Session Information
23 SES 01 C, Policy Reforms and the Regulation of Teachers and Their Work
Paper Session
Contribution
Teachers’ work and learning are increasingly influenced by performative demands, particularly in relation to assessment, curriculum enactment, and teaching practice. This is perhaps most obvious in the global trend of pressure for ever increased performance against standardized national and international measures of student literacy and numeracy, but is also evident in the development of detailed, ‘teacher proof’ curricula, and teaching standards that advocate narrow, more prescriptive approaches to teaching practice and teacher accountability (Green, 2013). Such governance processes have significantly influenced schooling practices in European (Simons, Lundahl & Serpieri, 2013), North American (Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge & Jacobsen, 2013) and Australian contexts (Lingard, Thompson & Sellar, 2016), including the extent to which teacher learning can be enacted to effect more substantive student learning. Nevertheless, and at the same time, schools are also characterized by efforts to ameliorate the more reductive effects of such foci. The research presented in this paper seeks to explore how teachers have responded to such demands, including how they have sought to develop spaces for more systematic inquiry into their own practice to counter the more reductive effects of such foci, and to engage in productive learning more generally.
The research explores the learning practices of teachers from a large (800 students) primary school in Queensland, Australia, as they met together one day per term to inquire into the nature of their teaching and assessment practices vis-à-vis a new curriculum. To understand the learning practices occurring during what were described as ‘Inquiry Cycle’ days, the research draws upon Habermas’ (1984;1989;1990;1996) understanding of the public sphere as a space of ‘communicative action’ within which people come together to engage freely and openly with one another, with a view to developing a clearer understanding of a given issue or problem. While there has been considerable application of Habermas’ ideas in educational research (Ewert, 1991; Lovat, 2013), there has been less explicit focus upon the notion of teachers’ learning as a public sphere in the context of current conditions of increasingly prescriptive curricula, and reliance upon national and international standardized tests and associated standardized measures of achievement as markers of student learning. The research seeks to reveal the nature of the specific communicative practices which characterize the ‘actually existing’ public sphere under these circumstances, and the implications for the concept of the public sphere as expressed in relation to teachers’ learning, at the present moment in time.
For Habermas (1984;1989;1990;1996), this intersubjective communication, or ‘communicative action’, constitutes a normative response to the challenges proffered by a critical social science. Such a response entails rich linguistic interactions aimed at mutual understanding between interlocutors, as a basis for social integration (- integration beyond the influence of administrative power and money). This entails free communication between equal partners in ongoing collaboration to respond best to particular challenges at hand. Public deliberation is construed as vital for developing legitimate responses to challenging circumstances, and contested/potentially contested positions. Communicative action also provides more optimistic normative possibilities for those dedicated to acting upon its premises.
However, while Habermas’ notion of communicative action and the public sphere have been applied variously by educators in schooling settings for the past three decades, including in relation to specific instances of teachers’ learning (Hardy, 2012), there is less of a focus upon what the ‘public sphere’ of teachers’ practice looks like under current, globalized policy conditions of increasing standardization of practice (Lingard, Martino, Rezai-Rashti & Sellar, 2016), and how teachers continue to seek to strive to engage in life-world relations heavily influenced by such systemic demands and parameters.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Anagnostopoulos, Dorothea, Stacey Rutledge, and Rebecca Jacobsen. (eds) 2013. The Infrastructure of Accountability: Data Use and the Transformation of American Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beck, John. 2008. “Governmental professionalism: Re-professionalising or De-professionalising teachers in England?” British Journal of Educational Studies, 56(2): 119-143. Calhoun, Craig. 1992. “Introduction: Habermas and the public sphere.” In Pp. 1-48 in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ewert, Gerry D. 1991. “Habermas and Education: A Comprehensive Overview of the Influence of Habermas in Educational Literature.” Review of Educational Research 61(3): 345-378. Green, Jane. 2013. Education, Professionalism, and the Quest for Accountability: Hitting the Target but Missing the Point. New York: Routledge. Groundwater-Smith, Susan and Nicole Mockler. 2009. Teacher Professional Learning in an Age of Compliance: Mind the Gap. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Habermas, Jürgen, 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action – Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989.The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hamilton, Laura, Heather Schwartz, Brian Stecher, and Jennifer Steele. 2013. “Improving Accountability Through Expanded Measures of Performance.” Journal of Educational Administration 51(4): 453-475. Hardy, Ian. 2012. The Politics of Teacher Professional Development: Policy, Research and Practice. New York: Routledge. Kemmis, Stephen, Jane Wilkinson, Christine Edwards-Groves, Ian Hardy, Peter Grootenboer, and Laurette Bristol. 2014. Changing Practices, Changing Education. Singapore: Springer. Lawn, Martin. 2011. “Standardizing the European education policy space.” European Educational Research Journal 10(2): 259-272. Lingard, Bob, Wayne Martino, Goli Rezai-Rashti, and Sam Sellar. 2016. Globalizing Educational Accountabilities. New York: Routledge. Lingard, Bob, Greg Thompson, and Sam Sellar. 2016. National Testing in Schools: An Australian Assessment. London: Routledge. Lovat, Terrence. 2013. “Jürgen Habermas: Education’s Reluctant Hero.” Pp. 69-83 in Social Theory and Education Research: Understanding Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu and Derrida, edited by Mark Murphy. London: Routledge. Mockler, Nicole. 2013. “Teacher Professional Learning in a Neoliberal Age: Audit, Professionalism and Identity.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 38(1): 35-47. Simons, Maarten, Lisbeth Lundahl, and Roberto Serpieri. 2013. “The governing of education in Europe: Commerical actors, partnerships and strategies.” European Educational Research Journal 12(4): 416-424. Timperley, Helen. 2011. Realizing the Power of Professional Learning. New York: Open University Press.
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