Crossing Glances: Teachers’ and Students Voices about School Rankings, within Transnational Educational Context

Author(s):

Eunice MacedoHelena C. Araújo

Conference:

ECER 2009

Network:

11. Educational Effectiveness and Quality Assurance

Format:

Paper

Session Information

11 SES 09 C, Teachers' and Students' Views and Perceptions of Educational Quality Assurance

Paper Session

Time:

2009-09-30

10:30-12:00

Room:

HG, HS 48

Chair:

Antonio Medina

Contribution

Meanings built by young people and teachers about Secondary Schools Rankings are questioned in this work. Rankings are understood as an imperfect way of schools’ setting up that does not capture the complexity of its core events and phenomena. Rankings are debated as symbol of the educational current system, while questioning its usefulness (or lack of) and (in)adaptation to an understanding of schools’ reality nowadays. Rankings are understood within the educational system evaluative framework in accordance with the accountability obligation rendered by the State to more global power. The existence of a new educational order, within a context of educational transnational regulation is assumed, while considering tensions that seem to arouse between globally structured educational agenda, whose lead role is played at supranational level and State’s decision power. States’ seem to be issued the mediation role between transnational regulation, which stands on the principles of comparability, competitiveness, mobility, and the ideals of a democratic school that comprises individual and group differences, understood in its potential for human development and citizenship enlargement. In face of efficiency and quality guarantee worries, which are patent in soft law regulative educational politics, at the European level, and that are imported to public politics of education in Portugal, as hard law, how to reconcile the guarantee and reinforcement of “school for all” at secondary school level, the expectancies of academic excellence shaped under middle class views and the qualifications demands towards the access to high education and the work market, in this European framework? Voices are heard and discussed within a theoretical-epistemological approach which assumes the centrality of voice, language and identity as citizenship mighty way of legitimacy. Voices potential to build, report and interpret the social order and to produce knowledge about is assumed. There is an attempt to capture school views from within, expressed by its actors produced voices, seen as privileged informants about their reality. This approach is a branch of the Educational Sciences PhD larger worries, in which one tries to understand young peoples’ emergent voices, in an educative context symbolized by the rankings. The appeal to teachers’ voices about the rankings seems to make sense in this context as they do some kind of mediation between the educational system meanings and objectives and the young people who inhabit it. In this sense, it is understood that they’ll allow for catching (in)visible messages that (in)form the young life, in school context.

Method

We take the methodological qualitative approach standing point, supported in departing questions and not in hypotheses. We develop a located research pregnant of implication and subjectivity (that must be dealt with). Young narratives are captured through 5 Focus Group Discussion sessions. This contextual method is used because it allows for more deep data, which emerges in less formal context of larger horizontality. Uttered speeches generate others, within self assuring interaction, which tends towards the construction of extended thought. The possibility of discursive management by participants also fits quiet well in the principles of young citizenship enlargement that we take as starting point. Teachers’ narratives result from an exploratory questionnaire with open questions, applied to 25 Secondary School teachers that have different levels of responsibility in schools management/leadership. These speakers were selected because their teaching level is more directly connected with rankings. Answers were subjected to content analysis and categorization.

Expected Outcomes

We take a sociological standing point that does not merely try to capture and interpret reality but assumes the explicit objectives to attempt to intervene in social change, as well. In this sense, it is understood that the effort to interconnect schools’ emergent voices and glances with the principles that lead education at global and national level, potentiates an understanding of the needed and possible changes. While questioning rankings, one tries to give a contribution towards the construction of more adequate evaluative ways, which catch the complexity of the educative phenomena, potentiating better articulation between the school world and the larger social world where it is enclosed, the world of the market and high education, in particular. Hearing the voices, we intend to emphasise young persons’ participatory potential, while giving our input towards their citizenship enlargement.

References

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Author Information

Eunice Macedo

CIIE.FPCEUP

Porto

174

Helena C. Araújo

University of Porto/CIIE/FPCE/ PORTUGAL

Education Department