Unmasking teachers' subjectivities in local school management
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Education Policy Vol. 17, no. 4 (2002), p. 463-482
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Relatively little is known about how teachers are affected by reforms that have moved schools increasingly in the direction of becoming self-managing schools. While there has been much hype about the alleged benefits that flow from more flexible decision making processes shifted closer to the point of learning, the cutting of bureaucratic red tape, and the notion that schools are made more accountable to parents and students - relatively little is known about how this impacts on the way teachers think or act in relation to their work. This paper takes a particular instance of an Australian primary school and examines how teachers' subjectivities are worked on and how teachers' pedagogical selves are being disrupted and fundamentally recast as a consequence of local school management.
'Voiced' research as a sociology for understanding 'dropping out' of school
- Authors: Smyth, John , Hattam, Robert
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 22, no. 3 (Spetember 2001 2001), p. 402-415
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: How people obtain more complex understandings of the phenomenon of 'dropping out' of school is one of the most urgent policy and practice issues facing educational practitioners, policy-makers and sociological researchers at the moment. Smyth and Hattam argue that a different 'sociological imagination' is required--one that is simultaneously more attentive to the lifeworlds of young people and more reflexive of its own agenda.
A culture of teaching under 'new management'
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The performing school : managing, teaching, and learning in a performance culture p. 118-136
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
Critical politics of teachers' work: An Australian perspective
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Book
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
Managing the myth of the self-managing school as an international education reform
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Taking education really seriously: Four years' hard labour p. 238-253
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
The self-managing school and social justice: Are they on the same planet?
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: School Field Vol. 12, no. 3 (2001), p. 71-90
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The self-managing school is an educational reform that seems to have developed the status of reform 'we had to have'. Regardless of whether it was in the educational interests of schools or not, this reform has been foisted onto schools worldwide, and in many instances, with quite devastating effects. Yet, despite its pervasiveness, there is precious little evidence to show that this reform improves learning. On the contrary, for vast numbers of students, especially those who are already least advantaged, this reform is coming to be seen as being extremely damaging. The paper poses a number of questions about the undisclosed intention of this reform, how it works, for whom, and its corroding effects on large numbers of students and teachers.