Session Information
32 SES 11, Understanding School Improvement From Different Perspectives - Reconstructive Qualitative Methods
Symposium
Contribution
Local school law in Switzerland and Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Lundy, 2007) expect schools to promote student participation. The research project "Strengthen Participation – Improve School" investigates how schools deal with this policy. Implementing policy is not a simple straightforward process but it is based upon a process of sense-making and on the local school context (Spillane, 2004). Our assumption was that what teachers think, know and feel about student participation has direct consequences on their behavior (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015) and on the practice of a school. However, values within a school are variegated and the school context is decisive in spreading ideas. School improvement is a process with a relational character, meaning we can best understand it by studying interactions, since reality is socially influenced and emerges from communication (Endres & Weibler, 2017, p. 215). In this project we focused primarily on school teams (meso level). However, we did also consider influences from the macro level such as educational policies. If school improvement is socially constructed, common sense-making processes (Spillane, et al., 2002) are at the core of the concept. Sense-making is a basis for understanding one’s own situation and challenges, and creating possible solutions and new social practices within a school. It is a collective, socially and interactively constructed, dynamic learning process within a complex system (Zala-Mezö & Hameyer, 2016). In a mixed method design we studied student participation as a topic for school improvement. Data in five schools were collected 2016 and 2017 from students and teachers. After each data collection and data analysis phase the research team fed back results to the school. Data feedback consisted of two parts: written reports and workshops. The goal of these data feedback elements was to support schools in using the research results and in planning school improvement processes. In this paper we set out to answer the question: What signs of change can be found in qualitative data before and after feeding back research results? We therefore compared group discussions using the documentary method. The results show that changes in how school teams construct the meaning of student participation have taken place: on the content level – how they understand student participation – and on the discourse level – how they treat the topic within the team.
References
Bohnsack, R. (2010). Documentary Method and Group Discussions. In R. Bohnsack, N. Pfaff, & W. Weller (Eds.), Qualitative Analysis and Documentary Method In International Educational Research (pp. 99–124). Opladen: Barbara Budrich. Endres, S., & Weibler, J. (2017). Towards a three-component model of relational social constructionist leadership: A systematic review and critical interpretive synthesis. International Journal of Management Reviews, 19(2), 214–236. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12095 Lundy, L. (2007). ‘Voice’ is not enough: conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. British Educational Research Journal, 33, 927–942. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920701657033 Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Przyborski, A., & Wohlrab-Sahr, M. (2014). Qualitative Sozialforschung: Ein Arbeitsbuch (4., erw. Aufl.). München: Oldenbourg. Spillane, J. P. (2004). Standards deviation : how schools misunderstand education policy ([2nd ed.]). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Zala-Mezö, E., & Hameyer, U. (2016). Schulentwicklung als kollektiver Lernprozess. Editorial. Journal Für Schulentwicklung, 20(2), 4–7.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.