Session Information
18 SES 11, Curricular and Policy Debates in Physical Education
Paper Session
Contribution
While many educators and policy makers are enthusiastic about the use of digital technology in schools, little sociological knowledge exists about how this is shaping contemporary PE imperatives, their enactment in schools, nor the policy entrepreneurs involved. This research project aims to fill this void and better understand the policy landscape, the impetus for the use of digital technologies in schools, and the entrepreneurs and networks involved in these initiatives. For the purpose of this study we specifically attend to the field of physical education (PE) in contemporary Australian schools. Recently, school PE has become a prime context for the promotion of policies that promote the use of digital technologies.
The scholarly work on the role of digital technology in PE classrooms has focused largely on questions of technical and pedagogical efficacy; does it work and how can it be done better? While these are legitimate concerns, they leave unaddressed at least two important areas of knowledge; the social forces, policies and entrepreneurial work that are converging and shaping the forms digital PE is taking and how and why teachers are responding to the emergence of digital PE in their classes. With this as our context our larger Australian Research Council funded project explored the reasons why educators utilize digital technology in their PE classrooms and how broader social, political, and economic conditions influenced curricular and pedagogical transformations. In this paper we specifically consider the role of various entrepreneurs, impetuses, and policy networks in the shaping of these initiatives. And while this is an Australia-based study, the implications of this research are of international relevance. As the use of digital technologies in schools becomes a global phenomenon – pushed by wide-reaching policy networks – it is of great significance and importance to understand the transnational nature of policy creation and enactment and the role that digital policy entrepreneurs have within this assemblage.
Theoretically, the paper brings together two separate literatures that have not often been connected. The first is the body of which which employs the insights of Stephen Ball (2012) and others who have written about the various roles policy actors and networks play in the governance of schools. On the one hand Ball and his colleagues write that pedagogical transformations – such as the use of digital technologies – are often championed by ‘policy entrepreneurs’ or those who are personally invested in the changes they are advocating (Ball, Maguire, Braun, & Hoskins, 2011). Individual policy entrepreneurs, however, are often entangled in complex policy networks, or “join‐up government, think tanks and some individual interlockers, who ‘straddle sectors’ and policy fields and settings” (Ball and Exley, 2010).
The second literature is that which investigates the ways ‘micro-celebrities’ or ‘social influencers’ use blogs, personal websites, YouTube and social media to create online profiles for themselves. Most of this research has investigated people who use their children and other personal information about their lives (such as their dietary habits or fitness routines) as the source of their content. Our analysis builds on this research by tracing the ways in which a select group of teachers from our project employed similar modes of self-presentation to position themselves as experts in the use of digital technologies for PE.
With this in mind, our broader project was guided by the following questions:
1) What conditions have enabled the emergence of digital policy entrepreneurs in PE? (eg. policy imperatives, digital platforms, individual characteristics).
2) In what ways do policy entrepreneurs interact, share, promote, and produce knowledge claims around the use of digital technology for PE, including their use of social media and other digital media?
Method
The project is funded by the Australian Research Council and data were collected across two Australian States (Queensland and Victoria) and one Territory (Australian Capital Territory). The project draws from data collected from observations of Australian-based HPE classes, interviews with teachers and field notes from attendances at HPE conferences and professional learning seminars that focus on the use of technology in classrooms. In total we interviewed 70 teachers and observed 35 classes. For the purposes of this paper we have selected four participants to focus our analysis and discussion on. The participants are of particular interest for our study as the PE teachers were all identified as being key actors in advocating the use of technology in the PE curriculum area. They are, as highlighted above, what Ball et al (2012) refers to as policy entrepreneurs. They were identified by key informants for the study as ‘people you need to talk to, they are doing great things, you need to talk to them’. They were regulars on the local conference circuit and involved in pushing the use of technology onto/into the everyday practices of teaching PE. They also self identified as digital innovators. Each participant also maintained an active digital professional presence at either the local, national and/or international level. The different but overlapping data sources used in this project need to be seen as points of connection. They were chosen because they are assumed to be connected but not reducible to each other. These points of connections will be used to map the conditions of possibility that enabled these phenomena and the generative effects of these efforts across the field of PE. Attention was placed on the ways digital technology was used, represented, and rationalized. In an effort to better understand the influence of policy networks and entrepreneurs, interviews also attended to the various sources of digital technology as well as these teachers’ interactions, involvement and influence over others in the field. Using standard qualitative methods, artifacts, interviews, and observations were coded and classified according to the guiding questions described above. This coding process created a matrix which was then interrogated for themes, consistencies, and key findings.
Expected Outcomes
According to Neil Selwyn, it is important to recognize the “social and interaction circumstances in which digital technologies exist and through which they attain their meanings” (Selwyn, 2012, p. 92). Following Selwyn our interest has been situated in the ways in which ideas about the need and imperatives around digital health are, “formed, reformed, and eventually consolidated into orthodoxies” both inside individual classrooms as well as within the larger policy environment (Player-Koro, Rensfildt, and Selwyn, 2017, p.3). Based on our fieldwork we have found that there exist complex formal and informal policy networks that contribute to the conditions of possibility that enable both the emergence, and flourishing of, digitech entrepreneurs in education. One of our major findings is that risk circulates powerfully within networks at various levels. The entrepreneurs in our study regularly incite risk in their professional learning offerings and digital social media networks as a means to justify the use of digitech to collect evidence of student learning, conduct assessment and substantiate the profession. Whilst they use risk strategically to help them advocate for the use of digitech, our data clearly reveals that they also feel that they are at risk as they are increasingly called on to provide evidence for learning, justify their professional decision making and the purpose of PE as an essential curricular content area. The development of these networks and the work of the entrepreneurs provides both constraining and enabling practices for the field of PE and thus the teachers who function within them. This work contributes to scholarship concerned with advancing a more sophisticated theory of the ways in which policy networks and entrepreneurs ‘work’ in order to better understand the complex ways that change and continuity occur in formal and informal educational policies.
References
Ball, S. J., & Exley, S. (2010). Making policy with ‘good ideas’: Policy networks and the ‘intellectuals’ of New Labour. Journal of education policy, 25(2), 151-169. Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., Braun, A., & Hoskins, K. (2011). Policy actors: Doing policy work in schools. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education,32(4), 625-639. Ball, S. J. (2012). Global education inc: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary. New York: Routledge. Selwyn, N. (2012). Making sense of young people, education and digital technology: The role of sociological theory. Oxford Review of Education, 38(1), 81-96.
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