The new educational pastorate: link workers, pastoral power and the pedagogicalisation of parenting

Home-school relations, home learning and parental engagement are prominent educational policy issues, constituting one aspect of a wider parenting support agenda that has suffused the landscape of social policy over the last two decades. This article examines a parenting support initiative distinctive for its use of link workers in mobilising ‘hard to reach’ parents to engage more effectively with their children’s education. Drawing on qualitative data gathered during the evaluation of the initiative, the article frames link worker–parent interactions as a form of everyday government and pastoral power. Link workers constitute a new educational pastorate; through friendship, care and control they exercise pastoral power over parents. Building on recent research into the role of ‘pastors’ in producing neoliberal subjectivities within the National Health Service, the article foregrounds their efforts to foster responsible, self-disciplined agency in parents. Link workers, it is argued, contribute to a responsibilisation and pedagogicalisation of the family, which has produced new figures of mothering/parenting, reconfigured the meaning of the home and extended the scope of state intervention into family life

Between home and school: mobilising ‘hard to reach’ parents to engage with their children’s education

The last two decades have witnessed an increasing politicisation of parenting and the emergence of parenting support as a key element of social policy. This policyscape is governed, however, by a narrow conception of the public good. The state has delegated responsibility for children’s future outcomes to parents, extolling parenting support as the means for redressing inequality and securing social mobility. This chapter focuses on a particular variant of parenting support: the use of link workers in mobilising parents to become more engaged in their children’s education. It draws on the evaluation of a local government initiative aimed at improving educational outcomes for white British, working-class pupils by encouraging attitudinal and behavioural change amongst parents deemed ‘hard to reach’ and disengaged from education. I argue that behaviour change approaches are misguided and that improved parental engagement cannot compensate for the impact inequitable socio-economic conditions have upon families’ lives and children’s attainment. The chapter challenges deficit constructions of white working-class parents and contests the parental determinism underpinning social policy. It calls instead for a broadened conception of the public good that accords value to all families and seeks to address the adverse socio-economic conditions affecting parents’ lives rather than simply seeking to (re)form their character and conduct

Learning, sharing and caring: pedagogical features of parents’ educational activism

Scholars of social movements have afforded increasing attention in recent years to pedagogical processes and practices within activist organisations. This article contributes to the ‘pedagogical turn’ in social movement studies by exploring pedagogical features of parents’ educational activism. Drawing on qualitative data collected from parent-led campaign groups operating in England, UK, the article attends to three aspects of activist pedagogy evident within the campaigns. The first concerns the learning that occurs through engaging in activism. The second, internal and external processes of knowledge-sharing. And third, parents’ perceptions of the educative potential of activism as a means for imparting democratic values to their children. I argue that the pedagogical dimension is a central feature of parents’ activism. Indeed, such activism constitutes itself a form of civic education in which democratic values and ideals are transmitted from one generation to another

Anarchist education and the paradox of pedagogical authority

This paper interrogates a key feature of anarchist education; focusing on a problem with implications not only for anarchist conceptions of education, but for anarchist philosophy and practice more broadly. The problem is this: if anarchism consists in the principled opposition to all forms of coercive authority, then how is this to be reconciled with situations where justice demands the use of coercion in order to protect some particular good? It seems that anarchist educators are forced to deny coercive authority in principle, whilst at the same time affirming it in practice. This is the paradox of pedagogical authority in anarchist education. Coercive authority is simultaneously impossible and indispensable. Exploring this paradox through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s later work, and, in particular, his conception of justice as requiring openness to the singular situation (Derrida, 1990), I argue that in exercising their authority anarchist educators encounter the aporetic moment in anarchism, experiencing what Derrida calls ‘the ordeal of the undecidable’ (Ibid.). Understood this way, the paradox becomes less an indication of anarchism’s limitations than it does its value. For it is here that the problem of pedagogical authority is treated with the gravity that all questions of justice deserve

‘It’s a tiger instinct – that’s my baby!’: affective practices of care in parents’ educational activism

This article presents findings from a qualitative study exploring parents’ struggles over their children’s education. Drawing on affective practice theory (Wetherell, 2012) and feminist care ethics (Fisher and Tronto 1990), we offer insights into the affective practices of care driving parents’ educational activism. We detail how parents’ activism is rooted in powerful feelings of responsibility for their own children as well as more altruistic concerns. Whilst ostensibly grounded in self-interest, we argue that parents’ activism challenges the traditional binary between altruism and self-interest, indicating instead that they can be mutually constitutive of collective action; a complex form of affective practice we designate altruistic self-interest. Our analysis suggests parental activism can be a force for progressive educational change in which care for intimates and care for others coincide, but also that educational authorities could adopt a more care-full approach when making key decisions affecting children, families and communities

Ramanujan-style congruences of local origin

We prove that if a prime ℓ>3 divides pk−1, where p is prime, then there is a congruence modulo ℓ, like Ramanujan's mod 691 congruence, for the Hecke eigenvalues of some cusp form of weight k and level p. We relate ℓ to primes like 691 by viewing it as a divisor of a partial zeta value, and see how a construction of Ribet links the congruence with the Bloch–Kato conjecture (theorem in this case). This viewpoint allows us to give a new proof of a recent theorem of Billerey and Menares. We end with some examples, including where p=2 and ℓ is a Mersenne prime

Governing through trust: community-based link workers and parental engagement in education

This article seeks to further understandings of contemporary patterns of parental government. Parenting has emerged as a key policy domain in twenty-first century Britain and we explore the politicisation of family life by examining a pilot programme tasked with enhancing parental engagement in education amongst ‘hard-to-reach’ families within the white British community of a large inner-London borough. Concentrating upon the programme’s signature device – the deployment of community-based ‘link workers’ to bridge home and school – ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 2009) is used as a theoretical lens through which to foreground the link workers’ role in governing parents. We draw on qualitative data collected from link workers, parents, and school leaders, to argue that link workers represent a mode of governmentality that privileges the instrumental use of trust to achieve strategic objectives, rather than coercive authority. The aim being to produce responsible, self-disciplined parents who act freely in accordance with normative expectations as to what constitutes ‘good’ parenting and effective parental support. As such, the article highlights the link workers’ role in (re)producing the ideal, neoliberal parent. However, governing through trust comes at the cost of being unable to firmly secure desired outcomes. We thereby conclude that this gentle art of parental government affords parents some latitude in resisting institutional agendas

Emperor penguins breeding on iceshelves

We describe a new breeding behaviour discovered in emperor penguins; utilizing satellite and aerial-survey observations four emperor penguin breeding colonies have been recorded as existing on ice-shelves. Emperors have previously been considered as a sea-ice obligate species, with 44 of the 46 colonies located on sea-ice (the other two small colonies are on land). Of the colonies found on ice-shelves, two are newly discovered, and these have been recorded on shelves every season that they have been observed, the other two have been recorded both on ice-shelves and sea-ice in different breeding seasons. We conduct two analyses; the first using synthetic aperture radar data to assess why the largest of the four colonies, for which we have most data, locates sometimes on the shelf and sometimes on the sea-ice, and find that in years where the sea-ice forms late, the colony relocates onto the ice-shelf. The second analysis uses a number of environmental variables to test the habitat marginality of all emperor penguin breeding sites. We find that three of the four colonies reported in this study are in the most northerly, warmest conditions where sea-ice is often sub-optimal. The emperor penguin’s reliance on sea-ice as a breeding platform coupled with recent concerns over changed sea-ice patterns consequent on regional warming, has led to their designation as “near threatened” in the IUCN red list. Current climate models predict that future loss of sea-ice around the Antarctic coastline will negatively impact emperor numbers; recent estimates suggest a halving of the population by 2052. The discovery of this new breeding behaviour at marginal sites could mitigate some of the consequences of sea-ice loss; potential benefits and whether these are permanent or temporary need to be considered and understood before further attempts are made to predict the population trajectory of this iconic species