CHAPTER TEN

TEACHERS FOR A FAIR GO: THE TEACHER AS RESEARCHER IN LOW SES CONTEXTS

EVE MAYES1 AND WAYNE SAWYER2

1 THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY 2 UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY

Introduction

Schools in low SES settings can be often characterised by deficit discourses about students (see Thomson and Comber 2003) and, with the popularity of school league tables in the politico-media world, so can their teachers. In this chapter we apply the conceptual tools of Holland et al’s (1998) “figured worlds” to argue for the potential of teacher research in low SES settings to proliferate alternative discourses, artefacts and identities for teachers and their students. We argue that teacher research in low SES settings is vital in getting “to the root of the teaching relationship” and creating “environments in which these learners thrive” (Teese 2006, 159). One does not have to “buy into” an agenda which positions teachers as deficient to see building research experience as an important function and highly appropriate ambition for the profession. Indeed, viewing teachers as intellectuals and social theorists has been argued as crucial in “creating counter-hegemonic resistance” to market-driven visions of education that mute the voices of teachers and their students (Smyth 2011, 53).

We are here drawing from the research project Teachers for a Fair Go which is explained in detail the preceding inter-chapter. Alongside the role of the teacher-as-researcher in specifically low SES communities, we are interested in the alternative discourses and identities that become possible

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in “figured worlds” where teachers are positioned, and position themselves, as researchers. We consider the questions:

• What discourses, artefacts and identities are typically associated with low SES schools?

• What is/could be distinctive about teacher research in low SES settings?

• How might teacher research in low SES settings contribute to the production of alternative discourses and learner/ teacher relationships and identities?

The figured world of the ‘low SES school’

In considering our first question, What discourses, artefacts and identities are typically associated with low SES schools? we turn to the theoretical frame of “figured worlds”i. Holland et al. (1998) define a figured world as:

… a socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others (1998, 52).

Artefacts are the means by which figured worlds are “evoked, collectively developed, individually learned, and made socially and personally powerful”, positioning individuals with respect to those worlds. Artefacts may be “tangible, used voluntarily and consciously”, but may later become “internalised”, “constitutive of thought, emotion and behaviour” (Holland et al. 1998, 36-63).

Test results and league tables, as well as the ways in which these are absorbed and translated within schools, very often create a “realm of interpretation” of low SES schools as “failing”. Because of this, artefacts such as: worksheets; behaviour management running sheets/ tokens/ booklets; student referrals and data packages from public testing, along with “discursive practices” (Rudd 2012, 683), such as a central focus on behaviour and basic skills, can sometimes dominate in these schools. One of the perennials of research into curriculum and pedagogy in low SES schools is the proliferation of artefacts and discursive practices that are cognitively low-level, usually in response to basic skills assessment results (Darling-Hammond 2010; Dudley-Marling and Michaels 2012; Luke, Dooley, and Woods 2010), and a focus on “performance”, rather than “achievement” (Teese and Lamb 2009, 19-20)—since public perception of schools based on league tables particularly disadvantages low SES

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schools. These deficit discourses and artefacts have profound implications for teachers’ and students’ actions, relations, achievements and identities.

The distinctiveness of teacher research in low SES settings

It is in response to this deficit framing of the low SES school and its students and teachers that we turn to our second question, What is/ could be distinctive about teacher research in low SES settings? Teachers were chosen for the Teachers for a Fair Go research partly because of the intellectual challenges that they presented to students (Sawyer 2013) and hence because of their working against the discursive practices described above. The lesson that high-level cognitive work in a supported environment might improve basic skills results as a “payoff” (Dudley-Marling and Michaels 2012) is a lesson that systems have yet to learn. The Teachers for a Fair Go research was premised on the assumption that teacher-researchers might be best placed to teach that lesson to their systems, by building knowledge and theory and helping schools and systems avoid investment in “quick-fix” basic skills programs and limited curricula.

Teese has argued strongly that low SES schools ought to be the centre of educational innovation. He is worth quoting at length:

Real innovation is not going to come from the high end of schooling. The high-end schools are committed to conservation, to entrenchment of advantage, to predictability, to the routine production of success for the groups for whom success is routinely expected…

We have to look elsewhere for innovation—for system-wide change in the fundamental qualities of teaching and learning. And our most likely candidates are going to be the schools where everything depends on relationships between individuals. These are the disadvantaged schools. It is in these schools that the fundamental question of a child's relationship to learning in a social environment is posed in its most acute form. It is in these schools where nothing can be taken for granted regarding a child's readiness for school, his or her language skills, attitude to work in a classroom, respect for others, comprehension of the “craft” of being a pupil…

So we would choose as our engines of innovation not high-end schools, but disadvantaged schools. We would make them laboratories of teaching and learning reform. We would relate to them as sources of systemic renovation

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aimed at fundamental improvements in quality of learning on behalf of the system as a whole (Teese 2006, 158-159).

Teese’s argument that innovation for the whole system is best addressed in lower SES environments looks to both improve the system as a whole and provide a route to equity for the low SES schools themselves. It is a compelling vision that would require, and certainly welcome, the teacher-as-collaborative- researcher in lighthouse schools. But in this context, important questions are: Is teacher research an innovation? Does teacher research lead to the reconfiguring of environments to be ones in which “learners thrive”? And if it does, how might teachers in these settings, the “engines of innovation” and “laboratories of teaching and learning reform”, be supported and encouraged to innovate? We have already declared a belief in the importance of research capacity to the profession, but, to put it crudely, is it related to greater success for students? Using PISA results as an indicator of teacher effectiveness has many inherent risks, but it is worth noting how often leading systems - as based on PISA results—are characterised by research as a central aspect of teacher practice (e.g. Darling-Hammond 2010; Sahlberg 2011), often beginning in pre-service teacher educationii ( Darling-Hammond 2006, 2010; Sahlberg 2011; Schleicher 2011, 20). From a social justice perspective, Giroux has argued for some time for teachers gaining enhanced control collaboratively over the production of knowledge (Giroux 1988; see also Smyth 2011). Lingard (2011) has argued that collaborative action research across schools is needed to facilitate innovative pedagogical and assessment practices, greater opportunities for disadvantaged young people and better quality school outcomes These arguments seem to us to relate strongly to the potential of teacher research to contribute to improved student achievement. In any case, it is difficult to see how the production of theory and knowledge (see Comber 2005; Smyth 2011) for teachers by teachers—done systematically, and in collaboration with others—could ultimately impact on students other than positively.

However, does teacher research matter more in low SES contexts? One absolutely central—however obvious—answer is that everything matters more for these students because of what low SES represents in terms of educational disadvantage. To stay with PISA briefly, in reading-literacy assessment across OECD countries in 2012, for example, the average performance difference between advantaged (the top quarter of socio-economic status) and disadvantaged (the bottom quarter of socio-economic status) students was 90 score points, or the equivalent of more than two years of schooling and more than one PISA proficiency level.

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Disadvantaged students were, on average, more than twice as likely as students who were not disadvantaged to score in the bottom quarter of the performance distribution (OECD 2013, 38). The fact that some countries are better at closing such performance gaps strongly suggests that educational inequities can be ameliorated with concerted action and the strategies used to do so are worthy of attentioniii. Ultimately, addressing the equity gap in education requires more than focus on so-called “teacher quality”, but must include public policy on poverty and public policy on educational equity. Nevertheless, in this mix teacher practice has a part to play. An adequate response to educational inequity has to approach each of these individual elements of teacher practice and public policy as necessary but not sufficient if considered alone. Whatever develops the capacity of the profession matters more for these students precisely because they are from low SES backgrounds with all that that entails.

Teacher research and the production of alternative discourses, practices and identities

We now consider the potential of teacher research to reimagine and reconfigure the experience of teaching and learning within low SES settings. We approach our third question, How might teacher research in low SES settings contribute to the production of alternative discourses and learner/ teacher relationships and identities? by reflecting on the shared experience of an academic (Wayne) and a classroom teacher in the role of researcher (Eve) in the Teachers for a Fair Go projectiv. Though conscious of our individual roles in the research process itself, we hope to move beyond simply exploring teacher identity from the individual reflective auto-ethnographic stance of the teacher- researcher and also beyond the single perspective of the external researcher’s gaze (see Doecke et al. 2007). While seeking to move away from a long tradition of educational research which has positioned teachers only as the objects of the researcher’s gaze, we also need to avoid romanticising the endeavour. Academics and teachers working as researchers are sometimes negotiating and mediating radically different viewpoints about knowledge claims and certainly radically different institutional pressures. Centrally important is “teacher-teacher dialogue and teacher-researcher dialogue that is genuinely two-way” while recognising “that in dialogue, perspectives grow and interact, but need not necessarily merge or produce ‘consensus’ in some final ‘truthful’ representation” (Doecke et al. 2007, 13-14).

A key part of the methodology in the Teachers for a Fair Go project was the position of teachers as co-researchers (Munns and Sawyer 2013).

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The academic team from the University of Western Sydney (UWS) were aware of not too glibly casting teachers as researchers. On the other hand, there was a firm belief that teachers exercising Lingard and Renshaw’s (2010) “researchly disposition” were, in that role, making a major contribution to professional practice and research knowledge. The academic researchers did not want the co-researching role to be tokenistic and, from the first, the teachers were aware that joining the project meant a commitment to traditional formal research practices. The research commitment that teachers undertook in joining the project was to:

• write about their pedagogical practices surrounding engagement (as part of the application/selection process after nomination)

• agree to be both the subject of a week-long case study, and • be a co-author of the case study itself • read and respond to the case studies of other teachers on a project intranet

• take part in an intensive cross-case-analysis workshop at the conclusion of all the case studies.

In this six-day cross-case analysis, the specific focus was on identifying, among other things, the key features of whole-class pedagogies, including how teachers provided individual support for studentsv. The six-day workshop had all of the participants engaged in what we would generally regard as fundamental research activities, such as: reviewing data; defining key issues and key terms; interrogating the taken-for-granted; coding and categorising data and re-considering previous categorising; interrogating the explanatory force of the model of engagement used in the research; taking different “cuts” through the data; re-conceptualising the data in specific ways, and mapping findings against literature. All of this analysis was done working within the teachers’ contexts but at the same time “developing more general insight and transferable knowledge about teaching and learning processes…not simply to improve practice locally, but to create a body of knowledge about learning and teaching that can inform theory and practice generally” (Lingard and Renshaw 2010, 36). Teachers also co-presented with the academic researchers at a number of conferences (e.g. Callow et al. 2009; Mayes and Sawyer 2010, 2013) and were asked to be part of the written dissemination of the project’s findings.

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(‘e’)ngaging messages and discourses and artefacts in ‘figured worlds’ of research

The research project used a model of motivation and engagement (the MeE framework) developed in the context of low SES school communities as part of larger Fair Go research program at the University of Western Sydney. The project and its analytical MeE framework is detailed in the preceding inter-chapter. We believe that the models developed through this research offered discourses and artefacts for interpretation of classroom interactions and events within the figured world of the research. The two key issues from the MeE framework to be highlighted here are:

• distinguishing classroom engagement ([“e”]ngagement] from the engagement a student attains (or not) to education in general ([“E”]ngagement) and

• the inclusion of a model of “message systems” pertaining to student engagement.

In the Teachers for a Fair Go research, the language of these “message systems” formed a heuristic through which teachers/ researchers evaluated their practice (see Table 1 in inter-chapter). This heuristic, in turn, where teachers and academics thought it appropriate, became a tool for teachers to reflect on and to construct and reconstruct their sense of self in relation to their pedagogy and research (Holland et al. 1998, 45). The 5-pronged “engaging messages” heuristic and associated documents facilitating reflection (see Tables 2 and 4 in inter-chapter) were examples of artefacts used within the figured world of the researched classroom. In Eve’s experience, these artefacts led to her further uptake of particular “discursive practices” (Rudd 2012, 683) by which artefacts are discussed, understood and valued in classrooms.

At the same time, discourses were adapted, re-shaped and appropriated into new forms as teachers and researchers integrated them into their sense of self and their construction of the classrooms. Each of us entered the figured world of the research case study on Eve from a different position—as academic researcher or as teacher. The figured world of the case study then became co-created. Our writing jointly necessarily constructed yet another figured world as we struggled to gain the appropriate voice, and negotiated perspectives—so that this current account is one of “multiple possible trajectories” of the experience of the case study (Davies and Davies 2007, 1140).

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While ostensibly, the routines, classroom configurations and patterns of interaction in Eve’s classroom did not dramatically alter during the case study from what they previously had been, the entry of an academic researcher translated the classroom into a place of research. A “realm of interpretation” constructed this particular classroom as “e”ngaging, and actors, acts and outcomes were to be read partly (but not exclusively) through the particular interpretive lens of the “e”ngaging messages discursive framework. Particular actors were recognised (engaged/ “e”ngaging teacher and engaged students), acts that led to visible signs of student engagement were assigned meaning, and positive outcomes in student attainment and attitude were valued. Eve was positioned as an engaging teacher: a teacher who is engaged in reflection and (now) in research and who employed “e”ngaging messages with students, consequently engendering student engagement. In responding to being labelled as a researcher, Eve thought of her words, actions and reactions within the “realm of interpretation” of the “e”ngaging messages framework. Eve became keenly aware of how her planning, her written artefacts (resources and classroom activities), her spoken words and her actions and interactions did or did not reflect the “e”ngaging messages heuristic, despite it not being the only form of observation or analysis (indeed, the explanatory robustness of the framework was, as it always is, an issue in itself for the research).

It was not as if Eve had never thought about the language she used with students, but the heuristic provided a particular language that shaped what she was saying, doing and feeling. Eve regards this language as productive, generative—it was not so much that the framework “recognised” what was there (like Platonic Forms) but, rather, that the MeE lens produced or proliferated her adoption of these messages. These affirmative discursive habits surrounding students’ knowledge, ability, control and voice were further reinforced for Eve as she encountered positive interactional and affective responses from students. In each interaction between academic and teacher, as we daily (re-) produced accounts of what had happened during the lessons in terms of student engagement, the engaging/ engaged classroom was constructed and re-constructed. A (recon)figured world was created through the research act itself which was different from “the sum of the parts” which each of us brought individually.

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Teacher research, spaces of authoring and a “researchly disposition”

A teacher’s sense of identity is socially constructed and culturally constituted, rather than “natural” or innate, while also being fluid, multiple and emergent in time (Holland et al. 1998, 40-41; Mockler 2011). In the Teachers for a Fair Go research, teachers were positioned, and positioned themselves, as researchers, as their classrooms were “translated” (cf. Cook-Sather 2006) into research sites.. Teachers who responded to the call to be positioned not only as reflective and “engaging”, but also as individuals able to make a contribution to research, could be said to be stepping into “spaces of authoring” (Holland et al. 1998) where they took on the subject position offered in the research figured world. The ways in which teachers in the project adopted the subject position of “engaged/ engaging/ researching teacher” could strongly depend on their “history-in-person”—defined by Holland et al as the “sediment from past experiences upon which one improvises, using the cultural resources available, in response to the subject positions afforded one in the present” (Holland et al. 1998, 18). A teacher’s previous identities and experiences may either pave the way for an acceptance of the subject position of teacher-researcher offered in the figured world, or may conflict with their sense of self. The figured worlds that compose an individual’s history-in-person may form “an untidy compilation of perspectives” (Holland et al. 1998, 46) that may produce a sense of uncertainty in interpreting experiences within the figured world (Holland et al. 1998, 56). Holland et al describe how, for an individual to adopt the subject position offered within the figured world, there must be opportunities for repeated participation in this new position that lead to its internalisation in a form of self-authoring. Continual participation in activities where teachers feel a sense of professional engagement and achievement—as, say, researchers—can lead to the embodiment of this identity. Holland et al argue (1998, 52-53) that as individuals make meaning of experiences, they “author” themselves and the world, not just from “creative springs within”, but rather through building with the “pre-existing materials” of “the words of others” to which they have been exposed (Holland et al. 1998,170).

For Eve, active participation in teacher research opened up “spaces of authoring” where she “translated” herself, shaping her professional identity in relationship to the particular discursive practices and artefacts of the research. She “interpreted” herself rather than only “being interpreted” by others (Cook-Sather 2013, 356). As she changed the form, expression and mode of expression of her professional identity, another

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expression of professional identity became “newly accessible to (her) comprehension and communication” (Cook-Sather 2013, 354)—that of teacher-researcher. As Eve translated herself, she then began considering how students might also be invited to re-constitute themselves as engaged learners, and (in a separate project which she later ran at the school) also themselves researchers of learning and teaching. Holland et al speak about the process of “identification—the formation of a concept of self as an actor” in a figured world (Holland et al. 1998, 120), allied with a notion of expertise. Using the analogy of learning chess, they describe a complex process through which an individual relies upon rules or discourses (such as the heuristic of the “e”ngaging messages framework), then uses these rules or discourses to mediate their activities.The year of the research, Eve laminated and displayed large, colourful photocopies of the “e”ngaging messages around her classroom, not only as a sign for students, but also as artefacts reminding her to employ this discourse in her day-to-day teaching, mediating her pedagogy (Holland et al. 1998, 117). She then “devis(ed her) own moves” as she internalised rules and discourses, becoming increasingly involved and developing a sense of ownership about this figured world (Holland et al. 1998, 116-121). Obviously, none of this—even during the case study—was required, expected or even predictable. The self-authoring that occurred in the case study week and later was a product of both her history-in-person, but also of her own sense of the value of that move in her context. The artefacts and discourses of the Teachers for a Fair Go research had become part of her “inner activity”, her “inner speaking” and “forms of the imagination” (Holland et al. 1998, 117) in thinking about how to work with, and alongside, students. She later applied and “translated” many of the research principles with which she engaged in the research project for students themselves to use. Eve came to experience herself “not as following rules or maxims (or discursive frameworks) taught by others but as devising (her) own moves” (Holland et al. 1998, 118). This is a movement from being “propelled into the activities by the urgings of others” to seeing oneself “as an agent in it” with “a complex view of the situation” (Holland et al. 1998, 122, 119). This process of identification might be instructive for the take-up of Lingard and Renshaw’s (2010) “researchly” disposition among teachers. In embodying a “researchly” disposition, teachers do not merely translate research but author it and translate themselves. They step into spaces of authoring where reconfiguring the dominant discursive habits and artefacts of, in this case, low SES schooling, become imaginable and possible.

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A word on what can be excluded in “figured worlds” of teacher research

As a final brief word, it needs to be acknowledged that certain discourses, artefacts, identities and actors can be discouraged, discredited and excluded by a figured world. The creation of a figured world of research may not be possible in all classrooms, nor may it be accepted. Conflicting histories-in-person and immanent concerns may lead teachers to excuse themselves from the figured worlds of research: teacher research may be seen as too academic, too removed, not meaningful to present challenges, or the embodied, emotional demands of teaching students with significant welfare needs may be all-consuming.

Teacher research might also be seen as too confronting or personal, in the light of the “ontological insecurity” (Ball 2000, 3) that teachers face in an educational climate focusingt on performativity, accountability and evaluation through high stakes testing. Teachers might feel barraged by deficit discourses about their work in media and government discourse, their sense of respect, professionalism and autonomy corroded. Paralleling the ways in which students might disengage from schooling when they are fed deficit messages about their knowledge, ability, control, place and voice, teachers might also disengage from research when the discourses and artefacts of these figured worlds do not resonate with their experiences and concerns, or when they perceive that they are encouraged to engage in research because of a deficit in their current pedagogical practices. Some teachers may feel undermined by the call to question the assumptions on which they have built their professional identities. The call to “unravel the social, cultural and political forces that have shaped their teaching and dislodge deeply entrenched practices” (Smyth 2011, 119) may be too existentially unsettling. Teacher research might be perceived as a dismantling of identity, without the provision of a clear alternative, or offering an alternative that seems alien. Research may also be seen as too time-intrusive—time and space for repeated participation in research figured worlds may not be available. Teachers are not necessarily given the time and space to interrogate their own practices collaboratively with others who have experience and expertise with the figured world of research. Similarly, mandating participation in a figured world of research (for example, to “meet” a professional teaching standard) may also only be instantiating new forms of neoliberal governance. A professional identity cannot be forced on a teacher, and time is needed to reflect and re-craft one’s sense of a professional self. There may be a dearth of systems and support structures for the classroom teacher who wishes to question and to innovate. Furthermore, in an accountability-driven environment, administrators may fear the very uncertainty, exploration and critical interrogation of the conditions of teaching

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and learning associated with teacher research, particularly if the research clashes with other figured worlds created in schools or if it openly or even subtly challenges prevailing artefacts and discursive practices. What we would particularly not like to see is that the attempt to open research from the academy to the school might ironically instantiate a new hierarchy of the “e”ngaged teacher and the disengaged teacher, or become simply an exercise in standards-based governance.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have argued that teacher research in low SES settings can make a key contribution to the education of students facing challenging circumstances. Teacher research has the potential to lead to the production of alternative discourses, artefacts, identities and relationships to those typically associated with low SES schooling. As teachers interrogate existing discursive practices, artefacts, identities and relationships in figured worlds of low SES schooling and of research, they might translate their own sense of professional agency, and invite their students to step into spaces where they author themselves as engaged, critical and agentic. The proliferation of discursive practices that position teachers as having knowledge, ability, control and a voice in research might help proliferate “e”ngaging messages to students about those students’ own knowledge, ability, control and voice in the classroom. “(E)”ngaging discursive messages and artefacts are vital in low SES contexts, where students and teachers have most to gain. Classrooms where “e”ngaging messages (for both students and their teachers) abound are surely “environments in which learners and teachers thrive” (Teese 2006, 159), proliferating innovative practices and fundamental improvements in the quality of learning that are significant not only for low SES students, teachers and schools, but also the system as a whole. We need to encourage the sustainable co-creation of figured worlds of research in schools, especially within low SES schools, with spaces of authoring that do not limit, burn out or fix teachers, but rather open spaces of potentiality, creativity and crafting of the professional self.

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Acknowledgement

The work reported in this article was funded through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Grants Scheme, with the (then) New South Wales Department of Education and Training’s Priority Schools Programs and Equity Co-ordination Division as funding partner

i This framework has recently been applied to the domains for identity

production constructed by teachers in specific classrooms or schools (for example, Boaler, 2000; Michael, Andrade, and Bartlett, 2007; Rubin, 2007). The notion of “figured worlds” has not been applied as extensively to considerations of teacher professional identity, with the exception of Fecho, Graham and Hudson-Ross (2005).

ii Sahlberg (2011, 93ff) credits the research orientation of teacher education as a leading factor in Finnish success in assessments such as PISA.

iii Among these strategies are: the genuinely comprehensive nature of their education system and equitable access to high quality education (ie socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged students attend the same schools), and high levels of school autonomy in formulating curricula and using assessments with low levels of school competition. Our own country, Australia, along with the UK and the USA, has chosen to adopt none of these practices – and, in fact, has adopted totally opposite policies.

iv The academic team also included a research assistant, but for space reasons and ease of discussion here we confine ourselves to our own roles.

v These included: aspects of cognition, affect and the operative; working on high expectations being realised among the students, and the key features of what the project framing calls the “insider classroom” (establishing a student community of reflection; holding inclusive conversations; facilitating student self-assessment; displaying teacher feedback that focused on learning as the central issue). These are all detailed in Munns and Sawyer (2013).