Introduction

Abstract

Drawing on a large government commissioned research study, the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS), the article confirms the existing research finding regarding the cenerality of teachers’ classroom practices (pedagogies and assessment) to student learning. On the basis of a literature review and classroom observations, analysis of assessment tasks and student work, the article identifies the models of productive pedagogies and productive assessment as being effective in terms of improving both social and academic outcomes for all students, especially students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In so doing, it stresses the need for aligning curriculum, pedagogies and assessment with desired student outcomes and also the need to create teacher professional learning communities so as to enhance whole school effects. However, the article also recognises the significance of family background in terms of students’ learning outcomes and thus argues the need for complementary and appropriate educational system funding and policies. Indeed, the article recognises that claims about teacher practices making a difference cannot be posed innocently and that a focus on individual teachers in policy is a double‐edged sword.     

Productive pedagogies and the challenge of inclusion

Julie Allan is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University of Stirling, where she also directs the Participation, Inclusion and Equity Research Network. In this article, she explores the challenges involved in achieving an inclusive education system. Her argument draws on recommendations from two separate studies, undertaken in Queensland, Australia and Scotland, which are attempting to shape inclusion policy and practice. The Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study identified a set of productive pedagogies in which issues of social justice, equity and inclusion are foregrounded. The Scottish Parliamentary Inquiry into special needs, to which Professor Allan was adviser, recommended a number of changes aimed at establishing an inclusive education system for all pupils. Comparisons of the two sets of recommendations, which formed the basis of a series of workshops with teachers, school leaders and administrators within Education Queensland, have prompted two major questions which are addressed in this paper: what gets in the way of inclusive practice and what will it take to be inclusive? Julie Allan's responses to these questions take account of the ways in which we think about ‘special education’ teacher training and professional development; and educational policies and practices. She represents a fascinating set of ‘double‐edged responsibilities’ that will challenge practitioners, policy makers and teacher educators to refocus and reframe their thinking about special educational needs and inclusion.     

Introducing a fifth pedagogy: experience‐based strategies for facilitating learning in natural environments

Educators have identified four categories of ‘productive pedagogies’ that are considered to lead to authentic student engagement and learning in the classroom. This study was designed to explore and extend these pedagogies in the context of learning in natural environments, in particular, through the programmes of Queensland environmental education centres. In‐depth interview and observation data were collected from students, classroom teachers and centre teachers who had participated in 12 environmental education programmes across Queensland, in order to identify the strategies that are most effective in facilitating learning in the natural environment. A fifth productive pedagogy category, ‘experience‐based learning’, is proposed. Experience‐based learning is particularly important in addressing students’ environmental attitudes and actions. The implications for the delivery of environmental education programmes both within and outside the classroom are discussed.     

In support of teachers’ learning: specifying and contextualising teacher inquiry as professional practice

Drawing upon research into a case study of teacher inquiry in one school in Queensland, Australia, recent theorising into professional practice, and relevant literature on teachers’ learning, this article reveals the complexity and particularity of teacher inquiry processes in support of teachers’ learning. Specifically, the research reveals how particular actions, dialogue, and relationships collectively constitute a practice of teacher inquiry which seeks to promote substantive teacher-led learning. The research draws upon a group of Year 5 teachers engaged in collective inquiry into their work in what was described as an “Inquiry Cycle” approach in a school in northern Queensland, during a period of support for substantial curriculum reform. The research reveals the Inquiry Cycle approach as characterised by specific actions, dialogue, and relationships – “doings,” “sayings,” and “relatings” – productive of the development of a learning culture focused on significant curriculum reform; overt support for whole-school “explicit” approaches to teachers’ pedagogies; and active/robust critique of data-focused assessment processes. The research reveals necessary texture and detail in support of teachers’ learning, and the specific circumstances and contextual “arrangements” that help constitute this learning.     

Pedagogies for social justice: did Bernstein get it wrong?

This paper explores the often‐touted incompatibility between ‘intellectual rigour’ and ‘relevance’ as this has manifested in Australian debates over Queensland’s New Basics and ‘productive pedagogies’, and associated initiatives such as the New South Wales Quality Teaching Framework. This debate can be located in longer‐standing concerns about how best to meet the educational needs of students who experience social disadvantage. In particular, we focus on the way Bernstein’s concept of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ discourse has been used by him and others to argue against attempting to make academic knowledge more ‘relevant’ by introducing elements of students out of school lives into the classroom. Drawing on examples from the literature, we trouble Bernstein’s contention that academic and ‘everyday’ knowledge represent different, incompatible knowledge forms that cannot be successfully integrated. This troubling creates an opening for reconsidering the relationship between ‘intellectual rigour’ and ‘relevance’. We argue that we can and should pursue the bringing together of ‘intellectual rigour’ and ‘relevance’ as a means to engage better all students, but particularly those who experience social and educational disadvantage, and improve their learning outcomes. Accordingly, we call for challenging, at a theoretical, practical and policy level, the perception that learning cannot be made relevant without sacrificing intellectual rigour. We also call for more research on teachers already integrating ‘intellectual rigour’ and ‘relevance’, and for teacher professional development and scaffolding to achieve this and to moderate multiple student perspectives and claims to ‘relevance’.     

Foucault’s ethical self-formation and David’s articulation of a creative self

Abstract

Much has been written about creativity in education policy and about how the concept is mediated in institutions like schools and universities. Although constructs like ‘creative teachers’ and ‘teachers that foster creativity’ are highly prevalent in the literature, there are few situated and contextualised accounts of what such constructs mean to the protagonist. The extent to which teachers co-opt or align themselves with discourses of creativity can be recast as a question of identity: What beliefs on creativity and associated practices are constitutive of one’s ‘teacher identity?’ This article draws on previous work that translates Foucault’s writings on ethical self-formation into an ‘identity grid’, and foregrounds the experiences of one teaching deputy-principal, to offer an account of how one teacher pursues particular practices congruent with his visions of a creative teacher. To identify rationales for actions undertaken, and to engage with situational factors of this teacher’s work, performativity and its problematic steering influences also informs this analysis. The article highlights the productive capacity of engagement with ethical self-formation, through identifying the potential it offers to access an individual-centric perspective in understanding how central concepts like creativity are negotiated and incorporated into accounts of the ‘teaching self’.     

Funding,reputation and targets: the discursive logics of high-stakes testing

This paper provides insights into teacher and school-based administrators’ responses to policy demands for improved outcomes on high-stakes, standardised literacy and numeracy tests in Australia. Specifically, the research reveals the effects of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and associated policies, in the state of Queensland. Drawing suggestively across Michel Foucault’s notions of disciplinary power and subjectivity, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, the research utilises interviews with teachers and school-based administrators to reveal how high-stakes, standardised testing practices served to discursively constitute performative teacher subjectivities around issues of funding, teacher and school reputation and target-setting within what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’. The paper argues that the contestation evident within this field is also reflective and constitutive of more educative schooling discourses and practices, even as performative logics dominate.     

Governing teacher learning: understanding teachers’ compliance with and critique of standardization

This paper examines how policy pressure for increased performance on standardised measures of student achievement influenced the teacher learning practices that arose in a school setting in Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon research and theorising of governing by numbers, and applications to the governance of education, and particularly teachers’ learning, the research analyses how a group of Year 3 teachers collaborated to better inform themselves about the nature of their students’ learning. The research reveals that the governance of teachers’ learning under current policy conditions was manifest through both teachers’ compliance with and critique of a strong focus upon school, regional, state and national data – specifically, students’ attainment in ‘leveled’ readers and other school-based standardised measures of reading and mathematics, and school, state and regional results on national literacy and numeracy tests. There is little research that highlights the tensions around these numbers as governing technologies in relation to specific formal, ongoing instances of teacher professional development practices. The research cautions against the influence of such governing processes for how they potentially narrow teachers’ attention to more standardized measures of students’ learning, even as teachers may critique these more reductive effects.     

(Re)turning to practice in teacher education: embodied knowledge in learning to teach

Contemporary research conversations about the utility of practice theories to professional education support the reconceptualisation of pre-service teacher education in ways that provide strong preparation for continued professional learning. This paper reports on an empirical inquiry that introduced a theoretically informed practice-based intervention in a pre-service teacher education course in order to judge the utility of such an approach for student learning. Innovations within the Study of Teaching programme illustrate the bringing together of pedagogies of observation, pedagogies of enactment, and pedagogies of reflection toward an integrated theory of teacher education that focuses on the teaching body as a central site for research and for the building of preparatory knowledge and skill for ongoing learning. Data was collected from pre-service teachers involved in the programme through video and audio recordings along with individual and focus group interviews, questionnaires and student reflection on video recordings. These were analyzed within an emerging theoretical framework derived from both practice-theoretical literature and international empirical research into core practices. Initial findings suggest that a focus on practice within pre-service teacher education may enhance traditional understandings of ‘practice-based’ approaches that situate the study of practice outside of the university, in school settings. These findings have implications for the ongoing reform of teacher education in increasingly regulated contexts framed in terms of teacher quality.     

The quandary of quantification: data,numbers and teachers’ learning

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon recent theorising of numbers and data, and applications to schooling, this paper reveals how tensions between more accountability-oriented logics, and more contextually-situated conceptions of engagement with data, played out in one school in a regional community in northern Queensland, Australia. The research reveals that at the same time teachers’ work and learning were heavily influenced by more reductive processes of quantification to account for teachers’ practices, teachers also sought to draw upon the attention to numeric markers of student achievement to foster more substantive teacher learning for student learning. These tensions were expressed in relation to: efforts to foster improved student learning through collection of evidence via ‘short-term data cycles’; engagement in various ‘data conversations’ with senior members of staff, and coaching by more experienced teachers, and; broader teacher learning initiatives focused on enhancing outcomes for specified groups of students identified as able to perform at higher levels of attainment. The research cautions that such practices present a quandary; even as broader processes of quantification of education may stimulate instances of more ongoing, substantive teacher learning for student learning, more performative applications of these numbers and data mitigate against the educative potential of such practices, and substantive learning for all students.     

Teaching like an artist: the pedagogic identities and practices of artists in schools

This article reports findings from an ethnographic study of the arts curriculum and pedagogy in a British primary school. The policy context for the study is the school's involvement in promoting creative partnerships between teachers and artists. The pedagogies of three different artist‐led projects are analysed, using a Bernsteinian framework, and are characterised in relation to notions of ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ pedagogies. These characterisations are then used to consider the impact of the artists' pedagogies on teachers in the school, and the extent to which the different pedagogies promote inclusion. Broad conclusions are drawn about the relative difficulty of adopting competence pedagogies in the current educational culture of British schools; more specific conclusions are drawn about the importance of time, text, discourse and interpretation in arts pedagogies.     

Governing teachers’ work and learning through data: Australian insights

This article reveals the multiple ways in which data are constituted as a vehicle for governing teachers’ work and learning. Drawing on the concept of governance, including in relation to the sociology of numbers, and data from one school in Queensland, Australia, the research reveals how teachers’ work and learning were constituted through practices of: establishing specific ‘targets’, including various ‘audacious goals’ for school and national testing; focusing upon ‘aligning’ all forms of school, regional and national data collected within the school; and participating in various ‘data conversations’ about specific students with senior members of staff. While the research reveals how teachers found such practices beneficial for improving their practice with students, it also shows how this learning was always and everywhere framed within a broader discourse of data, and how this data-centric focus came to constitute what was valued about their work and learning, and that of their students.     

Education as a ‘risky business’: Theorising student and teacher learning in complex times

This paper employs sociological literature on risk and the commodification of education to explain current schooling practices in a context of increased concerns about students’ behaviour and results on standardised tests of achievement. Drawing upon teacher and student learning practices in three school sites in south-east Queensland, Australia, the article reveals how specific tests, packages and programmes have been employed as technologies of governance to minimise the risk of adverse student behaviour, maximise student outcomes on standardised tests, and provide teachers with discrete learning experiences construed as improving such outcomes. The sum total of these foci is the construction of education as an increasingly ‘risky business’ which employs a myriad of products and tests to manage perceived and actual risks. The paper also reveals how these products and processes constitute student misbehaviour and inadequate teacher and student learning as ‘risk objects’ requiring constant intervention, but which also inhibit inclusion in schooling settings, and challenge teachers’ professionalism.     

Chinese university EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices of classroom writing assessment

This study investigates the extent to which university teachers’ beliefs about classroom writing assessment are congruent with their self-perceived practices in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) contexts, and what factors contribute to belief-practice inconsistencies. Drawing on data from a survey of 136 Chinese university EFL writing teachers and ten teacher interviews, results showed a degree of belief-practice alignment regarding assessment for learning (AfL) practices that make learning explicit, but belief-practice discrepancies were more salient. AfL practices that empower students to take responsibility in writing assessment were perceived to be more important than assessment of learning practices; however, the reverse was found in teachers’ practice. Impacts of micro-level factors including assessment training, teaching experience, student attributes, meso-level school factors, and macro-level assessment culture are discussed, and implications are drawn.     

Historicising teachers’ learning: a case study of productive professional practice

This paper reveals the significant historical traces which informed the learning practices of teachers at one particular school site in a rural and regional educational district in Australia. Drawing upon recent theorising into professional practice, the paper argues that teacher learning practices are intrinsically ‘ecologically’ related to teachers’ practices at specific sites. However, extending beyond this theorising, the research also reveals how teacher learning – in the case presented, in relation to classroom dialogue – is also significantly influenced by earlier learning experiences of the teachers involved. In this way, teachers’ practices are revealed as not only influenced by present-day, site-specific, whole-school teacher learning, but also by particular events encountered by teachers at an earlier phase of their careers. The research argues for a conception of teachers’ learning which is not only site-informed and ecologically arranged, but also deeply temporally embedded.     

Implications of social network sites for teaching and learning. Where we are and where we want to go

This conceptual paper deals with some of the implications that the use of social network sites, though not originally developed and conceived for learning purposes, have for schools and academic activities when they are used as tools able to modify and innovate teaching/learning practices and academic culture. Beside the differences that characterize the two contexts, the attention that social network tools are progressively gaining in schools and higher education practices and pedagogies requires adjustments in learning and teaching that should be constantly considered by educators and policy makers. These environments are also presenting new and crucial opportunities for teacher training and teachers’ professional development. The purpose of the study is to reflect on some significant challenges and opportunities offered by social network sites, and how to exploit the latter, in relation to a number of themes. These themes have been identified as those that deserve better comprehension and further research investigation: communication between students and teachers and appropriate professional behaviours; pedagogical and technological challenges related to incorporating social networking practices into teaching and academic practices; how social networking can be exploited for teachers’ professional training and development. The study also provides some implications for policy and practice.     

The cinematic pedagogies of underprepared teachers

Based on ‘netnographic’ discourse analysis of 14 blogs penned by unlicensed American volunteer teachers in Namibia, this paper compares the narratives of Western underprepared teachers to the maverick teacher archetype in popular Hollywood (white savior) teacher films. The volunteers’ narrations of their classroom activities and positionality within schools map onto the attributes of maverick teachers. I introduce the term cinematic pedagogies to conceptualize the dramatic but unresearched features of underprepared teachers’ classroom practices and their self-identity as narrated along familiar cinematic story arcs. This research contributes to emerging scholarship on underprepared teachers as educational actors worthy of analysis.     

Interrogating single‐sex classes as a strategy for addressing boys’ educational and social needs

This paper explores the policy of single‐sex classes that is currently being adopted in some schools as a strategy for addressing boys’ educational and social needs. It draws on research in one Australian government, coeducational primary school to examine teachers’ and students’ experiences of this strategy. Interviews with the principal, male and female teachers responsible for teaching the single‐sex classes and the students involved in these classes are used to illustrate the impact and effect of the strategy on pedagogical practices in this particular school. The data are used to raise critical questions about the impact and effects of teachers’ pedagogical practices in light of the current literature and research about single‐sex classes. In this case study, it was found that teachers had a tendency to modify their pedagogical practices and the curriculum to suit stereotypical constructions about boys’ and girls’ supposed oppositional orientations to learning. It is concluded that teacher knowledges and assumptions about gender play an important role in the execution of their pedagogies in the single‐sex classroom.