Pat Thomson

From ‘consulting pupils’ to ‘pupils as researchers’: a situated case narrative

Schools in England are now being encouraged to ‘personalise’ the curriculum and to consult students about teaching and learning. This article reports on an evaluation of one high school which is working hard to increase student subject choice, introduce integrated curriculum in the middle years and to improve teaching and learning while maintaining a commitment to inclusive and equitable comprehensive education. The authors worked with a small group of students as consultants to develop a ‘students‐eye’ set of evaluative categories in a school‐wide student survey. They also conducted teacher, student and governor interviews, lesson and meeting observations, and student ‘mind‐mapping’ exercises. In this article, in the light of the findings, the authors discuss the processes they used to work jointly with the student research team, and how they moved from pupils‐as‐consultants to pupils‐as‐researchers, a potentially more transformative/disruptive practice. They query the notion of ‘authentic student voice...

The Failure of Dissertation Advice Books: Toward Alternative Pedagogies for Doctoral Writing:

Anxious doctoral researchers can now call on a proliferation of advice books telling them how to produce their dissertations. This article analyzes some characteristics of this self-help genre, including the ways it produces an expert–novice relationship with readers, reduces dissertation writing to a series of linear steps, reveals hidden rules, and asserts a mix of certainty and fear to position readers “correctly.” The authors argue for a more complex view of doctoral writing both as text work/identity work and as a discursive social practice. They reject transmission pedagogies that normalize the power-saturated relations of protégé and master and point to alternate pedagogical approaches that position doctoral researchers as colleagues engaged in a shared, unequal, and changing practice.

Principal Selection: Homosociability, the Search for Security and the Production of Normalized Principal Identities.

Researchers investigating the decline of potential applicants for principalships have demonstrated that teachers perceive there to be a significant problem in current selection procedures. This article reports an investigation in two Australian states into principal selection. Drawing on a corpus of interviews, two case studies and administrative guidelines, we highlight five key problems in the interview process: (1) the dependence of selection panels on a written application; (2) the dilemma of experience versus potential; (3) the covert rule about the appointment of preferred applicants; (4) the quandary of panel competency; and (5) the evidence of inconsistency of decisions. We argue that the selection process amounts to a reproductive technology which, in the quest for certainty and safety, results in particular kinds of people being successful. This amounts we suggest, whether the selection process is managed by progressive or conservative personnel, to a form of homosociability the tendency to select people just like oneself

Unpacking the Issues: Researching the Shortage of School Principals in Two States in Australia

An investigation into the declining supply of principals in two states in Australia revealed that a mosaic of issues surrounds the overall trend towards fewer applications for vacant positions. Looking beyond systemic factors influencing this trend — factors such as the increasing workload of principals — this study discovered why some schools are more affected by a shortage of applicants than others. We found that one of four categories of deterrents was generally involved with declining numbers of applications: location, the size of school, the presence of an incumbent, or difficulties arising from local educational politics. We found, furthermore, that smaller numbers of applicants for vacant positions do not necessarily indicate a decline in interest in school leadership: interest in the principalship remains relatively high but principal aspirants have become increasingly strategic in their applications. Whilst drawing attention, in this paper, to the research finding that numerical interpretations of principal supply have serious limitations, we are keen to acknowledge, briefly, the research data that refers to (a) social and generational changes (b) demographic information, (c) teacher resistance to the modern principalship and how these data explain declining numbers. We also include information about recent changes that go counter to the trend.

Bringing Bourdieu to policy sociology: codification, misrecognition and exchange value in the UK context

The task of social scientists is to find ways of investigating and understanding the social, political and economic world, in order to offer insights into everyday and public life in the past, present and future. Bourdieu’s tool kit offers a particular way of theorizing the rules, narratives and self‐held truths of social phenomena and of educational policy as a specific object of analysis. In this article I develop a series of propositions about the ways in which field theory might be applied to explain the abrupt public policy shift effected by the Thatcher government and the adjustments made to it by the Blair government. I suggest that a Bourdieuian approach shows policy working as a means of codification, as a doxa of misrecognition and as currency exchange within and across fields. I conclude with some thoughts about the difficulties of explicating interactions between fields.

Pedagogies of transformation: keeping hope alive in troubled times

This paper seeks to challenge the view that there are no alternatives today to global neo-liberalism and its manifestation within schooling systems and educational practices, particularly as high stakes testing and reductive pedagogies and curricula. The paper challenges the fast and shallow learning endemic to these practices, arguing instead for a different temporality of learning and school change. Indeed, the paper argues that there is a pressing need for progressive educational change and that ideas are an important component for such change and for rethinking practices, although not enough in and of themselves. The paper works with a broad Enlightenment construction of pedagogies and a conception of school reform framed by values of democratic citizenship and social responsibility and the need to connect with school communities, especially those communities disadvantaged by contemporary economic and policy settings. In disadvantaged communities, schools and teachers need to work with community funds of knowledge to scaffold to valorised high status school knowledge. The school also needs to function as a quasi democratic polis, while the reach of curriculum needs to be global. The focus of the paper is thinking about new pedagogies of teaching and school change as resources for hope.

Driven to abstraction: doctoral supervision and writing pedagogies

The writing of academic abstracts is more than a tiresome necessity of scholarly life. It is a practice that goes beyond genre and technique to questions of writing and identity. In this article we deconstruct a series of abstracts from a variety of refereed journals to ‘read’ for the representation of data, argument, methodology and significance. We describe one strategy for writing abstracts, developed as part of a long‐term project on postgraduate writing pedagogies. We propose that the art of writing abstracts is neglected in the academy, is given scant attention by journal editors, and has produced a motley and often bland array of conventions and genres. We suggest that abstract art should be an important aspect of supervision if graduate students and novice researchers are to stake a claim in the academy.

Just ‘good and bad news’? Disciplinary imaginaries of head teachers in Australian and English print media

Australian and English print media are actively engaged in producing reports that claim to find the ‘best schools’, the ‘real state of education’, and ‘star head teachers’. This article considers the production of knights and dames, maverick heads and struggling schools. It argues that some of these stories are clearly the products of departmental press bureau activities and policy agendas. It shows, however, that even those stories intended to critique government policy support paradoxically a notion of the singular importance of the headship and the virtues of heroic leadership. It is suggested that the simulacrum of the heroic head works as a normative disciplinary device for performative and market practices and is singularly off‐putting to both serving and aspirant school leaders.

The Methodology of Students-as-Researchers: Valuing and using experience and expertise to develop methods

Students in England are increasingly involved in consultation and governance of schools. Some are also involved in researching their own learning, how they are taught, the kinds of curriculum on offer, and school policies and practices. In this article, we suggest that this could be seen as a form of “standpoint research”. We suggest that one way standpoint can be exercised is via the construction of experience-based research tools. We exemplify this through a student research project in which photo-elicitation and verbal scenarios based in students’ understandings of their school did not produce an “authentic” and homogenised voice, but rather multiple perspectives of the classroom and wider school.

Why do academics blog? An analysis of audiences, purposes and challenges

Academics are increasingly being urged to blog in order to expand their audiences, create networks and to learn to write in more reader friendly style. This paper holds this advocacy up to empirical scrutiny. A content analysis of 100 academic blogs suggests that academics most commonly write about academic work conditions and policy contexts, share information and provide advice; the intended audience for this work is other higher education staff. We contend that academic blogging may constitute a community of practice in which a hybrid public/private academic operates in a ‘gift economy’. We note however that academic blogging is increasingly of interest to institutions and this may challenge some of the current practices we have recorded. We conclude that there is still much to learn about academic blogging practices.