Alex Moore

The Developing Role of the Headteacher in English Schools: Management, Leadership and Pragmatism

This article argues that, at a time of extensive educational reform in England and Wales, some headteachers are developing pragmatic response strategies to mandated change, and drawing eclectically on a range of management and leadership traditions to maintain institutional equilibrium and preserve valued educational philosophy and practice. Of particular interest is evidence that heads’ efforts to incorporate imposed educational policies into their schools’ practices do not necessarily involve the abandonment of strongly held ideological positions, even when these appear to be threatened by such policy. The ideological and managerial positionings of headteachers are, it is argued, more complex and less ‘determined’ than is sometimes suggested in the literature.

Professional Standards, Teacher Identities and an Ethics of Singularity.

This paper offers a critical analysis of the education policy move towards teacher professional standards. Drawing on Lacan’s three registers of the psyche (real, imaginary and symbolic), the paper argues that moves towards codification (and domestication) of teachers’ work and identities in standardized (and sanitized) forms, such as the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership professional standards recently adopted in Australia, can be read as a colonization of the Real and the imaginary by (a rather static, mortified form of) the symbolic. The paper argues that in response to such normalizing moves, we need to consider how we might conceptualize the reanimation of what it means to teach and be a teacher, something we attempt in terms of enabling each of the psyche’s registers to inter-animate each other, as a means of engendering teacher identities characterized by criticality, creativity and passion – that is, by an ethics of singularity rather than by standardization.

Recognising Desire: A psychosocial approach to understanding education policy implementation and effect

It is argued that in order to understand the ways in which teachers experience their work—including the idiosyncratic ways in which they respond to and implement mandated education policy—it is necessary to take account both of sociological and of psychological issues. The paper draws on original research with practising and beginning teachers, and on theories of social and psychic induction, to illustrate the potential benefits of this bipartisan approach for both teachers and researchers. Recognising the significance of (but somewhat arbitrary distinction between) structure and agency in teachers’ practical and ideological positions, it is suggested that teachers’ responses to local and central policy changes are governed by a mix of pragmatism, social determinism and often hidden desires. It is the often under‐acknowledged strength of desire that may tip teachers into accepting and implementing policies with which they are not ideologically comfortable.

‘Cruel optimism’: teacher attachment to professionalism in an era of performativity

Abstract This study provides a critical exploration of the way teachers’ attachment to notions of professionalism may facilitate a process whereby teachers find themselves obliged to enact centralised and local education policies that they do not believe in but are required to implement. The study argues that professionalism involves an entanglement of (past) occupational and (present) organisational discourses and that the remainders of the former facilitate the enactment of the latter. The study draws on Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism to help understand this process, whereby teachers’ attachment to professionalism may assist them in undermining the very values they believe it embodies.

Teacher development and curriculum reform

Teachers’ professional lives have changed significantly in the past decade or so. With the advent of national curriculum guidelines many schools now program in accordance with nationally developed Statements and Profiles. Key Competencies have entered the educational discourse and the introduction of new assessment and reporting procedures, together with g̀ifted and talented’ programs . . . have all contributed to the complexity and intensity of teachers’ work. In this era, professional development has largely been devolved to schools, and information technology is beginning to challenge the very nature of schools as we know them. Not only are teachers expected to work harder, but there’s a lot of new learning involved in teaching. . . . We are feeling the impact of globalisation on our everyday lives, and techno-science and cyber-culture now have a deep impact on the identity of young people. (Hattam et al. 1999: 1)

English Literature at Brondesbury and Kilburn High School (UK 1980–1984)

This chapter describes a UK school English department’s successful but short-lived attempts in the 1980s to develop more linguistically and culturally inclusive forms of curricula and assessment working in collaboration with like-minded public examination boards. Referencing Basil Bernstein’s distinction between performative approaches to curriculum, assessment and pedagogy, which privilege ‘absences’, and competence approaches, which privilege ‘presences’, the department’s initiative is illustrated via an account of how one student’s non-standard use of English was able to be accommodated within formal examination systems in a way that valued his creativity and critical insights rather than punishing him for his lack of expertise in standard forms of expression. The account is contextualised within education movements and debates of the time, including the development of creative responses to literature study and the challenging of an existing literary ‘canon’, as well as within current central education policy in England which, it is suggested, promotes the return of ‘traditional’, performative, and fundamentally ex-clusive approaches to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.