Session Information
26 SES 07 A, Job Satisfication and Work-Related Stress
Paper Session
Contribution
The growing focus on management and leadership in all restructuring educational system elicited a debate about how head teachers and leaders can increase staff well-being, a construct often defined in terms of “the degree to which a person is fully functioning”(Ryan and Deci 2001, p.141), ascribable to the wider scenario of the school improvement studies.
The on-going growth of audit, performance measurement and accountability technologies aligns with the logic of the new liberal agenda in education, and with the shift towards forms of ‘soft governance’ (Grimaldi et al. 2014) where standards, data and performance play an increasing role in education policies in Europe (Lawn and Grek, 2012). This transition led to a mobilization of knowledge, advices and experts in classification, and measurement in order to enhance guiding improvement efforts. While the need to move towards more quantitative research is increasingly being proposed as 'the best way', social researchers (mainly sociologists and psychologists) increasingly aim to collect standardized data, focusing on the importance of ‘evidence’, and measuring devices in the ‘search of truth’.
Given the above, the guiding research questions are:
· What are the heuristic and cultural implications of using quantitative research strategies that aim to measure teachers’ well-being?
· Which discourses of well-being are endorsed within quantitative data, and what do they suggest?
· How is it possible to acknowledge to the detected dimensions, the complexity which characterizes them, preventing them from being crushed under the one-dimensional weight of the data?
In order to answer to these questions, we will focus on a specific investigation, which involved both primary and secondary schools, conducted by the National Health Wellbeing Observatory (ONSBI), between 2013 and 2014, in order to investigate wellness/health dimensions for a sample of 1510 Italian teachers.
The mentioned questions involve the following specific aims:
1) To analyse the ONSBI protocol as an assemblage of devices and artefacts. A specific attention was devoted to the way in which the device for data collection performs its power to establish the standards for 'wellbeing discourse'.
2) To analyse survey data collected by ONSBI, choosing the appropriate techniques regarding the different types of variable, but in an effort to gain understanding through the inner tacit dimensions and context.
3) To identify the existing relationship between leadership, organizational context and well-being, illustrating how it is possible to produce an explanatory hypothesis, stating clearly: the different epistemological and ontological assumptions concerning the adopted idea of leadership (Seddon 1994); the insertion of these assumptions inside visibility frameworks and ‘discursive’ regimes that are also often clashing (Tamboukou 2000).
4) To offer a reading model useful to understand the relationship between leadership and teachers’ well-being in reference to a “democratic” discourse (Serpieri et. al. 2009).
Briefly, dealing with distributed leadership theory and the related issue of education ecology democratization, we use two interpretative dimensions: discourses as regimes of truth and ontological and epistemological presuppositions. Thus, following Serpieri and colleagues (2009), we can distinguish between two different types of contexts:
a) Interactive contexts, where the focus is on social interactions among human agents;
b) Network-practices contexts, where the subject is decentred in favour of the reproduction of practice understood as a complex process in which human agents, institutions, cultures and material artefacts intertwine and influence each other.
In a similar way we refer to wellbeing: as a multidimensional construct (Hackman and Oldham 1980) that should be thought as a dynamic conceptual dimension associated to the school context and life that involves complex semantic considerations. It goes beyond collected data and suggest for genealogy, ethnography and narration as more appropriate forms of analysis and interpretation (Ball and Tamboukou 2003).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
References Ball, S.J., 2007. Education PLC, Understanding private sector participation in public sector education, London: Routledge. Ball, S. J., Junemann, C., 2012. Networks, new governance and education. Bristol: Policy Press. Blalock, H.M., 1985. Causal Models in the Social Sciences, New York: Transaction Publishers. Di Franco G., Marradi A., (2003), Analisi fattoriale e analisi in componenti principali, Acireale-Roma: Bonanno. Grimaldi, E., Serpieri, R., 2013. Jigsawing education evaluation. Pieces from the Italian new public management puzzle. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45 (4), 306-335. Grimaldi, E., Landri, P., Serpieri, R., 2014. NPM and the Reculturing of the Italian Education System. The making of new fields of visibility, in: Fejes, Andreas, and Katherine Nicoll. Foucault and the Politics of Confession in Education. London: Routledge. Hackman, J. R., Oldham, G. R., 1980. Work redesign. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley . Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual review of psychology, 52(1), 141-166. Serpieri, R., Grimaldi, E., Spanò, E., 2009, Discourses of Distribution: Anchoring Educational Leadership to Practice, Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 3(3): 210-224. Lawn, M., & Grek, S. (2012). Europeanizing Education: Governing a New Policy Space. In Symposium Books. Symposium Books. PO Box 204, Oxford: Didcot. Schwarzer, R., Hallum, S., 2008, Perceived Teacher Self-Efficacy as a Predictor of Job Stress and Burnout: Mediation Analyses, Applied Psychology: An International Review, 57, 152–171. Seddon, T., 1994. Context and beyond. Reframing the theory and practice of education, London: Falmer Press, Serpieri, R., 2008. Senza leadership: un discorso democratico per la scuola, Milano: Franco Angeli. Tamboukou, M., 2000. Writing Genealogies: an exploration of Foucault's strategies for doing research, in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 20(2): 201–217. Tamboukou, M., & Ball, S. J. (2003). Genealogy and ethnography: Fruitful encounters or dangerous liaisons. Dangerous encounters: Genealogy and ethnography, 17, 1-36. Telford, H., 1996. Trasforming schools through collaborative leadership, London: Falmer Press.
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