Interrogating the new normal: an ethnography of a special school

我研究的中心问题是：对于特殊学校的学生来说，什么是正常的？在这个问题中，我想问三个相互关联的子问题：1。特殊学校采用的管理策略是什么？这些策略如何体现在教职员工和学生身上？2. 当前英国教育中对生产力的强调在特殊学校中发挥了什么作用，这与种族和阶级观念是如何相互作用的？特殊学校的孩子、员工和家庭是否为当今英国教育中关于智力、学习和自我的主流理念提供了替代方案？很少有研究关注于批判性地评估和揭示特殊学校正常学生的想法。这个建议从人类学框架出发，将常态置于我们如何看待自己和如何看待他人之间不断变化的日常交流中。在这样做的过程中，我想研究一下治理理论和生产力理论在应用于当今英国教育时对普通学生的看法，承认它们的影响，但也思考一下它们的局限性。特殊学校是这些问题的迫切背景。由于它们作为排斥场所的机构声誉，以及它们的学生作为一个特别脆弱的群体的声誉，它们在英国教育部门占据了一个未被开发和边缘化的空间。然而，正如多次呼吁关闭它们的失败所表明的那样，它们仍然是世界各地教育系统的重要组成部分。

My central research question is: What is normal for students in a special school? Within this enquiry, I want to ask three inter-related sub questions:1. What are the strategies of governmentality that a special school employs and how are they embodied by staff and students? 2. What role does the current emphasis on productivity in UK education play in the special school and how does this interact with ideas of race and class?3. Do the children, staff and families at a special school offer alternatives to the dominant ideas of intelligence, learning and selfhood in UK education today? Little research focuses on critically evaluating and unpacking the idea of the normal student in a special school. This proposal starts from an anthropological framework that situates normality within the shifting everyday exchanges between how we see ourselves and how we see others. In doing so, I want to examine the idea of the normal student that theories of governmentality and productivity offer when applied to UK education today, to acknowledge their reach but also think about their constraints. Special schools are an urgent context for these questions. Because of their institutional reputation as sites of exclusion and their students' reputation as a particularly vulnerable group, they occupy an under-explored and marginalised space in the UK educational sector. Yet, as the failure of repeated calls for them to be closed shows, they remain a critical part of education systems around the world.