Alison Clemans

Collaborative working and contested practices: forming, developing and sustaining social partnerships in education

Despite a lack of applied research, social partnerships are increasingly being adopted by both government and non‐government agencies to meet localised needs in education and other fields. This article discusses the findings of an investigation of how social partnerships can best be formed, developed and sustained over time. Earlier work identified partnerships arising from community concerns, governmental enactment and negotiation between community and government agencies. However, across these distinct kinds of social partnerships, the partnership work that was central to their operation was particularly relevant. In the study reported here, researchers engaged with ten longstanding social partnerships to elicit, synthesise and verify the principles and practices underpinning their work. The principles and practices that are proposed as most likely to assist the effective formation, development and transformation of social partnerships over time comprise building and maintaining: (i) shared goals; (ii) relations with partners; (iii) capacity for partnership work; (iv) governance and leadership; and (v) trust and trustworthiness. These principles stand as ideals and goals to guide the development and continuity of social partnerships that can support important educational initiatives, and provide bases for evaluating partnership work. However, rather than being benign, this work and these practices are often underpinned by contested relations as much as collaborative work.

Politics of social partnerships: a framework for theorizing

This paper considers the politics of neo‐liberal reform of education and training in the specific context of social partnerships. Social partnerships are hybrid social spaces formed when a range of interests/partners work together for mutual benefit. Partnerships are one of a series of hybridized social spaces which have been formed as a consequence of the trend to neo‐liberal governance. The paper begins by situating the study of social partnerships in wider concerns about neo‐liberal reform and politics. It reviews literature on social partnerships as a way of identifying the different approaches to the conceptualization of conflict or practical politics. These are role conflict, interest conflict, and regime conflict. It also draws on a series of empirical research projects on social partnerships in Australia which have identified persistent points of tension within partnership formation and maintenance. Drawing these conceptualizations and persistent points of tension together provides a framework which can guide systematic inquiry of social partnerships. The paper suggests that this framework facilitates research by naming different types of political action. It encourages a multi‐dimensional analysis of partnership politics rather than presenting partnerships as either a celebratory or categorical expression of neo‐liberal political rationality.

Navigating Social Partnerships: Central Agencies--Local Networks.

This paper considers the way social partnerships tend to be represented as either horizontal localised networks or neo‐liberal policy instruments. Building on two empirical studies of partnerships, we argue that partnerships cannot be understood in either/or ways but are negotiated at the interface between central agencies and local networks. They are mediated by networks operating through the partnership and through government and community, and by the different organisational logics of agencies. These complexities challenge our ways of analysing and representing partnerships, and justify further research.

Lost and Found in Transition: The Professional Journey of Teacher Educators.

This paper considers the professional development of a group of 75 primary and secondary teachers in Melbourne, Victoria, who had been charged with the responsibility of leading the professional learning of their colleagues in their schools. To support these leaders of professional learning in their roles, the Victorian state government’s Department of Education and Early Childhood Development contracted members of the Pedagogy and Professional Learning Research Group at Monash University to develop and implement an appropriate Professional Learning program. The Leading Professional Learning (LPL) program ran for seven months and consisted of a series of four face‐to‐face workshops that were sustained through the formation of peer networks. Each participant in the program was responsible for designing and implementing a school‐specific professional learning project appropriate to their school setting. At the final workshop in the LPL program, participants reflected on and recorded their learning through the formalised process of case writing. Their cases were published in a book of Cases of Professional Dilemmas and form the basis of the data‐sets that have been used to research participants’ learning about leading the professional learning of their colleagues. As a consequence, this paper offers interesting insights into the journey of these educators of teachers as they have developed deeper understandings of what it means to be a teacher educator.

Social Partnerships: Practices, Paradoxes and Prospects of Local Learning Networks

This paper discusses the formation, character and contradictions of social partnerships. We report on a specific initiative, the Local Learning and Employment Networks (LLEN) established by the Victorian Government in Australia in 2001, documenting the nature of this initiative and how it is playing out. We draw attention to some of the tensions that exist between different agencies, including different agencies within government. Through this detailed case study it is possible to identify parallels between LLEN and other social partnership initiatives developing in other parts of the world. This process of situating a specific Australian partnership within the wider trend to social partnerships permits a more contextualised analysis. It shows the way social partnerships are developing as a consequence of education reform shaped by neo-liberal governance and various patterns of compliance and resistance to this political rationality.

Exploring the Nature of Teachers’ Professional Learning

In recent times, the distinction between traditional Professional Development (PD) and Professional Learning (PL) is becoming increasingly apparent. The shift associated with the intent and the language between PD and PL is evident in the report by Wei et al. (2009). The distinction between PD and PL is also captured by Mockler (2005) who characterized PD as something delivered in a ‘spray-on’ manner in which teachers attend a ‘PD day’ then return to their schools with the expectation that they will implement the workshop ideas in their own practice. What is clear is that the professional learning of teachers has become increasingly recognised as important in enhancing not only the quality of teaching in schools but also for developing the teaching profession more generally (Berry, Clemans, & Kostogriz, 2007). PL approaches tend to emphasize practices that are: sustained over time; responsive to the specifics of school and classroom contexts; underpinned by research and practice-based evidence; and, supported by professional learning communities and collaboration (Hayes, Mills, Christie, & Lingard, 2006; Hoban, 2002). In short, PD could be viewed as doing things to teachers so that they apply them in their practice while PL is about working with teachers to help them develop their skills, knowledge and abilities in ways that are responsive to their (pedagogical) needs, issues and concerns.

Stuck at Home: A Portrayal of Educational Work in Community Spaces.

Abstract This paper considers the positioning of work in community learning spaces through insights drawn from a particular case of adult community education in Victoria, Australia. Despite the rhetorical location of adult community education in Victoria as a legitimate and important sector of post compulsory education and as part of the platform on which the governments lifelong learning agenda is realised, perceptions held of it continue to devalue the significant educational work that is done within it and the outcomes it achieves. The paper draws on an analysis of a sample of qualitative interview data collected in the course of related research projects (Clemans, 2005; Billett et al., 2005; Seddon et al. 2008) to highlight the ways in which work in a community learning space is positioned, perceived and (mis)understood. These perceptions stem from those who work both within and are located outside of the community-based adult education sector. The findings demonstrate the centrality of the notion of the ‘domestic’ or home space in the ways that educational work in community settings is constructed and perceived. They suggest that a consistent emphasis on care overlays notions of unpaid, private and domestic work onto those who work in the community learning space. The paper invites readers to view the community as a spatial construction, drawing on ideas founded in feminist geographies and those within adult education. It argues that these scholarly resources are helpful in understanding the ways in which work within the adult community education space is distinctively positioned, yet consistently devalued, despite its significant impact on ‘second chance’ learners.

Public Anticipation Yet Private Realisation: The Effects of Using Cases as an Approach to Developing Teacher Leaders

Recent research has begun to conceptualise the professional learning of practising teachers who take on leadership roles in schools. In this vein, this article draws on a qualitative interview-based study designed to investigate case writing as a professional learning approach. It focuses on the way in which writing of a published case encouraged teacher leaders to articulate their growing knowledge about leadership. Data indicate that teacher leaders anticipation of a public audience for their case writing was the feature that compelled them to consolidate and articulate their knowledge. But teachers traditional positioning as knowledge consumers (rather than as knowledge producers) led to their fragile confidence to later share the professional knowledge they had developed. The outcomes of this study hold implications for case writing as an approach to developing teacher leaders and for professional learning programs that seek to shift practitioner and public knowledge of teacher leadership into professional communities.

Outside in: Learning from an International Professional Experience Program

This chapter explores the experiences of a group of 13 Australian pre-service teachers (all female) and their academic leaders on a three-week international professional experience program in Johannesburg, South Africa. The placement occurred across three different schools with each pre-service teacher in two of these schools, ensuring that they experienced contrasting educational and cultural spaces over the course of the three weeks. The authors (both of teacher educators from Monash University in Australia, who were actually born in South Africa) present a series of short reflective cases of three of the pre-service teachers, followed by a discussion of the significant learning and development of these students as a result of their three weeks in South Africa. These cases illuminate how the Australian pre-service teachers journeyed outside the familiarity of their ‘home’ country to be in South Africa and proceeded to dance between what they perceived as the sameness of the two countries and the differences between them. This choreography appears to have prompted the students to reflect closely on their own practice, to re-consider their identity and place in the world of teaching, and to come to understand the tensions that intersect in their desires to make a difference.