Teacher development against the policy reform grain: an argument for recapturing relationships in teaching and learning

Abstract

As public schools in countries like the UK, USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand continue to suffer from the damaging effects of poorly conceptualized educational reforms, educators struggle to come up with alternatives with which to reclaim schools. While acknowledging the situational, contextual and temporal differences between these countries, this paper presents a rationale for reinserting the relational work of schools at the centre of a teacher development‐led form of recovery. The central claim advanced herein is that teacher development in schools must have a central and demonstrable concern with the primacy of relationships in teaching and learning. Schools and teachers have the collective capacity to reclaim the ground that has been severely eroded by managerialist and marketizing agenda that have been allowed to intrude on schools and subjugate the importance of relational forms of knowing. Placing students at the centre is crucial to creating the direction necessary for re‐establishing the relational complexity of schools.

Keywords:

• Relational School
• Relationships in Learning
• School Reform
• Student Voice
• Teacher Development

Acknowledgements

This paper was funded by two grants from the Australian Research Council: School and Community Linkages for Enhanced School Retention in Regional/Rural Western Australia (Linkage Grant); and Individual, Institutional and Community ‘capacity building’ in a Cluster of Disadvantaged Schools and their Community (Discovery Grant). I acknowledge the support from my other institutional affiliations as: Visiting Professor, Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, University of Waikato, New Zealand; Adjunct Graduate Professor, College of Education, Texas State University‐San Marcos, USA and Adjunct Professor, Charles Darwin University, Australia. I express my appreciation to the two anonymous reviewers of this paper who helped me improve it.

Notes

1. I am indebted to Michael Fielding for drawing this passage to my attention.

2. The reason for the extensive use of author self‐citation here is to indicate the existence and location of the author’s previously published work on this topic particularly as it applies to the Australian context, and to avoid replicating ideas that have already been published elsewhere.