Session Information
19 SES 10, Policy and Education
Paper Session
Time:
2009-09-30
14:45-16:15
Room:
JUR, HS 17
Chair:
Dennis Beach
Contribution
A research project financed by the Swedish Research Council Humanities and Social Sciences Section called the Creativity and Performativity in Teaching and Learning (CPTL) project examined aspects of interactivity between competing sides two new policy agendas, interrogated the discourses of creativity and performativity in education through critical ethnography and critical discourse analysis, and identified and analysed the practical agency that is developing amongst teachers and pupils in education today (Jeffrey, 2006: Ed). Four schools were involved in the project and a number of issues were identified. The present article is part of this project. It describes elements of tension between the competing policy components in the development and execution of student agency. It focuses on the main kinds of agency described by highly successful pupils.
Two prior research projects informed the development of the CPTL-project. The first was an ethnographic investigation carried out in a Swedish upper-secondary school around the practical consequences of the 1994 Curriculum Reform Act. This project included interviews with teachers and students on strategies, experiences and ideas about how to work within a context where schooling is described in terms of self-determination and freedom of choice within regimes of performance control and assessment. What was often promoted was the value of competition where both producers and consumers of education were encouraged by the rewards and sanctions of a competitive education to develop a cult of selfishness (also Beach & Dovemark, 2009).
The present article is interested in this cult of selfishness in education, its roots, elements and moments, how it is practiced and what its effects are. It is based on research conducted in two secondary schools and two upper-secondary schools and focuses in particular on the formal classroom behaviour and comments on this behaviour amongst the most successful pupils in these schools. The aim has been to show how educational policies can be conceptualized and constituted in depth in practice and to say something meaningful about the nature of educational processes and outcomes in real situations in interactions between teachers and pupils and between pupils and the learning they encounter. A major intention has been to challenge narrower research and offer pedagogical insights and didactic clues relating to the transfer of successful approaches to creativity in different school environments.
Method
The research has used ethnography as a bottom up grounded approach that first locates empirical cases according to specified criteria and then employs fieldwork and theoretical analysis to portray and explain them (Troman et al, 2006). In this way living educational situations have been examined in detail, and intentions and strategies with regard to creativity and personalisation have been studied through observation, conversation, reflection and conscious experimentation in order to produce ‘thick description’ from long term qualitative enquiry. A discourse analytical component has been used together with the ethnographic component to develop to an investigation of learning as an element of the current circuits of education culture (i.e. education production, regulation, consumption, identity and representation).
Expected Outcomes
There are a number of things of interest concerning pupil agency. One of these concerns different but sometimes complimentary aims between pupil groups and their teachers, which have also promoted different commitments to work agentically. Moreover, the learners researched here have also recognised and used different structural, institutional, interactional, economic and cultural resources (or in Bourdieu’s terms different forms of capital) in the realisations of their aims and (thus) the development and execution of their agency. Different gauges have also been used by teachers to measure pupil success from. No significant gender distinctions have been noted in the research.
References
Beach, D & Dovemark, M. (2009: in press). Making Right Choices: An Ethnographic Investigation of Creativity and Performativity in Four Swedish Schools, Oxford Review of Education, 34: pp xx. Jeffrey, B (2006: Ed). Creative Learning Practices: European Experiences. London: Tufnell. Troman, G., Jeffrey, B. & Beach, D. (2006). Researching Education Policy: Ethnographic Experiences. London, Tufnell Press.
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