Session Information
23 SES 01 B, New Forms of Governing in School Education (Part 1)
Paper Session to be continued in 23 SES 02 B
Contribution
For more than three decades, teachers have been confronted with an increasing political pressure to perform ‘better’, ‘smarter’ and ‘faster’ (Ball 2008; Taubman 2011). This pressure is related to general changes of the welfare state, be those of a conservative restorative nature (Apple 2001; Sadovnik 2006), a neoliberal and ‘performative’ nature (Junemann and Ball 2013) or, as in the Danish case, a negotiated and ‘competitive’ nature (Hjort 2002; Rüsselbæk Hansen, Bøje and Beck 2014). As a result, new work relations between school leaders, teachers and researchers have emerged (Rüsselbæk Hansen, Phelan and Qvortrup 2015; Serpieri and Grimaldi). Increasingly, interventions by school leaders showing ‘pedagogical leadership’ are regarded as necessary in order to improve teachers’ teaching and students’ learning under limited budgetary frameworks (Ärlestig & Törnsen 2014; Robinson 2007).
In this paper we examine the following questing: How and why do these interventions occur, and what consequences do they seem to have to schools leaders and teachers?
Starting with the idea of the neoliberal competitive state (Cerny 1997; Pedersen 2011) and inspired by the work of Zizek (2008) and (Mouffe 2013), we argue that discourses of standards, accountability and technical efficiency are framing the Danish educational tasks and constantly push the leaders in difficult and delicate ways to raise and improve educational output and results.
Based on two examples: one from a Danish upper secondary school and one from a vocational educational training programme of basic health and care, we demonstrate how it takes place and how new, uneasy and sometimes conflictual relations between leaders, teachers, and researches arise.
In the first example, which is based on empirical interviews with school leaders in the Danish upper secondary school (Rüsselbæk Hansen and Frederiksen 2015), we point out how the leaders frame themselves within an ideological fantasy based on the idea that if they monitor teachers’ teaching and give them (productive) feedback they can improve their teaching and get them to work faster and even better. What we are witnessing, however, is that a problematic hierarchy between the ‘knowing’ leaders and the ‘unknowing’ teachers is being produced with various consequences. The leaders and the teachers are given different voices to speak about pedagogy and teaching – voices which make qualitative and complicated conversations difficult and perhaps even impossible.
In the second example, which is based on an action research project at a vocational school of basic health and care (Bøje, Beck and Winum 2014, Bøje, Winum, Beck and West 2015), we include the role played by researchers in these new and collaborative process between leaders and teachers. In this case, the imperative is not to save money and make teachers work faster, but rather to invest money in order to attain a favorable market position among other schools offering vocational educational training. Thus, the involved leaders, teachers and researchers embark on ‘joint venture’, which aims at defining and developing a new teaching concept: practice-oriented teaching. It is hoped that this new concept can give the school the aforementioned position in relation to other schools at the local market of vocational educational training. However, the ‘joint venture’ is not as easy as it seems. It challenges everyone involved: The leaders realize that they cannot lead things (top-down) as they are used to, the teachers become differentiated between those in favor of and those critical of the new teaching concept, and the researchers struggle to tie everything together.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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