Forms and Understandings of Engagement in a Co-operative School Setting: The Process of Becoming Relational

Author(s):

Deborah Ralls(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

14 SES 03 B, Family Education, Engagement and Participation to Transform Education

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-23

17:15-18:45

Room:

OB-Theatre B

Chair:

Joana Lúcio

Contribution

Almost one hundred years after John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916)academics and practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic continue to search for ways in which a participatory democracy in education can be enacted. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a case study on stakeholder (student, parent and community) engagement in a new type of state (public) school in England, a co-operative school. This study surfaces both the potential and the challenges that lie ahead in engaging more democratically with school stakeholders in the process of becoming relational; engagement as doing with rather than doing to.

Key words: Forms and Understandings of Engagement, Relational Approach, Co-operative Values.

Introduction

The rapid growth of co-operative schools in England has been way beyond expectation; from the first co-operative school in 2008 to over 800 schools in January 2015, the development is such that it has been described as a quiet revolution (Thorpe, 2013). The co-operative schools model has been borne out of a capitalist command economy (Monbiot, 2013) that has resulted in English Education policy reforms which have led to the marketisation of state education; a contemporary English educational landscape that houses an unprecedented assortment of alternatives marketed through the rhetoric of freedom and choice.

Against this background, co-operative schools have emerged; state schools with an ethos based on the globally shared co-operative values of self-help; self-responsibility; democracy; equality; equity and solidarity. Parents and carers, staff, students and the local community have direct engagement in the governance of the school through membership, making each co-operative school a community-based mutual organization. This paper illuminates forms and understandings of engagement that offer potential for Dewey’s (2016) vision of education through processes of democratic governance and collective responsibility and encourages debate and discussion on the extent to which a co-operative policy-discourse mediates change in positionality towards more equitable and relational practices in schools.

Purpose and Perspective

In seeking alternatives to professionally-driven approaches to school engagement policy and practice this paper draws upon the concept of a relational approach to engagement as espoused by Warren et al (2009). Following Warren (2009), a relational approach is defined as a school and its stakeholders getting things done collectively, starting from the point of their “shared interest in advancing the education and well-being of children” (Warren et al, 2009, p.2213).

Rather than applying this concept to one specific area of engagement (student, parent or community), this paper further develops the work of Warren (2009) by adopting Epstein’s (2001) notion of overlapping spheres of influence to focus the study. Framing the concept of engagement in this way challenges the tendency of research to treat student, parent and community engagement as totally separate entities and foregrounds the importance of recognising that stakeholder groups are interrelated and membership can overlap.

This study answers four research questions, the first two of which focused on how a school and its stakeholders approached, connected and developed forms and understandings of engagement. The third and fourth questions sought to uncover possible explanations for a more-or-less (Putnam, 2000) relational approach to engagement by exploring links between factors such as current school practices and external policy constraints and the forms and understandings of engagement that emerged during the study:

What forms of engagement does the school currently seek with its stakeholder groups and vice versa?
What understandings of engagement does this suggest?
To what extent are these forms and understandings of engagement moving closer to/further from a relational approach?
What are the factors that are influencing these movements?

Method

Methodology The decision to adopt a case study approach for this research project was informed by the research questions, which sought to explore ‘how’ and ‘why’ the phenomenon of engagement operated in its real life context (Yin, 2013) - the school. The study required a critical ‘most likely’ case study of best-case instances where a school was actively seeking to establish a relational approach to engagement with students, parents, and community members. Based on this requirement, I chose to locate the case study in a co-operative school. Data collection took place in negotiation with the school over a ten-month period from September 2014 to July 2015, with three data generation points; one in the autumn term, one in the spring term and one in the summer term. The main aim was to understand how development of and commitment to stakeholder engagement was happening in practice, by exploring approaches to and perceptions of engagement in a co-operative school setting from the perspectives of both the school as an institution and its stakeholders: the students, their parents and the wider community. The research was structured to begin with the school perspective, by interviewing key staff with roles and responsibilities linked to engagement. During the interview process staff were asked for their views on best-case examples of engagement as doing with rather than doing to. Documentary evidence such as leaflets, publicity material and the school website was used in order to better understand the focus of the nominated activities. Staff’s suggestions of best case activities of engagement as doing with were then used to observe engagement in action (the reality of the activity) so as to compare what was observed with the accounts given in the interview data and documentary evidence. Later stages of the research process involved eliciting participants’ views through separate stakeholder focus groups, the final part of the jigsaw in the attempt to assess the extent to which the nominated activities were doing with rather than doing to. The work of Michael Fielding, although traditionally associated with student voice, proved helpful in making sense of the stakeholder interactions that occurred and the type of engagement that this would perhaps suggest. Fielding’s (2001) framework for evaluating the conditions of student voice was adapted for use when observing activities, so as to better assess whether the forms of stakeholder engagement that were occurring were more-or-less relational.

Expected Outcomes

Results and Conclusion Analysis yielded several key findings for research into participatory democracy in education. The first finding relates to co-operative school governance and its potential for more democratic, relational forms of engagement. The re-launch of a democratically elected Student Council has resulted in a far broader range of engagement of young people from different backgrounds in increased levels of school decision-making. School leaders have questioned previous perceptions of student engagement as a result of the shift in power dynamic that has occurred. This raises the need for further research into the co-operative governance structure (the form of engagement), and its potential to influence understandings of student engagement in practice. Another finding is that forms and understandings of engagement differ according to the stakeholder group concerned. In spite of the co-operative governance structure, the school views community members, students and parents as separate entities to be engaged with for different purposes and in different ways. Organisational structures reflect these forms and understandings of engagement; staff roles and responsibilities are linked to specific engagement practice with three distinct stakeholder groups: student, parent and community. Opportunities for engagement as doing with are therefore restricted and fail to acknowledge the more complex overlapping day-to-day relationships between and amongst students, parents and the community. Finally, this study finds that students and staff are viewed as ‘the school’ and demonstrate greater accord in their understandings of engagement. However, with parents and community members, viewed as outsiders, tensions emerge as stakeholders and staff feel that one is attempting to impose their views (or do to) the other. This paper illuminates the difficulty in doing with stakeholders when Education policy seeks to do to schools and the dilemmas faced when attempting to develop a more relational understanding of engagement in a policy landscape of doing to.

References

Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: The Free Press, Collier-Macmillan, 1966 Dyson, A. and Kerr, K. (2013) Reviewing the field of school-community relations: Conceptualisations in the literature on school-community relations in disadvantaged areas. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, Vancouver, 13 April 2013 Epstein, J. L. (2001) School, family, and community partnerships: Preparing educators and improving schools. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ferlazzo, L. (2011) Involvement or engagement? Educational Leadership, 68(8), 10-14. Fielding, M. (2001) 'Students as radical agents of change' Journal of Educational Change, vol 2, no. 2, pp. 123-141 Glassman, M. and Patton, R. (2014) Capability Through Participatory Democracy: Sen, Freire, and Dewey. Educational Philosophy and Theory 46.12 (2014): 1353-1365. Monbiot, G. (2013) 'A Capitalist Command Economy'. The Guardian 2013. Web. 15 July 2015 Putnam, R.D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster Thorpe, J. (2013). Co-operative schools: A quiet revolution. Journal of Co-operative Studies, 46(2), 6–9. Warren et al. (2009) Beyond the Bake Sale: A community-based relational approach to parent engagement in schools. Teachers College Record 111(9), pp.2209-2254 Yin, R. K. (2013) Case study research: Design and methods. 5th Edition. London: Sage Publications Ltd

Author Information

Deborah Ralls (presenting / submitting)

University of Manchester

Institute of Education

Manchester

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