Rethinking Education Through Critical Psychology ─ Co-operative Schools, Social Justice and Voice

The first English co-operative school emerged as a result of wide-ranging public education reforms in 2008. Since this time the number of ‘co-operative’ schools in England has roughly doubled year upon year, bringing about what some have called ‘a quiet revolution’ in public education. Claims that such schools engender greater social equality sit uneasily alongside counter claims that warn of the dangers of neo-liberal appropriation of freedom. Yet, since the very first school opened its doors, the complicated relations between ‘co-operative’ approaches to schooling and subjectivity remain unexplored.Rethinking Education in Critical Psychology draws on and extends disciplinary debates that question what education can do, and who benefits, to consider how ‘bottom up’ or participatory ways of working in education might inform a more critical educational psychology – one that takes equality and collective well-being as an alternative starting point to mapping individual achievement and ‘development’.

Gail Davidge has over ten years experience as a practitioner in a variety of Primary and Early Years educational settings. She completed her PhD at the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK.