'Geographies of exclusion' in the policy reform of teachers' work
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Discourse Vol. 23, no. 3 (2002), p. 357-363
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
A high school teacher's experience of local school management : A case of the 'system behaving badly towards teachers'
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2003
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Journal of Education Vol. 47, no. 3 (2003), p. 265-282
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- 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: 2003003527
An argument for new understandings and explanations of early school leaving that go beyond the conventional
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: London Review of Education Vol. 3, no. 2 (2005), p. 117-130
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper presents an argument around the need to rethink the issue of early school leaving from the vantage point of students and teachers, and the conditions and pathways that need to be constructed and brought into existence within schooling, if such conditions do not already exist. The attempt is to move discussions outside of the well-meaning but ultimately unhelpful literatures of 'at risk' categories that end up blaming students, their families or backgrounds. The claim being advanced is that the focus needs to be on relationships, school cultures, and pedagogical arrangements that make schools more attractive and educationally engaging places.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001466
Climbing over the rocks in the road to student engagement and learning in a challenging high school in Australia
- Authors: Smyth, John , Fasoli, Lyn
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Educational Research Vol. 49, no. 3 (2007), p. 273-295
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0665569
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0208022
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Background There is increasing evidence that schools internationally are not meeting the needs of increasing numbers of young people, especially those at the secondary level, and whose backgrounds have placed them at disadvantage. The evidence is that significant numbers of young people are becoming disconnected from school. While the official term for this is 'disengagement', it seems that official educational policy responses to these tendencies, far from 'fixing' the problem, seem to be exacerbating it. Current policy preoccupations that emphasize accountability, greater parental choice of schools and a more prescriptive curriculum can present difficulties for young people, particularly those from challenging backgrounds. There may be a mismatch between formal educational policy, and the lived experiences at the level of the school and classroom for the most vulnerable young people. Purpose This paper reports on a single instance of a high school that embarked upon a process of reinventing itself in respect of the importance of relationships and 'relational power' for students over their learning. The paper examines what the teachers and students had to say about the efficacy of this school-based reform. Sample The case-study school was located in an area of extreme social disadvantage in which young people had diminished educational expectations. The research involved observations and interviews with a small sample of stakeholders and focus groups with students (13-16-year-olds). Design and method The study was an ethnographic case study of a single secondary school conducted over a five-week continuous period. It used 'embedded interviews' involving observation of in-class teaching prior to extensive 1-hour interviews with teachers and students' focus groups. All interviews were recorded. Detailed field notes were kept of classroom observations and other activities, including school assemblies, staff meetings and reflections on informal conversations held during teaching breaks in the staffroom. Results and conclusions Positive outcomes emerged from a context where fair boundaries were established and in which students could see school as a place where they could experience fun in their learning. The process was by no means complete, but the school felt that it had found a more efficacious way to move forward and the students made this clear in their statements about what the school was attempting to do with them. Key to these positive outcomes was a commitment to placing relationships between students, teachers and parents at the centre of everything the school did.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003005579
Early school leaving and the cultural geography of high schools
- Authors: Smyth, John , Hattam, Robert
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: British Educational Research Journal Vol. 28, no. 3 (June 2002), p. 375-397
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- 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.
Modernizing the Australian education workplace : A case of failure to deliver for teachers of young disadvantaged adolescents
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Educational Review Vol. 57, no. 2 (2005), p. 221-233
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This article has at its centre the project, discourses and practices of modernization and what these mean practically and existentially for schools. The author argues that schools are, at their core, relational organizations, therefore they are primarily concerned with creating the set of relational resources and conditions that enable learning to take place, among students as well as teachers. When this does not happen, for whatever reasons, schools are very dysfunctional, deeply disturbed and unhappy places. An instance is described of an Australian government school that courageously, and in a politically prudent way, created the space within which to construct a viable relationally-affirming alternative. It is a story about how a school found ways of working against the damaging and prevailing managerialist ethos, and devised ways of uniquely re-inventing and reforming itself against/in spite of the external dominant official reform agenda.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001467
Policy research and 'damaged teachers' : Towards an epistemologically respectful paradigm
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2004
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Waikato Journal of Education Vol. 10, no. (2004), p. 263-281
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- 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: C1
- Description: 2003000756
The ‘hidden transcripts’ of digital natives in the peri-urban jungle : Young people making sense of their use of social/digital media
- Authors: Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Educational Practice and Theory Vol. 37, no. 1 (2015), p. 5-17
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The way young people engage with and make sense of digital/social media is not quite what it seems. In this paper we present two quite different versions, drawing on the work of political scientist James C. Scott. On the one hand, there is the ‘public’ or official transcript or rendition, which comprises the way adults conceive of this usage, and in which young people acquiesce with. On the other hand, in order to subvert the former, what is going on concurrently, is a hidden transcript which is opaque to outsiders and is revealed only to other young ‘insiders’. Acquiescing with the former, in a sense, provides young people with the space in which to construct a much more resistant version of their usage of digital media. © 2015 James Nicholas Publishers.