Research Questions

 a) what globalised discourses and genres do educators draw on when talking about child poverty in their schools

b) how did participation in the Local Matters research programme shape the educators’ understanding of and response to globalised discourses 

The methodology that Local Matters employs has been advanced through the work of Comber and Kamler (2009), Anderson et al (2012) and more recently developed by Beckett (2016) and Gorski, (2016). We have have identified the need for a lived imperative, whereby practitioners across the education spectrum collaborate with communities to build research-driven accounts of poverty that are located in, and drawn from, local experience rather than a one size fits all,

globalised 'disadvantage' narrative perpetuated through standarised performance technologies. .  Acting as critical secretaries (Apple, 2016), and standing beside our teaching colleagues, we provide a critical discourse analysis of a series of semi structured interviews and focus group activities with teachers, school leaders and Local Authority education leaders who have participated in the project. In so doing, we explore the possibility for discursive agency within the individuals and schools tasked with narrowing the achievement gap of children living in poverty in a poverty policy context that, we contend, is constructed by ongoing education policy to categorize, compare and fix achievement in order to build a specific, taken for granted, global, ‘market-serving’ truth. In so doing it makes evident the localized reality of poverty inducing structural inequalities that pertain to people’s lives, thus providing a research driven bedrock for teachers to better understand and respond to the many challenges faced by local people within their context.

Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews and focus group activities with eight teachers, head teachers and district leaders. The interview questions were concerned with exploring and testing the impact of the Local Matters research program on the schools and staff taking part. The interviews were conducted by a research associate and held either at the university or school during the final month of the Local Matters project. The interviews were digitally recorded, and the dialogue was transcribed through what has been termed a ‘naturalized’ approach (Oliver, Serovich and Mason, 2005). The data analysis employed Fairclough’s (2013) three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis, as it allows for an exploration of the lexical preferences used by respondents (textual analysis); the production, distribution and consumption behind the textual selections (discursive analysis); and the historical, ideological and contextual influences on social practices (social analysis). Key to this issue was the task of illuminating which discourses were at play during the activity (interdiscursivity and intertextuality) and which genres were drawn on. We utilized this approach alongside knowledge gained from our previous studies (Emery, 2016) and the five steps model of analysis as referenced by Ziskin (2019). We coded the data from each transcript through the following lenses; discursive practice (the production, distribution and consumption of research); text (the language [wording, grammar, use of nouns] genres and discourse orders used by the interviewees) and the social practice (broader social/cultural/economic/political events).

Local Matters intervention impacted our teachers’ interdiscursive thinking and doing. Our evidence speaks to emerging notions of principled resistance with teachers now look(ing) local, asking questions of policy, examining research they would not have examined before and doing this with an eye to what might be viewed as the subliminal effects of mainstream policy and its discourse. We believe that this principled resistance of teachers was not only due to a new sensitivity and awareness of specific language and discourses but also due to the processes of collaboration with ourselves as activist academics through a joint construction of thinking and doing through space and inquiry. It was a resistance built through moments of an emerging infusion of a common ideological approach; one that took the form of a democratic reform attempting to challenge and transform the unjust and inequitable thinking and doing of present child poverty discourses. In that sense, we can say that our work troubled any deterministic notions of teacher subjectivation. Instead, what we witnessed was multiple subjectivities being interrogated within the context of constraint, productive powers and complex and fluid notions of discursive and material agency. There was learning and unlearning taking place which speaks to process questions of how we could govern ourselves as educators within a world of powerful ideological social practices and discourses that construct the globalised ‘problem’ of poverty' (Ball, 2019, Cochran-Smith, 2018).

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