Description:
This paper canvasses one of the most debilitating issues currently disfiguring schools – the absent voices of teachers in the policy reform of schooling. This is a phenomenon that has afflicted schooling around the world for more than three decades, and it is not without effects. The escalating levels of student disaffection, alienation, violence, disengagement and ‘dropping out’ are not unconnected to the marginalisation of teachers and the disrespectful and distrustful ways in which they have been treated by policy makers, politicians and a largely hostile media. What is advanced in its place in this paper is a way of conducting research that restores trust through acknowledging and celebrating the distinctive repertoires of knowledge teachers and students possess, and points to the way in which a more respectful policy paradigm might be re-invented.
Description:
This paper is an account of one aspect of a self-study - the 'roundtable reflections' - conducted over two semesters with two cohorts of Bachelor of Education preservice teachers at the University of Ballarat. An innovative approach to learning and teaching mathematics based on negotiation, 'commuting' teaching experience, and systematic reflection was introduced with each cohort and roundtable sessions provided the reflective space for the systematic 'unpacking' of the learning. Analysis of these roundtable sessions has developed understandings of the impact and effectiveness of this approach in redefining the role of both the preservice teacher and the teacher educator as 'co-learners'. The implications for those involved in teacher education are explored as a means of further understanding the nature of teaching and learning about teaching.
Description:
The move to local school management (LSM) in its various formations is one of the most significant educational policy moves to occur in recent times in western countries. Although something is known about the effects on governance, budgeting and resource decision making, relatively little is known about the rhetorical and actual ways teachers' work is affected. Even the proponents admit this, albeit in terms of the little known relay effect on student learning. Drawing on the narrative biography of a single high school teacher, as part of a larger multi-sited ethnography, this study revealed the level of policy incoherence to be such that most of the worst excesses of accountability and marketisation accompanying LSM were minimised. Emerging from a deeply held set of pedagogical values and convictions, this instance confirmed a robust view of teacher identity as lying beyond those of victim construction.
Description:
By concentrating on cases of family engagement with information communication technologies at a very local level, this paper tries to illustrate that issues related to 'access' and social disadvantage require extremely sophisticated and textured accounts of the multiple ways in which interrelated critical elements and various social, economic and cultural dimensions of disadvantage come into play in different contexts. Indeed, to draw a simple dichotomy between the technology haves and have-nots in local settings is not particularly generative. It may be the case that, even when people from disadvantaged backgrounds manage to gain access to technology, they remain relatively disadvantaged.
Description:
In Teachers as Researchers (2003: Ch 1), Joe Kincheloe advocates teacher research as a means by which teachers can resist and overcome a trend emanating from the United States toward domination of curriculum and pedagogy by ‘technical standards’ based on ‘expert research’ and imposed in a ‘top-down’ manner by educational administrators and policy makers. This is a trend where curriculum has become highly standardized. Teachers within the same subject areas in the same grades are required to ‘cover the same content, assign the same importance to the content they cover, and evaluate it in the same way’ regardless of the diversity of school communities, school settings, student needs and backgrounds, and so on (Marzano and Kendall 1999; Kincheloe 2003: 4). Teachers are strongly encouraged to teach to the tests that are used to measure student outcomes because schools are compared on the basis of the scores their students achieve. This regime of measuring and reporting outcomes is promoted in the name of ‘accountability,’ and is very difficult for schools to resist. On one hand, if schools do not make an effort to compete they are likely to lose students to other schools whose achievement scores impress parents/caregivers. On the other hand, if schools can show their scores are improving—by teaching more and more rigorously to the content-laden tests and enlisting parents/caregivers in this culture as overseers of student homework and preparation for tests, they can maintain and improve their enrolments.
Description:
In Teachers as Researchers (2003: Ch 1), Joe Kincheloe advocates teacher research as a means by which teachers can resist and overcome a trend emanating from the United States toward domination of curriculum and pedagogy by ‘technical standards’ based on ‘expert research’ and imposed in a ‘top-down’ manner by educational administrators and policy makers. This is a trend where curriculum has become highly standardized. Teachers within the same subject areas in the same grades are required to ‘cover the same content, assign the same importance to the content they cover, and evaluate it in the same way’ regardless of the diversity of school communities, school settings, student needs and backgrounds, and so on (Marzano and Kendall 1999; Kincheloe 2003: 4). Teachers are strongly encouraged to teach to the tests that are used to measure student outcomes because schools are compared on the basis of the scores their students achieve. This regime of measuring and reporting outcomes is promoted in the name of ‘accountability,’ and is very difficult for schools to resist. On one hand, if schools do not make an effort to compete they are likely to lose students to other schools whose achievement scores impress parents/caregivers. On the other hand, if schools can show their scores are improving—by teaching more and more rigorously to the content-laden tests and enlisting parents/caregivers in this culture as overseers of student homework and preparation for tests, they can maintain and improve their enrolments.
Description:
Reflects on the articles in this themed issue on reflective practice. Notes that these teacher/authors have been influenced by prior learning, past experience, feelings, attitudes, values, the school constraints on the learning environment, and their own assumptions about teaching. Describes how teachers have formed a learning community to increase awareness of reflective teaching.
Description:
Early school leaving is one of the most protracted educational problems around the world, but one of the least understood. Central to the issue itself, is the failure by the educational policy community to have ways of adequately ‘naming’ the problem. The study reported in this paper examines early school leaving from the position of 209 young Australians who had left school or who were at imminent risk of doing so. While acknowledging the considerable complexity of the decision making processes that lie behind this problem, this article provides a tentative theorising that traverses aspects of what we call the ‘cultural geography of the high school’ as a partial explanation of what is occurring. The question being pursued was how the culture of the school contributed to or interfered with early school leaving.