At the Potential Trust, we are speaking up for the needs of children and young people who are smart and highly motivated but may find themselves isolated at school. We like to call them kids with ‘high learning potential’ (HLP) and ‘dual and multiple exceptionality’ (DME). People used to say ‘gifted and talented’ but that went out of fashion, as so many things did in education. What hasn’t changed is that policy makers and also many parents tend to think that HLP kids don’t need any support because they’ll make it anyway.
We’ve always been struck by how persistent this way of thinking and talking is, in spite of all the evidence: lots of kids with potential struggle, and many withdraw into their shell. And yet, for decades we have been told that what we’re asking for – dedicated support – is ‘elitist.’ Whilst we believe that our own work and the many initiatives that we partner with have made a difference to a growing number of young people and their families, the language of public discourse is hard to dislodge.
We thought we needed to get to the bottom of this: why is it that educational discourse is so hard to influence? Are there any terms or catchphrases that have gone ‘from niche to big’? Can we identify factors that make it more likely that a certain term – and all the thinking behind it – catches on?
A new corpus
Computational data analysis offers one way of approaching these questions. Observing how people really speak about education – what terms they use, in what contexts, and with positive or negative attributes – should be an important reference point for our own discussions. We commissioned Dr Christophe Fricker and Cory Massaro, two linguists with considerable experience analysis large datasets and fraught debates, to compile a ‘corpus’ (i.e., lots of language), get it into a format that it can be analysed, and then essentially interpret it to shed light on our questions about educational discourse. Crucially, we wanted to see whether educators (‘specialists’) and the wider public (‘lay authors’) have anything in common when they talk about schools and learning.
Results
What Christophe and Cory discovered confirmed some of our suspicions, but it offers valuable context and conclusions as well:
- Specialist and lay authors talk about very different things when they discuss education, school and learning. Specialists talk about institutions and modalities of learning; there is a great deal of reflection on the practice of teaching and learning in specialist discourse. This is neither surprising nor bad, but it contrasts sharply with lay concerns, whose question is not normally how they learn but what they have learned and where it can get them.
- The education system as a whole is seen as in crisis. Educators focus, in discussions about education, on poor working conditions; lay authors, similarly concerned with the nexus between education and work, have become disillusioned with the notion that ‘a good education will get you a good job.’
Both these findings indicate why it is difficult to inject new thinking into educational debates. Christophe and Cory argue that disagreement and disillusionment are the reason why, for example, both STEM and gifted and talented have failed to gain traction in recent years. The acronym STEM is used by both groups in similar contexts, but concerns vary, along the same lines of institution vs situation as education. The discourse on gifted and talented is heavily informed by complaints about what is perceived as false promises of the past.
The term where Christophe and Cory see the greatest convergence between specialists and lay audiences in educational contexts is autism. This term seems to resist the trends that dominate each corpus: on the part of educators, the tendency to resort to abstraction and modalities of learning; and, in the lay corpus, an instrumental focus on education as a way into work. It focuses the mind on personal stories, the transformational potential of education, and personal development beyond earnings.
Recommendations
We asked Christophe and Cory to come up with recommendations as well, and their top 5 are:
- Keep it positive;
- Focus on learning as an experience or a means to an end;
- Make it personal;
- Avoid polemics; and
- Back up what you say with real impact.
The study, called “Opportunities to Shape the Language of Education,” is full of insights into the views of different groups on education and the way they make sense of their own. We’ll study it carefully, and we’re happy to share it with you if you’re pursuing similar questions.