Policy research and ‘damaged teachers’: Towards an epistemologically respectful paradigm (original) (raw)
Related papers
Research Papers in Education, 2017
The teacher preparation landscape in England has been subject to radical policy change. Since 2010 the policy agenda has repositioned initial teacher preparation as a craft best learnt through observation and imitation of teachers in school settings. Simultaneously a market based approach to the recruitment of pre-service teachers has led to significant changes for prospective entrants to the profession. In the enactment of policy between 2010-2015, the roles of universities and voices of prospective teachers were systematically silenced. Using critical discourse analysis we demonstrate how both actors have been positioned in, and have accommodated and resisted, the current policy discourses. These findings highlight the importance of problematizing and understanding these emerging issues at local and international levels.
Schools, teachers and public debates about education
Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 2010
Schools, teachers and education in general are frequently the subject of media interest and public debate. As we draft this editorial the Australian government's 'My School' website is attracting a good deal of comment in the print media and on talkback radio. The stated intention of the government is to enable parents to compare the performance of schools and to then use this information when selecting a school for their child. Making this sort of information available is not a new phenomenon elsewhere in the world. The Australian Federal Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, returned from a visit to New York in 2009 enthusing about the benefits of the systems and practices of teacher recruitment and administration in the United States. The publishing of 'league tables' has also been a feature of information about schools in Britain for some time, as has criticism of the practice. The fundamental tension in this tussle is between a government wanting to satisfy an apparent desire for information about the complex system of education provision and a concern that the measure used for comparison is too simplistic and, ultimately, unhelpful. In the Australian variant, the data used are the results of national literacy and numeracy tests conducted annually in all schools-tests that were never designed for this purpose. Teachers and teacher unions have also noted the folly of ranking schools on this single performance measure. Inviting comparisons in this way inevitably spills over into a debate about the amounts of government funding for government and non-government schools. However, providing information about school enrolments and staffing also permits comparisons that may be more revealing about the relative amounts of funding a school receives. There is clearly public appetite for information about schools and systems of education, and rightly so. Education is expensive to provide, employs large numbers of people in various capacities and is vital to the futures of the students who participate. It is evident that professionals, too, want to know more about the situations in which they work-the policy drivers, the changing contexts, demographic fluctuations, successful strategies and the like. What is most needed to address these issues is the thoughtful presentation of ideas and reasoned debate. These are the things we hope to provide in this Journal and, typically, this issue contributes ideas on a number of the matters mentioned above. The first paper in this issue, by Michelle Forrest, Terrah Keener and Mary Jane Harkins, concerns questions of who teachers feel themselves to be as a teacher and who they might feel themselves to be as a person. The authors use the work of Adrianna Cavarero and Judith Butler to explore this issue. This is an issue that can be overlooked if we assume that pre-service teachers are fully equipped to take on the role of 'teacher' without considering that either a transition or settling-in period may be necessary, or perhaps that differences and distinctions between private and public selves might be important. When we view or read media portrayals of teachers they are often uni-dimensional, suggesting that the person who performs the role of 'teacher' embodies a set of assumed occupational
Journal of Education for Teaching , 2021
As attacks on teacher education mount, teacher educators have been urged to take a more active part in policy deliberations. Yet the question of how teacher educators get their voices heard in policy contexts that are not receptive to their expertise remains underinvestigated. This qualitative case study addresses this gap by exploring the work of a group of teacher educators who engaged in advocacy against the introduction of edTPA as a licensure assessment in their state. Through the analysis of interviews, public testimonies, and policy artefacts produced by this group, we documented how over a span of one year the group engaged in policy advocacy that redirected reform efforts from the implementation of edTPA to running a pilot comparing edTPA to another locally produced assessment. The most important outcome of this advocacy, however, was the shift in roles afforded to teacher educators: instead of being seen as objects of reform, they were invited to become participants in policy dialogues about the future of teacher education. The significance of this study lies in offering insights for how teacher educators in other contexts can mobilise their response to neoliberal reforms of teacher education.
Abstract There is a position that Government will undertake its work in a responsible way that allows for the provision of education in Australian society with a just and equitable hand. While this may be a utopian idea of the role of education in a democratic society, the literature provokes different thinking. It suggests that policy development is misplaced within political ideologies and lost amidst the grinding gears of government departments at both federal and state level as it makes its way into schools, and therefore to those it impacts upon. This thesis explores the co-relation between the intended purposes of educational policy, its possibility for social equalising and its eventual impact for those who live the consequences of enacted policy at a local level. This includes a glimpse at past educational policy and the ideologies that inform them, the mechanisms of society which enforce change to policy and the eventual outcome. Its significance, in a wider context, is that current policy agendas which seem to readily enhance the benefits for all students, and by that fact should benefit our society, are being excessively argued, negotiated and delayed. The methodology/methods used in this thesis use bricolage to bring together rich experiences, narratives and contextual connectivity. This has value because the case and commentaries component gives a snapshot of the impact of policy, and how it is viewed by educators who use it and are part of its mechanisms. It also highlights the absent, what is of concern with the interpretation and use of policy at the local level, as many assumptions are made by teachers and administrators based upon their own lives and experiences. Three specific policies were considered by the participants – literacy, homework and reporting. This thesis presents the thinking of key stakeholders in a school around three significant topics and related policy on the work of students, teachers and school accountabilities. The insights provided highlight how many students are disadvantaged on the basis of educational policy that fails to acknowledge both the context and circumstances of their lives. As a result, these students are viewed as being deficient rather than being viewed for what they can do. The educational policies considered are written in a way that teachers working with these students are increasingly being constrained in their responses to these student’s needs, generating poorer learning opportunities.
Re-imagining teachers, reclaiming education
Teacher Plus, 2014
The proclamation of popular media is simple: there is a crisis in school education and it needs to be fixed. The sub-text that follows this proclamation is that teachers are responsible for this crisis and they need to be ‘fixed’. This idea has been projected so many times, in so many different ways that most of us have come to believe it to be true. Is it not true? Well, yes and no. Yes, there is a crisis in school education and it is one that has been looming large over us for a long time now. No, teachers are not solely responsible for this crisis. In fact, they are the victims of this crisis. The teacher has been made the target to deflect attention from the larger crisis in education. In contemporary times, the image of the teacher in popular imagination is based on parochial clichés that are fed to us through popular media and seem to be omnipresent. These clichés construct the teacher as being uninterested in teaching, unknowledgeable and ineffective. This image of the teacher serves two important purposes. Firstly, it provides society at large an option to transfer on to the teacher the blame for all its problems. Secondly, and more dangerously, it becomes the basis for exercising greater control over the teacher, turning her/him into an object of education reform. There is an urgent need for us to interrogate these images and for teachers to reclaim their space within education reform. Unless this happens the ideal of “education as the practice of freedom” will continue to evade us.
Negotiating second chance schooling in neoliberal times: Teacher work for schooling justice
Teachers' Work
The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon our work as two insider teacher researchers using action research methodology with teacher colleagues, marginalised young people and community stakeholders to develop a sustainable and socially just senior secondary ‘second chance’ school for young people who had left schooling without credentials. Twelve years after our beginning developmental work, the Second Chance Community College (SCCC) continues with over 100 students enrolled in 2015. It has catered for over 1000 students since its development. Through pursuing critical forms of action research, enriched through active participation within a university led professional learning community, we became ‘radical pragmatic’ educators. This called us into collaborative, tactical and critical teacher work to navigate through constraining neoliberal logic with students and colleagues, reassembling our professional selves and radically changing the SCCC design from the design logics of conv...
FORUM
This article considers the experiences of two teacher educators working with undergraduate and postgraduate trainee teachers in the School of Education at the University of Brighton. It foregrounds reflections shared within education studies seminars and on conversations with early career teachers on how trainees and new teachers negotiate their professional obligations whilst remaining true to their values and ideals. Education studies modules are curated to provide a space for trainee teachers to examine and consider the complexities relating to equality, diversity and social justice, and are underpinned by a desire to instil a 'commitment to acting as change agents in schools and advocates for students'. In this article, we consider how teacher trainees and early career teachers experience neoliberal reform and a policy context that seeks to silence any sceptics. It offers examples of how trainee teachers and new teachers engage in quiet resistance as 'tempered radica...