Abstract
Review 1
Prof. Stephen J Ball, University College London
This is a worthy book, a book rich with ideas, a book which offers a set of diverse but coherent papers that address a range of important pertinent and persistent issues that now face education systems around the globe. It is a book of hope, a book of redemption. That is to say, yet another book that seeks to save education from schooling while leaving virtually everything that constitutes schooling still in place. It is about doing better with what we have to hand, it is about history and the re-working of a 19th century institution that is patently unfit for purpose in the 21st century. The old adage about rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic comes to mind.
The book sets out to give primacy to teachers’ voices. It consists of 16 papers plus an introduction and conclusion. It rests on a premise of optimism and hope, to wit: “We propose that teachers, driven by a common and collective purpose, when led well, are able to exist in non-hierarchical structures, engage in more level, even and flat, democratic structures,” although it is admitted that “this is difficult while they work within layers and layers of hierarchical systems, byzantine administrations and departments” (p. 12). Thus, “we propose that within the time allowable and accessible for teachers that they connect with others and reflect on their own practice” (p. 12). It remains somewhat unclear as to why teachers’ voices should be privileged, rather than the voices say of students or parents.
There are some fundamental problems with these proposals and the examples put forward to support them. First their unremitting hopefulness; second the lack of any real questioning of the teacher as an ethical and political category; and third the de-contextualisation of teaching and the teacher. That is to say, the school as an institutional setting for teaching goes basically unexamined. Yes, there are asides to the untoward pressures of the neoliberal school and of the hierarchical school, but the school, like the teacher remains imagined as a space of possibility for democracy. All of this ignores the history and purpose of schooling – how and why it came to be assembled – and the history and purpose of the teacher, and at the same time thoroughly conflates education with schooling.
It seems more plausible to suggest that the teacher is a stumbling block in the quest for democracy. The teacher, as currently understood and practiced, is a professional of the modern state and agent of the project of modernity. The teacher comes into educational discourse loaded with a great weight of cultural, political and sometimes emotional baggage. The teacher has a genealogy which suggests little encouragement for envisioning them as agents of democracy.
Even so, the teacher is imagined here is a technician of hope, as ‘The benevolent educator’ or romantic educator (Allen, 2015b) who is burdened with the hopes and demands of democratic schooling and must live up to and emotionally and ethically manage ‘the contradictions of belief and expectation’ (Acker and Feuerverger, 1997, cited in (Dillabough, 1999: 382) with which they are confronted. Even more grimly, as Ansgar Allan says “under these conditions, obedient subjects are those that have not given up hope” (Allen, 2015a: 8).
This book fails to distance itself from the metaphysics and optimism of modern schooling. It is unable to articulate something we might call education in other than in these terms – which provide the stultifying grammar for our educational imagination. As so often before the premise is that with some tinkering, reform, improvement, right thinking and good will, all will be well– we just have to get it right. This ties us to the tired but resilient fantasies of education policy (Clarke, 2019).
And what goes unaddressed is that the school is a particular site, a point of concatenation, at which the modern subject is concentrated and enacted, through patterns, clusters and models – we call them levels, sets, streams, bands, specialisms, withdrawal units, etc. We rarely have any distance from this subjectivity because we are – in a knowledge society - an outcome of the school as a modern documentary, technological, socio-cultural system. It hails and labels us, and we must respond as a social entity, a learner, as a social fact (of competence, level, qualification, score, achievement). In sum, the school is a ‘bundle of relations which tie … power, the truth, and the subject’ (Foucault, 1996: 37). That is its inevitability, its raison d’etre. It is a key constituent site of the carceral archipelago. As (Deacon and Parker, 1995: 116) put it: “Education is designed to fail; it produces needs, and needy subjects, in order to justify its own necessity”. And we have yet to face up to the impossibility of education to ‘strip away the myths and self-deceit of educators, and expose the grim truth of the education process – namely, that it is a core element in the mechanics of modern disciplinarity’ (Leask, 2012: 59).
Underlying the project of this collection is an unspoken commitment to the enlightenment project and in this nexus and as suggested above the school and the teacher remain more or less unquestioned – romanticism is cherished and cynicism is abhorred. “With some hesitations and some dissent, contemporary critical traditions continue a nineteenth century view of social redemption through schooling” (Popkewitz and Brennan, 1998: 7). There is no space in which education may be thought differently, critique is blunted and circumscribed by cycles of hope and disappointment. Despite criticism and despite continual reform: ‘A vague romantic impulse remains, which just about sustains the educator. This impulse is the product of a belief that despite it all, education is still motivated by an essential goodness’ (Allen, 2015a: 5).
What is lacking here is a form of critique that challenges the necessity of schooling in order to produce an ‘other side of education’, a space of transgression and experiment for education rather than an alternative to or upgrade of what we now have. As Matthew Clarke argues:
Ultimately, ‘the other side of education’ should not be confused with notions of individual or societal redemption, or of a promised land where the enduring tensions and traumas of education will find resolution (Clarke, 2019 p. 144).
We cannot conceive of something different within the discursive possibilities we current inhabit. These papers are bound by epistemic rules and closures that enable and constrain us to think within certain versions of what is and might be true – the conditions of possibility of modern pedagogical thought remain as an exteriority. Rather than live with and perpetuate consolations of hope and promises of reason, and the fantasies of democratic education as Ansgar Allen suggests, we should begin by admitting the absurdity of education, ‘and learn to laugh while laden’ (Allen, 2017: 177) and to work with the ‘painful amibiguities’ that ‘are all we have left’ (p. 186). That is, we should be against school rather than for it. We should seek to reveal its contingency and make it intolerable rather than seek redeem or save or to improve it. We should seek to re-think the teacher and pedagogy and perhaps address ourselves to fostering ethical learners with a healthy suspicion of the present, while at the same time being able to acknowledge their own fallibility and that of the teacher (see Ball, 2017).
Let us abandon hope, forget the school, ignore the teacher and start elsewhere. Let us be cynical and adventurous. Our practice and thinking as ‘educationalists’ must move beyond the decadent consolations of redemption and simple deontological premises and struggle instead ‘to actively negotiate the future’ (Olssen, 2017) with openness and flexibility.
Review 2
Professor Lisa Murtagh, Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester
The collection “Empowering Teachers and Democratising Schooling” chronicles the struggles facing Australian educators under a rising tide of centralised control. It highlights how market-based reforms and standardised accountability have steadily disempowered both teachers and students.
The book provides an illuminative lens on education in the current climate. The book is novel and powerful, drawing on the lived experiences of a diverse collective through its inclusion of voices from across many aspects of education, including teachers, academics and award-winning teacher-innovators. Its core vision of re-empowerment is a key message, and it holds insights for England’s education system. Like their Australian counterparts, English teachers operate in a climate of surveillance and compliance, with attacks on professionalism that impact well-being, stress and attrition. By upholding collective action and democratic values as antidotes to notions of authorised pedagogies, curricula and the dubious promise of the ‘what works well’ agenda, this book offers a means of recovering teacher agency.
The writers depict a profession in Australia, assailed from all sides, with teachers facing a barrage of challenges that are steadily eroding their autonomy, efficacy, and well-being. The authors note, and I would agree, that some of the chapters are neither easy reading nor uplifting narratives, however, they serve to expose how unrealistic expectations, attacks on competence, and a culture of overwork have created a profession overwhelmed and besieged. For example, on reading Dunning’s chapter, I was drawn to the concept of “teacher bashing” by media outlets and political pundits who often scapegoat teachers for what are arguably systemic dysfunctions. In England, this was particularly notable during the COVID-19 pandemic with tabloids and politicians deploying discourses of ‘lazy teachers’ (Whittaker, 2020). The media plays an important role in shaping the perceptions of the general public (Mockler, 2022) and studies have echoed Dunnings concerns, that a negative portrayal of the profession, and in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic, was a contributing factor to a decline in teacher mental health and wellbeing (Johnson and Coleman, 2021; Kim et al., 2021).
The authors also draw attention to how the impact of globalised education reforms governed by mangerialism, performativity and marketisation, have led to an era of deep neoliberalism in education in Australia. However, and notably, whilst situated in the Australian context, the chapters here serve as a case study for other countries, and have particular resonance with the current educational climate in England. Here, there is an emergence of a “distortion” (Biesta, 2017) of the profession, and in particular of how professional knowledge has been distorted and reshaped, with a focus on “what works” that fosters and values singular and prescriptive approaches to teaching and learning. This market-based ideology has stripped educators of autonomy and voice, whilst workloads spiral out of control as teachers try to meet unrealistic demands, and a culture of overwork fuels martyr mentalities that expect endless sacrifice. Coupled with this, the constant narration of failure further demoralises an already emotionally depleted workforce. It is no surprise then that recruitment and retention of teachers remain intractable challenges in both Australia and England.
As a key education indicator, the authors note that PISA performance has been a significant lever for change in Australia. This is echoed throughout the world with poor comparative performances instigating often radical, policy borrowing from other, more successful countries according to the league tables based on what can be described as “PISA envy” (Thomson et al., 2014: xii) alongside educational reform. A crucial element of such educational reform agendas has involved an increased emphasis on practical and standardised methodologies. In England as in Australia, compliance has displaced creativity under reforms driven by economic instrumentalism, with a clear focus on ‘datafication’ (Pierlejewski, 2020) and the absence of the human as an individual. A standardised national curriculum enforced through inspectorial regimes leaves little room for teacher autonomy, discretion or student interests, and instead narrows learning as teachers ‘teach to the test’.
Such reforms undermine civic aims by cutting arts, humanities and vocational programmes that cultivate whole persons, and Nina Burridge’s and John Buchanan’s chapter provides a call to arms for the profession. Reclaiming educator agency is a precondition for moving from functionalist policies towards the human development goals of mutual understanding, critical citizenship, and the pursuit of human flourishing. The promises of empowerment it upholds offer hope that teachers can drive change in times of uncertainty. The current context teachers find themselves in includes broader concerns than teaching to a standardised curriculum to merely improve test scores. Teachers’ and their students’ worlds extend beyond the classroom, as matters of global concern are emerging: climate change, disparity of access to resources and threats to democracy. This book urges focus on the human connections at the heart of education, rather than simply figures on a spreadsheet. It argues for policy and institutions that empower rather than constrain agency. It calls on teachers to collectively reclaim their role in cultivating active citizenship.
Reclaiming agency and striving for democratisation however, require solidarity. Democratisation must also, therefore, encompass the students themselves, providing opportunities to amplify their voice in shaping their schooling. Building youth capacities for analysing and revising the status quo, rather than just adapting to it, are essential. The book provides a strong message for the democratising of schooling, and whilst advocating for systematic change, the authors call for collective action, including resistance, and not just in schools but across schools; building networks and pressing for policies that develop empowered professionalism rather than enforcement. The authors note the imperative of forging alliances between unions, university schools of education, and grassroots teacher groups to advance human-centred reforms.
As a pre-service teacher educator, I was particularly struck by the concerns raised by Sandy Nicolls regarding aspects of pre-service teacher preparation. It seems that, as in England, much attention has been given to teacher education with a focus on the effective preparation of new teachers joining and remaining in the profession (Murray et al., 2019). Notably Nicolls observes that in Australia, there is a focus on predominantly quantitative ‘evidenced based’ approaches. Whilst aspects of our teacher education programmes may differ, this echoes with my experience in England, where pre-service teachers are required to demonstrate that they have met the Standards for Qualified Teacher Status (DfE, 2012), and in doing so, become embroiled in gathering detailed evidence. Arguably, this can lead to the training year becoming more about meeting the standards than about developing as a practitioner. Nicolls also raises concern about edu-marketers, questioning, (as does Lilley earlier in the book), the significance placed on Hattie (2008), a dominant force in Australia despite the large body of academic critique of his work. Australia’s pre-service teacher educators are not alone in having dubious ‘evidence based’ pedagogies imposed upon them, and I urge my Australian counterparts to cast their eye across the globe and interrogate the recent policy developments in England, in relation to both pre-service teachers and Early Career Teachers (ECTs). We currently find ourselves as provider of pre-service teacher education, and mentors of ECTs navigating the demands of compliance to an Initial Teacher Training Early Career Framework (ITTECF, DfE, 2024). Whilst I support the desire for consistency of excellent standards, and as Nicolls notes, few would argue against the proposition to develop quality teachers, I am concerned about the drive for homogeneous approaches to education that lead merely to compliance (Murtagh et al., 2024).
This book presents a rich patchwork of academic research, teacher inquiry, and personal experience, and I found the change of style chapter-to-chapter to be refreshing. The diversity and experiences of the writers was clear; yet there was a defined thread through all of the chapters associated with the negative impacts of marketisation, managerialism, performance measurement and accountability. Similarly, the authors conveyed common perspectives associated with the potential of individual and collective action to counter the neoliberal agenda in education. Whilst the writers present a strong, and often impassioned case for empowering teachers and democratising schooling in Australia, there is undoubtedly resonance here for teachers and educators globally.