Local Authorities, Education and School Achievement: networking as 'good practice'

Author(s):

Helena C Araújo(presenting / submitting)Florbela Sousa(presenting)Armando Loureiro Isabel Costa

Conference:

ECER 2012

Network:

14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

14 SES 07 A, School-related Transitions Within a Life Course Perspective – Intermediate Phases

Parallel Paper Session

Time:

2012-09-19

17:15-18:45

Room:

ESI 2 - Aula 4

Chair:

Joana Lúcio

Contribution

The involvement of local authorities in networking regarding school improvement and achievement is central in a financed research project Building Local Networking in Education? Decision-Makers Discourses on School Achievement and Drop out in Portugal (FCT) that assumes education as a social right for all children (Bernstein 1996). It is the current agenda for local networking connecting local authorities, schools and communities that is at stake here on the education of children and young people, encouraging new and open forms of identity construction, knowledge building and sociabilities coming from non-formal contexts (Araújo, Sousa, Loureiro & Costa 2011). In this project, the perspectives and strategies of local policy-makers (and policy implementation) on ways of confronting school dropout and underachievement in specific social groups in Portugal gain a particular dimension as elsewhere. Networks and networking activities and policy measures for school improvement and social equity have appeared not only in Europe, but also in Australia, Asia, America, as Chapman and Hadfield (2010b) stress. Particularly, in the UK, some of the published work is concerned with interschool networking and pupils learning improvement (see Muijs, West & Ainscow 2010), while the work presented here departs from municipalities that project their networking activities with schools and local institutions to attain specific goals. However, the local allows also to emphasise the complex context that involves these perspectives, strategies and policies framed by the knowledge society and globalization challenges (Stoer & Magalhaes 2004).

Certainly, the network concept needs to be clarified as it could be a new buzz-word that appears to translate all the kind of actions that open new horizons by interconnecting diverse agents. Several contributions are of importance here: Castells (1996), Latour (2007) as well as those who more recently focus on school education as Chapman & Hadfield (2010a; 2010b), Muijs et al. (2010). These contributions are relevant for allowing to frame changes recently introduced in school education in countries as Portugal, changes based in the development of networks of schools with local official agencies and communities.

In this Project, developed in 22 Portuguese municipalities, we found ‘good practices’ most of them based in the building of partnerships and networks, with the aim of promoting education and social welfare. Having that in mind, we selected three municipalities as representative of ‘good practices’. By this selection, we are stressing that, independently of the different contexts, there are, indeed, ways of turning around the difficulties of working in education and that can be identified and analysed and, hopefully, will contribute to a broader understanding of other cases.

[paper w/ Laura Fonseca, Graça Pinto, José Portela, Sofia M Silva, Sofia Sousa, Eunice Macedo, Diana Andrade, Vanessa Coutinho, Alexandra Oliveira, Marisa Silva)

Method

In order to respond to the study aims, which are multidimensional in nature, the chosen methodological approach was the qualitative case study best suited to our attempt to understand the complex nature of the social problems associated with school failure and drop-out. The empirical orientation of this research resulted in an iterative process seeking through a number of semi-structured, in-depth interviews to keep a constant critical interchange with the varying agendas, expectations, values and needs of the selected key actors, with public and private responsibility. Previously, all the preparatory information needed on the sociopolitical environment of each of the 22 local authorities, its communities and schools, provided by the political and regulatory central and local documents, were gathered and analysed and will be of relevance here, contributing to a better understanding of the meanings attributed to good practices by these communities. The selected set of three, relatively independent sub-studies, each linked to different socio-geographical contexts, were identified, in a cross-study design. The case studies provide an insightful understanding of the complexity of the problem of school achievement, by examining both the contexts and the processes involved.

Expected Outcomes

The findings will highlight the negotiated decision-making processes that affect the political priorities of local and school authorities and stakeholders in involving partnerships and network mechanisms to claim for the success of children and young people. Most of those practices occur in ways of cooperation: others occur as a casual collaboration; but still others appear to configure networking – between the municipalities, the schools, and other collective and individual actors. Since the interviews were carried out with key social actors (local education politicians and technicians, as well as schools directors, teachers and parents representatives), the triangulation of perspectives allowed identifying good practices that are conveyed to foster education success.

References

Araújo, H. C., Sousa, F., Loureiro, A. & Costa, I. (2011) Building Local Networking in Education? Decision-Makers Discourses on School Achievement and Drop-out in Portugal, paper presented at ECER Berlin, 13-16 Sept Bernstein, B. (1996) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity – theory, research, critique, London: Taylor & Francis Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Chapman, C. & Hadfield, M. (2010a) Supporting the middle tier to engage with school-based networks: change strategies for influencing and cohering in Journal of Educational Change, 11, 221-240 Chapman, C. & Hadfield, M. (2010b) Realizing the potential of school-based networks, Educational Research, 52 (3), 309-323 Latour, B. (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muijs, D., West, M. & Ainscow, M. (2010) Why network? Theoretical perspectives on networking in School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 21 (1), 5-26 Portela, J. & Gerry, C. (2002) Dreams, pragmatism and employment outcomes among Portuguese rural youth: six paradoxes, in T. Dax & I. Machold (Eds), Voices of Rural Youth - A Break with Traditional Patterns? (pp. 122-157), Bundesanstalt fur Bergbauernfragen, Stoer, S. & Magalhães, A. (2004) Education, Knowledge and the Network Society in Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2 (3), 319-335.

Author Information

Helena C Araújo (presenting / submitting)

University of Porto/University of Lisbon/University of Tras os Montes

education

Porto

Florbela Sousa (presenting)

Universidade de Lisboa

Instituto de Educação

Lisboa

Armando Loureiro

Universidade de trás-os-Monte e Alto DOuro

Vila real

Isabel Costa

Universidade de Trás-os.Montes e Alto Douro

Psychology and Education

Chaves

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.