Professional Learning as Relational Practice

Professional Learning as Relational Practice

Jenny Reeves

Professional Learning as Relational Practice

123

Dr. Jenny Reeves University of Stirling Stirling Inst. Education Stirling United Kingdom FK9 4LA [email protected]

ISBN 978-90-481-8738-6 e-ISBN 978-90-481-8739-3 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010921590 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specificall for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Preface

For many years, I have been engaged in the professional education of experienced teachers, working with them to try and change practice for the better in schools on courses with a substantive element of practice-based learning in their design. I have been impressed by what many of the teachers have achieved in their classrooms and as leaders and managers in their schools. However, over time, the results have often been disappointing in terms of sustaining new ways of working. When searching the literature to try to gain a better understanding of what changing practice entails what I have read has often seemed at odds with my observations. Texts either were exhortatory, promoting approaches to changing practice that were essentially rational, staged and planned, or provided accounts that were interesting in relation to certain aspects of professional learning but, nevertheless, somehow incomplete. What I was experiencing were processes that were, in contrast, frequently messy, surprising, complicated and contested. It is this gap, between accounts and experiences of practice-based learning, which this book sets out to explore, the gap between the experience of an interactive, dynamic, and socially contextualised process and descriptions that are often individualistic, overly linear and largely context-free. My claim is that this difference between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ is both conceptual and methodological in that a restrictive and narrow framing of professional learning is both the corollary and the outcome of modes of enquiry that, in their turn, concentrate on a limited selection of data in exploring such learning. In order to counteract this problem, I have adopted a relational approach to describing practice-based professional development, which includes the use of graphical means for representing the material spaces and interactions produced by the activity. Drawing provides a means of representing the varied movements, relationships and interactions of people and things occurring in the course of learning processes that tend to get lost in words. By building a picture of the ephemeral spaces and connections that educating activities produce, mapping relational space allows for a more holistic overview of what is happening during processes of professional change. Given that we are witnessing a transformation in the form and structures of professional work through developments such as enquiry-based practice and transdisciplinary approaches to service provision, there is an urgent need for those of us involved in the fiel of professional education to develop a more robust v

vi

Preface

understanding of the dynamics of changing professional practice. This has to be based on a more inclusive approach to the analysis of the processes involved across the varied and interrelated contexts in which they occur. Thus the central claim of this book is that our capacity to understand the development of professional knowledge and practice is both transformed and enhanced by examining the events that are implicated in processes of professional learning. Event analysis allows us to map the learning spaces created by educating processes and track the movement of people and ideas between them. Mapping relational space provides a new way of undertaking qualitative and quantitative research into activity systems, including investigating knowledge exchange and creation in the networked contexts that we all inhabit in our professional lives. The chapters in this book draw on empirical work much of which has already been published as journal articles. The initial investigation of the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship (SQH) programme was reported in Reeves & Forde, 2004 and in Reeves et al., 2005. In 2003, I was part of a team that secured a commission to work with a local authority’s education department to support and evaluate the implementation of an organisational learning strategy. In tracking the inception of this initiative and the early stages of its implementation, we had access to many of the key events during which new ideas and practices in relation to school improvement were debated and framed. In trying to preserve the complex interconnections within this series of events, I began to develop event and content analysis as a means of deriving a visual representation of activity (Reeves & Boreham, 2006). In the interim, the continuing professional development team at Stirling University introduced a new practice-based master’s programme, Professional Enquiry in Education (2001), aimed at teachers interested in qualifying as chartered teachers (CT). Building on what we had learned from the SQH, the team designed this course to support collaborative learning; we also increased the level and rhythm of interaction between activity at the university and activities in the participants’ schools. Over the next 4 years, further investigations into participating teachers’ experiences of this CT programme, and of our own practice, formed the basis of a series of seminars that opened up other aspects of investigation into practice-based learning and its interconnections with the wider fiel of educating (Reeves & I’Anson, 2006; Reeves, 2007; Reeves & Fox, 2008).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank colleagues who have been engaged in the conversations, debates and activities centred on the work of the Western SQH Consortium and the Partnership for Professional Enquiry that led to the thesis outlined in this book, including all those who have allowed access to their work and their thoughts in the course of various research studies. In particular, I have to thank those I have worked with as co-authors on the various papers that form the basis of this present text and members of the Professional Development team at the University of Stirling who pioneered putting many of these ideas into practice.

vii

Contents

1 Adopting a New Approach to Professional Learning . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Looking at Professional Learning from a Relational Perspective Delineating Educating Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Plan of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part I: Mapping the Relational Spaces of Educating . . . . . . . . Part II: Exploring Professional Learning as Relational Practice . . Part III: Tracking Knowledge Creation and Exchange . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

1 1 1 4 6 7 8 9

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

13 13 13 17 19 19 20 22 23 24 25 30 32

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Educating as a Field of Activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Typology for Educating Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Order of Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Making Sense of Organisational Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . Surfacing Pedagogies, Relays and Discursive Struggle . . . . . . . Representing Relays and Networks: Building a Relational Map . Pedagogic Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

33 33 34 35 39 42 48 48 51

Part I

Mapping the Relational Spaces of Educating

2 Describing Educating Systems . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship? The Parameters of Educating Systems . . . . Developing a Descriptive Framework . . . . . . Five Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mediated Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Situated Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Activity Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Actor Network Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . Mapping Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix

x

Contents

Discursive Struggle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Making Learning Spaces Visible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relational Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forms of Spatiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assembling the Tool Set for Durational Mapping . . . . . . Event Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Participation: People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Participation: Artefacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spaces and Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spatial Patterning of Interaction on the SQH Programme Mapping the System as Time and Space . . . . . . . . . . The Durational Representation of the SQH . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Applications of Mapping Relational Space . . . . . . . . . . Using Mapping for Investigation and Design . . . . . . . Effects of Hybridity in Educating Systems . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary Part I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part II

54 55

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 57 58 58 60 60 62 64 65 67 67 68 73 74 74 77 81 81

Professional Learning as Relational Practice

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practice-Based Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Professional Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implications for Professional Learning . . . . . . . . . Learning During Practice-Based Programmes . . . . . Tracking Discursive Change in Reflect ve Commentaries Annette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dynamics of the Learning Process . . . . . . . . . . In-Built Contingency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enacted Social Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Imagined Social Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Outcomes of Interaction: The Creation of Third Space Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85 85 86 86 87 89 91 92 96 98 98 100 102 103 106

6 Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pedagogy and Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Psychological Approach . . . . . . . . . . . A Sociological Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . Agency and Intentionality . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

107 107 107 108 110 112

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

Contents

xi

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 1 The Intentions of Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relay 1: Shaping the Learner – Being Postgraduate . . . . Relay 2: Shaping the Learner – Being a Chartered Teacher Relay 3: Disciplinary Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 2 The Actions of Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collaborative Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflect ve Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pedagogic Practices – Relaying Agency . . . . . . . . . . . Creating the Activity Set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mixing Theoretical and Practical Knowledge . . . . . . . Creating and Rebundling Connections . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

113 115 116 120

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

121 124 125 127 128 129 130 132

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

133 133 134 134 138 141 142 144 145 146 147 147 149 151 152

8 Knowledge Creation: The Reflex vity of Hybrid Systems . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knowledge and Activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Refl xivity and Reflectio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knowledge Creation and the CT Programme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stage 1: Multiplicity – Performing the CT Programme as a Networked System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stage 2: The System in Action – Knowledge Exchange and Creation Characteristics of a Hybrid System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knowledge Exchange and Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forms of Forgetting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Network Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

157 157 157 160 162 166

. . . . . . .

166 169 172 172 174 174 176

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teacher Professionalism and Chartered Teachers . . . . Contradictory Conceptions of Professionalism . . . The Construction of Reflect ve Reports . . . . . . . . . Using Sources External to the School Community . . Using Sources Internal to the School Community . . Rhetorical Devices and the Making of ‘War’ Machines Re-contextualising and Creating Knowledge . . . . Displaying Expertise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Proven’ Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shaped Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Power to Influenc Others . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary Part II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part III Tracking Knowledge Creation and Exchange

xii

9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Describing Educating as Relational Practice Substantive Issues in Professional Learning Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Contents

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

179 179 181 184

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

187

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

197

Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

201

Chapter 1

Adopting a New Approach to Professional Learning

Introduction Whilst it sometimes seems that every book on education starts with the claim that everything is changing there is an opposite refrain, particularly with regard to professional practice in the public services. This is to the effect that some practices show a remarkable resilience despite repeated efforts to alter them. In this respect the ‘incapacity’ of public education services to respond appropriately to the needs of pupils, of hospitals to care for their patients and of social services to protect the vulnerable is an ongoing source of complaint. Continuing professional development (CPD) is seen as one of the answers to these problems. In education, there is a widespread belief amongst policy makers that the reform of classroom practice will come about through engaging teachers in CPD based on sound evidence of how pupils learn best. The problem with this solution is that much of this evidence has been around for some time and has already constituted the basis for various efforts at reform, many of which have come and gone whilst leaving remarkably little trace of their passage. For example, initiatives based on constructivist approaches to teaching and learning introduced in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s (Stenhouse, 1975; Brandes & Ginnis, 1986; Driver & Oldham, 1986) failed to become an integral part of classroom practice. These have been revisited in more recent national projects such as those associated with the implementation of formative assessment (Black, 2003) once again with a mixed prognosis for success (Priestly & Sime, 2005)

Looking at Professional Learning from a Relational Perspective The predominant approach to the professional development of teachers has been both individualistic and transmissive. Generally courses and programmes are still based on the assumption that teachers need to be told about and trial new teaching techniques during workshop-based courses which they can then implement with pupils. There has been a realisation in some quarters that there is also a need for support when it comes to transposing skills and knowledge from workshops to classrooms (Joyce & Showers, 1988). Over the years such support has been provided by allying professional and school development in the use of action learning cycles J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3_1, 

1

2

1 Adopting a New Approach to Professional Learning

(Hopkins et al., 1994), through coaching (Lieberman, 1986), and through the use of collaborative action research networks (Campbell et al., 2004), as means of overcoming barriers to integrating new teaching approaches into classroom and school routines. Nevertheless, the problem remains that professional development often does not work very well, or rather it may work for a while, but its effects are not sustained (Eraut, 2004). In a sense this is the reiteration of an old and familiar problem, that of knowledge transfer or the lack of effective means by which new forms of practice can be transposed across different contexts. The question this raises is whether or not there is an issue with the way that we think about professional learning. The reason for asking this question is not simply to try and resolve a technical problem regarding the effica y of professional development but also provoked by what teachers say about their learning. A group of us from the universities of Stirling and Glasgow undertook a 2-year investigation into the effects that the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship (SQH) course had on 40 of the candidates who completed it in 2000. This was a postgraduate programme that combined taught and work-based learning modules as part of enabling students to address an occupational standard. Participants communicated a sense of being between different social worlds, relationships and languages as they moved from the taught to the work-based elements of the course and back. They associated these movements with personal change and professional growth and also with political and ideational work in their schools to gain and maintain opportunities to alter practice. Whilst we knew that this programme was a hybrid, combining elements of a traditional postgraduate taught course with practice-based learning in schools, we had not paid much heed to the effects that this mixing of pedagogic strategies would have on participants. The evidence from this study drew our attention to the importance of perceptions of difference in this particular educative process and how difference was experienced as a direct outcome of the interaction between the various learning spaces that the SQH programme created. These teachers did not construe their learning as the simple acquisition and application of knowledge and skills but as a far more complex process embedded in changes to their relationships with people and things, their professional identities, their knowledge and their capacity for action. They were pointing to who they were and who they had become through the experience of the programme. In other words they represented their learning as a complex interactional and relational process that was contextually grounded. This led to thinking that, in investigating professional learning, one of the problems may be the convention, at least in the UK, of thinking about education, including teacher education, in terms of teaching and learning. This framing of practice has become leached of meaning over time with teaching increasingly being treated as a largely technical matter of exercising an efficien means to achieve learning, which has been reduced to the achievement of ‘outcomes’ in a neat lock-step trajectory punctuated by assessment. Between the two poles, teaching and learning, the complex interactions of persons and things over time have tended to get lost, and with it the notion of educating as a process of shaping and forming persons. This fundamental purpose of pedagogy, that people should change and become

Introduction

3

different as a result of education, has been pushed into the background despite the increasing dominance of standards and arrays of outcomes that seek to specify what persons should be like. For this reason, I have chosen to use the term educating when referring to programmes of professional development as a more ‘honest’ concept, because it admits of intentions on the part of educators to shape the character and practice of those who are being educated. The explicit inclusion of educative purpose also factors issues of power into the interrelationship of those who ‘deliver’ professional development, as teacher educators, and those engaged in it, as participants. Within this definition I am including as educators and educating all forms of initiatives, such as school improvement, where one group is attempting to mould the behaviour of another. Educating is a more holistic term not only politically but also because it involves teachers and learners in a single process that they perform together, emphasising that, even though the power balance is traditionally very one-sided, this is a joint activity. In its non-transitive form, as in educating oneself, it also allows for the extension of intentionality, in terms of becoming different, as a desire of the learner. Spatially too, on practice-based programmes, it directs consideration to the whole of the educating activity across the different contexts in which it takes place. Educating may still be occurring without the embodied presence of a teacher. In the case of experienced practitioners, educating activity on practice-based courses concerns both what happens in schools as learning contexts for teachers and what happens in the spaces where they meet with tutors, coaches and trainers. Such an examination across contexts foregrounds the nature of the interactions between the two. Confinin the description of teaching and learning to a largely technical level has also helped to isolate this interactive process from the matrix of relations in which it is embedded. A technicist interpretation tends to hide from view the ways of seeing, and being in the world, that these external connections bring to the conduct of educating. It helps to make what happens between educators and practitioners on a professional development course appear to occur in a separate world, sealed off from other aspects of their professional lives. For example, when recounting narratives of movement between spaces the SQH participants also personifie things, like the Standard for Headship (SOEID, 1998b) and the programme itself, as ‘making’ them act in certain ways. The attribution of agency to things was intriguing because of the clear connections this had to the political aspects of changing practice that figure prominently in their accounts. More importantly, it pointed to the interpenetration of the educating process through its external relations, in this case by a particular discourse as a way of framing and understanding what school leadership and management was and how it ought to be conducted. The inclusion of these external relations impinges on the key characteristic of educating which is its role in sense making since it is directed to the acquisition, development and creation of knowledge on the part of learners. Again, an inclusive relational approach to investigating professional learning has a much wider scope than enquiring into specifi learning outcomes for individual practitioners because it is concerned with how both professional educators and practitioners make sense of their professional worlds and of themselves and others within them. There is a claim

4

1 Adopting a New Approach to Professional Learning

here that knowledge and skills that are transformational of practice are not separable from the professional identities of the persons who acquire and use them. A relational approach to educating raises questions about what those acting as educators are making of the process they are engaged in: What kind of persons and knowledge are they seeking to produce and how does their professional practice link to these purposes? Lastly, in the feedback from the research, our students were alerting us to the materiality of educating, to how the educating process was experienced as a series of lived events. This drew attention to the nature of educating as a performance, as a process of co-production, something that the educators and learners make in the course of their joint activity. On this account professional change was something that was constructed in the spaces that educating created in time. It implied that a spatiotemporal approach was needed to describe what professional learning entailed. The students’ responses pushed us back to basics in our enquiry about learning, to asking simple empirical questions like what is happening here, who and what is involved in this activity, what are people doing, what are they making and using, where and how are they moving over time. Summarising the argument so far, the aspiring headteachers’ responses to questions about the nature of their learning indicated that there was a need to think about their experiences very differently from the way we had done in the past. It involved a change to conceiving learning as a matter of relations between spaces over time people and things being and becoming power and agency discourse and identity Whilst this did not suggest an easy answer to the question of why changing practice was so difficul to sustain, it did begin to indicate that looking at professional learning in a more inclusive and holistic fashion might well be fruitful for developing a greater understanding of the problem.

Delineating Educating Systems However, adopting a relational approach to investigating educating as a practice is problematic. If the aim of enquiry is to achieve a holistic and inclusive description of activity, then the outcome of the endeavour is necessarily complex and complexity is difficul to describe. The narrative forms we tend to use in qualitative research to delineate processes are not very satisfactory in this regard; they are well suited to tracking the trajectory of a single, common ‘entity’ or for expressing one viewpoint in relation to a process but much less effective for dealing with many trajectories, or considering the interactions of equally valid, but differing viewpoints i.e. holding in

Introduction

5

mind a number of perspectives. Dealing with relationality and multiplicity is diff cult both linguistically and conceptually; on the other hand, not dealing with these factors seriously limits our view of complex social activities such as educating. Another corollary of taking a relational view of activity is that it involves looking at networks which are, by their nature, extensive. Therefore, one needs some means of setting limits to the object of one’s enquiries if the latter are to be feasible. I have chosen to use the notion of an educating system where what define such a system is the educational object of the activity. On these grounds an educating system is made up of all those activities that form part of pursuing an educational object. Thus the SQH is an educating system that encompasses all those activities that go to make up the process of enabling teachers to be recognised as having achieved the Standard for Headship in Scotland. Equally, this definitio could be applied to other forms of professional development. For example, one could defin an action research project that seeks to develop practitioners’ knowledge through involving them as lead researchers working with university staff to share and publish knowledge generated as a result of collaborative classroom enquiries as an educating system. Here the educator function would largely rest with the funders (central government and local authorities) and their agents (university staff). In both cases the educational object determines the limits of the system as encompassing all those activities that actors would acknowledge as playing a part in its pursuit. There is a caveat here, since what comprises a system varies according to the differing points of view of the actors involved, their experiences of the activity will always be partial and dependent on their particular role, a caveat which applies equally to anyone acting as a researcher. These kinds of systems are open systems that interact with their environment so that, whilst it is possible to defin their boundaries in terms of the object of activity, each of them has connections with other systems as part of the matrix of relations in which it is embedded. Thus a relational view also requires that we have a way of tracking the network of connections between systems, paying regard to the external relations a system has as well as to the internal connections that characterise its operation. It is on these grounds that developing a visual mode of representation for activity has such an appeal because complex relational information is far more easily conveyed in an image than it is in words. Any such representation also needs to have a temporal dimension since learning and change take place over time. Over the last 9 years I have been trying to make sense of these issues by tracking what happened, as my colleagues and I engaged in educating experienced practitioners. During this time I gradually developed and refine methods for describing the complex interrelationships that these enquiries revealed. In so doing I have become increasingly literal, pedantic and inclusive with regard to material evidence. Rather than cutting out data as irrelevant or ignoring seemingly petty details, I have tried to retain it all and stay with the material complexities of the processes I have been investigating. Rather than dissecting information into separate categories, I have tried to fin ways of preserving its interrelationships. Part of the answer to making sense of all this material was to focus on events and how these and their relations could be define and ‘measured’. Issues of time and space were key to achieving

6

1 Adopting a New Approach to Professional Learning

this objective. The challenge has been to describe the activity systems that are performed by these events in a way that locates the resultant systems materially in time and space, is ‘true’ to their embodied and dynamic nature and retains the interrelationships between their components and their connections to related activity systems. In following the object of my enquiries I have come to realise that what I have been looking at are essentially networked systems of activity that are themselves embedded in a complex matrix of networked systems. Exploring relational space reveals a frequently disregarded world that is fascinating in its complexity and dynamism. It also highlights the simplification and exclusions we maintain in order to make sense of our daily lives. In that regard, the series of studies that this book relates will hopefully offer new and interesting ways of both perceiving the activity of educating and thinking about pedagogic issues. There is, of course, an inherent fault in this enterprise since any framing necessarily places restrictions on the data available and, in that sense, misrepresents the interrelationships that occur in practice. Nevertheless, given the marked exclusions of traditional framings of activity, an approach that enables the dynamics of educating to be described with greater plausibility is worth pursuing. Current ways of representing educating limit our capacity both to explore practice and to consider forms and pedagogies that may be better suited to our needs.

The Plan of the Book In writing the book I have tried to overtake two main objectives: • to outline a methodology for investigating the activity of educating in practicebased systems whose object is to bring about professional learning; and • to describe processes in which professional learning occurs in relational terms, in that sense to reconceptualise how professional learning may be described and understood as both process and practice. To meet these two goals the book is divided into three parts. Part I largely concentrates on methodological issues and how the spatio-temporal nature of changing practice, as professional learning, may be represented and investigated without losing sight of its dynamic and relational nature. In so doing it seeks a new way of describing the operation of networked systems. Part II explores what a relational and spatial approach to describing educating reveals about the interface between professional practitioners, their educators and their joint activity. It examines the interrelations between the different spaces created by practice-based professional development programmes emphasising the lived and embodied quality of educating practices. In so doing, it demonstrates the kinds of substantive issues in relation to professional learning that the techniques outlined in Part I can be used to explore.

Part I: Mapping the Relational Spaces of Educating

7

Part III concentrates on issues of knowledge creation and exchange in the networked systems created by the implementation of hybrid pedagogies and the implications this has for professional learning at a collective level and in particular the role of higher education in this field Within this structure, each chapter starts by outlining the background to a particular theme, which leads into a case study section chosen to illustrate it. This is followed by a discussion as to the significanc of the evidence and what it contributes to furthering our understanding of the theme. Because the book is about the relational aspects of activity, the case study sections are quite complex and lengthy and the maps that accompany the text are also quite complicated. There is an inescapable dilemma here since the rationale for the methodology on which the book is based is the preservation and inclusion of data rather than its simplifica tion through selection. I have tried to ease the burden on the reader by setting out the aspects of the case that are particularly germane to the argument at the beginning of each of the case study sections and by building up the maps in Part I step by step in order to clarify the protocols that are being used in their composition. For many readers the maps will not be critical to their understanding of the argument but for those interested in investigating practices in relational terms or designing systems to promote learning they do provide productive new tools for analysis.

Part I: Mapping the Relational Spaces of Educating The key features that are characteristic of networked educating systems are set out in Chapter 2, which establishes a set of criteria for developing a suitable array of tools for their analysis. It looks at various socio-cultural approaches to changing practice and developing knowledge; situated learning, activity theory and actor network theory, and provides an assessment of their strengths and weaknesses as orientations for exploring relational processes. Different techniques for mapping various aspects of social interaction are also discussed. The chapter ends by setting out the approach that is adopted in this book and how it both draws upon and extends previous work on the examination and description of activity systems. Chapter 3 seeks to locate practice-based educating systems, such as that described in Chapter 2, in the wider fiel of educational activity. Distinctions are made between educating systems on the basis of their pedagogic strategies resulting in a fourfold typology: socialising, schooling, developmental and contagious systems. The f rst two are characterised as assimilative pedagogic strategies, since learners enter the educators’ domain of practice, whereas the last two are characterised as invasive strategies, with the educators entering and attempting to disrupt practice in the learners’ territory. This typology is linked to an order of discourse, which provides the background to a case study that tracks the progress of a developmental educating initiative in a local authority. The case is used to generate a relational map for the implementation of the initiative, which provides a graphic illustration of the discursive connections that fuelled the conceptual and political work required to secure an initial commitment to the implementation of change in this particular case.

8

1 Adopting a New Approach to Professional Learning

The representation of relational space as the ephemeral, but nevertheless material and embodied, space produced by the performance of an activity is the subject of Chapter 4. It explains the key elements of event analysis and how this, linked to discursive analysis of the content of activity, provides the basis for durational mapping. These techniques are then applied to generate durational maps of two different versions of the SQH programme. Comparing the two maps illustrates the spatial differences between schooling and hybrid (schooling and developmental) educating systems. The comparison of the maps focuses attention on certain features of design in educating systems including spatiality, movement, rhythm and sequence and how these features relate to resourcing and knowledge exchange. It also demonstrates that such comparisons can be both qualitative and quantitative opening up the possibility of framing a number of new questions about educating activities for empirical investigation.

Part II: Exploring Professional Learning as Relational Practice Evidence of ‘discursive’ change in the texts produced by students on a practicebased postgraduate programme and its link to new experiences engendered by undertaking collaborative projects in the work setting forms the subject of Chapter 5. This chapter explores the interaction of ideas, identity and professional action that is provoked by having to bridge the intersection of two social spaces: the space created in the educators’ territory (the cohort learning space) and that of the participant’s work setting. Bridging the two can lead to the creation of third space as a space of interference between different forms of activity where professional practice may be changed. The chapter explores the issues that arise between the learning of the individual and the groups they interact with, pointing to the political, as well as the conceptual work embedded in processes of developing practice. Continuing the examination of the interface between educators, students and educating activity, Chapter 6 concentrates on the other half of the student/educator dyad. It examines two major themes: issues of intentionality and agency on the part of educators and issues of pedagogy, exploring the way in which the educating process is structured and managed by educators. It illustrates how educators can create and use social space by looking at how taught sessions are structured and ‘performed’ with a focus on the way in which professional practitioners’ perceptions and practice may be shaped by the use of various pedagogic devices. Chapter 7 explores the use that the students make of the resources provided by practice-based learning programmes. As in Chapter 5, a key theme is how knowledge is constructed, but this time the focus is on its rhetorical function. The case study looks at how the students make use of the more traditional resources that a schooling system provides (access to reading, discussions, ‘researcher’ and ‘scholar’ roles and written composition). The nature of the knowledge they develop and its power to influenc the behaviour of others is seen by the students as crucial in enabling them to sustain personal growth as well as to secure the involvement

Part III: Tracking Knowledge Creation and Exchange

9

of others in collaborative action. It is argued that the mixing of spaces and texts in students’ narrative accounts enables them to build a basis to figh for and win the space to change their own and others’ practice.

Part III: Tracking Knowledge Creation and Exchange The creation and transformation of knowledge in the process of educating within the system at a more holistic level is the subject of Chapter 8. It argues that hybrid educating systems have considerable productive potential because of their in-built refl xivity. Durational mapping of the system created by the chartered teacher programme, focusing on the activity of the tutors, is used to illustrate the complexity of the spatial structures involved and their fecundity in terms of generating new knowledge. The implications of hybridity for the promotion of professional learning and the creation and exchange of knowledge across the wider fiel of professional practice are explored. Chapter 9 draws the whole together and considers some of the issues that viewing learning as a relational practice raises for those working in professional contexts, particularly as educators of experienced professionals in higher education.

Part I

Mapping the Relational Spaces of Educating

Introduction to Part I The purpose of the firs part of this book is to lay out a set of tools that may be used for the analysis and representation of social activity as dynamic, material performances involving people, things and actions. It is based on the search for a means of coming to grips with a set of related problems: • understanding the lived materiality of professional learning as practice; • findin a means of creating a processual understanding of educating as action over time; • investigating the productivity (of particular cases) of educating activity in the making of patterns of connecting and interfering spaces; and • maintaining as integrative a positioning as possible in trying to describe the relationalities of such practices. It does so by examining the operation of educating systems. The approach aimed at affecting the practice of established practitioners. The three chapters in Part I outline a spatio-temporal approach to the analysis of practice-based educating systems. The approach concentrates on the relational aspects of their operation, including both their internal and their external connections as parts of networked field of activity. The systems that are examined are an organisational learning initiative in a local authority’s education service and a postgraduate programme for aspiring head teachers (SQH). The latter was implemented in two forms, one of which, known as the standard route, used a substantial element of work-based learning, whilst the other, the accelerated route, accredited prior experiential learning. In examining the textual data generated by these educating systems, discourse and event analysis are used to draw up relational and durational maps of activity as a means of representing the complexities of these systems’ functioning over time. Whilst the maps are presented in this book as part of case study narratives, in the course of an empirical enquiry they are a primary means of analysing and synthesising data in spatio-temporal terms. Methodologically, durational map making occurs as an analytical process; the map that results is therefore the analysis rather than, as it occurs here, an illustration of a narrative.

Chapter 2

Describing Educating Systems

Introduction In order to provide an overview of the kind of educating systems that I have been seeking to investigate and describe, this firs chapter begins by delineating the activities and interrelations involved in the performance of a particular course. This is a programme for aspiring headteachers, which was introduced in Scotland in 1998. The description of this particular educating system illustrates the key dimensions that need to be incorporated into any tool set that would allow for mapping the dynamic interrelations that the performance of this programme gives rise to. Subsequently, these dimensions are used to generate criteria for evaluating what kind of investigational tools are required for achieving a relational view of this type of activity. The second half of the chapter explores various approaches to investigating social activity, using the criteria that were generated in the f rst exercise. This serves to identify some of the ideas that relate to the analytic methods that will be developed in Part I and also, where some of the more obvious gaps lie in the description and representation of dynamic systems and the development and use of knowledge as part of educating. The chapter concludes by summarising the approach I intend to adopt in order to develop a more relational view of educating systems that seek to support professional development of teachers.

What Is the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship? Picking up on the issues that were outlined in the introductory chapter I am going to begin by trying to illustrate what I mean by an educating system in order to show, if we focus on a particular purpose, or object, for educating this allows us to delineate the extent of the activity and therefore to get an idea of the parameters that apply in attempting to describe it. I shall start by posing a single question: What is the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship? A question to which I shall give a number of seemingly disparate answers, each of which is empirically defensible, to illustrate the kind of complexities that the book sets out to explore. J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3_2, 

13

14

2

Describing Educating Systems

Answer 1: It is an activity that enables teachers to gain a qualification In 1998 a new programme was introduced in Scotland to ensure that teachers were prepared for taking on the role of headteacher in Scottish schools. The Scottish Qualificatio for Headship (SQH) was a course of leadership and management development that was introduced, and sponsored, by the Scottish Offic Education and Industry Department (SOEID). It is a practice-based learning programme designed to enable participants to demonstrate competence against an occupational standard, The Standard for Headship in Scotland (SOEID, 1998b). The production of national programme guidelines and an insistence on joint institutional governance led to the formation of three consortia, consisting of universities and local authorities. These were authorised by SOEID to deliver the programme that takes just over 2 years to complete. Successful candidates gain the professional award (SQH) and a postgraduate diploma, and this is the object of the activity. Answer 2: It is a set of ideas embedded in a form of language. The SQH activity has a particular jargon that is embedded in the artefacts that are central to its pursuit as well as to the speech of those who are involved in it. In the Standard for Headship in Scotland the words ‘leadership’ and ‘participative management’ are central to describing the function of headteachers. Verbs and verbal phrases such as ‘negotiate’, ‘agree and implement’, ‘monitor and evaluate’, ‘plan, develop and review’ and, of course, ‘manage’ are used to describe the actions that headteachers should be able to demonstrate. Drawing on a slightly different discourse the terms ‘critical reflection and ‘professional values’ are also prominent in the course materials. At a more mundane level tutors and co-ordinators refer to ‘P&Cs’ (portfolios and commentaries), and to ‘candidates’ or ‘SQHers’ as terms used for students on the programme. The function of this language is to provide a basis for joint sense making, sharing knowledge and the legitimation of the SQH activity. It serves to include ‘those in the know’ about the SQH as well as to exclude those who are not part of the system. It is a parochial and local way of making sense of the activity and its object of preparing candidates to undertake the role of headteacher. On the other hand, much of the SQH’s conceptual tool kit is derived from discourses that are characteristic of a much wider fiel of activity. Key managerialist assumptions are embedded in the Standard, the base text for designing the programme and assessing the outcomes of the candidates’ engagement. Whilst these assumptions have been translated into a formulation which is peculiar to the SQH, they nevertheless ensure that it has much in common with similar activities elsewhere. For example, in its origins and purposes, the SQH shares a great deal with its counterpart, the National Professional Qualificatio for Headship, which was introduced into England and Wales in 1996. The SQH is linked ideationally to a general trend in the UK in the second half of the 1990s to place increasing emphasis on professional standards and continuing professional development (CPD) as the means of improving public service delivery. This trend, in its turn, is an identifiabl stage in a much longer project, dating from the late 1970s, to import the discourse and practice of managers and management into the public sector in both the UK

What Is the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship?

15

and a number of other countries as a means of controlling costs and improving efficien y and effectiveness (Clarke & Newman, 1997). Thus sense making on the SQH is linked to frames of reference that operate across a much wider fiel of activity. Answer 3: It is structures located within and across organisations. The introduction of the SQH led to the formation of a number of new structures: three regional consortia located in the north, west and east of the country consisting of partnerships of universities with local authorities, validated work-based postgraduate programmes in the six universities involved, the appointment or assignation of the role of SQH co-ordinator to people in 32 local authorities, likewise roles of SQH course director and tutor in the participating universities and the identificatio of school staff as SQH candidates. Cohorts were formed annually to work with tutors, and network groups were set up within the local authorities. Field assessors were appointed and trained to undertake assessment and school visits. In schools, working parties were formed to carry forward the improvement projects that it was agreed SQH participants would lead and manage as part of the programme. An annual ceremony was instituted when certificates awarding the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship, were presented to successful candidates by a Minister for Education. A National SQH Consortia Group was formed to enable the three consortia to exchange ideas and co-ordinate developments. Besides these new structures dedicated to the SQH activity, the programme connects into others that are not dedicated to it, for example, structures for the validation and accreditation of courses in universities and human resource and financia management departments in local authorities. These structures are located both within and across the boundaries of a large number of organisations, and the nature and ‘closeness’ of the relationships between them varies. Whilst a number reflec the hierarchical organisation of educational services, within the activity itself, they are not part of a fi ed hierarchy. Power and control are distributed across the SQH structures and their directionality within the activity system is not clearly established. Answer 4: It is an interaction of people and things in various events. The local authority co-ordinators are involved in the selection and funding of candidates on the basis of a central allocation of grant from the Scottish Executive. In liaison with the university/universities within their local consortium, a calendar is agreed, and cohort groups are formed for the delivery of the taught part of the programme. The candidates’ headteachers are given training to act as supporter/mentors for candidates in their schools. Co-ordinators set up series of network meetings for their candidates. Later fiel assessors are appointed to assess the work of candidates. All these activities entail a number of events during which members of the various groups – candidates, local authority co-ordinators, headteacher supporters, course directors, tutors and fiel assessors – interact in pursuance of the SQH activity. Members of each of these groups share a particular and identifiabl role that they enact in relation to the SQH.

16

2

Describing Educating Systems

There are a number of things: books, forms, portfolios of evidence, reflect ve commentaries, articles, plans, websites, etc. which are inextricably part of the activity. Many exercise a form of agency within the SQH. The Standard is particularly powerful in this regard since it is fundamental to the way in which the programme is conceived and delivered (Reeves et al., 1998). It is used by candidates to argue for permission to undertake certain actions in their schools, or excuse such actions, on the grounds that the Standard ‘makes you’ (Reeves et al., 2003b:64). Other key artefacts are the Programme Guidelines, which lay out the curricular framework and the criteria for assessment; Unit Descriptors which specify the assignments which participants are required to complete; and the Guide to Assessment which forms the basis of the work of tutor and fiel assessors. These texts constitute the standard operating procedures of the programme and are therefore a material part of many SQH events. In addition, there are texts which are less central to the activity but nevertheless form part of the toolkit such as the core literature used on the various modules and the development plans produced in the candidates’ schools. SQH events consist of taught days for candidates, network meetings, school working party meetings, school visits by fiel assessors, online workshops, etc. These events take place at particular times, in particular places, involving particular people. Many of these people move from one type of event to another and back again, i.e. they participate in the activity in a number of different social spaces. For example a candidate may move from being involved in a taught day of workshops and discussions at the university with fellow candidates to a meeting of a school working party which is analysing the results of a pupil survey as part of a workbased project for the programme before going on to his/her next taught day. Both these types of events are provoked by/implicated in the SQH activity. A local authority co-ordinator may participate in a day of interviewing prospective candidates and later be involved in a meeting of their local consortium’s management committee. Field assessors move from being involved in training at a central location to assessing portfolios and commentaries in their own homes to making school visits and then meeting up centrally for moderation. All these events make up the variety of social spaces that are created in the pursuit of the SQH activity. Answer 5: It is a lived experience. It has a life – its own history. For the people involved in the activity it is a part of their life. It becomes an element in their professional identity. People enter the social spaces the SQH creates and inhabit them for a period. For example, there is a social space created for each cohort that is largely occupied by a group of students and their tutor. This space is both material and virtual for the whole of the time that the particular cohort is engaged in the SQH programme. As candidates, teachers are involved in this space until they graduate although some retain a connection through continuing to network informally with members of their cohort after completing the programme. Some may become reconnected with the SQH through gaining a headship and becoming a supporter or a fiel assessor. For other actors, such as tutors and local authority co-ordinators, the occupation of SQH spaces is more likely to be a significan element of their experience for a longer period of time. The nature of the spaces

What Is the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship?

17

that people occupy varies according to both their role and the particular contextual factors that affect it. Thus the activity is experienced in a variety of different ways by a range of differently situated actors. Its continuity is maintained despite a constant entering and exiting of people and their to-ing and fro-ing between different SQH spaces whilst they are engaged in the activity. Similarly its artefacts move between spaces whilst being subject to continual re-interpretation and modification The activity’s continuance is embedded in a set of identifiabl spatial practices and relations constituting a temporal, physical, ongoing structuration that is the SQH programme’s spatio-temporal ‘signature’. Answer 6: It is a system and a network. Once we begin to consider this particular practice-based learning course as a whole it makes sense to begin to describe it as a system, that is, as a whole made up of interrelated parts, since it is a complex set of interactions of people and things over time. As a system, the functions of the whole reside in the dynamic relationships between the parts, and, as Ackoff reminds us, there are added layers of complexity since A system, viewed structurally, is a divisible whole; but viewed functionally it is an indivisible whole in the sense that some of its essential properties are lost in taking it apart. The parts of a system may themselves be systems and every part of a system may be part of a larger system. . . . System performance depends critically on how the parts f t and work together, not merely on how well each performs independently; it depends on interactions rather than actions. (1980:27)

However, because the SQH has a sense making, semiotic function, it may also be conceived as a communication network, define by Monge and Contractor as ‘the patterns of contact that are created by the f ow of messages among communicators through time and space’ (2003:3). In this sense, pathways of communication are established by the activity that is governed by relatively predictable and stable relationships between the communicants, although the movements of information through a combination of people and things have a variety of levels of intensity and vary in their patterning in time in relation to some of the sub-activities. For example, assessment generates its own particular trajectories within the system at particular times within the year as the programme is performed.

The Parameters of Educating Systems This description of the SQH shows how complex an educating system is once you begin to explore its ramification in practice. The problem is therefore to develop a set of tools which enable a description of such a system, and others like it, that (a) plausibly preserves the complexity of what has been described and, in particular, a sense of the relations and movement between social spaces;

18

2

Describing Educating Systems

(b) is sufficientl fl xible to represent the differences between different educating systems without being unwieldy; and (c) provides a workable basis for reflectin upon and reviewing educating activities. What I propose to do in Part I of this book is to develop an array of tools for describing such systems that will meet these criteria. In order to do so it must be able to address the parameters identifie by the answers to the question: What is the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship? It must account for practice-based educating systems as the following: 1. Activities that have particular objects. A characteristic of an activity is that it has an object or goal, and it is the actions of the people who seek to achieve this object that delineate the nature of the activity. 2. Frameworks for sense making. Each educating system will have its own set of values embodied in its object and practices. This will be encoded into a local discourse used by members of the system to defin identities, for example, the respective roles and behaviour of educators and learners, the ways in which they should interact and what learners should be like when they exit the process. The discourse used by those engaged in the activity is also the basis for making sense of their actions and their object. It provides, through various pedagogic and associated artefacts, a system for the exchange, production and usage of knowledge. 3. Sets of connected spaces and structures within and across organisations. Although an activity system may be confine within a particular organisation or a particular grouping it often runs across such boundaries. Where such a system is bounded within a single organisation or community, it will still be composed of subsets, at the very least, in the case of educating systems, of educators and learners. Additionally those who engage in a particular educating system will also engage in other activities, which may or may not have a bearing on the educating system. Because educating systems often prepare people to enter other activity systems, for example, architects to enter the fiel of building and construction, they are, by their nature, likely to be permeable and permeating. 4. Patterns of interaction of people and things in events. Activities are carried out as events that form the basis of fixin when and where the actions that tend towards attaining the object take place. At these events, people interact with others to take action and with things (artefacts) that enable them to carry out those actions. 5. Lived experience in the patterning of space/time. Educating is a material activity that happens in time and space. For those involved, educating is bound up with their identities and the narrative of their own lives. It is experienced as an inhabited set of events not as an abstract category. It has a strong affective component. The experiences of the participants get built into the culture of the system and live on in its discursive practices. This

Developing a Descriptive Framework

19

material quality is preserved through the spatial practices by which the activity is maintained as a form or pattern of interrelationships. 6. Networked elements in wider systems of sense making. In a sense the sixth answer entails all the previous answers since systems and networks are characterised as complex, interacting, communicating parts. We are, however, talking here of human systems/networks which crucially involve sense making for those who are engaged in them. This means we are looking at changes in knowledge usage and production that is not necessarily the case for purely mechanical or biological systems.

Developing a Descriptive Framework Five Criteria Rather than returning to f rst principles I am going to proceed with my argument on the basis of a number of assumptions about the activity of educating: • fi st, that educating is a social activity and therefore concerned with the operation of collectives in, and across, spaces of interaction; • second, that educating is about interactions and relations between individuals, collectives and things (materials, locations, processes). • third, that educating is about making meaning and the exchange, creation, and use of knowledge; • fourth, that educating is centrally concerned with change and therefore it is a spatio-temporal process; and • fift , that educating is bound up with issues of power both within educating systems and the local field of practice to which they are attached. This view of educating distances my descriptive task from the usual body of learning theory that centres on individuals since it places an emphasis on the activity of collectives at different social sites. Using these f ve assumptions as criteria for developing a relevant analytic framework indicates that theoretical approaches based on social constructivism are most likely to have a bearing on my problem, since they seek to address the learning of collectives and of individuals as members of social groupings and, stemming from a rather different tradition, theories of organisational learning. Social constructivism, drawing on Marxist theory, has produced various offspring such as activity theory, situated learning and, following a slightly different trajectory into the fiel of semiotics and discourse analysis, actor network theory. Organisational learning theory, given its historical relationship to an individualistic psychology, has generally proved to be less well suited to my purposes, although it is increasingly being influence by socio-cultural approaches that give it greater relevance. There are also very clear links to systems theory and its

20

2

Describing Educating Systems

concern with relationality. However, the most immediate initial link through a concern for the interconnections between people, artefacts and action lies with mediated learning.

Mediated Learning Within the Marxist tradition Vygotsky’s work forms the foundation for social constructivist approaches to education. He proposed that human learning at the higher levels of cognitive functioning is mediated through language and signs and therefore based upon our social relationships. Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first on the social level; and later, on the individual level; f rst between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, logical memory, and the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals. (1978:57)

Vygotsky claimed that the cognitive capacities of children were constructed in interaction with the material world through the mediation offered by their teachers (1978), see Fig. 2.1. He placed a clear focus on the teacher and society as the force behind education using mediational means, of which the chief was language, to shape the understanding and conduct of learners. He pointed to an essentially dialogic process between the learner, the sense making tools made available to her and the material world as the basis for development (Daniels, 2001:64). The purpose of schooling he saw as promoting the development of higher mental functioning, or what he termed the internalisation of scientific as opposed to everyday, concepts on the part of children and young people. Thus he privileged socialisation, as the mediation of culture by adults to children, as the primary medium of human learning in contrast to constructivist researchers such as Piaget who emphasised the importance of the child’s direct interaction with the material world as the basis for the development of mental functions.

Fig. 2.1 Vygotsky’s triangle

Developing a Descriptive Framework

21

Leont’ev (1978) applied Vygotsky’s psychological insights to human activity at a more general level. Translating the social mediation of meaning to contexts of collective action he emphasised the role of activity in shaping the culture and consciousness of its participants, including their identities. He saw social action as a series of activity systems that are formed as a result of people engaging in collaborative action to pursue an overarching purpose (object) using tools (meditational means) that are adapted to its achievement. Within these systems there is a differential engagement of participants (subjects) who take on a variety of roles (division of labour) that are construed as contributing towards the fulfilmen of the object. The power of this formulation lies in foregrounding practice as the site of learning and alerting us to the way in which different forms of activity produce different constructions of conduct and knowledge embedded in the use of different arrays of artefacts or tools. There is a similarity here with Dewey’s (1973) pragmatic formulation of learning through enquiry and reflectio on experience, learning by doing, but a greater privileging of the concept of person-with-tool as agent. The discursive, semiotic nature of human activity identifie by Vygotsky and Leont’ev was extrapolated by Bakhtin’s work on the functions of language (1981). This provides a broader framework for the dialectics at play in the development of practice by emphasising the complex layerings of language and social groupings within any given society. According to this analysis, whilst people in France may generally speak French, within this broad language ‘community’ there are innumerable variants, or social languages, which are distinctive to the activity of different groupings. These groups use their own form of ‘jargon’ as the basis of interaction, and each of these dialects, or discourses, carries with it a particular view of the world. Thus Bakhtin points to a discursive multiplicity, associating different language forms and culture with variations in human practice. Furthermore, each of us may participate in a variety of such groupings, thus adopting a number of different identities, some of which may be based upon irreconcilable views of the world. Bakhtin claims that so long as we compartmentalise our lives according to these different activities this ‘multi-lingualism’ causes us no problems. However, if these discourses and activities are mixed together for some reason, they can open up a clash of ideas and practices, which force us to either reach a new accommodation between contesting positions or refute one or the other. Bakhtin gives the example of a peasant who prayed to God in one language ( . . .) sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third, and, when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried speaking yet a fourth (. . .) As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that these were not only various different languages but even internally variegated languages, that the ideological systems and approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected to these languages contradicted each other and could in no way live in peace and quiet with each other – then the inviolability and predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of actively choosing one’s orientation among them began. (ibid:295/6)

22

2

Describing Educating Systems

The Russian tradition of socio-cultural theory has informed three contemporary schools of thought concerned with the examination of practice as the location of learning, or coming to know: situated learning, activity theory and actor network theory each of which has built upon Vygotsky’s basic triad of persons, meditational means and object-related action (Fig. 2.1).

Situated Learning Situated learning has been largely elaborated and popularised by Wenger, based upon the outcomes of research into various forms of apprenticeship undertaken in the 1980s (Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991). For Lave and Wenger learning and competence are part of activity not some form of portable, abstracted knowledge internalised in individual minds. Rather knowledge as capability is manifest in collaborative action where understanding and experience are in constant interaction and mutually constitute each other in a given collective or community of practice. Wenger’s (1998) major concern has been to provide a description of how these communities of practice function. His attention, given his interest in socialisation, continues to be based on the experiences of newcomers entering and achieving recognition as a member of a community of practice. In this sense, his model is innately conservative, since it functions to ensure the replication and reproduction of practice by individuals rather than to accommodate change on the part of the collective. Although Wenger argues for the essential instability of practice claiming that the twin processes of participation and reification which underpin the making of meaning through activity, can somehow be sufficientl disturbed to bring about change, he provides very little in terms of evidence as to why and how this actually happens. However, the claim that since practice has to be continually reproduced it is open to variation is not sufficien to ensure that significan alterations are likely to occur. Social selection, within its own context, is nearly as efficien at weeding out unwanted variations as natural selection (Strauss, 1997). Wenger is relatively uninterested in the purpose of activity or the content of action. Indeed, in some ways he writes of communities of practice as almost utopian ends in themselves (1998:134) perhaps because his empirical focus has largely been on learning in either traditional or informal exemplars of collectives. Communities of practice by his account therefore function as relatively isolated and autonomous entities. Wenger’s lack of attention to the role of tools leads him to disregard ties to institutions and organisations, and because these constraints are not in view, he overplays the capacity of such collectives to operate as sites for new learning. Additionally, since situated learning centres around initiation, movement with regard to knowledge is limited. Trajectories apply largely to individuals either coming to know by acquiring the competences of the collective, or losing these competences, and hence are define either as a movement from periphery to centrality in terms of communal practice or vice versa. Of the three approaches examined here, Wenger’s emphasis on identity change as a central measure of the learning of subjects is both important and something

Developing a Descriptive Framework

23

that the other two schools tend to ignore. He also points to the place of affective elements in processes of being and becoming within social settings. However, consistent with the boundedness of his conception of community, he seems to provide a relatively simple account of identity. The notion that one’s work identity is unitary and omnipresent is questionable and again part and parcel of reifying a community of practice as a largely self-directed and self-contained enterprise. For much the same reason, he pays little account to the division of labour since what distinguishes between individuals is their level of engagement in a community rather than the nature of that engagement; in that sense communities of practice are exclusionary of difference. This leads him to an essentially politically quiescent account of learning which is perhaps what makes the theory so very attractive in managerial circles.

Activity Theory Building on the earlier work of Leont’ev (1978), Engestrom and his followers have retained the distinction between subject and object, stating of the latter: The object is a heterogeneous and internally contradictory, yet enduring, constantly reproduced purpose of a collective activity system that motivates and define the horizon of possible goals and actions. (Engestrom et al., 2003:307)

In these terms, the exploration of collective learning and knowledge creation lies in following what happens to the object during activity. Engestrom continues to assert the Marxist case that it is contradictions and anomalies that occur within an activity system that lead to disturbance and result in learning as part of ‘the expansion of the meaning of the object’ (Engestrom, 2001:136, 1999). Expansive learning is therefore an internal process. The explanation that contradictions arise naturally over time in a closed system is fairly unconvincing. It has echoes in much of the literature on organisational learning where change supposedly originates when organisational members confront and work on problems and in so doing create new practices (Senge, 1990; Fullan & Steigelbauer, 1991). Based on the pragmatics of learning through enquiry, models such as Lewin’s action research cycle (1952) and its various adaptations have been developed as the basis for managing organisational development. However, the attribution of change to people’s response to ‘problems’ is as unconvincing as the notion of contradictions. People in their habitual practice tend not to fin and respond to problems if they can possibly help it (Mintzberg, 1994). Since the capacity to operate in social settings crucially depends upon one’s ability to predict and understand the behaviour of others and to reciprocate within the same norms change is generally resisted as a threat to the capacity for collaborative action. The power of social conformity is well attested by research in the fiel of psychology (Strauss, 1997; Baron & Kerr, 2003). As with situated learning, the problem of accounting for changes in practice as an outcome of collective learning lies in delineating ‘tight’ boundaries for an activity system. This is the case even though the scale here is

24

2

Describing Educating Systems

very different from that of situational learning, since systems in activity theory are conceived as operating across a whole fiel of activity on ‘an historical’ timescale. In contrast to this theoretical position, the empirical work of activity theorists indicates that interference and difference are more characteristic of knowledge creation and development than internal contradictions in relation to collectives. More recently Engestrom et al. (2003) have proposed that interactions between activity systems should become the basic unit of analysis using the notion of boundary crossing and boundary objects developed by symbolic interactionists (Strauss, 1997) to describe the meeting of social worlds as a source of change. Adopting an approach called Developmental Work Research, activity theorists have taken to provoking expansive learning through their own interventions. On the basis of research-informed workshops, largely undertaken in multi-professional settings (Daniels et al., 2007), there has been an increasing emphasis in their writing on the role of ‘boundary objects’ as purposes that potentially form a basis for bridging across different activities to form hybrid systems (Pirkkalainen & Kaatrakoski, 2007). There is a puzzle here, since the original conceptualisation of an activity system was on such a grand scale, as to what an activity system constitutes in terms of scale of operation. Additionally the researchers’ accounts of their interventions demonstrate the role of difference in provoking change and learning, but this has not lead to them to paying much attention to roles and identities, that is, to the division of labour which was an essential element in Leont’ev’s original conception. Interestingly, they have investigated identity in terms of the ‘object’, in this case in the form of the trajectory of a patient within the care system, but they have not applied the same attention to the actors or subjects of the activity. In many ways there seems to be growing gap between their theoretical tools and their accounts of their empirical work where the former fail to account for the complexity and dynamism of sense making that is often amply illustrated in the latter.

Actor Network Theory Actor network theory (ANT) emphasises the role of discourses, incorporated as people, texts, tools and venues, in the formation and transformation of knowledge. This is both a strength and a weakness. It is very helpful in directing attention to the material evidence of ideational connections and relationships, and the complex entwinings of concepts, people, actions and things. Through attention to the movement and transformation of data it also surfaces the politics of changing practice and knowledge creation. However, it is unhelpful in that, by making ‘a whole’ of actants, both human and non-human, and a network it tends to obviate any need for further investigation as to the relations between the components of these entities. Indeed, because of a radical concern not to essentialise entities, researchers such as Latour actively discourage any such endeavour. There is therefore a tendency, recognised by its proponents, for the notion of an actor network to become something so all-encompassing that it loses descriptive value. In addition, by tracking meanings

Developing a Descriptive Framework

25

that are transformed and changed over time, dynamics tend to be limited to a single spatial trajectory, where the key is the transposition of a singularity, whether as concept or thing. Law (1999) recognises these dilemmas and the need to look at issues of form, in terms of the topology of actor networks, as a way forward. ANT is in many ways the most promising approach of the three for my purposes because it focuses on movement in space and time. By following people and artefacts and tracking action through and across different social spaces researchers in the fiel of science studies have developed a convincing account of how knowledge is made. Their picture of the transposition and development of knowledge is messier and more contingent than that offered by situated learning. They also bear witness to the multiple and often contested nature of identities and their inseparability from artefacts and performance. The notion of the actant/actor as a compound of person and tools is particularly useful as it points to the connection between the multiple identities held by persons and the phenomenon of the continual hybridisation of tools and practices that is so characteristic of our current experience (Giddens, 1991). The concept of an actant lends support to Bakhtin’s proposition of multiple social languages. Through a strict attention to materiality and the use of discursive analysis ANT researchers follow the process of mobilising knowledge, examining the material transformations that information goes through in the course of its transposition from location to location (Latour, 1987, 1999). This reinforces the notion of the interaction and interpenetration of competing discourses and groupings as an engine for changes in knowledge and practice that matches rather better with the messy characteristics of the process than does the notion of contradictions. It also provides some explanation of the kind of phenomena Engestrom et al. (2003) are exploring when they look at points of interaction between different activity systems where their account bears witness to the variety of interpretations of reality revealed in these encounters. Similarly Mol makes the claim that ANT has reshaped ontology ‘by underlining that the reality we live in is one performed by a variety of practices’ (1999:74). However, actor network theorists’ emphasis on change and mobility tends to push the influenc of structure into the background in many of their accounts although this is not always the case (De Laet, 2000). Indeed Latour has claimed (2005) that studies should be confine to exploring the new and emergent rather than focusing upon established forms of practice on the grounds that sociologists have been too ready to identify ‘structures’ in the past without having done the necessary empirical work on which to base these categorisations.

Mapping Techniques Whilst the Russo-European tradition provides a number of useful ways of meeting the f rst, second and fift of the criteria on our list, there are resources to be drawn upon from other disciplines that are helpful in addressing our third and fourth criteria and in providing additional clues to meeting the first These resources relate to the exploration of spatiality, relationality and sense making, all three of which are linked through the application of mapping techniques. Cartography is used to

26

2

Describing Educating Systems

represent relations of place in space; graphing is used to explore networked relations and discourse analysis; and semiotics use mapping to track relations between ideas in the formation of frames of meaning. Spatiality Notions of spatiality are critical to the endeavour to create a means of describing educating systems. Space can be conceived in a number of ways: as place, for instance, a classroom; as temporal as in, ‘I have a space in my diary for - -’; or, combining both, as a material space of interaction involving both people and things (Goffman, 1959, 1974; Nespor, 1994; Massey, 2005). It is this latter sense of space where location and time are linked to the idea of social action that particularly concerns me in this book. As such social space is something made in performance since time and space (location) are inseparable elements of movement and activity. These spaces are embodied and material in that they are both ‘peopled’ and ‘thinged’ since they involve the use of linguistic and other, more obviously material, tools. Such spaces are also material in time, in that activity has both a duration and a location, although the use of electronic media stretches the meaning of these terms. In such a contextualised or lived space a person acts in conjunction with others who also act in that space. For instance, the classroom (as place) is a context that, in part, constitutes the space where teachers and pupils enact school teaching and learning on the basis of a set of norms and values that shape the way of doing educating that governs their interactions. Because this type of space is a product of performance it is open to change since its ‘maintenance’ depends upon repetitions that are subject to contingencies (Deleuze, 1994; Bergson, 2002). For instance, in our example, on each occasion when the teacher and the pupils meet in the classroom for the time allotted by the timetable they re-perform the space of teaching and learning. Necessarily, however, this can never be done exactly as it was before or exactly as it may be done in the future. The class activity creates a repetitive spatial patterning opening up when members of this particular activity set are together and closing again when they disperse. In such patterned spaces, created by repeated interactions, there will be a tendency to normalise behaviour so that those using the space create a predictable environment. In our example, this adherence to a set of norms is not only constantly policed within the class group but also enforced by practices emanating from other locations within the wider activity system. For instance, the working of the school’s disciplinary procedures would be one of the interpenetrating technologies in this case. Because social space is created through the enaction, or putting into practice, of a particular discourse requiring obedience to certain rules of proper behaviour and practice, it is also inextricably linked with identity. Social spaces are locations where identity is formed and maintained, for instance, in our example as ‘school teacher’ and as ‘pupil’. As we have already noted a person’s identity, in the social constructivist tradition derived from symbolic interactionism, is the result of negotiation between the individual and the collective in such a space of interaction (Berger & Luckman, 1967; Gergen, 1989; Jenkins, 1996). The notion of a social space as

Developing a Descriptive Framework

27

governed by a particular discourse plainly links with Bakhtin’s ideas concerning heteroglossia as the capacity each of us has to use a variety of social languages or discourses. These discursive variants can therefore provide textual markers of change and movement as persons travel between social locations using different textual tools or languages as part of their everyday lives, for example, as someone moves between spaces where she is a teacher, a football player and a sister. Each of these three identities entails the enaction of different aspects of the person accompanied by different arrays of artefacts, shaped in order to meet the accountabilities, norms and expectations attached to the different social spaces to which they relate. This relationship between activity and social space raises the possibility of mapping activity as space thereby affording a means of visualising the relations between spaces produced by different activities and, if time can be factored into the mapping, of studying the changing patterns, or structurations and forms, that are produced by practices. Relationality There is branch of study, based on tracking relations between pairs of entities and of representing these mathematically, known as graph theory. Nodes or entities in a particular collection can be discriminated one from another on the basis of: • the number, directionality and nature of their ties; • whether or not they are directly linked to each other; and • their closeness or distance from each other in the particular array, or network, that constitutes the object of study. These relationships can also be represented graphically (visually). Graph theory has obvious applications in the fiel of communications, and it has also been used for the analysis of social networks (Scott, 2000; Carrington et al., 2005), although its application in social studies has, until recently, been relatively limited except in the fiel of information technology where it has increasingly been used to explore features of web-based networks (Muller et al., 2008). Mapping networks provides a visual means of tracking the various pathways by which organisations and people are connected and hence of evidencing of lines of influenc that fl w across them. For example, it has been used in exploring relational bases for the power of key families such as the Medici in fifteenth-centur Florence (Padgett & Ansell, 1993) and as a way of examining the rise to power of the Solidarity Movement in Poland (Osa, 2003). Visual graphing can be seen as one way of realising Latour’s (2005) metaphor of ‘flattenin out’ the social to preserve the track of relationalities across sites and times. An insistence on two-dimensionality, by pedantically exposing the material workings of relations between contexts of activity, would, he argues, discourage sociologists from making facile assumptions about social structures. However, similar objections apply to the use of graphing to explore social networks with Mische (2003) claiming that the types of relations used, such as

28

2

Describing Educating Systems

membership of organisations, fail to get to grips with exactly what ‘membership’ signifie in terms of practice. As a result, she claims that presumptions are made about influenc and affiliatio that go well beyond what the data can support. Recent studies of the Web touch on other aspects of network formation which tend to be elided in this form of analysis. They attest to the importance of the affective dimension in the structuration of networks, networks thrive only in the light of the actions, strategies and perceptions of individuals embedded in them. (. . .) Social drives, desires, interests and attitudes are fundamental aspects of how links are made. (Shadbolt & Berner-Lee, 2008:62)

Nevertheless the notion of a visual representation of synchronous relations within networked systems is helpful as a means of exposing the connections and relays between entities and systems. Bearing in mind Mische’s and Latour’s criticisms this needs to be done with careful attention to the empirical content and material occurrence of these relations. Sense Making Unravelling the nature of relations in practice is essential to describing educating systems in spatio-temporal terms. Since making sense of the world is at the heart of learning, it follows that tracking this process is critical in any attempt to provide a description of educating. In order to do this, it is necessary to pay due attention to the ‘content’ of activity, to what it consumes, uses and produces in ideational terms. Central to this is attention to discourses as characterised by particular patternings of concepts that are used within given forms of practice (Phillips & Jorgenson, 2002). Most of the evidence for discursive patterns, or articulations, of ideas is textual. By analysing the type of discourse used in texts associated with an activity and its constituent conceptual articulations, we can gauge whether and how frames of meaning travel between spaces and how they are preserved, developed or lost in the course of activity. In so doing, careful attention to the relations between texts is critical – who quotes what, cites what, or borrows what, provides a set of markers for changes in sense making. How authors, as writers and speakers, construct their frames of reference provides evidence for the type of knowledge being used and created in the course of action. For instance, Wodak’s (2000) study of decision making in relation to European Union employment policy demonstrates how such pasting and cutting in the making of a text reflect activity as members of a working group negotiate and compromise in order to reach agreement. Equally we need to know how these texts are used in activity, what their different genres signify and perform and how they both provoke and are involved in action. Potter and Wetherall cite a study that demonstrated how scientists used markedly different, and contradictory, discourses to describe their activities according to context: In the formal paper experimental results suggest a model – in the interview the central idea of the model becomes a dramatic revelation. Moreover, the results described as doing the suggesting in the paper are described in the interview as being produced from the intuitively formulated model. (1987:148)

Developing a Descriptive Framework

29

Thus according to one genre of report, science progresses from the empirical to the abstract and imagined, whereas, in another form, the account is quite the opposite, and it is imagination that provokes the empirical enquiry, the purpose of which is to demonstrate that a particular hunch is true. This emphasises the complexity of the discursive issues involved in looking at text and the importance of understanding its relation to its audience. Practices are institutionalised, and memorised, often in a textual form, in routines and procedures. March’s work on organisational intelligence shows that most organisations function on the basis of behaviours that are legitimated by becoming encoded in established procedures. organizations are seen as learning by encoding inferences from history that guide behaviour. The generic term routines includes forms, rules, procedures, conventions, strategies and technologies around which organisations are constructed and through which they operate. (1999:76)

Such artefacts not only encode learning which has already occurred but may also carry the power to provoke further learning since they provide the means whereby ideas are made mobile and usable across space and time (Giddens, 1990). For instance, a notable feature of the pedagogy of New Public Management has been the introduction of artefacts such as occupational standards, targets and performance indicators, allied to processes of assessment, as instruments for altering the practice of public service professionals (Mahony & Hextall, 2000). Changes in the nature and content of such artefacts therefore provide indications of changes in practice in collectives. Recent work on organisational learning emphasises that whilst some sort of shock to the system is a feature of change, events in themselves, even if they are problematic, are unlikely to bring about learning unless they are accompanied by theorisation that simplifie and distils proposed new practices and legitimises their effects: The importance of theorisation is likely to be especially acute in mature or highly structured settings (for instance, highly professional settings), where the boundaries of occupational communities and the templates of appropriate organisational forms are well established and structured. (Greenwood et al., 2002:61)

Greenwood et al.’s observations mark a recognition of the political and conceptual work involved in changing practice considerations of which have been notable in their absence from standard texts on organisational learning and change. This form of work is generated by the inherent conservatism of social interaction that requires that we continually account for ourselves as behaving in conformity with established norms and beliefs (Weick, 1995; Edwards, 1997). For instance Dunne notes that ‘discursive articulation is a pervasive requirement of practice which gets particularly sharp when we are looking at change’ (2005:370). Increased theorisation is symptomatic of the intensificatio of accounting practices that occurs when alterations in activity are attempted. Changes in practice require us to engage in argumentation, demonstration and justificatio to explain ourselves and establish a

30

2

Describing Educating Systems

warrant for our new behaviours that will maintain our credit in the eyes of our fellows. There is thus a strong political element involved in practitioner learning which is detectable textually in increases in rhetorical activity. On this basis, the tools of discourse analysis, in particular tools for tracking intertextuality, are essential for understanding the content of activity and the dynamic of the relations between actors, social spaces and networked systems.

Discussion All three of the schools of thought that relate most closely to the problem of describing the dynamic relational systems that I wish to tackle retain the Vygotskian triad in that the phenomena they are interested in are the relations between people, things and action in, and over, time. All are concerned with learning and change and social spaces of one form or another. Returning to my f ve criteria, it seems to me that what is required is some way of looking at action over time and across locations that stays with ANT’s commitment to attending to the materiality of activity as a productive approach to de-constructing the commonplace and the complex. ANT’s other major strength is its capacity to identify and track connections across spaces and structures through paying attention to the way in which knowledge is transformed and re-contextualised, i.e. by attending to the content of action and emphasising the importance of tools. In so doing, it provides a means of tackling problems of scale by radically localising them. ANT’s commitment to materiality helps here in that researchers adopting this approach emphasise that one is essentially bound to looking locally. Even at the level of a global organisation practice is ‘localised’ in particular sets of events, involving particular people and things in particular places at particular times (De Laet, 2000). In that sense, Latour’s geographical notion of a fla landscape also aligns with the work on social networks, communications networks and social movements (Scott, 2000; Monge & Contractor, 2003; Diani & McAdam, 2003; Carrington et al., 2005). Localism touches on the problem of scale and the common practice of assuming that accumulations of power are a phenomenon of the macro as opposed to the micro level of social activity. Power and influence in ANTic terms, is not a matter of bigger, more inclusive structures containing smaller ones, but one of relationality. Conceptually this is a significan move in that it requires a much more sceptical attitude to the notion of boundaries and boundedness; indeed, it opens up commonsense notions of concrete structures with fi ed territorialities to question. In so doing, it does not fi comfortably with conventional hierarchical means of ordering descriptions – given the caveat that this does not by any means justify discounting the place of hierarchy in discourses of practice. Haraway’s (1991) insistence on privileging situativity in accounts is crucial in this regard in that if we are looking at complex relationships in a matrix of networks of dynamic systems, then describing where we are looking from, as researchers, should be attempted as accurately as possible because our positioning affects what we see.

Discussion

31

One of the problems with ANT arises from its strength, which is that in ‘following the actors’ in pursuit of new knowledge it tends to present a unidirectional trajectory that is without repetitions, whereas many connections in the course of practice are multi-directional and spatially repetitive. Latour recognises this is the case but nevertheless believes researchers should confin themselves to the new and emergent in order to avoid the essentialising effects of looking at established systems, i.e. that the idea of organisations attaches to assumptions that obscure how organising is done (Law, 1994). Activity theory is more relevant in this regard because it centres on the operation of systems and therefore accommodates the notion of repetition and collaborative action around the pursuit of an object. The incorporation of the idea of contestation in the formulation of boundary objects at the point of interference between activity systems allows for a more obviously political account of learning and change processes. The notion of interference also provides a means of exploring the politics of change – in that sense it would combine very fruitfully with ANT’s attention to tracking connectivity and the dissolution of boundaries. Situated learning offers a certain antidote to ANT’s attention to the new and emergent and brings into play, in the emphasis on identity, greater attention to the affective aspects of practice-focused learning. One of the major difficultie with all three positions is that none of them have developed effective means of representation for the relations that they implicate in learning processes. Having asserted the importance of action over time and its location none of the three schools has devised a way of describing this other than in the form of narratives, which, as a genre, set their own, marked, restrictions on the description of data. The other major gap lies in the conception of the subject. Although Leontev’s definitio of activity depended on the analysis of the division of labour in the pursuit of an object by a group of people, all of the approaches I have examined tend to assume a basic homogeneity in participation at the level of collectivities involved in collaborative action. Again, ANT accounts are best at surfacing the political undercurrents of change but do not really provide a way of getting to grips with issues of identity, and the narrative form of the trajectory is quite limiting in this regard. Nespor tackles the issue to an extent in considering students as key actants in his book Knowledge in Motion (1994), but again this consists of a comparison of single-track trajectories within traditional subject-based undergraduate courses. Action that generates a multiplicity of actants that pursue varied trajectories is not easily accommodated within a narrative form. Activity theorists are very good at pointing to the multiplicity inherent in the objects of activity but tend to overlook the very similar issues that apply to subjects, those who are involved in pursuing the activity. Without some representation of space and time much of this is lost from view. In that sense, I agree with Law’s definitio of activity as mess (2004), although I suspect that what we are looking at are the endless variations in form that can be achieved through relatively simple means, i.e. that an infinit variety of networked systems are all the outcomes of relations between people and things in time and space and that the crucible for the formation and repetition of these relationalities are events.

32

2

Describing Educating Systems

I am going to pick my way through this set of problems by adopting the terms ‘system’ and ‘network’, meaning by the former repeating patterns of activity in an identifiabl locale that result from the pursuit of a particular object and by the latter arrays of systems that are connected together. These are merely working definition because I am not concerning myself, at this stage, as to whether what counts as a network and what counts as a system is a matter of scale. Indeed, the quote from Ackoff indicates the position I tend to favour, that there are: systems; of systems; of systems. However, I need these words because I am not going to ‘follow actors’ across a fiel of activity but rather to attempt to describe localised activities. Thus I shall not try to track all the connections between the activities that are the object of my studies and the hubs and nodes within the fiel to which they are attached. I am going to stay much more in one place revealing, as far as I can, given this localised approach, where those connections lie and the effects they have on the educating systems that are the focus of my attention.

Conclusion Scoping the parameters for the development of an adequate apparatus for the analysis and representation of educating systems shows that there is a tantalising mix of congruence and heterogeneity in terms of theoretical models and methods for investigating and describing social practices. The discussion has revealed some useful starting points for meeting the criteria that were identifie as critical to developing a more inclusive framework for description. Summarising where we have got in regard to the list, the f rst, second, third and fift of our original criteria have been addressed to a varying extent through the use of some of the theoretical resources that we have examined. However, we are still relatively poorly equipped to meet the terms of the fourth criterion. The latter part of the discussion has centred on ways of describing change processes in spatial and visual terms that go beyond the limitations of narrative as a representational format. This leaves us with the question of whether it is possible, through adopting a spatio-temporal approach, to derive a better means of exploring the dynamic aspects of systems and of representing their functioning as non-replicating ‘repetitions’. Both of these goals relate to the ability to investigate the production of space in the performance of educating. This is essentially a structural issue but not, perhaps, in the way we normally frame social structures. It would be an attempt to look at processes of structuration as performance, i.e. to focus on ephemeral spaces that come and go and change with activity. Successfully adopting this approach would also enable us to cast light on the contentious question of agency in relation to educating and to investigate the relationships between individuals and collectivities in changing practice and associated processes of knowledge creation and exchange in a new way.

Chapter 3

The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

Introduction This chapter is about the f rst stage of mapping networked activity systems, relational mapping, which is a means of representing the relations, transmission points and relays that run between and across educating systems. I want to begin to develop the tool set for mapping by positioning the operation of local educating systems within the wider context of educating as a fiel of activity. There are therefore two main objectives for the chapter: f rst, to provide some delineation of the types of systems involved in educating activity and second, to begin the process of building representations of the operation of networked systems within this particular field The chapter begins by exploring some of the general features of educating and the relationship this activity has to various discourses that are characteristic of educational contexts. In so doing, it identifie four broad categories of educating systems that use socialising, schooling and developmental and contagious pedagogic strategies to shape the behaviour of learners. The f rst two strategies are characterised as assimilative, since learners are taken into the space of their educators, whilst the two latter strategies are characterised as invasive, in that the educators move into the learners’ territory. The case study that forms the background for extending this discussion is about the introduction of an organisational learning strategy into a local authority’s education service. The account begins the analytical task by looking at how two particular local educating systems sought to establish frameworks for sense making that would alter the practice of teachers in schools and how these systems were materially connected to one another in contestation over practice. The case illustrates the conceptual and political work that was involved in attempting to shape practice through the use of an invasive, developmental strategy on the part of the local authority’s senior management team. Last, the discursive analysis of the case study data is used to derive a horizontal section or a relational map through this local network. A map that shows some of the key discursive relays and relations between the activity systems that were germane to the progress of educating at this particular location. The relational map is based on the use of a number of conventions that will be built upon and refine in the next chapter as a way of mapping educating activity over time. J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3_3, 

33

34

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

Educating as a Field of Activity It may seem odd to choose the word ‘educating’ to describe the practice of those systems with which I am concerned when ‘learning’ is the term in common use. However, I believe it is necessary to make a distinction between learning and educating. There is an intentionality about the process of educating which is lacking in the notion of learning. Educating brings the dimension of power into the discussion, which is critical to describing most people’s experience of formal, and informal, learning − educating is something that is done unto people, as well as with them. Whilst an educating system shares with a learning system processes of knowledge usage and creation on the part of those involved in it, educating as a practice is concerned with altering those who become educated. In educating systems, certain organisations, groups and individuals deliberately set about changing the behaviour and attitudes of other individuals, groups and organisations. Educators seek to affect learners’ sense of themselves and the world around them in ways that they, the educators, regard as valuable. Thus, educating, as an activity, involves an intention to transform, shape and convert in line with certain values, which is not a necessary aspect of the broader phenomenon of learning; this does not, of course, preclude an educating system, or those involved in it, from learning. On these grounds, apparently open statements such as ‘enabling every child to achieve his or her potential’ rest upon often unquestioned assumptions about how ‘enabling’, ‘female/male’ ‘child’ as ‘learner’, ‘achievement’ and ‘potential’ are to be performed in practice. Thus the use of the term educating exposes the role of educators to scrutiny, whereas the use of the term learning tends to hide the role of these actors from view. The business of educating has grown exponentially in the last 50 years. Within the fiel (Bourdieu, 1977), there is some commonality in the nature of the activity, in the roles and relationships between people and in the use and form of the artefacts which are part of it though nothing is fi ed or uniform. What can be specifie is that there are educators who generally conceive themselves to have knowledge and skills that those to whom they relate as learners lack. The object of the educators is to transmit, transfer and support the acquisition of this knowledge and skill by the learners. As an outcome of educating, the expectation is that the learners will change, and they will acquire the relevant knowledge and skill and become more competent. There is thus a common narrative for learners of engaging with the activity and ‘graduating’ from it as ‘transformed’ persons. A time of entry, a duration of engagement and a time of exit characterise the experience of being educated. Often this progression is marked symbolically as in ceremonies of initiation and certification This common educational narrative relates to another feature of educating which is that the to-be-educated must move, or be moved, from a space of familiarity into a new space, a space of educating, one where they do not know initially how to conduct themselves. Given this narrative of formation and associated processes of movement and becoming, educating also carries a high affective charge. The educators seek to make the goal of educating desirable for the learners, something that will tempt them to

Educating as a Field of Activity

35

move into the activity and participate fully once they have done so within the terms of the discourse that the activity promotes. However, since the to-be-educated are not always fully persuaded of this, coercive strategies are also commonly employed by educators to achieve their ends. Students undergoing compulsory education or workers being pressured to adopt new working practices may be unconvinced about the desirability of becoming educated, giving rise to conflic and friction. There is a ‘painful’ feature that is a characteristic of all forms of educating, since they are processes aimed at the change and transformation of someone’s, or some group’s, practice; they are also about the elimination of previous practice. Educating therefore entails, to a varying extent, the dissolution, as well as the creation of forms of activity, for those who are positioned as learners (Fullan & Steigelbauer, 1991). It exerts pressure and excites resistance both because it can be construed as a repudiation of a former self and because doing and being what you know how to do and be often feels less risky and uncomfortable than learning how to do and be something different. This has to be balanced against the excitement of learning and the desire to grow and change. Where educating is perceived as an imposition, those who are subject to the activity will attempt to resist or subvert the intentions of the educators. The impulse to become educated is thus a mixture of necessity, or pressure to change, and desire as in the pursuit of a vision of a better future to be secured through becoming educated. There are innumerable systems and subsystems within the fiel of educating where people and things are variously positioned. An activist who believes that global warming must be controlled may not see attempting to persuade people on the street to change their behaviour as part of the activity of educating. A plasterer working with a new labourer may not defin herself as involved in the business of educating when showing the recruit how the plaster mix should look and feel, whereas, under other circumstances, this activity might be formalised as education through a recognised apprenticeship linked to attendance at college. For others their engagement in the fiel is more clear-cut. A lecturer in a university is well aware that she is employed to teach other people, designated as students, in an institution whose core business is education. Thus the educator side of a system may appear to be relatively simple and informal or it may clearly be formalised as part of an elaborate technology involving national, or even international, organisations specialising in functions such as assessment and the specificatio of curricula.

A Typology for Educating Systems Educating can be characterised by a number of types of systems. In the f rst instance, human beings are inducted into social practice by their parents and/or other adult carers. The pedagogic strategies of socialising are both ancient and familiar in the form of mentoring and apprenticeship practices, such as those that were central to the operation of craft guilds in medieval Europe. The socialisation process is at the centre of Lave and Wenger’s description of situated learning (1991) and Vygotsky’s

36

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

notion of mediation (1978). Essentially learning takes place through the progressive engagement of the learner in the practice of the educating group accompanied by a movement of the person being educated from the periphery as apprentice towards greater centrality in the community of practice as master. Nowadays such learning has been technicised in many organisations through the adoption of formal managerial procedures: job descriptions, standards, performance reviews and the setting of targets where line managers progressively seek to induct organisational members through various ‘stages in their career’ within organisations. This latter strategy represents the use of a mix of socialising and developmental strategies together marking the extension of the period in which organisational members are classed as to-be-educated beyond initial induction. A second category of educating system is that created by organisations and collectives whose business it is to provide education for large groups of people or even whole sectors of a population. A schooling organisation such as a university sets out to educate people, through a knowledge system divided into subjects, to engage with a wide range of activities such as engineering, fin arts, biological sciences, media studies and business management. Religious, military and state institutions have been the major sponsors of this category of organisation. Nurseries, schools, universities and colleges require the attendance of people on their own premises, in the case of children and young people often compulsorily, in order to educate them. For school pupils and undergraduates, the educating process is popularly predicated on preparing them to handle the transition to adult worker and citizen based upon the acquisition of systematised bodies of knowledge. More recently continuing professional development, now characterised as an aspect of lifelong learning, is intended to transform an adult’s practice and either send them back whence they came as a more effective practitioner or enable them to change their occupation. Even in the case of e-learning and distance learning students still enter a space that is constructed by their educators. Besides a state’s designated education services, other public services may also carry out schooling functions. For instance, a health service may have specialists engaged in rehabilitation, occupational or cognitive behaviour therapy. In addition to the provision of education as a state-sponsored public service, there are companies and independent organisations which specialise in providing training, counselling and consultancy as well as divisions or groups within organisations whose purpose is to educate other organisational members in-house. A third type of educating system, popularised in the latter half of the twentieth century, sets out to manage change and bring about improvements in practice through the use of pedagogies such as performance indicators, target setting, strategic planning, action research, reflect ve practice, change agency, and consultancy. Here the emphasis is on re-structuring the activity spaces that people currently perform, or occupy, rather than taking them out of their usual environment and placing them in educating spaces that are new to them – although this too may be part of an overall plan for improvement. Often characterised as a strategy adopted by those at the top of an organisational hierarchy to transform the practice of organisational members lower down the pecking order, this form of educating system is

Educating as a Field of Activity

37

associated with managerialism and carries labels such as ‘scientifi management’, ‘organisational learning’ in ‘the learning organisation’, or ‘total quality management’. It also permeates the fiel of international economic and social development where, in developing countries, groups characterised as less skilled, knowledgeable and capable are to be assisted to improve their practice through the educational actions and technologies of those with greater technical ‘expertise’ and ‘competence’ (Parfitt 2002; Satterthwaite, 2003). Because developmentalism, linked to therapy, is based on the idea of improvement, it often has moral overtones, and responsibility is easily projected onto the learners, encapsulated in the notion of self-actualisation (Rose, 1991). Change management strategies have proved to be very popular with politicians as means that promise effective control over processes of reform, whilst avoiding the dangers of contestation or, worse still, revolution. Incremental or continuous improvement is seen as an evolutionary strategy that circumvents crises. Nevertheless resistance to this type of invasive educational strategy that tries to alter the operation of an already established activity can be both strong and persistent (Elmore, 2000). The fourth category of educating system is the political or social movement that seeks to recruit and educate people to a particular view of the world and social practice. Here, the driving purpose is very clearly one of ‘doing the right thing’ even though this may appear relatively superficial such as adopting a particular style such as ‘punk’. A more typical example is provided by organisations and groups campaigning on ecological issues that may mount conferences, run courses and, through campaigning on the streets, seek to educate others into joining and/or promoting their cause. Recently those concerned with promoting sustainable improvement in developing countries have seen indigenous social movements as the only viable and ethical vehicle for changing practice, marking a transition from the change management approach to a contagion approach in this field Social movements are often more clearly identifiabl as ‘war machines’ attracting hostility from established groups in that members of such movements have the clear intention of altering the future by breaking with current practice at an institutional level, and they are openly political in their intent. They also generally work outside, or across, established organisational boundaries. In summary, we are looking at the following broad typology in terms of strategies for educating: • socialising systems which operate within a fiel of practice and are basically conservative in that their purpose is to reproduce practice; • schooling systems where persons are removed to an institution which specialises in educating usually on the basis of formalised divisions of knowledge. These can be both conservative in preparing people to enter established field of activity or roles in life (Bernstein, 1996; OECD, 2007) or innovatory in sponsoring new forms of activity; • developmental systems which operate within a fiel of practice and attempt to change the behaviour of established practitioners. Generally this type of system is

38

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

about a top-down attempt at hegemonic change and functions within established institutional structures; and • contagious systems such as social/political movements which try to bring about hegemonic change from outside or across established structures. These systems are generally at the more creative and innovative end of the continuum. These variations in pedagogic strategy and form result in variations in the movements of learners: from outsider to insider positions in socialising systems; from one social space to another in schooling systems, being put into new spaces of interaction that are inserted into existing collectivities in developmental systems or being induced to both enter and create new spaces of interaction through contagious systems. Furthermore, these systems vary in their boundedness – some overlap and interfere with other types of systems in the fiel or with similar systems engaged in other field of activity; some systems are largely ‘contained’ within organisations or particular communities of practice and others run across and between organisational and communal boundaries. They vary in size and extent both spatially and temporally. What distinguishes one from the other can be determined in terms of time, people, artefacts, events, actions and location. These same parameters apply even where this location is virtual, as in systems that employ e-learning strategies. Types of systems can also be deliberately mixed by educators as, for example, in the use of contagious, socialising and schooling strategies by political movements or they may mix and interfere with each other as demonstrated by the growth of the resistance movement in South African schools during apartheid. Many educating systems have a close discursive relationship to other activity field that they serve to feed with suitably educated persons. This is very obviously the case with socialising and schooling systems, which are also largely predicated on influencin individuals. In contrast, the second two types of educating systems are targeted at groups of people and aim to transform established practices rather than reproduce them. Contestation and political activity are therefore likely to be more overt and endemic in the case of developmental and contagious systems because the power balance between the educators and those to be educated is often less unequal than is generally the case in the firs two types of system. Thus, in political terms there are basically two variants here: assimilative systems, where the to-be-educated are taken into the milieu of the educators and are thus relatively powerless and individualised as in socialising and schooling models. The basic objective in these systems is to maintain and sustain practices by inducting newcomers. invasive systems where the educators enter the territory of the to-be-educated who are therefore relatively powerful and already collectivised. Thus the base condition for developmental or contagious systems is the need to disrupt previous socialisations and practices, the opposite of the conditions that generally apply in the case of socialising and schooling systems.

Educating as a Field of Activity

39

An Order of Discourse Each type, and sub-type, of system is based upon a number of identifiabl assumptions about learning, the relationships that ought to prevail between learners and educators and the value and nature of what is to be learned. For any given system, this is embedded in a local discourse, as a framework for sense making which positions the various actors involved, assigning meaning and value to particular identities, purposes and actions. These local discourses in their turn draw upon more widely distributed forms of sense making current in the fiel of educating activity. Thus, the following discourses are likely candidates for widespread usage across the field There is an element of matching here between the discourses and the typology of systems outlined under the previous heading, which is, of course, exactly what one would expect given the link between discourse and action: • a nurturing, therapeutic discourse – of care, growth, educator responsibility and commitment, ethical engagement, disciplinary in terms of developing right thinking and behaviour for the good of the (young) person. • an academic discourse – making sense through a system of subject disciplines, a language for assessment and testing, the use of academic genres, expertise, scholarship and professionalism. • a managerial discourse – of improvement and reform, standards, objectives, targets, outcomes, audit and evaluation, projects and interventions. • a political discourse – of empowerment, legitimation, morality, argumentation and activism. Any description of a discourse tends to be broad-based and somewhat fuzzy, but the four categories above bear some resemblance to the list that Edwards et al. (2005:29) use to describe the ‘tribes’ of adult educators and to Bottery’s (1990) categorisation of purposes in compulsory education as child-centred development, cultural transmission, national economic productivity and social reconstruction. Discourses, as ways of making meaning are fundamentally material. They exist only in so far as they are uttered, actioned and textualised, in things, people, time and space. However, although discourses are not entities that ‘inhabit’ a parallel non-material sphere, they may be characterised as sets of ideas that stand in a particular relation to one another, along the lines of the collections of ideas that I have used in the bullet points above. On these grounds it is possible to make an analytical separation between discursive practices, as ideational relations, embedded in ways of uttering that play an active role in creating and changing our world. This can be done through analysing the material entities and relations such linguistic practices bring into being. Such a separation of ideas and actions is helpful in exploring relations, since there is a need to pay close attention to both the material form and the ideational content of a relation in order to understand what it signifie in practice. Thus, in order to make the link between content and process, discourses will largely be treated in this book as textual, as accounts of the world distinct from the totality of the fiel of activity that they create, maintain and change. Talking

40

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

of a discourse, such as managerialism, is therefore a convenient way of summing up a number of related material practices and also of identifying, through pattern matching with a characteristic articulation, or relation between key ideas or elements (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001), when and how practices at a particular location are changing. Change may therefore be identifie through noting how such discursive patterns are altering over time and across locations. Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s (1999: 114) notion that there is an identifiabl order of discourses associated with any given fiel of activity is useful and ties in with the relationship proposed above between the types of educating and types of discourse. Indeed, it follows logically from the analytical split made in this paragraph – that a fiel of activity and its related imaginaries, or its order of discourse, are roughly coterminous. The word ‘roughly’ is used because discourses are promiscuous and prone to invade other subfield of activity, as in the case of lifelong learning as a hybrid mix of the nurturing and the managerial forms of discourse in the guise of self-actualisation. Each of these discourses, in turn, may be used in slightly different ways and in different mixes within particular systems so that there are identifiabl local ‘dialects’. In this sense, Potter and Wetherall’s (1987) notion of a local discourse as having an interpretive repertoire which draws upon resources provided by a number of more ‘universal’ discourses is helpful. Returning to our original example, an analysis of textual productions of participants in the SQH activity would reveal elements of all four of the discourses listed above although the nurturing/managerial hybrid would probably predominate. Theoretically, there is a contrast between those who represent discourses as all-powerful, unitary interpretations of the world and those who see them as multiple and contradictory, providing opportunities for collectivities to compose their own mixes and dialects according to local circumstances. Although I favour the second interpretation, the influenc of more generally dominant discourses on local practice should not be underrated. Within each activity system there will be an intimate relationship between the discursive practices characteristic of the actants and the performance of the activity, i.e. the two are inextricably linked. To depict the dynamics of networked systems local discourses need to be examined in terms of their content, function, and their material means of movement within the system. Common ideational patterns in the fiel of educating and the various systems within it are invested physically in the artefacts used and formed during the course of educating. Again, such artefacts may be in common use across a significan number of educating systems of a particular type or across a number of types. For instance, certain scientifi texts or instruments might be used across parts of the schooling system, such as colleges and universities, and also as part of induction into practice in various workplaces. In this way, artefacts have an important role in networking and connecting systems within the fiel both as part of shaping local systems and as an accessible resource for creating ideational coherence. Pedagogical techniques are also artefacts that can be used to defin differences and commonalities between systems as Nespor (2003) does in examining the effects of different subjects’ pedagogical strategies in a university setting.

Educating as a Field of Activity

41

The analysis of textual artefacts allows us to trace knowledge creation and usage. It can also provide evidence of the use of power and the nature of contestation in changing practice. Tracking the movement of ideas and concepts through the use of language and other signs provides a means of identifying the evolution of new discourses/practices and the decline of established frameworks of meaning (Jones, 2002). The identificatio and analysis of what Laclau (2007) has called floatin or empty signifie s is helpful in this regard. These are signs that can be invested with different meanings by different discourses and are therefore useful markers of consensus or contestation. A classic example of this in the fiel of CPD is ‘professionalism’ (Reeves et al., 2008), a word that can mean very different things according to the particular discursive form or dialect being used by particular actors either collectively or individually. In sum, educating covers a vast fiel of interconnecting sites of activity, and whilst there are identifiabl discourses that clearly relate to the structuration of these interactions, none can claim a total dominance across all aspects of the field It follows that the analysis of discourse is one way of exploring connections and influences This opening discussion has necessarily been rather abstract. Following Latour’s advice, it is important to relate these ideas to the empirical level, bearing in mind that discourse analysis, which relies solely on text and does not relate this to bodies and action, provides an incomplete picture of practice. The case study that follows moves us on to this concrete level. It illustrates how local educating systems may be variously linked to discourses circulating in the fiel and hence how such systems may reflec the ideational differences between them. In this instance, we are looking at the interface between two developmental, or invasive, educating systems, drawing, respectively, on hard and soft dialects of managerialism (Trow, 1994), both of which embedded a different understanding of processes of school improvement. The two systems were a nationally established quality assurance system for the schools’ sector in Scotland that had been developed over more than a decade and an organisational learning strategy adopted much more recently by a local authority’s education department. The former can be characterised as an example of the hard version of a managerialist discourse with its emphasis on compliance with a centrally determined agenda for school improvement driven by targets, standards, performance criteria, etc. The latter initiative aligned with the softer version of managerialism that advocates the pursuit of an agenda for improvement that is locally derived to address issues judged by the school community to present the greatest potential for improving the school’s effectiveness. In terms of educating to change practice the case study illustrates the following: • the role of difference in provoking a contestation of ideas; • the conceptual and political work involved changing practice and how the local activity reflect wider discursive struggles in the field • hybridisation, the putting together and making of things and local discourses out of diverse elements.

42

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

Making Sense of Organisational Learning In July 2002, a team from the University of Stirling suggested to the director of education in Craigton, a local authority in Scotland’s central belt, that adopting an organisational learning strategy would assist the council’s education service to meet two interlinked challenges (Reeves & Boreham, 2006; Boreham & Reeves, 2008). Like all other authorities in Scotland, Craigton was implementing a major restructuring of its teaching force as an outcome of the McCrone Agreement (2001). The second challenge was pressure from the Scottish Executive to raise attainment and achievement, particularly within the secondary sector. Craigton’s senior management team favoured the use of the McCrone Report’s approach to school improvement, underlining the collective responsibility of staff in a problem-solving approach to raising achievement that concentrated attention on pupils’ learning. This married well with an organisational learning approach emphasising the flattenin of management hierarchies, teamwork and engagement in action enquiry for improvement under the aegis of a shared vision for the future. This is a familiar set of concepts relating to a strand of the managerial discourse that has become dominant in the public services in the UK over the last 20 years or so. After some discussion, and a visit to a company that claimed to have become a learning organisation, the authority’s senior management team decided to adopt such a strategy and entitled it: Succeeding Together. Succeeding Together aims to increase individual staff and school capability to significantl raise the levels of pupil achievement in relation to Education’s National Priorities. (Craigton Council, 2004)

Thus the object of this new strategy was school improvement, a goal that the Council had already been pursuing through its quality assurance procedures. Succeeding Together therefore marked a change in direction towards achieving this goal. In outline, the strategy involved the following: (a) Building a shared vision of how the education service could improve outcomes for all pupils; (b) Replacing the existing approach to school development planning based on centrally established priorities with an approach based on teacher-led action enquiries focused on identifying and overcoming barriers to pupil learning; (c) Setting up networks to provide staff from across the authority with opportunities to meet regularly to share ideas and experience; (d) Supporting teachers’ capacity for practitioner research by devoting a large part of the department’s CPD programme to Succeeding Together; (e) Revising the Authority’s practices and procedures to support changes in practice resulting from the action enquiries and networking; and (f) Evaluating the strategy formatively and continuously to develop more effective learning structures within the authority.

Making Sense of Organisational Learning

43

In preparing the narrative that follows the development of Succeeding Together was traced through the construction and use of three key artefacts, The Project Proposal; The Policy Statement; and The Guide to the Implementation of Succeeding Together. These particular texts provoked and shaped interaction in pursuit of the strategy in the course of a series of events. Data, in the form of fiel notes and documents used and developed in the course of these events, gave those of us in the university team an evidential base for examining changes in sense making. For example, there were nine drafts of The Guide to the Implementation of Succeeding Together all of which had the common objective of enabling action enquiries to take place in schools. Since the nine versions of this artefact arose from the interactions of particular groups in particular events, it was possible to track changes in the content and authorship of this text as it was constructed. In describing the process of putting Succeeding Together into practice, the term activity set is used for delineating the participation of people as members of groups and teams define by their role or, rather, the particular object which it was their task to pursue within Craigton’s education service. Stage 1 Justifying action through appealing to beliefs and values After agreeing the Project Proposal there was a series of meetings between the university research team and Craigton’s senior management teams (SMT) in the summer of 2003 that began with the aim of planning a way forward for achieving the four objectives outlined in that text but quickly centred on one of these: The f rst objective will be to develop a shared vision of Craigton’s future position – A management group should meet to work out an initial outline of the shared vision, oversee the development of the Quality Indicators and work out a strategy for the adoption of the vision by the whole education service. (Project Proposal, May 2003)

Discussions focused on the simplificatio and clarificatio of the central notion of organisational learning through agreeing a name for the strategy, preparing a draft policy statement and designing a bookmark for distribution to all employees stating Succeeding Together’s aim, objectives and performance indicators. During this series of meetings the senior management team held two seminars under the title Fit for Purpose? In this, Succeeding Together was discussed with education service managers and headteachers. Feedback from these groups resulted in various changes to the text of the draft policy document – the definitio of the organisation became more holistic; there was an acknowledgement that everyone would be called upon to change their practice (not just staff in schools); a commitment was made to simplifying and streamlining school development planning; and the need to strengthen communication was recognised. The political task of convincing everyone in the service of the worth of the strategy was central to these discussions. The somewhat bald statements about the aims of organisational learning in the Project Proposal stand in contrast to the more rhetorically aligned text produced for launching the strategy. The aim of this programme is to increase Craigton Council’s capacity to significantl raise the level of pupil achievement across the service, in relation to the National Priorities. This will take place against the background of the implementation of the McCrone agreement,

44

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays which is putting in place a new framework which promotes professionalism and define revised staff ng structures. (Project Proposal, May 2003) The aim of Succeeding Together is to increase individual staff and school capacity to significantl raise the levels of pupil achievement in relation to the National Priorities. Specificall the project aims to improve attainment and achievement for all our pupils by engaging everyone in action research focused on this objective and by sharing and implementing what we learn. The following improvement outcomes have therefore been identified • improving attainment and achievement for every pupil • engaging everyone in evidence-based improvement • sharing and implementing what we learn (. . .) The principles and working parameters of the project will support the new McCrone organisational and staffin structure and will facilitate new and more productive ways of working. Succeeding Together will reinstate the professionalism of teachers and ensure that all understand how they contribute to overall organisational goals. (Policy Statement September 2003)

The composition of the draft policy was used to marshal arguments from external sources for adopting the approach and countering contrary opinions. The branding and packaging of the strategy visually (logos and banners) and symbolically was seen as vitally important. Staging the launch event and deciding who would attend, who would speak and in what order was done with an eye to investing the strategy with legitimacy. This phase was characterised by justification which Weick (1995) identifie as one of the processes that characterises the enaction of new practice in organisations. How the vision was to be shared also formed an important part of this debate. Reliance on the normal system of face-to-face communication with headteachers and the accompanying distribution of documents was agreed to be inadequate. The artefacts produced in September reflecte the conceptualisation of a shared vision as one communicated directly and personally by the leadership of the organisation to all staff. ‘Sharing a vision’ was conceived as the transmission of a message from the top down. By sending a letter and bookmark to every employee and then visiting every establishment to talk about Succeeding Together (an activity nicknamed The Road Show) the Craigton SMT sought to demonstrate the importance that its members attached to this change in strategy. This series of events illustrates a process of assimilation, re-alignment and hybridisation of discourses and ideas at a local level. The work with Craigton’s SMT led to a re-working of the language in the Project Proposal which largely ‘belonged’ to the university team, drawing on an academic dialect and the genre of research proposals. In its place, the Policy Statement used a discourse that reflecte common usage within the authority. This, in its turn, related to that of national educational policy texts. The policy statement and the other artefacts produced for the launch of Succeeding Together, including the event itself, were rhetorically aligned towards a new audience. Their function was to justify the SMT’s decision to the chief executive, local councillors, headteachers and HMIE. They consisted of arguments and devices linking action to incontrovertible beliefs and values as part of attempting to impose a particular sense and meaning on the SMT’s decisions and

Making Sense of Organisational Learning

45

actions. Discursively these products were not ‘pure’, since they carried a mix of concepts in a discourse that was a hybridisation of the academic, the nurturing, the political and the managerial. This stage marked both an assemblage of power, in terms of putting together a collection of warrants, and its exercise by, and through, the senior management team in the marshalling and use of resources, in particular the application of money, time and labour in creating space for the initiative, symbolising its legitimacy and authority, publishing and communicating this throughout the service and investing in the process of implementation. Stage 2 Arguing about what actions beliefs and values entail The series of events that shaped the Guide began with a seminar for the central education services team in October 2003. This was followed by the cluster representatives’ seminar (CRS), which ran over a period of 6 months from November 2003 until May 2004. This was conducted by the university team and was attended by three headteachers from each of the 11 clusters of schools in the authority. Each of these clusters consisted of a secondary school and a number of associated primary schools in its local geographical area. Representatives of Craigton’s educational psychological service, the manager of continuing professional development for teachers and a representative, in its latter stages several representatives, of the quality development officers team also attended. A central issue in conducting these two seminars was communication. The mode of interaction within the authority had more commonly been top-down than interactive. In pedagogical terms, there was therefore a need to create conditions for dialogue if a suitable ethos for organisational learning was to be established. With the Fit for Purpose seminars, the senior management team had signalled a change to a more open relationship that had been welcomed. The cluster representatives’ seminar was predicated on eliciting participants’ views and concerns and addressing these in developing the Guide. Members of the cluster representatives’ seminar could see that changes were made to the text in the light of their feedback. Over time, the ethos of the seminar developed from a somewhat wary ‘them-and-us’ atmosphere at the firs meeting to one in which there was a sense of being engaged in joint problem solving. There was an interesting set of tensions in terms of identity because participants were oscillating between being a member of a temporary new group, charged with overtaking a particular goal, and being a member of their normal role or activity set. As the purpose of the seminar series was to produce guidance for schools on implementing action enquiries the interactions that took place within it were representative of the second of Weick’s (1995) forms of sense making during the enaction of change, i.e. arguing from beliefs and values to what these mean in terms of practice. As his use of the word ‘argue’ signifies this is often a more contested process than justifying actions. Whatever the declared intention of the seminar, the debate ranged far more widely than the concept of action enquiry itself. The major concern of participants was to address authority-wide issues such as central services’ practice in relation to planning; CPD provision; communication; and finall the role of the educational psychologists. The most immediate and pressing of these issues was

46

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

the need to clarify the relationships between the national priorities for education, school improvement planning and action enquiry. To achieve this, it was necessary to reconcile two processes, the Succeeding Together strategy and the framework for quality assurance devised by HMIE and promoted by the Scottish Executive. Both the Succeeding Together improvement plan and school development plans required by the quality assurance process shared the same conceptual origin in an organisational learning framework. However, over the years, the latter had been invaded and colonised by a more centralised and bureaucratic approach to improvement. Guidelines for school development plans laid a heavy emphasis on compliance with detailed quality indicators and nationally determined priorities (HMIE, 2002). The counter argument to the university team’s proposal that action enquiry represented a departure from current practice was presented by the quality development officers whose role was quality assurance. Their version of the Guide represented improvement planning as just a matter of simplifying current development plans. Development planning is a well established process in Craigton’s schools. However, in many cases it has become too unwieldy and diff cult to manage – Each school will be expected to produce a whole school Improvement Plan. Schools may select their own format, for example those who have found the PCPlan format useful [school improvement planning software] may wish to continue using this provided they select limited priorities and outcomes which meet their specifi improvement needs. (QDO draft Guide, February 2004)

In reply, and after a number of contacts and negotiations, the version of The Guide presented to the seminar group in February argued that putting the focus on pupil learning entailed delegating greater responsibility to schools and teachers to decide on the content and order of development priorities. Instead of schools being told what priorities and activities they should be pursuing each will, working with its own school community, identify a focus for improvement in the quality of its students’ learning. The focus will be based on an enquiry into underachievement and where and how barriers to learning are being experienced by students. Focusing on this area staff will then carry out collaborative action enquiries in the form of projects to develop creative and reliable ways of improving students’ performance. There should be no more than three projects per school. (CRS draft Guide, February 2004)

Thus action enquiry and improvement planning were welded together to present a coherent justificatio for the adoption of action enquiry. This draft was agreed to constitute a workable set of procedures by those attending the February meeting of the seminar. Thereafter, people rapidly moved to action with a Headteachers’ Improvement Planning Seminar, a Succeeding Together in-service day in all schools and the production of school improvement plans all taking place between March and June 2004. This succession, in the struggle to form a new activity set, clearly related to accounts of the development of boundary objects and boundary crossing alluded to by other writers (Haraway, 1991; Borum, 2004; Engestrom et al., 2003). The progression through this series of texts in terms of authorship is significant. The firs of the published texts, Succeeding Together: Draft Tool Kit for Action Inquiry in September 2003, largely contained text devised by the university

Making Sense of Organisational Learning

47

team together with some material jointly authored with Craigton’s senior managers. In contrast, the fina February draft contained text from the following groups: headteachers, quality development officers the CPD manager and the educational psychologists as well as ourselves and Craigton’s SMT. In Fairclough’s terms (2003) this constituted an acceptable re-contextalisation of the discourse or what Latour (1999) refers to as a ‘transformation’ that marks the successful movement of an actor/actant from one space to another. Here, a ‘text’ also served as a space for action, as a site for the expansion in the number of its authors and also for their interaction as co-authors. In so doing, it accumulated further power in terms of warrant and, in the nature of the compromise it represented, of resourcing by enabling the infiltratio of the action enquiry process into those structures and resources already in place to support school development planning. What happened in the space created in the CRS could be characterised as a contest between two dialects of managerialism: hard managerialism with its emphasis on audit, quantifiabl outcomes and tight control by a strategic centre was running up against soft managerialism, with its emphasis on the involvement and participation of shop floo workers in improvement processes and decision making. The QDOs, with close links to HMIE, were imbued with the discourse and ideas of the ‘hard’ camp, whilst the university team, as disruptive outsiders, were basing their proposals on the ‘soft’ discourse. However, the nature of the contestation and negotiation over the Guide was much more complex than a straightforward battle of ideas between these two activity sets. Within the two seminar spaces that centred on the production of the Guide there was a number of groups, or activity sets, with different interests, different reactions and different desires in terms of shaping the initiative. Many of the headteachers were findin development planning oppressive and unsatisfactory and were inclined to prefer the notion of greater autonomy for schools and teachers. This fitte with the discourse of a ‘new’ professionalism of McCrone and was implied in the concept of action enquiry. On the other hand the headteachers were also anxious about the reaction of HMIE to such a change in practice fearing they might be castigated in inspection reports for not covering every priority prescribed nationally. The quality development officers team had been specificall formed to ensure, under the terms of the 2000 Education Act, that the authority complied with the model of quality assurance that statutory engagement in Improvement Planning required. Their work centred on the use of standard operating procedures published by HMI in the form of Quality Management in Education (2000a), which covered quality assurance in local authorities and How Good is Our School? (HMI, 1996; HMIE, 2002) which performed the same function in schools. Their power derived from their close connection with HMIE. What was at stake for them was a substantive change in their practice and a threat to their current relationship with headteachers. The HMIE were ‘ghostly’ participants since, without being bodily present, their existence had a strong influenc on the conduct of the seminar. At this time, developments at national policy level had resulted in HMIE talking about taking a less

48

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

prescriptive approach to school inspection (HMIE, 2003) and allowing schools greater autonomy which favoured the adoption of the new proposals. However, many headteachers retained a certain scepticism about whether such a change in practice would be implemented. The educational psychology team placed a high value on research as an outcome of their academic training. The opportunity to work with schools on action enquiries aimed at identifying and removing barriers to learning was something that they regarded as better use of their expertise than being limited to assessing the learning needs of individual pupils. They were therefore in tune with the university team’s perspective and were delighted at the prospect of the introduction of the initiative. The university team were promoting a strategy that was in line with the development of a ‘softer’ tone in relation to school management and governance represented by the McCrone Report and changing discourses in the fiel of school improvement. We came from an academic setting where notions of evidence-based practice, action research and criticality were valued and we also had a contract with the authority to introduce a change in approach. Within this mix of motives and interests the Guide, as both artefact and boundary object, developed as a negotiated text (Wodak, 2000; Cooren, 2004) that eventually satisfie the various groups involved in the seminars sufficientl to serve as an agreed basis for action, which does not mean that it was sufficien to secure the continuation of the practice in the longer term. This negotiation was not simply a micro-political struggle based on the differing interests of the groups involved. It was also a conceptual process, as the CRS participants tried to make sense of what organisational learning might mean in practice. The Guide, whatever its limitations, was a creative invention of the group in a new space where people were unsure about the rules of the game, since its conduct was untypical of ‘normal’ practice in the authority. In political terms, what the seminar produced was a re-contextualisation of organisational learning at the ‘boundary’ between the SMT, the university team, the QDOs, the educational psychologists and the headteachers that balanced possible risk against possible benefi for the headteachers who were by far the largest group of participants. This allowed them to align themselves with the SMT without feeling they ran too great a risk in relation to Quality Assurance.

Surfacing Pedagogies, Relays and Discursive Struggle Representing Relays and Networks: Building a Relational Map In this section, I am going to go through some of the key connections that are pertinent to the case study, whilst at the same time building a way of representing these relations graphically in the form of a map. I shall do this by introducing the various elements in the mapping process in a series of steps Figs. 3.1 (1)–(3). The relational

Surfacing Pedagogies, Relays and Discursive Struggle

49

map that results, Figure 3.1 Significan Relays in the Introduction of Succeeding Together, represents a network of relays in a particular locality, Craigton, within the general matrix of networked systems within the field In the Craigton study, we have an example of ‘competition’ between two educating systems at the point at which they interfere with each other’s operation. There was a relatively ‘established’ quality assurance system, the Quality Initiative (HMI, 2000b), implemented through the Scottish Executive that was seeking to change and improve practice in schools, i.e. it was an educating system which fell within the typology identifie as a developmental strategy. It was challenged, in Craigton’s education department, by Succeeding Together, the title given to an emerging educating system, based on a different developmental strategy for school improvement. These two local systems shared a number of basic conceptual tools, so they can be categorised as being part of an overarching managerial discourse, but they entailed different forms of practice so they constituted competing discourses under the managerialist umbrella. Furthermore they resonated and interacted with other discourses differently. Soft managerialism’s links to reflect ve practice and action research form a bridge into a dominant professional/academic discourse in teacher education in Scotland. Equally, hard managerialism has a symbiotic relationship with some of the values and worldview of bureau-professionalism, which had traditionally been the dominant mode of operation in the public services in the UK (Clarke & Newman, 1997). In the Craigton case, in reaction to the disturbance caused by the introduction of Succeeding Together, members of the different activity sets at local level tended to align themselves slightly differently with different elements of this complex mix. Figure 3.1 (1) attempts to designate key elements of this background. The central shaded oval is where the specifi local connections in the Craigton case are going to be mapped. ‘Surrounding’ this area is a huge terra incognita of connections that

Fig. 3.1 (1) Building a relational map 1

50

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

stretch out globally and which cannot possibly be either known or charted. However, in Craigton’s case, we were able to demonstrate general connections through discursive analysis with two different dialects of the discourse of managerialism: the hard and soft versions. The labels in the area surrounding the central shaded oval indicate that these are the relevant elements in the field s order of discourse that apply to the local relays that are going to be mapped in the central oval. In Fig. 3.1 (2) the relay that was crucial to the instigation of Succeeding Together is mapped. There are two key activity sets involved, shown as labelled white ovals, these are Craigton’s senior management team and the university team. There are three transmission points in this relay:

Fig. 3.1 (2) Building a relational map 2

(i) Craigton’s SMT was engaged in translating or re-contextualising the McCrone Agreement for operation within the authority’s schools; (ii) The University team are looking to conduct research into organisational learning so have re-contextualised this to appeal to the SMT in their approach to the authority; (iii) The two groups worked together on the Project Proposal, which was an artefact that amalgamated ideas from organisational learning and from the McCrone report in the form of project plan for Succeeding Together. Thus this bit of the map represents the three-point relay that allowed the entry of the ‘new’ developmental system into the education department. Relays consist of series of transmission or translation activities where contents of action and artefacts are reformulated or re-contextualised in some way as they ‘move’ from space to space. Such transmission points are characterised by links between people (represented as activity sets) and key artefacts that they either use or make and use in

Surfacing Pedagogies, Relays and Discursive Struggle

51

action (represented as shaded rectangles). The connections between people and artefacts within the relays are shown as white rounded lines. The artefacts are textually connected one to the other by quotation, ‘plagiarism’ and/or reference, and these connections are shown as bold black lines. A relay is define as a connected set of re-contextualising operations (transmission points) on the basis of the identifiabl discursive links between the points – in this case through a series of texts. The territory that Succeeding Together entered was already occupied by an established system concerned with training people to comply with centralised prescriptions for quality assurance. This was conveyed through a line of artefacts that shared the pattern of ideas associated with hard managerialism. Here, key activity sets were the schools’s inspectorate, the quality development officer and the headteachers as those charged with operationalising quality assurance. Figure 3.1 (3) shows the key relays for this activity in Craigton.

Fig. 3.1 (3) Building a relational map 3

Pedagogic Strategy The Craigton case provides an illustration of how the initiation of a developmental educating strategy • involved the importation of new ideas into an organisation through contact with new people and new artefacts; • provoked sense making within the organisation as part of the educative process and the re-contextualisation of ‘old’ and ‘new’ ideas in the making of new artefacts;

52

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

• led to changes in alignment of the various groups of the ‘to-be-educated’ according to their positioning both ideationally and practically within the organisation and in connection with the wider systems of which the organisation was a part. • required the exercise of power through the mobilisation of resources on the part of the instigators, Craigton Council Education Department’s senior management team, and provoked ‘opposition’, particularly in the more overt resistance of the QDO team. • ‘Invaded’ School Improvement Plans and interfered with the terms of QDOs’ relationships with schools in requiring that these texts meet certain criteria laid down in the Guide and in putting headteachers together to share their plans with each other. The case also illustrated how Succeeding Together relied on the creation of new spaces for the to-be-educated that was achieved through the use of various pedagogic devices: • the design and enaction of ‘new’, non-routine types of events such as the Fit for Purpose and the Cluster Representatives’ Seminars, the Launch of Succeeding Together and the presentations to all members of staff in the Road Show; and • the production and use of new artefacts at these events such as the Policy Statement, the Succeeding Together bookmark and banners and the Guide to Implementing Succeeding Together. The process occurred within a complex matrix of connections between actors/artefacts with systems that had already been established, and these had a direct bearing on the processes of justificatio and argumentation that led to the re-contextualisation of new ideas about practice into an actionable form. These new spaces contrasted with those being produced by the quality assurance system that relied heavily on creating spaces based on assessment activities. This was achieved by incorporating the use of HGIOS as the key artefact for enacting auditing, improvement planning and reporting with the publication of school inspections as a strongly coercive strategy in its armoury (SG, 2007). An important characteristic of new spaces made through the activity of ‘improvement’ or ‘development’ is that they disrupt practice by juxtaposing different ways of acting and therefore surfacing a contestation between the past and the future that has to be resolved by the groups involved. Figure 3.1, the completed map, shows the relays that resulted as an outcome of this pedagogic activity in 2004. The ‘new’ system (Succeeding Together) and its originating artefact, the Project Proposal, spawned a number of new artefacts which wrested resources away from the former School Development Plans and diverted them to the Succeeding Together Improvement Plans (disconnection of relays, shown by dotted lines, on the left-hand side and re-connection shown just to the right of centre). However, this did not mark a complete break from the QA system of ties, merely a slight ‘re-bundling’ of the relays. The Local Authority Improvement Plan was also adjusted with the Road Show, The Guide and the Policy

Surfacing Pedagogies, Relays and Discursive Struggle

53

Key to Figure 3.1 The key artefacts are represented as dark shaded rectangles and the direct connections between them (actual textual transpositions) are represented by thick black connecting lines. The broken black line indicates connections and artefacts being superceded. HGIOS = How Good is Our School? (HMI, 1996; HMIE, 2002) Ed. Act 2000 = Standards in Scotland’s Schools etc Act (SE, 2000a) McCrone Report = A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century (SE, 2000b) Succeeding T. Improvement Plans = Succeeding Together Improvement Plans The key groups involved in the process are represented by white rounded shapes and their connections by white connecting lines. Council Ed. SMT = Craigton Council’s Directorate of Education QDOs = Craigton Council’s Quality Development Off cers EPs = Education Psychologists Fig. 3.1 Significan relays in the introduction of succeeding together

Statement (not shown) serving to instantiate the compromises and bridges between the two systems made by the various activity sets involved in their composition during the process of implementation (educating). Figure 3.1 begins the process of developing graphical means of representing certain aspects of educating systems. Drawing attention to how groups of people are attached to, or use, particular artefacts, and the practice they instantiate has value of alerting would-be educators in organisational settings to the prior relations that may be disrupted by their activities. It alerts would-be educators to the need to understand the implications this has for those whose practice they are endeavouring to influence

54

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

What such relational mapping shows is that concentrating on educating activity in a local system does not preclude a recognition of the globalised context in which such systems operate. The content of the events making up the case study have been used to surface the connections between local discourses formed for the purpose of educating in a particular context and the more immediate relays for the entry and maintenance of varying discursive traits at a particular site of activity. The attempt to introject a new educating system within a network of systems (Craigton’s education service), through the interference of a third network of systems, the university, sets up a complicated chain of interactions which is both about political negotiation between different interests and a conceptual/intellectual/ideological exercise involving the invention of a local discourse for changing forms of practice. The thesis being put forward here is that systems are always connected to a much wider fiel of activity and that these connections are material and embodied. They are also extensive because each connection is connected again, and again, through a series of ‘local’ relays. Even within the same educating system, in this case Craigton Council’s education service, there were a number of different groups involved in the activity that constituted the service. Each of these groups was differently connected to different artefactual/discursive lines of fl w. All of these could potentially be traced in the same way across space and time, as various ANT studies have demonstrated. One of the real limitations on tracking and understanding connectivity is the sheer bulk of the data generated in networked systems and the labour involved in collecting and analysing it. Referring back to one of the problems identifie in Chapter 2, analysing activity, according to both persons and artefacts, and identifying their discursive connections provides a basis for surfacing and representing the relays of knowledge and power in an educating system. It can therefore overcome, to a significan extent, Mische’s criticism of the use of graphing to explore social networks by giving much greater weight to the content of activity in determining what the relations in a given network signify for participants.

Discursive Struggle On the basis of the connections illustrated in Fig. 3.1, one would speculate that Succeeding Together is highly unlikely to succeed. The ‘opposing’ quality assurance system is much more powerfully embedded through statutory regulation, the process of central inspection, the publication of inspection reports and the inclusion of local authority quality development officer in HMIE training and inspections. Thus the formal power legitimating operating procedures on the left-hand side of the picture far outweighs the forces on the right. There are however opposing forces, sets of resistances (Gunter & Butt, 2007) indicated by the development of elaborated forms of paper practice in response to Quality Initiative procedures, rather than changes in teaching practice, the publication of critiques by educationalists, the capacity of teachers to resist change in their classrooms, and in the conservatism of pupils

Conclusion

55

and parents, etc. The penetration of the ‘soft’ discourse at policy level has become greater over the last few years, particularly along a thread running from Scotland’s National Debate on Education through to the latest pronouncements on curricular policy (SE, 2004). There is evidence of the creation of a new blend of ideological alliances that could improve the chances of ‘softism’, at least in terms of granting a greater degree of local autonomy and diminishing the emphasis on quality control. Although, having said this, the dominance of target setting shows no sign of weakening (OECD, 2007). Thus the contest for hegemony between the two managerial dialects continues at policy level and reverberates through local networks.

Conclusion A discursive analysis of events and artefacts shows the workings of the new educating system, Succeeding Together, as Craigton’s senior managers resourced and introduced new spaces of interaction and enrolled external educators, ourselves, to help theorise and enable the translation of knowledge and practices that were new to the authority into a form in which they could be enacted. At a given locality, relational mapping enables us to look differently at the fiel of activity. It takes us back to Ackoff’s observation (1980) about how systems are relationally bound to one another, although his notion of a ‘whole’ needs to be treated with caution. Connectivity challenges our notion of boundaries and concepts like ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. As a form of representation, a synchronous, relational mapping of activity, showing a horizontal section through a networked activity system, privileges connections, interferences, pluralities and permeabilities. Tracking the performance of the developmental educating system, Succeeding Together demonstrated the complexity and ambiguity of people’s positioning as they were caught in a complex web of contestations between various discourses that were mixing and hybridising together in different ways. This is an effect that is exacerbated under pressure from invasive pedagogies, which provoke the need for ‘rationalisation’ in order for those concerned to negotiate a way between different practices. Indeed, the solution that was reached in the space created by the Cluster Representatives’ Seminar illustrated what Rose refers to as a ‘contingent lash up’ (1999:276), the putting of sets of contents and practices that are not really compatible but are made workable in one way or another, sometimes as much because of their inconsistencies as despite them. This raises an important point. Mapping transmission points in relays may tend to convey that these faithfully pass on ‘the intentions’ of the originators of the chain. This is far from the case – relays mark linked transmission points of re-contextualisation and translation where the sense of a discourse can, and very often is, wittingly or unwittingly sabotaged. Transmission points in a relay often mark boundaries between systems and sub-systems and are therefore possible sites for refl xivity and change. Returning to the original question about professional learning and changing practice what the case illustrates is that this occurs within local field where practice is already anchored in a matrix of connections. These connections relate to the variety

56

3 The Field of Educating: Tracking Relations and Relays

of roles of those involved and their earlier socialisations and allegiances, including networks of governance and disciplinarity. Whilst the evidence is derived from the context of the authority rather than to that of the schools, the implication is that the latter will be subject to similar relational influence and contestations and that the introduction of new practices in schools is therefore likely to engender similar struggles over their legitimacy.

Chapter 4

Making Learning Spaces Visible

Introduction This chapter uses the concept of the event as a key analytic category for developing a way of representing the social spaces made by educating. Events are central to looking more closely at the interactions of people and things in activity. They provide the basis for exploring the forms, or patterns, that networked activity systems make over time, opening up to examination the social spaces that are produced by educating and the effects their production has on those who participate in their creation. The combination of event analysis and the discursive analysis of the content of activity is used to draw up durational maps that show the forms and relational patterning of the spaces created by educating systems over time. Visual illustrations such as these have advantages in representing relationality, for, as Kress et al. (2001) have pointed out, the use of written text tends to confin our descriptions of activity to a temporal rather than a spatial dimension and, I would add, often to grossly oversimplify the former as well. The use of a visual mode of representation allows us to surface relations and patternings of spaces that tend to get lost in textual descriptions. Maps enable us to do and see things in relation to one another offering, in Kress et al.’s terms, affordances that other modes of description do not. The chapter begins by discussing the theoretical underpinnings of the approach. Then, building on the discursive analyses that were used to generate the relational mapping of relays in Chapter 2, the various elements that go to make up event analysis and the relations between these elements are more clearly described. Event analysis is then applied, in the case study section, to mapping the relational spaces created by the two variants of the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship programme that ran from 1998 to 2005, the standard and the accelerated routes. A durational map of the standard route of the SQH programme, which is an example of an educating system that uses a hybrid design, combining a schooling and a developmental pedagogic strategy, showed that the movements associated with educating in this system created a distinctive patterning of spaces over time. This is compared with the pattern of another version of the programme to show how the technique can be used as a basis for both designing and investigating the properties of educating

J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3_4, 

57

58

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

systems. The patterns that educating systems make, it is argued, have important implications for learning and change. This leads to a discussion of the spatial effects of hybrid systems and how the interferences between spaces that they set up creates ‘third space’ (Gutierrez et al., 1995) as locations between established practices that offer the possibility of changing collective and individual behaviours and inventing new forms of interaction.

Relational Space Forms of Spatiality It is important, before going on to describe the basis of the mapping process in detail, to articulate the spatial relations that underpin this form of analysis, which relies upon positing three different ‘forms’ of spatiality. A relatively simple spatial typology is given by Harvey (2006:121) whose interpretation of Lefebvre’s earlier analysis results in a similar tri-partite division of forms. The f rst of these that he describes relates to spatial practice as being carried out in measurable space. This is a form of space that is directly apparent to our senses, a space of bodies, things and distances that both Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey label as ‘absolute’, being, in conceptual terms, fi ed and unchanging. The second form that Harvey identifie is relative space, which varies according to the viewpoint of the observer and the relations being observed; he provides the example of the space of transport relations in a particular location. Unlike absolute space, relative space is a spatio-temporal conception where the relationship between objects depends upon the frame of reference of the observer. The third form is representational space, which is also in Harvey’s formulation, spatio-temporal and concerns the cultural and affective ‘entities’ that attach to spatial elements and objects but which, in themselves, are immeasurable. They have an objective effect in the world, but this, according to Harvey, is not materially identifiabl in either absolute or relative space. In a sense, I am disagreeing with this position and asserting that combining analyses relating to material and, what I am calling, imaginary space does allow for surfacing the objective effects of the relationship between ideas and material activity in what I have called relational space. The argument being as follows: Locating activity in people, things, and their interactions in places and over time relates to the firs spatial form, which I shall call material space. This is measured through the use of event analysis where activity is treated as a series of interactions, or events, that relate to the pursuance of a particular object or purpose. This provides material grounds for identifying an activity system. Events, as social interactions, are locatable in time and place and have identifiabl participants undertaking concrete actions. However this is not sufficien to achieve our purposes. We need a way of identifying which events form part of an activity system, how these events are differentiated within the system, and the basis on which actants and artefacts move between them.

Relational Space

59

For this, we need to refer to a second type of ‘space’ that is immaterial – an imaginary space of ideas, purposes, desires etc. where these symbolic ‘entities’ relate to one another in articulations that give them meaning. I am referring here to the discursive plane that relates to an activity, or rather to the ideational basis upon which the activity is made meaningful to those who enact it. This space cannot be ‘mapped’ in the sense that it has no material existence. However, it may be materially evidenced through the discursive analysis of the tools and texts that are used and produced in action in any given activity system. Thus, although immaterial, imaginary space has objective effects in a third form of space. This I shall call relational space, an ephemeral space that is produced through the interaction between material and imaginary space in the performance of an activity. In a sense this connection between material and imaginary space has already been made in definin an activity system on the basis of its object, since an object, or purpose, is an ideational entity. Durational mapping is a way of surfacing relational space because it marries the material entities involved in social events with the discursive content of action to defin what goes to make up activity as movement and change over time. Whilst activity may have permanent outcomes and effects in material space, it is ephemeral as performance. You might make an analogy here with a traditional seaside resort, which often has an eerie quality in the winter, because, as a space it is about ‘being at the seaside’ but that activity only happens in the summer. In this sense, the resort loses much of its meaning when it is not being performed by people, dogs, icecreams, spades, umbrellas and sandcastles. Yet these latter come and go and ‘make the space’ in time. Relational space is mapped by using discursive analysis to identify what material interactions, as events, go to make up the performance of an activity system. It enables the mapping of duration, sequence and fl ws within a system. Table 4.1 sets out these different forms of space and their relation in the analysis. For our purposes, event analysis, with its concern for the answers to the questions of who, where, with what and when, provides information that is framed in terms of the material space created by activity. It relates to commonsense perceptions of what may be measured in relation to the functioning of an educating system. The second strand of analysis, the discursive and intertextual exploration of the content and process of educating, provides the basis for identifying the symbolic qualities Table 4.1 Forms of space Space Material space Relational space

Type of analysis

Event analysis Durational/relational mapping Imaginary ‘space’ Discursive and intertextual analysis

Subject matter Bodies, things, places and times. Activity, participation, duration, sequence and fl ws Objects (purposes), ideas, articulations or patterns of connections between ideas and desires.

60

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

that can be attached to the simple entities identifie in material space. It allows for the definitio of viewpoint and the surfacing of relations, for deciding which events and which participants are to be considered as the focus of attention and for delineating how they interact and interconnect in the activity of educating. Thus the set of analytic tools I am about to outline offers a way of representing how space is constantly being produced as an outcome of events. The relational spaces I am looking at are continually opening up and disappearing. Whilst they are linked to organising, they are not commensurate with organisations because the relational spaces represented by durational mapping are essentially the product of activity and vary in form according to time and viewpoint. Before going into the details of constructing durational maps it is worth outlining the relationship between durational mapping, which is the subject of this chapter, and the relational mapping that was introduced in Chapter 3. The best way to represent the activity systems that we are concerned with would be to map them in three dimensions. This is because they change over time as evolving patterns of activity. The spaces created in their performance can best be imagined as constantly changing volumes define in terms of the duration of events. The connections from space to space similarly occur at and over particular times so would also be more accurately represented in three dimensions. However, the limits of two-dimensional drawings can be circumvented to some extent by providing images of both horizontal and vertical sections through networked systems, i.e. by using both relational and durational mapping to delineate them.

Assembling the Tool Set for Durational Mapping In the last chapter, we began the task of building a representational framework by looking at means of tracking connections between systems through attention to the discursive content of activity and textual artefacts. This provided a basis for representing connections and tracking lines of power and influenc between systems but took us no further in looking at spatio-temporal issues other than as an element in narrative description. A key to making progress is focusing analysis on events. The analysis of events is critical to representing practice because doing so privileges the temporal and the locational elements of social action. Events allow a concentration on the processual aspects of educating (Van de Ven & Poole, 2005) rather than the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of education as an abstract entity. Foucault (1980:114) provides a strong justificatio for the analysis of events, claiming that it is in paying attention to the concrete minutiae of how things are done that we may escape the assumptions imposed upon us by the powerful institutions in which we are enmeshed.

Event Analysis Events, for our purposes, may be define as forms of social interaction involving two or more people (and things), which are understood by those involved to be

Assembling the Tool Set for Durational Mapping

61

part of a particular process of educating. Such events are therefore incidents within ongoing joint activity and entail interacting in any form that is recognisable as part of an ongoing pedagogic purpose. Thus the events I am concerned with are the products of deliberative, or planned, action. I am not interested in events that are unplanned – although that does not mean that the unplanned does not happen in the events that I am interested in. Focusing on planned events means that I am not concerned with the kind of events that are subject to quantitative techniques, such as event history analysis (Marsden, 2005), which is based upon the point in time when a particular event occurs, for example, when someone catches an illness in epidemiological studies. By definin events as planned social interactions in the course of a particular activity, it follows that there are several parameters that can be used to delineate them. An event of this nature not only occurs at a point in time but also has a duration; thus it may be located both within a sequence and its ‘volume’ or ‘size’, in durational terms may be compared with that of other events. In pursuit of an activity, there may well be several series of different types of events, and time can also serve as a medium for exploring the connections between one type of event and another within a sequence. Events also take place at locations, whether in material or virtual space, and they have participants as both the people and the things that are engaged in the particular interactions that occur during them. On this basis, the events that are part of the performance of a particular activity system may be define by who, and what, participates in them, where they occur and what takes place during them. All events are unique in that they can never be exactly replicated, but many are repetitive because they are scheduled, planned and/or otherwise part of a cycle associated with a form of activity. In sum, we may defin events by affixin the following: Place in time (sequence) Duration Location Participants – people Participants – tools in the form of language, procedures, equipment, etc. Action It is worth contrasting this listing of elements in events as concrete occurrences with the representations of events in text by comparing the above with a similar list drawn up by Fairclough (2003:135), where he makes separate categories for language, means and techniques of interaction all of which are classed as tools or artefacts in my list in order to avoid equating discursive elements with text alone. In a similar fashion, I have subsumed another of his categories, social relations as part of the analysis of action and participation. Furthermore, institutional forms are excluded as entities from my list because I am making the assumption that systemic forms and relations may emerge from events in repetition but cannot be determined as entities beforehand. Whilst Fairclough includes times and places in his list, he does not identify duration as a measure. I have also used the term location rather

62

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

than place because I want to include virtual as well as physical interactions, and location seems to be a rather ‘freer’ term. In the following sections, I shall consider each of these elements in turn and how they may be represented.

Participation: People Of course, definin these elements is not as simple as it seems for there remain a number of representational difficultie not the least of which is deciding what constitutes participation. This is in part because we come back to the problem about the relationships between individuals, as particular and unique bodies, and groups as forms of association that are not merely the sum of a number of individuals but serve as the basis for the sharing of a common discourse and positioning in relation to an activity. Thus, the question is, in considering participation in events, should the emphasis lie with identity as a composite phenomenon of engagement in activity or with persons treated as individuals? This dilemma has already been encountered in the Craigton case, where whilst each quality development office was different from her fellows, nevertheless, as a member of a working team, she shared a culture, a set experiences and a ‘worldview’ with her colleagues in respect of her working role. This positioning necessarily had an influenc on her actions and the particular sense she made of the initiative Succeeding Together. The assumption is that we usually act as a representative of the groups we are involved in when we are in a role, i.e. we adopt an identity that has a strong collective element to it rather than one which is individuated and independent of group norms and practices. Thus, when we were talking about those events in Craigton that related to composing The Guide, people tended to represent the views and position of their particular group because they held an allegiance with their normal professional role, whilst they were in the process of negotiating a way to implement the new initiative. The evidence from a number of sources is that people carry many identities in their everyday life that relate to the different activities in which they are involved (Woodward, 2002). The management of this multiplicity of roles in Western cultures is usually achieved by compartmentalisation on the part of the person concerned so that his or her various identities are kept apart (Goffman, 1959; Berger & Luckman, 1967; Edwards, 1997). For instance, conventionally, we tend to keep our private life separate from our working life, and the two spheres are only likely to ‘interfere’ or ‘spill into’ one another when there is a major crisis in either one. In another sense, our identities are not entirely portable anyway since a person does not, and often cannot, take the same artefactual array from one space to another. Someone could, for example, wear her swimming gear in a lecture theatre but this would be regarded as eccentric and inappropriate in this context, whereas on the beach or at a swimming pool it would form part of an accepted array of artefacts. Thus the ‘intentional’ tone of compartmentalisation is a bit misleading – leaving an identity ‘behind’ when you move to a different activity is, in many ways, a physical necessity rather than a matter of choice. In terms of social activities, identities are thus a

Assembling the Tool Set for Durational Mapping

63

mixture of persons and things in settings associated with similar mixes of persons and things rather than something that applies to individuals unencumbered with the discursive trappings that are considered proper to the practice they are engaged in. For the purposes of analysing educating events, this means that it is legitimate to consider the roles that participants hold that are likely to be pertinent in exploring the particular educating process one is concerned with. Activity Sets One way of examining what happens across interconnected social spaces is to use the notion of activity sets. The concept of ‘sets’, with their property of permeability, allows for interference and interaction as well as issues of separation and difference. Activity sets provide a means of paying attention to micro-political themes, such as those that arose in the case of Craigton, whilst avoiding the problem of using a ‘strong’ version for collective boundaries. Activity sets can be define as consisting of groups of people who commonly interact together in pursuit of an activity. An activity set has a number of broad characteristics: It centres around the pursuit of a particular object or activity; It has its own discourse and artefacts that are shared and used by set members; It embodies a particular point of view and hence a set of values; Membership is acknowledged by the people involved and forms an element, however minor, in definin their identities; • It is permeable so that members of the set also belong to other sets; • It exercises means for inclusion and exclusion in terms of membership. • • • •

If we apply these criteria to organisations, it is clear that they too could be define as activity sets although the opposite is not the case, i.e. not all activity sets are organisations. This definitio is still problematic in that whether or not persons can be counted as members of an activity set is sometimes difficul to determine, particularly at the stage where an activity set is either forming or disintegrating. For instance, you might have a group of public service professionals that come together to devise a coordinated service plan for their area. However, the group never really unites behind this purpose because participants act in alignment with their particular specialities as social workers, medical practitioners and educationalists. The question then is whether or not this group constitutes an activity set. It could be argued that it is not a legitimate set in the sense that the declared object is not really pursued – but it might also be argued that it does constitute a set in so far as all the participants recognise and agree that the group exists to defend and maintain traditional professional boundaries, even if this purpose is not made overt for political reasons. This kind of phenomena is particularly likely to occur with ‘invasive’ forms of educating that mix developmental and contagious pedagogic strategies. In the case of socialisation and formal models of schooling, issues of interference between roles are less

64

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

likely to occur so that singular forms of identificatio are more likely to apply or to be taken to do so (Bernstein, 1996). However, despite these ambiguities, the notion of an activity set as a basis for analysis retains a useful function as a means for surfacing the influenc of the various collectivities that people are party to. Just asking the question about whether or not an activity set exists helps to direct attention to the over-layering and interference of identities in educating activities.

Participation: Artefacts We also need to consider the things which are implicated in the activities which help to create these spaces, i.e. artefacts. According to Leont’ev (1978), a major part of the knowledge and expertise of a work group is embodied in its artefacts, which are significan constituents of its culture. These are the tools that set members use in pursuing their object; they are therefore part of the collective activity of the set members. We are back here to the notion of actants, mixes of people and things that exert power through action because they do work of some sort in terms of applying energy, time and material to achieve the production of an effect or some particular thing. For ANT theorists, artefacts are seen as exerting agency independently of persons. For instance, a key artefact for the SQH programme is the Standard for Headship that lays out a framework for practice and carries with it the authority of the national government. It also accrues authority from the governance of the course itself, because local authorities, as well as universities, are involved in delivering the programme. Whilst accepting the considerable effects that artefacts can produce, these happen in relation to action that also involves persons, so I am inclined to disagree with the ANTic position that they have ‘agency’ of themselves, separable from their embroilment with people. Artefactual Arrays Like people, in general artefacts do not exist in activity as single entities; they are usually associated with activities in complex and characteristic arrays. For instance in teaching and learning at a university there are specialist locations – lecture theatres, libraries and classrooms that contain equipment for the projection of presentations, etc., where students and teachers use particular textual and material artefacts. Pedagogic procedures and genres of communication within the ‘teaching and learning’ setting also constitute part of this collection as do assessment criteria and assignments. It is this whole array of devices, and the relations between them and the humans involved, which is implicated in educating. As with their human co-actors, the role of artefacts and their participation in action can be problematic. For instance, adaptations to a document may be made as a result of a meeting. Whilst the basis for change was determined in the meeting, the change was actually made later in a satellite event in which a person interacted with a text and altered it along the lines agreed by the group. Should this be treated

Assembling the Tool Set for Durational Mapping

65

as a separate event or do we subsume changing the text as an action ‘within’ the firs event?

Spaces and Flows The major assumption I am going to make here is that events create social spaces that are definabl by the use of the criteria that were listed for events and that these spaces are measurable in terms of points in time and duration. These measures, along with location, can be used to map a representation of social space. Putting this more formally, activity can be conceived as constituted by those events during which an object is pursued by an activity set (or a mixture of sets) performed as spaces, located in both time and place. In this respect, locations are occluded in a similar way to that of persons, i.e. just as I am referring to members of activity sets rather than individuals I am not pointing to events occurring in room 2B but to location as a typology such as classrooms or laboratories, etc. A second assumption I am making is that when more than one event takes place in relation to a particular object of activity and involves the same activity set(s) and the same array of artefacts, then the space created by the activity may be represented as additive of those events. On this basis, some events open singular social spaces since the particular group/s interact to pursue a particular activity just the once; whilst other events are spatially additive, the same activity sets interact in a succession of events in pursuit of the same object, resulting in a continuation of that particular social space. Social spaces can be mapped on the basis of the following: • • • •

points in time; duration (either as a singular event or as sums of like events); purpose/activity (location as a particular space); and connections (movement of persons plus things between spaces).

Thus in the Craigton Council case the cluster representatives’ seminar took place as four separate events between November 2003 and May 2004, but the same activity sets participated in all four of these events, and action during them centred around the composition of The Guide to implementing the organisational learning initiative. On this basis, these four events could be treated as additive and creating one type of space. Depending on the scale of representation, the four spaces can either be shown graphically as four separate occasions occurring at times t1 to t4 of duration d1 to d4 that are joined by a f ow of people and things from one to the other or summed as one space of duration D spanning time t1 to t4 . In the latter case, D is equal to the durations of all four meetings, i.e. D = (d1 at time t1 ) + (d2 at time t2 ) + (d3 at time t3 ) + (d4 at time t4 ). There are therefore decisions to be made about divisions into events – does a week’s residential course count as one event over 1 week or as a series of events. This depends upon the level of detail that one is seeking to illustrate. Whether or not to illustrate particular aspects and levels of detail within a

66

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

system depends upon the focus of a particular study and the boundaries set for data collection. Within a given activity system there may be a number of networked spaces. Returning to the case of the standard route version of the SQH programme, there are two spaces for learning, one involves candidates as students in a teaching space with a tutor, whilst the other (which is a multiple of the number of schools the candidates in a given cohort group work in) involves candidates working with groups of colleagues in their respective schools to overtake action-learning projects. There is also a space for governance where the local authority co-ordinators and tutors from the universities come together to manage the programme, and yet another space is created by the business of assessment. All these spaces link together and each is produced as a part of the performance of the SQH activity. To complete the picture of the educating process, we also need to follow the lines of connectivity by which ideas/knowledge move physically from one interactive space to another along with members of activity sets and/or in the artefacts carried by them. This movement needs to include the f ow of people and artefacts from event to event in the same space and the movement of people and artefacts from one space to another. Movement here is not simply a matter of material relocation but is about the ‘actant’, as person plus artefact(s), acting in the space to which they have moved, i.e. the definitio of movement entails the performance of a particular actant in both spaces. This is to distinguish a connection or relation from purely locational changes, for example, when a person changes out of her work clothes and goes swimming, there is no appreciable action that is provoked by her moving between her working space and her recreational space. In terms of activity there is therefore no relation or connection between the two spaces since she changes identity as she moves from one to the other. The greatest interference occurs when an identity is retained and transported. An activity set flo occurs where members of one or more activity sets, as actants, move from one interactive space to another at a point in time. An artefact flo occurs where an artefact, or parts of it, ‘move’ from one interactive space to another, and it is used in both spaces, i.e. because it forms part of an actant. The actant, of which the artefact is part, may remain the same in both the spaces or may change. For example, the SQH portfolios (artefacts) are used in one space by the candidates as a tool for assembling school-generated data (portfolio + candidate) and in another space by tutors and fiel assessors to assess candidates’ competence (portfolio + assessor). The artefact acts in both spaces but is not attached to the same type of person as it travels. All fl ws can potentially be tracked in terms of the time of their occurrence, activity set membership, artefacts and the interactive spaces constituted by events. In making these categorisations and determining relationalities, it is important to note that the discursive ‘content’ of artefacts, actants and activity is critical in determining which are the relevant events, activity sets, artefacts and actions that

The Spatial Patterning of Interaction on the SQH Programme

67

are the focus of study and in determining their relations. Thus, although we are mapping material relations, their form and nature always reflect the influenc of an imaginary plane of articulations, or relations, between ideas. The case study section that follows illustrates the following: • how you can make durational maps; • how durational maps privilege features of educating which are not brought into focus in other forms of representation; • how durational and relational mapping can be used to compare the design and functioning of different educating systems.

The Spatial Patterning of Interaction on the SQH Programme The SQH programme was delivered in two forms up until 2005. These were the standard route, which depended upon the participants undertaking practice-based learning projects in schools, and the accelerated route, which was developed to meet the needs of experienced senior managers, and substituted the accreditation of prior learning for the projects undertaken by participants on the standard route. In this section, durational maps of both the standard and the accelerated route programmes are provided and explained to show how the various concepts we have already discussed can be converted into a visual form. The reason for comparing these two routes is because they represent different types of educating systems. The standard route is essentially a hybrid system in that two of the four units that make up the programme are traditional taught units based on a fairly standard form of university teaching, following an assimilative, schooling model of educational practice, whereas the two work-based units occur in participants’ schools on the basis of practice prescribed by a standard and are therefore more typical of an invasive, developmental pedagogy.

Mapping the System as Time and Space The SQH will be mapped as a system by concentrating on the interface between the students and the programme. It is important to be specifi in this regard, because, as we shall see later, where you are in the system alters the shape, or rather the ‘view’ that you have of it. The discussion will apply the criteria that have been described in the introduction and show both how these relate to the empirical data and how the various entities provide the basis for mapping the SQH activity in durational terms. In contrast to the relational mapping that we used in Fig. 3.1, which did not map activity over time but rather cut a horizontal slice through the system to illustrate relays running across it, on this occasion the cut through the system is ‘vertical’, providing an asynchronous view that reveals the patterning of space that the activity makes as time passes.

68

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

The Durational Representation of the SQH The f rst stage in building the durational map is shown in Fig. 4.1 (1). Only one axis is fi ed in this form of mapping and it is shown on the right-hand side as a timescale running from the top of the figur towards the base. In this case, it is calibrated as 6 monthly semesters. It covers a period of just over 2 years which is the time it takes most SQH candidates to complete the programme as part-time students. On the left-hand side, the events that comprise the taught parts of the programme are shown as the cohort-learning space. In this space, the two taught units, Units 1 and 4 opened up 4 day long durations at the beginning and end of the programme with a period of 2 days in the middle for Unit 3 preparation. The smaller durations in this space mark when network meetings or tutorials took place. These spaces are

Fig. 4.1 (1) Building a durational map 1

The Spatial Patterning of Interaction on the SQH Programme

69

linked together because they all involved teaching, interaction of the same activity sets (tutors and SQH candidates) and a common set of artefacts, procedures and types of location. Figure 4.1 (2) completes the representation of the SQH learning spaces by placing the durations of school-based learning activities in a space to the right of the figure This shows that the bulk of activity in this learning space took place during Units 2 and 3 when the candidates were leading and managing their school-based learning projects. The smaller durations in this space were created by planning and assessment activities associated with the programme. The size of this space is in the nature of an approximation because the duration of activity obviously would have differed between candidates. For instance, some of them would have been engaged in larger and more complex projects than others. Again, all the activities in this space involved the same activity sets (candidates, their school colleagues and pupils), and they centred around school-improvement projects. Fig. 4.1 (2) Building a durational map 2

The next, Figure 4.1 (3) adds in the f ows that occurred between the cohortlearning space and the school-learning space. On Unit 1, candidates were asked to bring materials from their schools, in the form of policies and plans, for discussion in the cohort-learning space. For the second part of the Unit, each of them was required to carry out an investigation within his/her own schools. The outcomes of these activities were then discussed with their peers in the cohort in preparation for writing

70

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

Fig. 4.1 (3) Building a durational map 3

up a situational analysis of the school’s functioning as part of the assignment for Unit 1, which included a proposal for the Unit 2 project. During Units 2 and 3, the candidates met regularly with their peers in the cohort to discuss how their projects were going and what they were learning from them. Thus, the fl ws represent the movement across the spaces of texts (both oral and written), procedures, etc. and persons (the candidates). Flows indicate an importation/exportation of artefacts and people acting together in both spaces, i.e. as actants. Figure 4.1 (4) shows the key artefacts involved in the programme and the way in which they were interconnected with the spaces. The key texts for both learning spaces are shown at the top right-hand of the figure and they were the Standard for Headship, the Programme Handbook which specifie the principles behind the course, the content, learning experiences and assessment procedures for each of the modules, etc. and the academic and policy texts that were selected as appropriate learning materials. In between the two main learning spaces lay the assignments which linked the two spaces in a sequence of preparation and planning for action in school followed by reporting and reflectin on that action. Each planning assignment set up the basis for discussions in the cohort-learning space that took place at regular network and tutorial meetings during the course of the practice-based modules Units 2 and 3. Within the school-learning space, the inclusion of the SQH candidate’s project in the SIP or school-improvement plan was critical to enabling them to access the resources and legitimation they required from their headteachers and colleagues to carry out their projects

The Spatial Patterning of Interaction on the SQH Programme

71

Fig. 4.1 (4) Building a durational map 4

Finally, all this information is presented on the map as shown in the completed version of Fig. 4.1. The conventions that applied in building this particular representation apply in the case of all the durational maps used in this book. Obviously, things like the timescale and the particular viewpoint of a system that such a map shows can vary. Thinking back to the description of the SQH that was given in Chapter 2 makes it clear that Fig. 4.1 represents only a small part of the whole even though it is at the heart of the SQH activity. To get a sense of the level of variation that occurs according to viewpoint you can compare the durational maps in Figs. 6.3, 7.1 and 8.1, which all present different views of a similar practice-based educating system, the Chartered Teacher Programme. To illustrate how student experience may vary according to the design of a programme, a second durational map, Fig. 4.2, of student experience on the accelerated route to the SQH is included here. This version of the programme was developed to allow experienced senior managers to make a claim against the Standard for Headship based on their previous work; therefore it did not require students to undertake projects in school. As a result, the bulk of the space opened up by this activity was in the cohort-learning space, the taught element being much the same as that on the standard route. The accelerated route programme did not open up any substantive space in participants’ schools. It was also shorter by 1 year than the standard route.

72

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

Key to Figures 4.1 and 4.2 Rectangular boxes and f ow lines outlined in black delineate the artefactual system, whilst rounded white shapes and fl w lines represent activity set interactions and f ows. • The space on the left, labelled the Cohort-Learning Space (CLS), is where three activity sets interact (the students, the tutors and the local co-ordinators) • The space on the right, labelled the School-Learning Space (SLS), represents the interactions occurring between the students (as members of the SQH cohort) and the school activity set, i.e. activity in school that comes about as a direct result of the student’s involvement in the SQH programme. • On the far right-hand side, there is a timeline calibrated in 6 monthly semesters. Fig. 4.1 Durational map of the spaces created by the performance of the SQH programme standard route

Summary

73

Fig. 4.2 Durational map of the spaces created by the performance of the SQH programme accelerated route

It is important to note that timescale and point of view are indissolubly linked. In this chapter, we have been looking at the SQH system from the point of view of the candidates. They enter and progress through the system only once; thus their timescale, in this case, is either one and a half or two and a half years of parttime engagement. If we mapped the same part of the system (the learning spaces) from the tutors’ point of view, then they would have experienced the cohort-learning space as a series of repetitions with similar but different groups of students stretching over a timescale of as many years as they were engaged with the programme, i.e. there would be a repeating pattern of cohort-learning spaces over time rather than a single representation of this space, as shown in Fig. 4.1. In addition, as the school-learning spaces are not locations in which the tutors act, these spaces would be ‘missing’ from any durational map representing their particular viewpoint (see Fig. 8.1).

Summary What I have tried to do in this case study section is to show that by conceiving an educating system as a patterning of interaction over time it is possible to begin to look at what was happening during an educating process rather differently from

74

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

the way we would normally do. Mapping the activity at the interface between the learner and the programme provides a way of surfacing the spatial patterning of the programme highlighting the rhythms of interaction, stages in activity, frequencies and location of action and the points when key artefacts were produced. These are all elements of an educating system which can be varied by design, i.e. mapping provides a means of thinking rather differently about what an educating system is and how it may be performed.

Applications of Mapping Relational Space Using Mapping for Investigation and Design Durational mapping provides a useful way of comparing the two programme routes within the SQH system (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). On both routes the bulk of the input in terms of teaching and texts (activity in the cohort-learning space) is much the same. The major contrast between the two figures aside from the overall duration of the programmes, is that whilst the standard route opened up an SQH activity space within the candidates’ schools, the accelerated route did no such thing. It did not interfere artefactually in the candidates’ school spaces since there was no connection with schools’ improvement plans. The Portfolio Plan on the accelerated route largely entailed going back through file of past events and making decisions about what evidence to present from what had already been done. It did not involve entering into any discussions with anyone in the school about action for the future. Comparing Figs. 4.1 and 4.2 also shows the difference between an educational design that is a hybrid between ‘schooling’ and ‘developmental’ forms of pedagogy and one that is purely of the ‘schooling’ kind. This is because the SQH standard route employed an invasive strategy, since it used collaborative action-learning projects as a means of inserting itself into school-improvement plans. It thereby appropriated resources and legitimacy for action within the candidates’ schools. The pattern of the accelerated route, which has now been discontinued, was much nearer to that of a traditional programme employing a schooling strategy. On this route, the bulk of the action took place in the cohort-learning space, i.e. candidates were not engaged by the programme in any learning activities within their schools. The standard route was a mixture of a schooling strategy – removing participants to a new space (the cohort-learning space) – and a developmental strategy (intrusion into the school through creating a school-learning space for trialling changes in leadership and management practice). We can explore these issues further by comparing relational maps of the learning spaces created by the two programmes as shown in Fig. 4.3. If we look at a ‘synchronous’ slice through the standard route system, then the cohort-learning space for each particular grouping relates to as many schoollearning spaces as there are students. For instance, in Fig. 4.3 for a cohort of 10

Applications of Mapping Relational Space

75

Key to Figure 4.3 Octagons represent spaces. Flows of persons are represented as rounded, white lines. Artefactual f ows as black lines Fig. 4.3 Comparing the learning spaces created by the standard and the accelerated routes of the SQH programme

students, there will be 10 different school-learning spaces and what happens in each one of these spaces will vary. In some schools, the students’ projects will open up relatively large spaces as a product of SQH activity, whilst in others there may be much less engagement. Nevertheless, because the two forms of learning space are connected, in that candidates had to bring things from their school spaces (evidence of action, analyses of data, records of observations, etc.) into the cohort-learning space and, vice versa, take things from the cohort-learning space (the Standard, various tools for evaluation, principles, theoretical tools and procedures) and use them in the school-learning space, the programme sets up a series of interferences. The candidates were required to move as ‘actants’ between the two spaces. The compartmentalisation of identities as learners and as staff members on their part became problematic under these circumstances. An added pressure was the need for their headteachers’ and the local authority co-ordinators’ sponsorship and the knowing engagement of the members of their project groups in their work-based learning. This made their participation in the programme very public within their

76

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

work settings. For those on the accelerated route, these pressures, arising from the mixing of two different identities, as a learner on the SQH and as a member of the school management team, were largely absent and candidates could easily preserve their learning activity as something separate from their normal working life. The spatial design also affected the resources available for learning. Here I am referring to the potential within a cohort for mixing the range of experiences open to the group using case-driven teaching techniques. The potential for generating a much closer relationship between theory and practice in a hybrid programme is therefore much greater as a result of the design. Texts and ideas can be transported outward into the workplace to be involved in enaction and thereby become part of experience and then returned to the cohort space for critique and analysis. Knowledge generated in the school-learning space can provide the basis for theorisation and further knowledge creation in the cohort-learning space. These differences in the experiences of candidates on the different routes raise questions about the effects and implications that hybrid forms have for both the nature of the learning that occurs in their performance and the development of pedagogical practices that are relevant and effective in supporting practitioners’ learning. Mapping the spatial practice of the accelerated route and the standard route shows that these two, supposedly equivalent forms of educating, are in fact very different from the candidates’ point of view. Interestingly, the impression amongst the local co-ordinators and tutors in their own evaluations was that the accelerated route was having little effect on practice. This was confirme by an independent evaluation commissioned by the Scottish Executive that was published in 2003. The report was based on a national survey of headteachers who had had candidates on the programme in their schools and of the candidates who had successfully completed the programme and nine case studies. The outcomes indicated that the programme, in the standard form, was having an impact on practice: Many (candidates) were also aware of the effects of their interventions on the wider professional culture of the school. Indeed there were several accounts from colleagues of how they had been inspired to greater efforts in their own work through the leadership provided by the SQH candidate. So the programme not only provided candidates with insight and personal development, it actually lead to significan developments in schools. (Menter et al., 2005:18)

However, the evaluation team found no such positive evidence of impact in the case of the accelerated route – ‘there is some evidence that the accelerated route is not functioning as a development programme for the candidate nor is it having a significan impact on the candidates’ schools.’ (Menter et al., 2003:3) An obvious question to ask on the basis of this comparison is what difference do variations in spatial practices make when it comes to students’ learning. Are certain spatial practices more or less effective in enabling experienced practitioners to change the way they work? The evidence from the participants, which we will examine in Part II, and from the Scottish Executive’s evaluation of the SQH suggests that they were an important variable in this case.

Applications of Mapping Relational Space

77

Mapping has the capacity to allow for both qualitative and quantitative comparisons of systems. It can be used to track how systems change over time as, for instance, in comparing the initial stages of the introduction of Craigton’s organisational learning structure with later stages to see how, and if, it appeared in the schools and what sense was made of it in these contexts – which groups were actually involved and affected by the changes. It can also be used to compare different points of view, for instance the mapping of the Chartered Teacher programme from the students’ point of view in Fig. 7.1 is very different from the map of the system from the tutors’ viewpoint Fig. 8.1. We used our investigations into the patterning of the SQH to inform both the design of the Chartered Teacher programme, see Figs. 6.3 and 7.1 and the revised SQH programme in 2005. On both, the patterning of the design was changed in order to increase the interaction between school- and cohort-learning spaces, and we altered our pedagogy and the tools we used in order to make much better use of the resources that this mixing made available. We were thus able to place far greater emphasis on the co-production of knowledge and understanding about professional practice and its development.

Effects of Hybridity in Educating Systems Hybridity and Spatial Interference I want to explore the effects of the mixing and interference of relational spaces that were alluded to in the case study section a little further, particularly with reference to effects of hybridity which is a major theme in Part II. Similar issues regarding the interference caused by the ‘marriage’ of different forms of practice arose when we examined the Craigton case, and again these occasions led to contestation that signalled learning and change. Thus the indications are that this phenomenon was centrally implicated in processes of altering practice in both these cases. However, whilst both cases gave rise to spaces of interference, this was largely attributable to the use of an invasive, developmental pedagogic strategy. Having said this, interference is just that, so that when we are talking here about practice-based programmes that employ a mixture of schooling and developmental strategies the effect is to open up two different spaces to each other, i.e. influenc is reciprocal, not one way, and what is quite likely to be produced is a real hybrid, i.e. something which resembles neither parent. Thus hybrids are liable to have consequences which no one really foresees at their inception; they display some of the ‘emergent’ properties that are a feature of complex dynamic systems. In enrolling on the SQH programme, we can think of any standard route participant as being involved in three spaces of activity that had a significan bearing on her professional practice. All three involved different mixes and interactions of people and things. The f rst of these spaces was created by the participant’s work community and the assumptions, values and role definition that governed the activities of its members.

78

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

It was within this milieu that, as an established teacher, she had already developed a professional identity. The second space was created by the SQH programme and typifie in the cohort learning space. It was here that the particular values and purposes of the programme were enacted and established, largely by the tutors and the local authority coordinators. Here the participant was positioned as a learner and as an aspirant to headship, sponsored by her local authority and her headteacher. The SQH also created a third space, most forcibly during Units 2 and 3, this was the school learning space where the participant had to lead and manage two collaborative projects involving her colleagues. These projects provided the means whereby she was to demonstrate her competence against the Standard for Headship, an artefact that carried the weight of a nationally approved and applied definitio of ‘headteacherliness’. On the standard route a candidate was placed in the position of bridging the gap between the f rst and the second spaces described above, as did the projects that she led and managed. The projects were essential pedagogic artefacts in the activity since they were prescribed as the basis of demonstrating competence. They served to set up interferences between the participant’s identity as a learner on the SQH and her identity as a staff member in her school. These two spaces, that of normal school activity, and that of the SQH cohort-learning space, were likely to be based upon sufficientl different beliefs and values to cause some discomfort for most SQH candidates, leading, in a few cases, to a level of open contention in their school setting. Of the 40 SQH candidates whose work we examined, 29 made direct reference to micro-political dilemmas affecting project implementation, for example, In some respects I felt I was trying to work in two directions. I wanted the staff to see I was sympathetic to their problems in developing writing. I also wanted to show the headteacher I could take the staff with me and get positive results and feedback by the way I interacted with the staff. . . (Reeves et al., 2003b:62)

The evidence suggested that it was through interaction with both people and artefacts that conceptual/perceptual disturbance occurred, and the opportunity for change was effected. By ‘making’ candidates change the way things were done in school and ‘making’ headteachers and others give ‘permission’ for them to undertake these changes, the SQH programme substantially altered the parameters of professional development at the postgraduate level. By the same token, it also invaded and disturbed practices within the universities where the accreditation of work-based learning and the use of portfolios were new forms of pedagogic activity. Besides what happened to persons, there was a concomitant mixing and interaction between artefacts belonging in the f rst space, such as the school’s development plan, proceedings of working parties and groups, data on pupils’ learning and artefacts belonging to the second space, such as the Standard, assignments and

Applications of Mapping Relational Space

79

assessment criteria, and concepts derived from theoretical texts on school leadership and management. This mixing occurred in new texts composed by the students, in the form of project plans, and portfolios and commentaries produced as part of practice-based learning. In this sense, an artefactual third space was created alongside the embodied third space in schools engendered by the activity of the students’ project groups. For example, the project plans submitted for assessment at the end of Unit 1 of the programme opened up interaction between candidates and their headteachers because they had to be signed as an agreed plan. Similarly, the portfolios submitted at the end of Unit 2 were required to demonstrate the use of a collaborative approach to leadership and management and therefore contain evidence of the activities of both candidates and their colleagues (see Fig. 4.2). It was thus new combinations of people and artefacts that opened up and made third space possible. Looking back to Chapter 3, we can see the same sort of effects in the Craigton case where, for instance, Succeeeding Together provided a third space for the educational psychologists to move from a f rst space they found unsatisfactory to a second space which better represented their aspirations to contribute to the development of teaching practice on the basis of their expertise in learning. For the quality development officer the effect was the opposite, the third space of Succeeding Together represented the possible loss of a firs space that they wished to retain, their imagined future space in this instance being largely negative and therefore one to be avoided.

Characteristics of Third Space Couching what happened in more abstract terms, the notion of competing activity sets based upon different points of view expressed in different forms of discourse and material practice gives us a new tool for investigating what is changing for whom and how in a particular case. The progress the ‘new’ practice is making can be tracked by investigating how those involved are making up their minds both as individuals and as collectivities about what practice ‘should’ be. Such an analysis helps to reveal how change on the part of one or more individuals in an activity set is fundamentally a political issue involving contestation over the nature of practice and hence associated issues of practitioner identity. This phenomenon applies whether the change agents are already part of an established activity set or pushy intruders into an established system. Since it occurs in a social context, such a change requires others to allow space for the new practice to be enacted, which, of course, they may choose not to do. However, if the new practice is allowed to occur, these others also need to grant it a degree of acceptance and validation to enable it to be sustained. Thus changing practice always represents a challenge to the status quo and involves argument, questioning and debate about why the new way is desirable and/or should be considered as proper conduct. Even when arguments are not openly surfaced between set members, those sponsoring the change have to engage in this dialectic

80

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

internally. This view of the change/learning process runs somewhat counter to the managerialist portrayal of changing practice as a largely uncontroversial technical matter. The language of shared culture, ownership and empowerment papers over the conceptual, emotional and practical difficultie that people frequently experience on the ground (Dadds, 1994). The study of the SQH indicates that the intersection of activity sets creates ‘new’, more fluid third spaces (Soja, 1989, 1996), where changes may occur. The intersection between two different activities brings both forms of practice into question and challenges those who occupy this third space to negotiate a new way of behaving that overcomes the problem created by the overlapping of spatial boundaries. Strauss claims that ‘Innovation, in fact, rests upon ambiguous, confused, not wholly define situations. Out of ambiguity arises challenge and the discovery of new values.’ (1997:28). These spaces may be engendered in a variety of ways. In change management systems, ‘third spaces’ may be deliberately created through organisational re-structuring. For example, in Scotland the New Community Schools’ initiative (SOEID, 1998a) brought professionals into interaction in new groupings dictated by structural changes in service delivery. New forms of interaction were engineered between social work, health and school education in the hopes of changing the practice of these services. However, using re-structuring as a pedagogic device for change is liable to fail because people simply seek to make sense of the new arrangements within their previous framework of meaning. Even with a deliberate attempt at re-educating, change in multi-professional contexts is hard to achieve because of the plurality of tightly compartmentalised professional positions (Engestrom et al., 2003; Borum, 2004). Thus productivity of third spaces as locations for learning and the invention and emergence of new practices have to be set against the basic logic of spatial production. This latter depends upon the power to marshal resources and determine the object, norms and values relating to a given activity, driven by a desire for predictability and control. Third space is relatively easily achieved where the object is shaping an individual’s practice. Bringing about a change that constitutes a third space for her as she attempts to come to terms with a new behaviour may have little effect on the collectivity in which she is involved. It is much harder to achieve or maintain an opening when the aim is to alter collective practice, where opposition to the enquiry posed by difference is liable to be much greater. Appropriating room for change within the complex web of relations that go to make up practice is not easily achieved. Even the simplifie analysis I have conducted here, by limiting attention to only one part of the activity that makes up the SQH system, already illustrates Lefebvre’s claim, The hypercomplexity of social space should now be apparent, embracing as it does individual entities and peculiarities, relatively fi ed points, movements, and f ows and waves – some interpenetrating, others in conflic and so on. The principle of the interpenetration and superimposition of social spaces has one very helpful result, for it means each fragment of space subjected to analysis masks not just one social relationship but a host of them that analysis can potentially disclose. (1991: 88)

Summary Part I

81

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated the means whereby ephemeral space, as the product of the performance of an activity system, can be represented visually. Such durational mapping draws attention to features of educating that often pass unnoticed such as the following: Spatialities – the types and relations of spaces involved in the system Movement of things and people including ideas Rhythm and pacing of events Sequencing Connections and relations In so doing, durational mapping opens up a whole new set of questions that can be applied in the qualitative and quantitative investigation and comparison of educating systems. Equally, the technique has value in structuring and designing means of promoting and supporting professional learning. By demonstrating how systems are interlinked in practice-based learning, the mapping of activity enables us to consider the constraints and possibilities that apply to strategies for promoting professional development in a more comprehensive and less atomised fashion than is often the case. Being aware of the relational dimensions of activity allows us to factor them into the design of new or revised systems. The maps allow us to compare and contrast the way activity is patterned in particular systems and therefore to begin to think about what we do as educators, or as those being educated, in a rather different way. It helps us to think about the resources made available for learning, the range of interactions that a given system is bringing about, their balance, sequence and rhythm all of which are aspects of educating that are probably more important than we normally give them credit for.

Summary Part I This completes the outline of the particular array of tools for analysis that has been developed for exploring the relational spaces of educating systems and the connections and interactions that they can give rise to. Event analysis relies on the examination of texts at an ethnomethodological level of detail over time, since the task is not to fi meaning and relations at a given ‘point’ but to track changes in both as processes that unfold in the performance of collaborative activity. The resulting relational and durational maps capture some aspects of the movements, connections and patterns produced by these activity systems in performance. As Part II will demonstrate, they help to surface the social dynamics that link issues of identity, power, agency and risk to the development of practice and the construction of knowledge.

82

4 Making Learning Spaces Visible

Such mapping can serve to challenge some of our everyday assumptions. It demonstrates that spaces of activity in a system are experienced quite differently according to the form of participation of the various actants involved. In observational terms, whilst it may be evidenced that a viewpoint is broadly shared by members of a particular activity set nevertheless what is assumed to be a commonality of experience may vary significantl in how it is sensed from that of members of another set – even where the latter supposedly participate in the ‘same’ events. Relational analyses can help to bring these differences and pluralities of focus to our attention. Furthermore, the conception of boundaries and associated notions of what is internal and external to ‘an’ activity system are increasingly problematicised in the exploration of the data generated by the cases that are examined in the next three chapters. Looking at activity in relational terms implies a radical re-working of our view of structures.

Part II

Professional Learning as Relational Practice

Introduction to Part II The next three chapters take a much closer look at the interface between the to-be-educated, the educators and various forms of action that educating may take. Part II illustrates the substantive issues that the methods described in Part I can be used to interrogate. It does so by moving to a detailed examination of what happened in the three learning spaces created by the performance of two postgraduate professional development programmes: the standard route programme for the SQH and a similar practice-based masters programme for aspiring chartered teachers (CTs). Chapter 5 looks at students’ reports of their experiences in the school-learning space, the third space that was created by undertaking practice-based learning projects in their schools. Chapter 6 looks at the activity of the tutors in the cohortlearning space, on the CT programme, in particular at what informed and shaped their pedagogy and how they set about instantiating the key knowledge, skills and concepts that were ‘agreed’ to underpin accomplished teaching. Finally, Chapter 7 looks at what students composed and made for, and of, themselves in their individual-learning spaces from the resources that they accessed in the cohort and the school-learning spaces. Part II builds up a picture of professional learning that is multi-faceted and part of changing relations and relays in a process which is both heavily controlled and highly contingent. The hybrid pedagogy used by the programmes that are examined here opened up new space-to-space interactions that provoked knowledge creation through the mixing of difference. It illustrates how this led to the amplificatio of both refl xivity and power in the form of labour and the application of resources. These local systems served as hubs for the re-direction and creation of new transmission points and relays, forming, un-bundling and re-bundling relations and connections as part of the performance of educating activity.

Chapter 5

Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

Introduction This firs chapter explores what educating felt like for the students and how they made sense of their experiences. It concentrates on the interface between the individual practitioners and their accounts of enacting practice-based learning activities, i.e. at the point where they were trying to introduce practice that was new to them in their schools. It explores what happened in the school learning spaces created by a hybrid pedagogic system. The chapter starts by considering the nature of teachers’ professional practice and its relationship to what we know about effective professional development. This provides a context for the case study section, which focuses on the students’ experiences of practice-based learning on the standard route of the SQH programme. For this purpose, the accounts submitted by students at the end of Units 2 and 3 (see Fig. 4.1) were compared. These were the narratives constructed by the students about their experiences of leading and managing projects in their schools. Their comments in interviews held after they had completed the programme supplement this material. Both these forms of accounts related directly to the candidates’ attempts to bridge the model of practice promulgated on the taught part of the course into their work setting. Essentially the case study section explores the experience of third space, of being held betwixt and between two different discursive spaces, and the consequences this has for changing practice. The fina section explores what this evidence tells us about the learning process at this particular site and what it adds to the description of professional learning that was outlined at the beginning of the chapter. It summarises the insights into the learning process that are highlighted by the use of relational space as an analytic tool.

J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3_5, 

85

86

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

Practice-Based Learning Professional Practice Going back to firs principles, professional action is based on a claim to specialist knowledge and the capacity to exercise that knowledge to the benefi of clients/students/patients. Underlying this definitio is an assumption of agency, where the work of professionals affects the lives of others, making a positive difference to their circumstances, i.e. professionals take action in pursuance of what are agreed to be societal goods in their particular field There is a measure of consensus in the literature that professional action draws upon a complex mix of ‘knowledges’ that have been variously described by different writers (Schon, 1983; Eraut, 1994; Flyvbjerg, 2001). Underlying most of these descriptions is a twofold distinction between propositional or theoretical knowledge and know-how, labelled as procedural or practical knowledge. This theory/practice divide was built into a traditional career pathway of initial training at a university or college followed by a form of practicum for qualificatio and entry into a profession. It is now both structurally and conceptually unhelpful. Whatever the professional activity there will be some mixing of ‘procedural’ and ‘propositional’ knowledge in its execution since every practitioner must incorporate within her practice artefacts, in the form of conceptual frameworks, procedures or materials that owe their origin to both sources (Gibbons et al., 1994; Spillane & Sherer, 2004; Schwandt, 2005). It is therefore perhaps more fruitful to see practice as permeated by theory and theory as permeated by practice in professional fields It is this ‘mixture’ of knowledges that constitutes the resource that a professional relies upon in carrying out her work. Although a professional lays claim to the capacity to make appropriate judgements according to unique circumstances much professional work is essentially repetitive. Thus, in many instances, for an experienced professional, the exercise of knowledge results in routines. These take the form of standard f ows of action that have become largely automatic. These routines, given their relative complexity, may take several years to establish. Since many practitioners have to exercise judgement in contexts where decisions have to be taken very rapidly, there is little time to engage in deliberation (Brown & McIntyre, 1993). Some time may be available pre-action (planning) or post-action (evaluation), but this is likely to be scarce in pressured environments such as schools and hospitals. Hence, once practitioners have established reasonably effective routines, they are discouraged from changing them by the level of disruption and investment required to do so (Huberman, 2001). The difficult of changing practice is indicated by studies of the impact of professional development on teaching such as Joyce and Showers’ work (1988) where they found that incorporating new forms of pedagogy into teachers’ repertoires often required extensive support that was sustained across different contexts and included feedback and discussion whilst they introduced new practice in their classrooms. Motivation that supports persistence in pursuing an alteration in practice is thus critical. Change needs to accord with the ‘self’ of the person, and with her desire for agency (Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996; Day et al., 2007). This is because altering

Practice-Based Learning

87

her practice in any substantive fashion also alters her professional identity to some extent. For example, a teacher changing her habitual questioning technique from closed to open questions needs to change her understanding of her role from one of testing for retention to one of encouraging the development of her students’ thinking. In that sense, she needs to change her mind about what it is to be a good teacher. This in turn alters the balance of relations between her and her pupils challenging previously held norms about legitimate classroom practices. Thus, returning to the earlier point about theory and practice, it is important that new practices are justifiabl in the eyes of teachers and that they are supported by evidence of effica y in terms of their educational value, i.e. that there is a clear case for having a positive impact on learning and relations in school settings. Of course what constitutes educational value is open to interpretation. The judgements an individual teacher makes about attempts at change are often likely to be informed by the immediate behavioural feedback from pupils and significantl mediated by emotions and, in the UK system, by pressure to raise attainment (James & Pedder, 2006; Leat & Higgins, 2002). These kinds of warrants are a means of overriding some of the political difficultie which inevitably arise during the course of implementation. Additionally, because of the emotional aspects of changing practice, collaboration which provides access to professional dialogue and discussion, as in the form of coaching and mentoring, may provide the personal support a practitioner needs during a period of change (Lieberman & Miller, 1999).

Implications for Professional Learning What this discussion indicates is that professional practice is systemic at the level of the individual practitioner in that it includes affective, cognitive, behavioural and material aspects in an indivisible mix and that all these parameters are affected as part of professional growth. Evidence for this complex emerges from the results of reviews conducted by Cordingley et al. (2003, 2005) of studies that they judged to have established a link between collaborative continuing professional development and impact on students’ learning. In describing the effects on teachers of engagement in professional development cited in these studies, the review team identifie the following: • • • • • •

greater confidence enhanced beliefs about self-effica y in regard to students’ learning enthusiasm for collaborative working development of knowledge, understanding and skills in a curricular area changes in teacher beliefs access to suitable resources

However, this analysis at an individual level needs to be extrapolated further. For instance, the teacher’s working context includes her pupils and her colleagues

88

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

all of whom – teacher, pupils and colleagues – are bound into ways of conducting educational activity which are largely customary and habitual at that particular site. Classroom discourse is a particularly powerful anchoring feature of practice as is shown by the continued persistence of the teacher-dominated initiation–response– feedback (IRF) pattern of communication to which teachers, and indeed pupils, are habituated (Skidmore, 2006). These customary routines will be inscribed in the artefacts that the practitioner and those she works with use in any given setting. Any change undertaken by an individual teacher disrupts practice on the part of others by altering her relationships with them and the procedures and materials that they use in common. For instance, if the teacher switches from the IRF form of communication to a more open and exploratory questioning technique, then it changes her relationship with the pupils and requires them to begin to alter their behaviour and contribute to the lesson in a different way. What is being asserted here is that practice is relational, and therefore opportunities for professional growth need to be contextualised within the social spaces in which practice normally occurs. The practitioner is part of a collaborative activity system. Change on her part, because it disrupts the practice of others, is therefore likely to be resisted. She will have to justify any alterations she makes not only to herself but also to others in order to engage them in the process of change. Establishing links to this kind of wider contextual framing, empirical studies carried out by researchers across a number of field indicate the importance of socio-cultural factors in either blocking or supporting learning on the part of practitioners (Hargreaves, 1994; Davis & Sumara, 2001). An account of one of the initiatives that met the ‘test’ of an instantiated change in teaching technique that led to significan gains in student achievement bears witness to the complexity of the process. Adey et al. (2004), recounting their experience of changing practices in science teaching, cite three key dimensions for securing effective change. These are as follows: f rst, the nature of the innovation and how convincingly it can be argued and understood as being of educational value; second, elements in the provision of professional development such as longevity, intensity, access to coaching and reflectio and third, the nature of the environment in which the change is engendered including levels of collegiality, the attitudes of the senior management, opportunities provided for the personal engagement of teachers and teacher turnover. The implication of the model of practice that has been outlined here is that professional development that leads to a transformation in practice is about adapting complexes involving, broadly, contemporaneous changes: (a) At an individual practitioner level of beliefs and values (knowledge); self-concept and identity; relationships; artefacts (including conceptual frameworks, procedures, materials and equipment); and skills.

Practice-Based Learning

89

(b) And, by implication, the same ‘complex’ needs to undergo some alteration on behalf of the others she works with in her context of practice: students, parents and colleagues. One way of thinking about this, although it is too mechanistic and bounded, is to conceive of the practitioner as an interactional system of person, tools and relations who is operating within the bounds of another interactional system, consisting of those she works with and their tools and relations. One of the outcomes of this framing for considering the effects of professional development is that it is not possible to establish simple relationships between inputs to individual teachers, changes in their practice and outcomes for their pupils, i.e. to use a model of cause and effect and generalisability that traditionally underpins scientifi method. Thus, there is no sense in the search to test the effect of, for example, altering teachers’ approaches to questioning, because a change in questioning will be ‘contaminated’ by all the other changes which have to take place in order for a teacher’s questioning to change. Whilst it still makes sense to look at whether professional growth, define in terms of the complexes outlined above, is associated with positive effects on desired student experiences and outcomes, it does not make sense to attribute this to a technique. For instance, whilst agreeing with Adey et al. (2004) that there is a degree of predictability in matters of practice, I do not believe that controlled experiments are possible whereby the only variable is ‘a single change in teacher behaviour’ and indeed they later point out the considerable f aws in this argument themselves. On the same grounds, the belief that the adoption of a new practice is simply a matter of changing a practitioner’s knowledge and/or skills is equally unrealistic.

Learning During Practice-Based Programmes The particular focus for investigation in this chapter are the reported effects of SQH candidates’ experiences of carrying out action-learning projects aimed at achieving improvements in their practice within their workplaces. In the case of these experienced practitioners following this particular practice-based professional learning programme there will already be established ways of performing organisational improvement in their establishments. The requirement placed upon them by the design of the course, to collaborate with their colleagues in undertaking a joint improvement project, ostensibly involves the pursuit of the same object. It therefore has the potential to cause interference. At the same time, such projects also have the object of enabling participants to demonstrate competences and achieve a qualification There are therefore two potential forms of disturbance to the status quo within participants’ work settings that may be brought about by these projects: (a) that caused by participants engaging in a form of practice which is new for them, i.e. changing their personal positioning and professional identities; and

90

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

(b) that caused by participants engaging groups of people in improvement practices which differ from those which are normally employed in their schools. Obviously, it might be the case that the practice advocated on the programme is entirely congruent with that usually adopted in the workplace so that the only disturbance caused by bridging the two spaces would be of type (a). However, where the practice prevailing in the organisation is not entirely congruent with that advocated on the programme, the potential interference is of both type (a) and type (b). In this sense, practice-based learning, which is sponsored by agencies external to the learners’ organisations, can be construed as an invasive strategy likely to arouse resistance. Accounts of Practice On the standard route of the SQH programme each student submitted a reflect ve commentary and a portfolio of evidence at the end of Units 2 and 3 for assessment purposes, i.e. almost a year apart. Before looking at an analysis of these texts, it is important to consider the functions they served. Given that the commentaries refer to specifi actions carried out as part of a programme, they are stories about a sequence of events. They therefore relate to a much wider genre of ‘accounts’ and ‘narratives’ where authors present themselves and their actions to audiences. Each commentary is about the depiction of a ‘self’ of the author that is judged to be compatible with the kind of practitioner delineated by the Standard for Headship. This public presentation of self in the guise of a worthy aspirant to headship is at the heart of the task of students’ authorship at the end of Units 2 and 3. In these texts, students are expected to reflec critically on their own actions, thereby opening themselves, and their colleagues, up for scrutiny by a number of audiences: themselves, the university tutors and the fiel assessors who will visit the school to talk to colleagues about the projects they have carried out. Such public learning exerts its own particular pressures from fears of loss of face (Weick, 1995). On the other side of the equation constructing the commentaries and portfolios is seen by course designers and tutors as the medium for displaying valued knowledge and understanding. Over the last decade or so, largely under the influenc of Schon’s thesis in The Reflectiv Practitioner (1983), reflect ve accounts of practice have become a recognised genre for assessment in teacher education. In the context of postgraduate courses for teachers, writing which demonstrates applied knowledge and understanding is now privileged. Critically reflect ve accounts of practice, incorporating material drawn from experience and analysed in relation to theoretical concepts, constitute a common form of assignment for assessment purposes. As mechanisms for undertaking ‘self-work’, the reflect ve commentaries produced on the SQH programme are distinctive because students are required to position themselves in relation to a particular occupational standard. They must make claims that demonstrate their compliance with the characteristics and conduct that the Standard for Headship (SOEID, 1998b; SE, 2005) enumerates. The writers of these commentaries are directly implicated in the composition and authoring

Tracking Discursive Change in Reflect ve Commentaries

91

of a professional self in a public arena according to criteria set by the Scottish Government. Their texts, as artefacts for assessment, are therefore invested with a high degree of both personal and professional risk. Criteria for assessment prescribe that the commentaries must display evidence of the following: • critical engagement with academic texts; and • reflectio on professional action in the workplace. The uniqueness of each of these accounts comes from the contextualisation of the particular actions of a particular person, in a particular place, at a particular time and in conjunction with particular others. The accompanying portfolio is expected to provide evidence of actions and outcomes in the work setting that ‘confirms the account given in the commentary and the author’s claims to competence against the standard. These portfolios, as the outcome of work undertaken in the school, are public documents within the school since the evidence that they contain is derived from the work of a candidate’s colleagues and pupils. In seeking to enact new practice the case study illustrates the following effects reported by students: • the lived and embodied nature of the knowledge they are creating; • the affective, imaginative, social and political elements involved in sense making and the development of practice; and • the contingent and situated nature of the learning process.

Tracking Discursive Change in Reflect ve Commentaries This section draws upon a comparison of the reflect ve commentaries produced by SQH candidates during Year 1 and Year 2 of the standard route programme in order to explore any changes in discursive practice that they exhibit. The analysis centres on how the students used key elements of the SQH discourse and the linkages they made in their texts between these concepts and their own experiences. The research group looked at the work of 40 students who completed the course in 2001. Their reflect ve commentaries were examined on a case-by-case basis to explore how each person’s writing about leadership and management had changed over the 2 years. All of those in the sample were also interviewed about their experiences and what they felt they had learned in the course. The Year 1 commentaries were based on the school projects the candidates undertook during Unit 2 whilst the Year 2 commentaries related to their experiences of undertaking their Unit 3 projects. Of this original sample, nine students, three representing those who seemed to have substantively changed their discourse, three who gave some evidence of change, and three who did not appear to have changed were chosen as subjects for a more detailed analysis (Reeves et al., 2005). The connections between each person’s claims to

92

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

learning and the circumstances to which he or she attributed this learning were the focus of these nine mini-case studies. One way of construing the learning task that faced candidates on the SQH is to see it as being about the acquisition of a discourse of school leadership and management and the ability to enact this successfully in the workplace. Hence, the learning process encompasses changes in action and performance on the part of candidates in their schools. This entailed a re-negotiation and re-definitio of their professional selves to a greater or a lesser extent, depending on their initial positioning and the nature of what they sought to achieve. In the reflect ve commentaries, candidates were expected to account for themselves in terms of the model of school leadership and management embedded in the text of the Standard for Headship (SfH), i.e. to conform to a particular type of discourse (Burroughs, 2001; Chappell et al., 2003). They were required to demonstrate a mastery of the ‘proper’ language that, in its turn, reflecte the orthodoxies of its time. Key words and concepts such as Vision, leadership, direction and values. Participative and consultative approaches to decision making. Partnership, teams and culture. are very familiar and widely used in both policy documents and the literature on school leadership and management (Schein, 1992). Since this form of discourse was mediated to, and used by, all SQH candidates on the programme, one way of distinguishing between individuals is to compare the use they made of these terms. Two cases have been selected, respectively, identifie as the accounts of Annette and Jean. Whilst these two people are superficiall similar, an examination of their commentaries shows that their accounts of experience were very different. Both Annette and Jean were from the primary sector, both were members of the senior management teams in their respective schools, and both declared from Year 1 that they wanted to introduce more participative forms of leadership and management into their school settings.

Annette Annette worked in a primary school in an inner city area. A preliminary analysis of her commentaries placed her in the group of those whose texts showed clear development in terms of their articulation of the SQH discourse and their capacity to reflec upon leadership and management practice within its framing. Her project in Year 1 (Y1) centred on homework whilst in Year 2 (Y2) she concentrated on the introduction of measures to raise achievement. Discursive Changes The school already had a homework policy, but there were problems with its implementation:

Tracking Discursive Change in Reflect ve Commentaries

93

Although there was an existing policy, the interpretation of the policy by staff was very varied and the quantity and quality of homework had to be addressed. (Y1)

Annette’s account started from the premise that plans and policies were insufficien to ensure implementation. She presents herself as identifying the adoption of participatory management as the answer to this problem and believed this would entail a change in the staff’s conception of their professionalism although she did not articulate the problem in precisely these terms: I wanted everyone on the staff, and not exclusively the working group, to feel they had a stake and say in the change of policy that would be taking place. This required cultural transformation to ensure that the whole staff had the ability and the confidenc to make choices, to solve problems and to be fully involved in implementing, monitoring and evaluating the homework plan. (Y1)

However, her view of participation had its limits and inconsistencies, some of which she shares with the reader. Although she knew a participative approach entailed relinquishing the power over decision making she was, as her text makes clear, decidedly in charge of the project: The fact there was consultation and then a tight structure may appear to lead to conflic or tension. The plan does not allow for autonomy. This was a deliberate decision. Although much of the change is the responsibility of the teacher the task of monitoring, on which the success of the plan depends, is my responsibility. . . . Through the project I now understand that previous initiatives I have been involved in have failed because of lack of monitoring. (Y1)

Reflectin on the outcomes of her Year 1 project Annette presents herself as advancing a number of reasons as to why her approach to generating cultural change had been less effective than she had hoped. Writing a year later she identifie f ve key strategies that she had resolved to use in Year 2 to improve the impact of her new project: (a) There should be a large working party – to ensure that all staff are welcome and able to join in shaping the policy; (b) I should rely on the staff more and take a back seat. I should act as co-ordinator and organiser but let the tasks be completed by others. (c) The staff should be given the responsibility of monitoring and evaluating aspects of the policy so that they have a long-lasting investment in its success. (Y1) (d) Communication should be face-to-face and frequent. Written communication should not be used as the main medium of contact with others. (e) Parents should be included in the development of the policy. (Y2)

In her Year 2 commentary, Annette begins to use the concept of empowerment. Although she made it clear that staff, pupils and parents could and should shape the development, influencin operations and contributing to the implementation process, she did not believe they should determine strategy. The need for shared and enacted responsibility was her preferred argument in this second text:

94

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity The school has to move forward and empower the staff to participate in change. Empowering the staff will encompass giving them the understanding of why change is necessary, motivating them to participate and giving them the skills necessary to make a valuable contribution to the change. – The staff have been saturated by change, which has not always been long lasting or effective. I have to address the needs of the staff as active participants in change. (Y2) Engaging the staff was done through the working group meetings and the constant consultation with all staff members. By delegating much of the responsibility to staff the project has been a huge success. (Y2)

By the end of Year 2, Annette had made links in her account between the goals of participation, as she define it, and the conditions and processes for establishing it that showed greater consistency and helped to make a more convincing link with practice than that evidenced in Year 1. In the second year account, by distinguishing between empowerment and participation, she gained the means to examine how capability could be developed to foster participation, something that she could not do as well when the two concepts were conflated Situational Factors In her second text, Annette presents an assessment of the school’s functioning that was marked by a split between a very experienced staff, disillusioned by externally driven change, and a management team that endeavoured to ensure the school complied with national and local authority priorities: There has been a strong belief from the management team that there was no time to involve staff and that management would save staff the trouble of working on something they could do for them. The SMT also believed that staff were not interested in participating in change and would prefer not to be involved in the formulation of new policies. (Y2)

She balanced this account of the management team’s view of the staff by delineating an equally negative view of the former on the part of the latter as the basis for explaining how her role developed. Annette claimed in her Year 1 commentary that she believed in the improvement agenda from the beginning of the course, and she took on the task of enacting a new model of school leadership with enthusiasm: I was excited and challenged by the project from the beginning. I had my own ideas about the way teaching and learning and people should be managed which were in conflic with many of the values of my school. I was already convinced that by setting up a more democratic culture, focusing on relationships, empowering the staff and using my interpersonal and intellectual abilities, I could develop a home work plan which would lead to long lasting improvement in teaching and learning and raise levels of attainment. (Y1)

This passage was illustrative of how Annette demonstrated her commitment to the image of leadership she saw the SQH as promoting. In this text, she espoused a mission to alter the culture in her school, which she identifie as the prime stumbling block to improvement. In Year 2, she writes that the choice of a change in management style was straightforward, but there are elements in both her commentaries and her interview that indicate that moving away from a previous mind set

Tracking Discursive Change in Reflect ve Commentaries

95

took time. Clearly she was not always as critical of the old management style as she had become: The SQH allowed me to do things differently because my headteacher allowed me to do my project my way. Sometimes in the past you managed things and they were very much influence by the person above you. (Interview)

By the end of Year 2, Annette had achieved a better articulation of participation, and her text asserts the need to involve everyone including the headteacher, who was a marginal figur in the Year 1 account: The cultural change I was looking for would not happen without management backing. – This was perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of the project. – . Both the headteacher and the staff were looking for a commitment from each other before they would make a commitment. This problem could not be solved quickly or easily. As small but significan changes occurred I informed both parties in an informal way until both were convinced of each other’s commitment and shared aims and values. (Y2)

According to her account, Annette’s favoured concept of participation challenged prevailing norms and values held by both the staff and the management team. Through the structure offered by the SQH she desired, and took, the chance to be different driven by the following: (a) her fir belief in the project of school improvement; and (b) enough initial success with her firs project to maintain and strengthen her belief that she could achieve cultural change. In her commentaries, Annette gives evidence that she managed to win a viable space for change on several grounds. Her own desire to be successful led her to gain a mastery over the SQH discourse through her reading and to focus on the outcomes of her project and the actions of others, all of which of which helped her in retaining her own commitment and adapting her practice. However, despite her enthusiasm for the key ideas of participation and empowerment, it was clear that these did not make the same sense to start with as they did by the end of Year 2. She provides a story of how she shaped her approach on the basis of her perception of her situation. She attributed subsequent adjustments in her behaviour and thinking as arising directly out of people’s reactions to her actions. She also says that this meant she had to reject her previous ‘knowledge’ about the staff and the senior management team. In Year 2, she re-aligned her account of their interaction, i.e. deconstructed her previous formulation for action and re-wrote it within the frame of the dominant discourse promulgated by the SQH programme. This was necessary because, if the staff were as recalcitrant and incapable as she had formerly cast them, how would she have been able to account for their reform. She presented herself as successfully implicating others in new practice, with both the staff and the headteacher successively altering their behaviours to enable her interventions to be carried out with a degree of success.

96

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

Jean Jean worked as a deputy headteacher in a large primary school in a rural community. She was one of the candidates who showed little evidence of development as a result of the initial analysis of her commentaries. In the f rst year, she focused on the improvement of writing after having to defer her preferred project, ICT development, until Year 2. Discursive Changes In her Year 1 commentary, Jean conveyed the impression that she was very selffocused. In listing her purposes in developing writing she included the following: This area was of particular importance to myself, – because I wanted to prove to myself that I had the courage and determination to carry out the work and produce something concrete and useful at the end of the work. (Y1)

The frequent statements Jean made about displaying ‘leadership’ are such that readers perhaps interpreted them otherwise than was intended, that is, as indicating a concern with establishing credibility and taking on the demeanours that would achieve this. Jean stated the need for collegial leadership a number of times in the text. However, within her listing of desirable leadership attributes there was an inherent tension with this concept, for instance, ‘establishing authority’ and ‘preserving distance’ were not easily reconciled with the demand to ‘be collegial’ and ‘to be open and approachable’. These inconsistencies are evident in the following excerpt: As I have previously stated I believe that it is important to take the staff ‘with you’ whenever it is possible. It is sometimes equally important being prepared to be ‘forceful’ when it is needed. It is the role of members of the SMT to make decisions within the school. This is a major part of the job remit and it is an area that the other members of staff expect you to do – even though they realise there will be times when you make decisions they disagree with. (Y1)

The text affords little evidence of reflectio on her experience, for instance, there was nothing offered up in her account about making changes in her approach for the future. In the Year 2 text, these discontinuities were not resolved. There was some change in that there was less emphasis on demeanour and more on expertise as the basis for establishing credibility. There was also a slightly more ‘peopled’ quality to the text; the staff figure more in the leadership formulation although there were hints that Jean’s expectations of them were fairly low given the need for the school leader to ‘deflec pressure’, ‘hold things together’ and ‘get them to follow’. There was a certain defensiveness about some of her statements implying that collegiality provided a means of sharing aggravations: The headteacher needs to be at the forefront leading the school, providing a vision for everyone associated with the school while at the same time giving the staff the chance to

Tracking Discursive Change in Reflect ve Commentaries

97

take on some of the burden and take developments forward in an effective and meaningful way. (Y2)

There was no demonstrable linking of the concept of collegial leadership with principles for action nor was any tangible evidence offered in the text about developing the means of achieving a collegial approach. The rather restrictive nature of her formulation of these concepts showed in her summary of what she felt she had achieved: I feel that my ability to think strategically has been developed and can be shown through: The development of a three year budget; The project plan that allows for the pace of staff development to determine the pace at which advances are made; The realisation that I must take staff with me, and to do this it requires we work at their pace; Looking for different ways to go about developing ICT within the school e.g. audit, working group, inset days and twilight courses. (Y2)

Collegial leadership never appeared to signify more than a tactical stance in Jean’s texts. It was not associated with wider concepts such as professionalism or developing capability. Both of her commentaries showed greater concern with establishing personal credibility than they did with an exploration of the practice of collaboration. Situational Factors These were the formulations of an experienced deputy head who had been in the post for a number of years although the worries over management style are usually characteristic of new managers (Fisher, 1996). However, these preoccupations made more sense when we took account of her view of herself as introducing a new style of management and, coincidentally, setting up grounds for ‘failure’: The head works in a more ‘formal’ style as described by Bush in . . . I believe this method of producing policies does not encourage staff to put them into practice in the same way they would if they had been more involved in their development. I knew this would be an area that was going to be diff cult for me to work round without creating an awkward working atmosphere for myself. (Y1:5)

Despite having been deputy head for some time her Year 1 project was the firs occasion on which she had been given a project to lead and manage. Whilst she claimed that she had vindicated her approach in Year 1, in her interview at the end of Year 2, she expressed doubts that the new style would be adopted. A certain lack of confidenc ran throughout both commentaries and the interview. She appeared to have found it difficul to function as she would have wished and not simply because of difficultie with the headteacher: Yes that is right – and it (a collegial approach) would be with anything I am doing in the future – but not necessarily if it is being led by other members of the management. One of the goals I was trying to get across was to show that collegiality does work and while I have shown that it does it will not necessarily be adopted in other areas – that is one

98

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity of the difficultie you come up against. I am only a small cog amongst many other cogs. (Interview1 )

There were indications in the interview that showed Jean as someone who had never felt fully socialised into the management role. A sense of being set apart from the other staff was something she said she still found difficult and this may well have been compounded by her own ambivalence about the managerial values enacted in the school. Knowing about these situational factors, one might begin to interpret some of the characteristics of the candidate’s discursive framework as the manifestation of the equivocal position in which she found herself between the model being promulgated by the SQH and the actualities of her work situation. Under these circumstances, it is unsurprising if her schema for leadership was contradictory and unconvincing. Whilst Jean was ‘successful’ in gaining a space from her headteacher to lead two projects, this position was not clearly legitimated in the eyes of her colleagues. She did not appear to command the same degree of personal influenc as Annette. In part, this may have been due to not having worked in quite the same way to develop her own level of expertise, since her command of the discourse remained somewhat tenuous. Whatever the reasons, probably a mixture of personal and contextual factors, Jean was left with little space in which to bring about change. In terms of enacting new practices she was far less successful by her own account than Annette. In trying to retain her aspirations and avoid de-constructing current practice Jean appeared to compromise both her position and her espoused conceptual framework as she tried to reconcile her relationship to the ideas prevailing on the SQH and those prevailing in her school.

The Dynamics of the Learning Process In-Built Contingency Of the nine SQH candidates whose work we looked at in detail, seven overtly referred to experiencing some political tension as a result of being engaged on the SQH, and there is evidence in their accounts of how these tensions influence perception. There were only two in the sample who made no mention of politics, neither of whom showed any evidence of conceptual change which f ts with Fullan’s argument that if there is no loss or disruption there is no change (1991:32). In Jean’s case, it could be argued that her worries about credibility indicated that she had difficultie with enacting the role of leader and manager. This interpretation was given added weight by her perception of prevailing attitudes and practices in her school. The lack of evidence for discursive change in her texts may have been materially affected by her unsuccessful political struggles at work. Even where a 1 Italics

are my insertion.

The Dynamics of the Learning Process

99

candidate was more successful in securing a space to be different, their ideas were nevertheless coloured by the politics of the school. Our knowledge of Annette’s circumstances alerts us to the basis for the counter voice to her refrain of participation and empowerment that remains detectable even in her second commentary. Over the course of the programme Annette reformulates both the knowledge she presents of the ‘reality’ of a ‘more democratic culture’ and her view of herself and the significan others, headteacher and staff, in her school context. Her narrative is about successfully authoring what was a future, or imagined space of interaction, over the two projects and about a re-consideration and reformulation of her past to accommodate this new account. In many ways Jean does not become ‘educated’ by the SQH system. She find the means of avoiding open contestation with current practice within her establishment and takes on neither the discourse nor the practice that the SQH supports. Wrestling with notions of collegial leadership under a headteacher whose style she perceived as autocratic showed inherent tensions and inconsistencies in her articulation of leadership that were not resolved over the 2 years of the programme. Once she had completed the course, one would speculate that her position in the school would be pretty much indistinguishable from that which she held before she started. Annette, by contrast, claimed to bring about changes in practice and provided evidence of greater movement in terms of her knowledge, or framing, of leadership and management practice. Interestingly, she subsequently gained a headship, an event that raises the question of whether or not, if you do substantively alter your assumptions and practice, you need to move to a new context in order to maintain the changes. Berger & Luckmann (1967:180) note that in transformative change there is the need for the re-interpretation of the past identity of self and others that, unsurprisingly, is often not well-received. In both these cases, and in the texts of the majority of the others in the wider sample (Reeves et al., 2003a), there is evidence of a struggle to make sense of the SQH discourse that linked to elements of political struggle during the enaction of being an aspiring headteacher leading a project. Returning to the theme of changing the professional self, the extent to which the texts of those who participated in the educating activity attested to a change in identity and conceptual framing, was contingent on the complex interplay of forces at the point of the ‘antagonistic’ interaction of discourses in third space. The degree to which this space was opened up varied from candidate to candidate which, in turn, seemed to relate to the quality of personal/collective change achieved at the interface between the candidate, as active ‘SQHer’, and her colleagues. It was also clear that this engagement could be potentially damaging to the person who was placed in the position of change agent (Dadds, 1994). The texts were illustrative of Shotter’s observation that we need to have: . . .a concern with the way an audience (either a singular or a plural ‘you’) affords, permits, motivates, allows or invites only a limited performance on the part of f rst-persons. I act not simply ‘out of’ my own plans and desires, unrestricted by the social circumstances of my performances, but in some sense also ‘in to’ the opportunities afforded me to act. (1989:144)

100

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

Traditionally descriptions of learning referring to cognitive development or discursive change concentrate on the process of internalisation or the absorption of new concepts as the basis of acquiring knowledge and see externalisation, the ability to use these concepts as tools in the world, as a secondary process. This is a model for mental processes that is deeply contested. What I am going to do here is use the term in-folding (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) for those instances where candidates talk and write about ‘I’ and ‘my’ views, ideas and beliefs. I am going to use the term enaction for those instances where they describe putting these ideas into action. On this basis, what seemed to be happening to candidates on the SQH was that in-folding, the ability to use new language, and enaction, its practical application, are in fact simultaneous and better described as two aspects of one developmental process. Leont’ev’s (1978) distinction between meaning and sense is helpful here. Meaning describes how a term or concept is generally define and sense refers to how a particular individual (or collective) understands the term through activity. On this basis, in-folding, as discursive practice, can be seen as a process of personal sense making. For instance, the accounts of SQH candidates such as Jean and Annette show that whilst they use general concepts like leadership and collegiality, each individual makes sense of these terms in a slightly different way according to her accounts of how she has attempted to make them concrete in experience and accommodated them for enaction in her particular social context. Not only do the accounts support the case for seeing professional growth as a holistic process but they also show how changing practice is lived and why it takes time to establish. They bear witness to the political and conceptual work involved in becoming different. Changing practice is both emotional and risky because it is a move from that which is familiar, and therefore perceived as safe and proper, to that which is unfamiliar and unwarranted which arouses social pressure to conform. By underlining the importance of the social aspects of change, the evidence challenges assumptions about whom it is who learns under these conditions.

Enacted Social Space The discursive analysis of the candidates’ changing accounts over time indicates that the process of in-folding proceeds through experience (Reeves & Forde, 2004). It was by making the concepts lived that the candidates made sense of them. At the same time, the concepts did not remain inert; they were re-organised and differentiated at the level of language use through their re-contextualisation in accounts. They become part of know-how as lived activity and performance, which was captured as text in reflection We have evidence that the articulation of key terms in the discourse of school leadership and management for some SQH candidates became more coherent, comprehensive and organised in accounts as they became more concrete and real in embodied action. Annette, who embraced the idea of culture change through participative management, clearly repudiated her past practice in Year 1 but nevertheless found that her old perceptions and mind frame led to inconsistencies

The Dynamics of the Learning Process

101

and tensions. Having evaluated her Year 1 project she began to achieve a greater consistency in her articulation of the concept of participation. This dialogic process between language and action is one where simultaneously • the thin and initially ‘senseless’ abstractions of the new discourse are illuminated by attempts to put them into practice; and therefore, • reflectio and re-contextualisation of experience begins to thicken and more clearly differentiate the language through attaching it to events; and • events and experiences begin to be grouped, categorised and made meaningful through a personalised articulation of the discourse. This argument that enaction and in-folding are different emphases placed on a single dialogical process of professional learning might be countered by pointing out that this assertion is merely the outcome of examining accounts of practicebased learning. However, whilst agreeing that it is possible to partially in-fold concepts in discourse at the level of their meaning, the ability to use them in practice requires that we enact them in the world and thereby make personal sense of them so that they acquire the status of knowledge in action (Wertsch, 1998). On this basis the in-folding/enaction process is a key feature of changing practice wherever and whenever it occurs. For instance, if someone undertakes a year’s full-time study, they will confront many of the dynamics entailed in social learning processes when they return to work if they want to translate their new understandings and insights into action. There has been a tendency to underestimate the importance of enaction in much of the literature on professional development. Enaction from our data is clearly linked, at the level of the individual, to drive and motivation. Bakhtin’s (1986) notion of authorship is useful here because we could see enaction, in terms of planning, as an experiment in the future, a making. What some candidates demonstrate is an active authoring of their futures. In this sense, where the person enacts in imagination what I might be, what I might be able to do, these provide a force to action, literally a relay of power. The discourse connects to a desire that, in its turn, provides the emotional energy to undertake social action (Rose, 1991). The popular notion of reflectio on practice as the major mechanism for practitioner development underlines a tendency to ignore imagination and modelling as prior stages to the enactment of new practice. The evidence suggests that desire and projection are just as important as looking back and reflectin on the past in the learning process. To summarise, our evidence suggests that learning to change practice has two interlinked and contemporaneous aspects: In-folding – the aspect whereby an individual makes personal sense of a concept or a system of concepts and associated tools linked to reflection where she builds her experience and account of use of a discourse as part of her professional knowledge base. Enaction – the process whereby an individual and those she interacts with come to use a new concept or system of concepts and associated tools as mediating

102

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

artefacts in their individual and joint practice linked to projection, where the individual/s concerned plan how the use of these artefacts will bring about changes in her/their setting. Although the knowledge revealed by Annette and Jean was individually ‘theirs’ it was formed socially and contextualised in a particular time and space. The cases demonstrate the highly contingent nature of the professional learning associated with changing practice and hint at the difficultie of establishing and sustaining change in mature activity systems.

Imagined Social Space The enaction/in-folding process is complicated even further by its links to storying and imagination in the development of the candidates’ professional selves. Reflectio in these SQH texts served as the basis for weaving concepts into narratives. Through the selection of salient experience, ideas about leadership and management are invested in individuality and made part of a personal history. Whether they are projective or reflect ve accounts, other people have a big part to play in these stories and their ‘imagined’ responses clearly influenc discursive outcomes. Through this linkage of reflection/in-foldin and projection/enaction in the learning process, we can envisage two imagined social spaces, connected to the relational spaces produced by the SQH activity and the normal work of the teachers in their schools, which materially affect action in the context of the third space described in Chapter 4. One of these imagined spaces has already been discussed in relation to enaction. This is the space where either the individual candidate, or both she and the group she works with, project and plan how they might take action thereby ‘storying’ the future. On the SQH, this projection is reifie in the written rationales and plans that candidates are required to submit at the end of Units 1 and 2 (see Fig. 4.1). We can conceive of this imagined space as a source for the enaction of the ‘new’ in the workplace through the process of desire and projection, enabling new discourses and concepts to enter into contention in the school, setting off a process of ‘becoming’ different as practitioners – something we can detect in both Annette’s and Jean’s accounts. The second imagined space is the outcome of reflection rather than projection, the product of which is an account, or ‘history’, that legitimates and makes sense of where the individual and the group see themselves and their practice now. Accounting on the SQH is the way in which a candidate may alter her ‘story’ to f t a new practice and a new view of self. It is this accounting which completes the sense making process and marks an important step in gaining mastery over a new discourse in practical terms. It also completes the re-authoring of the self. Nevertheless, however convincing such an account may be, it is also imagined, it too is peopled and bounded in time and space like the projective imagined space. It too is a source

The Dynamics of the Learning Process

103

of enaction but the bias here is towards the preservation of current and past practices rather than the introduction of the new ones. However, this is still not the full story. Practice-based courses can afford opportunities for others, as co-participants, supporters and mentors, to engage in this process through the creation of third space. For example, the successful candidates on the SQH will build reflect ve processes into the work of their teams and their relationships with their senior managers. Evaluations of the SQH found that a majority of the headteachers acting as supporters to SQH candidates said the experience had contributed to their own professional development (Menter et al., 2005; Simpson et al., 2000). Joint reflectio and evaluation allows for the inclusion of the new practice into shared stories and accounts and thereby increases the chance of its survival.

Outcomes of Interaction: The Creation of Third Space Social space has thus acquired a further dynamism since we can conceive of it as a context for interaction that is permeated by two imagined spaces. One of these is a source of new forms of enaction, a space for experimenting with what might be, a future-storied space that can be the originator of disruption in the work context. The other imagined space is the source of stability and conformity, the past-storied space, where accounting and reflectio has fi ed personal/group sense, identity and perception. As shown in Fig. 5.1, social spaces dominated by a solidly past-storied perception will be like our firs space; in the second space one of the key functions of the educators is to change the emphasis from past-storied to a future-storied space by focusing on what practitioners may choose to become (Vygotsky, 1978:120); this leads to a push for enactment in the context of the third space which, in its turn, eventually leads to a re-alignment of the historical account. Perceptually the imagined spaces, created by desire for validation, control and agency, could thus be described as the source of power behind enaction in the contextual or lived spaces, and, at the same time, as driven by that enaction, i.e. we are looking here at two

Fig. 5.1 The relationship between imagined and enacted social spaces

104

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

constantly interconnected and co-permeable planes, or spaces, of imagination and enaction. Figure 5.2 represents how these three spaces link to three identities, the octagon on the right representing the ordinary school space and the practitioner’s identity in that milieu. On the left, we have the SQH cohort-learning space where she has an identity as a learner, predicated on aspiring to an identity that the programme and the Standard promote, and between them the third space, the school learning space, where she is neither one nor the other, with a third identity being established that falls either closer to, or further from, that which the SQH seeks to establish. Thus, in Annette’s case her identity 3 was closer to her identity 2 whereas in Jean’s case there is evidence to suggest that her identity 3 was little different from identity 1. In terms of identity the in-folding aspect of learning is not fully congruent with the notion of internalisation because it is linked to the use of the particular tools that these social spaces offer to the person, i.e. what we are looking at is the person-plustools as the actant/actor in these spaces, as their ‘identity’. For instance consider these comments on the uses of the Standard and the language associated with it taken from the interviews with participants: It has given me a structure/a framework for analysing/ checking out what I want to do. I used to be instinctive now I stop before I make decisions/ I choose from options. I look at management in a different way. It has helped me f rm up my ideas, make my philosophy clearer, I can now justify my actions (extracts from interviews). It’s given me a language to raise things, greater confidence I articulate things much better, you can explain to yourself, recognising what I was trying to do, recognising what had gone wrong. I am more conscious, more aware, I can explain and articulate my ideas. (Extracts from interviews).

In third space, the person was operating with an artefactual array consisting of the Standard for Headship; her Project Plan (as text, assessed assignment and as agreed with her headteacher); with the SQH discourse, the language developed in the cohort-learning space as learner, reading and discussing texts, etc. In addition,

Fig. 5.2 The social spaces and identity positions open to an SQH candidate

The Dynamics of the Learning Process

105

she will be working with a set of artefacts from the firs space: her school’s improvement plan, extant ways of organising the use of teacher time, standard operating procedures for working groups, etc. The creation of the third social space as a context for change was crucial since this was where the direct impact of the SQH on practice either stood or fell. The practitioner might have managed to carve this space out for herself but this could be difficul if she was not particularly powerful or convincing about the worth of her new practice. She could obviously be helped to achieve the requisite permissions if she had effective sponsorship from both within and without the school. Gaining the third space entailed the candidate being given the resources and the opportunity from the organisation and/or some of its members to enable her to change. This relates to Lave and Wenger’s (1991) discussion of the experience of new entrants to a community of practice and whether or not they obtain access to information, resources and opportunities to practice. The willingness of others in the school community to engage with the candidate in a new role is critical. Many SQH candidates claimed they received great support from their colleagues in carrying through their projects whereas others cited being told, ‘It’s your SQH’, a comment which effectively denied them support. The space for changing practice was also, as the quote above intimates, a space for negotiation, discussion, disputation and refl xivity. Unlike the observations of apprenticeship that underpin notions of situated learning in communities of practice, for our sample of experienced practitioners learning was not straightforwardly reproducible from a copy already available in the work setting. The model these candidates were introducing was novel to them. This meant that they had to invent their practice in the context of their work groups. Their colleagues were in much the same position because if the candidates were allowed to do this, then it disrupted current practice and they, in turn, were having to invent practice as well. The outcome was that politics and argumentation were part of learning both interpersonally and intra-personally, this latter since the candidate had to persuade herself that the new practice ‘was right’ as well in order to sustain the motive power for enactment. The conception of social space makes the essential link between the contestation of discourses and the practical learning of individuals and groups. It helps to show that changing practice, as a learning outcome, at this location, was inherently social at every level, even in terms of changing the discursive practice and knowledge of individuals. Equally it was also political. The third space, the space for change, was the arena in which the values of activity sets enter into struggle and contestation, where there was the possibility of doing things differently and hence for the formation of new knowledge. What emerged was the possibility of practice that replicated neither ‘parent’. Our examples in the case study section provide some insight into the impossibility of reliably reproducing a discourse. Signifier such as ‘participation’ and ‘collegiality’ are easily mobilised in ways that may be far from what educators ‘intended’ by the exigencies of life and the resistances of both people and things in the context of practice. The use of a term, such as ‘collegiality’, in the utterances, both oral and written, of members of a SQH cohort was as various as was the number of students. The data indicate that knowledge transfer in educating has

106

5 Changing Self: Interactions of Space and Identity

an in-built unreliability. Whilst the control structures – creation and membership of the SQH activity set and assessment processes – may ensure a degree of uniformity at the level of meaning, they will be insufficien to determine sense. New senses are always being made through the varied contextual exigencies of enaction.

Conclusion There is ample evidence that in many instances the provision of professional development for teachers, particularly in the form of short courses, has had little effect on practice, in part because the design of such courses does not address the learning required to transpose knowledge and skills from course settings to participants’ work settings (Beach, 2003). By using a hybrid pedagogy that combines schooling and developmental strategies, the SQH attempts to make the transposition of knowledge from one site to another an integral part of the educating activity. Thus, the exploration of candidates’ acquisition of a new discourse affirm the model advanced at the beginning of the chapter for affecting practice in the context of schools because it encompasses implementation as part of the learning process. Key themes in common between the candidates’ accounts and this model are changes in knowledge; tools (as ideas and things); self-concept; relationships and skills. However, a spatial analysis places a much greater emphasis on the importance of social relationships in influencin the practice of individuals and on the need for collective learning. The spatial dynamics of this particular case imply that we need think of a person’s identification as permeable and plural. The individuals involved in this particular educating system themselves functioned as dynamic systems of interaction because they variably in-folded the identity position promulgated through their educators as agents for the particular discursive mix that the SQH programme relayed. This was further complicated when it came to extending the SQH educating system into their school environments when the participants found themselves oscillating between three different identity positions, an effect that we have already touched upon in the Craigton case. The complexities of the development and creation of knowledge under these circumstances becomes much clearer when it is contextually grounded rather than based upon the essentially individualistic psychological framing that we are used to applying in educating. A spatial and hence relational analysis emphasises the complex social dynamics of changing practice which may go some way towards explaining why initiating and maintaining new practices, developing professional learning, is far from simple.

Chapter 6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

Introduction Having begun to look in some detail at what was happening to established teachers, positioned as students, I now want to look at events from a different viewpoint and consider what their tutors, positioned as educators, were doing. This chapter unpacks the black box of educating from another angle by deconstructing pedagogy at a particular site. In it, I have attempted to pull out all the procedures and things used by a group of tutors as part of the performance of a taught module on a practice-based programme. Having already asserted that educating involves the deliberate attempt of educators to shape and form those they seek to educate what I want to explore through this exercise is the nature of educators’ agency. The chapter begins with a discussion of pedagogy and the purposes it may serve in order to establish a context for examining what it is that a particular group of educators do. Following this discussion, the case study section tracks various threads of intentionality in the development and delivery of the Chartered Teacher programme at the University of Stirling using relational and durational mapping to explore how the course is enacted. Like the SQH, the CT programme is a hybrid form of educating system based upon a similar design. Section 1 of the case study looks at the inception of the programme, and Section 2 describes the pedagogic devices used in performing the firs module that the participants attend. The chapter concludes by looking at where this examination places the tutors and the implications that their positioning has for notions of educators’ agency within the set of relations mobilised by the performance of a hybrid pedagogy.

Pedagogy and Purpose In Chapter 1, the argument was made that most human learning is an outcome of educating. Daniels has suggested that the term pedagogy should be construed as referring to forms of social practice which shape and form the cognitive, affective and moral development of individuals. (2001:1) J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3_6, 

107

108

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

As a definitio of teachers’ practice this is perfectly adequate provided that the connections between, and within, educating systems are not ignored. When thinking about formal education it is all too easy, by concentrating on classroom practice, to see what happens as occurring at the discretion of teachers and their students. However, much of the work of educating occurs within frameworks that are determined far from their apparent locus in a particular course or programme. In this sense, educators form part of a complex agency of which they may be unaware or, more commonly, tacitly accept as the circumstances of their practice. In the dictionary, pedagogy is described as the principles, practice or profession of teaching, i.e. pedagogy encompasses both the abstract, in terms of principles, and the mundane, in terms of practice whilst also being the description of a profession or calling. The term pedagogy has been, and is, commonly interpreted, according to the biases of various authors, in broadly psychological or sociological terms. These two viewpoints can be subsumed to a certain extent in the writings of two educationalists, Jerome Bruner, as the representative of a psychological perspective, and Basil Bernstein, who approaches the subject from a sociological viewpoint. In developing a relational view of pedagogy, we need to fin a way of combining both aspects in our accounts of practice.

A Psychological Approach The moral basis of educational principles is central to the claim to teach for the good of those who are the subjects of the practice, so writers like Bruner emphasise the importance that conceptions of the learner have for the way in which teaching is enacted. In The Culture of Education (1996:53), he posits four different conceptions of children as learners, or models of mind, that he associates with four different pedagogical approaches. These characterisations of children are as follows: • imitative learners, accumulating know-how through copying what adults do; • absorbent learners, learning through exposure to instruction, acquiring abstract, propositional knowledge that can later be applied in practice; • thinkers who can construct knowledge through dialogue and interaction in the world; and • knowledgeable learners, able to know what counts as knowledge and to engage in making informed judgements about knowledge. The f rst two of these categorisations link to transmissive models of pedagogy where the role of the educator is to pass knowledge onto learners either, in the socialising model, by showing and engaging them in practising a particular activity or, in the schooling model, through ensuring they acquire abstract, propositional knowledge through instruction. That is, they underpin forms of educating that were identifie in Chapter 2 as assimilative. Both approaches are predicated on learning what is judged to be important for successful transition to adulthood. The third

Pedagogy and Purpose

109

model relates to the development of competence on the part of the learner through a more active engagement in the learning process. This model ties in better with what, for Bruner, should be the goal of education, which is the development of an agentive and evaluative self. It is a formulation that underpinned progressive education in the 1960s and 1970s. This orientation to the learner has now morphed to a more clearly invasive form that is increasingly salient in policy contexts in the West encapsulated in the notion of the personalisation of education (Leadbeater, 2003; Ranson, 2008). The rise of the independent learner is seen by some to originate from work done in the early twentieth century, in both the United States and Russia, that made the link, through socio-cultural means, between child development and education (Vygotsky, 1962; Mead, 1934; Dewey, 1973). Bernstein, for instance, claims that these were formerly seen as separate processes, with development being largely controlled by ‘natural’ processes rather than being conceived as an outcome of educational activity (1996). The notion of ‘realising the individual’s potential’ through the educational process is now explicitly translated into a push for self-actualisation (Maslow, 1970). In adult education Knowles’ (1984) caricature of the traditional pedagogy of schooling, where learners are treated as passive, dependent and motivated by pressure and rewards, is contrasted with a new ‘andragogy’ define as an orientation to educating where the learner is considered as active, self-directing and intrinsically motivated. This theme, drawing on its origins in counselling psychology (Rogers, 1969; Perls et al., 1951) and the talking therapies was being used amongst teachers of adults, or non-traditional students, in the 1970s and 1980s. It thus threaded its way directly into the discourse of lifelong learning where the prescription for learners, according to Chappell et al is to ‘focus internally and discover, unearth or otherwise construct a more independent, autonomous, free-choosing self ’. (2003:61) This is a self that is linked by commentators to wider economic goals that are to be achieved through having a supply of workers able to adapt and modify their behaviour to meet changing demands for goods and services (Giddens, 1991; Rose, 1999). This change in the definitio of the learner is something Kozulin (1998) identifie as the switch from a retrospective focus for education, on the reproduction of old knowledge within the context of schooling, to a prospective emphasis, on developing the capacity of individuals to create and acquire new knowledge in a wide variety of contexts. It marks an emphasis on what is variously described as competence, capability or capacity as practical knowledge. This focus on the adaptive performance of knowledge in practice and social action contrasts with valuing know-what as a purely ‘cognitive’ performance in contexts that are relatively fi ed and unchanging and hence ‘knowable’. Recent changes in the definitio of the learner imply a very different pedagogy from that used in a traditional transmission model. This new pedagogy shares its origins with organisational development strategies in post-war social psychology (Schein, 1992). The various learner-focused approaches to pedagogy outlined by Bruner emphasise the moral basis of an educator’s practice. Whichever view of the learner is taken, the role of the educator is arguably always benign. The teacher is there to do the best for the pupil, the lecturer to do the best for the student, the therapist to

110

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

do the best for the client and the coach to do the best for the protege. What that ‘best’ is varies according to the purposes of the educative impulse, and educators will argue passionately amongst themselves about the moral worth of different educational principles, for instance, whether these should be to empower the oppressed, to challenge orthodoxy or to provide access to the mainstream for the excluded. This psychologised view of the role of education supports educators in the West in retaining what some have characterised as a romantic orientation to professionalism which emphasises the benevolence of the educators’ role, its contribution to the good of the to-be-educated and confine attention to the interface between educators and learners to the relative exclusion of their activity’s connections beyond that location. The professional educator is construed as exercising autonomy of judgement in her context of practice. She has agency as a personalised power invested in her on the basis of a duty and responsibility for the good of those she teaches. Change, within this orientation, is based on the extension of disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge and skills on the part of educators and their understanding in relation to the life circumstances of the to-be-educated whether this applies in relation to educational goals in education, healthcare or policing etc.

A Sociological Perspective Whilst a psychological orientation focuses on the educator/learner interface and the direct interactions of persons, a sociological account points to the operation of institutions and the broader structuration of educating. In so doing, it problematises the level at which pedagogy operates. The distinction between the two approaches to pedagogy, the psychological and the sociological, is often conceptualised as an issue of scale within sets of relations that are hierarchical in their ordering. Thus psychology attends to the micro level of human affairs whilst sociology focuses on the macro level. In that sense, the divisions and boundaries in educating are often clearly marked both territorially and materially so the perception of pedagogy as something that is purely evidenced as classroom practice has a commonsense logic to it. As pedagogues, a structural viewpoint moves us away from some of the warm, relatively cosy notions of romantic professionalism to the dark side of the instrumentality of schooling and the application of power to categorise, sort, control and regulate both educators and the to-be-educated. Often this uncomfortable disjuncture is anaesthetised by using the notion of levels and their nesting within one another (Alexander, 2008; Leach & Moon, 2008). This move allows boundaries to be set between classrooms, schools, colleges and universities and governments, and thus writers are able to treat teaching practice as something largely divorced from wider issues of power and control which are confine to somewhere ‘beyond’ the borders of the classroom. This bounding of pedagogic activity also relates to a methodological divide between a largely phenomenological or interpretive approach to classroom activity on the part of educational practitioners as against the use of a structuralist framework on the part of social researchers.

Pedagogy and Purpose

111

According to Chouliaraki & Fairclough (1999), Bernstein is someone who attempts to steer a line between the Scylla of phenomenology and Charybdis of structuralism. In so doing, he adopts a different tack from the nesters and levellers that allows for the penetration of one level into another through the medium of discourse. He proposes the existence of what he calls the pedagogic device as ‘a symbolic regulator of consciousness’ (2000:37) that encodes a pedagogic discourse in classrooms as a mixture of two discursive strands – one instructional and the other regulatory. Within the pedagogic discourse, the regulatory strand, with its emphasis on evaluation and its connection to the social order, is the dominant force in shaping educational activity, ordering the roles of teachers and learners and determining the nature of outcomes for the latter. The instructional discourse, depending on the classificatio of knowledge as subject disciplines, occupies a secondary position. Bernstein’s definitio of pedagogy encompasses all those practices that are directed to either reproducing or producing culture. As such, pedagogy is fundamentally about the operations of power through the categorisation of social relations and the establishment of control within these categories through framing the rules of communication established as legitimate for each kind of actor. This orientation places educators in a very different position from that which emerges from the psychological viewpoint. In the sociological account, educators are the agents of those who control and determine social activity and agency reverts to its original meaning; instead of referring to the capacity to exercise autonomy, it signifie acting as an agent for another. Rather than working solely for the good of the to-be-educated on the basis of their professional knowledge and judgment, the role of educators becomes one of maintaining a system that benefit established elites. Morally this is an uncomfortable position for many educators. By disguising the operations of power, the pedagogy of schooling established a relative congruence between the legitimacy of cultural reproduction and the role of the educator as purveying this ‘good’ for the benefi of the to-be-educated. Thus a reliance on the worth of the content of education, the subject area, stills applies for many teachers although Bernstein emphasises the crucial role of the regulatory discourse, often relegated to the hidden curriculum (Woods, 1983) as the real shaper of learners’ identities and consciousness. With regard to change within Bernstein’s model, the major area for the entry of disturbance to the system lies in altering framing as the form of control which regulates and legitimises communication in pedagogic relations: the nature of the talk and the kinds of spaces constructed. (1996:26)

On these grounds, it is changes in the nature of the relations underpinning educating that have the greatest potential for transforming the activity (Bernstein, 2000:15). With the current rise in the discourse of the lifelong learning, we can see the effect of re-framing in action. The move towards andragogy, as a developmental pedagogic strategy, marks an alteration of communicative action between teachers and learners based upon different notions of competence than those underpinning a traditional transmissive model of education. This brings us back full circle to processes for educating experienced teachers, because it is the move towards

112

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

‘personalisation’, ‘active’ and ‘independent’ learning that requires teachers to teach differently. The current drive to improve professional development can therefore be seen as part of the general re-structuring of the fiel of educating that is taking place under the discursive umbrella of lifelong learning (Gewirtz, 2008). Lifelong learning is acting as an invasive policy movement in schools, colleges and universities to alter regulatory discourse. In the particular case being examined here, the professional development of teachers exemplifie the move from privileging know-what to privileging know-how. It is part of a pedagogic drive pressing upon schoolingbased institutions to radically alter their practice through changing the relations between educators and students. Thus what follows in the case study section provides an instance of changes to the content of this fiel resulting from the invasion of the developmental articulations of soft managerialism into Higher Education thereby exerting pressures on the boundaries erected by disciplinary classification (Newport, 2006), although one does have to take account of the fact that education, as a discipline, has always been very weakly classified

Agency and Intentionality Given the discussion above, the agency of educators can be caricatured (characterised?) as the product of a conceptually schizophrenic fiel cast between the poles of progressivism and the fostering of all that is best in being human and increasing enslavement to the dominance of fast capitalism (Bernstein, 2001). This is a nice dichotomy, but perhaps a little too easy. If discourse is considered as linguistic action, the function of agency and intentionality emerges as central to the business of interaction (Edwards, 1997; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1992). Rather than being a quality fi ed within an individual, agency, through its association with accounting, is used as a way of negotiating and co-ordinating speakers’ joint affairs and ensuring that behaviour is reasonably predictable. Agency, in practice, is thus largely a relational affair. In this sense, Foucault’s identificatio (1977) of the twin practices of surveillance, monitoring other people’s and our own activity, and confession, requiring, and being required, to account for our actions, are central to the use of language as a tool that makes complex social activity possible. If, and where, monitoring and accounting break down, then the results run from confusion and embarrassment to sheer anarchy. It is in seeking to make social life predictable that we are both placed by others and, in our turn, place them in the position of accounting for behaviour. Agency is thus a form of linguistic action for maintaining that affairs proceed as they ‘ought’ to do which is why the attribution of intentions and causes is often post hoc with regard to events. Accounting is a means of stabilising practice that relates both to the power to act and to the power that prevents action. The argument being that the possession of a ‘capacity for agency’ is dependent on a measure of predictability since this is what provides a basis for planning for the future. It can therefore be argued that deep-seated convictions about the extent of our personal autonomy serve, as a

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 1 The Intentions of Educators

113

largely mythic personal possession, to give us a degree of security and a sense of control. Of course, Foucault is pointing beyond this relatively informal process to the technicisation of monitoring and accounting. This occurs in forms that have become increasingly hard to breach or avoid because they are wielded and institutionalised within the machinery of the modern state and through the rapid development of organisations that exert a global reach. In educating, devices such as occupational standards and define learning outcomes serve, in the company of inspectors, tutors, committee members and a great deal of paper, as a means to impose uniformity and compliance across field of activity. The proliferation of these measuring artefacts is now frequently experienced as oppressive and intrusive. Many of the human companions of these devices, caught up with them in identities of surveillance and confession, struggle to maintain a selective blindness, black-boxing these artefacts from view or adopting the shield of criticality and thereby ‘distancing’ themselves from them in representing their practice to themselves. Thus, within an empiricist framing it becomes important to try and describe the operation of these processes despite the difficult that exists in untangling them from the ordinary conventions of language as a means of action. The case study that follows is written is in two sections: • the f rst sets out to identify the network of systems that are involved in designing and implementing postgraduate professional development programmes at Stirling University which will bear a close resemblance to similar networks at universities in the UK and beyond. • the second section looks in detail at pedagogic activity on one module. The level of investment and resources bundled in the things and people that connect through this one location is the key feature that emerges from these analyses, i.e. the transmission of power and agency.

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 1 The Intentions of Educators In order to examine the intentionality of educators that characterise a given course, I am going to provide a short history of the origins and design of the MEd Professional Enquiry course at Stirling University. This programme aims to support established teachers to demonstrate they meet a standard for accomplished teaching, the Standard for Chartered Teacher, so I shall refer to it as the Chartered Teacher (CT) programme. This case is used as the basis for tracing the relays and relations that have marked both the development and the continuing performance of this course. Many of the relations described here will be very familiar to those engaged in formal education in a variety of fields Like the SQH, the CT programme is an example

114

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

of a hybrid educating system that uses both schooling and developmental pedagogic strategies. In the discussion which follows I am fully implicated as one of the tutors on the CT programme and as one of the originators of its design thus I therefore include myself in the use of the pronoun ‘we’ when writing about the tutor team. Lines of Governance: Quality Assurance The outcomes of the analysis described under this heading are illustrated in the relational map in Fig. 6.1. Chartered teacher status was introduced in Scotland in 2003 as a qualification-base status pitched at postgraduate level. Recognition as having achieved the Standard for Chartered Teacher (SE, 2002) ensured a substantial increase in salary over and above the top of the normal pay scale for class teachers. The qualificatio was to be achieved through masters’ programmes accredited by the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS, 2003). However, before

Key to Figure 6.1: Activity sets = white ovals Texts (standard operating procedures) = grey rectangles Flows of persons are represented as rounded, white lines. Artefactual f ows as black lines. SCQF = Scottish Credit and Qualification Framework SCQF Board = body composed of representatives from the Scottish Executive, Universities of Scotland, Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the Scottish Qualification Agency and the Association of Scotland’s Colleges GTCS = General Teaching Council for Scotland Fig. 6.1 Relational map showing the relays involved in the governance of the CT programme system

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 1 The Intentions of Educators

115

a programme could be presented for accreditation, it had to be validated by a university that needed to ensure that it complied with the terms laid out in the Scottish Credit and Qualification Framework Handbook or SCQF (2004) for master’s level awards. The SCQF was administered by a government quango, the Scottish Credit and Qualification Framework Board. Thus it was within the specification outlined in these two documents, the SCT and SCQF, that individual programmes for aspiring chartered teachers were obliged to operate if they were to have legitimacy. Both these texts are primarily concerned with systems of assessment, described as measurable learning outcomes. Having demonstrated that a proposed programme met the criteria specifie by the two national bodies, the SCQF board and the GTCS, it was then designed and delivered by members of a university’s teaching staff. They, in turn, also had opinions as to the purpose and value of the programme that were enshrined in the documentation for the course and the educating process. These interrelationships are illustrated in Fig. 6.1, which shows the three main relays that were implicated in the processes of developing and maintaining the performance of the chartered teacher programme at Stirling. These relays were formed through the interconnection of various artefacts and the activity sets that either made and used them or simply used them.

Relay 1: Shaping the Learner – Being Postgraduate The Scottish qualification framework details f ve criteria for the award of credit at 12 levels where ‘Level 1 represents outcomes for learners with severe and profound learning difficulties’ and ‘Level 12 contains outcomes associated with doctoral studies’ (SCQF, 2004:9). Credit points are assigned on the basis of learning outcomes define as knowledge and understanding; practice (applied knowledge and understanding); generic cognitive skills; communication, numeracy and IT skills; autonomy, accountability and working with others. For a masters’ award outcomes are calibrated at level 11. In the various forms that staff at Stirling had to fil in to apply for the validation of new academic programmes and modules, the language of SCQF recurred in boxes labelled ‘learning outcomes, learning activities; criteria to establish outcomes have been achieved’; and ‘assessment tasks’. Once these forms had been completed and thereinafter approved by various academic committees their content was reproduced in the Programme Handbook, which served as a guide to the conduct of the programme for both students and tutors. If we look at the type of person that members of the SCQF Board expected to be produced at level 11, then they were looking for someone who displayed ‘extensive, detailed and critical knowledge and understanding in one or more specialisms’ who was able to ‘Demonstrate originality and creativity’ in its ‘application’ and to ‘Exercise substantial autonomy and initiative in professional and equivalent activities’. The words most frequently used as descriptors for performance were critical/critically (eight instances); specialised/specialism (seven instances); professional (four) and forefront (four) (SCQF, 2004:32). There was a strong

116

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

association between knowledge and understanding, enquiry and research, innovation and creativity, and leadership. These associations are characteristic of the prevalent discourse of ‘lifelong learning’ and its location within ‘the knowledge economy’ that permeates texts produced by international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1996) and the European Union (EC, 2002).

Relay 2: Shaping the Learner – Being a Chartered Teacher At the point where substantial areas of domestic policy were devolved to the Scottish Parliament a consultation document, Targeting Excellence (SOEID, 1999), proposed modernising the Scottish teaching force through the creation of ‘a more highly qualified more effective profession that would acquire higher status’ (ibid:68). Strengthening the professional expertise of teachers was linked to teachers’ career development and findin a means of encouraging excellent teachers to stay in the classroom (ibid:58–65). The adoption of this latter proposal resulted in the publication of the Standard for Chartered Teacher as one of a series of standards delineating teacher performance. This text followed the pattern of earlier standards in giving weight to educational values as well as functional matters: The consultation process confirm support for identifying nine forms of professional action. These can be categorised to correspond to the four professional values and personal commitments, namely, Effectiveness in promoting learning in the classroom; Critical reflection self-evaluation and development; Collaboration and influence and Educational and social values. (SE, 2002:8)

The discourse used in the Standard largely aligns with the set of articulations characteristic of the professional/academic discourse outlined in Chapter 3. This is particularly prominent in the section headed Critical reflection self-evaluation and development and in parts of the sections Collaboration and influenc and Educational and social values. Professional(ism) is a dominant refrain. The language of the SCT is very characteristic of that used in teacher education; connections are made between ‘accomplishment’, ‘professional autonomy’, ‘independent professional judgment’, ‘innovation’ and ‘leadership’. Engagement in ‘discussion’ and ‘debate’ is included, as is contributing to, and critiquing, educational policy. The SCT also makes a strong case for an evidence-informed professionalism based upon knowledge of research and backed by active engagement in professional enquiry. Thus the language of this text links very closely to that used to describe ‘postgraduateness’ in the SCQF. Given the Standard was composed by a consortium consisting of two university education departments and a management consultancy, this resemblance is unsurprising. These two texts are looking to develop a broadly similar type of person. The difference between them lies in the stronger articulations relating to ethics, values and collaboration in the SCT, which is less individualistic in tone than the SCQF text. The former perhaps harks back to a more liberal interpretation of lifelong learning giving greater weight to social, as compared to, economic values.

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 1 The Intentions of Educators

117

So, revisiting the relational map in Fig. 6.1, there are two sets of prescriptions for the formation of persons-to-be-educated which impinge directly on the educating activity of the tutors working on the CT programme. These can be tracked through events involving identifiabl groups and artefacts as shown in Relays 1 & 2. The trajectories of these two discourses share a common origin in activity legitimated and supported by the Scottish Executive through three different, publically funded, bodies. However, the trail does not stop there since these intentions relate to a globalised theme that could, in its turn, be tracked through events to the European Union and so on. The Tutors’ Views When the proposal for the new CT course was being developed a partnership was formed, called the Professional Enquiry Partnership, in which we worked with a group of teachers, headteachers and local authority representatives to identify a set of principles that would underpin the development of the programme. These were that the course should • have a clear focus on developing classroom practice; • provide opportunities for the creation of knowledge; • make a contribution to the development of the professional community through the use of rigorous, but practical modes of evidence-based enquiry to develop learning and teaching; • make a contribution to enhanced collaboration and team working to assist schools in their efforts to create and sustain learning environments for teachers and pupils; • support professional creativity and curiosity; and • provide learning opportunities for both students and the tutor team. The course should build on, and extend, the expertise of both groups. (University of Stirling November 2001) The structure of the new programme that resulted from this agreement is shown in Fig. 6.2. There were two professional enquiry projects, the f rst of which consisted of an investigation by the student into improving an aspect of her own practice and the second, longer project, required the student to carry out a collaborative action enquiry into pupils’ learning with one or more colleagues. There were risks attached to this design because the officia version of the Chartered Teacher programme was not as clearly practice-based and therefore the Stirling programme did not match into this framework (CT Partnership, 2001) in terms of either content or structure. On these grounds, the proposal was duly rejected by the GTCS’ accreditation panel. After some negotiation and modifications the Professional Enquiry Partnership appealed on the grounds that the GTCS’ documentation claimed its accreditation process would respond positively to ‘creative and innovative approaches to teachers’ professional development’ (GTCS, 2003:3). Nonconformity with the published programme was eventually agreed after a second meeting of the panel. What this meant for students at Stirling was an emphasis on the

118

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

Key to Figure 6.2: shading = practice-based learning module Fig. 6.2 The chartered teacher (CT) programme structure

association between professionalism and enquiry and a close, interactive relationship between theory and practice. Discursively the Stirling programme still situated chartered teacher within the dominant pattern of ideas contained in the Standard for Chartered Teacher but it lent a different emphasis to the particular dialect being adopted at national level. At Stirling, the SCT was interpreted in such a way as to emphasise the adoption of a questioning and empirical stance towards practice on the part of chartered teachers and on their capacity to act as collaborative, but critical, agents for change. In order to elicit the tutors’ views, they were given a questionnaire, 5 years after the introduction of the programme, which asked what outcomes they would like to achieve by teaching on the course; what they considered to be the three most important characteristics of a chartered teacher; and what they believed to be the beneficial/problemati outcomes of participation on the CT programme in terms of students’ professional lives, if any. By this time there were seven of us teaching on the programme. The responses made it clear that team members’ imaginations were caught by the notion of teacher activism (Sachs, 2003), which they linked very strongly to a collaborative professional framework. Activism was articulated as fl wing from being critical, developing personal opinions and having the confidenc to fin a voice and have a say in the work setting. These connections were reflecte in team members’ choice of CT characteristics and the links they made between them. ‘Critical’ and ‘collaborative’ were the most dominant values with ‘learner-centred’ and ‘reflect ve’ as the next most frequent; the distribution of responses showed an overlap between ethical and learner-centred, and reflect ve and critical qualities. There was a reaction against what was seen as pressure for teachers to comply with operational demands with two team members saying that opportunities to think about professional matters were noticeably absent in the culture of schools. Five out of the seven indicated that they saw the conduct of the programme as an overtly political activity: because the programme is really making the majority taking part think about what they are doing and I feel very strongly that there isn’t enough opportunity (if any) for that in the Scottish system. (B)

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 1 The Intentions of Educators

119

I also would like our graduates to be ‘diff cult’ people, not to be compliant, to have an opinion and be prepared to voice it and to insist on making classrooms worthwhile places to be. (G)

In addition to notions of activism tutor F, for instance, saw the course as being about ‘Changes in both personal and professional perception’. There was reference to reconnecting with teachers’ original motivations, an indication of an overtly affective intention to make people feel differently about themselves. Opportunity for practitioners to reconnect with the desire that perhaps firs led them into teaching. (A)

In their responses, the tutor team showed more concern with the affective and motivational effects of educating, issues which f tted better with the discourse in the SCT than with that of SCQF. The tutors also put a stress on the political functions of a chartered teacher: activism and the ability to act as a change agent. Again this was a detectable theme in the SCT although it was missing from SCQF where the emphasis was on economic functions. Nevertheless the discourse of all three matched in terms of their broad articulation of ideas; indeed, tutors emphasised much the same terms and relationships as were evident in the two other texts. In this sense, none of the activity sets shown in Fig. 6.1 escapes the dominant discourse, but neither does the discourse establish a consistent set of articulations between an invariant set of key terms because the constituent groups/artefacts do not ‘speak with one voice’; each uses a version of the discourse where the meaning of common signifier is nuanced slightly differently. Standard Operating Procedures: The Programme Handbook and the Module Descriptors Returning to Fig. 6.1, the point of entry for both of the officia prescriptions of persons at course level was through the Programme Handbook and The Module Descriptor booklets, the contents of which had been policed by various academic committees within the university and the GTCS’ accreditation committees. These two documents, given to every participant on the CT programme, constituted the basic operating procedures for the delivery and administration of the course. Issues of assessment are very prominent in these texts, forming the basis of one third of the Programme Handbook and nearly half of the text in the Module Descriptor. In addition, the Programme Handbook incorporates aims and pedagogies agreed within the local partnership, the tutor team weaving together, through ‘plagiarism’ rather than reference, words from both national and local texts. All this adds to the power of an authorial concoction in this text that is political, in so far as it is prescribed by policies, and motivational, in so far as it endeavours to mirror various stakeholder’s beliefs and desires.

120

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

Relay 3: Disciplinary Governance The Module Workbook and the Readings The fina tool I want to consider in this chain is the Module Workbook, which contains a number of articles for the students to read and also directs them to chapters and extracts from texts that were originally listed in the proposal forms for validation. Whilst it would seem that tutors had a free choice over the sources of content for their programme, their choices were still constrained (see Relay 3 in Fig. 6.1). This was because the texts available for them to choose from were produced by publishers whose f rst concern was with findin a market for their publications. Authors would have been asked on which courses their books could be used, and fellow academics in education, acting as reviewers, would have commented on the marketability of their proposed volumes. Similarly the editors of refereed journals, seeking to establish academic respectability and influence would have ensured that what they published complied with current genres and topics in their field Thus members of the discipline control which volumes get published under the heading Education and which articles editors allow into educational journals (Latour, 1987). The form of control here is less concerned with skills and practical action and more with the elaboration of what it is proper to think and to say. And here, with books on reflect ve practice, action research, teacher leadership and the ‘new’ professionalism we come full circle to content and language derived from and contributing to the continuation and elaboration of the lifelong learning discourse, whether the texts were critical or ‘conformist’. It would be difficul to untangle which came f rst, the drive by politicians in favour of a certain form of professionalism or the discourse shaped in academe around the same topic. Whichever, the point here is that the tutors are enmeshed by more than the officia lines of governance – they are encased in an equally powerful net through the orthodoxies of their subject discipline. Lastly the university required the course to be evaluated, through the appointment of an external examiner, a disciplinary expert, who completed an annual report on the quality of course outcomes based on samples of students’ assignments. It also required the collation and submission of reports on student evaluations and the attendance of the latter on Programme Boards. Summary Thus the interaction between tutors and students on this programme takes place within a complex web of intentions on the part of the ‘educators’. There can be no simple definitio of agency here. Whilst we as tutors embodied the educator role at the interface between the programme and the students, we did so as actants, and therefore as bundlings together of connections and relations, carrying the intentions of numerous others. The pedagogy we used as tutors was driven by a mixture of governmental, institutional, organisational and personal intentions ‘contained’ not only in our persons and actions in the classroom but also in the materials that governed and shaped the content and nature of what was to be learned, how it was to be

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 2 The Actions of Educators

121

learned and how it was to be judged to have been learned. The level of investment in the shaping of the learner/educator interface is striking, as is its embodiment in the business of assessment. Looking at Fig. 6.1, we can see how these various relays meet in the form of the Programme Handbook with its specificatio of the principles that inform the course, the six modules that make up the programme and the way in which the course will run. The Handbook serves as a textual space in which the tutors have ‘translated’, ‘accommodated’ and ‘re-contextualised’ the various prescriptions conveyed by these relays whilst also trying to preserve their own beliefs and desires in relation to the activity. With this account of the local fiel as background, Section 2 examines the interface between tutors (as people + things) and students (as people + things) on the firs module of the programme.

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 2 The Actions of Educators This section is based on an examination of the delivery of the firs module on the Chartered Teacher programme, Extending Professionalism. In this description, I have tried to delineate pedagogy at the level of both the overall design of events as well as at that of the activities and processes which constituted them. The approach adopted for the design of the firs taught module on the CT programme was intended to: • capitalise on social processes of learning and maximise the resources available for learning through the cohort structure by: a. adopting an active learning perspective, using a constructivist pedagogy; b. introducing extended collaborative tasks; c. providing plenty of opportunities for the sharing of experience, knowledge and ideas. • increase the mixing of workplace and taught spaces in order to develop interaction and synergy between theory and practice and enhance refl xivity through: a. adopting a relatively rapid rhythm of travel – engineering frequent movements between the learning spaces; b. introducing specifi and short-term activities to supplement the substantial practice-based learning projects in Modules 3, 5 & 6; c. creating an extension of the cohort-learning space through the use of structured self-study materials (by locating substantial input to reading in an individual learning space, more opportunities for interaction within the cohort-learning space were possible); d. using a learning journal as a bridging artefact across the school, individual and cohort-learning spaces.

122

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

Key to Figure 6.3: Spaces White rounded forms: Cohort-Learning Space, Individual-Learning Space, SchoolLearning Space Artefacts Shaded rectangles Flows Of people and things from space to space shown as artefactual (black lines) and peopled fl ws (white rounded lines). Fig. 6.3 Durational map of the spaces created by the performance of module 1 of the CT programme

Based on these principles, the firs module was structured durationally as shown in Fig. 6.3. This shows the module as a series of events taking place over a semester of 4 months. The timescale for the module is shown on the right-hand side of the map. There are three learning spaces that students help to perform in this design: • one created in the University’s classrooms which is shown in white on the lefthand side of the diagram This is the cohort-learning space where they work with

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 2 The Actions of Educators

123

their tutor. Within this space there are 5 days of interaction: Induction and Days 1–4 of the module; • space in the students’ homes where they undertake their reading and writing. This is shown in white second to the left and labelled as the individual learning space. Within this space, students are expected to undertake four sets of study activities in preparation for the four taught days and to complete an assignment for assessment purposes; and • space in their classrooms and staffrooms where they carry out investigations and discussions in relation to the course with pupils and colleagues. They are asked to carry out investigations in school as part of preparing for the activities on the taught days and as a basis for work in the individual learning space. This school-learning space is shown in white on the right-hand side of the figure The Extending Professionalism Workbook controls and coordinates activity across these three spaces. It is the large rectangle on the far left, which specifie the individual study (IS) tasks that students undertake; the programmes for the taught days; the collaborative task; and the rubric for the assignment. This workbook, with the associated tutor materials – power points, video and audio CDs, handouts, etc.– prescribes the activity of the tutors as well. The other key artefact is the learning journal (LJ) which is used as a repository for thoughts and observations by the students. The pedagogical tools that are used on this module relate to a number of key functions: • establishing the activity set within the teaching space – definin the culture of the group and the nature of the roles and relationships within it; • mixing the spaces, establishing the means, rhythm, nature, direction and extent of mixing between the three learning spaces created by the programme; • providing access for students to ideas which are new to them – through input from University sources and from other members of the cohort; • processing and reprocessing these ideas through discussion, oral and written presentation and giving feedback; and • assessment procedures, in a sense a sub-set of processing but characterised by a particular purpose and form of reception for students’ texts. In order to try and explain how this works, I am going to track the development of two key components of professionalism as define within the programme. These are notions of collaborative learning and reflect ve practice. Both of these ideas are mobilised through both the process and the content of the course. The whole course makes the application of a socio-constructivist approach a lived experience for the participants since both the workbook and the taught days are largely designed and delivered on the basis of this theoretical position (Critical Skills Programme, 2009). Within a practice-focused course ‘doing’ is the basis for learning. The way in which key concepts of ‘collaboration’ and ‘reflect ve practice’ are inscribed is through enaction. They are situated as a key part of the pedagogy used in the module thus

124

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

complying with the Vygotskian notion of the need to connect new concepts to the concrete through collaborative social action.

Collaborative Learning The main pedagogic strategy used to develop this concept consists of modelling the collaborative process since the learning activity that takes place on taught days is collaborative and therefore becomes a lived experience for the students. The establishment of a framework for collaborating starts during the induction session where the teachers are introduced to what it means to be a learner in the context of the course. The session opens with a short explanation of the aims of the course and the nature of the contract between the tutor and the students. This is echoed in the workbook: This workbook is designed to give an outline of what lies ahead. It will also provide guidance for your self-study activities, and help to prepare you for your assignment. The materials you will engage with have been selected to support you as you develop your understanding of the nature of professional enquiry. The whole programme has been designed to encourage peer learning through collaboration and shared reflection (2005:1)

The f rst activity requires each teacher to select two pictures, one to represent how they feel and the other to represent what they hope to gain from the course. Following the lead of the tutor each then gives his or her name to the group and explains the significanc of the pictures. Thus within minutes of their firs experience of the course, students are put into an exercise which is publicly self-revelatory. Next they are randomly sorted using a line out into what is called their home group. This is the group they will work with to complete a collaborative task that involves preparing a presentation on teacher professionalism to be given on Day 4 of the module. During the induction session, these home groups prepare an agreement about the nature of the learning environment that will characterise the conduct of all the taught days. This is copied to all cohort members. In addition all course members are asked to provide contact details for circulation. The last part of induction concerns the explanation of the function of the learning journals. This opening session is critical since it establishes the underlying ‘culture’ of the activity set which is largely controlled by the educators. Each cohort will have a slightly different character and feel, but nevertheless each will conform to the model that the tutors, using common processes and materials, seek to establish. This culture involves a degree of exposure of both one’s professional and personal self and high levels of interactivity. The learning of each student is made to depend upon the group and, vice versa, the group will depend on each individual playing his of her part; thus, learning is made both public and interdependent. Given these parameters it is quite surprising that students largely comply with this framing of activity. However, each is liable to feel vulnerable on this f rst

Pedagogy on the Chartered Teacher Programme: Section 2 The Actions of Educators

125

encounter; the majority will not know anyone else in the group. They are located within the university’s territory where they are ‘outsiders’ and therefore politeness and caution dictate they conform to the practices of their hosts (Goffman, 1974; Dugdale, 1999). In addition, they know they have placed themselves in a position where they will be subject to evaluation and they are concerned about failure and loss of face. From the tutors’ point of view, establishing expectations of how the group will work early on is essential. If a degree of openness and willingness to share thoughts and experiences is not secured, their pedagogy becomes impracticable. However, as with any exercise of power, their practice could become, or be interpreted as, overly intrusive. On each of the subsequent taught days, at least two thirds of the time is spent in group or paired activities involving various forms of discussion and presentation – this latter because each activity leads to some form of output. Most of these are converted into electronic f les and circulated so that they become texts for the group. All the activities tutors use are applicable in a school environment, so often the participants, after experiencing an activity as part of their own learning, will go and try it out in their classrooms.

Reflecti e Practice One way of looking at how the notion of reflect ve practice is mobilised is to track the use of the learning journal as an artefact. Every student is handed a learning journal on the induction day, and this is followed by an input from the tutor that promotes its value as a means of reflectin on practice. An emphasis on the journal belonging solely to the participant, through repeated reference to its being ‘yours’ and its ‘privacy’, peppers this presentation. However, in the next breath, the tutor team lays a claim upon it ‘as a tool we will use’ although ‘you’ will be forewarned when that is going to be the case. The learning journals start their travels at the induction session when students are asked to write down their hopes and fears about the course in them. The next encounter is in the workbook where they are instructed to read the f rst chapter of Moon’s book Learning Journals (1999) after which they are asked to make at least one entry a week, recording classroom incidents which strike them as significan in some way. The participants are told that they should be prepared to present one of these recorded incidents on the firs taught day of the module. This marks the initiation of the journals as conveyances for thoughts and experience arising in the school space back into the two other learning spaces for re-processing. On Day 1, after discussing the readings they did as part of their individual study activities, the participants use their learning journals to record how their understanding of key terms has changed. The students are then introduced to Tripp’s heuristic (1993:27) for analysing critical incidents. They are given an outline of the process of critical incident analysis (CIA) to paste into the back of their journals. They listen to an audio tape of two people using the technique before using it themselves

126

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

to explore the incidents they selected to present from their journals. Thus a school space experience enters the cohort-learning space for re-processing through analysis and discussion. During this activity the experiences of all the participants are being used as a medium for learning across the group. This is reinforced in dialogic plenary sessions where the tutor works with the group to frame what has been learned. The second set of self-study activities involves reading Tripp’s f rst chapter in Critical Incidents in Teaching, after which they are asked to re-read their learning journals and select another incident. Using CIA on this event, it is suggested that they note what the exercise reveals about their own educational reasoning and values. Here there is a mixing of the school and the individual learning spaces through the use of a tool for self-evaluation. Additionally they asked to observe

Table 6.1 Pedagogical tools used on module 1

(1) Space formation Class contract Home groups Collaborative tasks

(2) Travel Rhythm and direction of movement Use of locations

(4) Ideational processing devices (mixing Uni/School inputs)

(5) Assessment devices

Lecture

Discussion tasks

Assessment tasks

Guided reading

Feedback of task products Application of ideas in school School-based enquiries Presentations and critique Role play

Criteria

(3) Ideational input devices (from Uni)

Contact lists

Commissioning actions through set tasks Learning journal

Modelling

Social events

Progression of tasks

Demonstrations

‘Enforced’ participation Self-exposure

Sponsoring experiment

Tools/techniques re: enquiry

Using invasive assessed projects

The standard for chartered teacher

Dialogue and argument

Reading list

Module descriptor /SCT Feedback (e-mail) Use of exemplars Submission of evidence

Extended Field writing assessment assignments Critical incident Presentations analysis for dissemination One to one tutoring

Key to Table 6.1 SCT = Standard for Chartered Teacher The classificatio used in Table 6.1 is tools for set formation; ideational travel; ideational input (from Uni); ideational processing; and evaluation. The structural elements are largely located in the f rst two columns – the more detailed tools for the activity are set out in the other 3 columns.

Pedagogic Practices – Relaying Agency

127

and categorise their own teaching in their learning journal on the basis of learning theories outlined in one of the readings. On the second taught day, this becomes the basis for discussion and a role play. Later the participants are asked to record in their learning journals a new teaching strategy that they intend to employ. The third set of study activities asks them to make notes about what happened when they tried using the new strategy. Under the heading Reflectin on Power they are asked to read back over their entries and pick an incident that touches on issues of power that they would be prepared to share. On the third taught day, they share their journal observations on their teaching experiment and use their journals to note another new strategy they are going to try. Later they work in triads to analyse the incidents involving issues of power. In the fina set of study activities for Day 4, they use their journals to note modes of enquiry available to them in their own classrooms. This exercise involves applying a framework from Pollard’s Reflectiv Teaching (2002) as a basis for analysing their working environment and the outcomes of interviews with 2 pupils. These notes are used on Day 4 in the section that looks at evidence gathering in the context of self-evaluation against the Standard for Chartered Teacher. On Days 3 and 4, they also discuss using the entries in their learning journals as evidence for their self-evaluation in the module assignment. Summary This section has shown how the impact of the relays that were outlined in Section 1 were translated into ‘classroom’ practice at the interface between the tutors and the students. Its significanc lies in showing the details of how the relaying hub that is the system created by the implementation of the CT programme operates. Section 1 showed the lines of power connecting through the tutor-plus-handbook actant, and Section 2 has shown how this power is both relayed and amplifie through the translation of the Handbook into action.

Pedagogic Practices – Relaying Agency What this detailed examination of aspects of the taught elements of this programme reveals is that the pedagogical practices at the interface between tutors and students are not immune to the influenc of those elements of the wider networked system that make up educating in this particular locality. Section 2 of the case study has surfaced the complexity of the mediational means used in the performance of one module, even though this description is incomplete. There is one area that I have not touched upon, which is tutor behaviour and the rhetorics of their teaching style, exemplifie in the study undertaken by Kress et al. (2001) into the pedagogy of school science. Those devices that were identifie in the description given here ranged from overall design features that applied to the performance of the programme as a whole to short action sequences that were part of a particular teaching event. Condensing this material takes us back to the two key lessons

128

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

that emerged from the evaluation of the SQH programme: the importance of social processes and the powerful effect of mixing action across spaces. In this sense, the extrapolation of these two finding as pedagogic strategies represents a refl xive response to hybridity, with the performance of the CT programme marking a significant development of pedagogic practices that were piloted on the SQH programme. These two key strategies, in their turn, are each directly traceable, as elements of developmentalism, through material linkages to the relays identifie in Section 1 of the case study.

Creating the Activity Set The module starts with the making of the activity set, deliberately putting in place a culture for the group by establishing norms for interaction. It emphasises sameness in creating a shared identity for cohort members both as students at a university and as aspiring chartered teachers. This culture is key to making the pedagogical model used by the tutor team viable and it will be maintained over the 3 years of the course. The pedagogy builds aff liation and loyalty to the group by establishing interdependence between members through the sharing of personal as well as professional aspects of self. This produces a public learning space where members of the cohort collectively and individually begin to experience and appropriate key parameters of a particular model of professional practice. The devices mobilised by the tutors to induct the students foreground peer discussion and the sharing of knowledge and affect as a core strategy for learning. As the course progresses members of the group will spend less time working together and more time learning individually or collectively with work colleagues. Nevertheless, the cohort will remain an important part of their experiences for many of its members, acting as a source of support even after graduation. The induction activity provides a clear example of tutors setting out to establish a group identity that has immediate implications for the identity of the individuals within the group, in this case in the shaping and forming of what it is to be someone seeking to become a chartered teacher. This aspect of the pedagogy is clearly regulative in that it frames the forms of interaction and communication that are ‘proper’ for these students. The power to do this emanates through the tutors in combination with the various artefacts they use and the location of the activity within a university (Wilson & Cavero, 2003). The students themselves add to this power by playing their part in the activity, thereby marking our claim as tutors on their identity as the to-be-educated. Our adoption of a socio-constructivist stance underpins much of this model of working, and this relates directly to the conceptualisation of the learner promulgated by the lifelong learning discourse that is incorporated in the SCT. The creation of the cohort as an activity set, with a culture and an object that is shared amongst its members, relates to creating the future-oriented imaginary plane for members of the group that was identifie in Chapter 5. An imaginary that serves as a means of mobilising energy and affect for activities of enaction in the

Pedagogic Practices – Relaying Agency

129

participants’ work places. In creating a practice of support, this activity set also serves as a location for the re-working of negative affects, a space where people can discuss and review their difficultie and problems and obtain help in their reconceptualisation.

Mixing Theoretical and Practical Knowledge The second strand concerns the way in which the tutors seek to interrelate knowwhat with know-how. The module workbook provides the basis for mixing sense and meaning making throughout the enaction of the module. It privileges the use of practice, both within and outside the cohort-learning space, as the medium for learning but this is also leavened by working at a more abstract or theoretical level. The conduct of educating on this programme models a ‘vision’ of what being a chartered teacher involves as someone who is knowledgeable and well read and who can warrant their professional conduct through reference to authority derived from research and scholarship. Thus, where the two terms ‘collaborative learning ’ and ‘reflect ve practice ’ are made a part of what the students are enacting in the cohortlearning space they are also linked to the abstract through the use of conceptual tools derived from reading in the individual learning space and from tutor inputs. Through constant enaction, the pedagogy attempts to make key ideas practical and lived performances, for instance, if you compare Fig. 4.1 with Fig. 7.1, you can see that the CT programme engages participants in a more intense and rapid rhythm of to-ing and fro-ing between the cohort and the school-learning spaces than the standard route of the SQH programme did. On the imaginary plane, the students are constantly being pushed to question what they read and hear in one space with their experience of practice in another. The cohort-learning space provides for the repetition, articulation and examination of a discourse of professionalism to enable the group and individuals within it to master the language and the use of its associated tools. The artefacts that the tutors have created, such as the workbook, draw further power through the processes of legitimation and discipline that impinge upon teaching within the university as such. Here I am referring to the relays tracked in Section 1 of the case study through committees and the responsibilities of course directors to shape the shapers and form the formers, i.e. frame the way in which the tutors think and work. This aspect of the pedagogy is both instructional in Bernstein’s (1996) terms, in that it engages students with a content that is deemed proper for teachers as professional educators and regulatory in operationalising criteria for evaluation and assessment. Whilst the sameness established across the set provides safety and affective support for learning, the mixing of the cohort and the school-learning space uses difference and dissonance as a spur to change. Refl xivity is established through the interference of one cultural space with another with the student-cum-learning journal as a tool for enabling that mixing to occur. The workbook positions the learner/journal as a person/tool going between, and acting between, spaces. In this way, participants are constantly thrust into an extended dialogue between the

130

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

different positions that they occupy with memory and the learning journal serving as complementary repositories of this experience of betweeness. As a result of these movements and the constructivist pedagogic devices used by the tutors, the cohort-learning space thus becomes another means of creating third spaces within it through the mixing of students’ experiences, ideas and prior knowledge across the group. Key concepts are continually developed and differentiated in their meaning for both the group and the individuals within it, in a process of collective knowledge production that relies upon the dialogue provoked by otherness and difference. In these terms, it becomes very difficul to point to pedagogy as simply being invested in the tutors and their practice rather than as something that is discursive in its nature, extending through a panoply of persons, artefacts and interconnections which centrally includes the students in processes of knowledge creation. This strategy of opening up space-to-space connections and mixing resources is not demanded by the university’s policies and practices nor by the lifelong learning discourse inscribed in the notion of an occupational/professional standard. It is an outcome of mixing the two, a product of hybridity. This is because the standard specifie competences that apply in the work setting as against those competences traditionally required in an academic setting. Somehow the tutor team has had to reconcile the two. In that regard, the programme could be seen as part of an invasive, developmental strategy in the university space that is hybridising with a schooling strategy traditionally associated with knowledge transfer.

Creating and Rebundling Connections I have attempted, in unpacking teaching on the CT programme, to make apparent the connections between macro and micro ‘levels’ in the fiel in order to show that this notion has to be challenged in describing a networked system. It is an inadequate metaphor for relations, which are often extensive in their operation rather than limited by boundaries as was more commonly the case in the past. Despite the discomfort, I think it is important for educators to be aware of how power is exercised in educating networks and systems in order to think about how they, and the people they work with, are positioned. In the CT programme, we have a very clear example of the hybridisation of two discourses that produces a pedagogy that combines elements of both at every level of its performance. The managerial elements of criteria, occupational standards, procedures for quality assurance and aspects of self-work mix with disciplinary elements such as concentration on theoretical concepts, subject content, analysis and critique, and professional values and aspirations as part of the governance of the Programme as a whole. The same elements, admittedly re-contextualised, are also evident at the immediate interface between tutors and students. Our agency as tutors is riven through with extensions from both the disciplinary and the managerial circulations in which we are enmeshed. These two discursive strands, as pointed out at the beginning of the chapter, are not fully compatible with one another so that Stronach et al.’s (2002) findin that many

Pedagogic Practices – Relaying Agency

131

educators hold divided and fragmented identity positions is unsurprising and the team at Stirling certainly share that discomfort. Returning to our original question about the intentions of educators, the answer becomes very complicated. In one sense it is simple; at the level of the student, the shaping and forming is, in the case reviewed here, largely applied through the mix of ourselves, embodied as tutors, and the artefacts that we use. We provide the students, through the medium of the programme, with resources that will enable them to exert agency in their own settings using a discourse that we interpret to and with them. The type of persons they are to become in this process is largely laid down through the assessment system administered through us as tutors. Behind this, on the governance side we have two definition of professional personhood, postgraduateness and chartered teacherliness, each with a slightly different emphasis, combined with disciplinary norms for educated teachers, i.e. we are looking here at direct links into identity formation and the development of the future imaginary plane that was discussed in Chapter 5. In a sense, what is happening at the node within the network that the CT programme performs is a complex making and unmaking of connections. As tutors we have the rhetorical function of re-contextualisation with regard to elements of content in which we have some leeway to be ‘inventive’ and we relay this task of translation on to our students, to undertake, as part of the conduct of the programme, within their own professional contexts. In the interpretation process, we have applied some discretion by emphasising and construing an imaginary that we fin appealing and that allows us to present an ethically respectable view of our activities both to ourselves and to the students. In so doing, we have invested further power in this system. Agency, at the node that is the performance of the CT programme activity, largely rests with us, as tutors (persons plus things), wielded, through the co-operation of the students, as one of the relays of power within this networked system for discourses that differ in their framing of meaning and relations. We transmit to the students, through such prestige and status as still accrues to being university lecturers, bearing identities as gatekeepers to qualification our symbolic, institutionalised power. Powers we have through complying with power, exemplifying behaviour that John Elliot has labelled as the outcome of ‘pathologies of creative compliance’ (2001) within the tertiary sector. These somewhat pessimistic conclusions raise the issue of what opportunities exist for innovation and resistance in these types of settings. For us, answering it entails understanding what it means to enact a form of teacher professionalism that we, in the tutor team, fin ethical and motivating. Caught between two discourses, there is some space for creativity and novelty, but it is restricted. The arena for choice for us as educators has lain in the interpretation of the criteria enumerated in the SCT enabling us to pursue an enaction of accomplished teaching that is more congruent with our ‘own’ beliefs and values than was inscribed in the original framing for CT programmes. Once permissions were granted, we played the game of partial disobedience, adopting minor forms of subversion that go some way to ameliorating the tensions inherent in our positioning. Criticality does not enable us to get out of this bind (Walker, 2006).

132

6

Pedagogy: Creating a Hub in a Field of Relays

Conclusion In many ways, composing this chapter has been a somewhat disheartening experience. The exercise has forcibly brought home the complexities and complicities of my ‘agency’ as a course tutor within the matrix of relations in which I am embedded. However, the perception of one’s lack of autonomy and the moral inconsistencies of one’s positioning is not unique nor open to simple solutions. What perhaps is new is the capacity to develop, across the various analyses that have been conducted here, a picture that does greater justice to the complex dynamics of educating. Looking at small systems from different angles reveals the relays and amplification of power, which are both used and generated in the social spaces and networked relations that they produce. It may be that, with a better understanding and awareness of these dimensions of the activity of educating, we can explore ways of generating new and more fruitful ways of both influencin educational practice and opening up debate about its purposes and effects. Putting together what has emerged from Chapters 5 and 6, we can begin to get a sense of what it means to look at educating as a relational activity. What the two analyses reveal is the co-option of the to-be-educated as agents within the dominant discourse of the programme. The course itself is thus performed as part of a shared agency on the part of tutors, students and various things, an agency that also extends into co-opting others in the students’ schools into the activity (Fox, 2009). The performance of the programme bundles and ties together all these things and people in new relays and relations during the period of their mutual engagement. It does this in two ways: through the power that is relayed into the system and the power that its performance in turn produces. The performance of the CT course serves both as a relay and an amplifying device for particular forms of practice and in so doing it creates and disrupts structures as patternings of activity.

Chapter 7

Constructing Knowledge and Agency

Introduction So far we have examined some of the effects of activity in the school-learning space and the actions of the tutors and their tools in the cohort-learning space. In order to complete the picture of what happens at the interface between students, tutors and the educating activity, this chapter looks at students’ use of the resources made available to them across all three of the learning spaces formed by a hybrid system. This entails concentrating on the outcomes of the activities taking place in the cohortand individual- learning spaces, i.e. the arena in which the pedagogic strategy of schooling is most dominant. I am going to do this by looking at the knowledge that the teachers on the CT programme create: first through the way in which they compose their written assignments. second, in the claims to knowledge that they make in explaining the personal and professional effects of their engagement in the course. Whilst Chapter 5 looked at the knowledge students constructed in the schoollearning spaces, concentrating on the issue of identities and movements between them in the development of ‘new’ professional selves, this chapter looks at how students developed their rhetorical skills and the capacity to influenc audiences controlling the resources to enable them to act differently. The chapter begins by exploring the context in which Chartered Teacher status was introduced. This provides a background for explaining why, when students on the CT programme came to undertake collaborative enquiries in their schools, many of them confronted resistance from colleagues, and, more appreciably, from their managers. The case study examines the knowledge that students constructed in the written reports they submitted about the professional enquiries they had undertaken in their schools. It looks at how these texts were made, what their authors borrowed from texts produced by others, how they chose to stitch these borrowings together and the effects that they achieved by doing so. The results of this investigation are placed alongside what the same students said about the effects of their participation on the course. J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3_7, 

133

134

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

The analysis points to the ways in which the students appeared to be able to use what was available to them to make new spaces for action, leading back to themes that have already been touched upon about discursive contestations and the political work of opening up the space to change. This is followed by further exploration of the function of knowledge in the students’ professional contexts and its relationship to notions of teacher agency and leadership.

Teacher Professionalism and Chartered Teachers Contradictory Conceptions of Professionalism Professionalism is one of those words which often serves as an ‘empty signifier in attracting a jumble of often contradictory contents (Laclau, 2007); this is especially true for teacher professionalism in Scotland at the time of the introduction of chartered teacher status. In preparation for the devolution of power to the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Offic presented a comprehensive policy statement on the future of education entitled Targeting Excellence (SOEID, 1999). It advanced an argument for the modernisation of the teaching profession to the effect that teachers should be up to date and fully aware of developments in their field If they were then the quality of education would be suitably improved for the future. The White Paper went on to assert that teachers would become a modern profession through the mechanisms of performance review, define standards, ongoing CPD (including postgraduate qualification for advanced teaching and management), the reform of initial teacher education, a formal induction process and the reward of excellence in teaching. There was an interesting disjuncture here between an elaborate set of means and what seemed, on the face of it, to be somewhat modest ends. In the McCrone Report (SE, 2000b), professionalism was given a different slant. Here, the emphasis was on the conduct of teachers, rather than their knowledge and expertise. The text underlined that teacher professionalism was based on a sense of duty, responsibility and commitment, arguing that for displaying these values in their conduct teachers should be given greater autonomy and trusted to exercise judgement and discretion in relation to their work. The claim was that the goals of schools and teachers were essentially aligned from which it followed that teachers should be f exible in response to the needs of their schools and actively engage in processes of improvement and change. Thus the McCrone Report indicated that modernisation was more than a matter of keeping up to date. It required a change in teachers’ psychological contract with their employers and the development of a corporate approach to practice as against the more traditional, individualistic framing of teachers’ work. In this it conveyed a slightly ‘softer’ form of the managerialist discourse than Targeting Excellence. The resultant Agreement (SE, 2001) about teachers’ conditions of work revealed that this was not acceptable to the teacher unions. The Agreement recorded a reversion to an earlier formulation of

Teacher Professionalism and Chartered Teachers

135

professionalism where CPD, the reform of induction, and chartered teacher status were about developing the expertise of the individual teacher as the basis for improvement rather than any re-culturation of the workforce along corporatist lines. Meanwhile, the 2002 edition of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education’s (HMIE) guidelines for quality assurance in schools, How Good is our School? found no use for the notion of teacher professionalism. It referred to teachers throughout as ‘staff’ who practice ‘the craft of teaching’. Teachers were expected to be knowledgeable about child development and active learning, well-qualified involved in reflect ve self-evaluation, working in teams when appropriate and making effective contributions to the work of the school under the supervision of line managers, who were accountable for the quality of their work. Thus HGIOS represented a formulation that was congruent with the discourse of hard managerialism in which teachers cast as educational operatives complying with detailed, centrally prescribed procedures for conducting their work. In contrast, the Standard for Chartered Teacher, also published in 2002, advocated yet another version of teacher professionalism. In this text, accomplished teachers were critical thinkers who engaged with the research of others as well as having an enquiry-based orientation to their own practice. They had a vocation and they constantly sought to improve their practice. They were committed to the furtherance of the profession through collaboration, discussion and debate and the evaluation of professional practice. Chartered teachers would provide leadership in learning and teaching, generate new practices both within their own schools and the profession as a whole, act as advocates of change and contribute to planning, improvement and team development. They would require minimal supervision. This formulation of a reflect ve and collegial role for teachers has much in common with notions of professionalism advocated by educationalists and variously described as ‘extended’, ‘new’ or ‘activist’ (Sachs, 2003). It perhaps reflect the fact that two university education departments were part of the alliance that gained the contract to produce the Standard. However, Kirk et al. (2003), as members of that team, reveal some of the thinking behind this framing that made it palatable to the Scottish Executive: (a) the need ‘to reinforce the collegial aspects of teaching and to encourage teachers to see themselves as collaborators in a joint undertaking’; (ibid p. 25) (b) an expectation that teachers should play ‘a leading role in the enhancement of teaching and learning through school-based and classroom-based research. If teachers were to respond to that expectation, the Standard for Chartered Teacher could become the vehicle for the emergence of teaching as a researching profession.’ (pp. 28/9); and (c) the belief ‘that the educational imperative to help students to learn how to learn will lead to a diminution in the role of the subject specialist in favour of those who are recognised as specialists in human development – personally effective and competent across a wider age range than current teaching qualification suggest is reasonable’ (p. 31).

136

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

These are extrapolations of the desired characteristics of teacher professionalism described in the McCrone Report – corporatism, evidence-based practice and fl xibility. They bear the hallmarks of a hybrid discourse including both ‘new’ professionalism and ‘soft’ managerialism although here the ‘corporate’ is subtly qualifie as a commitment to the wider professional community of practice, bridging and crossing organisational boundaries. The SCT also attempts to instantiate a new orientation on the part of teachers to membership of their school communities. Through an appeal to the knowledge creation version of the soft managerialist discourse, responsibility to ‘one’s profession’ is restored in the expression of a claim to a collective, rather than an individualised autonomy. However, this does not disguise the political intents inherent in this formulation. The differences in emphasis in this set of documents reflecte the outcome of successive waves of educational reform resulting in three forms of professionalism that are actively in contestation in the public education service, each embedded at different locations (Gewirtz et al., 2009). In many staffrooms, the culture of bureau professionalism is still strong whilst amongst school leaders and managers, more vulnerable to possible public humiliation or praise through the workings of the quality assurance system, educational operationalism has taken a much stronger hold. ‘New’ professionalism, which connects most closely in Scotland to recent policy developments in relation to curricular and pedagogical matters, has probably, as yet, the most tenuous hold in the system although it, too, connects to a long tradition of professionalism as practised by a minority of teachers (Hoyle, 1974). It is against this background, where the role of teachers lies in contested territory, between discourses interpreted from a number of different positions within the local policy context, that chartered teachers had to fin a way to invent themselves. This was further complicated by a number of factors directly related to the initiative itself: • the McCrone Report had proposed two grades of accomplished teacher status: chartered teachers, who provided excellent examples of classroom practice and advanced chartered teachers, who were to have a define leadership role. The Agreement resulted in only one grade of chartered teacher allied to a standard which contained a mix of both the levels that were originally proposed, i.e. the SCT could be read either ‘as a means of rewarding experienced high quality teachers who seek a challenging career without having to pursue school management posts’ (SE, 2002) or as relating to teachers who were to be ‘a resource for the nation in driving forward educational standards’ (Ibid:22–23); • under the agreement there is no distinction made between the duties of a class teacher and those of a chartered teacher; • any teacher at the top of the main grade salary scale could seek to qualify as a chartered teacher on presentation of a certificat of eligibility to an accredited provider, and no references could be sought from their employers as to their suitability. Furthermore, the payment of fees was entirely the responsibility of the teacher.

Teacher Professionalism and Chartered Teachers

137

For all these reasons, the firs chartered teachers to graduate on the CT programme met with considerable resistance when they came to initiate collaborative enquiries in schools. They were being asked to demonstrate the capacity to influ ence and collaborate with others in a context where this was not generally seen as appropriate conduct for a class teacher. Lacking a promoted post and the sponsorship of their headteachers, they were in a much weaker political position than their colleagues on the SQH. They were also framing their activity in relation to a discourse that was largely at odds with that of their school leaders and managers (Fox et al., 2008; Reeves, 2007). Despite these factors, the majority of those on the CT programme did succeed in conducting collaborative enquiries in their schools, hence the question: What was it they learned that enabled them to successfully arm themselves for the fray? (Reeves & I’Anson, 2006). Intertextuality Before turning to the case study there is a methodological issue associated with the analysis that warrants further explanation. The argument has already been made that artefacts have a central role to play in the formation and maintenance of identities. In this regard, the accounts of aspiring chartered teachers about their classroom enquiries and the accompanying evidence that they supply at the end Modules 3 and 6 on the CT programme are something that they both make, and have, as adjuncts in the process of becoming CTs. So the initial question that needs to be answered is about the resources students use to compose these artefacts. This theme, of students making artefacts out of other materials, will be taken literally by deconstructing their compositions to examine both the elements they choose to put together and the rhetorical work that the selection and interrelations between these elements perform. In particular, the analysis will focus upon what it is that the authors borrow from others in their compositions and the effects they are able to accomplish by these ‘borrowings’. Chapter 5 was largely concerned with intertextuality at a discursive level, tracking the articulations of ideas as indicators of how students were making sense of the language of the Standard for Headship. This chapter looks at intertextuality from a slightly different angle. Bakhtin (1986) pointed out that the claim to ‘authorship’ with regard to composing text is illusory since one can only use a language that carries with it the meanings and usages of others. In this sense, any text is ‘rented’ and whilst authors can modify and fl x meanings, or cease to use certain words and phrases, they cannot invent new language. Thus, in producing text, we are in effect stitching together a number of ‘borrowings’ from other sources. This suggests that one way of gaining a better understanding of a text’s significanc is to de-construct it into the various pieces from which it is formed and to track the sources of these inclusions. In the case of the performances demanded of students on postgraduate courses, this is relatively straightforward since a central element of academic practice is the reference to, and citation of, disciplinary texts as proof of scholarship and learning (Lee et al., 2000). For students engaged in practice-based programmes the expectation is that there will be proof of both scholarship and professional action (Boud & Solomon,

138

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

2001). Professional action is frequently judged on the basis of evidence generated in the students’ workplaces so that reflect ve reports on professional projects will also be expected to contain reference to, and citation of, texts derived from the work setting. Borrowings from other sources are often used by authors as means of convincing their readers of the validity of claims they are making. Bakhtin observed that social languages, or the discourses used by particular groups, are embedded in hierarchies of power so that certain forms of textual usage are seen as more powerful and therefore more persuasive than others. On practice-based programmes, commentaries and reports are produced to convince assessors that the authors have acted in accordance with certain criteria, so they have a direct rhetorical function in relation to their intended audience. For the authors their use of language, of the right kind of discourse, is critical to how their audience will react. Rhetorically the work to be achieved in these accounts is the justificatio of the authors’ activities in schools. Students can attempt to do this by linking their actions to a set of ‘incontrovertible’ beliefs and values that prevail in their particular context of practice. Where such a text succeeds in being convincing it is also linked in our culture to truthfulness or ‘factuality’, and hence it serves as a form of knowledge (Potter, 1996). For instance, Latour’s (1987) studies of how disciplinary knowledge develops in the sciences have demonstrated how the activity of the scientifi community constructs which science is, or is not, accepted as fact. This is achieved through a circulation of reference where texts on ‘new’ science are deliberately linked to accepted texts to establish legitimacy and ‘truthfulness’ and, in their turn, if successful, become sources of reference for others. This process of reference is a cornerstone of practice in most academic disciplines. Viewed in these terms participants’ commentaries are acts of sense making, where they are attempting to both construct and establish ‘what is known’ as a result of their professional actions. Making convincing linkages to recognised sources of legitimation is central to this endeavour.

The Construction of Reflect ve Reports The focus of the case study section is on the relationship between the outcomes of educating as reported by the learners and the intertextual practices they employ in composing their accounts of action in the workplace. This time we are not comparing reflect ve commentaries over time as we did in Chapter 5 but simply examining a sample of texts produced by students on the CT programme at the end of their practice-based learning modules. The material used in this section was drawn from an analysis of the intertextual features of 10 reflect ve reports produced by teachers on the CT programme. It was supplemented by a set of interviews with nine of the authors about the nature of their experience. As a background to the analysis, it is worth reiterating the types of texts that are available to participants on the CT programme. As a nationally agreed prescription for the conduct of the role of chartered teacher, the Standard for Chartered Teacher

The Construction of Reflect ve Reports

139

(SE, 2002) is privileged as a core text that provides the raison d’etre for the course activity. The overall design of the programme, the criteria for assessment and the nature of the assignments the students undertake derive from this text. It maps the values, actions and abilities relevant to the status of chartered teacher. The reflect ve reports required participants to shape their accounts of action to f t this model of professionalism. The overall pattern for the programme is shown in Fig. 7.1 that maps the durational form of the CT programme at Stirling as a series of events taking place over 6 semesters. The programme consists of 6 modules each lasting one semester. The timescale for the programme is shown on the far right-hand side of the map and runs from top to bottom of the page. There are two main spaces that students occupy in this design: • one created in the university’s classrooms which is shown on the left-hand side of the diagram This is the cohort-learning space where they work with their tutor and each other. Within this space, the number of days of interaction are shown for each module. The centrally placed artefacts are the assignments which mark the completion of each module; • one created in their classrooms and staff rooms. This is shown on the right-hand side of the diagram where they interact with pupils and colleagues in carrying out short investigations in school as part of preparing for the activities on the taught days. The larger durations in this space represent the two practice-based enquiries that students undertake during the work-based modules. The smaller of the two in semester 3 is carried out in their own classrooms. The larger space in semesters 5 and 6 represents a collaborative classroom enquiry carried out with colleagues. The artefacts which control and co-ordinate activity for the taught modules – the module workbooks – are shown on the far left of the diagram. The SCT or Standard for Chartered Teacher is shown as a large rectangle feeding directly into the cohort-learning space at the top on the left as the key text for the system. To supplement the discussion that follows, Fig. 7.2 shows the linkages involved in the composing of the practice-based assignments. The part-time students move between attending the CPD programme and their workplaces. When they are in the cohort-learning space they access the various texts that are validated by the university as appropriate tools for the practice of being a postgraduate student and a chartered teacher. The literature made accessible to students is a mix of the theoretical and policy-based texts included in the study materials and reading lists relevant to the programme modules. The individual participant’s school community also provides sources and artefacts, both those generated in the course of the school-based projects, for example, opinions of pupils and colleagues, samples of pupils’ work, minutes of meetings, interview notes, records of observations and texts that are more generally available in schools, such as development plans, curricular policies, and text books. The students’ assignments, reflect ve reports and portfolios of supporting evidence draw on texts from both these sites. The primary audience for the assignments consists of tutors and fiel assessors – the latter visit participants’ schools as part of the assessment process. Many participants will also have their headteachers

140

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

Key to Figure 7.1 Activity sets: Tutors and participants acting together in the cohort-learning space; participants acting with pupils and colleagues in the school-learning space. Artefacts: Textual: Workbook, the Standard for Chartered Teacher; Assignments Spaces Cohort-Learning Space, School-Learning Space Modules There is one module for each semester. The taught modules: 1,2, and 4 occupy a series of days (D) in the cohort-learning space on the lefthand side of the f gure. The enquiry-based modules, 3, 5 and 6 open up large spaces in the school-learning space on the right-hand side of the figur – students attend network days and tutorials during these modules shown as spaces N and T on the left-hand side. Flows Of people and things from space to space are shown as artefactual (black) and people f ows (white) Fig. 7.1 Durational map of the spaces created by the performance of the CT programme system (student)

The Construction of Reflect ve Reports

141

Key to Figure 7.2: Spaces = white octagons Texts = shaded rectangles Movements: of people and things from space to space are shown as artefactual (black) and person fl ws (white) Fig. 7.2 Relational map showing access to resources for the composition of reflect ve report for modules 3 and 6 in the CT programme

and colleagues in mind as a secondary audience because these people will also expect to have feedback on the conduct and outcomes of the enquiries, particularly in the case of the collaborative projects. The examples that follow have been chosen to illustrate the ways in which participants on the course used text and are characteristic of the range of textual practices in the whole sample. They consist of either single extracts or a short series of extracts from reflect ve reports. All the borrowings taken from secondary texts are marked by the use of italics.

Using Sources External to the School Community Example 1 This passage is taken from a report on a collaborative enquiry aimed at exploring the potential of co-operative learning to improve attainment and skills development in a secondary school. In this passage, the author uses citation and paraphrasing to provide warrant for a number of claims about the effects of involving her colleagues in collaborative action: Ashton and Webb (1986) suggest that involvement in research is a challenge and gives us the ability to develop further. A successful intervention therefore confirm our professional success and teachers at all stages should be re-enthused through their participation. The

142

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

older member of staff identifie that they found this demanding and tiring but felt that professional relationships had improved. (portfolio item 48b) Teaching as a profession does not stand still and this enquiry reintroduced practitioners to educational theory and research which couldincrease their ability to deal with change by approaching it in a problem-solving capacity (Street and Temperley 2005). – I feel that unlike when Jolliffe (2007) reminds us of Slavin’s theory, that if someone from 100 years ago entered a classroom today the teaching techniques would not have changed beyond recognition, whereas now I believe that our classrooms are undergoing a transformation and modernisation that is exciting and helps pupils fulfi their full potential. (Sample 10 secondary Module 6)

The author is making a number of claims about the effects of her project on her colleagues. The reference to Ashton and Webb and a paraphrase of part of the content of this secondary text sets up the claim to have positively influence an older member of staff. The reference is tied directly to evidence in the portfolio which highlights, amongst other comments in handwritten script from the author’s learning journal, ‘the impact of the collaborative learning programme on teaching has been significan – new methods to some older hands!’ The theme of influencin practice is elaborated further in the second paragraph, first by being more specifi about the means of influenc and second, by making an overall claim for classroom impact drawing on two more secondary sources to provide a context of legitimation. In this passage, the text of the SCT acts as a ‘ghost’, something that shapes the passage, which serves as an answer to it, without the SCT being directly referred to. This example is typical of the sample as a whole in that the use of external secondary texts as resources for justifying and legitimating authors’ actions predominates in all the reports. Besides being used directly as warrants, these secondary external texts are built into themes that position the primary author as both a practitioner and a university student. The marriage of theory and practice, on this evidence, is arguably as much about building justificatio and legitimation for action as it is about any direct transfer of knowledge to classroom teaching.

Using Sources Internal to the School Community Example 2 This next example shows how texts generated by significan others from within the school community also get woven into the narrative. Here someone brings in a secondary text drawn from parents to demonstrate the worth of her intervention and underpin a claim to knowledge creation in accounting for the outcomes of her professional actions. One parent commenting on the use of the bones at home with his child stated, ‘they are beneficia in that the instructions are easy and straightforward enough for children to understand. They are fun, which is very important.’ Another parent wrote about her daughter, ‘she has more patience when stuck at a word if she uses her bones.’ All were definit that they felt the bones helped their child and that it had made a difference to their reading. One parent stated, ‘gives more structure rather than the parent trying to think of different ways to get their child to work out the word.’ Could this be the link to previous problems with

The Construction of Reflect ve Reports

143

reading? If parents are unsure what to do with reading homework perhaps they just avoid the situation rather than doing something they perceive is wrong! (. . .) By introducing and providing the ‘bone’ strategy, a ‘non-patronising and unobtrusive aid has been made available’, which hopefully has provided a scaffold for parents allowing them to support their child’s reading. I believe that this too has had bearing on the success of my intervention. (Sample 6, primary Module 3)

The parental quotations serve as ‘testimonials’. Their inclusion lends the author’s claims greater weight by providing evidence of support from key stakeholders in the education process. The author then frames these inclusions, through a reference to the literature (and one unreferenced inclusion), into a further justificatio for her actions as not only assisting children but supporting parental involvement in the education process, binding the whole into a thesis. Example 3 This example is taken from a collaborative project that involved seven teachers drawn across a range of subjects in a secondary school all of whom were looking at extending formative approaches to assessment in their classrooms. This passage consists of a collage of voices assembled by the author, which includes references to people’s written responses in her accompanying fil of evidence. Teachers had noted that peer-assessment is considered pre-requisite to self-assessment since it is thought to be easier to assess our own progress by f rst using the criteria to assess others (Black et al., 2003). The pupils in the Home Economics group seemed to agree because they displayed a strong preference for peer-assessment over self-assessment suggesting that others ‘are more honest’ and help you ‘pick out flaw that you wouldn’t have noticed’ (Portfolio 9e(iii)). Teachers D & G also noted how much on task pupil discussion took place during peer-assessment about peer judgements, compared to the usual casual chatter that takes place in practical lessons. The ensuing peer discussion in pupils’ own language was invaluable in clarifying success criteria and keeping pupils focussed on improving their work throughout the lesson (Portfolio 10a 2.2.05). (Sample 3 secondary, Module 6)

In this section of the report, the author is making claims to having effected change in pupils’ learning, mixing together evidence from both pupils and teachers to corroborate and amplify the message. The specificit of the labelling of these various insertions, for example, as Pupil A and Teacher G, adds to the sense that these people are real and traceable. They can be called upon as witnesses to the factuality of what is being asserted here. Again, the effect of this assemblage and the interrelationship that is established between the quotations helps to give the piece an air of authenticity and realism. This is a presentation of ‘facts’ about the outcomes of the project. Example 4 Our fina example demonstrates the use of material drawn from the primary author’s learning journal. Initially I organised the whole class talking and questioning sessions where the children sat in a circle taking turns to speak about a topic. Their peers could then ask questions. During

144

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

the f rst session I noted that the children were keen to talk but loathe to question others. I also noted that they had difficult asking questions involving more than a yes or no answer. After I modelled open-ended questions and directed the children to question words which were displayed on the wall their questioning was more successful. I circulated listening to pairs. Children enjoyed this more and were more active than when listening in a whole class situation. Hope this will be good practise for paired work and listening and questioning each other. (Learning Journal 29.8.03) . . .. (Sample 2, primary, Module 3)

The insertion shows an interesting difference in register, the immediacy and informality of the Learning Journal extracts contrasting with the more formal authorial voice adopted for the main body of the text. The recording of observations in itself lends plausibility to the storying of the intervention since the insertions of experience that are used to justify action are given additional legitimacy and weight by distancing them as part of another artefact legitimated by the discourse of reflect ve practice. The inclusion of textual sources derived from school activity provides a rather different context for justificatio (Tell, 2004) than that of external sources. It serves less as an appeal to authority than as evidence of authenticity and empirical veracity, an appeal that is more in line with the ‘practicality ethic’ displayed by teachers as a professional group. Potter identifie establishing ‘consensus and corroboration’ (1996:175) as one of the key stratagems for establishing factuality in narratives. There is also a moral theme inherent in these particular examples about making a positive difference to the lives of students and colleagues. Such moral claims can also provide teachers with further persuasive power in the micropolitical arena.

Rhetorical Devices and the Making of ‘War’ Machines In order to illustrate the relationship between literary and practical action, I want to juxtapose what students said about their experience of being on the Chartered Teacher programme with the rhetorical effects of their compositions. A study of teachers’ writing on an MA course (Stierer, 2000) raised doubts about whether this form of activity genuinely aided the development of teachers’ professional knowledge on the grounds that (a) such assignments are performances shaped for a specialist academic audience and (b) that, on interview, authors claimed that writing the submissions did not lead to any significan learning in relation to their practice. However, the study did not address the question of whether such writing represented newly acquired professional knowledge, i.e. the difference between writing as a tool for learning of itself, or, as a means of representing transformations that had occurred through other means. What this does raise however is the need to be cautious in making claims about exactly what accounts such as these do represent, since the authors are required to shape them to conform to the template of the assessment criteria. Balanced against this is the general tendency to ignore the significanc of many of the artefacts that people make and use in relation to their own self-perception and effica y and perhaps a certain snobbery about whose assemblages count as valid forms of knowledge and whose do not (Eraut, 1994:56).

Rhetorical Devices and the Making of ‘War’ Machines

145

Re-contextualising and Creating Knowledge Processes It is very common for people to describe their experience of education in terms of movement (Edwards et al., 2004), and this group of students was no exception. Nevertheless it was worthwhile to attend to exactly what it was they were saying. For instance, in the following quotation a student talked about her experience of reading in relation to three different settings: • an individual study activity (likely to have been carried out at home), • the discussion of texts in the cohort-learning space; and • the importation of ideas into her own classroom. She was, thus, within a single short extract, condensing a number of both bodily and informational movements from space to space in addition to describing ways in which information was re-contextualised as knowledge in action: It’s a lot of doing reading and things to begin with and then taking what I’ve read and using that within the classroom and also listening to other people and being within this group situation where there is everybody who is in the same situation as I am and, where we’re all kind of on the same level, so you’re working together as equals so you feel that you can be a bit more, kind of critical of each other, if you like, and then taking that on when you go back to school. (Person F)

The second part of this extract attests to learning new behaviours that directly pertain to processing information in the cohort-learning space, in this instance as the capacity to challenge others’ opinions, which was subsequently imported into school. In similar terms, a second person highlights the movement of ideas, material as written text and utterances with herself, as actant, in linking actions across different spaces: The best thing for me I think has been sharing my practice with other people to have an opportunity to discuss with others things we’re doing and things that they’re doing, sharing, and taking that back to school with me. (Person H)

There is an interesting dualism in the firs quotation, which was repeated by several respondents, about the importance of sameness, as a description of their colleagues in the cohort. Cohort members were represented as pursuing the same goal as the respondent, and hence, characterised as a group of like-minded people whilst at the same time the person cites the importance of difference in the same group as contributing to her knowledge. This latter effect arose because in coming from different school contexts, everyone in the cohort had different experiences. The juxtaposition of sameness and difference was seen as an important contributor to developing knowledge and understanding and also a ‘voice’: . . . . the WebCT thing. I’ve been exposed to very different types of writing and seeing other people’s perspective on those, kind of helped me change from quite a linear kind of mode to being more latitudinal in the way I think. It’s quite hard to describe the path. I seem to fin that I’m thinking [in] slightly different ways in my class than maybe I was in the past. (Person A)

146

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

. . . . the biggest thing for me was I took a long, hard look at what I’m doing. Why I’m doing it. I’m findin things ‘well I’ve always done that’ – I don’t know why I was doing it and now I’ve read such and such and understand the background to it now. I don’t know why I did it but I can explain to people now why I’m doing things I couldn’t do before. (Person C) You got to know lots of people and you worked with lots of different people and it just made you have a little more confidenc in your own views and an opinion on what you were reading and how you carried it forward . . . (Person G)

Experimenting with changes in practice in their own classrooms also gave the students a content to voice that was regarded by their colleagues as of legitimate professional interest: I think feeding back to other staff, they told me they had found it interesting and it actually made other people as well think about their practice, so I suppose you’ve got a knock on effect even within your own small teaching community if you like. (Person D)

Whilst these teachers were not talking about the assignments their responses do provide a possible bridge between what happened on the course, how this was recounted and the personal and professional significanc of these experiences. Returning to the exploration of the construction of the reflect ve reports, the analysis provides illustrations of three major rhetorical benefit resulting from mobilising and mixing texts from different sources which mirror some of the observations the teachers made about the process and, as cited in the next section, the outcomes of their learning.

Displaying Expertise The analysis of the scripts showed that borrowings from external sources were often inserted to provide legitimation for actions and reflections Students used two sources of authority for purposes of justification theoretical texts derived from the academic discipline of education and texts derived from the systemic and organisational structures that govern schooling. The knowledge evidenced in the use of these texts is that of knower of ‘knowledge’. The student assembles a convincing mix of arguments from authority to enable her to wield greater persuasive power with her audience. As a direct outcome of the experience of professional development, participants were able to draw on authoritative texts that backed their opinions because they had searched out the references either as part of their thinking during the implementation of their enquiries and/or in preparing their reports. In interviews, our sample of participants pointed to an increase in expertise as a major benefi of the course experience: You just have the confidenc to say I have read ‘x’ and I do know ‘y’ – it gives you the confidenc to say, ‘I do know’ and you become an expert in a particular f eld which gives you a voice. People do respect what you say and do appreciate what you’ve been involved in. (Person B)

What is noticeable about this benefi is that it is relational. B is making the claim that the course has altered the way in which she interacts with her colleagues. It

Rhetorical Devices and the Making of ‘War’ Machines

147

has provided her with the means of acting differently. Knowledge of theory can, in this particular instance, invest a student with power to alter the relational parameters within which she practises (Gergen, 1989)

‘Proven’ Experience The inclusion of extracts from texts derived from the author’s school setting is used to supply authenticity, plausibility and pragmatic force to the student’s claims. The evidence in the appendices to the reports can be used textually to implicate others in the students’ stories and to reflec a ‘real’ engagement in the context of practice. These extracts people the text with others who can be cited as possible witnesses or advocates for the truth of the author’s assertions. Amongst this category of texts, the students’ learning journals are a means by which they can reify their own perceptions, turn them into an acceptable source and select from them items to illustrate their experience – a distancing of self from self. This group of texts provide proof of proper action, but again, whilst they are derived from experience, they are selected and storied by the primary author. Added to the appeal to external texts, these insertions provide further ‘ammunition’ in any argument about the pragmatics and practicability of proposals for change. The participant can claim an ‘expertise’ which is not simply gleaned from literature but derived from real action in a real school setting. so what you could argue that comes from the course is the sense that it catalyses you to try these things in your classroom, from those things you gain a better understanding of the students. – I have a wider perception of the possibilities that I can employ in the classroom. (Person A)

Again, the comment by A points to relational changes between him and his students, which have opened up the possibility of a different way of acting in the classroom.

Shaped Experience Beyond a consideration of the details of composition, the reports need to be considered holistically. Through undertaking these pieces of writing, participants have had to shape stories of their own actions and the reasoning that led to their decisions. They have had the space to stand back from what they have done and marshal their evidence and arguments in order to present a consistent and coherent account of themselves and their practice. Coherence and consistency are used by others as measures of plausibility (Tell, 2004) and therefore serve as another possible source of social power that may be used to further the author’s agency as well as being important intrapersonally: I think it gives you confidence your body language changes – you feel more inclined to go to the management or someone else and say, ‘I would like to try this and these are the

148

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

reasons why. – I’ve got the confidenc to speak in front of people now – I can explain myself – I have the words, I have the knowledge. (Person C) It’s given me confidenc to initiate things more. After coming back after maternity leave and losing confidence I kind of dropped out. This has helped me because it’s made me feel I’m up to speed with things again and maybe even ahead of the game in some areas. (Person E)

Both these interview responses indicate that the significanc of their learning for these participants is that it has altered their relationships both with themselves and with others. They are not pointing simply to traditional notions of conceptual gains, although these do figur in developing expertise in relation to particular contents. In summary, the kind of professional knowledge that the assignments give witness to appears, by the students’ accounts, to have a close relationship to their sense of agency. What was at stake for these teachers was the capacity to alter and shape what went on in their world. In these terms, power was not some mysterious entity but the capacity to bring resources to bear on projects that mattered to them. Through its pedagogic devices, the programme provided a mandate and a place for students to think of themselves as having the capacity to act both as course members and as practitioners in their schools. The educating activity of the CT programme backed them to take on the role of agent in their own learning. Interestingly, given Bernstein’s emphasis on the effects of framing (1996), those who were interviewed related their new knowledge to bringing about what they regarded as notable alterations in their relationships with others in the workplace – pupils, colleagues and managers. The most significan outcome of these altered relationships was that many felt better equipped to create space in their professional lives to be allowed to practice differently. A note of caution has to be sounded here, because for a number of these teachers the capacity to exercise a wider professional agency, particularly in relation to working with colleagues beyond the confine of their own classrooms, both came and went with their engagement on the programme. The power, or capability, that allowed them to practice differently depended on the connections with the programme, or rather, remained situated within the spaces of its performance, providing support for Lave’s (1988) assertion of the essential linkage between competence as knowledge in action and the context in which it is performed. One of the experiences that most surprised us was the level of resistance that people met with in trying to instigate and implement collaborative professional enquiries. The individual action enquiries undertaken for Module 3 were overwhelmingly construed as positive which, upon reflection made sense. These projects re-instated the participating teachers’ agency as autonomous professionals within their own classrooms. This was a reversion to a ‘traditional’ framing of practice, which was experienced by participants as a renewal and re-aff rmation of their professional values. Despite all the talk in the literature about collaborative culture and shared and distributed leadership (Harris & Lambert, 2003; Gronn, 2003), the proposal of collaborative action to tackle problems in pupil learning, instigated and led by class teachers, generally violated hierarchical norms – an effect that mirrored

Rhetorical Devices and the Making of ‘War’ Machines

149

the restrictions of agency that Law and others have observed in other organisational contexts (1994:123; Boreham et al., 2000). It ran counter to the normal structuration of activity in most schools and local authorities. Nevertheless, participants still managed to accomplish collaborative enquiries, although some were on a relatively restricted scale. Out of this collective experience, the political dimensions and the discursive contestation that the conception of chartered teacher signifie made all of us involved in the programme much more aware that this particular form of professional development was about more than individual change. It was also about engaging in a politics of teacher activism embedded in the underlying ‘intents’ of the SCT. It was out of this perception that the metaphor of arming oneself, or building a ‘war’ machine, for engaging with the political dimensions of change emerged.

The Power to Influenc Others Theorisation Knowledge that enables someone to mobilise others is critical to changing practice, but it is frequently ignored in the popular literature on change. The commonsense view is that professional knowledge that is relevant for teachers is directly applicable to classroom practice as new ideas and skills for teaching (Hargreaves, 1999) and that enacting these has no appreciable political dimension. Even where professional development is supposed to lead to transformational change, the rhetorical aspects of practice are still largely left out of account. Rather than regarding professional learning simply as a matter of knowledge transfer it also had to be framed, on the basis of the students’ feedback, as allowing people to rehearse ‘theorizing’. This rhetorical activity is essential, according to researchers, on the part of those wishing to bring about change in organisational settings if they are to achieve the co-operation of others and neutralise the power of those who oppose them. In this sense, the students’ reports were spaces for the formulation of arguments and justification in favour of the adoption of particular approaches to teaching. Theorisation draws attention to the need to consider what kind of knowledge is embedded in the political skills and abilities of a professional and the justification she uses to persuade others of a course of action (Tsoukas, 2005; Greenwood et al., 2001; Tripp, 1993). What many participants also gained from the conduct of the programme was the capacity to argue, defend and clarify their own opinions and the habits of examining and questioning educational ideas and proposals. The practice of the course and people’s awareness of moving between spaces increased refl xivity and created stimuli for enquiry. Difference within the cohort not only added to the range of experiential resources available for analysis but also provided the chance to sample different responses to the same sources. As one of the interviewees pointed out, it made her realise that her reactions to a particular set of ideas were not the

150

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

same as those of others. Strongly linked to this was the importance that the teachers gave to gaining a command over ‘the language’, something that was echoed in the earlier study of aspiring headteachers. The programme gave participants access to discursive resources from which they could begin to compose, in conjunction with colleagues in their schools, new formulations, new ways of construing their professional world and the means of arguing and negotiating the enaction of new practices. Work Process Knowledge The overview of work processes and policy issues proved to be another form of knowledge that was important to success because it provided a basis for developing a shared language and understanding with which to negotiate with school managers and others acting as gatekeepers to organisational resources (Boreham, 2004). The collaborative pedagogy, in tapping into the cohort as a resource, helped to maximise learning across the group about the operation of schools and schooling. This challenged people’s assumptions about how things are organised in schools and authorities. Mutual exchange allowed people to explore knowledge about work processes because the difference between their experiences opened up questions of how things were managed in different establishments. This meant students had access to a range of case studies mediated by experts who could try and answer many of the questions that often cannot be answered when interrogating written texts or ‘visiting’ experts. A pool of knowledge that was extended through people’s participation in negotiation and dissemination within their schools as part of engaging in collaborative enquiry and again, sharing and reflectin on this set of experiences in the cohort-learning space during network meetings. Affiliatio Another necessary resource for change is personal energy and commitment. The course mobilised motivational support for students through the cohort structure by allying them with their fellow participants whom they came to construe as people ‘like me’, sharing similar attitudes and concerns. Within the cohort group they built an alignment with each other, a sense of fellow feeling and a new network of personal and professional support outside the context of their work setting. Participants frequently referred to the importance of contacting each other over the phone to compare notes and seek advice. Some claimed that without the support of their group they would have found it impossible to complete the course. Whilst this aspect of the cohort’s functioning was largely affective it had clear material consequences in that it built a capacity across the group to maintain individual and collective motivation. It is interesting to ask what knowledge such as ‘I have the support of x - - -’ or ‘I am like x’ has on people’s conduct of affairs. How is such affiliat ve knowledge expressed and used by people as part of learning and how does it set them apart from who they were? Clearly, it was perceived by a number of these teachers in their interview responses as an ‘inner’ resource that promoted confidenc and served as

Conclusion

151

a basis for taking greater risks. However, such courage was also based on a situated knowledge so that the loss of the cohort-learning space at the end of the programme meant for some the loss of this capability and, for nearly all the participants, some diminution in their capacity for agency. The conditions for interaction that were imposed by the tutors on the teachers as students created spaces for them to have a greater measure of voice and agency. In the cohort-learning space, their professional lives were validated, in that their experience was welcomed, their reflection and opinions were heard and used as part of the knowledge creation process within the activity set and beyond. In enabling these experiences, the course provided a form of life both as a student and as a practitioner that helped to build greater confidenc and encourage active engagement. This practice provided a space that was supportive and relatively open, where content and activities were negotiated with participants and, within the constraints of having a direct application to issues of learning and teaching, where they chose to undertake projects that centred on issues that they wanted to look at. Finally, the students gained symbolic power through their association and cooption ‘within’ the programme that both subjected them to power at the same time as it enabled them to exercise it. The programme activity, as relay for those institutions that supported it (University, GTCS, Scottish Government, EU commission etc.) served to mobilise the students, who in their turn mobilised their pupils and colleagues to undertake forms of work in schools. This relay was connected to valuable practical/symbolic outcomes for the students in terms of both financia benefit and status. Again, when the connection with the university ceased, this status did not necessarily carry quite the same weight and influence Thus, an answer to the original enquiry about what resources the hybrid programmes contributed to teachers’ capacity for agency and autonomy was that what they gained was knowledge. This was not simply knowledge about professional action but also knowledge of professional action, and, through the refl xivity of the system, knowledge about each others’ knowledges about, and of, professional action. They were taking part in making a discourse and shaping a vision of what being a chartered teacher might be. They were also creating knowledge about learning, schools and classrooms and change processes. What we have been looking at, across the spaces produced by the two hybrid programmes, was the constant re-contextualisation and translation of knowledge in the form of politicoconceptual-affective-material activity or, in other words, forms of work on the part of the various actants involved.

Conclusion In some ways, the accounts that students composed had a Janus-like quality because they faced two ways. They faced the university-based audience for whom they had the function of authorising their authors’ professional competence. As authors the

152

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

students needed to encode their professional conduct in a disciplinary genre and dialect that would achieve legitimacy in this setting and so gain public recognition in the form of academic credit. In facing towards their schools similar language practices could help to shift their authors into a cannot-be-dismissed-easily category. The activity of warranting claims to knowledge, investing them with authenticity and shaping them into coherent accounts equates directly with ‘theorisation’ (Greenwood et al., 2002). By importing, through the access to other spaces, elements of the ‘latest’ policy and theory and an understanding of how different schools operate participants had the means to become more influential The would-be chartered teachers were part of a network of spaces of practice involved in the invention of a role. They needed to become ‘strange’ in, and therefore partially estranged from, their habitual environment. As chartered teachers, they needed to be linked institutionally and discursively into a different point within the framing of teacherliness that operated in their locality. In so doing, many of them moved to ambiguous, less well-define identities that oscillated between past, present and future states of being. Through the medium of the cohort, the participants on the CT programme made affiliation to being a different type of person. In forming this set of relations, they were obliging themselves, their pupils and their colleagues to relate differently than had been the case in the past. The process of re-shaping required a breaking of some relations, the making of new relations and a re-bundling of others (Reeves et al., 2005). For a significan majority, the process of making these new relations to things and people was simultaneously cognitive, affective and material in time and space. The process of participation was about becoming different and assembling the reflec tive reports and portfolios both instantiated, and was part of, this making and becoming. In many ways there is a tension here between focusing on what the course system provided and what it enabled, i.e. whether you look at the performance of the programme as creating a forum for transmission or as opening up space for the co-production of knowledge. The operational logic of the hybrid is to favour the latter because the design requires a mingling of actants space-to-space across the system that it performs. In this sense, the students and the schools were as much ‘providers’ of the resources for learning as the educators were. The programme also created a common problematic for participants, in instituting and sustaining collaborative enquiries, which provided another focus for working together. However, such considerations do not override the fact that the basis of the agency that was enabled and relayed here originated as part of an essentially transmissive network of systems.

Summary Part II By providing a different way of looking at activity, mapping helps to open up a series of substantive issues. It shows how particular educating systems served as hubs, or centres for the relay of power, locations for generating a range of transitions and

Summary Part II

153

transformations. This is unsurprising, since the purpose of educating is to change people the generation of such disturbances is to be expected. In exposing elements of the functioning of an invading discourse at a couple of these local hubs, Part II has revealed the complex bundling, un-bundling and re-bundling of relations and resources that took place at these locales. These changing relations took form in the labour of enaction on the part of the various actants performing the educating activity. The analysis also indicates the importance of the effects of sameness and difference – how sameness, as solidarity (the cohort) created through the inclusion of individuals in a shared identity, served to focus projection and desire, providing motive as a form of power that fuelled new enactions and connections within the local field In this it showed where agency, as a pro-active intentionality reaching towards a desired end, generated power as an affective-cum-conceptual energy expressed in action. As a counter to this, the three accounts also indicate that the interference of difference in creating uncertainty also powered action at the affective-conceptual level in a reactive intentionality to avoid being excluded as ‘improper’. A relational analysis helps to surface important issues about positioning in the representation of networked systems and therefore some fundamental questions about the degree of conflatio that we are often content with in representing activity. The three different chapters present a ‘kaleidoscopic’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) picture of activity, and they intimate that ‘views’ are deeply contextualised and cannot be conflate one with another even where they relate to the ‘same’ events. These are not simply different viewpoints of the same thing; they are different embodiments and they are not reducible the one to the other. Post hoc there could obviously be an agreed account made by a collective, but this would be yet another bundling for yet another purpose in yet another space time. Surfacing the performances of activity in this way helps to intimate what and who is being left out of account. It provides a further means for critical examination of educative processes. Certainly the cases examined here are examples where changes in the relations between learners and educators opened up the possibility of developing new forms of professional learning – forms of educating activity that privilege knowledge creation by developing conditions where there is greater parity and mutuality of engagement between university and school staff. This is a change in orientation that is arguably particularly apt in professional development where established practitioners bring a wealth of practical knowledge and experience to the educative process. Professional learning is revealed as a complex series of enactions occurring in a knotting of the multiplicity of views and experiences that is generated by, and in its turn generates, various makings and productions in the form of identities, texts, procedures and spaces. The politics of learning are also foregrounded. The cases in Part II, like the Craigton case in Chapter 3, demonstrate how various parties attempted to remove the ambiguities of interference through citation, debate, argument, experimentation, disguise and black-boxing (removing from view as a means of living with

154

7 Constructing Knowledge and Agency

contradiction). A relational analysis indicates some of the limitations that are placed upon individual and collective autonomy in these matters. New practice within established systems is inherently fragile and often, rather than being a purely local invention, new educating systems succeed, if at all, because they are relays of a discourse that is already spreading, creating new networks and gathering power and resource, across a wider range of the field

Part III

Tracking Knowledge Creation and Exchange

Chapter 8

Knowledge Creation: The Reflex vity of Hybrid Systems

Introduction At the end of Part II, it was clear that the translation and creation of knowledge was a key element in the learning of practitioners. Tracking what was happening in the learning spaces produced by the SQH and the CT programmes showed that the transposition of knowledge through constant acts of re-contextualisation was a recurring feature of these systems. It was a process that accompanied the movement and interaction of people and things from space to space. In order to explore these issues a little further, this chapter examines how knowledge was exchanged, moved and transformed over a period of 5 years in the system created by the performance of the Chartered Teacher programme at Stirling. The chapter begins by looking at the relationship between knowledge and activity and processes of refl xivity and reflectio as part of educational design and technology. This provides a background for contextualising the case study, which focuses on the activities of the tutor team who teach on the CT programme. Rather than concentrating on action within the learning spaces created by the activities of students, as we did in Part II, here the description encompasses the spaces created by the various activities that members of the tutor team were engaged in. In particular it explores how this tutor sub-system was implicated in the production of knowledge that travelled into the wider disciplinary circulation in the form of a text for teacher education. The fina section considers the implications of the investigation for our understanding of hybridity and the effect of the ‘invasion’ of developmental educating strategies into a context of higher education.

Knowledge and Activity Writing about organisational epistemology Tsoukas, somewhat surprisingly given the title of his work, define knowledge as ‘the individual1 capability to draw 1

My underlining.

J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3_8, 

157

158

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

distinctions, within a domain of action, based on an appreciation of context or theory, or both’ (2005:119). He therefore makes the link between knowledge and activity central to his definitio and embodies it in persons. For theorists in the socio-cultural tradition, knowledge is a practical accomplishment, a quality manifest in activity. If one accepts this definitio of knowledge as a capability in action, it follows that it may take a variety of forms. It may for instance be technical, as in knowing how to carry out particular procedures or it may be communicative or political in persuading others either to adopt, or to allow an actor who displays such knowledge to adopt, a particular course of action. Whatever form it takes knowledge in action is conceived as the basis for agency. It is performed. It is a capacity to do things in the world. However, whilst knowledge may be define as a capability exercised by individuals, it relies upon a collective accomplishment since the capacity to make distinctions largely depends on language. Thus knowledge draws upon information inscribed as memory, written text, or embedded in other tools and devices. In these various forms, information that is applicable in practice acquires both longevity and mobility. It can be stored and transported allowing knowledge to be exercised by somebody (or bodies) who may be far distant in time and space from the original source of the information. It is the extent and ubiquity of the pre-existing matrix of encoded information that ensures that knowledge is inseparable from the use of artefacts. Thus Tsoukas’ definition in focusing on the individual as agent, omits to make it clear that knowledge does not accrue to an individual as such but to an individual plus artefact(s), i.e. to an actant. Whilst there may be a temptation to place tools in the contextual category, given his framing, this would be a mistake. The link between person/tool and capability in most activities is essential and therefore the artefactual element that allows someone to display knowledge should not be treated as a contingent factor. Inscription is thus an antidote to a purely individualistic account of knowledge, since it makes it part of discursive practice. Whilst discourses are normative frameworks for making sense of practice that are preserved and maintained through reflectio on, and accounting for, action, they are not fi ed. The particular articulations of norms and values to which they give expression are subject to change and adaptation because judging when and how they are applicable and/or effective is open to argument. Their ‘existence’ depends upon continuing performance. For instance, in deciding on the nature of a fault in an engine, mechanics may use a set of symptoms including sound, smell, measurements of gas fl w and emissions, etc. to decide on the nature of the problem. The diagnostic procedure they use may be routine but, for each faulty engine, it has to be re-done and re-argued. Thus knowledge is performed in practice as an essential element of activity whilst at the same time each performance potentially tests, re-enforces, adapts or rejects such knowledge as worthwhile or worthless. As knowledge can also be used as a warrant for agency in processes of argumentation and justificatio (Hoyle & John, 1995; Weick, 1995), this provides further opportunities for the entry of variations and changes in practice. As already noted, a key characteristic of knowledge, as inscripted information, is its mobility. It is dynamic in two senses since it changes over time as well as

Knowledge and Activity

159

having the capacity to travel from location to location. For example, individuals and groups gain in effica y as they learn to carry out a particular activity. In many organisations, this knowledge, identifie as the most useful and effective practice, is supposedly encoded in remits, policies, tools and procedures (March, 1999). Through processes of both formal and informal education and training, the use of these conceptual and material artefacts is transposed from one person to another and from one site to another. The reproducibility and transportability of knowledge may be described as the degree to which information is either embedded or disembedded in spatio-temporal terms (Giddens, 1991; Lash & Urry 1994; Monge & Contractor, 2003). This quality, however, is in direct conflic with evidence from another quarter. Lave (1988), for instance, has argued strongly that knowledge is situational and tightly bound to the collective context in which it is displayed, i.e. she challenges the conception of knowledge as both mobile and as an individual accomplishment seeing it rather as a capability exercised in collectives. This is a version of the Aristotelian division between technical knowledge that could be written down and practical knowledge that resided in practice and could not be dis-embedded from it (Flyvbjerg, 2001). In support of this view, much has been written in the fiel of education and training about the knowledge transfer problem, where the application of knowledge, as capability in an academic setting, to appropriate action in a work setting fails to materialise (Beach, 2003). Because much practitioner learning, particularly in the professions and established trades, assumes the transposition of knowledge across different sites of activity, it is often seen as particularly prone to this problem. The traditional assumption underpinning schooling that once knowledge is inscribed in a student’s memory she then ‘has it’ and can ‘use it’ can be conceived as the origin of the difficult but that, of course, overrides other problems that schooling was intended to resolve. Studies of development projects in Africa and elsewhere have shown that the mobility of knowledge is severely restricted when the range of material networked connections that support its use, frequently unnoticed, do not extend to a particular locality. Under these conditions re-embedding and re-contextualising information as knowledge are not viable options (De Laet, 2000). Nevertheless, within Western contexts, an extreme situationist position is hard to defend given that change is difficul to account for on such a basis and that it is counterposed by the weight of evidence that knowledge, as information in text, tools and procedures is both contagious and transformative. The linkage here lies in the postulation of processes of dis-embedding and re-embedding, or transformation, transposition and re-contextualisation, in other words, the observation that knowledge has to be re-made in situ through an active process of re-interpreting information to make sense of its use in a given context of practice. As I have already argued, this process requires a measure of collective acquiescence and collaboration. In this sense, it may be asserted that knowledge as capability is necessarily created in context by practitioners, making an element of situational learning, as both a collective and an individual matter, essential in the movement and acquisition of knowledge. This insight applies to all knowledge, since even the display of academic or propositional knowledge requires particular types of performances that are subject to judgement on the basis of particular sets

160

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

of norms and values (Latour, 1999). In addition, as Eraut (1994) points out much of what started out as practical knowledge has travelled back into academe so that the f ow of knowledge has never been as unidirectional as some members of the research community would like to make it appear. Either way, in testing the parameters of both situatedness and mobility, it makes sense to explore knowledge use and creation as a relational issue within and across different social spaces. However, moving away from the commonsense treatment of knowledge, as something contained in some abstract form in separate minds, towards a more materially and collectively define conception is difficult given the conventions of everyday language (Edwards, 2005). The problem of whether and how to distinguish between knowledge as action and as encoded information leads to a choice between being forced to use a rather convoluted form of expression in order to distinguish between the two or of masking important ambiguities by reverting to normal practice and treating knowledge as an abstract ‘thing’ that is separable from action. One solution is to bridge the distinction by typifying knowledge as a circulating form of reference. Whatever may be inscribed in a particular text has no influenc or effect in the world unless the information is used in activity. On these grounds, knowledge may be equated with information that has the capacity to engender action, and, as long as it is referred to in practice, it retains the status of knowledge. The word status is important since knowledge is not simply about knowing how to do something but also about whether or not that particular ‘doing’ is seen by others as proper and legitimate conduct. If not it will be denigrated. For instance, a great deal of information that counted as knowledge, and was used as a basis for action in the past, would now be discounted as either superstitious or erroneous. Activity systems, networked as a particular field determine in performance what counts as legitimate practice and what does not. In purely functional terms, it is important to ‘remember’, through re-performance, information that is judged to be useful and to ‘forget’ that which is not. Thus the ‘new’ or ‘innovatory’ is subject to testing that is often only waived in conditions of crisis or where a new fiel of practice opens up.

Reflexivit and Reflectio Refl xivity according to Edwards (1997:100) ‘is the property of talk whereby it constructs or otherwise contributes to the sense of its own occasions and contexts’ in that, in any sequence of interactions, talk is shaped by, and at the same time shapes, its own ‘proper’ conduct. This is achieved by speakers, who, as they interact, both attend to how they should do this, and negotiate how it should be done, through the sequence and content of their interaction. This form of refl xivity applies to all our activities. In any given setting we are expected to ensure that we act in an appropriate manner, and, in turn, we expect, and seek to ensure, that others do so as well. In this sense, there is an inherent pedagogical aspect to refl xivity which educating systems seek to amplify and exploit.

Knowledge and Activity

161

Giddens (1991) and others have claimed that the accelerating pace of change that characterises late modernity is the outcome of intensifie refl xivity brought about by the mobility and availability of knowledge and its direct and rapid application to practice. Since what constitutes appropriate practice is increasingly based on an appeal to knowledge rather than to ‘irrational’ values and beliefs, knowledge now acts upon knowledge. Consequently social practice, from a sociologist’s point of view, has a nasty habit of changing in the light of the knowledge that the human sciences feed back into the system. This speed of processing is made possible by technological changes that have immeasurably increased people’s capacity to access and use information. The concomitant explosion in the number and nature of expert systems that encourage them to do so serves to further accelerate the process. In that respect, the phenomena of hybridisation, boundary crossing and interference that are, to a large extent, the subject of this book have become an increasingly common feature of our lives. Set within these claims about the wider context of social practice, hybrid pedagogies, by creating new spaces of interference between activity sets, increase refl xivity by provoking questions about practice as people try to account for differences between contexts and seek for a reconciliation between the discourses embodied in them. In so doing, the pedagogies we have considered have served to create sites for the transposition and creation of knowledge by students at the intersection between university-based and work-based activities. However, there is still some way to go in investigating these processes in detail (Eraut, 2004). Before proceeding to do so, it is worth briefl revisiting a process that I have largely neglected so far, which is that of reflection The evidence advanced in Part II does allow for some revision of this concept and the place it holds in the learning process. The proposition has already been advanced that reflection as a matter of re-vision, or looking again at practice, does not stand alone but rather links with projection and enaction. In so doing reflectio occupies a relatively natural place in everyday practice where clear separations between feedback and feedforward are not generally part of our consciousness in the course of action. In the post-world war period reflection projection and enaction became increasingly reifie as part of the discourse of developmentalism. Accordingly, in describing experiential learning, Kolb (1984) posits these ‘processes’ as having a staged relationship, with reflectio being one of a succession in an ongoing cycle of learning. In this he is referring to an invention that underpins both andragogy and organisational learning as a pedagogic strategy. However, what I think our data are pointing to is that the conception of separation into stages is misleading. It is interesting to attend to how reflectio as part of learning is represented, especially in Schon’s The Reflectiv Practitioner (1983) which is often used as a foundational text. In this book, reflectio is not an introspective process, which is the way that it is often treated in educational settings, but rather a product of conversations and interactions. Every example that Schon uses shows reflectio occurring as a performance between actants, as a form of collective action. Yet this has been translated into an abstracted and internalised process disembedded from the social contexts of its occurrence, which may perhaps explain why those concerned with professional

162

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

development so often complain of the ‘lack of reflection shown by practitioners. They have possibly overlooked the centrality of its situational grounding. Teachers have been exhorted to be reflect ve without regard to the artefactual elements of the process or, as with Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, it has been assumed that distributing an artefact alone, stripped of any community of actants, is a sufficien basis for embedding practices of ‘self-evaluation’. Whatever the details of the conception, reflectio has now become, as shown in Chapter 6, a concrete and separate performance, technicised as the production of accounts belonging to a recognisable genre that is an essential element in both the rhetoric and the performance of educating in an increasing number of contexts. The exemplars we have considered so far suggest that there are two competences that are valued as reflectio on the educative programmes we have been examining. One takes the form of an interrogation of personal experience which centres on the question, ‘How could I do x better?’ This is based upon the assumption that a practitioner forms judgements on her own experiences in action, within the terms of a discourse of proper professional practice, as an agentive and autonomous self. In this, there is an often strong moral element associated with a project of selfimprovement or self-actualisation. The second competence does not implicate the self in the same way. It is often termed ‘critical reflection by which is frequently meant is the capacity to subject ‘ideas’, usually inscribed in what is either read or heard, to examination and analysis and make judgements upon their worth and their relations not simply in technical terms but also on the basis of ethical, political and social values. Here the assumption is that the reflecto stands aside from the action and comments upon it as a disinterested observer with an emphasis on analytical thinking and the capacity to manipulate knowledge. In hybrid systems, these two competences interbreed in a third version where reflectio on experience and critical reflectio are refl xively related and located back in the self. Potentially this has the capacity to jolt questioning from what Argyris & Schon (1974) called single to double loop learning because practice is subjected to the interrogation of knowledge drawn from outwith its context, and, vice versa, knowledge drawn from outwith the context of practice is subject to the interrogation of practice. The other missing element is of course power. Once you begin to look at reflec tion as a concrete activity rather than as a mental abstraction, its relationship to accountability in social space becomes apparent; it becomes part of the social shaping of activity, which brings us back to refl xivity because it is the public enforcement of these legitimised and elaborated forms of ‘reflection that also serves to fuel the refl xivity of systems.

Knowledge Creation and the CT Programme A longitudinal case study is used to explore the relationship between the two formulations of knowledge outlined in the introduction. In so doing a contrast is made, for analytical purposes, between forms of knowledge on the basis of their relative

Knowledge Creation and the CT Programme

163

mobility/immobility with K1 representing knowledge in mobile form as text and K2 representing knowledge as a capacity to act. Underpinning this decision is the assumption that tracking these forms of knowledge may serve as a means of detecting changes in competence, or knowledge in action, within the system. The questions that this exercise seeks to answer are as follows: First, is there a relationship between K1 (the mobile) and K2 (the situated) forms of knowledge in the system under examination? Second, if there is a relationship between the two then how does it operate; for example, how is K1 connected or transformed into K2 and how is K2 connected or transformed into K1? and Third, what does tracking transformations within such a system tell us about developing competence (K2) and professional learning? The activity that was the focus of the study was achieving qualificatio as a Chartered Teacher (CT) by successfully completing the MEd Professional Enquiry in Education Programme at the Stirling Institute of Education. The object of the activity, enabling teachers to gain CT status, therefore, served to delineate the system performed by the CT programme at Stirling. All the events that were examined were connected with carrying out and making sense of this activity. The processes of knowledge exchange and creation were investigated by focusing on the role of the CT programme’s tutor team, so the study was only concerned with those events in which team members were involved. The reasons for adopting this approach were twofold – first because it was the job of team members, as academics, to exchange and create knowledge and second, because they were a group of practitioners for whom it was possible to access a relatively complete longitudinal data set with regard to events. In conducting the analysis, it was assumed that the creation and use of knowledge within this system could be identifie in the form of its textual representation, i.e. knowledge was tracked in K1 form. On this basis, the creation of knowledge was identifiabl by detecting when and where new distinctions were made within the domain of action/activity and showing how and where these distinctions were subsequently represented in texts used by the team and others in ongoing practice. Obviously, by confinin the investigation to the materiality of written texts rather than oral/observational data (except in so far as contemporaneous records were made), a certain bias towards explicit, mobile forms of knowledge was built into the study. In defence of this strategy, in exploring competence as a collective issue for a team of people most significan changes in practice probably were made explicit in one form or another over time. The raw data for the study consisted of diaries and calendars, meeting notes, course documentation, typed feedback from students, assignments, notes of moderations, annual reports, papers, e-mails, etc.2 The f rst task was to arrange this 2 The sheer ‘fecundity’ of the system is quite overwhelming – much of it subsequently forgotten or remembered inaccurately.

164

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

material in chronological order so as to establish the sequence of events. The next was to make sense of the team’s pattern of activity through examining the nature of these events and their sequencing. They fell into four identifiabl types and were therefore mapped as four linked spaces. The core space was identifie as that in which the team met for purposes of planning and evaluating its activity, since, after the programme was established in 2002, it was largely from this sub-activity space that connections ran to and fro to the other three. The Planning space functioned as the hub for exchange, communication and co-ordination. The other three spaces pertained to Teaching, Quality Assurance and Publishing. In the initial mapping, documents were selected for representation because they were consistently central to action within the spaces of the activity system. These included course materials and internal reports. In the fina representation in Fig. 8.1 of the spaces created

Key to Figure 8.1 Rounded white forms represent peopled spaces and two-way peopled fl ws – key artefacts are indicated by shaded rectangles and artefactual f ows by black arrow-headed lines. Spaces and artefacts are represented in an actual time sequence that reads down the vertical axis from top to bottom on the right of the f gure. The numbers, KTC n, in many of artefactual rectangles refer to the identificatio of particular texts in the archive of texts created for the study Fig. 8.1 Durational map of the spaces created by the chartered teacher programme system (tutor team)

Knowledge Creation and the CT Programme

165

through CT Programme activity involving the tutors, only those artefacts that had a direct connection to the composition of a particular publication in 2007 have been included. (Fig. 8.1 can be compared with Fig. 7.1 which shows the spaces within the system created through activity involving the students.) The case starts with a local seminar to consult about the development of a new master’s programme, the MEd. Professional Enquiry in Education, in November 2001 when only one member of staff was involved and runs until June 2007 covering a period of 5 years and 3 months. By 2007, there were seven people who were teaching on this CT programme each of whom was required to engage in teaching, scholarship and research as part of their job remit. Figure 8.1 shows the structure of the programme where data are presented in the form of a durational slice through the activity system as tutor activity, whilst Fig. 8.2 is a synchronous transect showing the network of relays of which the tutor activity system was a part.

Key to Figure 8.2 Activity sets are shown as white ovals and artefacts as grey rectangles. Peopled fl ws are shown as white tubes and artefactual f ows as black lines. External relations to other areas beyond the mapped locality are indicated as black lines, although these too are connected through material fl ws and events that are not illustrated Fig. 8.2 Relational map showing the network relays connecting to the CT programme system (tutor team)

166

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

The Outcomes Stage 1: Multiplicity – Performing the CT Programme as a Networked System Internal Relations Looking at Programme events that involved members of the tutor team showed that they could be broadly categorised according to purpose into four social spaces: Teaching; Planning; Quality Assurance; and Publishing. The four spaces created in time by these activities are mapped from left to right in Fig. 8.1. Events within each of these categories of activity can be conceived as making up particular spaces of interaction because they not only share a common purpose, but this is translated into practice using conventions of participation in the roles the various people adopt and the particular materials, language and procedures that they use. Teaching: On the far left is the teaching activity where each run of the programme occurred as six modules (M1–M6) each of which lasted for a semester. Each run ceased at the end of 3 years. During the course of the events that comprised teaching, team members were working, either alone or with a fellow tutor, with experienced school teachers to develop the various learning outcomes specifie by the terms of accreditation and validation. Tutors made sense of these through the pedagogic materials and processes that governed their interactions with these students. As the team has deliberately chosen to use a social constructivist approach to teaching, knowledge drawn from disciplinary and policy texts and from accounts of our own and our students’ experiences were ‘imported’ into the teaching space as resources for learning. Tutor activity was repetitive in that the programme started for a new cohort every semester.3 Planning: The space shown as second from the left is the planning space. It occupied far less of the tutors’ time than teaching did, but it did constitute the most substantive element of joint working. Work in this space was carried out in monthly team meetings, lasting up to 2 hours, which dealt with both day-to-day matters as well as problems and feedback that was relevant in the longer term. Through setting aside dedicated time, the team concentrated 3 In the f rst year, two cohorts started in the autumn semester. The new cohorts that started for the years 2005/2006 and 2006/2007 are not shown in Fig. 8.1.

The Outcomes

167

attention on these latter issues at events lasting 1 or 2 days, held away from the university, which also formed part of this space. The team seldom mixed with members of other groups in this activity. Quality Assurance: This is the third space from the left. When the programme was initiated it had to be ‘sold’ within the framework of the university’s standard operating procedures for putting on a new course by putting together a proposal and fillin in various forms. Once it was validated and running, the programme director reported regularly on how it was proceeding to a programme board and involved an external examiner to meet the university’s quality assurance procedures. Since this was also an accredited course for the award of Chartered Teacher status, the team also had to ‘sell’ it to the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) and must comply with this body’s terms for continuing accreditation. This space also included the moderation events that were held at the end of each module to discuss the grading of assignments and evaluate the quality of learning.4 In the quality assurance space, the team interacted with an external examiner, student and local authority representatives and fiel assessors to provide, receive and discuss accounts applying public criteria to the assessment of its performance. You can see that once university validation and GTCS accreditation were completed in 2002/2003 this space settled to a regular pattern of examination and programme board events. Publishing: This is the small space on the right-hand side which originates later than the other three spaces. This comprised of those events that the team created for engaging with others in relation to the work of both students and team members. Events here were occasional and the team mixed with people engaged in a relatively wide range of positions within education through dissemination days, seminars, presentations and the distribution of papers, articles, booklets, etc.

External Relations There are four dominant external relations that are significan in the case that are illustrated and summarised in Fig. 8.2 (see also Fig. 6.1): 1. Looking at the origins of the system in Fig. 8.1 it starts in the quality assurance space since the f rst events in relation to the CT Programme consisted of forming a focus group to prepare a proposal. The terms of this proposal needed to satisfy institutional rules and genres.

4

Not included separately in Fig. 2

168

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

a. Those regarding postgraduate courses that can be backtracked through a chain of transmission points running from the Institute of Education’s academic affairs committee to that of the university to the Scottish Credit and Qualification Framework Board and to the Scottish Government. This backtrack is also personed, artefacted and evented. (Relay 1 in Fig. 8.2) b. Those regarding qualification accredited for achieving Chartered Teacher status through a similar chain of transmission points consisting of people and things: the Institute of Education’s academic affairs committee to that of the university via the accreditation board of the General Teaching Council for Scotland to the Scottish Government. (Relay 2 in Fig. 8.2) Thus this new activity was not invented in a space where there was great freedom of agency. The programme had to be accounted for as ‘proper’ in content and conduct to obtain and maintain officia sanction, hence the ongoing activity in the quality assurance space, since without such legitimation, and the resourcing that accompanied it, the programme would not exist. 2. Additionally, because the CT Programme is a practice-based course, it involves action in schools on the part of the teachers enrolled on it. Thus artefacts accessed through the programme were used and had influenc in the school spaces occupied by the students as teachers and, vice-versa, artefacts from these school spaces were brought into the teaching space by the teachers as students. This ongoing interference through to-ing and fro-ing between these spaces was a key aspect of the transposition of knowledge within the system particularly, as we shall see in the narrative section, linking the teaching and the planning spaces. (Relay 4 in Fig. 8.2) 3. Later in the sequence from 2004 to 2007, the team began to turn their attention to engaging with a wider professional community. This was the result of a mix of motives: to market the programme; to influenc the fiel through enacting professional enquiry within a wider educational sphere; to respond to the requirement placed on team members by the university to publish . Knowledge creation and transposition in this space was dependent upon the interrelation of the internal spaces within the CT Programme activity system in contact with the wider local fiel of educating activity. In creating this publishing space, the team was subject to another set of institutionalising norms enforced externally through networked systems that pertain to academic publishing and to the discipline of education (Nespor, 2006). This disciplinary network also influence the purpose and content of the CT Programme through controlling what counted as educational research and theory in the selection of content for the teaching space and, in the quality assurance space, through the appointment of external examiners. (Relay 3 in Fig. 8.2)

The Outcomes

169

Overall the mappings in Figs. 8.1 and 8.2 delineate a small local activity system that is both growing and changing and, in that sense, continuing to invent itself within a set of institutionalising constraints. These limit the capacity for innovation and direct to an important extent the form that ‘new’ knowledge, as practice at this locality, may take.

Stage 2: The System in Action – Knowledge Exchange and Creation The texts generated by CT Programme activity reveal that not only are there networks of different forms of activity within each of the four broad categories, but there are also connections across the categories. For instance, there is evidence that moderation meetings in the quality assurance space have generated evaluative discussions and notes that have subsequently shaped activity in the Planning and Teaching spaces. Likewise some discussions and reports from programme board and examining board meetings can be tracked into other spaces of interaction. In order to try and illustrate what kinds of processes the analysis reveals, I have taken a relatively simple example drawing on some of the information in Fig. 2. (a) Trajectory 1 Practice (K2 Teachers) to Theory (K1 Cohort) The f rst run of Module 5, Collaborative Professional Enquiry Part 1 was in the autumn of 2004. This is one of two work-based modules where students are expected to carry out collaborative professional enquiries in their schools. Prior to the f rst meeting, most of the teachers had begun to attempt to implement the proposals that they had put forward at the end of Module 4.5 Two of us were tutoring on the module. The course meetings were run along the lines of an action set, each student told his or her individual story, and the group discussed and reflecte on the issues which these accounts raised. The feedback on the f rst session was striking because of the level of difficult the students were experiencing. Interestingly, their immediate reaction was to fin it comforting that everyone was experiencing similar difficulties Commonality relieved feelings of personal anxiety as the experiences were dis-embedded from individual contexts and put into the context of the cohort as a whole. TRANSFORMATION 1 At the point of utterance by the student the significanc of the data changes from one of personal ‘failure’ to information validated as a shared experience – it loses much of its initial negative affect as it becomes problematised and shared. This transformation had an immediate effect for those in the cohorts involved in raising the students’ confidence

5 This involves them in enacting ideas drawn from the Standard for Chartered Teacher and the literature, i.e. attempting knowledge transfer by using ideas in practice.

170

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

The tutors typed up the notes of each case presentation and the discussion that followed, and this was circulated round the group. In this sense, the ‘knowledge’ was further mobilised by being put into a stable electronic form (KTC 9)6 and the same thing was done with the cohorts that followed (KTC 13). The two tutors, somewhat shocked by the feedback, used these texts to discuss what was happening with their colleagues, thereby moving this knowledge from the teaching to the planning and evaluation space. As a tutor team, we had thought we had a good understanding of what collaborative professional enquiry entailed. The feedback from practitioners challenged this assumption. With the consent of both cohorts, we shared the notes across the two groups, moving back into teaching space again for further discussion and reflection TRANSFORMATION 2 The feedback was typed up by university tutors and passed back to the students. It was now, as written text, validated by the university (tutors acting as proxies) as material f t for discussion and review on a postgraduate course. Students’ experiences were legitimated and given weight by these artefacts and their use as a basis for discussion and reference. (KTC 9 & 13)

(b) Trajectory 1 Practice (K2 Teachers) to Practice (K2 Tutors) Worried by the amount of resistance teachers were encountering, the team as a whole decided that some immediate alterations were needed to the content and teaching on Module 4 for the next groups of students (KTC11). We included more material on the political dimensions of change and activities to support teachers’ capacity to negotiate within the structural frameworks of their schools. Thus the knowledge resulting from activity in schools during Module 5 caused us to disembed what we felt was appropriate ‘knowledge’ from other sources to use in the Module 4 workbook to prepare students for undertaking the collaborative project in Modules 5 and 6. At the team evaluation early in 2006, drawing on our experiences and the outcomes of the moderations of the Module 4–6 submissions, we decided to re-design aspects of all three modules to incorporate greater awareness of the knowledge requirements for collaborative professional enquiry and the need to build capability for implementation (KTC16). TRANSFORMATION 3 The tutors distributed the feedback to the rest of the team, and, along with other data from student discussions and the moderation of assignments from Modules 5 and 6 this led to a revision of course materials and assessment tasks. The new knowledge was now instantiated in the programme in the form of new materials, readings, and tasks and would therefore influenc the learning experiences of future students and the teaching of tutors. The knowledge created on Module 5 was connected in this transformation to issues of school culture and structure. It acquired more ‘postgraduate’ f tness through its influenc on teaching and 6

These numberings refer to the archive of documents and are marked on Fig. 8.1.

The Outcomes

171

assessment. Students could now refer to it as an aspect of becoming a Chartered Teacher. (KTC 11 & 16)

(c) Trajectory 2 Practice (K2 Tutors) to Theory (K1 Teachers) When the students submitted their assignments for Module 5, it was clear that a number of them had used the discussions and feedback that developed over the four teaching sessions as a basis for theorising their own experiences in schools and for reflectin on strategies which might support the initiation of collaborative professional enquiries. In June 2005 and 2006, some of these teachers were involved in making presentations about their experiences at the National Chartered Teacher Conferences, Dissemination Days, in school in-service days, etc. re-processing and mobilising what they had learned for communicating to a range of different audiences. TRANSFORMATION 4 The students acquired a measure of influenc as experts whose opinions were of value. The tutors too incorporated the knowledge and linked it to further references in papers, presentations and seminars. The knowledge acquired additional weight as it was positioned more securely into wider frames of reference e.g. teacher professionalism and school improvement. (KTC 7,8,12, & 17)

(d) Trajectory 3 Practice (K2 Teachers & Tutors) to Theory (K1 Disciplinary) Within the team, the notes taken during the Module 5 sessions travelled into the publishing space as well. A paper on teacher professionalism in the Scottish context was commissioned for an ESRC-sponsored Teaching and Learning Research Programme seminar series in July 2005. Material on contesting professionalisms had been written in the summer of 2004 as a response to a team evaluation of the firs three modules of the course in May of that year. Each member of the tutor team took one student’s assignments for the f rst three modules and prepared a short case study (KTC 5) as a basis for discussing what learning was taking place on the course. An outcome of this team event was an article for the TESS (KTC 10) that identifie the need for the invention of practice on the part of both chartered teachers and those supporting them. These ideas, together with material from the Module 5 feedback, were put together in the TLRP paper (KTC 15). Thus the original material from the teaching sessions was re-embedded alongside various other bits of knowledge drawn from the teaching (KTC 5), quality assurance (KTC 2) and planning (KTC 6) spaces knitted with material from disciplinary sources to provide a suitable ‘academic’ warrant. In the following year, the Module 5 data from 4 cohorts of students were analysed and tabulated (KTC 14) and included in a paper that tied ideational conflic about teacher professionalism between policy instruments to conflic in schools. This was published for the annual seminar in June 2006 (KTC 17). Parts of this paper, combined with parts of the TLRP paper, resulted in an article that was submitted to a journal, modifie on the basis of

172

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

reviewer feedback, and then published in 2007 (KTC 19). Thus the original knowledge was shaped into an acceptable disciplinary form and warranted as academically respectable. TRANSFORMATION 5 The feedback from several cohorts is taken and tabulated (KTC 14) and added to other information from sources within and beyond the system to enmesh the students’ feedback in a form that enables it to earn ‘academic’ status through peer review and publication. It can now travel back to the teaching space as ‘a reading’ for new students on the programme. (KTC 19)

Characteristics of a Hybrid System Knowledge Exchange and Creation Event analysis and durational mapping allows the tracking and representation of this set of trajectories with its to-ings and fro-ings across the system. At the end of this process, the ‘knowledge’ has been used in every space in the system to generate new identities, things, actions and relations. It has also ‘travelled’ beyond the immediate boundaries of the system, acquiring relations with other bits of knowledge, incorporating ‘voices’ on the way so that its authorship and ownership at any given point is always complex. In the process, it has been transformed and inscribed in a variety of genres for a variety of purposes. This study hints at how pervasive knowledge creation and exchange was in this particular setting. It shows how information was encoded within distinctive genres according to variations in the mixtures of people involved in events and the type of activity they were involved in. A great deal of this knowledge was soon forgotten, as it needed to be. For those knowledge makings, whether in K1 or K2 form, which had a longer term significanc the metaphor of transfer from a site of creation to a site of consumption seems to be somewhat simplistic to describe what appears to be occurring. For example, once ‘released’ by utterance, the knowledge created in the f rst M5 cohort sets (tutor and students) travelled in a number of directions through chains of interactions where it was combined and recombined with other knowledges according to the different objects of the various sub sets involved in the activity system (Bakhtin, 1981). A key feature of these processes was their dialogic nature – arguing and discussing in the different spaces was the most generative medium for mobilising (extracting and carrying) knowledge, making distinctions in practice and re-combining the knowledge of one person, or of a group, with the knowledges of others. The most important quality of ‘knowledge’ on this evidence was its mobility and capacity for hybridisation giving users the ability to pick what they wanted and combine and recombine their selections according to the intentions and practices inherent in their own context for action.

Characteristics of a Hybrid System

173

In answering our original questions The relationship between mobile knowledge in textual form and situated knowledge as competence was very close within this particular system because we were all, students and tutors, motivated to action. The tutor team had needs and uses for new knowledge because we were encountering practical challenges. Thus the case reveals numerous instances of the extraction of K2 in K1 forms and the recombination of K1 forms in practice as K2. However, this distinction is in itself questionable when the evidence is closely examined because in many instances K2 and K1 whilst separable materially were inseparable practically. Thus the change in practice (K2) of the tutors on Modules 4–6 of the programme was directly related to the participation in action of the re-tooled teaching resources and assessment procedures (K1) we were using. The hybridity of the system fostered refl xivity and that in turn raised questions about practice that generated a need for knowledge. In the students’ case, this was an intentional effect. In our own case it was not. We had not factored outcomes for ourselves resulting from the spatial interconnections we had created. For instance, the tutor team might have been quite content with its ‘abstract’ approach to collaborative professional enquiry if it had not had feedback as to the difficultie of enacting this in schools. It was the pedagogic design/practice of the programme that ensured we had very rapid feedback in a space that fostered discussion, debate and dis-embedding of information, typing up the feedback and re-circulating it in this instance. A great deal of information existed in K1 form, but much of it had limited longevity in relation to action. The attention of an audience for K1 items in the majority of cases was both limited and ephemeral. For example, most student assignments were read against assessment criteria. They were only read within the more open framing of trying to ascertain what they revealed about students’ professional learning as part of an evaluation exercise in 2004. The criteria for validating knowledge were linked to audience, attention and levels of resourcing which combined in different ways to exert a power of influenc through K2/K1 combinations. What counted and what did not count as desirable knowledge varied from space to space according to different criteria, entailing that transformations of knowledge were context specific This applied even at a very mundane level. Barriers were placed to the access to K1 used in the Teaching space within the Quality Assurance space and vice versa, because artefacts, and the identities they formed with the tutors, were developed for specifi forms of action and thereby confine to their spaces of operation. In this sense, each space could be characterised by its own mini epistemic culture. This is most clearly marked in the Publishing space where formal disciplinary controls shaped the composition of the article KTC 19.

174

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

Forms of Forgetting Sub-activities within the team’s overall activity system were quite well differentiated right from the inception of the CT programme because of the pre-existing framings that the course had to comply with in order to be permitted to exist. The ‘team’ was a much more complex and open set of relations than the term implies. Applying the description of ‘a professional community of practice’ to this grouping (Wenger, 1998) would gloss over how interpenetrated and various even this little ‘community’ was. The number of relations, intersections, connections and disconnections that people experience in their engagement in a given activity can easily be overlooked. This raises the issue of how such boundaries operate and what conditions lead to changes in permeability. Mol, in her exploration of the performance of artheroschlerosis in a local health system (2000), also demonstrates that Wenger’s conceptualisation of participation as a continuum from peripherality to full engagement is too simplistic to apply in most settings. His approach makes for homogenisation of activity in contrast to Mol’s which illustrates, as does this investigation, that these performances are not carried out in one social space based on one form of action. Although the object of the CT programme may seem to be quite specifi and limited, it is still performed as a networked system and varies as to what is taken to be its focus in the different spaces in and across which the whole is performed. Mol points to the importance of the invention of scripts or narratives that simplify such diversities and serve to make the relatively incoherent coherent. Similarly at Stirling we tend to talk quite happily about ‘the team’s work’ without reflectin on how it is compartmentalised. If each of the four sub-activities identifie from the data engenders its own sub-identity, then in a sense persons become networked systems, fragmenting as entities, as does the team, into multiple spaces and relationalities. This de-construction of ‘the team’ helps to identify some of the means whereby the development of collective understanding can either be maximised or diminished. The mapping shows how one segment of practice can quite easily become disconnected from other parts, resulting in an internal ‘fragmentation’ where activity in the different subsets ceases to inform the whole, i.e. rather than acquiring knowledge in relation to the pursuit of its purpose the system continually ‘forgets’ information. If the tutors, as actants (sub-identities and linked artefacts) do not travel across internal boundaries, then questions about the separate sub-practices and their contribution to achieving the overall object of the system are less likely to be raised. The other side of this coin is that investigations of this sort demonstrate the huge amounts of information that are generated in professional systems. Under these circumstances a degree of both individual and collective forgetting is very necessary.

Network Effects The case illustrates what activity theorists (Engestrom et al., 2003) identify as ‘the expansion of the object’ since over the 5 years covered by the study, the conception

Characteristics of a Hybrid System

175

of what it meant to be a Chartered Teacher, the nature of collaborative professional enquiry and what constituted an appropriate pedagogy to support it all changed for members of the tutor team. Thus so ‘doing the CT programme’ in 2007 was not what it was back in 2002. For the tutors, there was a growing awareness that professional enquiry was emerging as a public and shared activity rather than something the students did whilst we acted as on-lookers. The interconnections showed that there was a need to work at developing a collective understanding and capacity to act that involved not only those participating in the system but engaged with those beyond it. At the more mundane level competence within the team developed as A changed understanding of what professional enquiry meant leading to adaptations in practice to support its use by both teachers and ourselves. An outcome of this changed awareness was the development of a number of new K1 and procedural artefacts for use by both ourselves and others; Greater awareness of, and skills in, dis-embedding, combining and reembedding knowledge became a key element in developing professional learning with teachers. This realisation was accompanied by a greater commitment to communication, publishing and pedagogic research as a means of engaging with a wider audience; Increased criticality with regard to our own practice with a movement towards engaging more knowingly and openly in co-operative knowledge exchange and creation as both a substantive and a political issue; A greater awareness of the various constraints within which the system operates allied to a growing understanding of the affordances that are offered by network creation. This has led to the articulation of a more holistic approach to professional learning as part of a more active discursive engagement on our part in the local field This account does not square particularly well with Engestrom’s notion of contradiction in a boundary object as a singular process (2001). What we had here was more akin to Law’s description of mess with ‘the object’ changing and moving, for example, • • • •

for the tutors as a pedagogic and an ethical issue, for the teachers as a question of identification for pupils as new relationalities and activities in classrooms. for the wider professional community as a question of teacher professionalism.

Boundedness was thus continually ‘shimmering’ according to varying interests or different sub-objects in different interconnected spaces. In Engestrom’s defence, the system as a whole (in so far as the designation makes sense) was refl xive and inventive in this regard, actively changing the premises on the basis of which it was performed over time. The CT programme would not have been so productive a source of knowledge if it had not been a hybrid. If this chapter had centred on an account of a programme based purely on a schooling strategy, then events in the workplace would not have

176

8 Knowledge Creation: The Refl xivity of Hybrid Systems

influence it because there would have been no legitimate point of entry for such information. A schooling strategy, even if it had provoked disturbance in some of the teachers’ schools, would not have enabled this to be refracted back into the university to disturb and provoke questions about practice in that setting. The practical effects of hybridity run, as Fig. 8.1 illustrates, all the way through both this system’s inception and its ongoing performance. As a result, it is legitimate to ask whether the developmental pedagogy embedded in a competence-based standard served to open up new spaces of interaction and provoke critical reflection innovation and change in the university or whether the schooling pedagogy of academe serve to ensure that a developmental strategy was less restrictive and reductionist by providing access to resources that provoked greater refl xivity and critical analysis in the schools. Either way, underlying this pattern of interactions was a change in relations between students and tutors that provided an opening for greater knowledge exchange: first because it served to legitimate student experience as a resource for learning; and second, because this was not simply an opening of person-to-person communications but of a space-to-space exchange and the mixing of the range of resources (people, things, time and affect) that this implies. The CT programme is an example of the intrusion of developmental and contagious pedagogic strategies into schooling systems. A phenomenon that is occurring in one form or another at many similar sites and one that is viewed with either optimism or dismay by educationalists (Delanty, 2001; Bernstein, 2001).

Conclusion In the particular microcosm that was the CT programme, there was room for a variety of network architectures, from those that relied upon close interpersonal ties such as the cohort and tutor activity sets to more impersonal forms of relations such as those developed through the publishing activities associated with the course. In the extended network explored in this chapter, some spatial connections relied more on professional interest and recognition of competence than on strong social ties (Muller et al., 2008; Wasko et al., 2004). However, the wider professional network both depended upon and influence the more intensive interpersonal networks and vice versa. One of the consequences of these interactions for the tutor team has been to return to firs principles and to re-conceptualise what we meant when we adopted the concept of professional enquiry as the basis for professional learning. This notion has now expanded to include our engagement in wider professional networks and a commitment to continue to blur the boundaries between teaching, enquiry and professional activism as well as those between institutions (I’Anson et al., 2008).

Conclusion

177

In so doing, the case relates to the current promotion of collaborative networks and communities as the solution to improving practice. However, we should not be over optimistic about the prospect. Networked learning communities are purposefully-led social entities that are characterized by a commitment to quality, rigour and focus on outcomes . . . They promote the dissemination of good practice, enhance the professional development of teachers, support capacity building in schools, mediate between centralized and de-centralised structures and assist in the process of re-structuring and re-culturing educational organizational systems. (OECD statement cited in Jackson & Temperley, 2006:11)

In addition to thorny issues of purpose and control, there is an ongoing tension in such systems in creating a balance between sameness and difference. Collaborative professional enquiry could become self-serving and exclusionary in addition to being used to strengthen managerial ambitions for conformity and continuing suppression of debate about educational purposes on the part of, and between, the range of key actors. Changing our focus slightly in picturing the performance of this particular educating system, we can also add all the spaces referred to in Part II, i.e. to each of the cohort spaces illustrated under the heading teaching on the left-hand side of Fig. 8.1, there are school spaces to be added equal to the number of students engaged in each cohort group. In this manner, the whole edific potentially continues to expand and spread, to build ‘its’ knowledge and power. The same is true of the spaces created by the publishing and disseminating activity. Thus, so long as it exists, the CT programme system produces and re-produces these patternings of space as it replicates and repeats its activity. In doing, its connections with other systems are constantly made and re-made. In this crude sense, there is an in-built ‘expansion’ of the activity over time and an accretion of power that can be applied to collective professional learning as a political and moral, as well as a practical, project. There is thus an element of hope that, rather than acting as compliant agents for dominant, or would-be dominant, discourses imposed from elsewhere, there are possibilities, in the form of some of the interactions we have examined, that allow for the adoption of more openly political orientation to practice and for the creation of new collectives and new public arenas for critical discussion and debate. In this, one places a certain faith in the inherent instability of discourses, an instability that offers the possibility for ‘local’ forms of engagement and participation in the creation of knowledges and discourses that may contend with and influenc events on a wider scale across educational networks.

Chapter 9

Conclusion

In this last chapter, I have attempted to draw together key themes arising from the studies outlined in this book and to indicate why I think that findin ways of describing the dynamics of professional learning, as boundaries between different social practices become increasingly permeable, is an important task for the future. The chapter considers what progress has been made against the objectives that were set out in Chapter 1: • to outline a methodology for investigating the activity of educating systems; and • to describe processes in which professional learning occurs in relational terms. First, it looks at some of the technical and conceptual problems raised by the mode of analysis, before focusing on the substantive issues relating to professional learning that this has illuminated. The fina section explores some of the implications the use of hybrid pedagogies has for professional educators, particularly in higher education.

Describing Educating as Relational Practice A materialist focus offers a way describing professional learning that does not simplify our understanding of the process but, in contrast, draws attention to the complexity, contingency and work involved in the transformation of practice. Underpinning durational mapping is the assumption that what is observed of an activity depends upon where, when and how the observer engages with it. Our usual doubts about the validity of accounts of social phenomena stem in part from the assumption that there is a truth to be had, a f xed reality in events, which pre-exists its fabrication in description. In contrast, the claim here is that a materially grounded account of systemic activities has validity, if it is appraised in relation to the circumstances in which it was generated. In other words, a particular phenomenon may be the case under the set of conditions where one observer is engaged with the system, whereas for observers engaged with it from other positions, different phenomena will pertain (Haraway, 1991; Barad, 2003). Systems thereby present themselves as J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3_9, 

179

180

9

Conclusion

multi-faceted and variable, an aspect of their functioning that the form of description presented in the book attempts to preserve. As shown in Part II, no actant, or type of actant, either did or could participate in events from exactly the same position. Durational mapping reifie this quality of experience to the extent that each map only conveys something about a particular slice through the spatial patterns that an activity system creates in its performance – it is always a partial and particular representation. Given these insights the task of researching activity is made much more onerous, since the blending of accounts on the assumption of shared experience becomes very questionable and disguises underlying pluralities. This is exemplifie in the contrast between the Craigton study and those that underpin Part II where different viewpoints are better represented. In addition, the bounding of a research study becomes very problematic – by exposing the complexity of the movements that may be associated with activity. For instance, the common solution for representing dynamics by accounting for a single trajectory becomes a questionable simplification Event analysis and durational mapping expose the classic version of social constructivism as an inadequate basis for accounting for professional learning in the local systems that have been explored in this book. Cultural mediation dissolved into the swarm of things that interpenetrated and attached to people as ways of being in action. These observations make the idea that conceptual tools stand between us and our world difficul to sustain. The humans in the educating systems that have been examined here conjoined in action with textual and procedural familiars that are both commonplace and frequently ignored when we think of social activity. These associations changed as people moved from space to space when some things were left behind and others were acquired or invented. Under these conditions, Vygotsky’s triangular relation (Fig. 2.1) morphed into a variety of complex forms of assemblage that were a basis for identification Identity in the performance of educating activity was something changeable and multiple, identities emerged as a binding together of the human and the non-human that changed with changes in activity. These amalgamations were not confine within the limits of persons’ bodies but extended, as relations with things and others, across both internal and external boundaries in the different spaces that various activities created. This was particularly striking in the study discussed in Chapter 8 where tutor identity dissolved into a system of networked relations in the performance of this ‘role’. Identity served both as a source of solidarity and of distinction. In the latter instance, the ‘internal’ capacity of persons for maintaining distinctions and preserving boundaries was most remarkable. This underlined the importance of mechanisms for the preservation of contradictions and inconsistencies in the course of practice. In this regard, the concept of activity sets and boundaries between forms of activity and their formation, evolution and dissolution over time are areas that have hardly been touched upon here. A more thorough exploration of these relational aspects of learning and change, particularly where and how pedagogic activity fails, would be useful in furthering our understanding of these processes. Another area for further investigation relates to mobility and movement as power/knowledge within networked systems. In exploring these issues, I have

Substantive Issues in Professional Learning

181

tended to concentrate upon those transmission points that were formally established. These were constituted by various forms of legitimating activity – approval, validation, accreditation, assessment, etc. which required re-contextualisations to be undertaken by actants in order to secure resources and thereby exercise agency. These transmission points are often linked together as bureaucratic devices to establish relays that attempt to f x and secure the reliable re-contextualisation of intents from a ‘centre’, or hub, out to peripheral systems in a given network. Transmission points often mark boundaries between activities and are points of translation that can either result in the amplificatio or dampening of intents and action or even, possibly, a reversal in direction of f ow of influenc and power along a given relay. They clearly vary, within the limitations of the studies in this book, in their longevity, their capacity to form new connections or to invade and take over other connections. They are potential sites for transformation and invention, and better descriptions of their nature, variety and life cycle is critical to understanding learning and change processes. Again, the studies in this book merely scratch the surface in exploring these mobilisations, which warrant far more attention than I have been able to give them.

Substantive Issues in Professional Learning Taking a relational approach to professional learning undermines many of the usual distinctions and dichotomies that we make in describing educational processes and their outcomes, opening up a whole new territory for investigation and consideration. The centrality of identification as a critical aspect of professional development, is emphasised and underlined when the social dynamics of changing practice are taken into account. Whilst the importance of identity formation is recognised in much of the literature, what is not sufficientl understood is the complexity of the interactional processes of personal and professional identificatio involved in changing practice, especially in the case of established practitioners. The nature of agency was also more problematic than the general everyday use of the term implies. There remained the usual difficult of whether agency was define as the production of a desired effect in the world on the part of an actor or whether it was the capacity of an entity to cause an effect in the world. Agency in the firs sense was generated by the affect that identificatio within the different activity sets both mobilised and aligned for the enaction of particular forms of practice. This was perhaps most obvious in the creation of the cohort learning sets on the CT programme where satisfying needs, such as those for greater autonomy and influ ence in relation to practice, were embedded within the goal of becoming a chartered teacher. The intentionality attached to achieving the object, through the blending of cognitive and affective elements in imagination, supplied the motive power for enaction. It led to the expenditure of energy in attempting to realise the particular becomings that the performance of the system promised for the various participants

182

9

Conclusion

involved. There was no evidence to support the claim that artefacts are agentive of themselves. In this case, they needed association with humans to achieve causality, although it was also the case that without close association with artefacts suited to achieving the object the enaction of new practice was either partial or did not occur (Chapter 5). This relation of things and humans in agency was muddied by the complexity of intentionality. Chapter 6 illustrates a number of instances of what Butler has called ‘the repetitive labour of the norm’ (1993:10) being used in the course of educating. The constant iterations of action used to establish ‘reflect ve practice’ during the firs module of the CT programme is one such example. In this way, identification and knowledge could be created that aligned with intentionalities relayed into the learning environment from elsewhere (relays 1–3 in Fig. 6.1). Pedagogic activity shaped the becomings available to both students and tutors and thereby served to secure the onward transmission of intents as part of the amplificatio of power through the local field Power was both used and released in the production of new relations between spaces. This is not to deny that action often led to unintended outcomes, particularly given that intentionality was always a bundling together of multiple purposes and thereby vulnerable to many and various contingencies. Nevertheless, there is a claim being made here that intentionality linked to desire was an important motive force for action. Emotion served to secure the attachment of power in the projection of desired ends as well as in the avoidance of those that were perceived as undesirable. The use and generation of power within these systems was also complex. Many of the officiall established relays sketched out in the various relational maps served as means of conveying resource in the form of time, space, artefacts and energy to support the enactions of the intentionalities that they instantiated. Established relay systems acted as a series of gates in this regard. For instance, in the desire to mount a new course, the instigators of the CT programme had to contextualise the intentions, values and norms conveyed by the quality assurance relay within the university (relay 1 in Fig. 6.1) in order to access the resources required to be able to run the course. In the case of new relays, such as the connections established through pedagogic activity into schools, these served to switch resources from one relation to another or called up new resources for enacting the purposes that practicebased programmes (SQH or CT) or developmental initiatives (Criagton) served to relay. For instance, by binding cohort members together in a collective endeavour to conduct professional enquiries, the performance of the hybrid programmes we have examined mobilised work by staff and pupils in schools. The latter thus became participants in the spread of the discourses these programmes purveyed. An interesting example of this accrual of power across organisational boundaries was exemplifie in one of the cases cited in Chapter 7. Seven departments in a secondary school became engaged in a collaborative enquiry that led to structural changes in the management of the school. The headteacher gave the chartered teacher concerned a remit for developing teaching and learning through collaborative enquiry that tapped her, as actant, into the resourcing released through school development planning in a similar re-bundling of connections that was evident in the Craigton case (Fig. 3.2).

Substantive Issues in Professional Learning

183

Indeed, because the school was in that authority, the organisational learning initiative ‘Succeeding Together’ already provided a relay into the school environment to legitimate this change in practice, thus combining the effects of the CT programme system with those of the Craigton initiative in the service of the discourse of ‘soft’ managerialism. As intention supplied a motive power for enacting new practices so knowledge supplied the means. Identificatio involved an association of affect with knowledge, and it was knowledge that allowed for the reforming of action. In both Parts II and III, the interconnections between knowledge, in both mobile and embodied form (as capability), and action were central to changing the performance of activity. In the operation of the hybrid pedagogical systems reviewed in this book object–subject relations were altered in such a way as to provoke enquiry, knowledge exchange and formation through the mixing of different spaces. This amplifie refl xivity allowed the object, as in the case of the CT programme system, to talk back to participants and to become an evolving problematic rather than a f xed and definabl entity. In opening space-to-space, sets of different contents, as knowledges, were brought into interaction in the various third spaces that were created by these programmes, knowledges that were therefore available to be mixed and multiplied by actants for use in the ongoing performance of a range of activities. Difference served here as productive interference generating the formation of the new rather than acting as a ground for maintaining separation. Barad’s claim (2003) that interference indicates difference is not quite accurate. Interference indicated the mixing of difference. Where there was no mixing, no opening of space to space, there was little evidence of interference, i.e. existing differences were maintained. The interferences caused by spatial mixings also engendered action in attempts to avoid the ambiguity and discomfort arising from threats to identity. Participants had to invent, negotiate and agree forms of proper behaviour in collaboration with those they interacted with in such spaces, which therefore constituted locales where new forms of practice became possible. In terms of learning, this relates to the truism ‘no pain, no gain’ in that where practices are effectively sealed off from one another the problematics engendered by a ‘space between’ do not arise. Successful maintenance of separation ensures that there is little pressure to seek new formulations of practice (Reeves et al., 2005) in established activity sets. Looking on the wild side, disturbances engendered in these third spaces had the potential to create disturbances that created further disturbances and so on wherever relational relays ran from one space to another. In this way, a system could begin to outrun the intentionalities pumped into it (Chapter 8) and take on a causal agency in its own performance. However, what was intriguing, in the light of the claims of some of those theorists working in an evolutionary oriented framework, was that whilst the CT and SQH systems were inventive, like the sea turtle, the vast majority of their progeny do not appear to have survived for long. For example, there was anecdotal evidence that once the relays established through the CT programme system ceased to operate after graduation chartered teachers found that maintaining collaborative practice became much more difficult If connections into other relays of resource were not made, the sustainability of this form of professional learning

184

9

Conclusion

was fragile. Nevertheless, even with looser ties, in the form of networking between graduates and activities taking place in the publishing space, reverberation kept the network/system open so that it could still bounce knowledge back the way into existing relays to either reinforce or oppose the discourses (dialects) contending for hegemony in local circulations. Thus, through the local networks they created, activities engendered by the programmes offered a potential for becoming collectively agentive for creating further interferences ‘unintended’ by dominant institutional relays. There was a paradoxical play of same and other. By creating spaces of identificatio and affiliation the systems increased the power of the discourses that established normative action within these spaces (for example, in the cohort learning spaces) at the same time as ‘othering’ cohort members’ established identities within the norms prevailing in their places of work (this applied to both students and tutors). In so doing, the system began to take on some of the characteristics of a social movement as a bringing together of diverse elements in a space that ran between existing institutional arrangements where power relations became, in this case, progressively less unequal. 1 Identity formation across the network of spaces created by the practice-based programmes began to develop as ‘a sufficientl powerful glue’ to provide a space where established relays could begin to be challenged (Castells, 2004:419). These systems, as noted above, held the possibility for participants to start functioning politically and critically. At the same time, the establishment of solidarity as a basis for effective agency carried the danger, redolent in the term ‘a community of practice’, of being exclusionary and self-serving. As in its more obviously corporate form, ‘having a shared vision’ in a community of practice carries the risk of becoming an uncritical product of the manipulation of desire by powerful educator/pedagogic relays (Rose, 1991).

Implications It has become clear that one way of construing the educating systems that have provided the context for this exploration of professional learning is that they are trans-professional, trans-organisational and trans-cultural. The nature of the professional learning that they generated and the processes of knowledge exchange, transformation and creation that were at the core of such learning potentially have relevance wherever similar cross-institutional, cross-organisational developments of practice are at stake. Two features of the hybrid pedagogical systems that have formed the context for learning in this book mirrored the characteristics of epistemic cultures identifie by Knorr-Cetina (1999) in her investigation of knowledge creation in the sciences:

1 I would however disagree with some advocates of emancipatory collaborative enquiry that these either were, or could easily be made, equal.

Implications

185

First, the public and frequent sharing of information; and Second, that objects of interest (scientifi investigation) are treated as undetermined. She found that whether the pursuit of a scientifi object of enquiry was by a number of individual researchers or collaborative groups a form of ‘communitarian’ communication was an essential part of the activity. This ongoing fl w of communication allowed for constant re-orientation by participants (both people and things) towards the object as something that was continually evolving. These characteristics make for a very different form of organising than a classic industrial approach to activity that relies upon specifying an object for fabrication, fixin its attributes, and then ensuring that everyone and everything relates to that one specificatio in the activity of manufacturing. By analogy, and here I am overstating a division in order to make an argument, what were and are in contention in professional education are two very different orientations to learning: One relates to achieving educational purposes as known or determinable ends where it follows that, subject to the right scientifi analysis, practice can be reliably described and therefore instantiated as a technical matter. This is a framing of activity that is very familiar to teachers in the UK as an exhortation to adopt reliable means-to-ends, or evidencebased practice, which can be duly encouraged by systems of performance management and suitable professional development. (Hammersley, 2000) The other orientation is where the relation of professional practice to educational purposes is one of discovery and invention. The object of educating is treated as essentially unknowable and therefore as something to be moved toward by practitioners as part of an on-going process of enquiry.

Underlying this dichotomy is a transgression of institutional boundaries. The f rst orientation maintains the notion of knowledge creation as a process carried out by experts and validated against rigorous standards in organisational settings set up for that purpose. The results of this activity can then be transmitted to those working in the field which they incorporate into their practice on the basis of pragmatic standards of appreciation. The second, which underpins the developmental pedagogies using practitioner research that are, and have been, the basis for interaction between education departments in universities and schools for some time threaten to disrupt this dispensation. This is particularly the case in the more recently developed form of such projects as knowledge creating and publishing partnerships, enabled by web technology. As with the hybrid pedagogies I have been involved in, these trans-organisational practices have the potential to attenuate and ‘muddle together’ traditional systems for the appreciation of knowledge: both the scientifi and interpretive standards of higher education and the practical, craft-based standards of practice. They breach the established structurations we have for doing theory and practice. And all the indications are that these transgressions are likely to increase as developmentalism continues to extend its influence As a number of writers have pointed out, this raises some fundamental problems with regard to the role of universities and other institutes of higher education

186

9

Conclusion

which have traditionally held a monopoly on knowledge creation and the control of standards of appreciation (Barnett, 1994; Delanty, 2001). Whether you view these developments with optimism, trepidation or dismay there are a number of reasons why a return to the relative clarity and security of previous institutional arrangements and divisions of labour is unlikely. In response to the knotted and interconnected problems that public services confront, there is increasing pressure for multi-disciplinary and inter-professional working. The implementation of a strategy for ‘joined-up services’ raises much the same issues with regard to professional learning and the status of knowledge. It does so by creating contexts that ‘violate’ disciplinary boundaries in a similar way as moves towards practitioner enquiry blur established distinctions between theory and practice. Of course, this trend runs alongside an opposite response to complexity, which is the further fragmentation of expertise into ever-more finel divided specialisms. More fundamentally, given that knowledge creation is regarded an economic imperative by policy makers, we can see the same drive towards spatial mixing with regard to pupil and student learning in schools and colleges. At the same time, on a less formal level, the revolution in information technology has made the public creation of knowledge an activity in which nearly everyone can engage. We are therefore confronted with circumstances in which learning and knowledge creation have breached the channels within which they were contained. In that regard, currently it is not advances in neuroscience and our understanding of the brain that are revolutionising educational and learning processes but rather a transformation in the social and material relations within which they are being performed. I hope that by attempting to fin a way of surfacing some of the relational aspects of professional learning this book contributes to the exploration and understanding of this new territory.

References

Ackoff, R. (1980) The systems revolution. In M. Lockett and R. Spear (eds) Organisations as Systems. Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, pp. 26–33. Adey, P., with Hewitt, G., Hewitt, J., and Landau, N. (2004) The Professional Development of Teachers: Practice and Theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press. Alexander, R. (2008) Essays on Pedagogy. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Argyris, C. and Schon, D. (1974) Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Franscisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas. Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801–831. Barnett, R. (1994) The Limits of Competence: Knowledge, Higher Education and Society. Buckingham: Open University Press. Baron, R.S. and Kerr, N.L. (2003) Group Process, Group Decision, Group Action (2nd edition). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Beach, K. (2003) Consequential transitions: A developmental view of knowledge propagation through social organisation. In T. Tuomi-Grohn and Y. Engestrom (eds) Between School and Work: New Perspectives on Transfer and Boundary Crossing. Amsterdam: Pergamon Press, pp. 39–62. Berger, P.L. and Luckman, T. (1967) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin Books. Bergson, H. (2002) In Pearson, K.A. and Mullarkey, J. (eds) Henri Bergson: Key Writings. London: Continuum. Bernstein, B. (1996) Class, Codes and Control: Vol. V, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. London: Taylor Francis. Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefiel Publishers. Bernstein, B. (2001) From pedagogies to knowledges. In A. Morais, J. Neves, B. Davies, and H. Daniels (eds) Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy: The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 363–368. Black, P.J. (2003) Working Inside the Black Box. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Boreham, N. (2004) Orienting the work-based curriculum towards work process knowledge: a rationale and a German case study. Studies in Continuing Education 26(4): 209–227. Boreham, N. and Reeves, J. (2008) Diagnosing and supporting a culture of organisational learning in Scottish schools. Zeitschrift fur Padagogik 54(5): 637–649. Boreham, N. Shea, C.E., and Mackway, K. (2000) Clinical risk and collective competence in the hospital emergency department in the UK. Journal of Social Science and Medicine 51(1): 83–91. J. Reeves, Professional Learning as Relational Practice, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8739-3, 

187

188

References

Borum, F. (2004) Means-end frames and the politics and myths of organisational f elds, Organisation Studies 35(6): 897–921. Boud, D., and Solomon, N. (eds) (2001) Work-Based Learning: A New Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Bottery, M. (1990) The Morality of the School: The Theory and Practice of Values in Education. London: Cassell. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brandes, D., and Ginnis, P. (1986) A Guide to Student-Centred Learning. London: Basil Blackwell. Brown, S., and McIntyre, D. (1993) Making Sense of Teaching. Buckingham: Open University Press. Bruner, J. (1996) The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burroughs, R. (2001) Composing standards and composing teachers: the problem of National Board Certification Journal of Teacher Education 52(3): 223–232. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter, On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London: Routledge. Campbell, A., McNamara, O., and Gilroy, P. (2004) Practitioner Research and Professional Development in Education. London: Paul Chapman. Carrington, P.J., Scott, J., and Wasserman, S. (eds) (2005) Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castells, M. (2004) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume II The Power of Identity (2nd edition). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Chappell, C. Rhodes, C., Solomon, N., Tennant, M., and Yates, L. (2003) Reconstructing the Lifelong Learner: Pedagogy and Identity in Individual, Organisational and Social Change. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Chouliaraki, L. and Fairclough, N. (1999) Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Clarke, J. and Newman, J. (1997) The Managerial State. London: Sage Publications. Cooren, F. (2004) How texts do things in organisational settings. Organisation 11(3): 373–393. Cordingley, P., Bell, M., Rundell, B., and Evans, D. (2003) The Impact of Collaborative Continuing Professional Development (CPD) on Classroom Teaching. London: EPPI Centre. Cordingley, P., Bell, M., and Thomason, S. (2005) The Impact of Collaborative Continuing Professional Development (CPD) on Classroom Teaching and Learning – How Do Collaborative and Sustained CPD and Sustained But Not Collaborative CPD Affect Teaching and Learning? London: EPPI Centre. Critical Skills Programme (2009) http://www.criticalskills.co.uk/ accessed 18.03.2009. CT Partnership (2001) Chartered Teacher Programme: Consultation Paper 2. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Dadds, M. (1994) Bridging the gap: using the school-based project to link award-bearing INSET to school development. In H. Bradley, C. Conner, and G. Southworth (eds) Developing Teachers, Developing Schools: Making INSET Effective for the School. London: David Fulton Publishers, pp. 94–115. Daniels, H. (2001) Vygotsky and Pedagogy. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Daniels, H., Leadbetter, J., and Warmington, P. with Edwards, A., Popova, A., Apostolov, A., Middleton, D., and Brown, S. (2007) Learning in and for multi-agency working. Oxford Review of Education 33(4): 521–538. Davis, B. and Sumara, D. (2001) Learning communities: understanding the workplace as a complex system. In T. Fenwick (ed) Sociocultural Perspectives on Learning Through Work. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, No 92. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, pp. 85–95. Day, C. Sammons, P., Stobart, G., Kington, A., and Gu, Q. (2007) Teachers Matter: Connecting Lives, Work and Effectiveness. Maidenhead: Open University Press. De Laet, M. (2000) Patents, travel, space: ethnographic encounters with objects in transit. Society and Space 18: 149–168. Delanty, G. (2001) Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society. Buckingham: Open University Press.

References

189

Deleuze, G. (1994) Trans. Patton, P. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) Trans Massumi, B. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Dewey, J. (1973) My pedagogic creed. In J. McDermott (ed) The Philosophy of John Dewey. Vols 1 and 2 The Structure of Experience, The Lived Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 442–454. Diani, M. and McAdam, D. (eds) (2003) Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Driver, R. and Oldham, V. (1986) A constructivist approach to curriculum development in science. Studies in Science Education 13: 105–122. Dugdale, A. (1999) Materiality: juggling sameness and difference. In J. Law and J. Hassard (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 111–135. Dunne, J. (2005) An intricate fabric; understanding the rationality of practice. Pedagogy, Culture and Society 13(3): 367–389. Edwards, A. (2005) Relational agency: learning to be a resourceful practitioner. International Journal of Educational Research 43: 168–182. Edwards, D. (1997) Discourse and Cognition. London: Sage Publications. Edwards, R. Nicoll, K. Solomon, N., and Usher, R. (2004) Rhetoric and Educational Discourse: Persuasive Texts. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Elliot, J. (2001) Characteristics of performative cultures: their central paradoxes and limitations as resources for educational reform. In D. Gleeson and C. Husbands (eds) The Performing School. London: RoutledgeFalmer, pp. 192–211. Elmore, R. (2000) Getting to scale with good educational practice. In B. Moon, J. Butcher, and E. Bird (eds) Leading Professional Development in Education. London: RoutledgeFalmer, pp. 30–51. Engeström, Y. (1999) Activity theory and individual and social transformation. In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen, and R.-L. Punamaki (eds) Perspectives on Activity Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–38. Engestrom, Y. (2001) Expansive learning at work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualisation. Journal of Education and Work 14(1): 133–156. Engestrom, Y., Engestrom, R., and Kerusuo, H. (2003) The discursive construction of collaborative care. Applied Linguistics 24(3): 286–315. Eraut, M. (1994) Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence. London: Falmer Press. Eraut, M. (2004) Transfer of knowledge between education and workplace settings. In H. Rainbird, A. Fuller, and A. Munro (eds) Workplace Learning in Context. London: Routledge, pp. 201– 221. European Commission (2002) A European Area of Lifelong Learning. Brussels: European Commission. Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fisher, C. (1996) Managerial stances: perspectives on manager development. In J. Stewart and J. McGoldrick (eds) Human Resources Development: Perspectives, Strategies and Practice. London: Pitman Publishing, pp. 28–46. Flyvbjerg, B. (2001) Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1977, trans Sheridan, A.) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (1980) In C. Gordon (ed) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Padstow: Harvester Press. Fox, A. (2009) Leading Collaborative Professional Enquiry: Implications for Teachers, Chartered Teachers and their Managers. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Stirling. Fox, A., Drew, V., and McBride, M. (2008) Collaborating to improve learning and teaching. In J. Reeves and A. Fox (eds) Practice-Based Learning: Developing Excellence in Teaching. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, pp. 52–66.

190

References

Fullan, M. and Steigelbauer, S. (1991) The New Meaning of Educational Change (2nd edition). London: Cassell. General Teaching Council for Scotland (2003) Procedures for the Accreditation of Programmes Leading to the Award of Chartered Teacher. Edinburgh: GTCS. Gergen, K.J. (1989) Warranting voice and the elaboration. In J. Shotter and K.J. Gergen (eds) Texts of Identity. London: Sage Publications, pp. 70–81. Gewirtz, S. (2008) Give us a break! A sceptical review of contemporary discourses of lifelong learning. European Educational Research Journal 7(4): 414–424. Gewirtz, S., Mahony, P. Hextall, I., and Cribb, A. (2009) Policy, professionalism and practice: understanding and enhancing teachers’ work. In S. Gewirtz, P. Mahony, I. Hextall, and A. Cribb (eds) Changing Teacher Professionalism: International Trends, Challenges and Ways Forward. London: Routledge, pp. 3–16. Gibbons, M. Limoges, C. Nowotny, H. Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., and Trow, M. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage Publications. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. London: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. London: Polity Press. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books. Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. New York: Harper and Row. Greenwood, R., Suddaby, R., and Hinings, C.R. (2002) Theorising change: the role of professional associations in the transformation of institutional f elds. Academy of Management Journal 45(1): 58–80. Gronn, P. (2003) Leadership. Who needs it? School Leadership and Management 23(3): 267–290. Gunter, H. and Butt, G. (2007) Conclusion: whither modernisation? In G. Butt and H. Gunter (eds) Modernising Schools: People, Learning and Organizations. London: Continuum, pp. 217–244. Gutierrez, K., Rymes, B., and Larson, J. (1995) Script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom: James Brown versus Brown v. Board of Education. Harvard Educational Review 65(3): 445–471. Hammersley, M. (2000) Evidence-based practice in education and the contribution of educational research. In L. Trinder and S. Reynolds (eds) Evidence-Based Practice: A Critical Appraisal. Oxford: Blackwell Science, pp. 163–183. Haraway, D. (1991) Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective. In D. Haraway (ed) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, pp. 183–201. Hargreaves, A. (1994) Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers’ Work and Culture in a Postmodern Age. London: Cassell. Hargreaves, A. and Goodson, I. (1996). Teachers’ professional lives: aspirations and actualities. In A. Hargreaves and I. Goodson (eds) Teachers’ Professional Lives. London: Falmer Press, pp. 1–27. Hargreaves, D. (1999) The knowledge creating school. British Journal of Educational Studies 47(2): 122–144. Harris, A. and Lambert, L. (2003) Building Leadership Capacity for School Improvement. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Harvey, D. (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Urban Geographical Development. London: Verso. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (1996) How Good Is Our School? Self-Evaluation Using Performance Indicators. Edinburgh: Audit Unit. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (2000a) Quality Management in Education: Self-Evaluation for Local Authority Education Departments. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (2000b) The Quality Initiative in Scottish Schools. Edinburgh: HMI Audit Unit.

References

191

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education (2003) Planning for Improvement. Available online at: http://www.hmie.gov.uk (accessed 4 August 2006). Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Education (2002) How Good Is Our School? Self-Evaluation Using Quality Indicators, www.hmie.gov.uk. Hopkins, D., Ainscow, M., and West, M. (1994) School Improvement in an Era of Change. London: Cassell. Hoyle, E. (1974) Professionality, professionalism and control in teaching, London Educational Review 3(2): 13–19. Hoyle, E. and John, P.D. (1995) Professional Knowledge and Professional Practice. London: Continuum International. Huberman, M. (2001) Networks that alter teaching: conceptualisation, exchanges and experiments. In J. Soler, A. Craft, and H. Burgess (eds) Teacher Development: Exploring Our Own Practice. London: Paul Chapman, pp. 141–159. I’Anson, J. Reeves, J., and Hewell, C. (2008) Developing excellence in teaching: redefinin professional enquiry. In J. Reeves and A. Fox (eds) Practice-based Learning: Developing Excellence in Teaching. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. Jackson, D. and Temperley, J. (2006) From professional learning community to networked learning community. Paper presented at the School Effectiveness and Improvement Conference, Fort Lauderdale, January 3rd–6th. James, M. and Pedder, D. (2006) Beyond method: assessment and learning practices and values. The Curriculum Journal 17(2): 109–138. Jenkins, R. (1996) Social Identity. London: Routledge. Jones, A. (2002) Archaelogical Theory and Scientifi Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joyce, B. and Showers, J. (1988) Student Achievement Through Staff Development London: Longman. Kirk, G., Beveridge, W., and Smith, I. (2003) The Chartered Teacher. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Knorr-Cetina, K. (2001) Objectual practice. In T. Schatzi, K. Knorr-Cetina, and E. von Savigny (eds) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 175–188. Knowles, M.S. (1984) Andragogy in Action. San Franscisco, CA: Jossey Bass Associates. Kolb, D.A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as a Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kozulin, A. (1998) Psychological Tools. A Sociocultural Approach to Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kress, G., Jewitt, C., Ogborn, J., and Tsatsarelis, C. (2001) Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom. London: Continuum. Laclau, E. (2007) On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2nd edition). London: Verso. Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage Publications. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lave, J. (1988) Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law, J. (1994) Organising Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell.

192

References

Law, J. (1999) After ANT: complexity, naming and topology. In J. Law and J. Hassard (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–14. Law, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Leach, J. and Moon, B. (2008) The Power of Pedagogy. London: Sage Publications. Leadbeater, G. (2003) Personalisation Through Participation. London: Demos. Leat, D. and Higgins, S. (2002) The role of powerful pedagogical strategies in curriculum development. The Curriculum Journal 13(1): 71–85. Lee, A. Green, B., and Brennan, M. (2000) Organisational knowledge, professional practice and the professional doctorate at work. In J. Garrick and C. Rhodes (eds) Research and Knowledge at Work: Perspectives, Case Studies and Innovative Strategies. London: Routledge, pp. 117–135. Lefebvre, H. (1991) Trans. Nicholson-Smith, D. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Leont’ev, A.N. (1978) Activity, Consciousness and Personality. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lewin, K. (1952) Group decision and social change. In G.E. Swanson, T.N. Newcomb, and E.L. Hardley (eds) Readings in Social Psychology. New York: Holt. Lieberman, A. (1986) Collaborative work. Educational Leadership 43(5): 4–8. Lieberman, A. and Miller, L. (1999) Teachers – Transforming Their World and Their Work. New York: Teachers’ College Press. Mahony, P. and Hextall, I. (2000) Reconstructing Teaching: Standards, Performance and Accountability. London: RoutledgeFalmer. March, J.G. (1999) The Pursuit of Organisational Intelligence. London: Blackwell Business. Marsden, P.V. (2005) Recent developments in network measurement. In P.J. Carrington, J. Scott, and S. Wasserman (eds) Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 8–30. Maslow, A.H. (1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper & Row. Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage Publications. Mead, G.H. (1934) Mind, Self & Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist. Chicago: University of Chicago. Menter, I., Holligan, C., and Mthenjwa, V. (2005) Reaching the parts that need to be reached? The impact of the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship. School Leadership and Management 25(1): 7–23. Menter, I., Holligan, C., Mitherjwa, V., and Hair, M. (2003) Heading for Success: Evaluation of the Scottish Qualificatio for Headship. Paisley: University of Paisley. Mintzberg, H. (1994) The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. New York: Prentice Hall. Mische, A. (2003) Cross-talk in movements: recovering the culture-network divided. In M. Diani and D. McAdam (eds) Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 258–280. Mol, A.-M. (1999) Ontological politics. A word and some questions. In J. Law and J. Hassard (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 74–89. Mol, A.-M. (2000) Pathology and the clinic: an ethnographic presentation of two artheroscleroses. In M. Lock, A. Young and A. Cambrosio (eds) Living and Working with the New Medical Technologies: Intersections of Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 82–102. Monge, P.R. and Contractor, N.S. (2003) Theories of Communication Networks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moon, J.A. (1999) Learning Journals: A Handbook for Academics, Students and Professional Development. London: Kogan Page. Muller, C., Meuthrath, B., and Baumgrath, A. (2008) Analyzing wiki-based networks to improve knowledge processes in organisations. Journal of Universal Computer Science 14(4): 526–545. Nespor, J. (1994) Knowledge in Motion: Space, Time and Curriculum in Undergraduate Physics and Management. London: Falmer Press.

References

193

Nespor, J. (2003) Undergraduate curricula as networks and trajectories. In R. Edwards and R. Usher (eds) Space, Curriculum and Learning. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, pp. 93–108. Nespor, J. (2006) Morphologies of inquiry: the uses and spaces of paradigm proliferation. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 19(1): 115–128. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1996) Lifelong Learning for All. Paris: OECD. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2007) Quality and Equity of Schooling in Scotland. Paris: OECD. Osa, M. (2003) Networks in opposition: linking organisations through activists in the Polish People’s Republic. In M. Diani and D. McAdam (eds) Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 77–104. Padgett, J.F. and Ansell, C.K. (1993) Robust action and the rise of the Medici 1400–1434. American Journal of Sociology 98: 1259–1319. Parfitt T. (2002) The End of Development: Modernity, Post-modernity and Development. London: Pluto Press. Perls, F. Hefferline, R.F., and Goodman, P. (1951) Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. London: Souvenir Press. Phillips, L. and Jorgensen, M.W. (2002) Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London: Sage Publications. Pirkkalainen, J., and Kaatrakoski, H. (2007) Hybrid organisations. Paper presented at Making Connections: Relational Analysis, Boundary Concepts and the Future of Organisation Studies April 2nd–3rd Cardiff. Pollard, A. (2002) Reflectiv Teaching: Effective and Evidence-Informed Professional Practice. London: Continuum. Potter, J. (1996) Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction. London: Sage Publications. Potter, J. and Wetherell, M.L. (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage Publications. Priestley, M. and Sime, D. (2005) Formative assessment for all: a whole school approach to pedagogic change. The Curriculum Journal 16(2): 475–492. Ranson, S. (2008) The Changing Governance of Education. Educational Administration, Management and Leadership 36(2): 201–219. Reeves, J. (2007) Inventing the chartered teacher. British Journal of Educational Studies 55(1): 56–76. Reeves, J. and Boreham, N. (2006) What’s in a vision? Introducing an organisational learning strategy in a local authority’s education service. Oxford Review of Education 32(4): 467–486. Reeves, J. Cowie, M., Stead, J., Lewis, M., and Meiklejohn, D. (2008) Discursive discontinuities: policy development in the fiel of school governance and management in post-Devolution Scotland. British Educational Research Association Conference Edinburgh September 3rd–6th Heriot-Watt University. Reeves, J. and Forde, C. (2004) The social dynamics of changing practice. Cambridge Journal of Education 34(1): 85–102. Reeves, J., Forde, C., Casteel, V., and Lynas, D. (1998) Developing a model of practice: designing a framework for the professional development of school leaders and managers. School Leadership and Management 18(2): 203–220. Reeves, J., Forde, C., Morris, B., and Turner, E. (2003a) Culture and concepts of school leadership and management: exploring the impact of CPD on aspiring headteachers. School Leadership and Management 23(1): 5–24. Reeves, J., Forde, C., Morris, B., and Turner, E. (2003b) Social processes and work-based learning in The Scottish Qualificatio for Headship. In L. Kidd, L. Anderson, and W. Newton (eds) Leading People and Teams in Education. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, pp. 57–70.

194

References

Reeves, J. and I’Anson, J. (2006) Using continuing professional development (CPD) to assemble the means to act differently: constructing a personal ‘war machine’. European Congress of Educational Research, 13th–16th September, Geneva. Reeves, J. Turner, E., Forde, C., and Morris, B. (2005) Changing their minds: the social dynamics of school leaders’ learning. Cambridge Journal of Education 35(2): 253–273. Rogers, C.R. (1969) Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become. Columbus, OH: C.E. Merrill Pub. Co. Rose, N. (1991) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sachs, J. (2003) The Activist Teaching Profession. Buckingham: Open University Press. Satterthwaite, D. (2003) The Millennium Development Goals and urban poverty reduction: great expectations and nonsense statistics. Environment and Urbanisation 15(2): 181–192. Schein, E. (1992) Organizational Culture and Leadership (2nd edition). San Francisco: JosseyBass Publishers. Schon, D.A. (1983) The Reflectiv Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. London: Temple Books. Schwandt, T.A. (2005) On modelling our understanding of the practice f elds. Pedagogy, Culture and Society 13(3): 313–332. Scott, J. (2000) Social Network Analysis: A Handbook (2nd edition). London: Sage. Scottish Credit and Qualification Framework Board (2004) Scottish Credit and Qualification Framework Handbook. Edinburgh: SCQF. Scottish Executive (2000a) Standards in Scottish Schools etc. Act. Edinburgh: SE. Scottish Executive (2000b) A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century: The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Professional Conditions of Service for Teachers. Edinburgh: SE. Scottish Executive (2001) A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century: The Agreement Following the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Professional Conditions of Service for Teachers. Edinburgh: SE. Scottish Executive (2002) Standard for Chartered Teacher. Edinburgh: SE. Scottish Executive (2004) A Curriculum for Excellence. Edinburgh: SE. Scottish Executive (2005) The Standard for Headship. Edinburgh: SE. Scottish Government (2007) The Crerar Review: The Report of the Independent Review of Regulation, Audit, Inspection and Complaints Handling of Public Services in Scotland. Edinburgh: SG. Scottish Offic Education and Industry Department (1998a) New Community Schools Prospectus. Edinburgh: Scottish Off ce. Scottish Offic Education and Industry Department (1998b) The Standard for Headship in Scotland. Edinburgh: Scottish Off ce. Scottish Offic Education and Industry Department (1999) Targeting Excellence: Modernising Scotland’s Schools. Edinburgh: The Stationery Office Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. New York: Currency Doubleday. Shadbolt, N. and Berners-Lee, T. (2008) Web Science Emerges. Scientifi American, October, pp. 60–65. Shotter, J. (1989) Social accountability and the social construction of “you”. In J. Shotter and K.J. Gergen (eds) Texts of Identity. London: Sage Publications, pp. 133–151. Simpson, M., Gooday, M., and Payne, F. (2000) SQH Programme Evaluation: The Role of the Supporter and the Effects on School. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh and Northern College. Sinclair, J. and Coulthard, M. (1992) Towards an analysis of discourse. In M. Coulthard (ed) Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Skidmore, D. (2006) Pedagogy and dialogue. Cambridge Journal of Education 36(4): 503–514.

References

195

Soja, F.W. (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Soja, E.W. (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Spillane, J.P. and Sherer, J.Z, (2004) A distributed perspective on school leadership. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Association, San Diego. Stenhouse, L. (1975) An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. London: Heinneman Educational Publishers. Stierer, B. (2000) School teachers’ writing at university: what kind of knowledge is at stake? Teacher Development 4(2): 199–221. Strauss, A.L. (1997) Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Stronach, I., Corbin, B., McNamara, O., Stark, S., and Warne, T. (2002) Towards an uncertain politics of professionalism: teacher and nurse identities in f ux. Journal of Educational Policy 17(1): 109–138. Tell, F. (2004) What do organisations know? Dynamics of justificatio contexts in R&D activities. Organization 11(4): 443–471. Tripp, D. (1993) Critical Incidents in Teaching: Developing Professional Judgement. London: Routledge. Trow, M. (1994) Managerialism and Control, Quality Support Centre Higher Education Report No 2. London: Open University Press. Tsoukas, H. (2005) Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organisational Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van de Ven, H. and Poole, M.S. (2005) Alternative approaches for studying organisational change. Organisational Studies 26(9): 1377–1404. Vygotsky, L.S. (1962) In E. Hanfmann and G. Vakar (eds) Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walker, M. (2006) Higher Education Pedagogies. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Wasko, M.M., Farj, S., and Teigland, R. (2004) Collective action and knowledge contribution in electronic networks of practice. Journal of the Association for Information Systems 5(11–12): 495–513. Weick, K.E. (1995) Sensemaking in Organisations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, J.V. (1998) Mind as Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson A.L. and Cavero R.M. (2003) A geography of power, identity and difference in adult education curriculum practice. In R. Edwards and R. Usher (eds) Space, Curriculum and Learning. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, pp. 123–138. Wodak, R. (2000) Recontextualisation and the transformation of meanings: a critical discourse analysis of decision making in EU meetings about employment policies. In S. Sarangi and M. Coulthard (eds) Discourse and Social Life. London: Longman, pp. 185–206. Woods, P.E. (1983) Sociology and the School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Woodward, K. (2002) Understanding Identity. London: Arnold.

Author Index

A Ackoff, R., 55 Adey, P., 88–89 Alexander, R., 110 Ansell, C. K., 27 Argyris, C., 162 B Bakhtin, M. M., 101, 137, 172 Barad, K., 179–180, 183 Barnett, R., 186 Baron, R. S., 23 Beach, K., 106, 159 Berger, P. L., 26, 62, 99 Luckman, T., 26–27, 99 Bergson, H., 26 Bernstein, B., 37, 64, 112, 176 Black, P. J., 1 Boreham, N., 42, 150 Borum, F., 46, 80 Bottery, M., 39 Boud, D., 137–138 Bourdieu, P., 34 Brandes, D., 11 Brown, S., 86 Bruner, J., 108 Burroughs, R., 92 Butler, J., 182 C Campbell, A., 2 Carrington, P. J., 27, 30 Castells, M., 184 Cavero R. M., 128 Chappell, C., 92 Chouliaraki, L., 40, 111 Clarke, J., 15, 49 Contractor, N. S. 30, 159 Cooren, F., 48

Cordingley, P., 87 Coulthard, M., 112 D Dadds, M., 80, 99 Daniels, H., 20, 24 Davis, B., 88 Day, C., 86–87 De Laet, M., 25, 30, 159 Deleuze, G., 26, 100 Dewey, J., 21, 109 Diani, M., 30 Driver, R., 1 Dugdale, A., 125 Dunne, J., 29 E Edwards, A., 160 Edwards, D., 29, 62, 112 Edwards, R., 145 Elliot, J., 131 Elmore, R., 37 Engestrom, R., 23–25, 46, 80, 173 Engestrom, Y., 23–25, 46, 80, 173, 175 Eraut, M., 2, 86, 144, 160–161 F Fairclough, N., 40, 47, 61, 111 Fisher, C., 97 Flyvbjerg, B., 86, 159 Forde, C., 100 Foucault, M., 60, 112 Fox, A., 132, 137 Fullan, M., 23, 35, 98 G Gergen, K. J., 26–27, 147 Gewirtz, S., 112, 136 Gibbons, M., 86 197

198 Giddens, A., 25, 29, 161 Ginnis, P., 1 Goffman, E., 26, 62, 125 Goodson, I., 86–87 Greenwood, R., 29 Gronn, P., 148 Guattari, F., 100 Gutierrez, K., 58 H Hammersley, M., 185 Haraway, D., 30, 46, 179 Hargreaves, A., 88 Hargreaves, D., 149, 86–87 Harris, A., 148 Harvey, D., 58 Hextall, I., 29 Higgins, S., 87 Hopkins, D., 2 Hoyle, E., 136, 158 Huberman, M., 86 I I’Anson, J. 137

Author Index Lefebvre, H., 58 Leont’ev, A. N., 21, 23, 64, 100 Lewin, K., 23 Lieberman, A., 2, 87 Luckman, T., 26, 62, 99 M Mahony, P., 29 March, J. G., 159 Marsden, P. V., 61 Massey, D., 26 McAdam, D., 30 McIntyre, D., 86 Mead, G. H., 109 Menter, I., 76, 103 Miller, L., 87 Mintzberg, H., 23 Mische, A., 27–28 Mol, A. M., 25, 173 Monge, P. R., 30, 159 Moon, B., 110 Moon, J. A., 125 Mouffe, C., 40 Muller, C., 27, 176

J Jackson, D., 176 James, M., 87 Jenkins, R., 26–27 John, P. D., 158 Jones, A., 41 Joyce, B., 1, 86

N Nespor, J., 26, 31, 40, 168 Newman, J., 15, 49

K Kaatrakoski, H., 24 Kerr, N. L., 23 Kirk, G., 135 Knorr-Cetina, K., 153, 184 Knowles, M. S., 109 Kolb, D. A., 161 Kozulin, A., 109 Kress, G., 57, 127

P Padgett, J. F., 27 Parf tt, T., 37 Pedder, D., 87 Perls, F., 109 Phillips, L., 28 Pirkkalainen, J., 24 Pollard, A., 127 Poole, M. S., 60 Potter, J., 28, 40, 138, 144

L Laclau, E., 40–41, 134 Lambert, L. 148 Lash, S., 159 Latour, B., 25, 27, 47, 120, 138, 160 Lave, J., 22, 35–36, 105, 112, 148, 159 Law, J., 25, 31, 89 Leach, J., 110 Leadbeater, G., 109 Leat, D., 87 Lee, A., 137

O Oldham, V., 1 Osa, M., 27

R Ranson, S., 109 Reeves, J., 16, 41–42, 78, 91–92, 99–100, 137, 152, 183 Rogers, C. R., 109 Rose, N., 37, 101, 109, 184 S Sachs, J., 118, 135 Satterthwaite, D., 37

Author Index Schein, E., 92, 109 Schon, D., 162 Schon, D. A., 86 Schwandt, T. A., 86 Scott, J., 27, 30 Senge, P., 23 Shadbolt, N., 28 Sherer, J. Z, 86 Shotter, J., 99 Showers, J., 1, 86 Simpson, M., 103 Sinclair, J., 112 Skidmore, D., 88 Soja, F. W., 80 Solomon, N., 137–138 Spillane, J. P., 86 Steigelbauer, S., 23, 35 Stierer, B., 144 Strauss, A. L., 22–24 Stronach, I., 130–131 Sumara, D., 88 T Tell, F., 144, 147 Temperley, J., 176

199 Tripp, D., 149 Trow, M., 41 Tsoukas, H., 149 U Urry, J., 159 V Van de Ven, H., 60 Vygotsky, L. S., 103, 109 W Wasko, M. M., 176 Weick, K. E., 29, 44–45, 90, 158 Wenger, E., 22, 105, 173 Wertsch, J. V., 101 Wilson A. L., 128 Wodak, R., 28, 48 Woods, P. E., 111 Woodward, K., 62

Subject Index

A Accelerated route, 11, 57, 67, 71, 73–76 Accountability, 115, 162 Accounting, 23, 29, 102–103, 112–113, 142, 158, 180 Accounts of practice, 90–91, 101, 108 Actant, 24–25, 31, 40, 47, 58, 64, 66, 70, 75, 82, 104, 120, 127, 145, 151–153, 158, 161–162, 174, 180–183 Action learning projects, 66, 74, 89 research, 2, 5, 23, 36, 44, 48, 49, 120 Active learning, 121, 135 Activist, 35, 135 Activity sets, 26, 43, 45–47, 49–51, 63, 65–66, 69, 72, 80, 82, 105–106, 114–115, 119, 123–124, 128–129, 140, 151, 161, 165, 176, 180–181, 183 Activity theory, 7, 19, 22–24, 31 Actor network theory, 7, 19, 22, 24–25 Affiliation 28, 128, 150–151, 184 Agency, 3–4, 8, 16, 32, 36, 64, 81, 86, 103, 107–108, 110–114, 120, 127, 130–154, 158, 168, 181–184 Alignment, 44, 52, 63, 103, 150 Amplification 83, 132, 181–182 Andragogy, 109, 111, 161 Artefacts, 14, 16–18, 20–21, 25, 27, 29, 34, 38, 40–41, 43–44, 48, 51–55, 58, 60–66, 69, 72, 74–75, 78–79, 86, 88, 91, 102, 104–105, 113–115, 117, 119, 121–123, 125, 128–131, 137, 139–141, 144, 158–159, 162, 164–165, 168, 170, 173–174, 182 Artefactual arrays, 62, 64, 104 Artefactual f ows, 75, 114, 164–165

Assignments, 16, 64, 70, 78, 90, 104, 120, 123–124, 126–127, 133, 139–140, 144, 146, 148, 163, 167, 170–171, 173 Assimilative pedagogic strategies, 7 Asynchronous, 67 Audience, 29, 44, 90, 99, 133, 138–139, 141, 144, 146, 151, 171, 173, 175 Authorship, 43, 46, 90, 101, 137, 172 Autonomy, 47, 55, 93, 110–112, 115–116, 132, 134, 136, 151, 154, 181 B Boundaries, 5, 15, 18, 23, 29–31, 37–38, 55, 63, 66, 80, 82, 110, 112, 130, 136, 172–174, 176, 179–182, 185–186 Boundary crossing, 24, 46, 161 Bureaucratic, 46, 181 Bureau professionalism, 49, 136 C Change management, 37, 80 Change processes, 31–32, 151, 181 Chartered teacher (CT), 9, 71, 77, 83, 107, 113–115, 117–119, 121–124, 125–129, 131, 133–140, 144, 149, 151–152, 157, 163–164, 167–171, 174, 181–183 Cognitive, 20, 36, 87, 100, 107, 109, 115, 152, 181 Cohort learning space, 8, 68–72, 74–75, 77–78, 104, 121–122, 126, 129–130, 133, 139–140, 145, 150–151, 184 Collaborative, 2, 8–9, 21–23, 31, 46, 74, 78–79, 81, 87–88, 117–118, 121, 123–124, 126, 129, 133, 137, 139, 141–143, 148–150, 152, 169–171, 173–174, 176, 182–185 Collaborative enquiry, 141, 150, 182, 184 201

202 Collaborative projects, 8, 78, 141, 143 Collegiality, 88, 96–97, 100, 105 Community of practice, 22–23, 36, 105, 136, 173, 184 Competence, 14, 22, 37, 66, 78, 89, 91, 109, 111, 130, 148, 151, 162–163, 172, 174–176 Complexity, 4, 6, 9, 17, 24, 29, 55, 80, 86, 88, 127, 179–182, 186 Contagious pedagogic strategy, 38, 51–54, 57, 78, 111, 124, 133, 161 Contestation, 31, 33, 37–38, 41, 47, 52, 55–56, 77, 79, 99, 105, 134, 136, 149 Contexts, 2–3, 9, 17, 21–22, 26–28, 33, 52, 56, 62, 77, 79–80, 85–90, 98–100, 102–107, 109–110, 124, 127, 131, 133–134, 136–138, 142, 144, 147–150, 157–162, 169, 171–173, 181–182, 184, 186 Contextuality, 2, 88, 98, 103, 106, 158 Contingency, 98–100, 179 Craigton Council, 42–43, 52–54, 65 D Design, 7–8, 14, 35–36, 43, 49, 52, 57, 67, 71, 74, 77, 81, 89–90, 106–107, 113–115, 117, 121–124, 127, 139, 152, 157, 170, 173, 175 Developmental, 7–8, 24, 33, 36–38, 41, 49, 51, 55, 57, 63, 67, 74, 77, 100, 106, 111–112, 114, 128, 130, 157, 161, 175–176, 182, 185 Developmentalism, 37, 128, 161, 185 Developmental pedagogic strategy, 57, 77, 111 Dialect, 21, 40–41, 44, 47, 50, 55, 80, 118, 152, 184 Disciplinary governance, 120–121 Disciplinary knowledge, 138 Discourse analysis, 19, 26, 30, 41 Duration, 26, 34, 59–61, 64–65, 69, 74 Durational map, 11, 57, 67–74, 122, 140, 164 Durational mapping, 8–9, 59–67, 74, 81, 107, 172, 179–180 Dynamics, 6, 11, 13, 17, 30, 32, 77, 106, 158 Dynamism, 6, 24, 103 E Educating, 2–9, 11, 13–61, 63–64, 66–67, 71, 74, 77–83, 85, 99, 105–115, 117, 119, 127, 129–130, 132–133, 138, 148, 152–154, 157, 160, 162, 168, 177, 179–180, 182, 184–185

Subject Index Educating activity, 3, 8, 11, 33, 39, 54, 83, 99, 106, 117, 133, 148, 153, 168, 180 Educating strategy, 51 Educating system, 4–5, 7–9, 11, 13–41, 49, 53–55, 57–59, 67, 71, 74, 81, 106–108, 114, 152, 154, 160, 177, 179–180, 184 Educators, 3–9, 18, 33–36, 38–39, 53, 55, 81, 83, 103, 105–113, 115, 117, 119–124, 129–131, 152–153, 179, 184 Embodiment, 121, 153 Empirical, 4, 8, 11, 13, 22, 24–25, 28–29, 41, 67, 88, 118, 144 Enacted social spaces, 100–103 Enaction, 26–27, 44–45, 52, 76, 99–104, 106, 123, 128–129, 131, 150, 153, 161, 181–182 Event analysis, 8, 11, 57–62, 81, 172, 180 Expansion, 23, 47, 174, 177 Externalisation, 100 F Field of activity, 14–15, 24, 32–41, 54–55 Flows, 59, 65–66, 69, 72, 75, 80, 86, 114, 122, 140–141, 164–165 Forgetting, 173–174 Future-storied space, 103 G General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), 114–115, 117, 119, 151, 167–168 Genre, 28–29, 31, 39, 44, 64, 90, 120, 152, 162, 167, 172 Governance, 14, 48, 56, 64, 66, 114, 120, 130–131 H ‘Hard’ managerialism, 41, 47, 49, 51, 135 Hegemony, 55, 177, 184 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education, 135 Higher education, 7, 9, 114, 157, 179, 185 Horizontal section, 33, 55 Hub, 107–132, 164, 181 Hybridity, 9, 77–80, 128, 130, 157, 173, 175 Hybrid pedagogy, 83, 106–107 Hybrid system, 24, 58, 67, 133, 157–177 I Ideational, 2, 14, 24, 28, 39–41, 52, 59, 126, 171 Identification 15, 41, 64, 106, 112, 164, 175, 180–184

Subject Index Identity formation, 131, 181, 184 position, 104, 106, 131 Imaginary space, 58–59, 67 Imagined social space, 102–103 Individual learning space, 83, 121–123, 126, 129, 133 In-folding, 100–102, 104 Institutional, 14, 37–38, 61, 120, 167, 184–186 Institutionalisation, 29, 113, 131, 168 Intentionality, 3, 8, 34, 107, 112–113, 153, 181–182 Interactive space, 66 Interference, 8, 24, 31, 54–55, 58, 63, 66, 75, 77–80, 89–90, 129, 153, 161, 168, 183–184 Internalisation, 20, 100, 104 Interrelationships, 3, 5–6, 19, 115, 143 Intertextuality, 30, 137 Invasive pedagogic strategy, 77 J Justification 29, 44, 46, 52, 60, 138, 142–144, 146, 149, 158 K Knowledge creation, 9, 23–24, 32, 41, 76, 83, 130, 136, 142, 151, 153, 157–177, 184–186 exchange, 8, 163, 169, 172–173, 175, 183–184 transfer, 2, 105, 130, 149, 159, 169 L Language, 2, 14, 20–21, 25, 27, 39, 41, 44, 61, 80, 92, 100–101, 104, 112–113, 115–116, 120, 129, 137–138, 143, 147, 150, 152, 158, 160, 166 Leadership, 3, 14, 44, 74, 76, 79, 91, 92, 94, 96–100, 102, 116, 120, 134–136, 148 Learning journal, 121, 123–127, 129–130, 142–144, 147 Learning space, 2, 8, 57–83, 85, 104, 121–123, 125–126, 128–130, 133, 139–140, 145, 150–151, 157, 184 Legitimating, 54, 142, 181 Lifelong learning, 36, 40, 109, 111–112, 116, 120, 128, 130 Local discourse, 18, 39–41, 54 Location, 15–16, 19, 22, 25–27, 30–31, 33, 38, 40, 58, 60–61, 64–66, 69, 74, 80, 105, 110, 113, 116, 126, 128–129, 136, 152, 159

203 M Managerialism, 37, 40–41, 47, 50–51, 112, 135–136, 183 Map, 7, 11, 33, 48–52, 57, 60, 65, 67–80, 114, 117, 122, 139–141, 164–165, 180 Mapping, 7–9, 11–32, 48, 54–55, 57–80, 107, 152, 164, 172, 174, 179–180 Materiality, 4, 11, 25, 30, 163 Material space, 26, 58–59 Matrix, 3, 5–6, 30, 49, 52, 55, 132, 158 Mediated learning, 20–22 Micropolitical, 144 Mobility, 25, 158–161, 163, 172, 180 Motivation, 86, 101, 119, 150 Movement, 2–3, 8, 17, 22, 24–27, 30, 34, 36, 38, 40–41, 47, 57, 59, 65–66, 70, 80–81, 99, 112, 121, 126, 130, 133, 141, 145, 157, 159, 175, 180, 184 N Narrative, 3–4, 9, 11, 18, 31–32, 34, 43, 60, 85, 90, 99, 102, 142, 144, 168, 174 Networked systems, 6, 28, 30–31, 33, 40, 49, 54, 60, 127, 130–131, 153, 166–168, 174, 180 Networks, 2, 5, 19, 25, 27–28, 30, 42, 48, 54, 56, 113, 130, 154, 169, 176–177, 184 O Object, 5–6, 13–14, 18, 21–24, 27, 31–34, 38–39, 42–44, 46, 48, 58–59, 63–65, 80, 89, 128, 163, 172, 174–175, 179, 181–183, 185 Occupational standards, 2, 14, 29, 90, 113, 130 Order of discourse, 7, 39–41, 50 Organisational learning, 11, 19, 23, 29, 33, 37, 41–43, 45–48, 50, 65, 77, 161, 183, 187 P Participation, 22, 31, 43, 47, 59, 61–62, 64, 75, 82, 93–95, 99, 101, 105, 118, 126, 133, 141, 150, 152, 166, 172–173, 177 Past-storied space, 103 Patterning of space, 18, 57, 67 Pedagogic devices, 8, 52, 80, 107, 111, 130, 148 Pedagogic knowledge, 18, 83, 108, 110 Pedagogic strategies, 2, 7, 33, 35, 63, 114, 128, 176 Pedagogy, 2, 8, 29, 67, 74, 77, 83, 86, 106–132, 150, 174–175

204 Performance, 4, 8, 11, 13, 17, 25–26, 29, 32, 36, 40–41, 43, 46, 55, 59–61, 66, 72–73, 76, 81, 83, 92, 99–100, 107, 109, 113, 115–116, 122, 127–132, 134, 137, 140, 144, 148, 152–153, 157–162, 167, 173–175, 177, 180–183, 185 Performance of space, 8, 26, 32, 59–60, 72–73, 83, 122, 148, 153 Personalisation, 109, 112 Political, 2–3, 7–8, 23, 29–31, 33, 37–39, 41, 43, 45, 48, 54, 63, 78–79, 87, 91, 98–100, 105, 118–119, 134, 136–137, 144, 149, 158, 162, 170, 175, 177, 184 Portfolios, 14, 16, 66, 79, 90–91, 139, 152 Postgraduate programmes, 2, 8, 11, 15 Power, 3–4, 8, 15–16, 19, 21, 23, 27, 29–30, 34, 38–41, 45, 47, 52, 54, 60, 64, 80–83, 88, 93–95, 99, 101, 103, 105, 110–113, 119–120, 123, 125, 127–132, 134, 138, 144, 146–149, 151–154, 162, 173, 177, 180–184 Practical knowledge, 86, 109, 129, 153, 159–160 Practice -based educating systems, 7, 11, 18, 71 -based learning, 2, 8, 14, 17, 67, 79, 81, 83, 85–91, 118, 121, 138 -based programmes, 3, 77, 89–91, 107, 137–138, 184 Procedural artefacts, 174 Processual, 11, 60 Production of space, 32, 152 Professional development, 1–3, 5–6, 13–14, 36, 45, 78, 83, 85–89, 101, 103, 106, 112–113, 117, 146, 149, 153, 176, 181, 185 Professional enquiry, 113, 116–117, 124, 163–165, 168–170, 173–174, 176 Professionalism, 39, 41, 44, 47, 49, 93, 97, 110, 116, 118, 120–121, 123–124, 129, 131, 134–137, 139, 171, 175 Professional learning, 1–9, 11, 13, 55, 81, 83, 85, 87–89, 101–102, 106, 149, 153, 163, 173, 175–177, 179–184, 186 Professional networks, 176 Projection, 64, 101–102, 153, 161, 182 Projective thinking, 102–103 Publishing, 45, 164, 166–168, 171, 173, 175–177, 184–185 Q Quality assurance, 41–42, 46–48, 51–52, 54, 114, 130, 135–136, 164, 166–169, 171, 173, 182

Subject Index R Re-bundling, 52, 83, 152–153, 182 Re-contextualisation, 48, 51–52, 55, 100–101, 131, 151, 157, 159, 181 Reflection 14, 21, 88, 91, 96, 100–103, 116, 124, 146, 148, 151, 157–158, 160–162, 170, 175 Reflect ve practice, 36, 49, 120, 123, 125–127, 129, 144 Reflect ve reports, 138–141, 146, 152 Refl xivity, 9, 55, 83, 105, 121, 129, 149, 151, 157–177, 183 Regulatory discourse, 111–112 Relational map, 7, 33, 48–51, 54–55, 57, 59–60, 67, 74, 114, 117, 141, 165, 182 Relational practice, 8–9, 13, 83, 179–181 Relational space, 6–8, 11, 57–60, 74–81, 85, 102 Relays, 28, 33–56, 67, 83, 101, 107–132, 151–152, 154, 165, 168, 181–184 Resources, 8, 15, 25, 32, 40, 45, 47, 52, 55, 70, 74, 77, 81, 83, 86–87, 105, 113, 121, 130–131, 133, 136–137, 141–142, 148–154, 166, 172, 175–176, 181–183 Rhetorical devices, 144 S School improvement plan, 46, 52, 70, 74 School improvement project, 69 Schooling, 7–8, 20, 33, 36–38, 40, 57, 63, 67, 74, 77, 106, 108–112, 114, 130, 133, 146, 150, 159, 175–176 School learning space, 69–70, 72–75, 76, 78, 83, 85, 104 Scottish Executive, 15, 42, 46, 49, 76, 114, 117, 135 Scottish Qualificatio for Headship (SQH), 2, 13–18, 57 Self, 23, 35, 37, 40, 85–106, 109, 116, 121, 124, 126–128, 130, 135, 143–144, 147, 162, 176, 184 Self actualisation, 37, 40, 109, 162 Self-assessment, 143 Sense making, 3, 14–15, 17–20, 24, 28, 33, 39, 43, 45, 51, 91, 100, 102, 138 Shared identity, 128, 153 Signifiers 41, 105, 119, 134 Situated learning, 7, 19, 22–23, 25, 31, 35, 105 Social dynamics, 81, 106, 181 Social space, 8, 16–17, 25–27, 30, 38, 57, 63, 65, 80, 88, 100, 102–105, 132, 160, 162 Social structures, 27, 32

Subject Index ‘Soft’ managerialism, 136, 183 Space, 2–9, 16–19, 25–34, 36, 38–39, 45, 47–48, 50, 52, 54–55, 57–82, 85–106, 111, 121–123, 125–126, 128–134, 139–141, 145, 147–153, 157–158, 160–162, 164–177, 180, 182–184 Spatial, 3, 6, 8–9, 17, 19, 25–26, 31–32, 38, 57–60, 65, 67–74, 76–77, 80–81, 106, 173, 176, 180, 183, 186 Spatial interference, 77–79 Spatiality, 8, 25–26, 58–60 Spatial practice, 17, 19, 58, 76 Spatio-temporal mapping, 28 Standard for Chartered Teacher (SCT), 113–114, 116, 118, 126–127, 135, 138–140, 169 Standard for Headship (SfH), 3, 5, 14, 64, 70–71, 78, 90, 92, 104, 137 Standard operating procedures, 16, 47, 105, 114, 119, 167 Standard route, 11, 57, 66–67, 71–72, 74, 76, 77–78, 83, 85, 90–91, 129 Standards, 2–3, 5, 11, 14, 16, 29, 36, 39, 41, 47, 53, 57, 64, 66–67, 70–72, 74–78, 83, 85–86, 90–92, 104–105, 113–114, 116, 118–119, 126–127, 129–130, 134–140, 167, 169, 175, 185–186 Structuration, 17, 27–28, 32, 41, 110, 149, 185 Synchronous, 28, 55, 67, 74, 165

205 T Text (s), 7–9, 14, 16, 24, 28–29, 40–41, 43–48, 51–52, 57, 59, 61, 64, 69–70, 74, 76, 79, 81, 90–100, 102, 104, 114–116, 119–120, 123, 125, 133–135, 137–139, 141–142, 144–145, 147, 150, 153, 157–161, 163–164, 166, 169–170 Textual artefacts, 41, 60 Theoretical knowledge, 86 Theorisation, 29, 76, 149–150, 152 Third space, 8, 58, 78–80, 83, 85, 99, 102–105, 130, 167, 183 Tools, 7, 11, 13–14, 16–18, 20–22, 24–27, 30, 33, 46, 49, 59–67, 75, 77, 79, 81, 85, 89, 100–101, 104, 106, 112, 120, 123, 125–126, 129, 133, 139, 144, 158–159, 172, 180 Trajectory, 2, 4, 19, 24–25, 31, 169–171, 180 Transmission points, 33, 50–51, 55, 83, 167–168, 181 Trans-organisational, 184–185 V Vertical section, 60 W Warrant, 30, 45, 47, 87, 100, 129, 137, 141–142, 152, 158, 171, 181 Work-based, 2, 15, 67, 75, 78, 139, 161, 169 Work process knowledge, 150