Ciaran Sugrue

Complexities of teaching : child-centred perspectives

Compexities of teaching - postmodern perspectives substance context and method teachers, interpretations of child-centred teaching teachers, constructions of child-centred teachings Barrytown - a major case study a postmodern reconstruction of child-centred teaching.

Irish teachers' experiences of professional learning: implications for policy and practice

Abstract Despite significant increases internationally in provision of professional learning opportunities for teachers, there is substantial evidence also that such provision continues to be fragmented and lacking in coherence. This article documents the experiences of Irish primary and post-primary teachers in this regard and interrogates them for their potential to illuminate conceptualisations of teacher professional learning, policy formulation, facilitation of, and support for, sustained learning as well as identifying areas requiring further investigation. The article concludes that the nature of provision is often inadequate and poorly conceived due to lack of differentiation that is sensitive to context and career stage, while there is need also to connect teacher and student learning in a more coherent and comprehensive manner that enables the voices of all learners to be heard and heeded within professional learning discourses

Welfare State Restructuring in Education and its National Refractions Finnish, Irish and Swedish Teachers’ Perceptions of Current Changes

The governance of the welfare state is going through profound transformations in many western countries. Similarly, reforms, influenced by neoliberal ideology, are being applied particularly in the field of education all over Europe. However, it is likely that there are divergent outcomes as these widely shared models are adapted in historical and local particularities. The aim of this article is to examine how Finnish, Irish and Swedish teachers perceive change in professional control and autonomy, and the influence of documentation and evaluation on daily work. Correspondence analysis on survey data (N = 2304) shows that whereas the Finnish teachers regard that the new regulatory measures do not influence their daily work much, the Irish teachers, and also the Swedish teachers, tend to feel the increasing influence of control and accountability. Obviously, despite the similarities in formal policy and education acts, there are different kinds of restructuring operating in Finland, Ireland and Sweden.

Irish teachers’ experience of professional development: performative or transformative learning?

Consistent with the impact of globalisation and international social movements in general, the rather conservative and stable educational system in Ireland has been buffeted severely over the past two decades by a major acceleration in the pace of change and the extent of policy churn. Now that the Celtic Tiger has died, it is a time for reflection: what has been the impact of unprecedented spending on the continuing professional development of teachers on the quality of teaching and learning? Through a multi-focal lens of curriculum reform and professional development from policy and practice perspectives, this paper provides a critical meta-analysis of available research in the setting. It is anticipated that key messages regarding overload, time for learning, the necessity to conceptualise a more coherent and comprehensive policy for building pedagogical and leadership capacity rather than delivering ‘inservice’ are legacies and lessons that will resonate readily with emerging findings on professional renewal and systemic reform in other contexts.

Back to the future: perspectives on current realities and future quality of educational research through the prism of Irish Educational Studies

While ‘paradigm wars’ have raged internationally during the past decade in particular, the research community, qua community in the Irish context has been largely silent on these important issues. This paper provides a synthesis of key aspects of these international discourses against a brief historical backdrop of the field of educational research. Thereafter, this theoretical lens is used to interrogate the more than 200 papers published in Irish Educational Studies (IES) over a period of 10 years: 1996–2006. This analysis seeks to establish the relative health and quality of educational research in the Irish context, and in the third section of the paper, this analysis is the basis for discussion of lessons that may be learned from insights and understandings gained. The paper concludes that a more systematic and comprehensive review of educational research funding in the Irish context would be particularly apposite and timely, while also advocating the necessity for a comprehensive educational research policy and the creation of a national educational research council. In the absence of such endeavours, research is likely to remain fragmented, small scale and easily dismissed by policy-makers, thus enabling advocacy rather than evidence and research generated elsewhere to overly-influence educational reform, while failing to enhance and extend a comprehensive ‘native’ research literature, a vibrant research culture, while funding and systematically supporting and developing the next generation of educational researchers. In the absence of policy and funding, quality and capacity will continue to falter in a more complex, sophisticated interdependent world.

From heroes and heroines to hermaphrodites: emasculation or emancipation of school leaders and leadership?

In the fast paced, fluid contemporary world, and in a headlong rush to invent the future, there is a tendency to jettison aspects of the past as flotsam and jetsam, unworthy of a place in steerage into the future. This paper argues that is some respects the ordinary heroes and heroines who enact school leaderships, and from their practice contribute to contemporary leadership literature, are short changed by a tendency towards collective cultural amnesia that denies them ordinary hero status; a tendency towards emasculation of ordinary heroes and heroines. While situating more contemporary concepts of leadership within a longer trajectory of leadership archetypes, myths and legends, the paper argues that some valuable aspects of more traditional conceptualisations of leadership have been debased, marginalised by a tendency towards celebrity in academic discourses that values more fashionable notions of teacher and distributed leadership where claims to authenticity outstrip available evidentiary warrants, as well as silence more enduring aspects of leadership literature. This is not a denial of incremental contributions to contemporary leadership by more recent emphases on more democratic and participative or distributed approaches to leadership so much as a call for a more considered recapitulation of the field whereby ordinary people doing extraordinary work are given due recognition for their sterling contributions with some potential also to render school leadership more attractive to teachers. Thus a more perspectival rendering of leadership literature is more likely to have an emancipatory impulse, while recognising that individual agency, no matter how carefully choreographed in the dance of distributed leadership practises, continues to be indispensable.

Policy rhetorics and resource neutral reforms in higher education: their impact and implications?

As higher education (HE) comes under increasing pressure from policy-makers, nationally and internationally, to contribute more directly to economic development, tensions between more traditional missions of universities and their more recent entrepreneurial makeovers create major dilemmas for academic staff regarding their roles and responsibilities. Using the lens of professional responsibility and accountability, the paper takes Initial Teacher Education as an instrumental case study to illustrate how these tensions, in terms of policy documents, and perceptions of teacher educators unfold. Analysis strongly suggest that when external prescription is increased, and reforms under-resourced, pressures for accountable conformist compliance render the exercise of professional responsibility extremely difficult if not impossible, compromised rather than finding ‘legitimate compromise’. The paper argues that HE has significant lessons to learn from this case while signalling that current challenges within teacher education are already becoming a gauntlet that the entire HE community needs to consider seriously.

Lifelong learning for teachers in Ireland: policy, provision and vision

Abstract This article is in three parts. First, a document analysis is undertaken to establish the breadth and depth of vision envisaged by policy-makers in relation to the provision of lifelong learning opportunities for practitioners in Ireland. Second, a snapshot of current provision is developed and this is critically analysed against the rhetoric of section one. The third and concluding section identifies a number of key issues which need to be addressed by policy-makers and providers if a more comprehensive and securely grounded vision of lifelong learning for teachers in the setting is to be developed while being cognisant of career needs, stages and aspirations, as well as system requirements

Professional responsibility, accountability and performativity among teachers: the leavening influence of CPD?

Abstract In a climate of accountability and performativity, do teachers experience CPD provision as an externally imposed demand for conformity, compliance, to be accountable, or as a personal and professional rejuvenation that enhances their sense of professional responsibility? Through a qualitative study of secondary schools in England, this paper critically scrutinises the experiences of teachers in five case study schools to create a composite picture of the realities of their lives as they are buffeted and shaped by performativity while also examining the extent to which their CPD experiences may be perceived as enhancing their sense of professional responsibility. Critical analysis of the evidence suggests that the language of accountability is pervasive, and its logic gains currency by being imposed throughout schools where there is limited space to craft an alternative, thus performativity and conformity are more likely than dissent while enhancement of a sense of professional responsibility is rendered more difficult, marginalised if not entirely silenced. The concluding discussion raises critical questions regarding the health of the profession from a policy and practice perspective if the language of professional responsibility continues to be weakened or diluted by being filtered through the closely woven weave of externally prescribed accountability criteria. It concludes that the language and logic of professional responsibility is vitally necessary in provoking alternative discourses on the future of the profession and the quality of teaching, learning and leading in schools within and beyond the confines of the study.

Learning from Conceptions of Professional Responsibility and Graduates Experiences in Becoming Novice Practitioners

In this chapter you are invited to consider the complexity of professional responsibility. The argument we construct is in six sections. Part 1 develops a theoretical framework around professional responsibility and positions this within the negotiation of meaning and identity within communities of practice, competing influences of accountability and autonomy. Cognisance is also taken of these dynamic influences within a wider confluence of ‘social movements’ (Castells, 2000, The information age: Economy, society and culture volume III end of millennium (2nd edn., Vol. III). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers; 2004, The information age economy, society and culture volume II the power of identity (2nd edn.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.) and the imperative to construct new synergies. Part 2 describes the national policy context of higher education in Norway and how external forces such as the Bologna Agreement are shaping national policies in some areas (cf. Karseth, 2008, Education & Democracy – Journal of Didactics and Educational Policy, 17(2), 51–72). Part 3 deals with the participants in the study and its methodological challenges, the manner in which the data were generated and analysed (cf. Solbrekke, 2007, Understanding conceptions of professional responsibility). Part 4 presents a number of themes that indicate the manner in which graduate students within two different professional schools have concepts of professional responsibility mediated to them and the various ways in which they first begin to internalise and work with them, while they begin to develop their professional identities during their transition from higher education to workplace settings. Part 5 focuses on these students’ experiences of professional responsibility as novice professionals; how they renegotiate their conceptions of professional responsibility in workplace environments and their ongoing identity construction is re-formed in the context of workplace realities. Part 6 speculates on the scope for reconceptualising our approach to professional responsibility and on how higher education might respond in a more comprehensive manner to its own responsibility for the professional formation of new professionals.