Pedagogies and policy: issues of teacher practices and professionalism

1. Pedagogies and policy: issues of teacher practices and professionalism C-TRIP Series, 5 July 2005 Bob Lingard, University of Sheffield

2. Contextual frames • Schools: modernist institutions linked to ‘imagined community of the nation’; particular history of mass schooling systems and teachers’ work. • All challenged by globalization: organisationally, epistemologically, teachers’ work and definitions of professionalism. • Pedagogies: a concept to take back for teacher professionalism within the ‘totally pedagogised society’. • Be speculative in these contexts BUT draw on research, but see research as informing NOT determining policy and practice. • Individual and collective teacher politics required to struggle around the issues raised.

3. Structure of presentation • Curriculum, pedagogies, assessment need to be central to teacher professional identities. • Systemic policy operates with different logics of practice to that of classroom professionals. • Systemic policy is important, but need trust and some professional space for teachers. • Quality teacher practices central to successful schools and systems.

4. Pedagogies: the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS) (1998-2001) • Teachers interviewed in study: first conversation about pedagogy in their professional careers. • Need for explicitness about pedagogies, but two-edged sword: systemic policies – technise, control and de-professionalise. • Talk and policy frames about curriculum and assessment, not pedagogy. • Recognition of symbiotic relationship between the three message systems. • Significance of policy frames: discursively. • Significance of teacher conceptions of their work and sense of responsibility and collective effects. • Significance of teacher threshold knowledges.

5. Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study • Newmann’s ‘Authentic Pedagogy’ • Higher order thinking • Depth of knowledge and understanding • Substantive conversation • Connectedness to the world beyond the classroom. • QSRLS Productive Pedagogies represent a refinement and expansion of these elements to a 20 item pedagogical mapping instrument, which mapped pedagogies on 4 dimensions.

6. Dimensions of productive pedagogies

7. Findings • A lot of social support: teachers as caring professionals. • Not enough intellectual demand, connectedness and working with and valuing difference. • Differences across curriculum areas. • Differences across year levels. • Too much curriculum content? • Non-alignment of assessment practices (particularly in primary schools). • Need for greater teacher assessment literacy; need for teacher networks within and across schools.

8. Where and why did we find good assessment practices in the QSRLS? • Pedagogies in Year Two: Teacher Professional Learning Communities • Senior Years: Teacher Professional Learning Communities

9. Queensland assessment practices: the senior years • In place for more than 30 years. • Includes all schools, both government and non-government. • Administration, research, development of system dependent upon a statutory authority: Queensland Studies Authority. • No public examination; system based on teacher professional judgments; builds within and across school teacher professional learning communities. • School-based, teacher moderated. • Use of Core Skills Test (based on Common Curriculum Elements) in final moderation process for selection and equity purposes; positive effects on pedagogies.

10. New Basics curriculum organisers

11. The three message systems

12. Competing logics of practice: systemic policy and teachers in classrooms • Bourdieu: social arrangement consists of a hierarchy of multiple, relatively autonomous fields with their own logics of practice, hierarchies of positions, players and strategies. • Educational policy as field versus schools and classrooms as field. • Educational policy field: affected by: field of journalism, economics, new public management, globalised.

13. Logics of practice of policy production • Ranson (2003): neo-liberal regime of accountability – leads to increasing specification and reaches into the pedagogic core of teachers’ work. • Hartley (2003): disjunction between policy framing of pedagogies and society in which young people will live and work. • Ball (1999): ‘struggle for the soul of the teacher’: constructed as a pedagogic technician responsive to externally imposed goals and indicators – ‘the archetypal postmodern teacher, defined by depthlessness, transparency and spectacle’. • NSW: Quality Teaching in NSW Public Schools (2003). • Queensland: implementation of productive pedagogies.

14. Significance of policy • Policy findings from QSRLS. • Social justice and redistributive funding. • Assessment practices in Queensland. • Assessment is for Learning project in Scotland. • Trust and space for teacher action: set against a moral economy of mis-trust (du Gay, 2000; Clarke, 2004). • Multiple foci for a politics around a new teacher professionalism.

15. Other readings • Hayes, D., Mills, M., Christie, P. and Lingard, B. (2005) Teachers and Schooling Making a Difference (Sydney, Allen and Unwin). • Lingard, B. (2005) ‘Socially Just Pedagogies in Changing Times’ , International Studies in Sociology of Education, Vol 15, No 2. • Lingard, B., Hayes, D. and Mills, M. (2003) ‘Teachers and Productive Pedagogies: contextualising, conceptualising, utilising’, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Vol 11, No 3, pp. 399-424. • Lingard, B., Hayes, D., Mills, M. and Christie, P. (2003) Leading Learning: Making Hope Practical in Schools (Buckingham, Open University Press).

16. Research reports The Queensland School Reform LongitudinalStudy (2001), Brisbane, Queensland Government, Education Queensland. The Queensland School Reform LongitudinalStudy: Supplementary Material (2001), Brisbane, Queensland Government, Education Queensland.