Thriving amid the performative demands of the contemporary audit culture: a matter of school context

The predominant focus in this paper is on issues of school context and, in particular, on the dimensions of context at a large English comprehensive school that enable it to thrive within the current demands of the contemporary audit culture. Featuring interview data gathered from a number of senior educators, the paper draws on Braun et al’s (Braun, A., S. Ball, M. Maguire, and K. Hoskins. 2011. “Taking Context Seriously: Towards Explaining Policy Enactments in the Secondary School.” Discourse: Studies in the Politics of Education 32 (4): 585 -596) heuristic device for thinking about the ‘situated’, ‘professional’ and ‘external’ dimensions of context at the school. This device supports an analysis of the school’s intake (in particular the high cultural and class related aspirations of parents and students) and its values (namely the school’s traditional ethos of academic and behavioural excellence). The central argument of the paper is that these contextual dimensions contribute significantly to the school’s capacity to forge a worthy school identity within the current hyper-accountable and competitive environment where academic achievement (along increasingly narrow and conservative lines) and maintaining standards in relation to this achievement are utmost priorities.

Digital kids, analogue students : a mixed methods study of students' engagement with a school-based Web 2.0 learning innovation

The inquiry documented in this thesis is located at the nexus of technological innovation and traditional schooling. As we enter the second decade of a new century, few would argue against the increasingly urgent need to integrate digital literacies with traditional academic knowledge. Yet, despite substantial investments from governments and businesses, the adoption and diffusion of contemporary digital tools in formal schooling remain sluggish. To date, research on technology adoption in schools tends to take a deficit perspective of schools and teachers, with the lack of resources and teacher ‘technophobia’ most commonly cited as barriers to digital uptake. Corresponding interventions that focus on increasing funding and upskilling teachers, however, have made little difference to adoption trends in the last decade. Empirical evidence that explicates the cultural and pedagogical complexities of innovation diffusion within long-established conventions of mainstream schooling, particularly from the standpoint of students, is wanting. To address this knowledge gap, this thesis inquires into how students evaluate and account for the constraints and affordances of contemporary digital tools when they engage with them as part of their conventional schooling. It documents the attempted integration of a student-led Web 2.0 learning initiative, known as the Student Media Centre (SMC), into the schooling practices of a long-established, high-performing independent senior boys’ school in urban Australia. The study employed an ‘explanatory’ two-phase research design (Creswell, 2003) that combined complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to achieve both breadth of measurement and richness of characterisation. In the initial quantitative phase, a self-reported questionnaire was administered to the senior school student population to determine adoption trends and predictors of SMC usage (N=481). Measurement constructs included individual learning dispositions (learning and performance goals, cognitive playfulness and personal innovativeness), as well as social and technological variables (peer support, perceived usefulness and ease of use). Incremental predictive models of SMC usage were conducted using Classification and Regression Tree (CART) modelling: (i) individual-level predictors, (ii) individual and social predictors, and (iii) individual, social and technological predictors. Peer support emerged as the best predictor of SMC usage. Other salient predictors include perceived ease of use and usefulness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals. On the whole, an overwhelming proportion of students reported low usage levels, low perceived usefulness and a lack of peer support for engaging with the digital learning initiative. The small minority of frequent users reported having high levels of peer support and robust learning goal orientations, rather than being predominantly driven by performance goals. These findings indicate that tensions around social validation, digital learning and academic performance pressures influence students’ engagement with the Web 2.0 learning initiative. The qualitative phase that followed provided insights into these tensions by shifting the analytics from individual attitudes and behaviours to shared social and cultural reasoning practices that explain students’ engagement with the innovation. Six indepth focus groups, comprising 60 students with different levels of SMC usage, were conducted, audio-recorded and transcribed. Textual data were analysed using Membership Categorisation Analysis. Students’ accounts converged around a key proposition. The Web 2.0 learning initiative was useful-in-principle but useless-in-practice. While students endorsed the usefulness of the SMC for enhancing multimodal engagement, extending peer-topeer networks and acquiring real-world skills, they also called attention to a number of constraints that obfuscated the realisation of these design affordances in practice. These constraints were cast in terms of three binary formulations of social and cultural imperatives at play within the school: (i) ‘cool/uncool’, (ii) ‘dominant staff/compliant student’, and (iii) ‘digital learning/academic performance’. The first formulation foregrounds the social stigma of the SMC among peers and its resultant lack of positive network benefits. The second relates to students’ perception of the school culture as authoritarian and punitive with adverse effects on the very student agency required to drive the innovation. The third points to academic performance pressures in a crowded curriculum with tight timelines. Taken together, findings from both phases of the study provide the following key insights. First, students endorsed the learning affordances of contemporary digital tools such as the SMC for enhancing their current schooling practices. For the majority of students, however, these learning affordances were overshadowed by the performative demands of schooling, both social and academic. The student participants saw engagement with the SMC in-school as distinct from, even oppositional to, the conventional social and academic performance indicators of schooling, namely (i) being ‘cool’ (or at least ‘not uncool’), (ii) sufficiently ‘compliant’, and (iii) achieving good academic grades. Their reasoned response therefore, was simply to resist engagement with the digital learning innovation. Second, a small minority of students seemed dispositionally inclined to negotiate the learning affordances and performance constraints of digital learning and traditional schooling more effectively than others. These students were able to engage more frequently and meaningfully with the SMC in school. Their ability to adapt and traverse seemingly incommensurate social and institutional identities and norms is theorised as cultural agility – a dispositional construct that comprises personal innovativeness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals orientation. The logic then is ‘both and’ rather than ‘either or’ for these individuals with a capacity to accommodate both learning and performance in school, whether in terms of digital engagement and academic excellence, or successful brokerage across multiple social identities and institutional affiliations within the school. In sum, this study takes us beyond the familiar terrain of deficit discourses that tend to blame institutional conservatism, lack of resourcing and teacher resistance for low uptake of digital technologies in schools. It does so by providing an empirical base for the development of a ‘third way’ of theorising technological and pedagogical innovation in schools, one which is more informed by students as critical stakeholders and thus more relevant to the lived culture within the school, and its complex relationship to students’ lives outside of school. It is in this relationship that we find an explanation for how these individuals can, at the one time, be digital kids and analogue students.

Navigating the demands of the English schooling context: problematics and possibilities for social equity

The English schooling context has seen radical and rapid reform in recent times with the processes of devolution or deconcentration of centralised school governance, on the one hand, and the instating of ever-increasing and rigid external accountabilities, on the other. These reforms driven as they are by neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies have created a new kind of ‘system’ of schooling in England, one that is ‘heterarchical’ in governance, increasingly complex in its overlap, multiplicity and asymmetric power dynamics, but one that remains strongly tied to and regulated by the reductive and narrow measure of ‘success’ imposed by the state. Against this complex and changing backdrop, what constitutes quality and equitable schooling has been transformed. This special issue explores these concerns and, in particular, focuses on how the current demands of the English schooling context construct student achievement and identity, teachers’ work, conceptualisations of knowledge and pedagogy, and school organisation and collaboration. The issue has a strong equity focus. Many of the papers to this end focus on how teachers and schools are navigating through the demands of current policy reform to mobilise spaces of possibility for equity and good schooling. In this paper, we provide a context and framework to set the scene for the subsequent papers in the issue.

Digital literacies in the middle years of schooling

This paper uses Glister's interpretation of digital literacy whilst acknowledging that a computer is not the only means for the delivety of digital texts. I will explore how we can support student teachers to develop understandings about the teaching in the middle years in order to work with students in schools to successfully read digital texts, create digital texts, search, fmd and use information in the digital world and to become critical users of digital texts. Students in the middle years of schooling are facing increasingly sophisticated literacy demands of new technologies that go well beyond that of the traditional printed page as they interact with information communicated through a range of digital media both inside and outside of school. At best new technologies can open doors to students for researching and accessing a world far beyond their own environment, empowering them to direct and control their own learning and produce quality work.

Understanding quality and equity of schooling in Scotland : locating educational traditions globally

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the OECD’s (2007) national report on Scottish education, Quality and equity of schooling in Scotland, while also briefly considering the Scottish government’s Diagnostic Report, prepared for the review. The national report is situated against Scottish traditions of schooling, particularly the view that access to academic curricula for all is a democratic and egalitarian approach, and also set against the changing role of the OECD. On the latter, the paper argues that the OECD, in the context of globalisation, has become more of a policy actor in its own right, in addition to its more traditional think-tank function. The OECD is a now significant transnational policy actor in education, contributing to the emergent global education policy field. The overarching argument proffered is that debates provoked by the OECD’s report, for example the David Raffe/Richard Teese exchange in the Scottish Educational Review, 40(1), 2008, stem from tensions between the new supranational expression of political and policy authority as articulated in the OECD’s report and that located more traditionally within the nation. The academic curricula for all, the Scottish tradition, is challenged by the OECD report, which supports more diverse curricula provision, including more vocational education in schools, particularly at the post-compulsory phase. We note, drawing on theoretical and empirical insights of Bourdieu, that the success of the former demands pedagogies which scaffold for those students not possessing the requisite cultural capitals for success with academic curricula, while the latter demands a strategic effort to ensure parity of esteem between different curricular provisions.

Queer contingencies: bifurcation and the sexuality of schooling

This article critiques the contemporary focus on same-sex attracted youth, “antihomophobia,” and “safe schools,” as well as the ways these foci structure the logics of the prevailing policy approach. The author examines how contemporary antihomophobic reform in education is sustained by a series of false dilemmas: that the political demands and  investments of straights and nonstraights can be easily distinguished one from another; that the expression of homophobia is anathema to queer educative work; and that everything that is at stake in the messy confluence of sexuality, gender, and schooling can be made sense of by figuring the problem as a matter of being safe. Gesturing toward a queer social policy for schooling, this article critiques the “zero-tolerance” approach of antihomophobia education, arguing that it falsely bifurcates the social world of the school into homophobic/antihomophobic iterations, unsafe/safe versions, and straight/homosexual interest.

Equity and quality in the early years of schooling

For most of the latter part of the twentieth century, the issues of quality and equity have been part of the agenda of compulsory schooling in Australia. However it is only more recently that the two have been brought together, which has drawn attention to the quest to create high quality and high equity schooling. The outcomes of this union have been the focus of analyses undertaken using data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which show that several features of Nordic secondary schools have produced high quality and high equity schooling. This article concentrates on the early years of school and considers the role of curriculum and syllabus documents in creating high quality and high equity in the early years, including the non-compulsory prior-to-school year. It draws on recent research in education generally to identify issues of significance that are instructive in the quest to produce high quality and high equity schooling in the early years. These issues include equity of access, syllabus design and curriculum, and transition to school; but before they are considered, I discuss the context of moves to create high quality and high equity schooling.

Interdisciplinarity vs disciplinarity : developing knowledge for problem solving in middle years of schooling

Interdisciplinary studies are fundamental to the signature practices for the middle years of schooling. Middle years researchers claim that interdisciplinarity in teaching appropriately meets the needs of early adolescents by tying concepts together, providing frameworks for the relevance of knowledge, and demonstrating the linking of disparate information for solution of novel problems. Cognitive research is not wholeheartedly supportive of this position. Learning theorists assert that application of knowledge in novel situations for the solution of problems is actually dependent on deep discipline based understandings. The present research contrasts the capabilities of early adolescent students from discipline based and interdisciplinary based curriculum schooling contexts to successfully solve multifaceted real world problems. This will inform the development of effective management of middle years of schooling curriculum.

Teachers’ conceptions of essential knowledge for integrated social education : a middle years of schooling perspective from Australia

Integrated social education in Australia is a divisive educational issue. The last decade has been marked by a controversial integrated social studies curriculum called Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE) where history, geography and environmental studies were integrated with civics and citizenship. The introduction of a compulsory K-10 Australian Curriculum from 2011, however, marks the return to history and geography and the abandonment of SOSE. Curriculum reform aside, what do teachers think is essential knowledge for middle years social education? The paper reports on a phenomenographical exploration of thirty-one middle school teachers’ conceptions of essential knowledge for SOSE. Framed by Shulman’s (1986, 1987) theoretical framework of the knowledge base for teaching, the research identified seven qualitatively different ways of understanding essential knowledge for integrated social education. The study indicates a practice-based theorization of integrated social education that justifies attention to disciplinary process and teacher identity in middle school social education.