Interrogating the new normal: an ethnography of a special school

我的中心研究问题是：什么是正常的学生在特殊学校？在这个调查中，我想问三个相互关联的子问题：1。特殊学校的管治策略是什么？这些策略如何在教职员和学生身上体现？2.目前英国教育对生产力的强调在特殊学校中发挥了什么作用，这与种族和阶级的观念是如何相互作用的？3.特殊学校的孩子、教职员工和家庭是否提供了当今英国教育中关于智力、学习和自我的主导思想的替代方案？很少有研究集中在批判性地评估和拆包的想法，正常的学生在特殊学校。这一提议始于一个人类学框架，该框架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。在这样做的时候，我想检查的想法，正常的学生，治理和生产力的理论提供了当应用到今天的英国教育，承认他们的范围，但也认为他们的限制。特殊学校是解决这些问题的紧迫背景。由于他们的机构声誉作为排斥网站和他们的学生作为一个特别脆弱的群体的声誉，他们占据了一个未被开发和边缘化的空间在英国教育部门。然而，正如一再呼吁关闭这些学校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.