Examining the Discourses of Experienced Educators in the Migrant Education Program: Care or Audit?

Author(s):

Robyn Henderson(presenting / submitting)Judith Gouwens(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

14 SES 08 A, International Perspectives on Immigrant Students, Families and Communities

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-24

09:00-10:30

Room:

K3.21

Chair:

Tim Jay

Contribution

In today’s world, education is dominated by agendas for constant change and improvement, often drawing on high stakes testing regimes and assessment measures that seem selective and narrow. Assessment programs like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), highlight measures that compare and rank at various levels—nations, states, schools. In conjunction with such measures, schools and education systems are encouraged—indeed, they are often pushed—to take up the change and improvement agenda, often with expectations that improvements will occur rapidly. This view is evident on the OECD’s website (Oganisation for Economic Co-operation & Development, 2015), for example, where it is announced that ‘all countries/economies can raise their game – and relatively quickly’ (p. 1).

With the take-up of notions of constant improvement, discourses of data and accountability have been seen to dominate school learning agendas (Cormack & Comber, 2013). Such discourses can result in narratives of blame, whereby teachers are blamed for low standards and students are ‘labelled, grouped and taught; in relation to the deficits the tests reveal’ (Cormack & Comber, 2013, p. 87). Not only has the pressure of constant change impacted on teachers, but some research has reported the impact on students. Howell (2016), for example, described the effects of Australia’s National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy on students’ well-being, citing isolation and emotional responses as negative effects experienced by students.

Teaching has long-term recognition as a caring profession (Goldstein & Freedman, 2003; Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006). According to many researchers (e.g., Falkenberg, 2010; Noddings, 2005; Vogt, 2002), teaching is a moral enterprise that incorporates an ethic of care. As Lynch and Lyons (2009) pointed out, a ‘strong care dimension of teaching’ is ‘central to education … primarily as a process that enables learning’ (p. 58). This echoes Connell’s (2013) description of education as involving an ‘encounter between persons, and that encounter involves care’ (p. 104). However, with the current language of education highlighting ‘regulatory and measurement-oriented performance cultures’ (Mockler, 2013, p. 38), it seems timely to investigate the place of discourses of care in a context dominated by discourses of data, audit and accountability.

As a result, the research project that is reported here is based on our question as to what discourses are evident in the talk of experienced educators about their work with students. We have chosen to examine the discourses evident in the talk of educators from the Migrant Education Program in the USA. This program has a strong academic focus—‘to improve the educational opportunities and academic success of migrant children, youth, agricultural workers, fishers, and their families’—and it aims to ensure that migrant students ‘receive full and appropriate opportunities to meet the same challenging state academic content and student academic achievement standards that all children are expected to meet’ (US Department of Education, 2016). In moving from rural location to rural location, and across state and sometimes national borders, these particular students are often marginalized within the context of ‘regular’ schooling. The Migrant Education Program, therefore, is grounded in equity and access aims, to ‘ensure that migratory children who move among the states are not penalized in any manner by disparities among states in curriculum, graduation requirements, or state academic content and student academic achievement standards’ (US Department of Education, 2016).

The research project investigated the following research questions:

What discourses are evident in the talk of experienced and successful educators in the Migrant Education Program?
What do these discourses suggest about the role of care in relation to the current educational focus on data, audit and accountability?

Method

Data were collected from semi-structured interviews (Barbour & Schostak, 2005) with six educators from the Migrant Education Program in the US states of Illinois and Wisconsin. Although this was a small data set, all of the educators had worked for a long period of time in the Migrant Education Program and often engaged in summer programs that operated during time that is traditionally holiday time for teachers. The purpose of the interviews was to obtain detailed information from this group of educators. Each interview was between 60 and 90 minutes in length. The participants were asked about their current role in the Migrant Education Program, how they became involved, and what keeps them in the program. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Although the number of participants was small, the amount of transcribed interview data was quite large. Therefore, an initial analysis of the data will identify what Bamberg and others have referred to as ‘small stories’ (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008). In doing this, we recognize that the participants used narratives as a way of explaining their experiences and thereby helped to draw ‘attention to the social and cultural dynamics through which individuals construct themselves as social actors’ (Maynes, Pierce, & Laslett, 2008, p. 2). From these stories, we will then use Fairclough’s (2001) context-interaction-context model to consider the linguistic evidence of discourses in the data, as well as the links to the social and cultural contexts, to offer insights into the education contexts within which the educators were working. Maxwell’s (2009) notion of ‘connecting’ will facilitate the connections and relationships amongst the data. The data analysis will thus explore and map the discourses that are used by the educators, to consider the discourses of care, data, audit and accountability and the relationship/s amongst these and the educators’ work in the Migrant Education Program.

Expected Outcomes

The presentation will explore the types of discourses that were evident in the semi-structured interview data. This will include the analysis and map of the discourses used by the educators and will indicate how they took up, or did not take up, the discourses of interest to the research. In particular, the discourses of care will be considered in relation to the other discourses that are found. The discussion of the findings will include a consideration of how the discourses were used in the educators’ talk and the perceived links to learning in schools. It will also address the implications for education more broadly. While it is recognized that the study had limitations, namely in relation to the small number of participants and the research being located within a particular context, we argue that there is a need to rethink the dominant discourses that are manifesting in education in Europe, the USA and Australia. Although there are differences across the globe in how the discourses of accountability play out, this happens ‘whilst sharing a common logic and producing similar effects’ (Lingard, Thompson, & Sellar, 2016, p. 2).

References

Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity? Text and Talk, 28, 377-396. Barbour, R. S., & Schostak, J. (2005). Interviewing and focus groups. In B. Somekh & C. Lewin (Eds.), Research methods in the social sciences (pp. 41-48). London: Sage. Connell, R. (2013). The neoliberal cascade and education: An essay on the market agenda and its consequences. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 99-112. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2013.776990 Cormack, P., & Comber, B. (2013). High-stakes literacy tests and local effects in a rural school. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 36(2), 78-89. Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power (2nd ed.). London: Longman. Falkenberg, T. (2010). Framing an integrative approach to the education and development of teachers in Canada. McGill Journal of Education, 45(3), 555-577. Goldstein, L. S., & Freedman, D. (2003). Challenges enacting caring teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 54, 441-454. Howell, A. (2016). Exploring children's lived experiences of NAPLAN. In B. Lingard, G. Thompson & S. Sellar (Eds.), National testing in schools: An Australian assessment (pp. 164-180). London: Routledge. Isenbarger, L., & Zembylas, M. (2006). The emotional labour of caring in teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 22, 120-134. doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2005.07.002 Lingard, B., Thompson, G., & Sellar, S. (2016). National testing from an Australian perspective. In B. Lingard, G. Thompson & S. Sellar (Eds.), National testing in schools: An Australian assessment (pp. 1-17). London: Routledgge. Lynch, K., & Lyons, M. (2009). Love labouring: Nurturing rationalities and relational identities. In K. Lynch, J. Baker & M. Lyons (Eds.), Affective equality: Love, care and injustice (pp. 54-77). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Maxwell, J. A. (2009). Designing a qualitative study. In L. Bickman & D. J. Rog (Eds.), The Sage handbook of applied social research methods (pp. 214-253). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Maynes, M. J., Pierce, J. L., & Laslett, B. (2008). Telling stories: The use of personal narratives in the social sciences and history. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mockler, N. (2013). Teacher professional learning in a neoliberal age: Audit, professionalism and identity. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 38(10), 35-47. doi: 10.14221/ajte.2013v38n10.8 Noddings, N. (2005). Caring in education. The Encyclopedia of Informal Education. Oganisation for Economic Co-operation & Development. (2015). How has student performance evolved over time? PISA in Focus 47(January), 1-4. US Department of Education. (2016). Office of Migrant Education (webpage). from https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oese/ome/index.html?exp=0

Author Information

Robyn Henderson (presenting / submitting)

University of Southern Queensland

School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood

Toowoomba

Judith Gouwens (presenting)

Roosevelt University

Chicago

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