trajectory of future action they have been socialised to expect. Amidst this uncertainty, ambivalence towards shaping the future (‘Fuck It, Shit Happens’) can in some ways feel like the most agentic stance to take. Furlong et al.’s (2011) social generations approach to understanding youth transitions reveals how we must critique the very concept of ‘the future’ if we are to understand the reality of youth transitions in the present.

Each November, commemoration of the First World War armistice (and subsequent military events and conflicts) is almost ubiquitous in UK schools and has been given increased importance during the centenary years of the First World War. Yet as seemingly isolated occasions outside the regular curriculum, school practices of remembrance, and the understandings and perceptions surrounding them, have been subject to surprisingly little scrutiny. The Remembrance in Schools project (2013–19) investigates armistice commemoration in primary and secondary schools in three counties in southern England. This paper considers the theorisation of public commemorative rituals and relates this to teachers’ reports of school-based events. It analyses teachers’ accounts and perceptions, from survey and interview data, of the ways in which the First World War and subsequent conflicts are remembered, presented and discussed through school commemoration events. We conclude that such events mirror the ‘social technologies’ of public remembrance rituals. However, behind almost ubiquitous practices (the two-minute silence) and symbols (the poppy), these accounts reveal nuanced variations in teachers’ views of the knowledge and values children gain from armistice commemoration in schools. These variations are inflected by individual schools’ histories, community contexts, and pupil demographics, as well as teachers’ own histories, values and ideals.

This article presents ethnographic research on the aspirations of graduates from a private university in New York City, some of whom move to Los Angeles. Findings depict financial and family pressures exerting a governing force upon the graduates’ futures, often beyond their control. Focusing on the narratives of four individuals, we introduce the language of fate as a means of conceptualising the potential repercussions of aspiration and Higher Education. The premise of both is an increased determinacy over one’s future, yet in the high-stakes U.S. context here examined, this financial investment and articulation of family hope may generate fated (seemingly inescapable) and/or fateful (ominous) outcomes. The dynamic of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) illustrates some of the paradoxical consequences of Higher Education, whereby people may be punished by their aspirations. We discuss what factors affect differing outlooks on the future and imply alternative dimensions to adversity beyond the remit of ‘inequality’. 

This article explores class, capital, and aspiration to social mobility in an ethnographic study of an English secondary school. In particular, the article considers the school’s musical instrument programme as a site for inculcating forms of capital, under the auspices of developing skills for upward social mobility. Bringing together Bourdieu’s conceptions of schooling with theories of materiality and situated learning, we contend that this school succeeds in cultivating new forms of embodied capital among students through the development of communities of musical practice. However, a tension remains between emancipatory aims of the programme and the sanctioning and championing of certain forms of dominant cultural practice. The learning environment of the instrument programme highlights the complex and conflicted impact that schooling can have on the development of cultural capital and on reproducing disadvantage and difference.

In this paper, we explore the usefulness of three different approaches to facilitating reflexivity and a critical awareness of emerging academic identities for doctoral students. This paper stems from a longitudinal research project entitled The Next Generation of Social Scientists, which was conducted across three research-intensive British universities and based at the University of Oxford. The research examined how doctoral students in a range of social science disciplines develop (or do not develop) notions of ‘academic’ identity as they move along the doctoral trajectory and into academic positions. In what follows we describe how three different data collection tools – weekly logs, interviews and a card-sorting activity – were used to encourage doctoral students to consider the process of constructing academic identities more actively and self-reflectively. We then consider how the use of these tools at two workshops further revealed how they can be utilised by academic developers to explore the needs of doctoral students and improve the support in place for this student group.

This special edition of Teaching Anthropology explores the common ground between pedagogy and the practice of anthropology. In particular we focus on the process of learning in order to think critically about unlearning that parallel process of loss, of reshaping, of uncertainty, of shedding intellectual skins, that makes up part of how we gain new knowledge and new forms of academic, institutional or disciplinary identity. To this end, learning unlearning is an exploration of the revelatory paradoxes that lie at the heart of pedagogy and anthropological inquiry.

Patrick Alexander argues that the current debate over the "toxicity" of childhood in contemporary Britain needs to be recontextualised if it is to provide helpful, positive discussion about the nature of childhood and education in the twenty-first century. He believes that "toxicity" suggests that we are dealing with a disease that needs to be cured: apparently, children are being poisoned by globalisation, new technology, and standardised testing, and we must seek the remedies to these ills. He argues that the framework of "toxicity" fails to appreciate the complexity of "childhood"; and also reinforces an image of the relationship between adults and children - or teachers and students - that is asymmetrical and alienating to the young people it presumes to help