Charlotte Haines Lyon

Whilst there is a range of evidence demonstrating the benefits of young people undertaking their own community-based research, youth capacity building for research is often adult-led (Cullen and Walsh, 2020). In this project, we explore a deliberately ‘weakly framed’ (Bernstein 2000) approach to capacity building in a community centre, where youth researchers have control over their participation and key decisions in their project design and implementation. We find that a weakly framed approach aligns well with informal education and that by giving youth control over their development as researchers, power relations between adults and youth are negated. Furthermore, by responding to youths’ interests, facilitating choice and validating the fluid nature of their participation, youth can both recognise and realise researcher identities that embody critical and ethical thinking. Through this exploration of weakly framed capacity building in an informal educational setting, we make key pedagogical recommendations for how youth research should be facilitated in methodologies like community-based participatory research and youth participatory action research to deepen young people’s critical understanding of and engagement in research.

In this editorial, we argue for the urgent need for democratic methodologies in education research in a time of global upheaval, increasing populism, and authoritarianism. We outline how neoliberalism has narrowed pluralism, education, and in turn democracy, proposing that research that is relational and disruptive in nature can counter this trend, and develop democracy, whether in the micro, meso, or macro. Moreover, we believe that democratic methodologies are about ‘more than research’. They are necessarily political, offering research methods that can support the growing global call for new approaches to socioeconomic policymaking and practices that reject the promotion of narrow, individualistic capitalist concerns and are instead based on unifying collaborative, relational values that are, we argue, vital in an increasingly divided world. After establishing our case for democratic methodologies, we explore the articles that are contained in this Special Issue. Presenting innovative international research perspectives, the collection explores how research methodologies can actively further democratic principles. The articles represent an intersectional approach, addressing critical social issues including disability research, decolonization, LGBTQIA+ resistance, youth climate engagement, and educational participation. By highlighting diverse research experiences, this editorial demonstrates how research methodologies can serve as a powerful mechanism for furthering democracy, even amid a progressively divisive political landscape.

This paper reports on a longitudinal study in the North of England with 13 educators in schools, colleges and universities during two lockdowns. The project was designed to ‘unlock’ education by providing spaces to co‐create new ways of thinking about education in light of the Covid‐19 pandemic. Focus groups were conducted with school and college teachers as well as university staff at the end of the first and second English lockdowns, in summer 2020 and spring 2021. An initial analysis identified issues with expectations and communication between educators and executive management as well as a lack of agency of educators, and how participants framed them as impacting on their identity as educators. Therefore, the framework of tactics of intersubjectivity was adopted to explore how educators discursively positioned themselves and others through constructions of similarity and difference, realness and power, and how their professional identities were affected by the experience of working through the pandemic and by those around them. Whilst educators took opportunities to authenticate their identity and reimagine education, their agency was undermined by top‐down governing involving little successful communication, leading to denaturalising and illegitimising experiences for educators. Executive management were perceived as lacking engagement with staff and understanding of the implications of their decisions on them. The findings call for relationship building and recognition of educators' voice.

The paper aims to explore how head teachers and other education service leaders and their teams have been experiencing shifts in their identities during the last decade of education cuts in Catalonia (Spain), and the possible effects during the current COVID-19 crisis on educational leaders. Our exploratory hypothesis covers the crisis years (2008–2015) and on into the non-recovery years (2015–2020) until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. During these years, through what Ball (2008) describes as a “ratchet effect,” education cuts and their everyday effects in schools produced learned helplessness (LH) in head teachers and leaders. Theoretically, we propose to examine this malaise from a political angle, seeing it as a disciplinary technology to transform education leaders’ identity and practices. To corroborate this, we conducted four interviews with head teachers of different public primary, secondary, and special education schools, and a psychopedagogical service leader in the same semi-rural area in Catalonia. The exploratory results show that the incremental and selective cuts soon became a new normal and created feelings of (political) learned helplessness that may be seen not as negative side effects but as a disciplinary technology that reshaped leaders’ subjectivity. At the same time, education leaders carried out some (ir)responsible practices of resistance that can be understood as care of the self and others. More research needs to be done with different agents to capture the complexity and ambiguity of cuts and LH as a political phenomenon.

Education is usually considered a force for good, associated with hope and optimism about better individual and social futures. Yet a case can be made that education and education policy in recent decades, far from being a force for good, has had nefarious effects at multiple levels. This can be seen in the growing alienation of significant numbers of teachers and students in disparate global contexts and in the growth of authoritarian models of schooling, involving ‘zero-tolerance’, ‘no excuses’ disciplinary approaches, that have undermined notions of the common school as a public good. Against this background, and drawing on philosophical literature and our own empirical research, this study interrogates the practice in schools in England of placing students in ‘isolation’. In considering this practice as an instance of banal education policy, our study makes obvious reference to Hannah Arendt’s characterization of evil in her account of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. But it also draws on the work of moral philosophers, Elizabeth Minnich and Simona Forti, in relation to the distinction between intensive and extensive evil, in order to analyse the nature and effects of school discipline policies and practices such as isolation in the neoliberal era as a contemporary form of evil.

In opposition to the discourse of silent compliance and the neo-liberal colonisation of voice, this article shares research with parents in an English primary school. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and John Macmurray, the author argues that there is a need for a more relational but dissensual approach to parent engagement and voice, instead of parents being positioned by schools as support acts. Parent engagement, increasingly commodified over recent years within English school policy, has been relegated to responding to questionnaires, dutiful attendance of parents’ evenings, ensuring homework completion and choosing the correct school. Meanwhile, the social mobility agenda demands that parents inculcate aspirations in their children unquestioningly. Policies and pronouncements seek to ‘close the gap’ in attainment between the poorest children and their peers in England, Australia, the USA and other neo-liberalised countries. Hence a context is created in which parent engagement is now an exercise in creating ‘good’ pupils and successful economic beings. This article considers how parents have been rendered objects rather than agentic subjects within neo-liberal education systems and have lost their democratic voice. It concludes that there needs to be a reanimation of Dewey’s vision of education politics.

In this paper, I will reflect on the initial reconnaissance, action, and reflection cycle of my doctoral research, exploring Community Philosophy as a tool for critical parental engagement in a primary school (Elliot, 1991). I will examine how I reflexively engaged with my influence on participants, which then significantly influenced the framing of, and the planning for, the second action research cycle. The challenges that the initial stages of my research have presented will be considered using Herr and Anderson’s five components of validity (Herr and Anderson, 2014). I then use the four Chronotopes of Research developed by Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2005) to discuss the implications for my understanding of positioning, authenticity and transformation, and the resultant reframing of my research. In order to set the context for my research, I begin by giving a brief overview of my own interest in ‘democratic voice’. This is followed by an exploration of the current ‘closing the gap’ discourse in English education (OFSTED, 2013; Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, 2014; Wilshaw, 2013), to demonstrate how parental engagement has become individualised, lacks democratic voice, and often valorises middle class parents. Hence I will argue that there is a need for a more democratic and collective model of parental engagement, and make a case for justifying Community Philosophy as a possible model.