Adam Lefstein

Changing Classroom Practice Through the English National Literacy Strategy: A Micro-Interactional Perspective

How and why is national policy translated into interactions between teachers and pupils? This article examines the enactment of the English National Literacy Strategy (NLS) in a case study of two literacy lessons, which are drawn from a yearlong ethnographic study of the NLS in one school. Although the teacher taught directly from and adhered closely to the prescribed materials, curricular contents were recontextualized into habitual classroom interactional genres, and the open questions that constituted the primary aim of the lesson were suppressed. In explaining these enactment patterns, the author supplements analysis of teacher knowledge and policy support with consideration of conditions of teacher engagement with the policy and the durability of interactional genres, rooted in pupil collusion and habitus.

How not to reason with PISA data: an ironic investigation

International comparative testing, such as the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), has considerable impact on policy-makers, the media and the general public. A central assumption underlying PISA is that global variation in students’ academic performance is attributable to national educational structures and policies. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the problematic nature of this assumption. Rather than critiquing it from the outside, we turn the tools, data and presumptions of the current discourse of international comparisons upon themselves, showing that this assumption is refuted by analysis of immigrant student test scores. Data from the PISA 2009 tests show that Chinese immigrant students in New Zealand and Australia achieve math scores that are more similar to those of students in Shanghai than to their non-immigrant Australian and New Zealand peers. Thus, cultural background appears to be more consequential for the educational attainment of Chinese immigrant students than exposure to the educational systems of Australia or New Zealand. We discuss limitations of our analysis, using them as basis to discuss the shortcomings of PISA more generally.

Thinking about the technical and the personal in teaching

This article is about current discourse regarding teaching and its regulation and reform. I argue that underlying most positions in current debates are two competing visions of teaching—one technical and the other personal. Technical teaching is manifested in recent developments in English education—for example, the National Curriculum, National Primary Strategy, accountability measures, and the drive for evidence‐based practice. Advocates of personal teaching tend to oppose these developments, which they see as ‘deprofessionalising’ teachers and ‘dehumanising’ educational relationships. I explore these two competing visions, examining their assumptions and assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Technical teaching and personal teaching are manifestations of broader worldviews, which I call instrumental rationality and experiential wisdom, respectively. Each vision captures critical aspects of teaching, yet each is also partial and problematic: teaching cannot and should not be reduced to either. Moreover, seeing the world in terms of one vision often blinds us to the realities and possibilities revealed by the other. When discourse is polarized between these two visions, conceptions of teaching methods and expertise are distorted, and critical questions regarding the interaction of teachers and teaching methods are eclipsed. I conclude the article with an illustration of how technical and personal teaching could be integrated in the design of curricular materials.

Thinking Power and Pedagogy Apart— Coping With Discipline in Progressivist School Reform

This article suggests that failure of progressivist school reforms is due in part to inadequate treatment of the relationship between pedagogy and classroom control. Traditional teaching techniques and disciplinary technologies coincided. Progressivist teaching methods undermined traditional disciplinary structures, without proposing an alternative classroom supervision theory. This study examines the way schools in a current, Israeli progressivist school reform initiative cope with classroom control, both conceptually and practically. Teachers’ thinking and discourse is partitioned, such that teaching and control issues are kept distinct. Numerous school structures and other practices reinforce this partition. A number of questions are posed for the creation of a progressivist theory of classroom control. This article is about pedagogy and control and about the mechanisms by which they are kept conceptually distinct in progressivist education. My interest in the topic is both practical and theoretical. Practically, this study reflects my attempt—as teacher and teacher facilitator—to grapple with the difficulties entailed in implementing progressivist 1 educational reform in Israeli schools. Theoretically, my perspective on these problems is informed by the history of current practices—specifically, the relationship between pedagogy and control in traditional classrooms and the way in which progressivism has influenced that relationship. I argue that a progressivist approach to classroom control has placed teachers in an untenable situation, both conceptually and in their daily encounters with students. I show how teachers in one Israeli school reform initiative cope with this problem and how school organization and the structure of teacher discourse assist them in functioning as progressive teachers and traditional disciplinarians. For over a century the cycle has been repeated: Reformers criticize “traditional” schools as being unnatural and coercive places in which students are expected to absorb passively large quantities of information irrelevant to their life experience and developmental needs. Instead, reformers propose the adoption of progressive educational theories based on scientific

The Regulation of Teaching as Symbolic Politics: Rituals of Order, Blame and Redemption.

This article explores the school inspection as a political ritual for the management of tensions between competition and equality inherent in neo-liberal educational regulatory regimes. At the centre of the article is a case study of how teachers in an allegedly failing working-class English primary school coped with issues of social class, educational success-and-failure and an Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED) inspection and related accountability measures. National educational policy – relative performance data and inspection – generated a crisis within the school, and intervened in teacher discourse about the role of social class in pupil attainment. Whereas previous scholarship on OFSTED and inspections has emphasised their harmful effects on teachers and teaching practice, the current article broadens the focus from regulatory to political issues, from specific schools to the stability of the educational order more generally. Based on this case study, situated within a broader analysis of shifting discourses about social class and education in English educational policy, I argue that (1) the current regulatory regime makes ‘failure’ inevitable, thereby posing a symbolic problem for policy-makers and politicians; (2) by identifying failure and allocating blame, the inspection ritual fulfils an important symbolic function; which (3) serves to buttress the legitimacy of the neo-liberal educational order.

Investigating dilemmas in teaching: towards a new form of pedagogical scholarship

This article investigates five dilemmas that emerge from analysis of a brief episode of classroom practice: issues concerning the design and management of the classroom discussion, the use of drama in teaching, teacher handling of pupil disturbances, and the advantages and drawbacks of competition. We argue that such dilemma-driven analysis is missing from current pedagogical scholarship, in which analyses tend to be theory-driven and narrower in their scope. Our aims are to (a) do justice to the richness and complexity of classroom activity and the work of teaching; (b) illustrate a means of working with representations of practice that is likely to facilitate the development of teacher professional judgment; and (c) uncover some of the central dilemmas experienced by Israeli primary teachers. The data are drawn from a sixth grade Hebrew language lesson in an Israeli state primary school.

Democracy, voice and dialogic pedagogy: the struggle to be heard and heeded

ABSTRACT Dialogic pedagogy is widely viewed as an excellent means of educating students for civic participation in deliberative democracy. While many intervention-based studies have researched dialogic teaching and learning, we know very little about the enactment of dialogic and related ideas ‘in the wild,’ in regular classrooms. This paper contributes to the naturalistic study of dialogic pedagogy through close examination of an episode of sustained student engagement with, and argumentation about, a controversial social issue in an Israeli primary school classroom. In particular, we focus on the emergence and interaction of voices, defined as (1) opportunity to speak, (2) expressing ones own ideas, (3) on ones own terms and (4) being heeded by others. While the norm in Israeli classrooms is exuberant, voiceless participation, in the rare classroom episode examined here, we find students – and their teacher – engaged in heated, multivocal deliberation. We follow the struggles of marginalized students to be heard and heeded, exploring the conditions which ultimately allow for the actualization of student voice, and the accompanying pedagogical challenges and dilemmas.

“Low Ability,” Participation, and Identity in Dialogic Pedagogy:

Teachers are increasingly called on to use dialogic teaching practices to engage active pupil participation in academically challenging classroom discourse. Such practices are in tension with commonly held beliefs about pupil ability as fixed and/or context independent. Moreover, teaching practices that seek to make pupil thinking visible can also make perceived pupil “inarticulateness” and/or “low ability” visible, with important implications for pupil identities. This article explores how teachers in a dialogic teaching intervention managed the participation and identities of “low ability” pupils. We use linguistic ethnographic methods to analyze three different case studies in which teachers seek to include underachieving pupils’ voices in the discussion and discuss implications for dialogic pedagogy and the study of classroom social identification processes.

A cross-cultural analysis of disagreements in classroom discourse: Comparative case studies from England, the United States, and Israel

Abstract How do cultural and institutional factors interact in shaping preference structures? This paper presents a cross-cultural analysis of disagreements in three different classroom settings: (1) a year 6 (ages 11–12) mainstream class in England, (2) a fifth-grade class of gifted students in the United States, and (3) a fourth-grade mainstream class in Israel. The aim of the study is to investigate how disagreements are enacted in these settings, exploring the influence of cultural communicative norms on the one hand and pedagogical goals and norms on the other. The study highlights culture-specific discursive patterns that emerge as the teacher and students manage a delicate balance between often clashing cultural and educational motives.

Problematising Researcher-Respondent Relations through an Exploration of Communicative Stance.

To what extent and in what ways should researchers share their views with research participants during ethnographic fieldwork? This article discusses the authors experience of adopting different communicative stances with respondents in the context of an ethnographic study of the enactment of the English National Literacy Strategy in a ‘failing’ primary school. A commonly accepted communicative stance in ethnography, according to which the researcher avoids disclosure of his or her own views, is problematised; and the potential advantages and disadvantages of feedback as a research tool are explored.