Teachers’ work and pedagogy in an era of accountability

Abstract

A great deal of educational policy proceeds as though teachers are malleable and ever-responsive to change. Some argue they are positioned as technicians who simply implement policy. However, how teachers go about their work and respond to reform agendas may be contingent upon many factors that are both biographical in nature and workplace related. In this paper we discuss the work of middle school teachers in low-socioeconomic communities from their perspectives. Referring to reflective interviews, meeting transcripts and an electronic reporting template, we examine how teacher participants in a school reform project describe their work – what they emphasise and what they down-play or omit. Using Foucaultian approaches to critical discourse analysis and insights from Dorothy Smith's (2005) Institutional Ethnography, we consider the ‘discursive economy’ (Carlson, 2005) in teachers’ reported experiences of their everyday practices in northern suburbs schools in South Australia in which a democratic progressive discourse exists alongside corporate and disciplinary discourses.

Keywords:

• teachers’ work
• pedagogy
• accountability
• discourse
• middle schooling

Notes

1. This paper is an outcome of a collaborative research project, ‘Reinvigorating middle years pedagogy in “rustbelt” secondary schools’, funded by the Australian Research Council 2004–2007 (LP0454869), between the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures (University of South Australia), the Northern Adelaide State Secondary Principals Network, the Australian Education Union (SA Branch) and the South Australian Social Inclusion Unit. Chief Investigators include Robert Hattam, Phillip Cormack, Barbara Comber, Marie Brennan, Lew Zipin, Alan Reid, Kathy Paige, David Lloyd, Helen Nixon, Bill Lucas, John Walsh, Faye McCallum and Brenton Prosser with assistance from Kathy Brady, Philippa Milroy and Sam Sellar.

2. There is more work to be done in the RPiN project on the specificities of ‘context’ that affect the work of teachers in the 10 participating schools (see Thrupp & Lupton, 2006).