Contested geographies: competing constructions of community and efficiency in small school debates Michael Corbett1* and Leif Helmer2 Rural and Regional Education, Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia 2 Nova Scotia Community College, Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada *Corresponding author. Email:
[email protected]
1
Received 15 September 2015 • Revised 27 June 2016 • Accepted 7 July 2016
Abstract The history of rural education in North America can be understood as a history of school closure, amalgamation, and consolidation of schools. Typically, historical and geographical arguments have converged in debates about whether or not to close small community schools, which are positioned as the victims of the march of time and reconfiguration of space. In this paper, we analyse the archetypical positioning of rural parents in the ‘school wars’ as emotional and irrational participants who want to turn back time and who fail or refuse to understand and accept what is alleged to be the inevitable transformation of rural space. We then analyse the political strategy and tactics engaged in by school governance officials and community agents in these struggles over the meaning and future of rural space. We argue that the confrontational politics that ensues do not support strong rural development conversations and that the unilateral search for what we call ‘trump cards’ to settle arguments with data and rational or emotional ‘appeals’ has led to ongoing tension in rural communities. Keywords rural eduation; small schools; rural geography Framing the frame: the spatial politics of the small rural school wars in Atlantic Canada This paper reports on a three-year investigation of the politics and dynamics of small school closures in a province of Atlantic Canada much less heavily urbanised than is the national norm. This coastal province has historically depended on primary industries for its economic foundations, moving more recently toward tourism and a contested and politicised ‘post-productivist’ rural geography (Cloke & Little, 1997; Corbett, 2006). One residue of historic resource dependence is the survival of many rural and coastal villages and small towns scattered throughout provincial geography. Because this region has retained its rural character and its rural population (enumerated at more than 40 per cent of the total), the persistence Geographical Research • 2017 doi:10.1111/1745-5871.12209
of rural schools parallels the problematic ‘spectral’ persistence of rural communities themselves (Corbett, 2006; 2014). There is a view that rural parts of the province are persistently inconvenient ‘resistant’ geographies and a problem for modernisation and development. This view has been common since the beginning of the 20th century (Corbett, 2001; Edvardsen, 2011). The ‘rural school problem’ remains a constituent part of what Cubberley (1922) called the ‘rural life problem’. In Cubberley’s formulation, the professionalisation of teaching, centralisation of administration, and consolidation of schools would solve this problem. This sort of thinking set in motion a relentless educational and social respatialisation process of closing small schools in rural North America (DeYoung & Howley, 1990; Howley, 1997; Theobald, 1997). Today, 1
2 the rural school problem is a flashpoint for conflict in rural communities as school governance authorities struggle with citizens over the meaning of educational modernisation. This struggle is part of a broader geopolitical process of the continuous spatial production and reproduction that global capitalism represents (Harvey, 2006; Held, 1999; Lefebvre, 1992; Massey, 2005; Pini, Moletsane & Mills, 2014). Small rural schools often represent a ‘last stand’ (Bennett, 2013) for communities marginalised in the relentless urbanisation and exploitation of rural lands that accompany capitalist globalisation (Corbett, 2007; Sassen, 2001; 2014; Spivak, 2013). In Atlantic Canada, the school closure process has evolved into one in which communities are formally consulted. The way that educational geopolitics works in rural regions varies in accordance with differently scaled school governance structures. Many European systems are governed nationally, and rural school closure politics can become national issues (Hargreaves, 2009; Kalaoja & Pietarinen, 2009; Kvalsund, 2009). In Australia, schools are governed in a more complex fashion with centralised curriculum, oversight, and regulation at the national level and state ministries operating government schools. There, small school closures tend to be highly politicised, and local rural politicians often intervene when rumblings of closure erupt. In most of Canada and the USA, decisionmaking about school closures is ultimately in the hands of school boards. In Canada, school boards are principally responsible for a K-12 system of universal public schooling where approximately 95 per cent of youths are educated, typically in their neighbourhoods and home communities. These governance bodies have been steadily amalgamated to contain broader geographies, but the fundamental principal is that local citizens close to communities and schools are responsible for governance and regulation. This project is a qualitative analysis of school closure decision-making in an Atlantic Canadian province. Our principal data source is 64 audio recorded mostly on-site (office) interviews conducted by the research team with Department of Education personnel, school board officials, educators, parents, community activists, and consultants. The research team—consisting of the principal investigator and a postdoctoral researcher—also conducted content analysis of media coverage of school closures and participated in a government-sponsored provincial
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consultation that investigated the process for school review and closure in 2014. Interviews were transcribed and thematically analysed using a modification of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 1990). The demographic context of this province is one of stagnant population growth, with steep declines in most rural areas. Economic growth has been slow by national standards for some years, and youth outmigration has been chronic in the rural areas for generations. While there has been a slow trickle of immigrants, this inbound population has tended to locate in the province’s only city. In selected rural areas, there has been ‘sea change’ immigration of retirees and those seeking lifestyle amenities. Despite high unemployment, guest workers mostly from the Caribbean and Mexico are employed as temporary agricultural labourers. Processes involved in school closures The process of closing small rural schools is a delicate balance managed within an ever-changing bureaucratic framework reviewed and reformed several times in the past decade. In the current framework, many difficult problems and management of the process are outsourced to expert consultants. At the same time, decision-making authority is ‘insourced’ to local actors—in this case voluntary school board members. While the nuances of the process have changed, the fundamental decision-making structure has not. Figure 1 shows the hierarchical nature of school closure decision-making in the Atlantic Canadian province where this research was conducted. At the top of the hierarchical chart is the provincial Department of Education (DOE), which is the bureaucracy that develops the procedural framing and criteria for school closure decisions. This arrangement allows the DOE bureaucracy and the elected political class to maintain distance from school closure decisions while at same time retaining the resource-allocation and regulatory power over the way that school boards and communities work through the difficult politics of school closings. School boards employ both their own staff and external consultants to study school situations and to provide evidence used in school reviews. In Figure 1, we call this the ‘outsourcing’ of evidence production. This outsourcing is typically carried out by consultants, but these external consultants have not generally assessed the quality of programming in schools that are targeted for closure. What is normally assessed is the architectural © 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers
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Figure 1 The structure of authority in school closure decision-making
integrity of the school building and excess space. In the process, the school building itself becomes an ‘actant’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Latour, 2007) and a focal point of educational quality and community identity debates. For instance, the school can be constructed in these debates as a much loved community icon, or a decaying anachronism. These discussions represent geospatial debates over the proper scaling of educational services, the relationship between schooling and community development, and the question of what constitutes educational equality/equity and quality education. Here, we focus specifically on how rural parents are positioned in these discussions in four archetypal categories: emotional, activist, engaged, and absent. These categories represent models of parental engagement in the school review process but are also idealised spatial sensibilities with appropriately ‘engaged’ parents assuming the perspective and point of sight of administrators. Using outside consultants and their own staff, school boards then set up managed consultations about policy frameworks. These consultations require communities to justify the necessity of their schools in terms that are non-emotional and that fit the criteria. The result is that many community members feel as though they spend © 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers
large amounts of time in a futile exercise. This process tends to raise the emotional temperature of the small school (wars) by prompting rural citizens to believe that decisions are made beforethe-fact, or that school boards essentially employ tactics of wearing communities down not by making arbitrary decisions, but ironically, by consulting them (to death) and subjecting them to endless conditions, parameters, and managed discussions. The idea of ‘tight-loose’ policy framing is what we see at play here: where central bureaucracies retain control of setting expectations and measuring their attainment but devolve responsibility to local actors for developing efficient ways to meet the targets (Ball, 2006; Sykes et al., 2012). This situation illustrates what Hildreth (2011) terms ‘conditional localism’ or the devolution of responsibility to communities so long as local actors meet specific conditions. For example, in 2014, the DOE responded to a consultant’s report (Government of Nova Scotia, 2014) that ‘hub’ model schooling should be considered when small rural schools are considered for closure. For more than a year, activist parents had been lobbying for hub model and multiservice schools (Clandfield, 2010). These recommendations were accepted and subsequently guidelines were drawn up by school board officials in the summer of 2014.
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4 However, the specified conditions for setting up a hub school were virtually impossible to meet. For instance, to be approved, these small schools would be required to demonstrate how they could generate revenue to make them cost-neutral to the school board, a condition imposed on no other provincial schools. Not surprisingly, in the spring of 2015 when three schools completed their hub school proposals to try and meet the conditions imposed by the guidelines, all were rejected by the school board and closed in September of 2015. No matter how the procedures are framed, there is no way to avoid the inevitable emotions involved when a community school is up for closure. Indeed, school board personnel claim that they are placed in a position where they have no good choices and where they face emotional and typically entrenched opposition. Parent activists, on the other hand, complain that they are not consulted properly and that too much is demanded of them, and report that they wish that the school board members could see the world and their community schools through their eyes. In the bureaucratic vision, someone must ‘take the heat’ and close schools. Somebody has to be the bad guy, to consider closing a school and maybe close it … I’d much rather that it’s my next-door neighbour that I’m going to get in the argument about later on than some stranger down in Halifax. Yes, my neighbour and I don’t speak, but gosh, looking back I’m glad it was her or him instead of somebody I don’t know. In this process, responsibility for contentious decisions is devolved to the school board that serves as a heat shield for bureaucrats and the political class. The move from more flexible, compassionate decision-making to an ‘evidencebased’ approach tends to sideline social, cultural, development, and community survival arguments that are central to the case most activists attempt to make. The evidence production to support the process then is outsourced by school boards to expert consultants who are considered to produce unbiased data. By contrast, the final political decision-making is ‘insourced’ to local actors, the ordinary citizens elected to school boards. In the process, the sorts of evidence citizens tend to bring to the table are marginalised as being ‘warm and fuzzy,’ and self-interested, but these positions are framed as neither practical, fair, nor reasonable. The protection of the integrity of community as an emotional geography (Kenway & Youdell, 2011) is then
subordinated to an administrative spatial politics. It is this framing we will explore in the next section of this paper. Parental archetypes: framing participation, constructing space Parents are positioned in these school debates as local actors whose limited and emotional perspective is conditioned by their immersion in the lifeworld of rural communities. The limitation of parents is geographic in the sense that many of them are alleged to be unable to see beyond their children, their communities, and own local interests. Some are also constructed as an emotional, resistant, or recalcitrant population that refuses to accept its fate and accede to the assumption that their rural community is in a situation of chronic population loss. To imagine otherwise is to fail to accept the geotemporal determinism of rural decline which is a core assumption in administrative discourse. Yet the community’s survival-oriented emotional geographies and the rural school itself as a key actant are understood by rural parents very differently. Framing in this case involves both defining the nature of democratic process and creating a typology of forms of participation and participant identities. This framing also assumes the production of functional and efficient educational geographies. Within the larger frame of the process itself, we discovered four archetypical identity positions, each of which is situated through the exercise of pastoral power as more or less ‘docile’ in the Foucauldian (Foucault, 1977) sense.1 Emotional parents Emotional parents are framed as irrational. A veteran administrator suggested that: the emotional component is always there for those families who don’t want it to close, who grew up there, who went to school there, or who moved there because it was small and rural. Indeed, the management of emotion is widely considered the most difficult administrative problem in the school review and closure process. Emotional parents see school as a geography that includes attachment to physical school space but also to retrospective and prospective imaginaries relating to how things might be in a positive future. These emotional, place-attached geographies (Altman & Low, 1992) also connect to discourses of metrocentric respatialisation of service delivery and government neglect, which © 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers
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exacerbates ongoing population loss in rural communities. As a school board member observed: … they demonstrated, they came out, they presented both parents, students, teachers … I mean, the hall was packed full. They were pleading with us. Pleading and begging please do not close our school. Fear and panic were associated with parents whose participation fit this archetype. As one administrator recalled: … the trepidation in the community was just, huge. Lots of vocal comments about distrusting the board, distrusting staff, not believing that staff was giving the board the correct information. But you could just feel the distress of the community members … You know, a school is an important part of any community and lots of emotion, lots of emotion. Emotional parents tend to be dismissed by some administrators for clinging to degraded local schools. A more reasonable understanding would accept the established demographic assumptions concerning the inescapable decline of the local community and the inevitability and desirability of consolidating services in what are considered to be better facilities in more viable places. This understanding involves a definition of reason that links with a broader scale spatial frame that situates the local school as a small and inefficient part of a larger system. One local critic of the emotional parent archetype did not want the community characterised as irrational and backward-looking because this undermines and prejudges the legitimacy of their argument to keep the school. First of all, there’s this sense that all community members are emotional and there’s no rationality to them because they’re just speaking from emotion alone and they’re angry, scared and anxious. So what they say is to be expected but it’s not to be listened to. Activist parents Activist parents are hyper-engaged and can represent a specific/another challenge to administrators because they tend to understand the language of consultation process politics and policy. Neither do they tend to be as exclusively grounded in the emotional geographies of the locale. When asked, one parent described a fellow activist as being … familiar with the language of the government and how everybody is always looking after their © 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers
5 own position. Where a lot of other people may not be as savvy to machinations of local government … where some of the other local people weren’t as aware of how it actually turns over. And I think that was a big part of knowing the right language to use and present your case and don’t leave them the room to wiggle that they fight so much for. Activists are often quite verbal in meetings, rarely missing an opportunity to question details or point out inconsistencies. They write letters, lobby decision makers, speak with the media, and seek out alliances with other actors. Sometimes activist parents operate within the parameters of the administrative framing, adhering to its standards of evidence and process requirements. In other instances, they can question the parameters of the review, arguing that they were not consulted about how the process is followed and that the administrative worldview is inconsistent with their desire for community protection. They also tend to frame their engagement in terms of the geopolitics of community survival refusing to accept the reasoning of administrators who offer them only the rationale of rural population decline. They initiate discussions in their networks to counter evidence and framing offered by those in administration and dedicate significant resources to researching alternative interpretations of data and administrative worldviews, often by drawing on research and critical analysis. Activist parents are most likely to be formally involved in the school review process through structures such as School Advisory Committees (SACs) and/or school-based ‘Study Committees’ associated with the review of particular schools. These actors are also most likely to form alliances with parents from other communities facing school review, veteran parents from past reviews, or academics with expertise on small schools and rural education. These alliances create new political networks and geographies, and bring together communities of interest often using contemporary networking and communication technologies.2 In general, activist parents tend to question how the review process, data, and standards of evidence are structured. Activist parents may attempt to disrupt the process if they feel it is unfair. These parents may also mistrust administrators and consultants facilitating the process and can be sceptical about the genuine impact that public participation will have on decisions. Like the emotional archetype, they refuse to accept the geography of progress represented by
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6 administrative efficiency-driven consolidation and amalgamation ideology. But activist parents tend to use the system logic inscribed in the school closure process in conjunction with alternative rationalities that arise from community development arguments. Nevertheless, parents of this archetype are regularly positioned by administrative actors as self-serving and self-interested, even if this framing is sympathetic. As one administrator put it, there will be … individuals speaking so passionately, but it’s more about their own children and the impact on their family and on their breakfast table … and on their work schedule, and on their bussing … Our schedule. When I have to get my little one out on the bus how long she’s going to be on the bus. This group of parents is most likely to bear the majority of the pressure related to the outcomes of the school review process, in part because of their deep investment and involvement, and in part, because of expectations of less involved parents. As a senior system administrator observed, … they put in a lot of time … And they’re under tremendous pressure from their friends and neighbours and colleagues. And the more work they do, and the better informed they become, the more they feel the pressure because the simple solution suggested at the grocery store they learn is not a simple solution, so that pressure increases. This quote is particularly sensitive to the micropolitics of involvement in school closure process. It also indicates how the process is said to be complicated once activist parents see a broader geography and come to understand the difficulty that accompanies viewing educational problems from a greater distance; this should, in the eyes of this administrator, lead to a more thoughtful posturing on the part of the activist parent. Conversely though, a deeper understanding can also lead to deeper and more entrenched resistance as the activist parent comes to see how their participation in the process is circumscribed and how their worldview is marginalised. The pressure of deep involvement can also have a high cost. As one parent recalled: I think emotionally myself, my wife and a couple of others that were very involved with it, were tapped; like it was touch and go there
for a while, we were like definitely drained. Personally, the cost is very high and this school review is for a community it’s anxious and there’s a lot of fear and kind of distrust. But on a personal, volunteer basis it’s a nightmare. Activist parents often burn out over time, and the management of time itself in the review process can act as a slow erosion of energy of activist parent volunteers who are so crucial to the success of an anti-school closure campaign. In some cases, activist parents may be isolated as ‘rogue’ in their use of tactics to alter the process, align with other actors, or to question the framing of standards of evidence, policies, and procedures. Engaged parents From an administrative perspective, the parental ideal is ‘engaged’. They read newsletters, attend meetings, speak with others in their community about the review, and generally support the way the process is structured and carried out. Essentially, they see the process as democratic and just and they accept the standards of evidence and other features of the review process. They trust those in authority to listen to all voices and weigh factors in decision-making. These parents understand and accept the rules and play by these rules. Process facilitators and administrators who describe this type of engagement as good and meaningful reward this behaviour. As a senior administrator put it, … if you bring the parents, guardians, of those children in a safe environment and you engage them in conversations you get amazingly deep reflection and how torn they are about what they believe is best for their children, which is a very different conversation in a room of 300 involving community members. It’s a strategy, you know … It infuriates articulate, strong-minded community members. This archetype is not one that interferes with process or questions policy. Indeed, these parents may not have much interest in the next steps beyond the review process and are unlikely to have reviewed the relevant policy such as transportation or grade alignment frameworks that may influence the eventual decision. They also typically accept the geopolitical remapping of educational jurisdictions and the corollary © 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers
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arguments about efficiency, fairness, and the inevitable decline of rural population. The engaged group is most likely to defer to more active/activist parents or to the school principal to stay abreast of the situation. Some may serve on formal school-based bodies such as the local SAC. Often they are among the least active members of such structures. Indeed, the SAC structure was put in place to provide local parents with a minimal or even token role that has little power and authority. These bodies also create the conditions for a more sympathetic and ‘insider’ mode of engagement that is consistent with the broader administrative vision of a more macro-scale understanding of the local community and school within broader geographies. Engaged parents may align with other likeminded parents in the community but would not generally seek out alliances. Engaged parents are often encouraged to maintain their participation by administrators at the school and board level, and media releases are generally aimed at engaged parents to confirm that things are on track and that the administrative rationale for its decisions and worldview are sound and reasonable. A crucial distinction between the engaged and activist parent is the extent to which each accepts the geographic determinism of school governance officials. The absent presence: the silent majority The final parent archetype we encountered is what we call the absent presence. These are parents who do not directly engage in the school review conversation. They are unlikely to attend a public meeting, but if they did, they would not speak or actively participate. As one activist parent observed, ‘a lot of people don’t feel comfortable doing that, or they don’t feel comfortable taking on any leadership, or they may feel intimated by the process’. They are silent, but what they think is imagined, framed, and often reported by more active players in the process. There is substantial rhetoric constituting descriptions of absent parents, who by definition, cannot or will not speak for themselves at least publicly. Absent parents can be spoken about and conjured to support one or another point of view. They are named by administrators and activists alike as individuals who lack either time or the ability to stand up in political forum to make their voices heard. They talk, but only in private, when and where they feel comfortable and not intimidated. © 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers
7 Absent parents serve as shell categories for more vocal actors, each of whom claims that the absent presence of the silent majority is on its side. This group does not pose a threat to the process, as its ‘members’ do not actively align with other parents or external actors. Diverse actors nevertheless involve absent parents and will speak about and for them as part of the general community and to counter the points made by opponents. They are imagined to be silent perhaps because they defer to engaged and activist parents or to school board officials and consultants. The silent majority is constructed as rational when they are presented with calm, reasoned arguments in a smaller dialogical space. Indeed, administrators often cast this silent majority as supportive of the process and of the inevitability of the option presented to them—thus, they are used to support the eventual closure of a school. One administrator commented: There will always be families that come to see you or call, or one of my staff, who want to find out where they can buy their house to avoid that small school. They’re not at the meetings. They’re not even in the community. My staff, or I used to take a lot of calls. The absent parent can also be used to invoke an understanding of complexity around school closure decisions. For instance, this parent—whose story is quoted by an administrator—expresses the contradictory view that the community needs a school and that individual children and youth need programming and desire social networks that the local school does not provide. I had a dad say, and this was incredibly difficult for him, this was a dad who was a proponent of small schools regardless of any other factors for a long time, and in a small circle where we were talking he said ‘I absolutely believe that keeping the school open is best at every level, but my son he wants to go to a bigger school, he’s in soccer with them, he’s in church with them, he doesn’t want to spend 6 hours a day where he doesn’t really have a friend in his class. He wants to be where his friends are.’ Because they are absent and non-verbal, the silent majority can be constructed as a silenced/bullied voice of reason. This construction exemplifies Foucauldian pastoral power and the infantalisation of parents who need to be cared for—just like the children of a school
8 community—under proper stewardship of the lead administrator. Framing argumentation: appeals, co-optation, and trump cards Each proponent makes arguments, appeals to reason and process, and attempts to construct and marshal evidence to make its case. Nevertheless, the school review process, as we have seen it play out, is about power because seldom are negotiations across competing worldviews in this arena very successful. As the administrator quoted earlier indicated, somebody must do the dirty work and exercise power to settle the question of whether or not to close a school.3 The ultimate power in this situation rests with provincial school boards. But, as Max Weber claimed generations ago, the ultimate aim within bureaucracies and firms alike is authority, which is legitimate power, or power that is considered just by ordinary actors; this means forming stable and deliberative actor networks. We have observed how key actors in the process attempt to construct linguistic bridges and networks by appealing to evidence, providing expert analysis, framing participation and fairness, and by inviting actors in to share geographies and worldviews (Corbett & Tinkham, 2015). Community activists derive their worldview from conceptions of local educational geography and arguments about the survival of their communities. Administrators and bureaucrats make institutional efficiency arguments predicated on wider-scale spatial framing. Each tends to construct its arguments in terms of democracy, fairness, and equity, but in different ways. There are two kinds of gambit that can be pressed by either side. The first we call ‘appeals’ which represent soft attempts to co-opt the other side into the worldview of the proponent. The second type of gambit is what we call the playing of a (trump card). Each side may have at its disposal one or more unilateral trump card at a given moment. Conclusion: appeals and trump cards Administrative appeals 1. Geographies of governance: appeals to a rescaling of perspective. This type of argument represents a claim that parents do not and cannot understand the complexity of the decisions that school authorities must make because they tend to see the world through the lens of their particular communities and the interests of their
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own children. These are micro-scale geographies presented as partial representing ultimately selfish and narrow understandings of fairness and equity. When local agents are brought into the wider scale and allegedly more complex discursive universe of the administrators, they can then understand the ‘big picture’ and see the interests of their children, their schools, and their communities within the matrix of a regional constellation of schools. What follows from this expansion of perspectives is a co-optation that shifts parental rationality into a larger frame as they come to grips, at least in abstract terms, with the situation of school administrators and governors. The rescaling that this ‘engagement’ effects is a shift to what is considered by administrative cadres as increasing rationality. 2. Appeals to data-driven ‘reason’ through spatial optimisation. Typically, this strategy is to present data concerning the key elements in a school review process, that is, educational programming, school population, and the quality of the school structure. The framework within which the evidence is presented or the appropriate scale of analysis is generally not up for discussion. The rationality of the process amounts to debates concerning whether or not the rules were followed as data are generated by both sides in the process. One of the principal ideas in the appeal to reason is to create the impression that there are no political sides in the review process and that there are only objective data. If the administrative agents can convince parents and other activists that this is the case, then much of the difficult work of co-optation is complete. This is difficult to do though, so administrative agents are often forced to resort to the playing of their final trump card, which we detail later in 4. 3. Appeals to retrospective rationality. This type of appeal addresses directly the most consistent and persistent appeal from community agents and parents. Retrospective appeals both argue that previous review and closure processes were fundamentally democratic and fair even if they were lengthy, emotional, and contentious. The argument here is that the closing of a school is a process and it is one that is inevitable. In the heat of the moment or the ‘fog of war’, it is impossible to see the way that reason eventually prevails. This is actually a predictable position from an administrative point of view, because if historic practices around © 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers
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school closure are seen as unfair, then current struggles will tend to be framed as an extension of past injustices. This is precisely how community activists frame these struggles, as we will show later. Community actor appeals 4. Appeals to community survival. This type of appeal contends that without a school, the community will die. From the perspective of community members and very often that of municipal politicians also, this is a genuine threat that represents the difficulties associates with a ‘siloed’ approach to governance. The school boards that have the ultimate authority to close school and to operate educational services across a regional jurisdiction are not ‘in the business of saving communities’. The school board is an administrative and governance body charged with the efficient operation of schools and nothing more. 5. Appeals to culture and heritage. This appeal goes to the right of people to live where they do and to receive services there on the strength of the historical importance of their established communities. This argument can be pressed in terms of the contributions that particular communities have made to the economy and society of the region. These arguments are often made in relation to resource extraction communities for instance. Such appeals can also be made about the cultural importance and connection of a people to place. The most powerful example of this kind of argument is the case of Aboriginal communities, but similar arguments are often made in coastal/ fishing and agricultural communities or in places where ethnic groups have lived for multiple generations. 6. Appeals to reason. Similar to the claims made by governance authorities, communities too can make arguments about the reasonableness of their position. Most often, communities will argue that they have followed the rules and respected the process only to meet with intransigence and shoddy information provided to them by the school boards. This is the sense of being ‘set up’ no matter how they engage the process because it is perceived to be designed to railroad them into a decision, which has already been made by the board. This process, they argue, is both unreasonable and anti-democratic. In this kind of framing, the governance authority and sometimes the process itself are considered to be outside reason. © 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers
7. Appeals to innovation. In recent years, a series of rural development publications and government policy documents have pointed to the need for innovation and enterprise in rural communities. The rationale for this policy direction is that for too long, rural communities have been too dependent on (a) government, (b) large firms, and (c) single resource industries. Diversification of the economy and entrepreneurial initiatives are generally proposed as the way to address these structural problems. Community actors in the school review and closure process have over the past several years used this policy discourse to argue for educational change and for the importance of having a learning centre and ideally a multifunctional or ‘hub’ learning centre in as many rural communities as possible. Without schools, it is argued it is unlikely that innovative young ‘creative class’ professionals and entrepreneurs are likely to want to relocate to rural communities. They also argue that re-imagining schools as multiservice centres for instance is in itself an example of entrepreneurial initiative and thus, according to provincial policy, it should be supported. Trump cards 1. End runs. The final potential trump card for community actors in the process of school closure is to break off ‘negotiations’ and other forms of participation in the process and attempt to influence the process politically by going over the heads of school boards. We call this the political end run, and it involves local actors putting pressure on elected provincial politicians and/or convincing them that their arguments about the protection of small schools are not only valid, they are important enough that government should use its power to forbid schools boards from closing particular schools or even all schools. Political end runs have been successful in several individual cases, and twice in the past ten years the provincial government has stepped in and either advised school boards against closing schools or, as was the case in 2006, prohibited the practice for two years while the government studied the issue. 2. Data thresholds. Appeals to reason can become trump cards in the case of data threshold arguments. The most common threshold
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10 arguments employed by administrators concern student population numbers and what is called ‘excess or surplus space’. The argument is that once a population drops below a given threshold, then review or closure process is automatically invoked. By the same token, local citizens also make arguments about isolation thresholds arguing for instance that bus rides of up to an hour in each direction are acceptable for certain ages of children. Thresholds are employed as nonnegotiables to stop arguments with data. The argument for instance that bussing young children long distances is inhumane and/or a waste of time can lead to proposals for thresholds of distance and isolation, which are then used to justify keeping schools open. 3. Unilateral power. The ultimate trump card that governance authorities can play is the unilateral decision to close a school against the wishes of the community. This card has been played on a regular basis historically and continues to be played today.4 It is a retreat from the possibility of dialogue, appeals, co-optation, or any other alignment of world views. In struggles over the closure of small rural schools, process is crucial. The various gambits employed by actors to create durable networks and to stabilise power relations around small, rural schools involves what Latour and Porter (2013, p.23) call an ‘ecological’ perspective that recognises diversity of opinion, perspective, and standards of evidence rather than an ‘economic’ perspective that imagines decision as a matter of linear quantification. This paper has documented and analysed the strategies used by different actors to spatialise, manage, and frame process. All sides claim to want to listen to each other, but it is clear that the process has, in recent years, led different sides to search for game-ending evidence-based or political trump cards rather than entering seriously into the difficult negotiations and respectful, and open conversations that we think might hold a better hope for the creation of networks and open, deliberative democratic process that should lead to better decisions. What has emerged in this research is that framing processes effectively structure the relations between actors in the school review process. We understand actors here as agents working within networks that form around material objects such as a rural school where the meaning of these key objects is contested and framed (Callon, 1984; Latour, 2007). What we find missing in
Actor Network Theory is strong focus on power, which we see as crucial to the formation of stable and durable actor networks. Here, we link post-structural notions of power that can be related back to Foucault’s work (Foucault, 1978; 1980; 1984). The spatial dimensions of the exercise of power were also central to Foucault’s vision (Foucault, 1986, p.22) and we might understand efficiency-oriented, consolidating school administrators as his ‘pious descendants of time’ who oppose community actors playing the role of ‘determined inhabitants of space’ defending the emotional geographies of local communal space. In the midst of these challenge is the school itself, an object of love and memory or of scorn and nostalgia? Notes 1. By docility, Foucault was referring not to passivity, but rather to an attitude of openness that might be characterised as being prepared to engage with institutional authorities in terms that are defined by the authorities themselves (Corbett, 2009). The docile body in this sense is one that is prepared to be instructed or directed by those in authority. 2. For example, Bennett (2013) documents the rise of the Nova Scotia Small Schools Association, a network of small schools activists who lobby locally and provincially in support of small rural schools. 3. And of course, this comment in itself assumes agreement with the administrative efficiency worldview that determines certain schools and by extension certain communities to be non-viable. Why is it that a school ‘has to’ close? Because someone or some group has decided that this is the case. When an administrative unit puts a community school up for review and attempts to close it, this determination has been made. 4. For an analysis of a recent example of unilateral power, see Corbett (2015).
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M. Corbett and L. Helmer, Contested geographies
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