Beyond Decontextualisation and Cynicism

Stanton Wortham, University of Pennsylvania

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Postprint version. Published in Pedagogies, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2006, pages 13-20.

Abstract

Some see schools primarily as places where students learn academic skills that are crucial to individual and social development. Others see them primarily as places where students are stigmatised and where social inequality is reproduced. Despite their differences, both views of schooling tend to assume the same unrealistic conception of schooled knowledge as being decontextualised, as being separate from the social identification, power relations, and interpersonal struggles that occur in all cognitive practices. In this article I argue for a more complex account of schooling, one that reimagines the intertwining of academic learning and social identification without privileging one over the other.