Flip the System Australia

What Matters in Education

Deborah M. Netolicky, Jon Andrews, Cameron Paterson, Deborah M. Netolicky, Jon Andrews, Cameron Paterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429770500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is a book by educators, for educators. It grapples with the complexities, the humanity and the possibilities in education. In a climate of competing accountabilities and measurement mechanisms; corporate solutions to education 'problems'; and narratives of 'failing' schools, 'underperforming' teachers and 'disengaged' students; this book asks 'What matters?' or 'What should matter?' in education.

Based in the unique Australian context, this book situates Australian education policy, research and practice within the international education narrative. It argues that professionals within schools should be supported, empowered and welcomed into policy discourse, not dictated to by top-down bureaucracy. It advocates for a flipping, flattening and democratising of the education system, in Australia and around the world.

Flip the System Australia: What matters in education brings together the voices of teachers, school leaders and scholars in order to offer diverse perspectives, important challenges and hopeful alternatives to the current education system.

Part I

Teacher identity, voice and autonomy

Turning the system inside out

The absence of teachers in policy formulation, on boards of professional bodies or at the helm of critical agendas suggests a lack of trust in those who work each day with students in classrooms. There are many who purport to speak for teachers, and plenty of contexts in which non-teachers are invited to speak on how to improve teaching. Education is debated, reprimanded or celebrated by those who speak from a distance, away from the day-to-day realities of teaching and working in schools. The exclusion of teachers from education discourse does little for the identity and agency of the profession in broader society, let alone for the individual. The unrecorded ordinary folk who prop up the system have such richness of experience and breadth of expertise; they have voices and their voices should be heard. While there are a few practitioners who achieve exposure of their views, writing and work through mass media, questions still remain about whether they represent and characterise the system at large and indeed the considerable variability of contexts across the vast education landscape.

This section of the book assembles contributions that strongly advocate for the presence of teacher voice and expertise within discourses and decisions, which directly affect the work and purpose of schools, as well as sculpting the identity and power of the profession in resisting forces that accentuate a deficit view of education. The power to transform education is within it, not outside it.

Deborah Netolicky draws on her doctoral research to suggest that in the ever-changing policy arena of education, true and sustained improvement can come from a system that recognises and includes the experience of teachers, and that collaborative dialogue and action is central to diffusing promising ideas and practices. She points to trust as central to building the profession, one that seeks to grow and understand teachers and teaching, as opposed to the often competitive, blame-ridden portrayal.

Anna Hogan and Bob Lingard explore the susceptibility of education to commercial interests and influence. They contend that this phenomenon has a long history and is becoming ever more pervasive. Drawing on evidence from a commissioned survey and analysis of teachers’ perceptions, they find that commercialisation generates teacher worries ranging from employment insecurity to wellbeing impact due to escalation of workload and detrimental impacts of student learning expectations. They call for urgent public debate and for a line to be drawn.

Gert Biesta explores who ‘owns’ education, including the roles of teachers, students and parents. He posits that policy and subsequent accountabilities have led to a transformation of the role of teacher, in which teachers are undermined by the language of learning which often defines their action, thus reinforcing a top-down logic. He contends that different generations of teachers find meaning and value in discourses of education that derive from different policy eras, resulting in varying professionalising and deprofessionalising experiences.

Cameron Malcher argues that market conditions and ever-contested funding structures have impacted the experience of teacher professional learning, resulting in the emergence of greater personal responsibility over the guidance or support of schools and systems. He suggests that a wide array of practice and research sharing methods have proliferated in Australia and served the profession well under difficult financial conditions and time constraints. Drawing on his own experience of podcasting, he illuminates the great potential it possesses to engage the profession in debate and empower teachers.

Benjamin Doxtdator challenges the risk management lens so often applied to students in schools. He takes aim at the mechanisms resulting from a risk lens such as ‘what works’, corporate, and technology ‘solutions’ that standardise education and disempower teachers. He argues for the consideration of the impact that these discourses, infrastructures and technologies have on education, and especially on those within the system who are most vulnerable.

1 Elevating the professional identities and voices of teachers and school leaders in educational research, practice and policymaking

Deborah M. Netolicky

‘The System’. It sounds mechanistic and Orwellian, which is to some extent what the education system, in Australia and around the world, has become. Australia, the national context of this book and this chapter, is influenced by the globalisation and economisation of education policy, and an emphasis on performative accountabilities (Lingard, Thompson, and Sellar 2016). School leaders navigate relentless and competing pressures from governments, policymakers, test administrators, boards, parents, communities, and the often unsupportive media. The worth of educators, and that of the schools in which they work, is constantly judged via league tables, external testing results, and visible data. Polarising media narratives seem intent on assigning blame or pitting stakeholders against one another, encouraging educators and scholars alike to bend to the will of the output-hungry machine. Education policies, which shape realities and experiences of schooling, use language to create a reality that privileges certain ideas while excluding others (Ball 2017). The ideas privileged include accountability, compliance, and numbers. Quantitative data are valued over the professionalism of teachers. Data and accountabilities become the ‘truths’ around which teachers and school leaders define themselves (Ball 2016). Teachers are disciplined within mechanisms of audit and accountability, impacting on the degree of professional autonomy they feel (Keddie 2017). Meanwhile, they do their best to serve their students and carve out time for what really matters: their students, their teaching, and the learning and relationships in their classrooms.

Yet when governments set education up around quotients, results, and league tables, “our worth, our humanity and our complexity are abridged” (Ball 2016, p. 1133). Educators’ identities are reduced to a limited and limiting range of options, defined by a system of machinic production, ruthless competition, and unceasing surveillance. When averages are sought, or large numbers of disparate studies amalgamated, the complexity of education and of classrooms can be overlooked (Snook et al. 2009). Schools and educators working in schools are pressured to comply, often at the expense of the humanness that sits at the heart of the system. National and school compliance cultures stifle teacher voice (Keddie 2017). The subjective voices and intricate identities of teachers and school leaders, not to mention students, are often absent, marginalised, or simplified in educational policymaking. Not only that, but when teachers and school leaders resist policies and performative measures, they risk being censured, marginalised, or ridiculed (Ball 2016). This chapter argues that it is vital that we eke out, listen to, and elevate, the voices of those on the ground in our schools. I deliberately include in this chapter those voices often at the nadir of the system: teachers who are frequently overlooked in school reform efforts (Hargreaves 1995, Cordingley and Buckler 2012), and middle leaders who are absent from much research around school leadership.

I write this chapter as a boundary-spanning teacher, school leader, and researcher, who has taught English and Literature in high schools for almost 20 years. I continue to teach in the classroom and now act within the realm of senior leadership. Currently, I lead professional learning, research, and pedagogy, in a Pre-Kindergarten to Year 12 Australian school. I am also a research adjunct at an Australian university and continue the research and academic writing that began with my PhD. In this chapter I share partly my own perspective, informed by lived experience as an educator and qualitative researcher. I also, importantly, share the perspectives and voices of the other 13 participants of my PhD study (Netolicky 2016a): two teachers, six middle leaders, and five executive leaders from one independent Australian school. It is through offering and lifting up these voices from the field—rather than those of the Minister’s office, the think tank, or the academe—that this chapter embodies system flipping. The chapter illuminates how the constantly shifting self-perceptions and self-constructions of teachers and school leaders are shaped, and in doing so shines a light on a less tangible, less measurable, messier, and more human side to teaching and leading schools.

Professional identity as a lens into education that resists performative drivers

Neoliberal and capitalist drivers in education have gone hand in hand with a global push to develop the ‘quality’ of teachers and teaching, and to hold teachers and schools to account over performance data through endless processes of quality assurance (Groundwater-Smith and Mockler 2009). Initiatives in Australia intended to measure achievement and drive improvement include NAPLAN (Annual National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy), the National Partnership for Improving Teacher Quality, talk of performance-based pay for teachers, and the AITSL (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) National Professional Standards for Teachers and Principals. Professional standards are one of the ways teachers and principals are governed, valuing decontextualised traits and behaviours that construct a particular version of ‘what works’ (Niesche and Thomson 2017). As with elsewhere in the world, policy and media narratives in Australia often focus on performative data without considering human elements such as emotion, identity, and experience. Niesche and Thomson (2017) argue that “school leadership has increasingly been robbed of its educative purpose and is now ruled by school effectiveness and improvement discourses” (p. 203). There are toxic side effects to neoliberal regimes of accountability, such as teaching to the test, inequity, unrealistic measures of improvement, closing down professional judgement, and stifling the capacity to innovate (Thomson 2009).

A focus on identity can be a useful lens through which to consider education, despite being a slippery concept (Lawler 2014) that lacks a clear definition (Mockler 2011). Schools are socially and culturally constructed worlds encompassing complex relations between elements such as participant, world, act, thought, knowledge, and meaning (Lave and Wenger 1991). Examining professional identity allows for the exploration of what it is that shapes educators’ development of professional identity, what shifts educator self-perceptions, and in what ways schools and systems might work with a greater understanding of educator identities when designing and implementing education reform. Beijaard, Meijer, and Verloop (2004) identified teacher professional identity as an emerging research area. Their review of literature suggests that interpreting the relationship between educators’ stories and their professional identities has a sound theoretical basis, and that the literature would benefit from further attention to the role of context, including looking at relevant others as well as teachers.

While some researchers support the notion that professional identities are fixed or formed early, much research demonstrates that identities are flexible, multiple, and continually shaped by contexts and relationships. Not only do identities shift, but they are multifaceted and situation-specific. That is, each person has a fluid and ever-changing set of identities; they call into action the identity appropriate to the situation in which they are currently functioning. This chapter aligns with theorists who conceptualise identities as pluralistic, multiple, overlapping, and intersecting constructions, operated by the individual and changing over time (Breen 2014, Holland et al. 1998, Lawler 2014, Robertson 2017). For my purpose here, identity is the ongoing sense-making process of contextually embedded perceived-selves-in-flux. Drawing on Holland et al.’s (1998) description of identities as “imaginings of self in worlds of action” (p. 5), identity is the socioculturally entrenched way that we make sense of ourselves, to ourselves.

Little is understood about the ways in which teacher identity interacts with reform mandates to affect teachers’ experiences of professional vulnerability (Lasky 2005). The body of scholarship on teacher professional identity is also limited to primarily traditional routes to becoming a teacher and traditional classroom experiences, leaving out those involved in alternative routes such as fast-track teacher training (Thomas and Mockler 2018). There is also limited research into the ways in which professional learning interacts with professional identities. The body of literature on educator identity is often focused on the pre-service or early career teacher, sometimes on the principal, and rarely on the middle leader or mid-career teacher. Stories of identity are a lens through which to view how people grow, change, and develop their ways of being in, and interacting with, their worlds. Paramount to understanding the importance of teacher and school leader identities is the way that experiences are described and constructed. Rich stories that reveal educators’ senses of professional identity and perceptions of their own living, learning, teaching, and growth, add a new dimension to current data that drive education reforms such as teacher quality initiatives, professional standards for teachers, and performance pay schemes. Sharing of teachers’ and school leaders’ stories facilitates education interventions more readily integrated with educators’ identities and practices than initiatives driven primarily by the strategic aims of schools or systems, and analyses of student data.

Questions about professional identity emerge. In what contexts are professional selves fluid or fixed? How and when is professional identity shaped and in what ways does it interact with educators’ learning and experiences across their work and lives? What internal and external factors might facilitate either malleability of identity or resistance to identity change? The area of contextually based educator identity, in combination with lived experiences of professional learning and school reform, is a valuable one ripe for further exploration. Examining educators’ identity transformations as a result of school-based professional learning and participation can illuminate how identities and practices might be shaped.

Professional identities in one Australian school

This chapter looks to my PhD participants to describe their lived experiences of their contextually embedded perceived-selves-in-flux, accepting Mockler’s (2011) argument that the storied nature of identity lends itself to description, rather than definition. In this chapter I share data from my PhD study for which the research site was an Australian, non-selective, independent, Pre-Kindergarten to Year 12 school, with about 1500 students from metropolitan, rural, and international backgrounds. My PhD study was situated within a social constructionist paradigm. Interviews and storying were qualitative methodologies used to illicit multi-voiced descriptions of the lived experiences of teachers and school leaders. It assumed that identities are en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Introduction: What matters in education?
• PART I: Teacher identity, voice and autonomy: turning the system inside out
• PART II: Collaborative expertise: reprofessionalising the system
• PART III: Social justice: democratising the system
• PART IV: Professional learning for a flipped system
• PART V: Leadership for a flipped system
• List of contributors
• Index