Beyond Academic Outcomes

Overview & Synopsis

This chapter attempts to survey contemporary debates and research on outcomes of schooling that have been grouped together under the convenient label "nonacademic". This is not an affirmative labeling. As the nomenclature indicates, it is not a label that groups together things that share like properties. Rather, this is a label of distinction, a naming of what lies on the outside. In this chapter, the author attempts to identify some of the central educational tensions that will be confronted by any analysis of, and advocacy for, educational programs designed to promote student outcomes other than academic outcomes in schools. After some initial analytical and historical framing of the academic tradition, the author presents four examples of research on nonacademic outcomes in schooling and comments on the current state of affairs in each: (1) values education; (2) nonacademic outcomes in multicultural education; (3) civics and democratic education; and (4) environmental education. He addresses the final two examples in detail to highlight his central arguments. He focuses on civics and democratic education as an example of one call for nonacademic outcomes that is quite compatible with the academic tradition and which is currently well placed to extend studies of effects beyond schooling itself. Environmental education provides an example that includes some calls for nonacademic outcomes that are contradictory to schooling itself. He focuses more specifically on the research literature in environmental education to illustrate this archetypical condition in contemporary nonacademic outcomes research. From that point, he attempts to place the call for nonacademic outcomes in the context of the logic of schooling and shows how that placement carries significant implications for how everyone understands "outcomes." Finally, he outlines the limits of the current knowledge about nonacademic school outcomes and suggests a line of theoretical and empirical research that would be needed if one is ever going to open the debates about the multiple purposes of schooling to a more systematic and rationalized level. (Contains 4 notes.)