Putting words in their mouths: the alignment of identities with system goals through the use of Individual Learning Plans

Abstract

This article analyses the role of Individual Learning Plans (ILPs) in teachers' work in the Skills for Life sector. It shows how ILPs, originally a means of formative assessment, have become part of a system of performance indicators and function as a key mediating mechanism between local interactions and system goals. The article draws on theoretical perspectives from the new literacy studies and the sociology of science to reveal the pivotal role of texts in projects of social ordering. The methodology is a version of institutional ethnography, whereby an artefact (the ILP) is tracked as it circulates across the different sites of its production and use. Documentary and interview evidence are used. The article concludes that, in its current form, the ILP shapes teaching and learning relationships and aligns both tutor and student identities. Permissive guidance, combined with a core curriculum, the demands of audit and inspection, positions tutors uncomfortably as active mediators between student experience and the policy discourse.

Notes

1. I am grateful to course participants on the MA in Adult Literacy, Numeracy and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) (ALNE) at Lancaster University who took time to discuss their uses of ILPs with me, six of them in detailed telephone interviews. I also benefited from presentations made by Amy Burgess (Burgess, 2006) and Harriet Cookson (Cookson, 2005) on their own research with ILPs; discussions with practitioners at the North West Research Forum in November 2005; and participants at the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA) symposium in Madison, Wisconsin and a Teaching and Learning Research Programme seminar at the University of Exeter, January 2006. Richard Darville, Linda Pearce and Karin Tusting read and commented on drafts.

2. Brandt and Clinton (2000, p. 17) explain: ‘We can think of sponsors as underwriters of acts of reading or writing—those agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract who enable or induce literacy and gain advantage by it in some way. The concept of the literacy sponsor recognises the historical fact that access to literacy has always required assistance, permission, sanction or coercion by more powerful others, or at least, contact with existing grooves of communication. People throughout history have acquired literacy as a reward for lending their loyalties or labor to the sponsor or have rendered up the use of their literacy skills in exchange for other rewards or have taken on literacy as part of their commitment to or conscription into a larger cause. As a basic analytic concept, sponsors help to account for the fact that literacy practices are rarely invented or sustained by local agents alone and enables us to ask questions about the literacy materials in a setting. How did they get there? Who paid for them or provided them, delivered them or imposed them? Who is responsible for them? How are they controlled or shared? What is the cost or obligation to the user for using them?

3. This satisfies one of the conditions that makes the approach of actor network theory so powerful: its suitability for examining innovations, social projects in the making, especially focusing on controversial ‘matters of concern’ that are not yet settled (Latour, 2005, p. 114).

4. Alternative ways of approaching language and mathematical learning include more holistic functional and task‐driven approaches and those starting from everyday demands. In addition, Sunderland and Wilkins (2004) cite Lightbown and Spada (1999) to argue that ‘current theories … suggest that language learning is not made up of small, measurable chunks and does not go in a straight line’ but is rather an iterative process.

5. An additional feature of this story, not well elaborated here, is that ILP guidance moves through layers of administrators, managers and practitioners within a learning organisation, becoming apparently more compulsory and fixed in its format as it reaches more junior and part‐time staff. Programme and quality managers play a pivotal role in this process of translation.