policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
Rethinking
equity
Questioning the concept
of equity in education.
By Neil Hooley
I
have been worried for some time about
the concept of equity and how it is usually
understood in relation to schooling. It
seems to me to be very strange that family
income, as one indicator, can determine
how children think. Coming from a low-
income family, I reject this assertion and
cultural arrogance entirely.
What exactly does income mean in a
country like Australia? Poverty, for example,
is seen to impact about 10 per cent of the
population and will seriously restrict access
to employment, diet, health services,
housing and education. At the other end of
the spectrum, families who also constitute
about 10 per cent of the general population
are reasonably wealthy and do not have
such problems.
For the remaining 80 per cent of
Australians, there is a variety of incomes,
and therefore connections with the
services just mentioned, but daily life is
manageable. Provided that all schools
have suitable facilities and well-qualified
teachers, all children should be able
to engage with key ideas across the
curriculum to a satisfactory extent.
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There are problems that get in the way,
of course. Any curriculum is based on
the culture and values of the dominant
society, requiring those from different
backgrounds to navigate different
assumptions and meanings. This goes
to the essence of curriculum design,
approaches to teaching, and how learning
is assessed.
Curricula can be seen as merely a
collection of preselected information that
is transmitted to students, in a relatively
passive manner. Bundles of facts, events
and procedures are provided, usually within
fairly short time frames, and accepted
explanations are outlined. This establishes
a very persuasive ideology that schools
are repositories of truth and accuracy: an
imposing centre of social authority.
Pedagogy, or how teachers go
about their classroom and educational
work, persists as a contested area for
the profession around the world. A
conservative approach to the teaching
of prescribed content occurs through a
one-way, teacher-dominated transmission.
On the other hand, the participation of
students in following their own interests
can be observed within a progressive, two-
way framework of recognised knowledge.
Whichever broad approach to teaching
is followed, the key to learning outcomes
in schools is how students are assessed.
Assessment can focus on how students
have adopted the main ideas that have
been presented, at specified times, or how
they are pursuing their own, more tentative
understandings of the regular ideas of
the curriculum.
Overwhelmingly, assessment around the
world concentrates on so-called student
achievement of pre-set ideas at pre-set
times, and not the monitoring of learning
progress through practice and experiment.
It is much easier to organise the former,
of course, rather than track ‘work in
progress’ for individual children.
Within the variation of the majority
80 per cent, therefore, the issues of
curriculum, pedagogy and assessment
strongly influence the pathways and
difficulties that students encounter, and
consequently, how society views their
capabilities.
Could it be that society and the
education profession have a long way to go
in arranging these three factors, such that a
much more sophisticated understanding of
learning can be established?
If so, the education system badly
disadvantages legions of children, whatever
their socioeconomic background.
It is useful at this point to refer to the
work of the French philosopher, Jacques
Rancière, who suggests that educators
should begin with the concept of
intellectual equality, rather than inequality
and disadvantage. Rancière accepts that