Jo Frankham

Making sense of the development of inclusive practices

Schools in England are currently being asked to pay greater attention to the issue of educational inclusion. This paper reports some of the findings of a collaborative action research Network that was set up to address the implications of this trend. The Network involves teams of university researchers in working with practitioners in order to encourage the development of inclusive practices. As a result of this work, it is argued that the development of such practices is not about adopting ‘recipes’ of the sort described in much of the existing literature. Rather, it involves social learning processes that occur within a given workplace. The paper attempts to provide deeper understandings of what these processes involve. To assist in this analysis use is made of the idea of ‘communities of practice’, as developed by Etienne Wenger, focusing specifically on the way he sees learning as a characteristic of practice. It is argued that the development of inclusive practices involves collaborative working arrangements; that they can be encouraged by engagement with various forms of evidence that interrupt ways of thinking; and that the space that is created through such interruptions can enable those involved to recognize overlooked or, indeed, new possibilities for moving practice forward.

Seeing Voices and Hearing Pictures: Image as discourse and the framing of image-based research

This paper addresses an increasingly popular technique for eliciting student “voice” through the analysis of young peoples images as a medium of expression, focusing in particular on photography. Of course, there has been considerable critical interrogation of student voice activities in the recent past and the complexities and challenges associated with the analysis of images is longstanding. Where critical scrutiny is less apparent, however, is in the interpretation of children and young peoples visual “statements”. We argue that young peoples images should be subject to the same processes of deconstruction as other texts produced under the aegis of voice activities and conclude by suggesting that the crisis of representation familiar in most interpretive genres is sometimes absent from what tends to be an uncritical celebration of representation in this particular context.

Network utopias and alternative entanglements for educational research and practice

‘The network’ has achieved a form of ‘institutionalized utopianism’ in the recent past and is posited as a neo‐liberal solution to social scientific researchers and education practitioners learning with and from one another. This paper first outlines why the metaphor of the network is so persuasive. It goes on to problematize some of the key concepts deployed in the field and to ask what is currently inadequately addressed in the discourse of ‘learning networks’. It describes how a series of disconnections may be more helpful in understanding how ‘learning networks’ might ‘work’. The paper concludes with questions about the proliferation of the discourse of networks and the marketization of education and commodification of knowledge.

Peer Education : the unauthorised version

Abstract Peer education — where people are equipped to educate their contemporaries — is an increasingly popular strategy amongst providers of personal and health education in the UK, especially amongst those who work with teenagers and young adults. This article takes an irreverent look at the premises on which peer education has been founded and considers whether the approach is the panacea that so many claim.

Talk as action in 'collaborative action research': Making and taking apart teacher/researcher relationships

This article considers the role of university researchers in a project aimed at developing inclusive practices in schools through collaborative action research. It tells the story of how these researchers became part of the action in one school—Beechbank Primary—through visits, the collection and reporting of data, and through the development of a relationship (particularly with the head teacher) that facilitated learning and change to take place. One of the issues highlighted is that it is in the process of setting up an action research project that many disturbances are evident and, perhaps, inevitable. We argue that it is in working with these disturbances that one might begin to establish the basis of a collaborative relationship, rather than implying that collaboration may result in such things. The approach taken in the section ‘Beechbank Story’ is a conscious departure from the investigations conducted as a consequence of audit mechanisms, where only particular measurable outcomes, designated in ad...

The Master's in Teaching and Learning: Expanding Utilitarianism in the Continuing Professional Development of Teachers in England.

The article focuses on the policy rhetoric of the Masters in Teaching and Learning (MTL). This is a new degree being launched in the summer of 2010 aimed, initially, at teachers who have just joined the profession. The degree presages the aspiration for a Master’s level teaching profession in England. Professional development as conceived in the MTL is continuous rather than continuing and permeating the vision is the language of ‘personalisation’. Teachers will be accompanied on the journey by an ‘in-school coach’. These notions suggest a highly tailored approach to continuing professional development (CPD), with careful attention to the identification of teachers’ needs and close support from a colleague. The article argues that, contrary to this impression, the MTL marks a new and significant step in expanding the utilitarianism of the English education system. The MTL represents a deepening hold on education by the state and a growing scepticism about the value of higher education in the CPD of teachers. It also aspires to a changing culture in schools as the workplace becomes the locus for the CPD of teachers. As other authors have described, the national character of education systems in Europe and in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Asia reflect an increasing instrumentality. The MTL, then, can be seen as part of a global phenomenon; in this case the policy lever of CPD is employed to support performative and audit policy agendas via a rigid accountability system. The MTL also represents a particular form of neo-liberal governmentality where increasing centralisation is ‘masked’ by a ‘simulacra of care’.

Choosing not choosing: the indirections of ethnography and educational research

This paper argues for the importance of ethnography in the conduct of educational research and the ways in which it can threaten, in a good sense, the certainties and dominance of performativity. The paper uses the poetry of Emily Dickinson to signal the importance of indirection in the conduct of ethnographic work and, more specifically, the ways in which she ‘chooses not to choose’ in her work. Her work is used to illustrate the complexities of meaning in what we see and hear in the conduct of research, the impossibility of mapping (in any ultimate sense) experience and identity and the indeterminacy we need to ‘hold’ in the stories we tell. The intention of the paper is to underline our necessary obsession with language in the processes of educational inquiry. The paper deliberately tries to echo its ‘message’ in refusing to ‘spell things out’ too closely for the reader.

Employability and higher education: the follies of the ‘Productivity Challenge’ in the Teaching Excellence Framework

Abstract This article considers questions of ‘employability’, a notion foregrounded in the Green and White Papers on the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The paper first questions government imperatives concerning employability and suggests a series of mismatches that are evident in the rhetorics in this area. This summary opens up elements of what I am calling the first ‘folly’ in the field. The second section of the paper considers recent research with individual academics engaged in employability activity. This research suggests another series of mismatches in the aims and outcomes of ‘employability initiatives’ and opens up a further series of ‘follies’ in the day-to-day practices of academics and students’ responses to them. The third section of the paper turns to academics’ reports of student behaviour in relation to the outcomes of their degree. This section develops an argument that relates to the final ‘folly’ associated with the current focus on employability. I argue that students’ focus on outcomes (which at face value suggests they have internalized the importance of employment) is contributing to the production of graduates who do not have the dispositions that employers – when interviewed – say that they want. The highly performative culture of higher education, encouraged by the same metrics that will be extended through the TEF, is implicated then in not preparing students for the workplace.

The X-Factor Performing Reflexivity as Indeterminate Praxis

This article addresses practices of reflexivity, drawing on a number of stimuli, including Zizek’s formulation of Lacan’s “prisoners game,” whereby different circumstances generate a typology of reflexive responses from the prisoners in their competitive efforts to win freedom. The article also draws on reflexive performances based on literature and in history, and more extensively on the art of Rene Magritte. These various reflexive performances are then related to the reflexive “praxes” of the authors’ doctoral study. We conclude that reflexivity is always part of a necessary uncertainty, whose “remainder” between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, generates an inescapably qualitative symbolon.

Troubling the field of service user involvement in research

This paper sets out to interrogate two key issues in the field of service user or public engagement in research. These relate to privileging personal experience as a way of knowing and the forms of knowledge production that are assumed to take place in research partnerships. In both instances it is suggested that current orthodoxies may ‘close down’ opportunities for learning and understanding rather than democratising them. The final section of the paper suggests alternative ways of thinking about these aspects of service user involvement in research. These include ‘troubling’ identity claims and the forms of knowledge that tend to accompany them, a reconceptualisation of how they have come to be known in research partnerships and a reorientation towards the centrality of relations/hips in these research endeavours.