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THE POWER OF RESISTANCE: CULTURE, IDEOLOGY AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION IN GLOBAL CONTEXTS

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ADVANCES IN EDUCATION IN DIVERSE COMMUNITIES: RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRAXIS

Series Editor: Carol Camp Yeakey

Recent Volumes:

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ADVANCES IN EDUCATION IN DIVERSE COMMUNITIES: RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRAXIS VOLUME 12

THE POWER OF RESISTANCE: CULTURE, IDEOLOGY AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION IN GLOBAL CONTEXTS

EDITED BY

ROWHEA M. ELMESKY

CAROL CAMP YEAKEY

OLIVIA MARCUCCI

Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2017

Copyright © 2017 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78350-461-9 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78350-462-6 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-887-1 (Epub)

ISSN: 1479-358X (Series)

Dedication

This volume, The Power of Resistance: Culture, Ideology and Social Reproduction in Global Contexts, is dedicated to poor communities and her children who suffer from inequality, uneven opportunity, and oppression in global contexts. We extend our hands to you in solidarity and stand beside you in the pursuit of free expression, social justice, and education to advance humankind across the globe.

Your struggles are ours.

List of Contributors

Introduction

This volume The Power of Resistance: Culture, Ideology and Social Reproduction in Global Contexts comes at a unique point in the lives of humankind. Social protests, demonstrations, and calls to redress racism, inequality, marginalization, unfairness, and underrepresentation abound on local, national, and international levels in all segments of the broader society. No part of the globe has been spared as the millennial generation focuses on the growing division between the haves and have-nots, as present generations suffer from the decisions of their forefathers and foremothers. Research (Yeakey & Shepard, 2014, 2016) has demonstrated the impact of the Great Recession, ending in 2009, and its resultant impacts on a global scale, which occasioned crises and institutional collapse on a major scale. Systemic problems went well beyond institutional crises brought on by collapsed economies and corporate excess, but exacerbated issues of inequality, racism, sexism, inadequate housing and health care, un/employment, poverty, underachievement, inadequate schooling, and crime and in/justice. The shifting nature of work, global economic competition, and technological advance now has a marked influence on jobs, income, and social mobility, in both developed and developing countries. Schooling, education, and advanced education have never played more important roles in selecting and sorting individuals for future social placement in the broader society.

It was perhaps the Occupy Movement that provided one of the first massive social protest movements across the globe in the new millennium. It has been argued that high unemployment rates and poor economic downturns worldwide, as a result of highly questionable corporate and bank irregularities, brought forth global debt crises and bankruptcies, which in turn, propelled the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement. Globally speaking, what has resulted is high unemployment worldwide and college educated youth with the limited employment and career prospects in competition for jobs with low wages that are unrelated to their educational background. Broader career prospects are proving to be even more daunting for millennials with the decline in average incomes that are expected to last for at least another decade (Yeakey & Shepard, 2014). While the college educated have suffered, worse still are those persons living on mainstreet. The social indices for those persons at the bottom of the economic pyramid are painfully sobering with massive increases in poverty, unemployment, hunger, homelessness, foreclosures, increased crime and drug abuse, mental illness, two-parent family disintegration and growing class divisions.

Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X. As a generic group, the Millennial Generation is known for its marked familiarity with communications, technology, media, and digital technologies – vehicles that have been used to spread their message and galvanize social protest and resistance to unfairness and injustice. Similarly, the millennial generation has been characterized as being more liberal- and civic-minded, with a strong sense of community, both local and global (Strauss & Howe, 1997), and a shift toward work in the public service sector (Howe, Strauss, & Matson, 2000).

While Occupy Wall Street is among the largest social protest movements to have emerged in twenty-first century America, it is by no means the only one. The most recent Arab Spring in Egypt, The Black Lives Matter Movement, the Women’s March following the election of United States President Donald J. Trump, campus protests against sexual assault, organized marches against the Muslim immigrant ban in the United States, the movement against homophobic laws and practices, and the ongoing protests against the proposed U.S. border wall with Mexico are a few of the many protests that have social, political, and economic reverberations across the globe. What unites these movements is the fight against inequality and authoritarianism in all of their manifestations.

Schools as purveyors of institutional and normative values are in the crosshairs of the aforementioned intersectional issues. As such, schools and the education they impart are not neutral entities, but are powerful social, political, and economic reproductive engines of society and serve as the primary vehicles for social mobility in our twenty-first century society. Because of their centrality, schools and education are a primary focus of the volume The Power of Resistance: Culture, Ideology and Social Reproduction in Global Contexts. As a result, they invite our analysis and focus as institutions to uncover structured biases, to foment change, and to reinvent policies and practices that marginalize student populations across the globe. The words of Freire (1993) could not be more relevant as he states:

The very nature of the educational practice-its necessary directive nature, the objectives, the dreams that follow in the practice-do not allow education to be neutral as it is always political… . The question before us is to know what type of politics it is, in favor of whom and what, and against what and for whom it is realized. (p. 22)

This volume is most fortunate in providing original research from authors across the globe, including Norway, Australia, Finland, China, Iran, Malaysia, Sweden as well as research conducted among highly marginalized groups and neighborhoods in the United States. As such, readers will gain from the insights, research, and viewpoints by examining schools and schooling practices and problematics, and attempted resolutions to those problematics, from multiple voices, spaces, and places.

The Power of Resistance is divided into two major sections. Section 1 of the volume, “Institutional and Historical Factors in Inequality,” aims to highlight various mechanisms of inequality from a global perspective. In order to understand the power of resistance efforts, it is important to interrogate how unequal power structures operate in different contexts. In this section, analyses from various local settings begin to paint broad strokes of how ideology, embedded institutional structures, and even mundane interpersonal interactions can contribute to the perpetuation and exacerbation of inequality. In Nicholas P. Triplett’s chapter “Conceptions of Equity in an age of globalized education: A discourse analysis of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Results” examines the ways that PISA and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conceive of educational equity in a global context. Analysis revealed that the OECD and the PISA foreground economistic notions of educational equity, which diminishes the role of other factors (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender, immigration status, language) that mediate equity in schools. Rollert’s chapter “Advancing or Inhibiting Educational Opportunity: The Power of New Teachers to Reinforce or Deconstruct Social Reproduction in Urban Schools,” addresses the increase in negative perceptions of students as new teachers in the United States face challenges that are less likely to occur in non-urban schools. Findings suggest that new teachers do change their beliefs during their first year, and that these beliefs often reflect the beliefs of trusted and close colleagues within their social networks. The chapter concludes that historical context provides a lens to understand the complexity of how education systems are formed and reformed under various ideologies, and the ensuing consequences of social inequity. Afridi and Berrwin look at the evolution of Egypt’s educational system under different regimes that were in power during the years of 1954 to 2011 in their chapter “Tracing Egyptian Education Policy in Changing Eras and Regimes: From 1954 to 2011.” The chapter aims to show how different ideologies have influenced the educational system and the larger goals of social development in Egypt. The chapter “Accommodating and Resisting Dominant Discourses: The Reproduction of Inequality in a Chinese American Community” by Yu-Ling Hsiao and Lucy E. Bailey draws from a three-year ethnographic study focused on the educational and community interactions among working and middle-class ethnic Chinese immigrants in a Midwestern town in the United States. Findings suggest the complexity of Chinese immigrants’ accommodation of and resistance to normative ideologies and local structures that cumulatively contribute to social reproduction on the basis of class. Duncan-Shippy, Murphy, and Purdy’s analysis in the chapter “An Examination of Mainstream Media as an Educating Institution: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Contemporary Social Protest” focuses on one of the most recent contentious social protest movements in America, dealing with the shooting of an unarmed African American youth. Their chapter examines the framing of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement in mainstream media. Notaro’s chapter “The Stonewall Riots: Moving from the Margins to the Mainstream” examines the systemic discrimination of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities, and their growing fight for equal rights and empowerment. Notaro captures the Stonewall Inn riots as the foundation for a legacy in the civil and political rights of the LGBT community in the United States. Rounding out the first section of the volume, Afridi’s chapter “PPPs in Global Education Policy: Looking at the case of the Egyptian Education Initiative” explores the rise of public-private partnerships (PPPs) through theories of neoliberal globalization, by analyzing the practices of international organizations and transnational corporations in education sector reforms.

Section 2 of The Power of Resistance narrows the focus of social resistance and protests to students, youth, and families as agents of resistance. Section 2 acknowledges, honors, and analyzes how individuals and communities – all centered in schools and educational spaces – make their mark against the oppressive structures of inequality. How do students, youth, and families effectively negotiate these structures to produce social change? Each chapter in this section examines a small piece of that question. Mary Yee’s chapter “Resisting the Hegemony of School Bureaucracy and Organizing for Safe Schools: First Generation Immigrant Asian Students Develop Activist Identities and Literacies” details the lived experiences of first-generation Asian immigrant student activists, who waged a powerful struggle against school violence and bullying in a large urban high school. The chapter “Standing in Solidarity with Black Girls to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” by Cumi, Washington, and Daneshzadeh, studies the proliferation of zero-tolerance behavioral policies and the deleterious effects they have on students’ functioning. Skårås’ chapter “Educational and Social Challenges in the Reintegration Process of Former Child Soldiers” explores how marginalized youth, specifically former child soldiers in South Sudan, struggle to access education that is crucial in the process of reintegration to the broader society. Using data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, Lee, Dean, and Kim examine the structural relationships between negative school social relations, school safety, educational expectation and academic achievement of Latino immigrant students in the chapter “Academic Achievement of Latino Immigrant Adolescents: The Effects of Negative School Social Relationships, School Safety, and Educational Expectation.” Yin’s chapter “Youth in Modern Egypt: Toward an understanding of Civic Engagement and underlying social dynamics” provides a study of the broader ecology and political economy associated with Egyptian youth’s development during the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. Issues related to education, poverty, health, opportunity structures and challenges associated with social mobility are discussed. In her chapter, “Resources for Resistance: The Role of Dominant and Non-Dominant Forms of Cultural Capital in Resistance among Young Women of Color in a Predominantly White Public High School,” Bueker explores the ways in which Black and Latino women who graduated from a predominantly White, elite public high school in the northeastern United States engaged in acts of resistance, while students, both within the classroom and within the larger community. Dorio’s chapter “Pedagogy of Transition: Understanding University Student Movements in Post-2011 Egypt” conceptualizes social movement theory and applies it to three transitional political periods in modern Egypt, followed with a discussion of the implications of student activism on future university reform. The chapter written by Hedayati, Kuusisto, Gholami, and Tirri and titled “Gender-Specific Religious Moral Dilemmas in Iranian Schools” discusses how, in Iranian schools, the power of resistance is evident in students’ and teachers’ moral dilemmas. The study reveals the impact of Islamic values in school life and how issues related to gender and religion are interconnected in Iranian schools and society. In their chapter “The Role of Everyday Spaces of Learning for Refugee youth,” Wilkinson and Lloyd-Zantiotis highlight the fact that everyday spaces can act as rich sites of informal learning, which young refugees can draw upon to advance their life chances, employability, and social inclusion. The chapter “Chicago African American Mothers’ Power of Resistance: Designing Spaces of Hope in Global Contexts,” by Mendenhall, Linear, McKee, Lamers, and Mouawad, centers the lived experiences of African American women living in Englewood, a neighborhood with high levels of violence in Chicago. This study illustrates Black mothers’ efforts to resist ideologies and stereotypes about their mothering, beauty and socioeconomic status, among other factors. The chapter ends by discussing the implications of the findings in relation to two programs developed to help mothers work toward neighborhood change, collaboratives which seek to remedy the paradoxical existence of spaces of hope and spaces of despair through innovative approaches. Zion, York, and Stickney’s chapter “Bound Together: White Teachers/Latinx Students Revising Resistance” examines data from a student voice research project, framed by the theory of sociopolitical development, implicating both teachers and students in the process of resistance and liberation. The final chapter provides an epilogue examining both macro and micro attempts of humankind to resist and challenge those factors which oppress the human spirit and endanger human fulfillment in global societies.

As resistance to growing inequality, marginalization, and increasingly limited opportunity structures becomes more pronounced across the globe, schools and their neighborhood ecologies have become a forum for protest, from pre-school through tertiary education, among youth and adults alike. The editors do not pretend to address or provide solutions to all of the serious issues confronting marginalized groups throughout the globe, using education as our lens to view these confounding issues. The Power of Resistance: Culture, Ideology and Social Reproduction in Global Contexts attempts to further the dialogue and address the myriad of challenges facing those suffering from marked inequality and lack of opportunity. We welcome your voices and contributions in this struggle.

Rowhea M. Elmesky

Carol Camp Yeakey

Olivia Marcucci

Editors