Educational potential, underachievement, and cultural pluralism.

Download

EITN_16_2008_p23_23_1_2016.pdf

content

Comments on Donald Gillies’ article – issue 16, 2008-9

This article opens with this striking statement: ‘The issue of educational
‘underachievement’ is one which seems to recur as a crisis every so often in
public discourse’. We may consider on re-reading this article how far in this
current context of austerity we are once again experiencing a ‘crisis narrative’
in which we need, like Gillies, to examine and de-construct current dominant
notions of ‘underachievement’ and ‘potential’; these notions may encourage
educators to pathologise children and families rather than to examine the
ways in which the education system may evaluate and miss opportunities to
develop children’s achievement on the basis of narrow and limiting
understandings of their capabilities.

Sarah Kearns

June 2016

DOI