Student autonomy, parent involvement and social inequality

Abstract

The autonomy of learners is a key concern of present-day educational policies: “individualized” teaching formats are promoted to address the heterogeneity of students and to optimize individual learning. However, the form of autonomy generated within these educational settings are opaque and its relation to social inequality at least ambivalent. Our presentation explores the links between individualized teaching arrangements valuing autonomous learning and the students’ social background and their family resources. We will trace the expectations of schools and teachers to make use of parental and family resources for school work. The discussion is based on an ongoing ethnographic research project on self-directed learning in lower secondary schools. Informed by a governmentality perspective and a practice theory approach, the research questions address the social dimensions of individualized classrooms and ask about the forms of autonomy, the practices of control and the subjectivations that these arrangements generate. The project relies on participant observations and ethnographic interviews in five schools with different classroom organization in the French- and German-speaking parts of Switzerland.