Ian Hardy

Ecologies of practices

This chapter proposes that a fruitful way to think about practices is to view them as living things. Thought of this way, practices are interdependent with one another, being connected in ‘ecologies of practices’. The key idea underpinning this approach is that practices themselves are embedded in ‘practice architectures’. This approach takes us beyond previous relational and ecological understandings of practices and offers a fresh perspective on the notion of ‘learning practices’. The value of these ideas is illustrated with findings from a current project involving a cluster of schools in rural Australia. This project is examining how practices of educational leadership, professional development, teaching and student learning connect with one another, with each influencing and being influenced by the others.

My School? Critiquing the abstraction and quantification of Education

This paper draws upon and critiques the Australian federal governments website My School as an archetypal example of the current tendency to abstract and quantify educational practice. Arguing in favour of a moral philosophical account of educational practice, the paper reveals how the My School website reduces complex educational practices to simple, supposedly objective, measures of student attainment, reflecting the broader ‘audit’ society/culture within which it is located. By revealing just how extensively the My School website reduces educational practices to numbers, the paper argues that we are in danger of losing sight of the ‘internal’ goods of Education which cannot be readily and simply codified, and that the teacher learning encouraged by the site marginalises more active and collective approaches. While having the potential to serve some beneficial diagnostic purposes, the My School website reinforces a view of teachers as passive consumers of information generated beyond their everyday practice.

A logic of appropriation: enacting national testing (NAPLAN) in Australia

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students’ results on national literacy and numeracy tests – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) – in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers’ learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as ‘enactment’) of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students’ learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers.

Inclusive education policies: discourses of difference, diversity and deficit

This paper provides an analysis of inclusive education policies across international, and Anglo-American national and provincial/state jurisdictions to reveal how policies discursively construct inclusion under current, increasingly neoliberal conditions. In making this case, the paper draws upon primary UNESCO and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development policies, and a selection of key policies in United States, Canada, England and Australia. To explore whether and how these policies discursively encourage inclusion under such conditions, the paper employs a broadly critical policy sociology approach. The research reveals a disparate array of approaches to issues of inclusion within and across specific policy contexts. Fostering more systematic and supportive inclusive policies is possible and essential for promoting conditions for more genuinely inclusive educational practices, but a lack of attention to issues of inclusion in policy settings also reveals how more neoliberal conditions have also influenced policy production processes.

A logic of enumeration: the nature and effects of national literacy and numeracy testing in Australia

This paper reveals the array of practices arising from strong policy pressure for improved student results in national literacy and numeracy tests in Australia: the National Assessment Programme in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The paper provides an account of a policy context characterised by significant pressure upon teachers and principals to engage in practices to ensure improved outcomes on standardised literacy and numeracy tests, and of teachers and principals’ responses to these policy pressures. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article argues that what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’ has become increasingly dominated by a ‘logic of enumeration’, and that high test results on standardised literacy and numeracy tests are increasingly valued capitals, evident in a strong focus upon teachers meeting, discussing and informing one another about NAPLAN; engaging in curriculum development practices which foreground NAPLAN, and; actively preparing students to sit the test, including, whether intentionally or unintentionally, teaching to the test. Such a focus has important implications for the sorts of practices most valued in schooling settings, as more educative logics are potentially marginalised under such circumstances.

Academic architectures: academic perceptions of teaching conditions in an Australian university

This article reports a case study of academics’ perceptions of how the conditions under which they worked, at one campus of a multi‐site regional Australian university, influenced their teaching practices. The data comprise transcripts of periodic meetings of a group of seven education academics, as they reflected upon the nature of their teaching practices during the first half of 2008. To understand how the conditions under which they worked were perceived to influence their teaching practices, the study applies the concept of ‘practice architectures’ to participants’ perceptions. The concept of practice architectures frames the social world as comprising interacting socio‐political, material‐economic and cultural‐discursive dimensions, which collectively influence and are influenced by those who constitute any social setting. The study indicates that political, material and cultural pressures for increased use of new teaching technologies were seen as partially responsible for stimulating productive teaching practices. However, political, cultural and material pressures supportive of increased accountability and economic productivity, and of increased student demands and diversity without adequate resourcing, were believed to inhibit more productive teaching practices.

Teacher professional development as an effect of policy and practice: a Bourdieuian analysis

This article draws on Bourdieu’s field theory and related concepts of habitus and capitals, to explore policy implementation in relation to a particular case of teacher professional development in Queensland, Australia. This implementation process is described as an effect of the interplay between what is called the policy field and the field of teachers’ work. The policy field demonstrates intra‐field tensions between the federal Quality Teacher Programme (QTP) and a raft of state policies, particularly those associated with the Queensland meta‐policy, Queensland State Education 2010 (QSE2010). To investigate the effects of this complex policy ensemble, the article draws upon the experiences of principals and a group of teachers engaged in professional development across a cluster of six schools in south‐east Queensland, Australia. The specific focus is on the ‘Curriculum Board’, a cross‐school body created by the principals in the participating schools, and its mediated work in policy implementation and teacher learning. The article analyses the effects of the involvement of the principals in the creation of the board, the limiting impact of QTP requirements to involve consultants rather than support for teacher release, and the limited influence of the board on teacher learning and policy implementation in the individual schools. By doing so, the analysis shows the disjunctions between the logics of practice of the policy field and that of teachers’ work, and the ways in which the differing habitus of principals and teachers and teacher members of the board affected teacher learning and policy implementation. It is argued that effective implementation requires learning within and across fields, and more reflexive habitus of policy makers, principals and teachers.

The Value and Valuing of Continuing Professional Development: Current Dilemmas, Future Directions and the Case for Action Research.

This paper explores and challenges the rationale for current, mainstream approaches to teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) within schooling systems. Such approaches are significantly influenced by neoliberal and managerial pressures, evident in advocacy for generic, individualistic models of teacher learning, often focused on specific state-sanctioned domains. The paper draws upon a précis of recent action research literature, and empirical research from Sweden, to argue for an alternative paradigm, based on the practices and principles of participatory and collaborative action research. Action research is not presented as a simplistic ‘method’ which can be ‘applied’ regardless of context, but is explicitly focused on situated, specific, local sites. While more managerial and neoliberal practices can close down debates necessary for effecting real improvements in practice, evidence suggests action research, in its emancipatory iterations, enables a rich conception of educational practice which cannot be ‘managed’ into existence by a simplistic application of ‘what works.’

Relational architectures: recovering solidarity and agency as living practices in education

This article will explore education, pedagogy and praxis (morally informed and committed action oriented by tradition, and ‘history‐making action’) through the lens of the ‘relational’. The article brings together empirical investigations of professional development and classroom teaching to explicate the role of this relational dimension, via the concept of ‘practice architectures’. The first section describes what is meant by the term practice architectures and introduces the notion of ‘relational architectures’ as a vehicle for understanding the crucial role relationships in education, including interpersonal relationships (between actors in social settings) and institutional relationships (within systems and organisations). The second section tests this notion of relational architectures by examining it in light of the day‐to‐day, living practices in cases of educational practice. The third section defends a position that education is compromised wherever the relational dimension in educational practice is not properly addressed, that failure to attend to the relational may empty education of its moral and social purpose. Further, failure to attend to the relational also threatens agency and solidarity among participants in those practices. In our view, restoring focus on the relational dimensions of education will sustain future educational and societal growth, and provide resources of hope for educators: a sense of cohesion of purpose, commonality of direction (solidarity), and a sense of collective power and control (agency).

Competing priorities in professional development: an Australian study of teacher professional development policy and practice

This paper argues that neoliberal and managerial pressures external to the teaching profession, as well as more progressive and democratic approaches internal to the profession, have simultaneously influenced professional development policy and practice in Australia. In making this case, the paper reviews the nature of the teacher professional development that is supported in federal Australian policies associated with the recently defeated Liberal/National Coalition government (1996–2007) and research into how professional development has been enacted in practice in Australia, during this governments tenure. While acknowledging the significant impact of more neoliberal and managerial approaches and how such policy emphases contribute to the continuation of traditional, systemic/employer provided workshops, the paper also provides evidence of competing, more teacher‐centred approaches.