This paper undertakes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how the material, spatial and metaphoric boundary of the school gate might be understood as a cultural formation. We see the school gate operating simultaneously as a technology that disciplines and regulates, protects and secures, whilst also being appropriated, resisted and reconfigured through a range of cultural texts and social practices. We argue here, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau, that the school gate has multiple discursive functions – both symbolic and material – that are implicated in the production of relations of power between self, community, institutions and the state. In this paper, we draw on a range of recent film and television images, popular internet blogs, and interview data from a study with parents of school children, to explore the ways that school gates figure in social imaginaries, community views, and logics of schooling practice. Firstly, we consider the school gate as a cultural text – as a visual and narrative textual feature through which social relations are suggested, implied, ordered and managed, and signifying both constraints and possibilities associated with educational experiences of various sorts. We suggest that the school gate in popular texts is an important visual device by which subject positions are constructed, and through which institutional power might be interrogated by those positioned outside its structures. Such texts offer new ways of considering how the visual rhetorics of schooling operate to inform both the cultural logics of schooling as well as resistances to those logics. Secondly, we consider the ways that school gates function in everyday life as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. We draw here on recent interview data with parents of school children, raising concerns about the ways that various belongings can be extended or withheld through the literal and figurative 'gate-keeping' practices at the school gate. As a manifestation of institutional strategies that establish and maintain relational boundaries, school gates, we argue, symbolically and physically mark out the 'proper place' of institutional structures of power as distinct from the tactical space occupied by parents and communities. We contend, however, that despite the representational and material barriers implied by the school gate, the productive activity of culture and community can nonetheless exceed, subvert and reconfigure its disciplinary forms and functions.
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