Kathryn Glasswell

Policy enactment, context and performativity: ontological politics and researching Australian National Partnership policies

Recently, critical policy scholars have used the concepts of enactment, context and performativity as an analytic toolkit to illuminate the complex processes of the policy cycle, in particular, the ways in which a multitude of official education reform policies are taken up, challenged and/or resisted by actors in local, situation-specific practices. This set of theoretical tools are usually deployed to analyse interview data collected from a single school or cluster of schools to draw findings or conclusions about the complex processes of policy enactment. We aim to build on this critical policy studies work by, firstly, highlighting key aspects of these theoretical/methodological constructs, secondly, exploring the performative role of research in the materiality of specific contexts and, thirdly, theorising education policy research in terms of ontological politics. We ground this work in a recent collaborative enquiry research project undertaken in Queensland, Australia. This research project emerged in the Australian policy context of National Partnership Agreement policies which were designed to reform public or government-funded schools servicing low socio-economic communities, in order to improve student learning outcomes, specifically in literacy and numeracy as measured by high-stakes national testing.

Dilemmatic spaces: High-stakes testing and the possibilities of collaborative knowledge work to generate learning innovations

This paper examines collaborative researcher-practitioner knowledge work around assessment data in culturally diverse, low socio-economic school communities in Queensland, Australia. Specifically, the paper draws on interview accounts about the work of a cohort of school-based researchers who acted as mediators bridging knowledge flows between a local university and a cluster of schools. We draw on the concept of recontextualisation to explore the processes of knowledge mediation in dialogues around student assessment data to design instructional innovations. We argue that critical policy studies need to explore the complex ways in which neoliberal education policies are enacted in local sites. Moreover, we suggest that an analysis of collaborative knowledge work designed to improve student learning outcomes in low socio-economic school communities necessitates attention to the principles regulating knowledge flows across boundaries. In addition, it necessitates attention to the ways in which mediators navigate dilemmatic spaces, anxieties and affects/feelings in order to generate innovative learning designs in the current global context of high-stakes national testing and accountability regimes.

Teaching Flexibly With Leveled Texts: More Power for Your Reading Block

The practice of matching texts to readers is one that many teachers use and yet one that can become rigid and cumbersome with everyday classroom use. Here we discuss concerns about leveling and propose that by observing and listening to the students in our classes we can develop more powerful ways with leveled texts.

Doing education policy enactment research in a minor key

ABSTRACT This article discusses ‘minor key research’ and doing this kind of research as ‘response-ability’. We explore the possibilities that education policy enactment research might hold for theorising and doing research, not just for work on ‘how schools do policy’, but also for how researchers do policy research with schools. A methodological question is raised here by us with respect to what researchers might ‘do’ in schools and other policy locations (such as when working with bureaucrats or politicians). We also discuss our researcher responsibility with respect to such work, and we have attempted to respond to the questions: ‘Is there an alternative for the current regime of accountability? Are there ways to resist and intervene in the current culture of accountability?’ In the first section, we focus on minor key research, and in the second section we discuss doing minor key research as ‘response-ability’.

Explorations in policy enactment: feminist thought experiments with Basil Bernstein’s code theory

ABSTRACT This paper builds on feminist elaborations of Bernstein’s code theory to engage in a series of thought experiments with interview data produced during a co-inquiry design-based research intervention project. It presents three accounts of thinking/writing with data. Our purpose in presenting three different accounts of interview data is to demonstrate the relation between theory and empirical data. In the first two accounts, interview data are interpreted and performed through the lens of theory. By contrast, in the third account attention is paid to the ways in which care is practised not only in terms of policy enactment, but also research enactment. Empirical data are not moulded to fit generalisable theoretical frameworks. Rather, empirical data push back on theoretical concepts in a collaborative thought experiment.

Reflective Practice in Teacher Professional Standards: Reflection as Mandatory Practice

This chapter analyses the contemporary phenomenon of the inclusion of reflective practice in the national professional standards for teachers in a range of countries. Through exploring the teacher standards of Australia, England, New Zealand, Scotland, Singapore and the United States of America (USA), the chapter documents the various ways in which reflective practice is characterised by policymakers, showing the theoretical and everyday elements evident in these constructions of reflective practice. It argues that there is a tension in mandatory standards documents between the expectation that teachers are to be encouraged to be critically aware of teaching practices and the standards’ purposes as documents of regulation. That is, while the standards promote critical reflection, they rarely suggest that teachers be reflective about the larger sociopolitical aspects of schooling and education systems.

Drawing and redrawing the map of writing studies

Book reviewed in this article: Handbook of Writing Research. Charles A. MacArthur, Steve Graham, and Jill Fitzgerald (Eds.). 2006.

Distributed Leadership Policies and Practices: Striving for Educational Equity in High Poverty Contexts

Education reform policies in Australia, the UK, and US have prioritised the role of the school principal and teacher leaders in school organisational change. Particular versions of leadership, namely distributed leadership, have emerged within these policy discourses and are prescribed as the means for effecting school reform. Critical scholars have raised concerns about the models of distributed leadership dominant within recent education policies, describing these as functional or normative and aligned with neoliberal education policy discourses of performativity and accountability. Key instruments or technologies of the neoliberal education reform agenda are high-stakes national testing, public reportage of test results via designated websites, and discourses which hold school leaders, teachers, students, and parents accountable for test performance. This macropolicy context frames our exploration of leadership practices within a case study school involved in a Smart Education Partnership project (SEP) between Griffith University and a cluster of local schools to address problems of low educational achievement. Through an analysis of interview, survey, and focus group data, we explore how leadership practices materialised in the interactions between people (district administrators, school leaders, classroom teachers, university researchers), objects, artefacts, routines, and rituals to generate possibilities for improving students’ literacy learning. In so doing, we contribute to the critical discourse policy literature which has challenged functional perspectives on distributed leadership prevalent within education reform policies and professional development materials. Moreover, we add to the critical scholarship literature by drawing on theories of distributed activity (Spillane JP. Educ Forum 69(2):143–150, 2005) and diffraction patterns (Barad K. Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, Durham, 2007) to explore how leadership practices in one case study school came to materialise an educational difference.