Changing Schools

Alternative Ways to Make a World of Difference

Terry Wrigley, Pat Thomson, Robert Lingard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136734519
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Changing Schools places educational and social aims at the centre of a discussion of educational change. It draws on forteen case studies to explore school change which is oriented towards social justice and democracy.

In an age of global mobility, economic polarization and unprecedented environmental and cultural challenges, the education of all children and young people to higher levels has become a key issue of international policy. Educational reform in such a context requires a serious rethinking and reworking of school and classroom practices. Social justice is integral to the challenge of raising standards, since this requires removing the ongoing influence of poverty on school success.

This thoughtful book presents new thinking and practice for bringing about school change, drawn from diverse contexts around the world. It distils and compares the experiences and theories-in-action of engaged teachers, school principals and academics. It seeks to challenge the dominance that human capital theories of school improvement currently hold on policy making. The authors draw on contemporary innovations in practice and theory and also long-standing traditions of alternative thinking and practice. Linking together and articulating other ways of conceiving of and implementing school change, the collection bases its findings on values of equality and global citizenship. It shows how schools can work to make different languages, knowledge, narratives, and truths integral to the mainstream curriculum, everyday pedagogy, assessment and general culture of the school.

Changing Schools is directed at all who are concerned with progressive school change and the promotion of democratic citizenship and social justice. It will prove an invaluable source of inspiration for all involved in schools, including teachers, head teachers, policy makers, and those currently studying for school leadership positions.

Chapter 1

Reimagining school change

The necessity and reasons for hope

Pat Thomson, Bob Lingard and Terry Wrigley

Introduction

Changing schools. This phrase can be read in two ways. The first is a description of schools being in a continual state of flux driven by social, cultural and economic shifts, and policy agendas. We are using it in a second and more positive sense to talk about changing schools for educative, democratic and socially just purposes. Of course, talking about changing schools immediately raises issues about who is driving change, for what ends, and in whose interests. And today, the idea of change inevitably draws our attention to the increasingly global contexts in which schools are located and the ways in which a range of technologies mediate who knows what and who is able to know about what.

Our collective research and experience strongly suggest that one of the key attributes of schools that change in educative ways is that, more or less explicitly, they work with deep funds of professional knowledge and theory. They mobilise and extend intellectual resources well beyond what is available in much current policy. They are not eclectic in their approach but are focused, pulling together a coherent mix of philosophies, commitments, practices, material resources and people. Together, these position their activities, events, programmes, stories and rewards and allow them to do what is required – and much more besides.

The purpose of this book is to make such intellectual resources and practices more broadly available. We offer these not as technical solutions but rather as contributions to the development of a more generous and generative imaginary of schools and what they can do. In doing so, we also hope to contribute to an alternative lexicon of change useful for teachers in their reflection and dialogue about the practices and purposes of their everyday work in classrooms and schools. We aim to provide some intellectual resources for continued hope, in a spirit of ‘non-stupid optimism’, as our colleague Erica McWilliam (2005) often puts it.

We worry that, as an institution, mass schooling still bears too many of the residues of its origins in an industrial age. This can be seen in

• the design of school buildings – where some classrooms still have raised platforms for teachers; the majority of schools are designed on the basis of one teacher–one class and, in secondary schools, where one child per desk remains the norm;

• curriculum assumptions – that knowledge emanates from the teacher and textbooks, that it comes in discrete units called subjects, and that children acquire it in an ordered, linear and timetabled fashion;

• the way that knowledge itself is conceived – namely, as a thing that can simply be transferred or delivered from the one who knows to the ignorant.

The weight of international research clearly shows that knowledge is a social construction, which is built collectively in often unpredictable interactions among teachers, children and young people, texts, family members, media and objects, and through events and experiences. It is ironic that, even though teachers understand that children learn in multiple ways and at different rates, the curriculum is built on the assumption of linear transmission, and official policy in some countries says the only way to deal with these differences is by tracking and setting. Teachers also recognise that, with the digitised world that young people live in, they have multiple sources of knowledge and modes of expertise, often unrecognised by the official curriculum. It is increasingly difficult to maintain the view that schools are enclosures cut off not only from their local community but also from the wider world. How this affects the role of teaching and the policies and practices of schools is debated too infrequently (Crook et al. 2010; Lankshear et al. 1997).

Too often, we believe, schools underestimate children and young people and focus, as Gonzales, Moll and Amanti (2005) suggest, on what children cannot do rather than what they can. This is because children are seen as empty vessels and not already possessed of knowledge, experiences, interests, concerns, languages, skills, competences and values. The educational challenge is how to construct a common set of learnings that respectfully accommodate the myriad cultural experiences of most student populations today. Unfortunately, this goal comes starkly up against the standardising imperatives of contemporary policy and accountability frameworks. This denial of difference is evident both in traditional forms of summative assessment, such as essay-driven examinations, and in contemporary forms of high-stakes testing. Designing curriculum as small measurable bites frames students as homogenous units, resulting in a pedagogy of the same, rather than pedagogies of and for difference (Lingard 2007).

The logical conclusion to these concerns is not a blind opposition to educational accountability but rather a recognition that we need richer and more intelligent genres. One of the hallmarks of an alternative accountability approach would be respect for teachers’ professional judgement and a demand for sophisticated assessment literacy in all teachers – and also in education systems, with accountability working in multiple directions. Further, such accountability would work with communities and respect their funds of knowledge and aspirations for schools.

Whose change, whose schools?

Teaching is often seen as a craft-based occupation that some people are innately positioned to undertake rather than as a research-informed and research-informing profession (Lingard and Renshaw 2009). In some locations, it is almost impossible to suggest that teachers are knowledgeable and are capable of building a professional knowledge base. Because of the lack of trust in the profession – an attitude endemic in much contemporary policy even if denied by policy makers – it is assumed that directions for change need to come from elsewhere and be teacher-proof.

It seems to us that, with some notable exceptions, much international reform policy, as it floats between nation states in deeply de-contextualised ways, misrecognises specificity and professional expertise and therefore fails to deliver what it promises. In addition, the orthodox school reform literatures – often because of their narrow research base – have easily been co-opted into technical recipes for change (Thrupp and Wilmott 2003). Despite paying lip service to context, in reality much of this work overstates what it is that schools can achieve. When it does take account of social and economic context, it generally focuses on health and welfare needs alone, rather than acknowledging local cultural assets and strengths. There is also a widespread failure to acknowledge the need to redress wider structural inequalities. Though much of this school reform literature has either overlooked context or dealt with it in a narrow way, some earlier sociology of education emphatically denied all possibility of schools and school systems confronting inequality and underachievement. We disagree with both these positions: though there is irrefutable evidence that structural inequalities are reproduced from generation to generation, partly through schooling, there is also evidence that schools can make a significant difference. Just because schools can't do everything doesn't mean that they cannot achieve something; schools can make a difference but not all the difference.

We start from an understanding that individual schools and their communities can and do change for educative, democratic and socially just purposes. Such schools

• understand that though some communities have acute needs and troubling problems, they also have valuable assets in the form of histories, expertise, experience and networks;

• see differences as valuable resources, not only as bridges to the mandated curriculum but as valuable knowledges in and of themselves;

• see their school community as a polis, with citizenship rights for students, parents, community members and teachers;

• are committed to developing, extending and challenging students, refusing to accept that they are incapable of achieving the highest levels of learning;

• understand that the production and reproduction of privilege are complex processes that require clear thinking and considerable effort to redress;

• intervene in formal curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices to allow students to demonstrate what they have learned;

• produce detailed interrogation of school structures, cultures and default settings;

• work within the mandated frameworks when and as they must but also seek to do much more;

• reflect upon, debate, and have dialogue about what they do, why they do what they do, and its individual and collective effects.

Such schools work within and against the grain of policy simultaneously. They do not simply acquiesce, unquestioningly adapt, or mutinously rebel. They strategically work out how to ‘feed the bureaucracy’ (Haberman 1999) while also doing what they as a school collectively have agreed is right and worthwhile. These schools take up and create opportunities to work together to oppose and change uneducative, regressive policies. Research, theory and professional experience are intellectual resources used by such schools to challenge these policies and also to justify and protect their own policies and practices. The focus of such schools is on learning – learning for teachers and community and for young people. It is also on serving rather than the provision of services. These schools enact education as a public good.

We are interested in how the intellectual resources – or the know-what and know-how – that are organically developed in these schools might be able to have a positive influence across broader systemic and policy settings: what some policy makers and policy commentators call ‘capacity building’ and ‘scaling up’. The processes of making meaning and changing professional practice are more complex than are allowed for in such terms, which seem to imply that it is possible to locate two or three key ‘levers’ or ‘recipes’ through which change can be rolled out. Educational change involves negotiating a tangle of taken-for-granted ideas, practices, identities, histories and deeply held ‘truths’. Bringing about change in systems that have evolved over long periods of time, and in which there are powerful vested interests committed to the status quo, is not an easy matter but requires hard intellectual and emotional work against the odds and, often, prevailing policy trends.

There are undeniably policy makers who simply wish to borrow or transfer what apparently ‘works’ in specific schools and ‘roll it out’ to every school, even across national educational systems. We reject this kind of one-best-blueprint approach, delivered top-down via websites, glossy publications and high-priced consultants. In rejecting this approach, we acknowledge the specificity, or this-ness, of each and every school (Thomson 2002) but also see the absolute necessity for systemic reform and policy learning. This would be systemic reform of a vastly different kind. Such a school system would work top-down, bottom-up and inside-outside. Most often in contemporary schooling systems, policies are developed at the top and ushered into schools, which are expected to simply implement them. Opposition to this often takes the form of arguing the reverse: that all policy should come from the grass roots of schools and communities – the bottom-up approach. By contrast, we see that both of these directions are essential and mutually informing: that is, we take a view that policy and the change it produces should be both top-down and bottom-up. Similarly, in opposing externally imposed change, some people want to argue that all developments should be entirely internally designed by a stand-alone school, perhaps in concert with a handful of like-minded others. We believe that external ideas can be helpful to a school, raise challenges, and provide new perspectives. Furthermore, localism cannot provide the kinds of common learnings to which all children and young people can lay claim as an entitlement of citizenship – and as an international human right. Finally, a commitment to equity and social justice demands that there be a system with a centralised capacity to redistribute the necessary resources to ensure that all young people have access to high-quality schooling and associated life chances.

The schooling system we envisage would be characterised by reciprocal relationships and richer mutual forms of accountability, where the giving of account works in multiple directions simultaneously. A significant step in this direction would be the development of ‘opportunity-to-learn’ standards where systems are held to account for what they provide to schools to ensure more equitable outcomes (Darling Hammond 2010). Another step would be to immediately remove draconian, punishment-driven regimes of naming, shaming, blaming, sacking and closing. No person or institution can undertake sustainable and productive change under threat. The accountability system we envisage would work with and enable schools to pursue a broad array of social, cultural and educative purposes, purposes well beyond those implicit in many contemporary accountability regimes that reduce educational accountability to test results. Such an approach would uncouple the relationship between the kinds of information needed by school systems to determine equity and develop capacity, and the sorts of formative and summative assessment that students require to learn. In our view, the current conflation of these is educationally destructive and often denies students the systematic feedback they need in order to make genuine progress.

In times when fragmentation (of institutions, communities and individuals) seems to be the order of the day, we are concerned with how the very idea of a schooling system might be rethought. At a broad level, such rethinking requires debating what kinds of nation states we want and, therefore, what kinds of education systems are not only desirable but possible.

Our wider concern is that nations should recognise difference and redistribute public ‘wealth’ and resources in ways that are fair. We want states that are democratically governed not by spin-dominated elites but by informed citizens who can respect and trust bureaucracies and professions, at the same time as they are respected and trusted by them. This demands a vibrant civic society and a vibrant state, and places demands on schooling to produce generations of educated local-global citizens.

Our conception of desirable educational change sits in stark contrast with the model of change that has dominated in the last 20 years, particularly in the most powerful Anglophone countries. This model of change has also been promoted by many international organisations and has steered change discourses in many countries across the globe. The model is directed toward greater efficiency of designated outputs through top-down, centralised change, and it requires comparability of student and school performance measured through international and national tests. This approach does generate data to judge whether schools and systems are equitable in terms of gender, ethnicity, or class (or something approximating it) and how much headway they are making to redress historical patterns of inequitable outcomes. Conversely, the system itself (re)produces the patterns it proposes to measure in part through the use of measures that conflate the needs of systems and schools, and also by using the data to produce competitive markets of school choice.

Tests focusing on limited aspects of basic literacy and numeracy have led to a narrowing of curriculum. Where testing becomes high-stakes, the requirement to meet targets can result in cheating at all levels, from selecting potentially high-achieving students, removing those who fail to produce the desired results, conducting educational triage on those who might fall just below the desired ‘line’, intensive teaching and leading to the test, substituting easier qualifications and curricula, and even to official bodies lowering pass marks and grade criteria. The fear of failure, experienced by students, teachers, and schools and school systems alike, leads to a pedagogical impoverishment where anxious teachers shift toward transmission pedagogies tightly orientated toward test items. These are the pedagogies of under-attainmen...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Changing Schools
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acnowledgements
• 1 Reimagining school change: the necessity and reasons for hope
• 2 Making a difference through philosophy: Australia
• 3 Development processes in a laboratory school: Germany
• 4 Curriculum development and thematic learning: Norway
• 5 Educating in the margins, lessons for the mainstream: Australia
• 6 Reflections of an Aboriginal school principal on leading change in an Aboriginal school: Australia
• 7 Pedagogy of the landless: Brazil
• 8 The promise of place- and community-based education: United States
• 9 Approaching school change through ‘learning lives’: Norway
• 10 Storythread pedagogy for environmental education: Australia
• 11 Creative learning in an inner-city primary school: England
• 12 Talking honestly in a challenging primary school: England
• 13 Weaving the web of professional practice: Australia
• 14 A fair go for students in poverty: Australia
• 15 Using critical mathematics to understand the conditions of our lives: United States
• 16 Resources for changing schools: ideas in and for practice
• Index