Episode 7 : Conversation with Dr. Jordi Collet Sabé

Jul 9
18 min read

Updated: Aug 2

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TRANSCRIPT

Stella Micheong Cheong 00:00

Hello, listeners. Welcome to this episode of conversation for citizenship. This is a Stella Micheong Cheong from University College London. Our guest today is Dr. Jordi Collet-Sabéwho is an associate professor in education at the University of Vic in Spain. He has been involved in a range of research projects relating to critical pedagogy and school reforms and so on. Today, we would like to talk to Dr. Jordi about challenges raised by the school system and how to improve education. Now I'm going to pass over to Adam who leads today's conversation with Dr. Jordi.

Adam Peter Lang 00:47

Well, thank you very much. Hello and welcome to all the listeners and a particular welcome to Jordi who we're going to be speaking to. Jordi conversations4citizenship. We and our listeners are very interested in our own stories, actually, and journeys, autobiographical reflexivity. So, I wonder to start with if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests. And we know that at the moment, you're presently a visiting professor at UCL-IOE, and perhaps you can talk to us a little bit about that as well.

Jordi Collet Sabé 01:19

Okay, well, first of all, thank you very much for the invitation, thanks to Stella, Adam and Rowena. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, my academic career, it's quite simple. I started with a degree in what we call in Spain and France, something called social education, so that means like, like social work, but probably more related to social and community interventions, less related to paper works, etc. And the second one is about sociology. So I'm someone really interested in what's happening with schools and families and communities and education policy. And 10 years ago, I started to visit the Institute of Education with Professor Carol Vincent, and then with Professor Stephen Ball, and this academic relationship leads to a friendship. So, I feel at home at the IOE. And this is an amazing opportunity to share with these people and many other people and with people around the world. And it was a place to meet Adam as well. So, it's a pleasure to be there.

Adam Peter Lang 02:23

That's, that's great. Now, you've touched on that relationship with professors Vincent and Ball. And obviously, you've just written two recent papers, and co-authored them with Stephen Ball. We're quite interested in that. Do you want to just talk to us a little bit about those papers and the key essences of it? Obviously, we'll delve into more detail as we go through the conversation.

Jordi Collet Sabé 02:45

Yeah, good. Well, the good news is that yesterday, they approved the second one. So, on the website, you can find the first and the second one, the third one is still being written by Stephen and myself. The first one starts with a personal experience, that maybe some of the people who are listening now have the same experience is that, that sometimes, when we have those tools, like the school or other social institutions, like this feeling like we always we are rowing against the row. So, this idea that we are trying all the time is to fix it, to improve it, to try to make their institutions more equal, more inclusive, more supportive. But at the end of the day, we lost the battle, you know, and the institution comes to the riverbed, and it always comes back to what we call the deep grammar of the school. So this idea that one hour, one teacher, one group, one subject, etc. And with that kind of structure, equality and inclusion and well-being are so difficult. So the point of the part, with the first paper with Stephen, that it's called, “Against School and its epistemological critique”, it's this personal experience for the two of us, about this difficulty to improve institutions in a sustainable way, you know, because for a while it's more or less possible, but sometimes, for example, my experiences about the school segregation, we work with some cities in Catalonia, about school segregation, and they improve it a lot. But 10 years later, they were worse than at the beginning of the process, you know, so that that feeling is the same about inclusion and about equity and about well-being and about I don't know, so this is the point of departure. So we analyze critically school as a modern mass institution, and we have there six main axes of critique of the school. So, this is a little bit what we tried to do in the first paper, this like, critique, but it's important to say that it's not a critique to teachers, it’s not a critique to students, it’s not a critique to parents, it’s not a critique to community or local authorities. It's a critique of the tool, the modern tool that probably is not what we expected that it was, we desire that it was, but it's become something else.

Adam Peter Lang 05:30

That's interesting. So, in essence, I might ask you a little bit more about those six points in a moment. But are you kind of arguing against schooling as an institution? Is that what you're saying? I mean, I picked up that bit. You're not, you're not critiquing individual teachers and young people, but the actual structures that they have to go through. Is that in essence, what you're saying we need to relook at schools?

Jordi Collet Sabé 05:56

It is exactly what you say is exactly like that. So our point of departure is that probably, for the first axe, the first critique of the school, is that we discover that the school was not built up to create equality, dissemination of knowledge, or well-being in people. Schools, instead, were created and spread out for the state's competition, modern states' competitions for moral management or inequality. It's sometimes frightening to discover, that classics like Diderot, or Voltaire, or Rousseau saying that, okay, your schools are fine. But please, do not question the status quo, you know, schools have for maintaining poverty, maintaining inequalities. So probably here lies our disappointment, you know, because the tool, the schools, as many other modern tools, were created for the inequalities and not against inequalities. And probably we are disappointed with a tool that we believe that we are trying to rule in one way, but probably, it was created in another way. So sometimes it's difficult to reshape it. So probably this is the first point of the critique, you know, the historical one, related to a tool that probably was not created for equality or for wellbeing or for inclusion. But on the contrary,

Adam Peter Lang 07:31

just going back a bit, did you draw on the sort of Ivan Illich schooling ideas? Or does your work, take that forward and look at things in a different way? I know you draw on any of the sort of Foucauldian toolbox, we have quite a lot of our listeners have quite interested in that approach. What would you say about that?

Jordi Collet Sabé 07:50

It's interesting because I haven't read properly, Ivan Illich. You know, so sometimes people say that that is Ivan Illich’s position in essence, probably because I haven't read it. So that is something that happened. I'm sure I know the deschooling movement. So I read a little Ivan Illich and John Holt and Paul Goodman, and Thorsten Hussen and all those people, you know, and I'm sure that we share some of the points. But two weeks ago we read a long paper about Ivan Illich’s academic career, and he was someone that actually 20 years later, reshaped a little bit his arguments about all that stuff. So I guess that you Ivan Illich was a really good academic, a really interesting, really, really interesting thinker. You know, what kinds of things so I'm sure that we learn a lot from him. But at the same time, it's true that we, as many of the people who are listening to us know Stephen Ball is someone who uses a lot of Michel Foucault's work and approach and we used more this one because, as you know, Foucault is someone who really questions modernity, and the questioning of the school is just one of the part of the questioning of the modern jails, modern hospitals, modern schools, modern disciplinary technologies, etc. So, as you said Adam, we use these Foucauldian tools especially these strategies to refuse you know, like so to refuse the tool and to try to refuse who you are! Because Stephen and me, we are both academics. So we teach at school, high school, but at school you know, so it was a journey with Stephen that was not always so easy because some of the things that we say in this paper, is probably schools are irreparable or irredeemable, and you cannot try to fix it and this is quite strong, you know? Yes, sometimes it's like anxious, makes me feel anxious when I read that kind of thing that we wrote. But it's true, as you're saying it comes from more a Foucauldian approach than Ivan Illich, John Holt or Paul Goodman approaches, even if for sure they did 40 years ago really interesting approaches.

Adam Peter Lang 10:13

Yeah. And obviously, this is why we've got you on the podcast because I think what you're writing in your papers is challenging our thinking. I mean, I spent most of my life working in schools. So you know, I’m defensive to a point. But can I just ask you about the business, you read about modernity? Because I think somewhere in one of your papers, you say that, you know, hospitals, and medicines changed a lot over the last 200 years. But I think, in fact, you're saying that schools haven't really been. Is that? Is that part of your debate, part of the argument that you're putting?

Jordi Collet Sabé 10:47

Sometimes, when we talk about innovative schools, the schools that are really interesting for parents, and for children, sometimes it's interesting, but I don't know, in England or in the UK, but especially in Spain, I know a little bit more. Those schools that are more valued by parents and children, sometimes teachers, are those schools that are far away from the classic model of schools, you know, from this classical deep grammar of schooling with one hour, etc. So, in some sense, what are we saying is the far the better that the more different the better schools, you know, so we are trying to, in most cases, I guess, most part of cases, we're trying to escape from this modern grammar of schooling, but at the same time, we are trapped by the sound. So sometimes the schools do something really innovative, but 5-10 years later, they come back to this one. So this is a huge debate about probably we are all aware of, and we all agreed that we need another school. But the question is, the question that Stephen and I put this, is it possible to reform it, or do we need another tool? Because the same tool, it's related to this, it's for inequalities, it’s related to the universal, related to the normal and abnormal, so it will be really difficult to question this tool. It’s related to disciplining people, etc. Now, one of the most interesting things that we propose in that paper, and that we learned from Foucault is that Foucault proposes that education should be something related to an ethical and political activity. And I guess that nowadays, related to climate change, the rise of a new fascism, new divisions, etc, probably this is one of the most important points now. So let me check if I find like a quote about the Foucaldian approach that he said, “Education has to be a political and ethical activity of self-formation that gives priority to ethics, rather than to truth. And that to produce our configuration is of experience.” And one of the most beautiful things during the journey, writing this paper, we wrote, like, more than 20 versions of this paper, you know, it was back and forth, back and forth, back and forth during the lockdown.

Adam Peter Lang 13:24

Was that during the pandemic?

Jordi Collet Sabé 13:28

Exactly. Something that can explain partly the paper, maybe, you know, and it was really beautiful to be aware that people from really far away lands of knowledge, like environmental research, etc, are claiming against the school as well. And they are saying, for example, in one of the quotes in the paper that “we have to consider if education is in fact a solution or a cause of the climate change. And they say, is it clear that the Earth does not need more educated consumers of knowledge, instead, we must change ways of being”. So this idea that that the schools produce one kind of subject related to normal and abnormal, related to knowledge, consumer, etc, individuality, etc. That probably is what we don't need related to climate change, climate crisis, related to divisions, etc. So one of the main points of the paper and shared with that kind of people or researchers that come from really far away lands of knowledge, is that we share the point that probably the school now it's part of the problem and not part of the solution related to our huge challenges as humans and I don't know, but I guess this is one of the main points probably of the paper.

Adam Peter Lang 14:53

I know that comes through very strongly in the paper and one of the themes of our podcasts actually is reimagining education, citizenship, and so on, as we come out of the pandemic, how's that changing? It's quite interesting what you just said there about how you're writing it actually, during that experience. Now, I was just going to push back something; I've worked in education for many years. So what would you say to this that, during the pandemic, actually schools have been bastions of support for welfare for families? They fed children, they clothed children, they've gone out of their way to help, and they operated during the pandemic when lots of other arms of the state have failed. So how would you answer somebody that came back to you and sort of said that, that schools actually have made a difference, particularly during the pandemic?

Jordi Collet Sabé 15:48

The answer is quite simple. You're totally right. Absolutely. And that's a really good point to start with the second paper. That is, like, as you said, more a proposal. I guess that about what you said, and I totally agree with you is that probably we can distinguish the school as an institution and the functions that the school is related to, right? Oh, there is, they are, sorry. Sorry, for my English mistakes. There are two different functions that the schools accomplish, that are really important. The first one is related to guarding children. And this is something that when we said that kind of thing, people said, but who's going to guard our children, I mean, while we are working, and but this is a function, this is not an institution. And the same as you said, some schools during the pandemic, really work as community centers, community support, like a point to gather people and support people, others not, but some of them, some of them they did. So, we need to keep that kind of function that the school accomplishes, for sure. So, when we think about alternatives, from our point of view, it’s really important to understand that our complaint is about the institution, and its deep grammar, but not about what teachers do and what pupils do and what kind of functions the school can accomplish. So, I totally agree with you. And it's important when we think about alternatives, to understand that some functions that the school can accomplish now, can be not only protected, but improved and boosted.

Adam Peter Lang 17:29

Now, that's very helpful. And I would urge all our listeners to read your papers, we will through the podcast, detail the information on that I have to leave the meeting. Thank you so much indeed, for your time. I'm going to pass over to my colleague, Rowena.

Jordi Collet Sabé 17:44

Thank you very much. Pleasure.

Rowena Azada-Palacios 17:46

Thank you so much, Adam. Just to pick up on what you were just talking about, it seems as if just to pick up on what you were talking about earlier, it seems as if many of the barriers to the kind of change that you're advocating for our systems in wider society prevent your vision of schooling from happening, which makes me wonder whether this is a chicken and egg kind of problem? Should we be changing schools first, in the hopes that that will ripple out into wider societal changes? Or do we need to change society first, and hope that when we change society, it will become easier to change schools?

Jordi Collet Sabé 18:27

My answer to what you're questioning is that we need to improve or change the schools first and my reason is quite simple because we are talking about the socialization process. So, we are talking about the process of what kind of subjectivities we’re producing, you know, first and second socialization, up to 12 years old, produces one kind of subject that you need years and years to reshape then. So for example, related to neurosciences that they support the idea that from sociology and psychology and pedagogy, we had for a century at least, that the first and second socialization processes are shaping not only attitudes and values and norms, they're shaping brains. So how the brain is shaped, it's something that's happened in the first 10-12 years. So, if we don't reshape subjectivities in order to make new subjects, new people with new values, new attitudes, new norms, new habits, it will be impossible to save the planet, it will be impossible to fight that kind of divisions and, and inequalities and, and, you know. So for me, this is quite clear, because the question is, people like me near the 50s who I’m going to reshape our whole life to adapt it to a new way of being related to climate change, are you sure? I can change some things but my life, my habits, my norms you know, have been shaped in a really modern consumerist society. So we need to build up new institutions, new truths, and new spaces, to create new subjectivities because if not, from my point of view, we are lost.

Rowena Azada-Palacios 20:28

Thank you so much for that. Now, one of the alternatives to the modern mass school system that you've suggested in your work is this common or commoning approach. Can you say a little bit more about what that means?

Jordi Collet Sabé 20:42

Yeah, it's that is related to Adam’s question about the function of the school that is really worth it. And one of the parts of guarding children, one of the most important functions that the school accomplishes is that it can be, not always accomplishers but it could be, a place where different people interact together. So a commonplace. And this is the perspective in the second paper that probably will be released next week called “Beyond the School, the Challenge of Co-producing and combining different epistemic for education”. This second paper is about using this perspective of the common good, that probably as many people know, comes from Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize winner economist in 2009. She spent her whole life, her whole career looking for well-managed commons around the world, she found like 400 experiences, where lands and water, and fish, and forest and all that stuff are really well-managed and in a sustainable way in common. So there is no market, there is no state, there is only self-government of the community. And the question that Stephen and I put in the paper is, could we think about education as a common? Could be this idea of education as a common and so educating as a commoning activity, the way that we could implement these ideas, this Foucauldian idea of education as self-formation, as an ethical and political activity? And this is the question we tried to develop in the second paper, you know, trying to be moving forward about that.

Rowena Azada-Palacios 22:36

Thank you, that sounds like a really exciting idea. And many of our listeners are actually practitioners. So, they are teachers, youth workers, and students. And what you're talking about in your second paper is something that is quite practical or has very practical implications. So, can you tell us a little bit about how you imagine the bridge between what you're theorizing about an actual practice?

Jordi Collet Sabé 23:03

Yeah, for sure. The Foucauldian approach, one of the last papers or chapters or books, or lessons that he wrote, was about this idea of care. That is something that both the feminist approach and environmental approach, put at the center, you know, this idea of, we have to take care of life, we have to take care of people, and Foucault proposes this idea of that it's so important to learn to take care of oneself, to take care of others, to take care of the community, taking care of the planet. Well, he didn’t explain exactly those terms, but we can understand that. And the way we propose to do this learning to take care of oneself, others, the community, and the planet is that education could be like, a common activity. So doing things in common are more related to an ethical and political activity, than knowledge but that doesn't mean that knowledge is not important, but knowledge is not the most important. You know, if we only learn we only have to learn knowledge, to consume knowledge for ourselves, you know, it doesn't make sense at all. So this idea that it could be like a point of departure, to think education differently, you know, a lot of like practical tenets for an education beyond the school, related to this idea of doing things in common related to the community, related to the community challenges related to community care, related to the teachers, families, and, for example, the bakers and mechanist and butchers and, you know, everybody in the community can learn and teach and what we could learn there related to the community challenges could be really interesting. And probably related to this idea of taking care of each other, you know, so we don't know. But probably this idea of the common activity that Ostrom, so many, since she have tried to think about, it could be a point of departure to think and to practice that kind of thing. I don't know.

Rowena Azada-Palacios 25:20

Thank you so much. That's a very hopeful and inspiring vision. And I do hope that I mean, I imagine that many of our listeners will think quite seriously about that, and how that might impact their practice. So, we're coming to the end of the set of our conversation. But in conclusion, is there anything you'd like to share with our audiences about your work that hasn't come up yet, or anything you'd like to talk about in relation to what you're currently working on?

Jordi Collet Sabé 25:47

No, but related to what you said before about that most of the people who listen to the podcast are related to the practitioners, I guess this is really important from my point of view, because I used to be a practitioner related to social care, and, you know, in children in social care, and all that stuff, that sometimes when you hear that kind of things, sometimes it's easy to think that they are too theoretical or you know, far away from reality. But I guess it's not. Especially in the second paper with Stephen, we try to think about that like that, what people are doing in everyday life. And this is really important that practitioners, probably they are already doing some kind of things. So the proposal is how to keep doing that kind of thing. How can we keep thinking about these things together in common, in the network, and how this approach to education as a common activity, now related to schools, maybe when they related to institutions, or spaces beyond the schools can be like, an alternative? So, to some things that are happening in our countries that we do not agree with, you know, like more discipline or more punishment, or more accountability, or more, you know, so everywhere in the world, the comment is, like, as you said, like a hopeful or a hope perspective that is helping us to rethink to re-practice, and probably something about to explore. So that will be really interesting that people that are trying to rethink and to re-practice from this kind of perspective of the common and the commoning. Explain it in the podcast, what are they thinking and what are they doing?

Rowena Azada-Palacios 27:36

Thank you so much, Jordi, and thanks for your time today. I think what you've said has challenged a lot of people's assumptions about schools, challenging what people usually consider to be “good” schooling, but I'm sure that all of our listeners are definitely going to benefit from your knowledge or experience and your expertise. And you've definitely given all of us something to think about. And so we're now about to close this episode of this has been Rowena Azada Palacios for Conversations for Citizenship. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you have enjoyed this episode. Please subscribe to the Conversations for Citizenship podcast and look for us on Twitter. Our handle is @c4c_ed. A transcript of today's conversation with Dr. Jordi Collet-Sabé is available at www.conversations4citizenship.com. In a forthcoming episode, we will have a conversation with Professor Carol Vincent, co-director of the Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity at the Institute of Education, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. This episode of Conversations for Citizenship was produced by myself, Adam Peter Lang, Stella Micheong Cheong, and Kamille Beye recorded and sound mixed by Ingrid Espinosa. Thank you so much and take good care.

EPISODE SUMMARY

Most of us tend to assume that schools, as we currently know them, are the best form of institution for educating youngsters in society, but is that really true? In episode 7 of Conversations4Citizenship, we have a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Jordi Collet-Sabé, who challenges many of our assumptions about schools.

EPISODE NOTES

In this episode, we converse with Dr. Jordi Collet-Sabé, who is an associate professor in education at the University of Vic in Spain and a visiting professor at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Social Sciences. Dr Collet-Sabé speaks to us in this episode of some of his latest publications, including papers co-authored with Stephen Ball, which offer thought-provoking critiques of schools as social institutions, and raises questions as to how we can transform education. Specifically, his work proposes that, following Foucault, we think of education as an ethical and political activity, and that we take a “commoning approach” to education, seeing it as self-formation.

Some of Collet-Sabé's work is available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jordi-Collet-Sabe

List of further readings

Ball, S., & Collet-Sabe, J. (2022a). Against school: an epistemological critique,Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education,43:6,985-999, https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/AKAVZ4GAFP6HKSTF3KZ9/full?target=10.1080/01596306.2021.1947780
Collet-Sabe, J., & Ball, S. (2022b). Beyond School. The challenge of co-producing and commoning a different episteme for education,Journal of Education Policy,DOI:10.1080/02680939.2022.2157890
Collet-Sabe, J. (2023). Pre-modern epistemes inspiring a new Global Sociology of Education Imagination, British Journal of Sociology of Education,DOI:10.1080/01425692.2023.2195089