Abstract
This issue is wide-ranging in its scope, introducing six innovative and original approaches to understanding school change. These authors explore challenging processes of parental networking, building teams of sufficient criticality, engaging with children’s preferences in more independent approaches to learning, the nature of organisational memory and expectations of students and teachers. Issues include important social justice questions such as avoiding urban segregation and supporting transgender and ‘gender expansive’ students.
The first article, by Dara Hill from the University of Michigan-Dearborn (USA), concerns parents in inner areas of the city of Detroit organising together to ensure good school places. There has been a strong trend of better-off families moving away from the inner areas and out to the suburbs, thus increasing segregation. The article describes an initiative by more knowledgeable parents, including young professionals, to avoid this, while also challenging the tendency for inner city schools, under pressure of accountability, to opt for narrow back-to-basics ‘teach-to-the-test’ curricula. Hill’s article includes informative transcripts of interviews with parents, which illustrate the struggle to pursue progressive social and educational values in a complex urban environment. It provides a valuable case study of parental engagement for enlightened school reform.
Much has been made of the importance of collaboration in school improvement. This is not always valuable, as repeatedly emphasised by Hargreaves in his accounts of contrived collegiality. In this article, Pascale Benoliel and Chen Schechter, of Bar-Ilan University (Israel), explore the value of doubt within the processes of teamwork and team development. This is important in order to critique normative assumptions and habitual practices. They highlight behaviours such as questioning, debating, exploratory learning, analysing, divertive exploration and reviewing past events. It is important for teams to learn to engage with different standpoints, beliefs and experiences. This article provides important advice for team members and principals in developing a stance of critique and invites further empirical research.
It is equally important to engage with a diversity of pupil perspectives, and particularly in contexts which expect learners to engage authentically. This is the subject of Reetta Niemi, Kristiina Kumpulainen and Lasse Lipponen from the University of Helsinki (Finland). Working with a class of 8 year olds, they show how diamond ranking and peer interviews provide tools to capture the pupils’ experiences and perspectives. Finland’s revised national curriculum involves active, investigative, reflective and communicative learning and holds that play, imagination and artistic activity will improve knowledge and skills for critical and creative thinking. This innovative research provides a rich account of techniques which inform and strengthen pupil engagement in more independent forms of learning.
Continuing a body of work on organisational learning, Daniel Nordholm and Metta Liljenberg, of the universities of Uppsala and Gothenburg, Sweden, have been exploring the ways in which organisations such as schools can be said to ‘learn’ or hold knowledge. This relates to wider philosophical debates about the nature of mind, using concepts such as ‘situated cognition’ or ‘distributed intelligence’. They explore the concept of ‘organisational memory’, asking how knowledge can be stored in the improvement history of schools, within large-scale educational reforms, and how experience can be sustained through local networks of key agents who develop practical expertise. The role of hard and soft knowledge, pedagogical habitus and resources, local infrastructures, collective work practices, supportive learning environments and capacities of collation is considered.
Julie Luecke, at Edgewood College, Madison (USA), examines the challenge of making schools safe places for transgender, gender expansive and questioning young people. The article points to evidence of harassment and physical harm, and the risk of dropout. It points to teachers’ discomfort and inexperience in moving beyond binary ways of thinking so that trans experience is simplified into a move from one distinct gender to another, with no allowance for students who understand themselves as ‘gender expansive’ or are living with uncertainty. The article presents a framework for conceptualising and developing a Gender Facilitative School. It explores the particular experiences of one student and examines the importance of supporting the student’s voice, of support groups, language and narratives, curricular space, and professional development and partnership.
Grethe Sæbø and Jorunn Midtsundstad, from the University of Agder, Norway, examine the issue of teachers’ sense of responsibility and their expectations of each other and their students. By comparing a high and low achieving school, both situated in relatively poor neighbourhoods, they identify a different culture of professional responsibility. In the high achieving school the teachers see themselves as competent and proactive in encouraging pupils to engage and participate collectively in learning. In the low achieving school, they see themselves as not competent to create the right ethos; problems are understood as deficiencies in individual pupils. In the low achieving school, the teachers feel relieved that they can delegate relationship and motivation issues to classroom assistants so that they (the teachers) can ‘concentrate on their teaching’. The authors relate these differences to discourses of communication among the teachers: in the less successful school the teachers avoid verbalising their expectations for actions.
Finally, Paul Smith and Melanie Blackburn review a new book on collaborative school leadership by Phillip Woods and Amanda Roberts. This book, by two very experienced authors and researchers, relates leadership styles to social justice and educating for democratic citizenship.