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’.

KEYWORDS:

• Accountability
• minor key research
• policy enactment
• response-ability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We refer here to the research project Smart Education Partnerships: Testing a Research Collaboration Model to Build Literacy Innovations in Low Socio Economic Schools- an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage funded project (LP0990585). The project was a design research collaboration that developed and tested a set of innovative practices for enhancing literacy outcomes in schools situated in high poverty contexts. The specific aims of the ARC Linkage project were: (a) collaboratively test and develop an innovative model of school improvement; (b) produce an empirically validated model for adaptation to a range of state, national and international schooling contexts; and (c), elaborate on the research of school improvement via a number of innovations that will contribute new knowledge to the field.

2 Australian Research Council Linkage Projects are for collaborative research and development (R&D) between higher education researchers and industry partner investigators. While the research grant is administered by the university, a legal contract is signed with the partner organisation, prior to the commencement of the research project. The Smart Education Partnerships project (LP0990585) received significant investment from the federal government research agency, Australian Research Council as well as two sources of contribution from the industry partner the state Department of Education: a cash contribution and an in-kind contribution. The in-kind contribution comprised significant time allocation of senior education officers, principals, teachers, and use of departmental buildings for research meetings, as well as access and use of data generated by the Department for collaborative research purposes. The cash contribution from the partner investigator was used to purchase resources to design interventions for trial and testing in the 12 participating schools, including: school-based resource packs, material for data displays, diagnostic assessment kits, classroom observation schedules/instruments; teacher release time, and web-enabled devices for data collection and synchronisation to support collaborative inquiry based processes. ARC funds were primarily used to employ two categories of research assistants. The first category, school-based researchers, worked intensively in schools with classroom teachers and lead literacy teachers to co-analyse student learning data, co-design innovative pedagogies, and co-test the effectiveness of these pedagogies. The second category, university-based researchers, collected data via interviews and focus groups, and theorised this data (see Singh, Märtsin, Glasswell, 2013; 2015).

3 The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is conducted annually for all students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The Australian government's expectation is that all Australian students in these year levels will participate in reading, writing, language conventions (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and numeracy tests.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this study was provided by the Australian Research Council Linkage scheme (LP0990585).