Changing times in the classroom: teaching as a ‘crowded profession’

Abstract

This article reports on a study of teachers in New South Wales (Australia) and their practices surrounding outcomes assessment and reporting, which took place in 2003 and 2004 as a follow-up to a major study in 1995. The study explored whether the main focus of a teacher's work involves planning, teaching, assessing, rewarding and sharing in their classroom and with colleagues, and whether this focus suffered many distractions in the flurry of reforms of the past decade. One example of ‘changing times’ in the classroom has been the devolution of school management, which caused a number of diversions of energy and time away from teaching and learning. Yet even in the area of curriculum schools were struggling with a range of issues, many brought on by the advent of outcomes-based curricula. In seeking to change what happens in schools, teachers argued that they needed clear and well-argued reasons to change. This article thus provides an update on the relevant research, beginning with national and international experiences, before a discussion of workload, the place of parents and school organizational effects. One finding is that alongside a ‘crowded curriculum’, teaching has become a ‘crowded profession’. The article concludes with reflections on how changing times in the classroom mean social reform as well as educational reform, in which teaching and learning shape effects and consequences from educational events so that knowledge grows through experiences, measuring possibilities not outcomes.     

Film as a ‘thoughtful’ medium for teaching history

This collective case study of teachers and students in two ninth-grade US history classes examines the role that films can play as a ‘thoughtful’ medium for teaching history. Specifically, the study focuses on the nature and range of authentic intellectual work that students are engaged in with film in the classroom (Newmann, F., B. King, and D. Carmichael. 2007. Authentic instruction and assessment: Common standards for rigor and relevance in teaching academic subjects. Des Moines, IA: Iowa Department of Education. http://centerforaiw.com/resources/center-aiw-materials). The findings contribute to the literature by challenging and extending current notions of pedagogy with a film, in particular, Hobbs' (2006. Non-optimal uses of video in the classroom. Learning, Media and Technology 31: 35–50) findings of ‘non-optimal’ use of video. In addition to using a film as simply a historical ‘text’ or visual textbook, students in these classes are engaged with the medium of film in developing conceptual knowledge and historical empathy and in the deliberation of controversial issues or historical events. The study also reveals a continued lack of critical analysis of films as a source and reveals the tension between ideology of ‘educational’ media and teacher practice with media.     

Teacher reflections on ‘bumpy moments’ in teaching: a self‐study

This study recounts a practicing teacher's attempt to describe reflections during the course of teaching at the primary level. A self‐study was conducted to address teacher thinking during ‘bumpy moments’ in teaching, offering an insight into how we might capture the details of teachers' unseen reflections. Through an analysis of the many ‘bumpy moments’ in teaching, several important findings emerged about the nature of reflection and how reflection actually occurs in the classroom context. Results of this study have implications for future research, teacher education and improvement of the teaching practice.     

‘Teach as you preach’: the effects of student‐centred versus lecture‐based teaching on student teachers’ approaches to teaching

This study investigates the effects of teaching and learning environments on student teachers’ approaches to teaching and compares a lecture‐based setting to a student‐activating teaching environment, in which self‐discovery learning by means of authentic tasks is central. Data collection (N = 852) was obtained by a pre‐test/post‐test design including the Approaches to Teaching Inventory. Though student teachers’ approaches changed significantly, the direction is only consistent with the assumption that the student‐activating experiences push students towards conceptual change/student‐focused approaches; however, not away from information transmission/teacher‐focused teaching. In fact, students’ approaches to teaching at the start of the experiment are important predictors of their scores after they followed the course on child development under both conditions. Moreover, student teachers’ changes in approaches to teaching tend to be affected by variables such as performance, academic self‐esteem, perceived workload and students’ changes in approaches to learning: variables that operate in distinct ways for diverse categories of approaches and work differently in both settings. In addition, the willingness of students to teach in the way they have been taught is not as straightforward as might be expected. Although several students became convinced of the use of the teaching methods in the experiment for their own practice, the majority of students demonstrate reflective practices, make critical judgements, formulate terms or suggest amendments to the teaching methods before simply adopting them for their own future pupils.     

Language,discipline and ‘teaching like a champion’

This article presents an analysis of various language policy mechanisms currently circulating in secondary schools in England, with a particular focus on those that intermingle ‘language’, ‘standard English’ and ‘discipline’. Although the connections between language, ideology and behaviour are well established within critical educational linguistics, this has not been explored in relation to current education policy in England, which is characterised by an overt focus on standardised English and behaviour ‘management’. In a grounded approach, I explore how the disciplining of language correlates with the disciplining of the body, based on ethnographic-orientated fieldwork undertaken in a London secondary school and drawing on a broad range of policy mechanisms such as curricula, textbooks, classroom artefacts and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion industry. I show how the current linguistic conservatism found within government policy gets reproduced in school-level policies, pedagogies and classroom interactions, and highlight these relations within a network of policy actors and key terms associated with so-called ‘zero-tolerance’ and ‘no-excuses’ schools. I show how teachers are positioned as language policy managers who work within a system of surveillance, compliance, coercion and control. As such, this article contributes to current thinking within critical language policy and the sociology of education by offering an expanded view of language ideologies in schools, whereby connections between language and discipline are explicitly illustrated and critiqued.     

‘I’m not a “maths‐person”!’ Reconstituting mathematical subjectivities in aesthetic teaching practices

In this study I have investigated how alternative ways of teaching mathematics influence and affect Early Childhood Education (ECE) students’ attitudes towards maths and how they understand their own subjectivities as more or less mathematical during a 10‐week alternative maths course. The investigated course adopts a feminist post‐structural approach based on critical pedagogy and deconstructive theory and includes an interdisciplinary approach to investigative mathematics. The data used include the memory/narrative writings and process‐writings of 75 female teacher‐education students, collected from three different cohorts, in which the students describe their learning processes throughout the maths course. The study shows that, in the main, the students became much more positively inclined to the subject of mathematics after the maths course and agreed that this course had changed their understanding of their own mathematical subjectivity, albeit in different and varying ways.     

Appropriating professionalism: restructuring the official knowledge base of England’s ‘modernised’ teaching profession

The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to ‘modernisation’. A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob Moore and Lynn Jones, is drawn upon to examine in some detail one key aspect of this ongoing process of governmental appropriation of professionalism: the specification by the Training and Development Agency for Schools of new ‘standards’ for both initial teacher training and teachers’ subsequent career progression. It is argued that although this enterprise represents itself as a species of purely common‐sense reform, it is in fact a mode of competency training that is rooted in selective appropriation of elements of post‐fordist management theory and a loose form of behaviourist psychology. The capacity of this training discourse to suppress awareness of its own presuppositions and of alternative or competing conceptions of professions and professionalism is explored.     

Datafying the teaching ‘profession’: remaking the professional teacher in the image of data

This paper explores how data-driven practices and logics have come to reshape the possibilities by which the teaching profession, and teaching professionals, can be known and valued. Informed by the literature and theorising around educational performativity, the constitutive power of numbers, and affective responses to data, it shows how different US educators experienced, and came to embody, new forms of numbers-based accountability. Drawing on interviews with teachers, and school- and district-level leaders, as well as relevant school-based documents, it is argued that such data are now both effective (i.e. they change ‘what counts’ within the profession) and affective (i.e. they produce new expectations for teachers to profess data-responsive dispositions over actual educative practices). This prevalence and use of data have combined not only to change teaching into a ‘data profession’, but also to change teachers into ‘professors’ of data.     

The construction of the ‘ideal pupil’ and pupils’ perceptions of ‘misbehaviour’ and discipline: contrasting experiences from a low‐socio‐economic and a high‐socio‐economic primary school

This paper examines the effect of school social class composition on pupil learner identities in British primary schools. In the current British education system, high‐stakes testing has a pervasive effect on the pedagogical relationship between teachers and pupils. The data in this paper, from ethnographic research in a working‐class school and a middle‐class school, indicate that the effect of the ‘testing culture’ is much greater in the working‐class school. Using Bernsteinian theory and the concept of the ‘ideal pupil’, it is shown that these pupils’ learner identities are more passive and dominated by issues of discipline and behaviour rather than academic performance, in contrast to those in the middle‐class school. While this study includes only two schools, it indicates a potentially significant issue for neo‐liberal education policy where education is marketised and characterised by high‐stakes testing, and schools are polarised in terms of social class.     

‘In-between’ Asia and Australia: on the politics of teaching English as the ‘Other’

This article mobilizes story-telling to narrate my lived experience of teaching English as a minority academic in one Australian university. Positioning myself as living ‘in-between’ two cultures and as an ‘Other’, I tell my story of how I have been ‘racialized’ and ‘Othered’ because I do not look White, and my spoken English is distinctly accented; hence, my legitimacy of teaching English is held suspect. My story contributes to the theorizing of the sociology of the in-between with the argument that while living in-between culture can be a space of negativity, it can also be a space of empowerment if one exercises choice and agency by forging new spaces. I end my story-telling with a happy ending by presenting a contrasting story of how my run-away from Australia to (a new space in) Hong Kong to teach English has reaffirmed my cultural capital as I morph into a different ‘Other’.     

‘I was kind of teaching myself’: teachers’ conversations about social justice and teaching for change

This article shares teachers’ conversations within teacher inquiry groups and considers how this reflective approach has potential for transforming teachers’ practices. Conversations took place at the early stages of a longer teacher inquiry project and centred on the critical interrogation of social justice-oriented children’s literature. These conversations served as a forum to help teacher professional learning communities and to reconcile understandings about social justice, action and agency within larger political and cultural forums of teaching. The teacher inquiry sessions shared in this paper explore teachers’ beginning struggles with conceptualizations of social justice, and the teacher’s role in imparting values to students. Teacher participants imparted their experience and practice as they negotiated their own understanding and implementation of social justice education in their schools. The teacher inquiry groups provided a needed supportive space where classroom teachers’ struggles were shared alongside their beliefs and pedagogical approaches so that a social justice agenda could be achieved.     

Bridging the implementation gap: a teacher‐as‐learner approach to teaching and learning policy

A major dilemma facing higher educational institutions around the world is how to achieve quality outcomes for students in an increasingly internationalised and competitive environment. To effect change in teaching and learning, we advocate a teacher‐as‐learner approach to the implementation of teaching and learning policy. Our approach has been influenced by approaches to change management as well as contemporary educational theories, such as constructive alignment and deep and surface approaches to learning. In this paper we use these approaches to evaluate the success of a policy initiative designed to encourage subject coordinators to use a faculty‐endorsed template to embed graduate attributes into their subject outlines. The difficulties experienced by teachers at the disciplinary level in using the subject outline template illustrate how a seemingly positive and well‐intentioned initiative can have a potentially minimal effect on teaching and learning practice and, as a consequence, student learning. We suggest that the Course Experience Questionnaire provides a useful model for evaluating not only teaching but also the management of teaching. As teachers responsible for the implementation of teaching and learning policies, we hope our views will provide a more integrated approach to teaching and learning changes in the higher educational context.     

Teaching in the ‘margins’: rekindling a passion for teaching

The data for this paper are drawn from a qualitative research project involving a number of alternative education sites in Australia and the United Kingdom. In this paper, we focus only on the motives and teaching philosophies of a sample of teachers who have chosen to work in alternative education sites despite, for some, the prospect of uncertain employment conditions and lower salaries. A thematic approach is used with the data so as to structure participant perspectives on a range of teaching-related issues. We argue that the experiences and perceptions of these teachers provide a starting point for reflection about the impact of many current educational policies that have been shaped or influenced by market-driven neo-liberal paradigms emphasising disciplinary accountabilities for teachers.     

Teacher education graduates’ entrance into the teaching profession: Development and test of a model

This study aims to advance insight into the relationship between teacher education and graduates’ intended and actual entrance into the teaching profession. Moreover, it indicates how this relationship varies between teacher training for primary education (i.e., programs for class teachers-to-be) and teacher training for secondary education (i.e., programs for subject teachers-to-be). A hypothetical model of graduates’ entrance into the teaching profession comprising empirically grounded variables was developed. Besides teacher education related variables, other factors (e.g., motivation and labour market) were included. Data for this study were collected based on a sample of 301 teacher education graduates. Logistic regression analysis shows that intention to enter teaching is a valid predictor of actual entrance. Path analysis was applied to test the hypothetical pattern of (inter)relationships between the variables. For graduates from teacher training for pre-school and primary education, the path model accounts for 33% of the variance in intention to enter teaching. For teacher training for secondary education the explained amount of variance is 44%. Results are largely consistent across the two types of teacher training showing a small, although statistically significant, contribution of teacher education above other antecedents of graduates’ intention to enter teaching.     

Narrative study of a high school English teacher’s beliefs about teaching students identified as having a disability

A qualitative study probing the connection between a high school English teacher’s lived experience and beliefs about teaching students identified as having a disability using interview story method was undertaken. Struggles with family quickly emerged as a dominant storyline in the participant’s discussion of her beliefs about teaching such students. The teacher’s value of diversity in students, regardless of disability/ability status, evolved from family relations. The narrative also illuminates the importance of persistence and compromise in preserving and developing relationships that extend to colleagues and students. Lessons learned from gathering the narrative are also discussed.     

Learning,literacy and identity: ‘I don’t think I’m a failure any more’

The impact of participation in adult literacy programmes on learners’ identities is examined through an interrogation of their past and current experiences and the assessment of the effect of particular pedagogies. The findings show how learners’ positive experiences in their programmes had caused them to re-evaluate their previous understandings and enabled the construction of new identities as people that are able to learn. These changes had come about through the challenging of negative discourses, the creation of new figured worlds and imagined futures, and the use of a learning curriculum where learners’ experiences were utilized as positive resources.     

‘I know what you are about to enter’: lived experiences as the curricular foundation for teaching citizenship

ABSTRACT

This qualitative multiple case study documents how two African American women social studies teachers utilise their lived experiences as the curricular foundation for teaching differing notions of citizenship to African-American students. Particular events, experiences, and relationships helped shape their perception of their roles as teachers and how they approached crafting a curriculum that was representative of their lived experiences as well as those of their students and community. This study hopes to shed light on how experiences may be used as valuable sources of knowledge in creating a more inclusive curriculum that mirrors the diversity seen in classrooms.     

Comparative education in Greece,as a European ‘semi-periphery’

ABSTRACT

Comparative education was established in Greek universities in the 1980s, with the creation of pedagogical departments and two laboratories, and the publication of a journal. There was an early emphasis on education policy analysis, in terms of assumptions about the ‘semi-peripherality’ of Greece within Europe. Later, the emphasis shifted to what was also called ‘modernisation’ – framed by entry to the European Economic Community. There was an emphasis on education policies in other European countries, and the educational policy of Europe, in contrast with Greece which had not yet absorbed what was becoming ‘a European discourse’. There was a continuing motif – reflections on methodology – but the changing concepts of modernisation, the more or less permanent anxiety about reforming Greek education, and the theme of education within the European Union dominated academic work in comparative education in Greece – even after 2010 and the major new economic crisis. An optimistic view is that comparative education will continue to develop in the Greek university through teaching and research. There is, however, a question to be asked about the silences within Greek comparative education.     

‘I Knew Jean-Paul Sartre’: Philosophy of education as comedy

Abstract

Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that ‘A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes’. The idea for this dialogue comes from a conversation that Michael Peters and Morwenna Griffiths had at the Philosophy of Education of Great Britain annual meeting at the University of Oxford, 2011. It was sparked by an account of an assessment of a piece of work where one of the external examiners unexpectedly exclaimed ‘I knew Jean-Paul Sartre’, trying to trump the discussion. This conversation is a dialogue about comedy and humor as a basis for philosophy, education and pedagogy that provides an introduction to recent works and a context for ongoing research. The concluding section provides further reflection on some of the main themes, drawing attention to the significance of humor in dialogues within philosophy and education, and suggesting that it has a particular role in resisting managerialism at all levels of educational institutions.