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Education & the Reshaping of LIVING IN A SCHOOLED SOCIETY

UCL Institute of Education
Geographical Space Term 1 2023
Friday November 3rd Research Report Workshops

9am-11am IOE Drama Studio (Becky)

11am-1pm IOE Drama Studio (Samantha)

2pm-4pm IOE Room 5.03 (Stuart)

2pm-4pm 23-29 Emerald Street G02 Knowledge Lab (Patricia)

4pm-6pm IOE Room 5.03 (Kristy)

4pm-6pm IOE Committee Room 1 (Manxin)
Lecture 4 Key Goals

1. How schools, colleges & universities reshape local & regional

social & physical spaces.
2. How curriculum & pedagogy contribute to the shaping of (often
nationalist) spatial imaginaries.
3. How education systems contribute to the shaping of movement
& mobility across geographical space.
4. How ALL of these spatial effects of education can sometimes be
positive, sometimes negative, and sometimes neither positive
nor negative but just different.
5. Concepts of school catchment area effects, jiaoyufication,
studentification & brain drain.
School catchment area effects

• Families with £££ move to

good school catchment areas….

• Houses prices in these areas

are driven up….

• Families without £££ are priced

out of these neighbourhoods....

• Social & educational

segregation increases....

• Social segregation reshapes the

lives of all families & their
children....
 “School District
“Jiaoyufication” House”

jiaoyu – education

Urban change driven

by a desire for high-
quality education.

Education-led
gentrification.

Colonization of school
catchment areas by
the professional and
managerial classes.
 But, over time, school
catchment area effects may
lead to re-segregation??

School catchment area effects
• Families with £££ move to good
school catchment areas….
• Houses prices in these areas are
driven up….
• Families without £££ are priced out of
these neighbourhoods....
• Social & educational segregation
increases....
• Social segregation reshapes the lives
of all families & their children....
When we talk about the
effects of schooling or
education on society, we
are actually always talking
about the effects of
particular ways of doing
school/education on
society:
 Is there any other way that
we could organise schooling
systems … so that they did
not have these unequal
geographical effects?
 And so that they do not
create other kinds of
inequalities for families and
children as well?
Schooling produces “geographical imaginaries – that is, territorial affinities, spatial fields of
reference, and other frameworks that ‘explain who ‘we’ are collectively and individually,
who ‘others’ are and how the world works.”
- Claudia Thiem (2009) “Thinking through Education”

Education systems are ”space adjusting techniques.”

- Spencer & Thomas (1969) Cultural Geography

Space adjustment in terms of education does not only operate at the national scale, but at
all scales from the gathering of pupils into classrooms … to local educational authorities,
through the national level to regional bodies such as the European Union, to global
networks…
- Colin Brock (2013) “The Geography of Education & Comparative Education”
Education systems as ”space adjusting
techniques.” - Spencer & Thomas
(1969) Cultural Geography
 Washington, DC, 2022

Chennai, India, 2017

What happens when the local
school is shut down?
The decision to shuffle students from one
building to another in the name of numbers
… is based on the premise that children,
teachers, and schools are indistinguishable
widgets, to be distributed as efficiently as
possible across the landscape.

But the fact is that schools are ecosystems,

each with its own history, culture, and
intricately woven set of social relationships.

Schools are community anchors. They are

not interchangeable, nor are they
disposable.

Schools are home.

Eve Ewing, Ghosts in the Schoolyard

Universities are … key urban institutions ... with
significant local direct and indirect impacts – on
employment, the built environment, business
innovation and the wider society.
There is no question that higher education
institutions can deliver positive community
outcomes for their cities.

But a central question remains: what are the

costs when colleges and universities exercise
significant power over a city’s financial
resources, policing priorities, labor relations,
and land values?

Despite all of the triumphalist rhetoric

surrounding higher education’s expansive
reach across US cities, Black and Latinx
communities that largely surround campuses
don’t experience the same levels of
prosperity
In fact, the relationship of university and city is often quite complex and
conflictive - Wiewel and Perry, Global Universities and Urban Development
Studentification: Distinct social, cultural, economic and physical
transformations that are tied to residential concentrations and
seasonal in-migrations of students in university towns, cities
and neighbourhoods.
 Studentification

Caused by: (1) Growing numbers of university students; and (2) Higher education
system where university students live away from parental homes.

 With your neighbours, please discuss the following questions:

• What are the likely social, cultural, physical, political and economic impacts on a
neighbourhood from studentification?

• What are the likely positive impacts & what are the likely negative impacts?

• Are there ways we could organize education to avoid any negative impacts and
increase positive impacts from studentification?
STUDENTIFICATION
 Race discrimination

Class discrimination

Gender & sex

discrimination

Place/national citizenship
discrimination
 Also, access to widening participation
support, grants/bursaries & loans, inclusion
in laws/principles of equal equational
opportunity
 Pedagogies of Space

The process through which institutional

discursive landscapes of power infuse the
national space with certain cultural, social
and national meanings.

The division of space into discontinuous units,

separate territories conceived as the ‘homes’
of certain peoples but not others.

Pedagogies of space, as part of the broader

national education systems, appear to be
especially crucial cogs in the sociospatial
socialization of children.
World is natuarally divided into nations...
Land

People

State Modern schooling developed during the

rise of the nation state system… and
consequently, we have a nation state
model of schooling.
State-supervised schooling has long
been recognized as the quintessential
mechanism by which nation-states
turn children into citizens….

Without state schools, there would be

no nations as we know them….
 Two hundred years
ago, French was a
foreign language to
the vast majority of
the French population,
and most of the
population did not
identify as French.

Blanc & Kubo (2023)

”State-Sponsored
Education and French
Identity”
How I became
Canadian….

This was me being

interviewed by one of
Canada’s national
newspapers at a
ceremony for
immigrant children
who were all
becoming Canadian
citizens for the first
time….
HISTORY
LITERATURE
SCIENCE
GEOGRAPHY
FLAGS & ANTHEMS
 Schooling produces “nationalist geographical imaginaries –
that is, territorial affinities, spatial fields of reference, and
other frameworks that ‘explain who ‘we’ are collectively and
individually, who ‘others’ are and how the world works.”
• In your own school experience or the experience of your family & friends, did schooling
produce nationalist geographical imaginaries? How did it do this? Or did schooling
produce different kinds of geographical imaginaries?

• Is this production of nationalist geographical imaginaries in schooling: (1) a good thing?

(2) a bad thing? (3) just a thing?

• In an ideal world, would schools produce other (non-nationalist) kinds of geographical

imaginaries for children? What should these be?
 “When they even mention Palestinians at all,
Israel’s official schoolbooks … quite literally
wipes Palestine off the map. Maps in the
schoolbooks only ever show ‘the Land of Israel’,
from the river to the sea.”
Education helps frame a modernity in which individual progress and achievement
are increasingly linked to the sheer physical act of movement.

- Martin Forsey, “Education in a mobile modernity”

Please stand up if….
You or your family moved to a new house or
neighbourhood or city or region or country in order to
access (a good) PRIMARY SCHOOL
Please stand up if….
You or your family moved to a new house or
neighbourhood or city or region or country in order to
access (a good) PRIMARY SCHOOL

You or your family moved to a new house or

neighbourhood or city or region or country in order to
access (a good) SECONDARY/HIGH SCHOOL
Please stand up if….
You or your family moved to a new house or
neighbourhood or city or region or country in order to
access (a good) PRIMARY SCHOOL

You or your family moved to a new house or

neighbourhood or city or region or country in order to
access (a good) SECONDARY/HIGH SCHOOL

You or your family moved to a new house or

neighbourhood or city or region or country in order to
access (a good) UNIVERSITY
The connections between a movement away from
place and the processes of formal education are so
well established and ingrained that we seldom even
recognize them.

This is particularly true for people growing up in

small, rural, poor & peripheral communities
around the world.
• Education often involves physically moving away
from home

• Education as leaving behind home cultures &

practices

• Education as moving from concrete thinking &

practice to abstract thinking & practice

• Education as moving from a state of nature to a

state of being cultured

• Etymology of the word “education”: to draw out,

lead forth, take out
Education & Geographical Mobility

• decisions about schooling and

education often also involve decisions
about….

• commitments to family and friends

• commitments to local places

• commitments to cultures & countries

• commitments to different kinds of

values and priorities
 Education systems as ”space adjusting
techniques.” - Spencer & Thomas
(1969) Cultural Geography

The Rise of Education-Based Immigration

Policy

• wealthy countries are increasingly opening

their borders to the highly educated, while
shutting them to those with low levels of
education

• as a consequence, global high skilled

migration has been increasing at a rate two
and a half times faster than low skilled
immigration

• education is being used to divide the world’s

population

• university educated individuals can access a

level of global mobility that non-university
educated individuals often can not…
 The Education Gospel?
How is education supposed to help
solve social problems … if those who
gain an education end up leaving???
 Education & Geographical Mobility

• Could/should we organise education so that it better benefits small, rural and

peripheral communities?

• Could/should we organise education so that students don’t feel compelled to leave

behind home communities in order to pursue their studies?

 This could involve where schools/universities are located…

 It could involve addressing the hierarchies & inequalities between different
schools/universities….
 It could involve supporting nonformal/informal education…
 But it also is about what kinds of knowledge, values, attitudes, goals, ethics etc
are promoted in curriculum & pedagogy

• Could/should we organise education so that mobile students are better supported and
protected (e.g., international students in other countries who lack citizenship rights
etc.)?