Teachers’ everyday work-for-change: implementing curriculum policy in ‘disadvantaged’ schools

ABSTRACT

Focusing on teachers’ practices amid a national curriculum ‘implementation’ project for schools identified as having high enrolments of students experiencing disadvantage, this paper uses narrative methods to illustrate what we refer to as teachers’ everyday work-for-change. Teacher interview data was generated via a longitudinal multi-site case study. Two teachers at one school are selected for detailed attention because—despite their significant engagement, commitment, and work towards enacting the new curriculum—their innovations were not sustained. These cases provide a useful site of analysis of change as a practice, rather than a more common focus on change as an outcome. De Certeau's theory of everyday practice is used to discuss how work-for-change is an everyday feature of teacher practice in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage. This aspect of teachers' work in these settings is seldom acknowledged because successes are easily obscured by deficit discourses. Other factors contributing to the invisibility of teachers' work-for-change in these schools include the often-intangible nature of teachers’ professional successes amid more formally visibilized failures, the ephemeral nature of everyday practice, and a workforce context characterised by teacher and leadership transience.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher practice
• disadvantaged schools
• digital technology
• rural schools
• curriculum enactment
• teachers’ work

Introduction

In Australia, socio-economic, cultural, and geographical factors collide with system-wide curriculum and resourcing practices to produce disadvantage with respect to formal education participation and achievement. The unevenness of educational outcomes is strongly associated with poverty, and evident in lower levels of attainment found in poorer urban postcodes and in rural and Indigenous school settings (Thomson, De Bortoli, and Underwood 2017). Among the many challenges faced by school communities in these settings, inadequate access to teacher professional learning (Lock et al. 2012) and frequent staff change (Downes and Roberts 2017; Rice, Richardson, and Watt 2017) are perennial issues that negatively impact the continuity of initiatives and expertise. These factors affect schools’ enactment of new curriculum policy, which requires significant levels of teacher leadership and teacher-initiated innovation.

Education policy research draws attention to teachers’ work to enact, translate, and elaborate policy (Braun, Maguire, and Ball 2010). The active role attributed to teachers in policy enactment at the local level recognises the discretion that teachers have as professionals; the labour involved in teachers’ policy work; and the performativity that can accompany teachers’ and schools’ responses to external policy imperatives. However, dominant explanations of teacher practice remain policy-centric, for example, referencing the aims of policy, the degree to which policy is ‘implemented’, and the impacts of implementation, rather than putting teachers’ views and agendas at the centre of inquiries into their curriculum practices. This is often the case even in research that investigates teachers’ perspectives, for example, by identifying how they actively pursue, respond to, resist, or ignore policy directives (Jenkins 2020). The research project through which the data reported in this paper was generated is also an example of policy-centric research, focused on whether teachers implemented new curriculum policy, what influenced their enactment, and what the outcomes and impacts were.

Policy-centric approaches to investigating teacher curriculum practices risk that those practices are poorly understood. This point is highlighted by Singh, Heimans and Glasswell (2014), who note how their extended work with twelve ‘underperforming’ schools to examine practices amid a literacy program enabled them to see ‘successes of all kinds’ that were not apparent via reporting mechanisms referenced to the characteristics of the program. But spending extended periods in schools is a luxury not often afforded by researchers (or by the schools themselves). Provoked by Singh et al, this paper results from a re-examination of data to provide insights into teachers’ curriculum work amid policy change rather than report outcomes and impacts of ‘implementation’ or how they translated policy in its enactment. We do this because much of what we term teachers’ work-for-change is not understood as such, particularly if it does not result in sustained change with respect to formal policy. To this end, we provide detailed accounts of two Australian teachers’ engagements with the complexities of their school context amid their participation in a national curriculum project.

The project was titled Supporting Implementation of Digital Technologies and involved professional learning, teacher-led research, and the provision of other supports to Australian schools enrolling high numbers of students experiencing disadvantage, to support their enactment of a new national curriculum. Our research – commissioned as part of an external evaluation – focused on following the practices of six case study schools participating in the project. We have selected one school for focus in this paper because of a dilemma we faced as researchers evaluating the success of the project in this school: Despite the teachers’ enthusiasm, labour, and indeed numerous successes, by the end of the three-year project, this school was not delivering the new curriculum. So, the arguments we present here depart from the focus of the wider research project undertaken to evaluate the initiative. Instead of addressing the extent to which teachers did or did not succeed in their ‘implementation’ of policy, or focusing on the barriers encountered, or referencing teacher practice to the intended impacts and outcomes of the project, we enact ‘an interpretive escape’ (Shieh 2023, 4) and look closely at how the teachers engaged with the initiative to produce opportunities in their specific school setting. Our approach is ontologically sensitised by de Certeau’s (1984) theory of everyday practice, wherein practice involves a continual and creative usage of available resources and structures as practitioners pursue their own agendas. This theory provided us with a way of understanding these teachers’ professional practice, the impacts of that practice, and why teachers’ everyday work-for-change might be overlooked.

The paper contributes to knowledge about teacher practice amid curriculum change by supporting a view of teacher practice as necessarily (already) innovative but in ways that make the impacts of that innovation difficult for policy researchers (particularly evaluators) to capture. We argue that understanding teachers’ everyday work as innovative and change-focused is particularly important in settings with high levels of disadvantage because in such settings there is rarely a good fit between policy and context and the impacts of teachers’ work are often intangible.

The paper is organised into three main parts:

• Part I – highlights the challenges of teacher professional learning and curriculum implementation in Australian schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage; introduces the professional learning project with which the teacher participants were engaged; and outlines the research approach and methods used to generate data and the approach to representing the data.

• Part II – narratives—provides a narrative presentation of teacher practice and reflection, drawing on interviews with two teachers from one case study school.

• Part III – Coda—discusses the significance of the practices illustrated by the narrative, arguing that a view of teachers’ work-for-change as necessarily innovative is needed to recognise and affirm teachers’ ongoing but often invisible contribution to transformational work in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage.

Part I. Background and framing

Disadvantage, teacher professional learning, and digital technologies

Australia is a wealthy country with high rates of access to digital technologies (International Telecommunication Union 2015), but the provision of digital technology in Australian schools is patterned along socio-economic lines (Wilson, Thomas, and Barraket 2019), with lower-socioeconomic schools and their communities having lesser access to resources and infrastructure (O’Mara, Laidlaw, and Blackmore 2017) and to the Digital Technologies curriculum (Murphy 2020) than those in wealthier areas. This inequity is compounded in rural and regional locations where the geographic distance from urban centres poses material challenges and makes access more expensive (Afshar Ali, Alam, and Taylor 2020; Wilson, Thomas, and Barraket 2019). Indigenous schools represent some of the settings experiencing the most disadvantage in this regard, with Indigenous Australians having lesser access to digital infrastructure (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2018) and less continuity of access (Radoll and Hunter 2018).

Additionally, when young people do have access to digital technologies, the types of usage can exacerbate disadvantage. Historically the pedagogical approaches to using technologies for school learning have correlated with school demographics, with schools serving higher income populations more likely to use technologies to build higher-order inquiry and problem-solving skills, and schools in poorer areas are more likely to use technology for lower-order drill and practice activities (Papanastasiou and Ferdig 2006; Wenglinsky 1998). More recently, studies suggest that differences between high socioeconomic neighbourhoods and low socioeconomic neighbourhoods in how technology is used both at school and at home advantage those young Australians from privileged backgrounds (Harris, Straker and Pollock 2017). Consequently, these differences in how technology is used, and pedagogical approaches to integration, can compound disadvantage in terms of development of digital skills, achievement in other learning areas, and attitudes towards technology (Kunina-Habenicht and Goldhammer 2020).

Despite these challenges facing schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage, many examples exist where teachers in these settings have used digital technologies and implemented Digital Technologies curriculum in ways that empower students and their communities. Successful approaches are usually sensitive to the specific needs and strengths of students and their communities, including engaging local community knowledges and responding to local contexts and problems (e.g. Bigum and Rowan 2009; Djabibba, Auld, and O’Mara 2019; MacGregor 2018). These seemingly isolated examples are part of the steady, long-established curriculum work of teachers to disrupt traditional power-dynamics in Australian schools by connecting with marginalised communities and repositioning the ‘at risk’ as sources of knowledge and expertise. Engaging curriculum in ways that value the knowledge, practices, and potentials of students and communities experiencing high levels of disadvantage challenges the deficit logics of popular and public discourse and of normative policy responses to disadvantage in Australia (e.g. Fogarty et al. 2018; Lingard, Creagh, and Vass 2012). Indeed, it challenges the ‘disadvantaged’ label itself and associated terms such as ‘rural’ and ‘remote’ that assume city-centric understandings that these communities hold lesser knowledges and are less able to develop solutions to local problems than more affluent, urban communities (Guenther, Halsey, and Osborne 2015).

Digital technologies curriculum and teacher professional learning in Australia

The new Australian Digital Technologies curriculum (ACARA 2022) provides a framework focused on problem solving methodologies and thinking skills that holds potential to empower students and their communities rather than positioning them passively with respect to technologies. Digital Technologies was endorsed in 2015 as a substantive learning area in the Australian National Curriculum (ACARA nd) and reviewed and revised in 2021 (ACARA 2022). It is mandated for all Australian children across the compulsory years of schooling. In some state jurisdictions, the requirement to teach Digital Technologies continues or extends on curriculum directives initiated in the 1990s. For other jurisdictions, the aim and focus of this curriculum area represents a significant change to curriculum practices and a challenge to teacher knowledge. The current Digital Technology curriculum aims to empower students to be critical users and agents in the design of technologies, focusing on problem solving and design processes. In terms of positioning learners, the curriculum deliberately engages students in developing skills and understandings needed to make technology, to solve problems with it, and to consider ethical and sustainable technology practices. As stated in this curriculum framework, Digital Technologies ‘helps students to become innovative creators of digital solutions, effective users of digital systems and critical consumers of information conveyed by digital systems’ (ACARA 2022 np). The Digital Technologies curriculum is represented in the framework as a significant opportunity for Australian students to develop skills, knowledge and dispositions for powerful learning, civic participation, and workplace skills.

For teachers unfamiliar with the content, the curriculum poses significant professional challenges, requiring professional learning and the development of new pedagogical practices. While curricular change poses both opportunities and challenges to all teachers, these are usually amplified for teachers in schools enrolling high numbers of students experiencing disadvantage. Curricular change can provide opportunities for much needed innovation in disadvantaged settings, including avenues for enhancing student engagement and school – community connections. However, issues such as reduced access to specialist knowledge and high staff turnover (Downes and Roberts 2017; Rice, Richardson, and Watt 2017), and lack of reliable equipment and infrastructure (O’Mara, Laidlaw, and Blackmore 2017), can hamper teachers’ efforts to pursue innovation and to implement new curriculum. In such contexts, teacher-initiated innovation is often required to take advantage of potentially empowering curriculum initiatives.

In Australia, these opportunities and challenges were anticipated by the Australian national curriculum authority – the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) – who, from 2017 to 2020, were funded by an Australian Federal Government grant to support the implementation of Digital Technologies in Australia’s school enrolling the highest numbers of students experiencing disadvantage. One hundred and sixty schools with very low values on the Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage (ICSEA) (ACARA 2020) subsequently participated in the project. The project aimed to respond to the specific circumstances and priorities of schools and their communities by scaffolding the development of school-specific plans and action-research projects within a professional learning ecosystem (ACARA 2021). The ecosystem included: the allocation of an external Digital Technologies curriculum specialist (known as curriculum officers) who provided site-specific support to each school; collaborations facilitated between participating schools, and between schools and other partners; and a range of online and face-to-face professional learning focused on the Digital Technologies curriculum and associated resources and pedagogies. Schools participated in geographical clusters in every Australian state and territory. This initiative and funding are part of the broader policy context of the data reported here.

Research design and data

The interviews drawn on in this paper are a subset of data generated as part of commissioned case study research into the project.¹ These interviews focused on the experiences, opportunities and challenges for teachers participating in the project; the outcomes achieved; and impacts and sustainability of practices as reported by teachers and school leaders. The research focused on six schools located in diverse jurisdictions, sectors, and locations. It involved interviews with teachers, assistant teachers, and school leaders during three school visits for each school, conducted across a three-year period (2018–2020). Interviews provided insights into:

• Historical and contextual factors, including the history of Digital Technologies curriculum in the school; the history of the school’s resourcing for Digital Technologies; and, teachers’ backgrounds, plans and concerns.

• Outcomes of participation in the project, including curricular and pedagogical resources and plans that were developed and implemented with support from the project, and the learning outcomes observed.

• Impacts of the project on teachers and students, and implications for sustainability of practices and impacts.

Ethics approval was received by the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee, (Ref: 2018–012), informed consent was provided by all participants, and pseudonyms are used in this paper.

This paper focuses on two teachers from one case study school to provide a close examination of the ways these teachers engaged with the complexities and fragilities of their school settings while involved in the project.

Understanding teachers’ work

Conceptualisations of teachers’ work that ostensibly centre on enabling teachers – such as capacity, capability, professionalism, and agency—can equally be co-opted as a means of subscribing teachers’ labour and aspirations to external agendas and initiatives in ways that rest uneasily with teachers’ own professional agendas and local knowledge and that fail to recognise the conditions and freedoms that empower teachers in their work (Blackmore 2013). For example, Hilferty (2008) notes that the concept of teacher professionalism can be deployed both to support teacher empowerment and as a means of occupational control. Similarly, Priestley et al (2012) caution that the notion of teacher agency can be construed as synonymous with change, whereby the agency of teachers who resist change is not recognised. The appropriation and codification of teacher agency and teacher professionalism for the purpose of auditing and controlling teacher practices is particularly problematic when other factors impacting teacher practices are not considered, positioning teachers as key change agents yet leaving them open to scapegoating when initiatives fail (Clarke and Moore 2013). Tasked to evaluate a government-funded initiative supporting the ‘implementation’ of new curriculum policy in ‘disadvantaged schools’, we therefore deliberated over what might and might not be captured by our research methods and how teachers’ expertise, labour, and the impact of their work might be represented or not. With these things in mind, we look beyond the intended outcomes of the initiative and the formalised foci of the evaluation to instead draw attention to aspects of teachers’ work amid policy change that would otherwise elude representation.

De Certeau’s theorisation resonates with our sense that while teachers’ work-for-change in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage is an ongoing, everyday aspect of teacher practice, it is an aspect that is not necessarily referenced to dominant, authorised policy priorities. Instead, teachers’ work-for-change emanates from teachers’ own understandings and agendas that – intertangled with a palimpsest of policies and practices – emerge in relation to circumstances at their school and in their professional lives that are also emergent. It also resonates with practice-oriented conceptions of agency, such as that developed by Emirbayer and Mische (1998) and elaborated to address teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta, and Robinson 2016). These emphasise agency as temporally situated; often partially, temporarily or incrementally achieved; and emerging in ways where success can be uncomfortable or ethically ambivalent (Emirbayer and Mische 1998).

Narrative analysis

Teachers’ practice stories are a well-established source of insights into the ways that teachers’ histories, expertise, aspirations, and activities engage with the socio-cultural-material conditions of their teaching work. The aims of this paper are explicitly normative. We want to affirm the participant teachers’ work-for-change by applying a generous lens to identifying their everyday practice, even in cases where this work appears to be in vain or to deliver short-lived benefits or ambivalent outcomes. We use narrative methods to produce an account that incorporates a narrative voice and verbatim voicing of two teachers based on individual interviews. Narrative devices (Coulter and Smith 2009) allowed us to render visible the affective depth and complexity of the teachers’ work-for-change within the broader context of the government policy implementation initiative, while referenced to the specificity of their own professional desires and their school’s social, cultural, and material circumstances. We use a conventional narrative arc (beginning, middle, end, coda), interweaving excerpts from different interviews to build chronological sense. This approach allows us to move between the words of the teachers and our interpretations, sensitised by theory and in the service of our research intent. The chronology is limited by the period of our research encounters, the conditions of our human ethics approval, and the teachers’ availability. To give the teachers’ accounts primacy we are generous in the space we provide for their words, and we reserve much of our argument to the coda that follows the main narrative.

De Certeau’s theory helped us to think about this method of presentation. For de Certeau (1984), stories enact a discursive production, creating spaces for alterity and providing insight into the micro-innovations of the everyday. Accordingly, the approach we take to constructing the narrative is axiologically distinct from more representational methods because interpretation and literary devices are drawn on for more-than-representational purposes (Lynch et al. 2019), to provoke a particular a/effect.

To construct the narratives, we examined interview transcripts at a micro level (Bloome et al. 2005), deliberating about the operations evident in their accounts, and selecting excerpts we interpreted as suggesting resourceful, tactical, and productive engagements with context via the project, while also taking the reader on a tour of the challenges, growth, and limits of the teachers’ work-for change.

Part II. Narrative of teachers’ everyday work-for-change

Narrator :

At the time of data collection, Amethyst Primary School was amid major staff change. Following a long period of time when most staff were long serving with permanent ongoing positions, the principal had retired along with three other teachers and a fourth was transferring to another school. This was perceived as both an ending and a beginning as new graduates and casual relief teachers were employed on short-term contracts and an Acting Principal was appointed. Danielle was the Acting Assistant Principal. Her account of her personal history and the history of Amethyst were strongly intertwined.

Danielle:

I came to this school as a student. I think I was 8 turning 9 when I came, and at that stage, that was in the late 70s and it was open to new subdivisions that had opened down the road and so – it was the school to come to because it seemed to be a bit more affluent. I have been teaching at this school for 19 years. I originally came as a support teacher. I was doing that probably for 5-6 years and then I was keen to get ‘on class’ so when the opportunity came up, I asked to be on class, and I’ve been on class ever since. In that time, I have taught every grade except for Foundation.

The demographic has changed since I started, and attendance is now a huge issue for our kids. You hear on the news lately how we’re failing a whole generation of students, and we need to do individual plans and track them, and we are already doing that, but you can’t do that if a child is not coming to school. You are talking domestic violence; violence towards each other – like you watch these kids, if there is an issue and they want to solve a problem, the first thing to do is to hit someone. You have drug, alcohol, mental health issues – they have difficulty getting help for those things or they don’t know where to go for help, or it’s a pretty big process to get help for those different conditions. So, you’re pushing a stone or a rock up a hill. It’s really difficult to counteract what’s going on at home with school.

Narrator :

Nayree was a beginning teacher when we first visited the school.

Nayree:

I knew this school from when I did teaching rounds seven years ago, and at the end of Uni I was like, ‘Oh, do I really want to go there?’ I put my resume in, got casual work straight away. The principal would ring, ‘Can you come?’ ‘Yep.’ Sometimes it’d be 9 o’clock, ‘Can you come?’ I’m like, ‘Yep.’ I’m like, ‘It’s going to take me an hour to get there.’ He’s—’I don’t care, just get here when you get here.’

It’s a pretty tough school. Bin throwers, swearing, and year 5 and 6 they’re evil. I shouldn’t say that but – yeah. They just say anything they can, ‘Oh you don’t know anything. You’re not our teacher, we don’t have to listen to you. You’re ugly.’ I used to do casual work on 5 and 6, and I think I used to take it personally. But – yeah so, yeah, I’m still here and finally this year I got my own class—22 five-year-olds!

So, I started off and I was like, ‘Nah, I can’t do this.’ For the whole of Term One: ‘Nup, nup, nup [no, no, no]’. Two of the students used to fight with each other. They had high needs, very. They’d been taken from their parents and suffered a lot of trauma. They were living with their Nan. Their behaviour was awful. And they used to fight with each other. Most of the other kids were petrified.

So, basically, I spent most of the time doing literacy, numeracy, counting – because I was just like, ‘They can’t count! They can’t do anything! They can’t write their name! Well, they can’t read! They have no idea!’ And there’s too many things to do … Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, this is due. This is due.’ And you’re just like, ‘Okay, when am I going to do this, this and this?’ Programs, PLP’s, ILP’s – so, they’re personalised learning plans for the kids, individual learning plans for the kids, data – data’s due for K12—data’s due every 5 weeks … reading monitoring sheets … vocab testing, hear and recording sounds. And it’s just like, ‘When do you get time to teach?’

Narrator:

Nayree’s accounts of these early experiences of ‘having her own class’ illustrate her position with respect to the everyday challenges of her classroom work and the processes and systems intended to respond to these challenges and support change at the classroom level.

Nayree :

Then I got roped into the Digital Technologies project. Danielle was walking past me, and she was talking to the principal, and she goes, ‘Nayree will do it.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’ I didn’t even know what they were talking about.

Narrator:

Danielle saw the project as an opportunity to improve the digital technologies equipment and infrastructure available to support learning at the school. Early in the project, she conducted an audit that exposed a lack of functioning devices available to the student body. She advocated for new technology and for the project’s professional learning to be extended to all teachers at the school.

Danielle :

When I went to that initial [professional learning], like they told us anything under 2 gigabytes we should be disposing of, and we only had about 10 computers and they were under that. That was a bit of a surprise. So, we have replaced four of those and we will just have to keep using the others. They still work. I mean you don’t have unlimited funding. It’s a little bit unrealistic – the Department – where they think every couple of years you should be replacing your computers.

I went to the principal and said, ‘We need to purchase some equipment’, and he said, ‘Put a proposal together and we’ll have a look at it’. So, we ordered some Bee-Bots, some Dash and Dot robots. Of course, you need tablets to get those to work, so we had to buy tablets. And then, you know like the security up there, we had to get the cupboard to lock everything up. So yeah, would have been about $10,000 all up.

Now our focus is upskilling our staff in Digital Technologies curriculum. We had a curriculum specialist come in for three hours which was really good because this involved the whole staff looking at the curriculum. We did some fun practical things with some robots. So, we got some people engaged and sort of looking at the logical thinking and the problem solving behind the curriculum. I think there’s a bit of excitement that we have got some new equipment.

Narrator:

Danielle’s vision was realised later in the school year when a second school visit by the research team saw the school had resourced a fully operational makerspace. Nayree described the work that Danielle had done to establish the makerspace, including persisting over an extended period to troubleshoot Wi-Fi issues in the school.

Nayree :

A lot has happened since May. We’ve had a lot of professional learning, so we know what we are doing, kind of. We’ve got a new room set up. We call it the Makerspace. Danielle has been very busy, and she has set it up and then we got the robots, and she took them home and programmed them because the internet here is bad. The Department internet doesn’t let you fix things like that. So, then she took them all home and set them all up and brought them back. Time is like the biggest issue and there is only so many hours in the day – you can only do what you can do, but having Danielle set up the Makerspace … she just got in there and cleaned it out and she got everything and it’s like, hands down to Danielle because it’s like, who else was going to do it? And she got in there, and she did it, and now we have the leisure of walking in there, unlocking that cupboard, and ‘let’s play – let’s pack it away – let’s go.’ And she comes around and does the updates. She will do them in her own time. So, we are very lucky to have her!

Narrator:

Nayree’s growing confidence with the children was evident, as was her excitement about their Digital Technologies learning, contrasting sharply with the doubts and deficit discourse displayed during our first interview. She was enthusiastic about the new resources in the school and had been proactive in arranging regular access for her class. She took pleasure in her students’ excitement for Digital Technologies learning and projected confidence in their growth.

Nayree:

There’s a timetable in the staff room so you can just book it. I booked my class in. An hour each week. The classroom assistant turns on the robots and pairs them up, so the kids don’t have to do it. And so, the kids just play. We just play at the moment. I showed them how to use the robot and it was basically, ‘If you press the arrow forward three times and turned it once and then forward again and then back to the start.’ Then I made it go. And they were like amazed – they were like ‘how did you do that?’ And I was like ‘I just showed you – I just pressed the buttons.’ And they said, ‘Will we get to play with that?’ They are keen! I sat them in a semi-circle, and I sat at the end, and said ‘Make your robot come to me.’ I made a movie of it coming to me. We had to do it like three times because they just couldn’t just get it to me in the first go. I am like ‘Let’s do it again!’ I made a video. Here we go – let’s watch it…

Narrator:

By end of the second year of the project, supported by professional learning, Nayree had a clear view on how she could implement Digital Technologies with her Foundation students and was thinking about a school-wide approach to integrated curriculum. She expressed an emergent philosophy of teacher professional learning, with a focus on hands-on play and learning together with the students. Nayree’s involvement in the enactment of the Digital Technologies curriculum – collaborating with her mentor Danielle – expanded her professional identity as she developed confidence in content and pedagogical knowledge and adopted an informal role at the school, offering support to other teachers.

Nayree :

We are upskilling our staff and well we’ve been to a lot of PDs – not just the three of us on the project – it was all of us. There are some people that have a lot more knowledge than other people, but I think if you just bounce your ideas off each other you will be fine. In class, if we don’t know how to do things, we just Google it and then we work out how to do it… sometimes the kids will be like ‘this is how you do it’ and maybe that’s how teachers are going to be now – if they show you something new, well that’s good.

So, we went and looked at the Digital Technologies program at another school. They have a scope and sequences – that’s Australian curriculum – but we just have to adapt it to our state curriculum if that’s what we are going to do. It’s got to be linked to your other Key Learning Areas… I just think we’re all time poor. It needs to be linked together because it’s just like ‘Oh, I’ve got to teach science. Oh no, I’ve got to teach history. Oh no, I’ve got to do this … . You can use it in maths – measurement. We brought in some literacy – we started reading We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, and we had the little cards of each picture. The kids moved the robots around, like in the story, so following the sequence of the book. They had to learn how far the robot moved in one button press, how far it would actually go, so the length of their hand. Like move it five steps forward and then “Does it turn left? Does it turn right?” However, many?’ And if it was going a full circle around, ‘How many times you have to press that button to go around?’ And then they had to play to see if it works, and then if it didn’t work, they started again.

Narrator:

In our final interview with Danielle, she reflected on her role on the school and on what was needed for a more sustainable program that recognised the work involved in maintaining a functioning makerspace.

Danielle :

Last time I saw you I was relieving AP – The job was advertised; I went for the job and I didn’t get it. So, then I was back on class, and we now have Peta as our AP, which has affected my role with this a little bit, because our timetable also changed when we got Peta. So, in the past I had been getting a full day for computer coordinator, which helped me keep the computers running, and plus doing this project as well. Now I’m down to two 40-minute sessions a week, which makes it very difficult – for any of this to happen really.

So, I think from now on I’m just going to have to go and see the principal and say, ‘I’ve got to get this done; you need to give me some time’. But I think maybe there’s not a knowledge of how much work is involved. It’s a lot of work, and that’s why it’s okay to deduct that amount of time from my timetable to keep things, yeah. I think sometimes, well I’m the type of person that just does things because they need to be done, and I don’t go saying ‘Oh I did this today, and this, and this’. So, it might be my fault too, in the fact that I haven’t told them that, ‘Well I’ve spent five hours on the weekend in here, you know getting this sorted!’ Or fixing up those computers or updating all the computers, and that type of thing. So, it’s probably me as well. Just have to go and bite the bullet and have a discussion.

Narrator :

By the third year of the project, Danielle had left the school after an association of 30 years; Nayree also left the school; the makerspace that these teachers had established was decommissioned; and Digital Technologies curriculum was sidelined by a more instructionist emphasis on literacy and numeracy.

Part III. Coda – Understanding teachers’ work-for-change as an everyday practice

This narrative might easily be interpreted as a story of a failed initiative in the face of insurmountable challenges and in the context of the perpetual skill drain from rural and schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage. Inadequacy and failure are familiar tropes of research into ‘disadvantaged’ schools that focus on deficits in resources, skills, and material and social capitals of communities (Stacey 2022), including the difficulties of attracting and retaining staff (Downes and Roberts 2017; Rice, Richardson, and Watt 2017). However, like other researchers who spend time in disadvantaged settings, we wanted to affirm the expertise, resourcefulness, and work these teachers did to try to interrupt patterns of disadvantage by creating new opportunities for their students and colleagues. As Singh, Heimans and Glasswell (2014, 7) note when reflecting on their own research in ‘failing’ schools: ‘so much more [is] happening in these schools.’ We therefore deliberately tuned into the tactical and productive aspects of the teachers’ engagements with the initiative, rendering their professional agency, passion, strategy, and hard work visible amid and in relation with perceived and material inequities, challenges, and failures. We did this to provide a counterpoint to the deficit discourses more often constructed about these types of settings, schools, teachers, and communities, particularly when external initiatives appear to fail.

The narrative presentation deliberately sought to make visible how the teachers engaged productively with the project, and the work and professional growth this entailed but which then vanished from view and what not represented in the way the broader initiative counted outcomes and impacts or measured sustainability. We now consider how to theorise these aspects of the teachers’ professional practice, aspects that seldom feature in positive ways in the official accounts of teachers’ work in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage. Having been inspired by de Certeau’s understanding of the productive force of narratives, we now draw on his understanding of everyday practice to argue that teachers’ everyday work-for-change is not extraordinary but is instead a fundamental aspect of teachers’ work, particularly in schools where students and their families experience socio-economic hardship and where ‘change’ is a constant condition and imperative. Three interrelated features of de Certeau’s theorisation are useful here: everyday practice is productive; it is prolific; and its products are ephemeral. These features help us to think about the persistent, change-focused work done by teachers in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage, and also the scarcity of affirmative accounts of this work and, indeed, the difficulty researchers like ourselves have in capturing and representing this work.

Fundamental to de Certeau’s theory is the ongoing dialogue between tactical and strategic operations (Buchanan 2000). The everyday practices of teachers tactically traverse the strategies intended to control, monitor, and measure their work. These strategies include the policies, systems, initiatives, and resources intended to encourage and monitor the outcomes and impacts of teachers’ curriculum work. Teachers’ everyday work-for-change is productive in that it co-opts policy and related resources to other agendas, rather than simply receiving them. This productive aspect of teachers’ everyday work-for-change resonates with theories of policy enactment (Braun, Maguire, and Ball 2010), but it tips the scale of power more towards teachers’ situated professional agency and less towards a translation from policy to practice.

These narratives foreground how the teachers – in different ways – developed and pursued their vision for the project; demonstrated high levels of persistence in the face of challenges; engaged resourcefully with the project as an opportunity; and recruited others (teachers, spaces, resources, equipment) to their professional endeavours. Tenacity and resourcefulness are a key feature of de Certeau’s characterisation of everyday practice, as humans creatively redeploying available resources in pursuit of their own desires. Some of this resourceful production was visible in our research encounters with the teachers in their schools. Initially the teachers appeared to make significant inroads towards their envisioned school-wide implementation of innovative approaches to Digital Technologies curriculum and pedagogy.

Nayree – a graduate teacher who initially expressed doubts about her own capability and that of her students – reoriented her labour, talk, and interactions with students, and colleagues in support of positive learning encounters and through this development of new insights, skills, and confidence well suited to her ‘yeah, I’ll do it’ professional persona. Nayree rapidly developed her teaching practice in ways that allowed her to operate effectively amid the serious challenges associated with the social, cultural, and material contexts of the school. She quickly realised a need to modulate her expectations and practices in the classroom and seized an opportunity for mentorship by a more experienced colleague whom she admired. Her candid, open approach to professional anxieties and her enterprising approach to gaining access to resources enabled her to ‘[change her] relationship to structure’ (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 964). This can be seen in her talk that moved from an initial sense of shock and being nonplussed by her students’ low skill level with respect to state curriculum, to being inspired and empowered to support their engagement and growth. Further to manipulating the material context to develop and deliver Digital Technologies pedagogy suitable for her students, she also recast her professional identity. Over a short time, she had reconstructed herself from a new teacher who harboured serious doubts about her desire to work in such difficult circumstances (‘nup nup nup’) to an enthusiastic teacher who took delight in her students’ engagement with new learning and who espoused a strong position on pedagogy, teacher professional learning and teachers’ work.

Danielle’s practices evidenced deep local knowledge of the children’s lives and how the institutions of schooling manifest paradoxically as both problems and solutions. Her actions within the project were characterised by initiative, resourcefulness, wisdom, and hope. Her engagement with the curriculum implementation project showed evidence of skills in using data, argumentation, and advocacy to build a collective vision and strategically commandeer resources and allies in pursuit of that vision. Her use of data was tactically astute in a policy context where data is frequently used by administrators as an instrument to shape teacher practices. Danielle’s actions and reflections suggest a strong philosophy of teacher professional learning and educational leadership based on building confidence, skills, and professional agency for all staff. Her professional practice exemplified what Rowan (2012, 46) characterises as ‘neither nihilistic nor naïve… [allowing her] to work within a transformative agenda that is both anchored [in the present] and aspirational [for the future].’

The impact of this work and professional growth was lost to our researcher gaze and apparently to the school when changing circumstances (change of leadership) and loss of support for their aspirations was followed by the teachers leaving the school for other appointments. But de Certeau’s (1974) theorisation suggests that these creative, resourceful, tenaciously productive aspects of everyday practice are prolific, happening everywhere all-the-time. We can speculate that other things are happening in this schools even now, and that Nayree and Danielle continue their work-for-change in their new schools. Because of its minority status with respect to authorised agendas and official discourses, everyday practice is not performative. The prolific activity of everyday practice exists in time, eluding top-down efforts to measure and document, and ‘cannot be reduced to the recordings or to the remainders it leaves behind’ (141). A challenge for researchers therefore is that everyday practice results in ‘perishable’ rather than ‘durable’ products (de Certeau 1974, 139–140) such that teachers’ everyday work-for-change escapes and exceeds policy-centric research.

Conclusion – the invisible work of everyday innovation

Change is a constant concern in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage because of the long-established and persistent inequities and injustice with respect to schooling experiences and outcomes. Additionally, settings like Amethyst are constantly subject to change agendas because they (their performance) are constructed as a policy problem, and are frequently subject to competing and conflicting policy agendas (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012). The concept of teachers’ work-for-change helps to counter views of teachers as ineffective and recalcitrant by identifying work-for-change as an ongoing, ever-present feature of teachers’ work, but it is work that does not necessarily translate into linear, perceptible, or permanent change. It involves tactical commandeering of resources, including policies and the opportunities that they can represent for both student learning and teacher agency.

This paper was informed by an intent to render the tenacity and hard work of two teachers whose aspirations and labour are of a type that is not often portrayed in representations of disadvantage in these schools. The context of our engagement with these teachers was a national curriculum implementation initiative – targeting ‘Australia’s most disadvantaged schools’ – where we were the external evaluators contracted to conduct case study research in six schools. Our brief focused on the qualitative documentation of impacts, outcomes, and sustainability of the national initiative. In different ways, our engagements with each school presented us with dilemmas as researchers. The teachers at Amethyst school were of particular interest because, of the six schools and numerous teachers we interviewed, they seemed the most ready to take advantage of their participation in the initiative and to enact the Digital Technologies curriculum; yet, within the specification of the formal evaluation, by the end of our three-year engagement with the school, sustained impacts of the work were not apparent.

In this context, what can we say about this work which becomes invisible within the formal framework of inquiry? In Australia, as in other countries internationally, schools that do not meet the standards of student engagement and learning outcomes as specified in formal education policy are often portrayed as failing. Commonly, public representations of these ‘failing’ schools are politicised and scapegoat the teachers and communities involved. Critical sociologists work to demonstrate that failure is a function of socio-cultural and material circumstances and prejudices and inequity within societies, which provides evidence and arguments for defending teachers in disadvantaged settings. However, this risks assumptions that these teachers are downtrodden (Singh, Heimans, and Glasswell 2014), cut loose and left adrift by the centre. Portrayals of the agency, resourcefulness, and innovation of teachers in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage are uncommon and popularly perceived as exceptional (e.g. the teacher as saviour (Shoffner 2016)).

However, there is a tradition in education research (largely in the margins of dominant discourse and evidence bases) that documents the work of teachers in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage in positive ways. For example, Kamler and Comber (2005, 125), when writing about turn-around pedagogies, describe the type of curriculum, pedagogic and people work needed to improve outcomes for ‘at risk’ learners as ‘an everyday (rather than miraculous) event that may not be as easy to measure, but which is no less profound.’ De Certeau’s theory of everyday practice is useful for understanding this work as a type of everyday innovation, where teachers in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage are constantly confronted simultaneously by the need for problem-solving and innovation at the microlevel and by the fragility of the things they build. Much of teachers’ work-for-change is minor in status, not attaching itself to authoritative discourse but instead unfolding in time as teachers turn resources and opportunities to the service of emergent situations and circumstances. This activity doesn’t create an enduring product but can ‘slowly change the equilibrium of social constellations’ (de Certeau 1974, 145–146). It is ‘a common, ethereal creativity that is at once everywhere but unrecognised and unassailable’ (Lynch et al. 2016, 57–58).

We didn’t have an opportunity to talk to these teachers about their decisions to leave the school or follow them to their new schools. We can speculate that they have taken their skillsets, knowledge, and aspirations for engaging children in inspiring Digital Technologies learning to their new schools, together with their frustrations and doubts. In a policy and funding context where schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage have difficulty attracting and retaining staff, new understandings of capacity building might be needed to account for the ways that professional expertise circulates between schools: where experience, skills and aspirations developed in one setting move to another. And while we didn’t have an opportunity to look closely at Digital Technology practices at Amethyst after these teachers’ departures to see what evidence of the professional learning initiative endured under the new leadership and amid a seeming return to more instructionist literacy and numeracy priorities, we might speculate that the work of these teachers did make some difference.

With respect to implementing transformational change in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage, Rowan (2012) points out that schools are institutions that are ‘skilled at returning to narrow and limiting understandings and practices’ and that, in the face of this, change towards more equitable schooling for diverse students requires ‘the repetition of small-scale interventions – the ceaseless introduction of difference’ (61). Everyday work-for-change does not directly challenge systematic disadvantage, but the minor, ephemeral successes of teacher-led innovation ‘offer daily proof of the partiality of strategic control and in doing so they hold out the token hope that however bad things get, they are not necessarily so’ (Buchanan 2000, 89). In disadvantaged settings where challenges may seem overwhelming, successes are often partial or incremental and ‘improvements’ usually carry some ambivalence because of the complexities of disadvantage. In such settings teachers must work hard to recognise their professional successes and how they contribute to improved schooling and education, and it is not an easy task for teachers to represent this work in positive ways. We therefore urge researchers to also work hard to identify this aspect of teachers’ work, because a deliberate effort is needed to disrupt long held assumptions of inadequacy that teachers in these schools attract.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julianne Lynch

Julianne Lynch is a associate Professor in transdisciplinary education researcher who investigates technology practices, innovation, and change in informal learning, formal education, and professional learning.

Glenn Auld

Glenn Auld Associate Professor in teaches and researches language and literacy education. His research attempts to enact social justice in literacy education on stolen land in neoliberal times.

Joanne O’Mara

Joanne O’Mara Associate Professor in teaches and researches subject English curriculum, pedagogy, and workforce issues. She is the current President of Victorian Association for the Teaching of English.

Anne Cloonan

Anne Cloonan Associate Professor in researches digital culture and its impact on literacy education and teacher and student learning.

Notes

1. Full report: Lynch, J., Auld, G., Cloonan, A., O’Mara, J., and Speldewinde, C. 2020. Supporting the Implementation of Digital Technologies in Disadvantaged Schools: Case Study of Impact, Outcomes and Sustainability. Waurn Ponds, Australia: Deakin University. Available: https://australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/7213/deakin-university-report.pdf