ABSTRACT

The relationship between poverty and education is a longstanding issue for education policy, research, and practice. Through a policy as discourse approach, this article focuses on the work policy does to define education as a solution to poverty. Recent policy discourses in Aotearoa have positioned the teacher as the most important factor in raising student achievement irrespective of socio-economic factors like poverty. However, by linking student achievement to economic success, those policy discourses also position teachers as a remedy to poverty. This article considers the ways two Aotearoa education policies, Ka Hikitia and Investing in Educational Success, impossibly position teachers between needing to ignore and remedy poverty. The analyses show how both policies impossibly position teachers by reducing education to learning and students and teachers to learners. By positioning teachers as responsible for learning, policies are able to displace structural and historical conditions of poverty through a focus on the work teachers do to improve learning, culminating in a logic where one learns not to be poor. The article concludes with a coda seeking to reverse the impossible position of teachers by describing education as weak, whereby teachers can acknowledge poverty without having to remedy it.

摘要

贫困与教育之间的关系是教育政策，研究和实践的长期问题。通过以政策为话语的方法，本文重点介绍将教育定义为解决贫困的工作政策。无论贫困等社会经济因素如何，最近在Aotearoa的政策讨论都将教师定位为提高学生成绩的最重要因素。但是，通过将学生的成就与经济成功联系起来，这些政策论述也将教师定位为对贫困的一种补救措施。本文考虑了两种Aotearoa教育政策（Ka Hikitia和Investing in Educational Education）如何将教师置于需要忽略和纠正贫困之间。分析表明，这两种政策是如何通过减少对学习的教育以及对学生和对学习者的教师来定位教师的。通过将教师定位为负责学习的政策，政策可以通过关注教师为改善学习所做的工作来取代贫困的结构和历史条件，最终形成一种逻辑，即人们学会不贫穷。文章最后以尾声结尾，试图通过将教育描述为弱者来扭转教师的不可能地位，从而使教师可以承认贫困而不必进行补救。