- Title
- The only blonde in the playground: School choice and the multicultural imaginary
- Creator
- Tsolidis, Georgina
- Date
- 2015
- Type
- Text; Book chapter
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/99112
- Identifier
- vital:10323
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16003-0_8
- Identifier
- ISBN:978-331916003
- Abstract
- The title of this chapter draws on a comment made by a colleague explaining her choice to leave inner city Melbourne and move to a country town. She did not want her son to be the “only blonde in the [school] playground”. Unlike many suburbs of Melbourne that are home to large ethnic minority communities (commonly not blonde), regional Victoria is imagined ‘white’. This evocative comment is taken as a starting point for an exploration of how markets and school choice intersect with cultural difference to make some schools more or less desirable in the public imagination. Current debates in the press about which students have access to sought-after Government schools are drawn on to illustrate the salience of ethnicity in representations of schools and their communities and the impact of this on decision-making about school choice. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of heterotopian space, the argument is made that with regard to the constitution of a “good” school, some ethnicities are seen as more valuable than others because they achieve good results. However, if high-achieving “non-white” students are seen as “taking over” a school this can shift the balance the other way. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.
- Publisher
- Springer International Publishing
- Relation
- Cultural, Religious and Political Contestations: The Multicultural Challenge p. 119-134
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- Heterotopia; Marketisation; Multiculturalism; Racism; School choice; White flight; Whiteness
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