When students 'speak back': Challenging elite approaches to teaching, learning and education policy

This chapter comes at an interesting strategic juncture in this book – placed in the latter part – and I suspect placed deliberately so by the editors. It helps to focus attention on how corporate governance and provision are experienced in everyday learning within and out of school. Everything that occurs in the educational policy domain can ultimately be ‘read off’ in terms of what happens to students, and how they respond. I want to frame the opening part of this chapter around two orienting concepts: the first is the canary in the educational coalmine – a harbinger of the effect of what corporate elite policies are doing; and the second, what Sheehan (2013) refers to as ‘callous capitalism’ – as a way of depicting how it is that the corporate elite policies do their disfiguring and deforming work. In the second part of the chapter, I will deal with the conditions that are turning young people off school, specifically, the most disadvantaged, followed by a discussion of the very different set of conditions these young people ‘speak into existence’ when they are permitted to re-engage with learning.