Considerate, convivial and capacious? Finding a language to capture ethos in 'creative' schools

Bibliographic Data

ID2931143
AuthorsSara Bragg (0000-0002-0377-5843, University of Brighton, corresponding author), Helen Manchester (0000-0001-8311-3841, University of Bristol)
Year2017
Volume38
Issue6
Pages864-879
Publication date2017-11-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDiscourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0159-6306 • E-ISSN: 1469-3739
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01596306.2016.1227302
OpenAlexW2512045442
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited37

Concepts of school ‘ethos’ or ‘culture’ have been widely debated in education since the 1980s. This is partly as a consequence of marketisation, partly because ethos has been identified as a low-cost route to school improvement. Corporate, authoritarian, and most recently ‘military’ models of ethos have been widely promulgated in the UK. Another significant strand of educational thinking, however, has emphasised ethos for and as learning: how schools might prefigure alternative, more socially just, worlds. This article argues that accounting for such divergent notions of ethos demands greater attention to the intellectual resources mobilised in interpreting educational processes. We discuss schools that used their work with the English creative learning programme, Creative Partnerships, to develop what we describe as ‘considerate, convivial and capacious’ school ethos. We aim thereby to value their achievements, provide tools to contest dominant discourses around ethos, and advocate more critical, reflexive approaches to researching school cultures

CONTEST · Epistemology · Ethos · Pedagogy · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · Global Education and Multiculturalism · Global Educational Policies and Reforms · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

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