School culture and values-related change: towards a critically pragmatic conceptualisation

Abstract

While ‘school culture’ is a topical issue, there is some consensus on a knowledge deficit regarding its subterranean dynamics and influence on change effort. This article describes an exploration of the mediation of a values-related change effort by school culture in Irish post-primary schools from the perspective of a research project which focused on the dynamic interface of change, special educational needs (SEN) and information and communication technology (ICT). The study identified how an inclusion-orientated polycultural entity can be enabled in schools, but also tracked and modeled the contestation and bounding of that phenomenon. The findings point to the inadequacy of the dominant monocultural conceptualisation of school culture, and alternatively construct school culture as a zone of polycultural contestation and ideological settlement. This interpretation suggests the dominance of a naïve reformist discourse on school culture and change, and suggests that an alternative discourse of critical realism be applied. A range of interpretations and recommendations arising from the study are outlined in relation to our understanding of school culture and values-related change.

Keywords:

• school culture
• polycultural contestation
• change mediation
• innovation adoption
• moral purpose
• information and communication technology (ICT)
• special educational needs (SEN)

Notes

1. It should be noted that these adhocratic conditions are fast dissipating as the Irish post-primary SEN landscape becomes increasingly more professionalised and bureaucraticised. This trend is evidenced by the establishment of the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) and the Special Education Support Service (SESS) in 2003, the passing of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act (2004), the appointment of inspectors with specific responsibility for SEN, the 2007 publication by the Inspectorate of post-primary guidelines on The Inclusion of Students with Special Educational Needs (DES 2007), and considerable expansion in the range of professional development opportunities and supports. The implications of this phenomenon are outside the scope of this article.

2. Some Junior Certificate Schools Programmes (JCSP) in the schools had very similar origins, personnel and dynamics, and were an example of such niche activities supported by formalised structures. However, these also operated somewhat in the margins and were similarly bounded.

3. In this regard, the term margin dynamics is a useful conceptual handle, considering that the most innovative work in Irish education in recent times has occurred at the ‘margins’ (Gleeson 2000; Sugrue and Gleeson 2004), with much of it eventually withering. This representation may be seen as a framework for understanding such margin dynamics in the Irish context.

4. Gleeson (2004) observed a ‘rhetoric/reality dichotomy’ in broader Irish educational development.

5. This also suggests the merit of an inquiry into why that vibrant critically pragmatic scholarship is not more forefronted at meso-level, and whether the uncomfortableness of such scholarship leads to an unbalanced meso-level representation. In other words, is there an ‘insider/outsider’ phenomenon through which the softer genre of academic critique becomes represented in policy formulation, and in subsequent meso-level implementation and support structures (Travers and McKeown 2005)?